Interview: ” We have broken the myth that one has to invest on inventory to sell online, eCom owners has unlimited options with us”

What’s your name?

Karthic Kumar

What’s your store/company’s name?

Baapstore

We are a dedicated eCommerce dropshipping company and help online sellers from sourcing of the products, cataloging, web and app development, tech support, to deliveries, and returns

Sharing Success Stories with Karthic Kumar

Disclaimer: all the success stories published on our blog are the results of written interviews. Even though the editors may make some minor changes to the grammar, spelling, and/or punctuation, the respondents’ writing styles, views, opinions, stores screenshots and personal photos are left unchanged.

The Dropshipping.com Team

What’s the website?

www.baapstore.com

What’s your email?

karthic@baapstore.com

Describe your business/service in a few words:

We are a dedicated eCommerce dropshipping company and help online sellers from sourcing of the products, cataloging, web and app development, tech support, to deliveries, and returns. An online seller can sell lacs of products via dropshipping without compromising on profits. That’s our USP. We see that many dropshipping companies in west provide software features and all, but their product prices are higher than what Amazon and eBay is listed for. At Baapstore, our sellers can blindly sell our profits at 50-80% profit margin and yet their pricing will be as competitive as the other online prices.

With us, online sellers can focus only on sales and leave all the other work to us.

Describe your e-commerce journey. How did you enter the space?

I come from a business family and started my career with IBM as a software engineer for a couple of years. Then I started a few of my own ventures, one of which was a digital marketing firm. We had clients from freelance platforms, word-of-mouth referrals, and direct visits. We served US/UK regions majorly and most of the clients we handled were in the e-commerce dropshipping business segments. It was not a plan to serve dropshipping clients only, but based on our success ratio and client feedbacks and referrals, we naturally started getting dropshipping clients majorly. That’s how I got to know about the dropshipping industry and having worked from the front row has helped me understand all the challenges and opportunities in dropshipping model.

Later, I went on a business trip to a local manufacturers hub in Gujarat. That’s where I witnessed thousands of small shops were closed due to online pressure and it totally convinced me to do something to help those small sellers. It’s natural that they did not have knowledge about online sales, they are basically traditional wholesalers and manufacturers. But would building mere tools to list products online would solve their problems? not at all.

The real problem that these small sellers faced was that they were not able to source products at a competitive price which also made them to sell products at not so competitive prices. So, obviously, price conscious customers in India would buy from those giants who provide products at the low cost, right?

That’s when I thought dropshipping platform would be the solution for small sellers. How? we can consolidate all the suppliers and online sellers in a single portal which gives us the purchasing power to get products from suppliers at dirt cheap costs. We’d then pass the products at the same pricing to online sellers as we charge them a small yearly fee which actually helped us to not rely on the profits from the inventory. Now all those online sellers can sell our lacs of SKUs, without buying those inventory upfront and yet, for higher margins.

That’s how we started baapstore.com dropshipping platform in India. It’s been more than half a decade now and we are travelling succesfully helping our sellers make profits.

How your business is helping the e-commerce owners?

About 90% of the online sales in India are taken by the top 1% of the online sellers. To put in numbers, 90% sales are shared by 4000 sellers and 10% sales are shared by 1mn+ sellers. It is not that small sellers are not putting efforts or not know about marketing or strategies. Most of the battle is won or lost at a time when a seller procures a product. Negotiation is the key here. When you are unable to increase your SKUs or unable to procure SKUs at a competitive prices than other online giants, the battle is lost already.

Let me ask you a question, how many times do you think a customer would buy from the small online seller when a bigger online seller sells the same product at a lesser costs and has high number of reviews? Almost never.

That is what we are helping e-commerce owners with. Ecommer owners never have to worry about the number of SKUs or price of the SKUs anymore. At Baapstore, we have broken the myth that one has to invest on inventory to sell online, eCom owners has unlimited options with us now. We assure them that, with our dropshipping india model, we always have huge number of SKUs and all are priced at competitive prices that they can take on bigger sellers eye-to-eye and still win the sales and customers trust.

We also help our e-commerce entrepreneurs with tools that would make products listing easier for them. Not just that, we provide inhouse website development and app development solutions, robust hosting, and cataloging for our inventory. An online seller would traditionally take 3-6 months to list and sell products successfully, however with us, it would take him/her lesser than 24 hours to start their online sales.

What is the most significant challenge dropshippers are facing today?

Dropship suppliers, basically wholesalers or manufacturers, give more importance to bulk buyers than single shipment buyers. This resulted in high pricing of inventory, delayed shipments, incorrect product descriptions, stockout issues, etc., all because dropship suppliers were not supportive. At Baapstore, we totally solved this issue by consolidating suppliers and onboarding only the verified vendors who follow our strict process to adhere to our quality parameters and timelines.

What was the game changer to enter dropshipping or e-commerce business as a service provider? What are your future plans?

Online selling was challenging. From taking photographs, and listing products per marketplace formats, to managing returns and accounts, all these were real issues but nobody talked about them. All those tasks that looked menial would suddenly become a pain when entrepreneurs start selling online. I can confidently, even today, many people who are selling online are not great at maths and wouldn’t be knowing if their business is profitable or doing losses.

So, the game-changer idea was to, take care of everything and let people just focus on getting sales. So, at Baapstore, we decided to do everything that’s not important for our sellers, on our own. From feeding product data, taking photographs, package selection, website development, app development, courier partnerships, vendor payments, etc., all are taken by our own and our resellers can just focus on marketing and getting sales. Like, literally.

We are focused on getting as many integrations as possible that would make the work more easier for our dropship sellers.

What’s your best advice for both dropshipping beginners and experienced e-commerce owners?

Focus on sales, and not be too worried about the small details on the operations side. There is no perfect system. You need to focus on tasks that get you sales i.e., customer servicing, promotions, etc.,