Dropshipping in South Africa: Everything You Should Know in 2022

From a legal perspective, it is completely feasible to start dropshipping in South Africa. However, there’s some aversion towards this business model because of the confusion around starting dropshipping. We have cleared up all your queries in this article. Have a look and understand how to start dropshipping in South Africa.

What Is Dropshipping in South Africa

Before we move on to other important things, here’s a quick overview of the dropshipping model:

Dropshipping is a valuable business model that involves sourcing products from a marketplace without creating an inventory. The dropshipping business can sell these products on their e-commerce store, and when a customer places an order on the store, the order is placed on the marketplace and sent to the user directly.

In a normal e-commerce model, you may source products from a wholesaler or create an inventory, which you can even sell under your brand name. However, in dropshipping, you can only send products directly to the customer.

Why You Should Think about Dropshipping

If you are wondering why this e-commerce model is beneficial for you, here’s the answer. Based on this survey, we can say that the popularity of online commerce is increasing as we speak. The pandemic has further changed the way users shop and expect delivery orders.

Ideally, there would be a shift in the direction of online commerce across the globe. With the pandemic still surfacing with new variants every year, more and more people are shopping online. Therefore, it seems logical to believe that the popularity of the dropshipping business model will only increase with time. This also means you may be able to make good profits by dropshipping South Africa in the near future.

How to Start Dropshipping South Africa

If you need to understand the right method to start dropshipping in South Africa, here are some steps that we believe in:

Choose a Target Audience

Start by creating a buyer persona. It is obvious that you already have a product niche in mind. Keeping this niche or product category in mind, you should create the persona of your users. This means age, gender, demographics, likes, dislikes, and other related information about your users.

For example, you are selling minion cushions and soft toys. Even without proper research, we can say that your target audience includes new moms whose kids are at least 3-4 years old.

In the same way, you also need to define your audience to create the right dropshipping South Africa model.

Dropship from AliExpress to South Africa

One of the best methods for dropshipping from South Africa is to use the AliExpress marketplace. How can you dropship with AliExpress?

• Create an account on AliExpress.
• Find the products of your choice.
• Randomly search and filter products to see how many sellers are selling the same product.
• Find the seller with the lowest pricing and shipping option.
• Check if this seller is also sending the packet quickly.
• Add one or two sellers to your list.
• Live on your website and start accepting orders.
• Now, when you receive an order from a customer, use the list of sellers to place the order.
• Remember that you need to directly ship the product to the customer.
• Once you have the tracking number, share it with your customer and allow them to track the order.

When you are dropshipping in South Africa using AliExpress, you need to spend time selecting the seller and finding an optimal quality product.

Select Payment Method

Once you have finalized products and sellers from AliExpress, you should start shortlisting the payment methods you can offer to your customers. If you look at it, many users like to have options for payment. Sometimes, they may pay on delivery, via credit card, or debit card. Many users also like to send payments with the help of different wallets like PayPal.

If we talk about PayPal, then this payment method has created a market name for itself in the entire world. If you wish to transfer funds internationally or nationally, PayPal is a trusted source. However, in South Africa, PayPal only works with First National Bank. Now, that might create an issue.

This is also one of the reasons why we are suggesting adding two to three payment methods to offer the feasibility of transactions to users.

Test Product

Now, after you have selected the above factors, you can start testing the product.

Many dropshippers may suggest against it, and you might even feel the friction to test your products.

There are many reasons why we may recommend testing the product:

• You will know the quality.
• You can assess the packaging.
• You can get nice pictures of the product for your website.
• You can assess the features carefully.
• You can know the expected shipping time.

If you are not checking the product before adding it to your website, your users may get really bad packaging, shipping time may be haywire, and features may not be the same as expected.

This will cause a bad customer experience!

Therefore, we always suggest starting a new dropshipping business in South Africa to test the product. Whatever categories you are adding to your e-commerce store, order one of each. With this, you can assess all of the above and even click pictures. If the product is not up to the quality you expected, you can choose a better seller and remember not to order from the previous one.

Use the Right Tool

The final dropshipping South Africa tip is to use the appropriate dropshipping tool. For example, DSers is a valuable, advanced AliExpress dropshipping tool for every type of business.

It helps you automate seller and product selection and provides a range of valuable features. Let’s see what they are:

• With the DSers dashboard, you can automate the AI-based selection of the right seller. This will help you maximize your profits.
• If you have integrated your AliExpress store with DSers, you can select products from the tool itself. Here, you can review every detail of the product in one place.
• It is possible to place every order at once from the tool. This will allow us to save time spent on individual orders.
• Once the order is placed on AliExpress, it is synced with DSers dashboard. This means that you can overview orders from your dashboard only.

DSers has many other features, such as price selection rules, better customer support, bundle orders, and many more.

Using DSers helps you integrate AliExpress with the tool and manage the entire supply chain of your dropshipping store without hassle.

Conclusion

Dropshipping in South Africa is not much different than dropshipping in any other country. You only need to follow a few steps, make strategic decisions about the marketplace and dropshipping tool, and test products you are adding to your website. If you have fulfilled these basic requirements, there’s nothing to worry about.

Check more about our dropshipping tool DSers on our website.