Even if you didn't realise it, if you have bought anything online, you've bought something that was “Dropshipped” to you. This means that the seller never held the goods. They simply received your order and then shipped the product to you via a third-party dropshipping company.
Dropshipping has always been a desirable way of selling products online as costs are minimal. As you do not have to worry about the logistics of storing goods, you can focus your energy on marketing and giving customers good customer support.
In this article, I would like to show you how you can dropship products to the USA using a service called MerchMixer. The service is free to use and greatly simplifies the task of building an online store.
What Does MerchMixer Do?
When I first looked into Dropshipping in the 2000s, you had to spend a ton of time trailing through dropshipping directories and blasting out emails to distributors to find long-term partners. Today, the process is much simpler.
Services such as MerchMixer can be used to set up a dropshipping business at the click of a button. MerchMixer is a free Shopify app and once you have connected it to your Shopify account, you can start dropshipping thousands of brand name products to customers in the USA.
MerchMixer stores all products within the USA and is able to deliver orders to customers within three to seven business days. This is much better than dropshipping from China, where two to six weeks is normal for dropshipped products.
All orders come with free shipping. too This is obviously great for customers, but it also makes it easier for you to work out your own profit levels.
One feature that makes MerchMixer stand out for me is returns. When you dropship using a company in China, it's nearly always a one way street as there is no easy way to handle returns. So if a customer isn't happy and wants to return a product, you need to either accept a return directly yourself or give them a full refund.
With MerchMixer handling returns for you, you can not only offer customers a better service, but reduce the costs you incur with returns too.
Dropshipping with MerchMixer
In order to use MerchMixer, you need to have a Shopify account. Shopify is a fantastic hosted eCommerce platform that retails from only $29 per month.
Before you sign up to a premium Shopify plan, I recommend taking advantage of their free trial. It's zero-risk as it allows you to use Shopify for 14 days without even entering a credit card.
Once you have set up your Shopify store, you just need to install the MerchMixer app on Shopify. Simply click on “Add App”, enter your Shopify store URL and then approve the connection on Shopify.
Once you're connected to MerchMixer, it will be listed in the app section of your Shopify account.
You can then start selecting the products you want to sell on your store. Shopify's use of frames makes it difficult to show you a larger screenshot of the products on offer, but as you can see below, at the time of writing there are 6,882 products to choose from.
Thankfully, you don't have to review every single product. All 6,000+ products can be filtered by category and by cost. You can also sort products by price, cost, release date and order count.
Alternatively, you can simply use the search bar to find the products you want to sell.
MerchMixer lists products from large international companies such as Logitech and Apple, however you will also find cheaper items from smaller companies.
For each item, you can see product images, a product description, the number of items and the cost. The cost of an item is how much it costs you to sell it. Whaever you charge above the product cost is the profit you make per product sold.
You can select multiple items at once and them import them into your store. All imported products can be viewed from the My Products page. Orders can be manually approved too and you can see your latest sales in the reporting area. You can also upgrade to a premium plan via the settings area.
Once you have imported products into your store, you can manage them in Shopify just like any other product. This helps you easily see stock levels, the product category and more.
Clicking on a product allows you to customise things further. You can create your own description, upload your own images, change the price, add it to a collection and much more.
That's all there is to selling products with MerchMixer. The whole process is simple and fast. In just a few minutes, you can add hundreds or even thousands of products to your store.
Whilst the process of importing products through MerchMixer into your shop is simple, I do recommend spending some time researching the products you sell and modifying the sales information for each product.
The Cost of Using MerchMixer
MerchMixer is free to use. Under the free plan, you can import up to 100 products into your store. This is the best plan to start with as it gives you time to develop your store and market it. Once you start selling products regularly and your store is profitable, it pays to upgrade.
There are two premium plans available. The Pro plan costs $49 per month and allows up to 1,000 products to be imported, whilst the Premium plan costs $99 per month and has no import restrictions.
The cost of each product is reduced when you upgrade to the Pro plan and reduced further when you upgrade to the more expensive Premium plan.
Becoming a premium member of MerchMixer also gives you access to support and to exclusive products that you cannot add under the free plan.
I believe MerchMixer's pricing policy to be highly competitive. There is no push for anyone to upgrade when they use the service, but once your store is successful, paying a little extra each money to unlock more products is worth it.
Final Thoughts
I have been impressed with what I've seen with MerchMixer. It only takes seconds to connect the service to your Shopify account and in just a few minutes, you can import a huge number of products into your store.
Even though I am not based in the USA, I could still use MerchMixer to build an online store that sells directly to American customers. The nature of dropshipping makes MerchMixer a great way to build up passive income with a relatively low amount of maintenance.
Of course, as someone who lives in the UK, I've not been able to place any test orders to see if my expectations of MerchMixer's packaging and shipping times are met, though I'm encouraged by the positive reviews of MerchMixer on Shopify.
To find out more, please visit the official MerchMixer website.
Thanks for reading.
Kevin
