April, 2022 | Modalyst

Where to Find the Best Indie Brands for Dropshipping

Posted on April 30, 2022August 25, 2022 by Alain Miguel

Indie brands are exploding onto the beauty and fashion scene. While they may start small, some grow to be worth billions of dollars.

It’s no wonder as statistics show that about 93% of Indie companies are owned by women and 90% of shopping for personal care products is done by women. Indie makeup brands and other types of indie brands are uniquely positioned with their finger on the pulse of the industry. They know what their customers want and are savvy enough to give it to them.

So what are Indie clothing and beauty brands and what is interesting about their products for a dropshipping business? Let’s find out.

What Does Indie Mean?

Wait, let’s back up a second, what is an Indie brand, anyway? While Indie brands are as diverse as the people who found them, there are a few qualities that define them as a company. Let’s look at them here.

Funded Independently

Indie brands start out by funding themselves independently. The founders put up the capital needed to get their business off the ground or come up with creative methods of obtaining said capital. This can range from methods like pre-sales, crowdfunding, or nurturing valuable partnerships.

Though they are often left scrambling and hanging on by their fingernails, this approach also works well with consumers. People these days prefer to support small businesses making a go of it over large mega-companies.

Passionate Purpose

Indie brands are often headed by one founder (or pair of co-founders) with a passionate purpose. They build their brand around products that they believe will help people and provide value — not just products with which they can make a quick sale.

A Focus on Design

Back in the old days, shoes, clothes, and many other products were crafted by artisans highly skilled in their craft. Indie brands are reminiscent of this. They focus on quality and that includes not just their products but also their marketing and right down to the design of their packaging.

Small Quantities

An Indie brand is different from a tech startup or software company in that they sell a physical product. However, because of their limited resources, they can’t mass produce their products. This gives them an exclusive feel that also appeals to their customer base.

This also means they can be more nimble with their production. If a certain product isn’t appealing to their audience, they can scrap it and go in a different direction without having to dispose of a large inventory.

Innovative Marketing

Indie brands can’t afford to blast advertisements across television or radio. Instead, they turn to more inexpensive methods like content marketing and social media to market their products to a more niche audience.

This also allows them to connect with their audience in a unique way. Through social media, brands can actually ask customers what they think about a product or what they want to see in a new product and customers can answer. This gives them a unique edge over big companies trying to please everyone — which ultimately pleases no one.

Why Should You Sell Indie Products?

Indie brands connect with today’s consumers in a unique way. Millennials, in particular, are looking for an experience, not just a product.

Just browse YouTube and you’ll see loads of videos of people unboxing products they’ve bought from an Indie brand. YouTube personalities enthusiastically promote their favorite brands, gushing over the lovely packaging and delighting in the personal touches that the maker added to the product.

And since Indie brands make products for a highly niche audience, there is literally something for everyone. For example, Indie makeup brands that specialize in products for women of color. Or Indie clothing brands that focus on hipster clothing or another particular look that won’t necessarily be found in a big clothing store.

Additionally, the uniqueness of Indie products appeals to consumers. People don’t like the idea of their clothing or cosmetics being the same as everyone else’s. They want to buy unique products.

The success of Etsy shops shows this. Small businesses can handmake or create just about anything and sell their artistry on this online marketplace — and customers are eating it up.

There really isn’t any good reason not to be selling indie products in this day and age.

How to Add Indie Products to Your Dropshipping Business

For eCommerce business owners looking to stock their e-shelves with Indie products, Modalyst is a great place to start. It is one of the only marketplaces out there from which it is easy to source Indie products for an online store.

They have a specific Independent Brands Marketplace which makes searching for dropshipping products a breeze. All suppliers are thoroughly vetted and they take care of commissions, shipping, and returns policies so everything is uniform.

All the suppliers are based in the U.S. or Europe, rather than China or India. This means shipped products arrive within a few days rather than a few weeks. This, as you know, is key for a dropshipping business. Today’s consumers expect to see their orders in a timely fashion.

Hingeto is another platform where business owners may have some luck connecting with Indie brands for dropshipping.

There are a number of other marketplaces that work with Indie brands, but most of them sell wholesale to business owners. These include

Faire: which prides itself on connecting retailers to the makers
EcoCult: which will only accept ethical brands as part of their commitment to sustainability
The Indé Project: facilitates connecting Indie designers with retailers and helping them grow their businesses

Getting Started with Dropshipping Indie Products

For business owners looking to expand their eCommerce stores, adding Indie products is a great way to do it. Customers are looking for unique products and unique experiences. By connecting with Indie brands, businesses can do both.

Get started with your dropshipping business today.

