I have been asked several times what mini importation business means and how it differs from dropshipping.
According to the Cambridge dictionary, importation is the process or business of bringing goods into a country from another country.
Although highly similar to dropshipping, the mini importation business differs in many ways – mostly in the logistics involved and the process of fulfilment of the order from the seller to the end-user.
In both cases, importation takes place, however, with the mini importation business, the seller would make money by strategically keeping inventory and controlling the cost of sales, but with dropshipping, inventory could be counterproductive.
That being said, here are the major steps that can help you go into Mini Importation as a profitable business in Nigeria.
Estimated reading time: 14 minutes
Contents
Table of contents
- Steps To Guarantee Success in the Mini Importation Business
- 1. Identify and Understand Your Target Market
- 2. Niche out – Chose a Niche that You Can Be The Best At
- 3. Carefully Select Your Partners along Your Value Chain
- 4. Get Adequate Funding
- 5. Understand Ways To Pay for Your Goods from Nigeria
- 6. Understand Available Marketing Platforms
- 7. Promote Your Products and Services
- 8. Leverage on Digital Media
- 9. Maintain an Excellent After-sales Support System
- 10. Create a Brand For Yourself and Product
- Maintain International Partnerships of Manufacturers, Suppliers, and Freight agents
Steps To Guarantee Success in the Mini Importation Business
Like any other commercial ventures, the steps that you must take to be successful at being a mini importer are:
- Identify and understand your target market
- Know their pain points and buying patterns
- Understand Order fulfilment
- Niche out – Chose a Niche that You Can Be The Best At
- Carefully Select Your Partners along Your Value Chain
- Your product suppliers
- Your Shipping partners
- Your Clearing agents
- Your fulfilment partners
- Get Adequate Funding
- Understand Ways to Pay for Your Goods from Nigeria
- Identify the Best Way to Reach Your Proposed Clients
- Understand The Available Sales Channels and Place yourself and your Products on the Right Sales Channels
- Promote Your Products and Services
- Leverage on Digital Media
- Maintain an Excellent After-sales Support System
- Create a Brand For Yourself and Product
- Maintain International Partnerships of Manufacturers, Suppliers, and Freight agents
1. Identify and Understand Your Target Market
To build a solid foundation for your mini importation business, you must first identify who your typical customers are and tailor your marketing pitch to suit them accordingly.
There is no point in spending millions of Naira on advertisements that resonates more with the elites if your target market is the common masses.
To understand the steps needed to identify your target market, kindly visit this highly rated article – How to Define Your Target Market
Suggested Read: How To Determine The Best Products To Sell On Digital Platforms in 2021
a) Know their pain points and buying patterns
Business owners assume that the customer often knows what he or she wants. The reality, however, is that though the customer is hardly wrong, he may not always be right – he hardly ever knows what he truly needs.
All that a customer truly wants is to solve a pain point; it is your duty as a business owner to understand it, and also get it resolved.
You must understand that your customers don’t often care about your products or services, but about the problems you are solving for them – Their pain points.
Your customers tie their loyalty to the value that you provide to them by solving their problems.
And the problem-solving experience that you give them is, in fact, a big part of what makes them loyal to your brand.
Customers don’t just buy, their choice of how and when to buy from you is determined by forces mostly beyond the customer’s control. Such forces come together to dictate the buying pattern of customers in a chosen market. Buying patterns are often defined by the frequency of certain activities, timing, quantity, etc.
These patterns are determined by factors such as:
- Where someone lives
- Where they work
- How much money they make
- What they enjoy and prefer
- What their friends and family recommend
- What their goals and motivations are
- The price of the product or service they’re interested in (and any active sales or discounts)
- Any product displays
- The necessity of the product or service
- Festivals, holidays, rituals, or celebrations
Dig Deeper: How to Predict and Analyze Your Customers’ Buying Patterns
b) Understand Order fulfilment
From home-based entrepreneurs to CEOs in big companies one rule is commonly kept close to heart: Keep your customers happy. To do this, one must either master the complicated process of order fulfillment (which could take up 90% of your time) or simply choose a fulfillment partner who can do it all for you.
Order Fulfillment is the delivery process used to move a product from its point of sale to the hands of the customer. Some people describe it merely as the act of distribution and shipping (also called logistics) but this is not always the case.
