Let’s know some points about Drop Service. Also many of you must be confused about what is drop shipping and drop servicing. So here is a clarification article on it and a detailed description of drop servicing.
What is Drop Servicing?
Drop servicing is a business model which can be seen as an alternative to drop shipping, where you sell services without doing the work yourself.
When a customer places an order, you simply contact the service provider (or contractor), who will then perform that service for your client.
Drop servicing has become increasingly popular in recent years, thanks to top free platforms like YouTube to learn from, which make it easy for anyone to start their own online store selling services rather than products.
You can also offer services such as social media management or SEO optimization on your drop servicing website!
Pros.
- Broad services. Drop servicing offers a much wider range of services that you can offer to customers, making it easier for you to find an area of expertise with significant demand.
- No previous experience is required to start drop servicing. Dropshipping requires you to have a good amount of knowledge about the products you’re selling so that you can answer inquiries from your customers and provide them with adequate information regarding their orders.
- Drop servicing can be started with little to no money upfront. Dropshipping requires you to have a small amount of capital to purchase the products that you’ll sell and pay for your business’ setup costs and advertising expenses. Drop servicing does not require this level of investment because all it involves is marketing your services.
- A low-maintenance budget. Drop servicing also has lower running costs than drop shipping because you don’t need to maintain an inventory of products that other people are selling, and your main expenses will be marketing, buying the product, and advertising.
Cons.
- Quality control. The major disadvantage of drop service is the lack of quality control. You don’t have any say in the quality of your order since you aren’t performing it yourself.
- Morality issues. There’s always a moral question surrounding drop service. This is due to some that do not disclose their outsourcing or employment of third parties. As a result, the client assumes that the individual they’re dealing with is actually responsible for the work.
What is Drop Shipping?
Dropshipping is a business model where you sell products without carrying any inventory. When someone places an order, you simply contact the dropshipping supplier, who will ship the product directly to the customer’s door.
Dropshipping has become increasingly popular in recent years, thanks to platforms like Shopify and DSers, making it easy for anyone to start their own online store.
Dropshipping is a great option for new entrepreneurs, as it requires very little startup capital, and there are no ongoing costs. You also don’t need to worry about shipping or handling products yourself; the supplier takes care of that!
Pros.
- Easy to get started. Dropshipping is a relatively simple business model to start up, and you don’t need to have any experience in the industry to begin.
- You’re not responsible for shipping and fulfillment. This can be a major advantage if you don’t have any experience or skills in this area. All of the logistics is taken care of by the supplier, which also saves you time and money.
- Low overhead costs. Dropshipping doesn’t require you to have an inventory, so you don’t need to worry about storage or order fulfillment costs.
- A wide selection of products to choose from. Dropshipping allows you to offer a wide range of product categories, so it’s easy for you to find an area that matches your interests and skillsets.
Cons.
- You don’t have direct control over your inventory. When you dropship, you rely on your supplier to send you the products that you have sold. This means that if they do not have enough stock, or if they decide to stop selling a particular product, you may be unable to fill any orders that come through.
- You’re not in control of your shipping. Drop shippers are responsible for the cost and timeframe of delivery. Some drop shipping companies offer free shipping, but there will always be a price to pay at one end or another. If you have customers expecting their orders by next Wednesday and they don’t arrive until Friday, this is likely to upset them.
- You’re at the mercy of your supplier’s reputation. Drop shippers rely on their suppliers to ensure that their goods arrive in a timely manner and are of good quality. If the supplier is unreliable, this will reflect poorly on your shop. Don’t forget to ask good questions before working with someone.
- Competition is high. With millions of online stores, competition for sales can be fierce. This means that it can be difficult to make a profit, especially if you compete against big brands with a larger budget for marketing and advertising.
Here are list of products and services that you can drop services.
#YouTube Intros
YouTube is a place where tons of channels are struggling to increase their viewership. Some people succeed due to their sheer talent, personality, or luck perhaps, while others are barely getting new subscribers. Here’s where you could step in!
Let’s get straight to the point. What you should do is look for channels with a low subscriber count (up to a couple of thousand). Browse through their channels and videos. A very practical solution would be to use the Channel Crawler that allows you to look for YouTube channels by filling out the specific criteria, like number of subscribers, when the channel was created, keyword, number of videos, and more.