Reap the Benefits of AI and Chatbots for Your Dropshipping Business

Posted on April 11, 2022August 25, 2022 by tea@moosend.com

We’ve come a long way since those early days where data scientists needed to predict a customer’s needs all on their own and be lucky enough to have come to the right conclusion.

Today, more and more companies implement AI and chatbots to optimize customer service and gather data that will enable them to not just make predictions but data-driven decisions that will help them down the line.

Hence the need for email marketing and marketing automation platforms -like Moosend, which is one of the best Constant Contact alternatives out there- that can help out with tasks as large as data analysis.

And, as all businesses need email marketing, all businesses need the super-pro type of segmentation and personalization that AI can offer them.

Furthermore, chatbots have come to be an exceptional tool, both as a means to achieve interaction on a landing page, thus generating leads, and to create a better customer service department.

Chatbots, in this sense, will manage to automatically sort out the “easy” questions and leave the agents to tackle the more important issues.

Do you think that your dropshipping business should be an exception? This is a rhetorical question, of course. The answer should always be no. So, let’s begin!

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

Let’s start with the basics. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a pretty old concept.

AI refers to the ability of a machine to “mimic” human intelligence, thus enabling it to learn rules, remember information, apply basic principles to that information, come to conclusions and correct itself whenever necessary.

It doesn’t take an expert to understand that these traits can turn AI technology to the best salesperson you’ve ever had.

Let’s see how!

1. It can help with personalization

It’s not a secret anymore and it doesn’t seem like a fad that will fade within the next couple of years. Personalization is here to stay, and it’s no surprise. After all, since the beginning of time, people trusted the ones that could sell them something they actually needed.

AI can help with that, like nothing else.

As a matter of fact, it can take the data generated by the customer’s personal choices, analyze it and make the most of it by recommending something similar or something just as interesting, as is the case with Amazon’s recommendations or Apple’s famous Siri.

Of course, it can -and will- help your dropshipping business. Consider the following: You want to make personalized recommendations for people to get hooked, whether this is on a landing page of yours, or on your website.

AI can help with that, on a one-on-one basis no less, identifying and predicting behaviors and preferences creating more segments and taking into account more parameters than a data analyst could, also eliminating the human error factor.

2. It can keep your leads’ list clean and tidy

Put a machine to the test, and be sure that it will analyze the data in a way that a human wouldn’t be able to – mainly because of the volume.

Now, all data contain patterns that could be invisible to the human eye, however, they could be more than obvious to a machine, enabling it to analyze, come to conclusions and “feed” businesses and sales teams with the leads they need to be focusing on.

These leads can be one-offs, repeaters, anything at all. AI will sort them into proper lists and check which ones need to be used by the sales team, which ones will find value in upselling or cross-selling and which ones need some more time to “mature” and convert.

Essentially, through AI, you can make educated decisions that would otherwise be partly data-driven and partly guesstimates, as far as your funnel is concerned.

With AI, your dropshipping business can lead prospects, customers and anyone and everyone in-between, further down the sales funnel.

3. It can improve your email marketing endeavors

Don’t tell me you didn’t see that coming. AI is ideal for email marketing, as I mentioned in the beginning.

Let me explain the hows and whys since your dropshipping business needs email marketing as much as online stores and brick-and-mortar stores do.

First of all, AI can segment your list faster and more effectively than any human could do, seeing as data is its main source of energy.

Secondly, list segmentation can lead to personalization when it comes to emails, from content and design to products, recommendations, upsell and cross-sell opportunities -remember the funnel I mentioned before?

AI will take various demographics like education, age, and budget into account, as well as factors like previous orders, browsing behavior and so on and so forth.

These factors will help determine the CTAs that are more appropriate and, seeing as the CTAs will be more than one, can help you with A/B testing.

But CTAs are not the only thing that can be tested, right?

AI can utilize all the information it can gather and make content suggestions, body copy and subject line suggestions, identify trends and so on and so forth.

And you already know what that means when it comes to A/B testing and an email campaign in general.

Combine all these factors and what you’ll get will be a highly segmented, highly personalized email campaign.

Now let’s move on to the second part of our article… Chatbots.

Chatbots: A definition

A chatbot is exactly what its name indicates: a little bot that pops up in a chatbox and holds a conversation with the user that happened to browse at that moment.

As evident, a chatbot is an AI appliance that aims to act as a customer service agent.

And how can this bot help your conversion?

Chatbots eliminates waiting time

It’s true. A chatbot replies to any and all people that will message it. You can just go ahead and personalize everything, from the name and picture of the bot, down to its messages and how it can distribute information.

Mind you, waiting time isn’t just a “Please hold” message. It’s also an “I’ll get back to you as soon as possible” that went amiss or even a very detailed search in blogs, posts, websites and FAQs.