In a much broader sense, Order Fulfillment also refers to the way that a firm responds to its customers and the steps they take to ensure that sold products are delivered to the consumers correctly within the tightest time frames. Source: The Logistics of Logistics
2. Niche out – Chose a Niche that You Can Be The Best At
Choosing the best products for your mini importation business that investors and customers are likely to buy into isn’t easy. One major success factor in the mini importation business is to distinguish your brand from the thousands of other businesses competing against you every day.
Certainly, you want to do your due diligence in selecting a viable niche business, but it’s better to get up and running than to wait around.
Having the best sincere answer to the following questions will help you in determining the best niche to choose:
- What are your interests and passions?
- What are your talents and what skills are you good at?
- Out of the above talents and skills, what do you enjoy doing most?
- Of those talents and skills you enjoy, what do people need?
- From the above needs, what will people pay big money for?
Finally, be sure to know your numbers and select the best niche based on the best numbers. Follow your head and not your heart.
3. Carefully Select Your Partners along Your Value Chain
- Your product suppliers
- Your Shipping partners
- Your Clearing agents
- Your Local fulfilment partners
- In the mini import business, there are certain partners that determine to a large extent your level of success or lack of it. For example, the Internet is filled with a lot of fraudulent suppliers listed all over the Internet and scheming unsuspecting buyers of their hard-earned capital.
- It is essential that you identify and partner with reputable suppliers and service agencies down your value chain.
Look out for and source your suppliers with the following online marketplaces –
- AliExpress
- DH gate
- Amazon
- Ebay
- iPmart
- Oberlo
- Click here for all other reputable China stores
Look out for and source your reputable Shippers with the following online marketplaces –
- DHL
- FedEx
- DB Schenker
- R+ L Carriers
- UPS
- YRC Freight
- DTDC
- Blue Dart
When choosing your shipping partner, ensure to choose based on the underlisted criteria, some shippers would offer door to door delivery for you and also help with clearing your products.
Check out this website for a list of reputable customs clearing agents in Nigeria.
4. Get Adequate Funding
Funding is one major problem with the mini importation business, like any other business out there, your level of funding determines the capacity of goods that you are able to trade on. The current government in Nigeria luckily has put in place several funding opportunities that any Nigerian business or entrepreneur might leverage on.
You need to pay for your goods, mostly in foreign currencies and in most instances the USD. A look at these articles will help you with your funding needs –
- Source of Funding for Small Businesses in Nigeria
- Nigerian Youth Investment Funds
- How to Apply for the 75 Billion Naira Youth Investment Funds
5. Understand Ways To Pay for Your Goods from Nigeria
Regardless of the fact that the world, through technological innovations has become a global village with inter-continental trades taking as low as a few milliseconds to initiate and conclude, sending and receiving money from international clients had until recent times been a nightmare for Nigerians; most payment platforms only allowed individuals and businesses to receive money in Nigeria through unified platforms and as such made it extremely difficult for clients to remit payments directly to the accounts of Nigerians.
A major downside to such arrangements is a hindrance to instant fulfillment as the Nigerian needs to either go to platforms that rendered money transfer services; these services did not, however, solve the challenge of instant fulfillment, a major prerequisite to a successful e-commerce venture.
Luckily, Nigeria now has a lot of payment systems opening up their markets to Nigerians to operate full payment transfer features. Some of these are homegrown and some are international. However, of all the available payment systems, Paypal remains the most popular and most secure.
Up until recently, Nigerians could not enjoy the full benefits of the Paypal platform. There was no provision for receiving funds; this was due to the effect of massive corruption and money laundering by Nigerians. The resulting effect of this is the massive proliferation of the payment transfer market in Nigeria by many other players; equally good in their service offerings and low on charges too.
Luckily for Nigerians, though the most popular, PayPal is not the only payment gateway option available for online financial transactions. There are several of them, some home-grown and indigenous to the Nigerian market, yet there are many international payment gateways that have opened up their market to Nigerian businesses.
Below is a list of payment gateways available to Nigerians:
6. Understand Available Marketing Platforms
Understanding the various marketing platforms available to most drop shipping business owners in Nigeria; their merits, demerits and distinguishing features would help you make the right choices. Consider reading up on how to sell in a crowded market like Nigeria – click here
Online:
A Nigerian retailer may choose to have a website or blog to market his or her products. A sample of each item will be displayed. You do not need to purchase a sample of the product to achieve this if you do not have a personal need for the product(s). You can simply get a sample from the manufacturer/wholesaler/another retailer.