If you see no intro in the videos of found channels, or if you find it unappealing, you could leave them a comment or look for an email in the “About” section and message them directly.
As you can see on the image above, the email address can be seen in the “Details” section of the “About” page. To reveal it, simply click on the “View Email Address” button. Though bear in mind that not all channels feature the email address on their page. In this case, a comment would be a smarter option.
There’s a chance that some creators would be interested in such an offer and they could be your potential first clients!
#Designing YouTube Thumbnails
YouTube is a very demanding place when it comes to its guidelines and how it promotes channels. From video descriptions, through its title, and up to the thumbnail, the website’s algorithm is unpredictable. The giant that is YouTube focuses on original content. What it essentially means is that custom-made thumbnails are very important.
Every day thousands of YouTube channels and their videos come and go, and let’s face it, a nicely done custom-made thumbnail would do some good for most of them. This niche definitely has potential and can be highly profitable as there seems to be no end to YouTube content.
#Data Entry
This drop servicing niche would be a reasonable choice taking into consideration the fact that there are plenty of available freelancers for entering various data. Ranging from filling data in a simple spreadsheet to more complex tasks that deal with analytics or math. It can also consider rewriting, correcting, or simply copy-pasting a lot of text.
If you decide on that niche, a good choice for finding available freelancers would be to visit Fiverr. Fiverr gives freelancers the opportunity to post their offers. Feel free to check out the example search using the keyword “data entry”.
Depending on the freelancer’s level and skill, you could choose with whom you would like to partner.
#Web Scraping
Web scraping is a type of data entry that is often used for marketing purposes. If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s essentially extracting data from other websites.
Let’s say that you’re being contacted by a client who’d like to know the decision-makers of the fastest-growing companies in Europe. You, as the owner of the drop servicing business, would search for a freelancer who specializes in web scraping. After finding one, you’d then send him a list of FT1000 (Fastest Growing Companies in Europe). The freelancer would proceed to scrape the data, search for decision-makers and enter the results into a spreadsheet or a file of your choice.
A drop servicing business based on web scraping would require the usage of tools like ParseHub or OctoParse, but of course, there is a wider choice.
#Data Mining
Data mining could be an interesting idea for a drop servicing business. It’s a process of collecting data from the website to look for trends, patterns, and anomalies. Doing so can have different outcomes such as increasing the customer experience, preventing frauds or breaches, cutting costs, and more.
Various tools can be used for mining data, among them you could find ones like:
- MonkeyLearn;
- IBM SPSS Modeler;
- Orange;
- SAS Enterprise Miner;
- And many more!
It can also be applied to a wide range of areas:
- Media;
- Communication;
- Banking;
- Retail;
- Others;
#Writing
Can you imagine a good business website without professionally written components? Yeah, me neither. Many companies aspire to have a well-scoring blog with engaging articles and plenty of views, though not all succeed. And it doesn’t actually matter if it’s a store, science blog, or movie review website, they all share something in common, and that’s writing. It needs to be well-written and coherent for the reader.
Should you choose this niche, you have to be prepared. Let us offer you one hint: a good practice would be to charge your client per word. Also, some knowledge in the field would be preferred so you’d be able to correctly assess the work that would be done by the freelancer.
If you have written something before, or perhaps the freelancer had, include some examples, or maybe a portfolio even. That would definitely help you grow your customer base and increase their trust.
If you decide on this service niche, a great improvement would be using the Zendo platform where you could build your business network, connect with a client and answer their issues in a much more efficient way.
#Transcription
By choosing the transcription niche, you’d have to look for clients that are searching for people who are willing to write down the text from a spoken video.
If you’re looking for an example of transcription, we’ve got you. By transcribing a person would be creating subtitles for videos or writing texts by listening to audio recordings, for instance, for Instagram stories. If you and your freelancer manage to deliver a transcribed text that is well-written and good-performing, you’d probably gain a recurring customer.
#Graphic Design
Graphic design is a term that gives you only a general idea of the niche. In order to be successful in it, you’d have to decide on which type of graphic design services you want to pursue. Design can be divided into (but not limited to):
- Logo design;
- Book or album covers;
- Ad designs;
- Custom graphics;
- And more;
As you can see, the term graphic design covers a variety of different branches. You should decide on what suits you best, and go for it!