A chatbot can help resolve all that and acquire valuable data at the same time, seeing as it will need to ask a question or two, in order to serve the customer.

So, the customer will be happy and you will be happy with your data as well.

Not to mention that a chatbot can be so engaging as to become, along with AI, one of your best salespeople with personalized recommendations and offers a prospect won’t refuse that easily.

Talk about a win-win!

Chatbots can boost sales

Much like its Momma, AI, a chatbot can boost sales by walking a customer through the whole signing up and picking out an item process.

It can make the experience more fun and interactive altogether, while driving sales and revenue.

Let me put it this way: Signing up for something is a tedious process. But I’d gladly sign up if I wanted to check out some shoes with my best friend.

And I wouldn’t abandon my cart if I was chatting and doing something fun at the same time, seeing as mood can play a major part in the whole process of a purchase. And I won’t need to clarify what I’m looking for, too many times.

Not to mention that, if a great interactive quiz popped up into my screen and I answered questions with the help of a chatbot that would help me decide on the actions I should take to make the most of what your dropshipping business has to offer me, I would most likely be hooked.

Really, I would buy more and more if a good salesperson had something of value to recommend, and chatbots and a quiz are great at upsells, cross-sells and recommendations.

Chatbots automates the whole process

The great thing about chatbots is not just the fact that they’re great at selling just the right thing at the right time.

Leaving your customer service and sales alone and granting them the time and energy to tackle some real issues that could potentially be harmful is one of the realest benefits of the use of chatbots, especially in businesses like dropshipping.

Most people need to know working hours, how they can contact the business, if there is a discount on a product, delivery dates and so on and so forth. These are questions a chatbot can be great at answering.

On the other hand, not too many prospects need a refund, are angry because they received a damaged product or have never received their item. And they’re the ones in need of immediate assistance.

If they’re happy, they’ll keep coming back for more, saving you the money and effort of finding new customers.

So, let the chatbot deal with trivial things like giving out information on the company, light sales to top-funnel customers and product suggestions.

And allow your sales and customer service teams to deal with the “heavy stuff” that can drive a prospect further down the funnel and keep them happy enough to come back for a little more of you.

The use of chatbots, especially combined with AI, email marketing, and teams that are there to keep customers happy-as-a-lark and pleased with the overall service of your dropshipping business, shows a company that is transparent and can help you boost your ARR and MRR churn efforts.

And that’s it for today!

There are many uses for chatbots and AI apart from conversion, of course. AI can be successfully used in medicine, for example, or engineering, or some other uses I’ll let you think of…

And tell me down in the comments!

Also, don’t forget to ask any questions and share the knowledge!

Author Bio:

Téa is a Content Writer working for email marketing software Moosend and an obsessive writer in general. In her free time, she tries to find new ways to stuff more books in her bookcase and content ideas-and cats-to play with.

16 Wix Apps You Need For Your Ecommerce Website

Posted on April 6, 2022August 25, 2022 by Alain Miguel

If you’re a business owner looking to create your website in a simple, affordable, and hassle-free manner, then Wix.com is probably your best bet.

Having more than 160 million users across 190 different countries, it’s a universally reputed cloud-based platform that helps you in building virtually any sort of website. It is the ultimate website builder.

Through Wix, both small and huge businesses receive the tools they require to build their business website. This in turn allows for them to display their creativity without the necessity of any coding expertise. Wix is extremely user friendly and great for beginners. Although the Wix platform does have a free plan, users can also go for their premium paid plans that cater to more professional needs (particularly to ecommerce websites).

Wix is of the opinion that effective website creation software should be eclectic, which is why its apps and plugins serve multiple purposes. Whether you’re hoping to build a high-quality free website or an internationally popular online shop, you can employ Wix’s editing apps, coding apps, as well as Artificial Design Intelligence models to give an aesthetic hub to the content on your website.

Which are the Best Wix Apps for Your eCommerce Website?

Wix provides ecommerce stores and dropshippers with an array of apps to improve the experience it can provide to its customers. These apps are available to all Wix users and can be found on the Wix App Market.

What is the Wix App Market?

Wix has built-in features which are excellent, but the Wix platform can’t quite do it all. Fortunately, if there is some tool or feature which is missing from the out of the box Wix experience, you can likely find a Wix app that can fill that gap.

The Wix App Market contains over 300 apps that are easy to install and make your Wix site do more.

Essentially, this means that there is certain functionality that Wix itself does not provide you as part of its core offering. To close this gap, Wix provides you with hundreds of homegrown apps that can enhance your Wix website.

Wix apps are like the ‘plugins’ you can add to WordPress, or the ‘integrations’ you can add to Squarespace.

