What Is Branded Dropshipping and How to Start in 2024 - A Comprehensive Guide

Updated by March 18,2024

The importance of branding cannot be overemphasized. Good branding will make you stand out from the competition and keep repeat customers. This is even more vital when you do dropshipping, since dropshipping allows you to sell products that other companies and other dropshippers might also retail on their stores due to the same suppliers.

Branded dropshipping is similar to your regular dropshipping, so you usually don't have to worry about any upfront costs, warehousing, risks, etc. The only difference is that you have to choose a niche and start selling products branded with your logo within that niche.

What Is A Brand

A brand is an impression that a store has on its customers, helping a business grow. Online stores make those impressions through a combination of store design, such as name and logo, products images and videos, attending trade shows, and making use of influencers.

What would your store be like? How would your customers act when they come to your store for the first time? The answer is that: Your store must suit your customers well. It means that you should offer an excellent website design, a fluent check-out process and good products images and descriptions. All of these factors stand for your brand.

A person may be attracted to what he/she already recognizes, and that is true for online stores. So if you build a brand that feels familiar to your customers, you might get your first order quickly and will get more sales in the future.

What Is Branded Dropshipping

Branded dropshipping refers to a concept that dropshippers sell non-branded products purchased from their suppliers without storing any inventory. Dropshippers then privately label the products and set up a product-themed online store to build their brand.

Branded dropshipping is not the same as dropshipping (selling products labeled with others' logos). While you can deliver products from other brands and make a lot of money doing so, that's not what the term branded dropshipping means. Branded dropshipping usually means buying unbranded products and relabelling them as your own.

Why Branding Your Dropshipping Business Is Important

It is super significant to brand your business when operating an online business, especially for a dropshipper.

The main reason is that there’s typically more than one dropshipper selling a given product. In other words, when customers search for products they are going to purchase, there will find other similar ones as well. Good branding might set you apart from other similar sellers and big-box competition like Amazon.

Moreover, branded products always suggest high quality. Thus, it may bring customer loyalty and good reputation to your store, you will thus be more likely gaining more sales. When sales boost, it can be overwhelming to deal with a large number of orders one by one. Therefore, a third-party tool like DSers helps you manage both stores and orders easily.

However, you also need to keep in mind: Along with devoting your efforts to build your brand, it’s still vital to increase your brand awareness. Once your customer has a strong recognition of your brand, you will become their first option when they want to make a purchase.

How to Brand Your Dropshipping Business

If you are eager to succeed and stand out from your competitors, who do regular dropshipping, you need to take time to look at the following guide and start your branded dropshipping business.

1.Brainstorm Products Idea

The first thing you should do to start branded dropshipping is to come up with a product idea. At this stage, your creativity and market research prowess comes into play. Firstly, you can think about the trendy, newer stuff you recently came across online or in an offline retail store.

Moreover, you can get product ideas from social media such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, etc. Why? They are places where your potential customers are. You will discover what your customers are concerned about and which products they prefer. Then you may know how your stores should act, and which products you are going to sell.

Another alternative way is to verify a product to make sure it sells well. Keyword research is useful when you want to identify how many people are looking for the product online. In addition, it’s also a good idea to analyze searches for specific parts of your product, as they can also help you open up a niche for your private label business.

Also, checking best-sellers on different marketplaces can help you a lot. AliExpress, the biggest and reputed marketplace, is a good option for you to find your branded dropshipping niche.

2.Find Private Label Suppliers

Now, you have a brilliant product idea, then come the next stage. You should find out the most reliable suppliers for your products since you are doing dropshipping. However, the suppliers you are looking for should be private label suppliers. In other words, you need to find white label products. In nutshell, you sell the products manufactured by another brand under your brand's name.

You can use product sourcing apps to find suppliers and contact them to see if they dropship branded products. DSers selects qualified and well-reviewed suppliers which can connect you with them. You can contact them to learn whether they can do branded dropshipping.

Apliiq is a branding tool that helps print on demand for your apparel products, if you plan to open an online clothing store. You can contact the company to search for cooperation.

Here is another example for your coffee dropshipping business, you can check out this Shopify app called Dripshipper if you’re looking to start your coffee brand. It allows you to build and customize the product’s packaging, labels, pricing, and logo. It enables you to ship fresh coffee worldwide.

3.Develop Branded Name and Logo

Now it’s time to build your online store. Shopify and Shopify Plus are both great options. You can search to both and make a comparison, then get the one service that best suits your needs. What's more, the Shopify plugins, like DSers, are here to help you manage and deal with orders.

The most important thing is that Shopify also provides you tools for your branded dropshipping. You get access to a logo maker, video creator, business name generator, and many other powerful tools on it. Thus, starting your brand is easy and fast.

Once you have set up the store, you need to add products. You’d better write compelling product descriptions and use high-quality images. It's an excellent way to make your items more appealing to shoppers. Your customers cannot touch the products since you are doing online business, better products images and descriptions will attract more buyers.

There are some great dropshipping examples you can learn from:

• Meowingtons: It is a cat niche store at its finest. It's dropshipping all cat-related items, such as toys, beds, or something for you.
• Mooshe Socks: Its products have their design which makes the socks unique.
• BOOM by Cindy Joseph: It is the world's first pro-age cosmetic & skincare line.
• 5TH Watches: It’s a professionally designed watch store.
• ........

4.Promote Your Branded Store

The last thing to do is promote your brand. To achieve the goal, you’ll need to explore different ways you can market your business.

If you have a good budget, paid advertising on Facebook and Instagram is a great way to get your name expanded there. For newcomers, free marketing channels like SEO and influencer marketing can be equally powerful in gaining people’s attention to their brand.

No matter which way you choose, you need to consider whether it is suitable for your products or not. After all, the best fit is the best.

Branded Dropshipping: Pros and Cons

Let's take a quick look at the advantages and disadvantages of branded dropshipping.

• Unique Company: For business owners who want to have more control over their brands and create products that are different from those on the current market, branded e-commerce products are the key to building a truly unique company.

• Brand Control: Unlike regular dropshipping, when you plan to do branded dropshipping business, you create your brand, including the name, the logo, and the package, etc. The factors of your brand are all under your control.

• Good Reputation: Dropshipping business model means different people are selling the same products with the same products images and descriptions. Branded dropshipping can stand your store out of these stores. It can help you build a good reputation and gain more sales.

• Long time: Generally, you might be able to start dropshipping business quickly. However, finding private label suppliers for your branded products is time-consuming. Although there are many suppliers online, not every supplier accepts branded dropshipping.

• Higher costs: Dropshipping is well-known for its low starting costs. But the question is to pay a lot since you want to build your brand. In other words, you have to spend a lot of money on designing your brand name, logo, package, and so on.

Conclusion

Both regular dropshipping and branded dropshipping are good ways to make money in 2021 since the influence of pandemic and restriction does not disappear. Thus, you may wonder which one is the first option for you.

If you're new here, regular dropshipping is a good option, as it has a low barrier to start and low startup costs in comparison to most other e-commerce models.

However, you could also start branded dropshipping if you have the budget and passion for it. Below is a list of the steps involved in branded dropshipping;

Whatever choice you make, you should keep in mind: funding success is all about learning and growing as you go.