Catalog:
As a Drop Shipper, you can keep product catalogs for the purpose of marketing. This does not necessarily require a physical shop. Catalog marketing can happen where two or more people meet for any type of meeting/activity.
Physical Store:
You can have physical samples of the products for customers to view and make informed choices. However, you do not keep an inventory. This approach can also be beneficial to small retailers who sell only small quantities; whenever they have large demands for their products, they can use the Drop Shipping method to meet their client’s needs with ease.
Online Auction Sites vs Internet Retailing:
A seller can use online auction sites such as E-bay or other online retailers like Amazon, Jumia, Konga, Jiji, and the likes to market a product without having stock. Once, an order comes in, the retailer can ship directly from the wholesaler to the client in need of the goods.
7. Promote Your Products and Services
Coming up with a new product or service especially on International trade is a lot of work; unfortunately coming up with ideas is just a part of it all —launching, building the right structures and promoting it is the other half of the equation. You could be offering the best product or service around, and yet not known by your focus market if you don’t promote properly.
A lack of the right marketing, positioning and promotion will make you lose out on opportunities or even end up losing money down the line. With so many businesses pivoting their products and services, the competition is quite real and the best way to stay in the race is to spend some money promoting your goods and services accurately and effectively.
Here are some tips on how to promote your mini importation business – 20 proven tactics to market a product:
- Email Marketing
- Press Mentions
- Source User Generated Content
- Work with An Influencer
- Create a Featured Video
- Direct Mail
- Trade Shows and Conventions
- Create a Pre-order Promotion
- Leverage a Loyalty Program
- Custom Audiences with Facebook Ads
- Tell Your Product Story
- Promote Your Products with Pinterest
- Write Guest Posts
- Use Eye-Catching Visual Media
- Use Social Posts to Generate Engagement
- Create Product Inserts
- Use Product Recommendations
- Create Gift Guides
- Sell More with Social Proof
- Promote and Sell in Multiple Marketplaces
8. Leverage on Digital Media
On leveraging digital media, I do not expect you to have the skills of Digital Media Marketing experts like Neil Patel. However, a drop Ship retailer might advertise a product using different media. However, digital media is a big plus in the Nigerian market space, because you can reach farther. It is a common belief that all classes of people in Nigeria are on social media (rich, average, poor, educated, and uneducated).
Paying for targeted adverts on social media such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, a blog or SEO optimization for some keywords on search engines will definitely create the needed awareness for your business.
9. Maintain an Excellent After-sales Support System
Your customers are the most important assets of your mini importation business. You must ensure that you try your level best to satisfy your customers for them to come back again and again.
After-sales support system refers to various strategic processes which ensure that your customers are satisfied with the products and services that you offer them.
After-sales service makes sure products and services meet or surpass the expectations of the customers Invest in building an excellent system.
In the mini importation business, the needs and demands of the customers must be fulfilled for them to spread positive word of mouth. In the current scenario, positive word of mouth plays an important role in promoting brands and products. Take every complaint from your customer as a new opportunity to learn what may not be working and needs some improvement on or outright change.
10. Create a Brand For Yourself and Product
New Businesses are opening almost daily; just as some businesses are exiting the scene. Several others are doing what you do. And guess what? Your target audience is humans who can only take in so much information. So, how do you ensure that you are the first to come to mind whenever they think of the products or services you provide? Simple – you need a memorable brand identity.
As many businesses all over the world try to get noticed by people, there is no denying the place of strong brand identity in the mix. And for a small business like yours, you need good branding to help your customers and prospects to remember you after first sight easily. You need a memorable brand identity.
Here is how to create a strong brand for your mini importation business.
Dig Deeper: How to Position Your Brand in the Mind of Your Audience
Maintain International Partnerships of Manufacturers, Suppliers, and Freight agents
One consequence of market globalization has been the growing incidence of collaborative ventures among companies from different countries. Small and large, experienced and novice, companies increasingly are choosing partnerships as a way to compete in the global marketplace. Motives for international collaborative ventures are varied and complex, including a desire to leverage resources and assets, retain flexibility, reduce risks, gain speed, and capitalize on each partner’s strengths.
Source: JSTOR
Seeking global partnerships is essential in some fields to compete with the growing market. It is so important to meticulously choose the appropriate partner. That cannot be done without the help of foreign insiders that know the local market in the target countries.
Conclusion:
The Mini-importation business still highly profitable And you can make it big if you follow the steps in this article.
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