Description

Dropshipping e-commerce businesses are enormously increasing day after day due to their unique structural business model that is relatively easy, affordable, and quick to build compared to traditional physical stores or conventional eCommerce websites, which are costly to establish and maintain due to the need for dealing with inventory and shipping procedures. This growing trend in adopting a dropshipping model in e-commerce is encouraged by the increasingly huge demand from customers on online shopping due to its attractive features, such as ease of use, competitive prices, and the convenience of placing orders from home without the need to go outside, which is exactly aligned with the procedures imposed by governments worldwide to combat and prevent the spread of COVID-19. Because it is comparatively easy to build a drop-shipping business, this makes it very enticing for individuals and small businesses with limited budgets to enter this domain; however, statistics show that only very few businesses and individuals really succeed in making a sustainable profit using the drop-shipping e-commerce model. Therefore, this research study is dedicated to discovering and finding out the key factors that can affect and determine the success of drop-shipping e-commerce businesses. This is done through investigating and analyzing the most successful 100 e-commerce Shopify stores using different metrics including the estimated monthly revenue, monthly web traffic to the website, number of followers on social media, number of products, number of backlinks, and whether they use online ads or not. These metrics are adopted to learn and understand what makes these stores successful. It has been found that the revenue of the top stores is most affected by the number of their followers on social media, where it is shown that revenue is highly correlated and proportional to the number of Instagram followers and average product prices. The findings also show that web traffic does not necessarily increase revenue as many website visitors leave e-stores without making purchases. The obtained results and drawn conclusions in this work are expected to be extremely useful for those who want to make their currently open drop-shipping business successful or those who are thinking of starting a new drop-shipping e-commerce business