Online retail in the UK is seeing a boost in recent years, with 17% to 18% increase year after year, and sales revenue amounting to billions per year.
To get a share of this revenue, you should seriously consider starting a dropshipping business. With this business model you don't keep an inventory of your products. You simply advertise and market your chosen products, and let the supplier or manufacturer ship the items for you.
The problem is, most affordable goods are sourced in Asia. If you source products from there, the shipping will take weeks or months before they arrive in the United Kingdom, giving your customers a bad experience.
To solve this, you must source your products from the UK, and make sure that the products are physically in the country so the shipment will not take a while.
Today we will be looking at a tool called Spocket. It's a platform where you can find dropshipping suppliers in the United Kingdom, a good place to source your products if you want to enter the UK market.
In the end, you will be earning more profits, sell better quality items, and make your customers happy.
Many online marketplaces make themselves look like they have suppliers in the UK. But, the big problem is that these online sites, like AliExpress and Chinabrands, do not have a way to filter sellers or suppliers by location of their warehouses.
How Does Spocket Work?
Spocket is an online platform that has a list of suppliers and manufacturers from all over the world. It can't be accessed by a retail consumer. People can't browse products and buy products here like they would in Amazon or eBay.
This is a good thing!
It means you have exclusive access to products and suppliers.
Spocket is a system where manufacturers, wholesale suppliers, and dropship companies meet with sellers. The sellers can pick the products they want to sell, and they post these products on their online stores.
As the customers order from the seller, the seller simply has to go back to his Spocket account, place the order, and then the manufacturer will ship the item to the customer.
As of now, Spocket can only be integrated with Shopify and WooCommerce platforms.
One highlight of Spocket and why you should use it to source products for your UK market, is that you can find products here that are physically in the United Kingdom. What this means is that the manufacturers are also in the UK, and they will use UK shipping couriers to get the product to the customer who ordered.
This is important, so you will not be waiting for weeks before your customer receives the products he ordered from you.
Why Should You Use Spocket?
Spocket is a great tool that comes with a free plan. You should use it for three main reasons:
- They has a free plan
- You can source products from companies from specific countries of your choice
- It makes the inventory and order management easy
The tool is great for both the expert dropshipper and the newbie.
If you are serious in growing your online business, you must be prepared to spend a small amount of money. The reason being is that the free plan has limitations, which will be discussed later on.
If you are new to online selling, you can use Spocket to make your business much more organized. It's great is you just want to sell products in the UK and have fast shipping times. It also saves you a lot of time on product research.
If you go to large marketplaces like AliExpress, there is no way you can make it show only products from manufacturers from a specific country.
On AliExpress, you must open each product, but you will not see where the product is from. However, you will find so many posts and marketing materials telling you that the suppliers in China have warehouses in the UK.
As you can see from the screenshot below, this product will ship to the UK in 40 days. That should be a sign that this product is physically not in the UK but in Asia.
Spocket is also great for people who want to sell high-quality products. AliExpress is full of imitations. Many claim to be Original Equipment Manufacturers, which is also a dead giveaway that they are not OEM.
An OEM is never allowed by any brand to sell the products they manufacture. Their job is to manufacture, not distribute.
With Spocket, you will find products that are original and of high-quality, making your customers have loyalty and be satisfied with the products that you sell.
Spocket Feature: Suppliers From Around The World
So, you want to find products that are in the UK. You can do this in Spocket. But you are not limited to that. You can choose products that are warehoused from any country you want.
But if you want to focus on UK products, you simply have to log in to your dashboard. Once you log in, you will see the same page below.
The next thing you have to do is to click on the “Search Products” link on the left panel. Or you can just type the product keyword in the search box.
As you can see, besides the search box is a series of filters. To show only the products from the UK, just click on the SELECT BY LOCATION button.
If you do this, a drop-down will show where you can make two choices:
- Ships from
- Ships to
What you want to do is to fill both areas with the country United Kingdom so the site will only show products from manufacturers whose products are in the UK, and only those that also ship to the UK.
This way, you are guaranteed that the products you see are only those that are in the UK, ready for UK distribution.
This is important because there are manufacturers who keep their inventory in the UK, but they do not ship to the UK.
You will only be frustrated later on if you find this out after you have already selected and updated your products to your store.
Spocket Feature: Import List
In your control panel, click on the IMPORT LIST link at the left side. After clicking this, you will see the list of all the products you have selected.
The contents of the import list are not the products that are currently live in your online store. These are products that you picked, ready for editing.
In this example, the selected product is called Graphic Print Ringer Tee. This is the name the manufacturer used, but you can change it.
Changing the name is important, as this is a key component of search engine optimization. Optimizing for SEO will help you get more traffic to your product.
Here, we are changing the name to T-Shirt with Yellow, Pink and Blue Hem.
It is your option to put the product tags there, which will make it easier for you to later sort all the products on your store, or put it in a specific collection.
A Collection is a group of products that are similar in nature. For example, you can create a collection called Pants. All the products that you put in this collection must be pants.
In your online store, if your customer clicks on Pants, he will only see pants, not t-shirts. It makes it easy for the customers to browse only a group of products that they want.
Now, you can also change the description of the product if you want to. You need to do this if you are not satisfied with how the manufacturer created the product description.
You can see on the screenshot above that the description is rather straightforward. You can into something like this:
You can also change the variants, and more images if you want. If you click on the variants, you will see the default available sizes of the shirt. You can check or uncheck the boxes. Here, we unchecked the box for the XL size to demonstrate that we have the option to not sell that size.
It is also in this area where you can change the selling price. It's up to you if you want to sell the product variants at different prices or at the same prices.
If you are not done editing and you are tired, just click SAVE and all your work will be saved. However, the product will not be live on your store.
If you want the precut to be available for browsing and selling, you must click PUSH TO STORE.
Spocket Feature: My Orders
This is the area where you can see your orders. This will only have content once your selected products have been pushed to the store, and if somebody bought it.
In here, you must click on the button that says CHECKOUT. After doing that, you will see the details of your order, like the cost and the shipping cost.
You can add a note to the supplier if you want. Then you can click on PLACE ORDER.
Once this is done, the supplier will be notified, and he will ship the item to the customer.
To view the details of the customer, such as his name and his shipping address, you have to click on VIEW CUSTOMER INFO at the top of the page. You can use this information to contact the customer and confirm if the details are correct before you order the product.
After doing all this, you do not need to worry about shipping. It is the supplier who will take care of that.
Spocket Pricing
As mentioned earlier, Spocket comes with a free plan. However, this will only allow you to sell or choose up to 25 products. This is great if you are just starting out. But if you want to be able to sell more, you need to subscribe to the paid plans.
The other choices are PRO and EMPIRE. The PRO costs $49, and the EMPIRE costs $99 per month. You can get a big discount if you pay for the subscription annually.
To get started start your trial! Click here to start using Spocket
Summary
Sourcing products in the UK is easy if you know where to find them. However, there are less options than the American suppliers or China.
Dropshipping for the UK is best done if you are willing to put in the effort and the time to search for products that are physically in the United Kingdom, but you can do this better with Spocket.