Owning a vape shop can be a tremendous business opportunity. The differences between the wholesale and retail prices in the vaping industry are often fairly large, which means that there’s potential for great profitability.
Also, running a vape shop means that you’re doing your part to help keep the smokers of the world away from cigarettes – so it’s a big win on both sides.
Suppose, though, that you want to open a vape shop with no money. In that case, things are going to be a bit more difficult. If you don’t have the budget to buy stock and can’t get a loan, opening a brick-and-mortar vape shop is basically impossible – but there is an alternative.
You Can Open an Online Vape Shop with No Money
There is one way to open a vape with no money: You can start an online vape shop and connect it to a drop shipper. A drop shipping service is a company that stores its own inventory and handles order fulfilment on your behalf. Your website makes the sale and transmits the order information to the drop shipper, who then packages and ships the order for you in exchange for a share of the profit. You don’t have to worry about anything except setting up the website, and that means you can start a vape shop with almost no budget at all.
Before you rush to register a domain name and get a website set up, though, it’s important for you to understand the amount of work that will be necessary before you’ll be able to turn a profit. In fact, it could be a long time before your vape shop earns any money at all.
Is starting an online vape shop the right business opportunity for you? Competing with other shops will be your biggest challenge.
Understand the Competitive Environment Before You Begin
The biggest benefit of working with a drop shipper is that you basically need no operating capital to get started. The biggest drawback, though, is that you’ll always be at a competitive disadvantage compared to online vape shops that warehouse their own products. Those vape shops can offer lower prices because they’re not giving a cut of their earnings to their fulfilment partners.
In addition to competing with online vape shops that handle their own order fulfilment, you’ll also have to compete with other companies using drop shippers. Before you begin, you should take a look at the websites that already rank for your most important keywords. See if you can come up with a concrete plan for doing even better than those sites.
The vaping industry is intensely competitive, and it could be a long time before your online vape shop earns any revenue. Because of the level of competition, you’ll probably need to set your prices low and will have to make it up with volume. If you’re not prepared for this, it might be best to choose a different industry – perhaps one that’s still in its early stages and hasn’t had as much time for the competition to become entrenched.
Remember that although it’s very difficult to succeed as an online vape shop with drop-shipped products, the fact that you’re starting out this way doesn’t mean that you have to retain the drop-shipped business model forever. Once you start earning money, you can always begin stocking and shipping your own products as your budget allows.
How to Get Started with a Vape Drop Shipper
Before choosing a fulfilment partner for your online vape shop, it’s a good idea to look at several different drop shipping companies to see who has the best terms and rates. It’s also important to examine the technical requirements for working with each drop shipper. If you don’t have web development experience, there’s a good chance that you’ll be using an e-commerce platform like Shopify or WooCommerce because those are the most common platforms used by new website owners. You’ll need to choose a drop shipping company that integrates easily with your chosen platform.
It’s very beneficial to work with a drop shipper that allows you to connect your website to a product feed that populates your site with product information and photos automatically. Remember, though, that your site will never be successful if you’re using the same product pictures and text as your competitors. The content on your site needs to be unique if you want to rank for anything on Google. That means you need to have the ability to change the product information on your site without losing inventory synchronization with the drop shipper.
How to Compete as a Drop-Shipped Vape Shop with No Money
If you have no money for launching your online vape shop, it stands to reason that you probably also have no money for promoting it – and that means you’ll have quite a bit of work to do. Presented roughly in order of importance, these are the things that you’ll need to do in order to help your site establish a competitive foothold.
- You need to make sure that your site looks professional and is easy to navigate. Because of the huge volume of vaping products on the market today, it can be hard to find something to buy unless you already know what you want. A great user experience helps to ease that friction by making products easy to browse.
- You need to make sure that your site looks trustworthy and provides clear contact information. Remember that although your shipping partner will be handling order fulfilment, providing customer service will still be your responsibility.
- You need to write a unique and helpful text description for every product page.
- If possible, you should also take your own product photos. This might be difficult if you’re not the one stocking the products, but it’s worth trying to figure this out. Google Images can be an important source of traffic, and your site won’t appear on image searches if you’re using generic stock photos.
- You should also write helpful text for your category pages because these pages may have a chance to rank for broad search terms that receive a great deal of traffic.
- Once all of these things are done, you can potentially move the needle further by starting a blog and publishing informational articles that help people solve problems or get more out of their vaping experience.
- When you publish something especially valuable, you should reach out to bloggers and other influencers in the industry and tell them about the content. If people link to your content, it can help your site earn higher rankings for competitive search terms.