#Video Creation
Another niche worth taking into consideration would be video creation. Though similar to graphic design or writing services, that too can vary quite a bit. You can choose from creating short videos, through ads to VFX or animation. All of them fall under the category of video creation.
When it comes to animation, this category could be further divided into:
- Black and white animation;
- 2D animation;
- 3D animation;
- Cartoons;
- Comic-style animation;
- Video ads;
- And even more!
As you can see, the video creation niche is quite broad and would require some thinking on which path to take. Whichever you choose, the end goal should be worthwhile.
#Social Media Management
There are a lot of unmanaged or poorly managed social media profiles that would need some sprucing up. Doesn’t matter how new and fresh businesses are, they often start with creating a social media account. That fact alone creates a need for social media managers.
Bear in mind that this category requires some experience, so choose freelancers wisely and make sure they are competent enough to handle such tasks.
You may also wonder what tasks would a freelancer have to perform? Well, it would probably range from marketing and advertising up to customer support, and probably many more.
#SEO – Search Engine Optimization
SEO is an important factor of every blog or website that wants to focus on delivering well-optimized and high-scoring content. There’s a plethora of companies that would love to have their texts optimized or written based on SEO.
Search engine optimization is a part of the writing niche that includes tasks like keyword research, traffic analysis, structuring the text in a proper way, and more.
SEO can be further divided into:
- On-page SEO – where you look for keywords, write content, and optimize your website to gain more traffic;
- Technical SEO – where you improve your website’s readability to provide a better customer experience along with improving website’s structures, speed, and more;
- Off-page SEO – where you increase the website’s reputation, authority, and trust by link building and guest posting;
The best option would be to find a freelancer who has already had experience in SEO, as it would make the partnership more credible and easier.
#Developing Websites
Who wouldn’t love an optimized, fast, and nicely-coded website? Everyone would gladly have one! That’s why this web design drop servicing niche could be a potential home run.
Businesses may look for developers to create or optimize their websites and you could be the one who could make it happen. Though remember that while choosing a freelancer to cooperate with, choose the ones who have enough experience.
You may also get an inquiry for customizing a Shopify website, which isn’t anything odd as plenty of businesses run their shops on Shopify.
#WordPress Customization
There are tons of WordPress-based websites out there, and plenty of them wouldn’t mind some optimization and customization. Whether it’s customizing the theme or fixing the existing bugs, the need for such services is real.
However, competition for such a niche would probably also be high, though if you can provide a great service, this drop servicing idea could become a profitable business.
#Programming
Similar to the previous point, the programming service arbitrage niche may be quite profitable. There are a lot of companies that are looking for experienced developers to bring their ideas to life.
Clients could contact you with a variety of offers, from the creation of a plugin, through coding a dedicated bot or perhaps creating an app from scratch. Some experience in programming would definitely be an advantage. After all, this would be your company and you would be responsible for the quality of the service.
Here are three examples of programming services:
- WP Amelia Plugin Customization
- Magento Page Speed Optimization
- Flutter App Development
#Advertising
Although it may seem like an obvious choice from all the drop servicing ideas, it doesn’t make advertising any less important than the rest. In fact, it’s one of the most important things that every sales-oriented company should be doing.
There is a huge advertising demand, as most businesses would like to promote their products or services. But how should it be approached?
It can be done via a lot of different means:
- Ads: by using Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, Reddit, or Quora.
- Social Media Ads: by using LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, or Pinterest Ads.
- Email: by using newsletters, cold mailing, and drip mailing.
FAQs.
Q1. Is Drop Serve Drop Profitable?
Ans: Drop servicing, when done effectively, may be quite profitable, especially for projects that require continuous services. Setting up a system that gives you a good profit margin is problematic.
Q2. Is Drop Servicing better than Drop Shipping?
Ans: Your experience will determine if you’re better suited to drop servicing or drop shipping. Stick with what you know if you’re used to buying and selling things drop shipping. Drop servicing, on the other hand, is a terrific option. If you’re a person with prior freelance experience, you can come with drop servicing.
Q3. Is The Drop Servicing Business Real?
Ans: Drop servicing is a real business, just like drop shipping. Drop servicers outsource services and resell them for a profit instead of selling real things.