Here are some of the best Wix apps to use for ecommerce websites or when starting a dropshipping store with Wix.

1.Wix Stores

Wix Stores gives you all the necessary tools to gift the best kind of ecommerce journey to your consumers. With more than two million ecommerce experts using Wix Stores, the effectiveness of the app can barely be doubted.

This Wix app aids you in forming a fully-functioning online store with just one click. You can then customize your store however you like, and choose from the numerous customizable templates as well as the countless product options, product galleries, and the choice of a one-click checkout, too.

Using Wix Stores, ecommerce businesses can assure a complete secure checkout procedure for its customers. This Wix app also assists with inventory, creating coupon codes, managing your store, reflecting the tax and shipping rules, and so on. It doesn’t have any transaction fee on sales, builds and sends newsletters using ShoutOut, and also helps in adding unlimited items to your Wix website.

2. vCita Inc.

When you’re using vCita Inc., which is Wix’s online payment app, making and processing payments becomes much easier. With the charges beginning at $12.25 every month, the management process is extremely simple, without you having to pay any transaction fee.

You can set your preferred currency, and also receive automatic SMS and email notifications whenever a new payment occurs. While using a free account limits you to $300 in payments every month, a premium account doesn’t have those restrictions. A mobile-responsive version makes receiving payments for your ecommerce website smooth and simple, and also creates branded invoices by using its integrated invoicing system.

3. Wix Blog

A well-curated blog is a part of every successful ecommerce website. A professional-looking blog engages your visitors and educates them about your brand, Wix Blog helps you in managing your website blog by aiding in creating new posts, adding new categories, managing comments, etc.

With the addition of different categories, not only is it easier for you to categorize your blogs, but it’s also more feasible for your readers to go through the blog posts accordingly. With Wix Blog’s social features, readers can comment on the images and videos, share your posts, follow your company, and so on.

You can also add and manage more than one writer with this app. By giving the writers the ability to log in to their separate section, you can delegate to them the task of managing profiles, and sorting out everything relates to comments, posts, and followers.

Having visually aesthetic quotes, fonts, bolded text, links, and the like is made easier with Wix Blog’s rich text editor. In order to reclaim readers to your blog, you can send them push notifications through messages and emails to notify them about a new post. You can also use the relevant hashtags to increase your social media reach.

4. Wix Language Menu

With a Wix Language Menu, the visitors on your website will be able to browse in their native language. In order to give them a better browsing experience, you can redirect them by choosing from over 30 languages. Users can then use the language selector tool to choose their preferred language.

5. Back to Top

It can be frustrating for website users to go back to the main menu after they’ve already scrolled all the way down. To ease this issue of theirs, the Back to Top app allows them to return to the top of a webpage with just a click.

This Wix app gives you control over the button’s size, style, position, and colors that go with the scheme of your website.

6. Wix Get Subscribers

Business owners can expand their list of subscribers by using Wix Get Subscribers. Through this, you can craft thank-you messages, personalized sign up boxes, and have matching colors on your sign up forms to increase the branding level of your website. This particular Wix app allows you to customize layouts, form fields, and fonts.

With the help of Wix Get Subscribers, you can also sync your contact information using the marketing automation platform provided by Wix. The app also enables automatic pop-ups and lets you have access to unlimited subscriptions.

7. Wix FAQ

Constantly answering questions related to your website isn’t always possible. Therefore, use Wix FAQ to answer any questions visitors might have about your business. This decreases the time you have to spend on customer support. You can also choose to add images, videos, and group questions. Also, make sure to keep updating the FAQs whenever necessary.

8. Modalyst

With Wix’s Modalyst app, you can hunt down dropshipping products for your store and then send them directly to your customers. With quick shipping and stellar product assortment, Modalyst serves as the sole dropshipping marketplace with a huge selection of brands.

Modalyst has over 100 reviews on Wix, most of which are 5-star ratings.

Modalyst also provides an impressive collection of niche suppliers, fashionable and affordable goods, and products that are high-margin and low-cost ones. Through its centralized platform, you can manage all the products and suppliers from one place. It also keeps updating the descriptions, pricing, imagery, and inventory. Order numbers and tracking IDs get synced with your store, and you can also view how much you’re earning in real-time.

9. Wix Forum

By making use of Wix Forum, owners will be able to create an online community within their ecommerce website. These community members will have the freedom to join in on conversations, follow different posts, make comments, upload videos, and so on.

Owners can choose from a list of layouts to give a customized look to their forum. The setup process is fast and simple, the design is user-friendly for every member to operate, and it also gives you a real-time mobile experience.

10. Site Booster

Driving traffic to your website and getting discovered by the famous search engines and directories is made easier with Wix’s Site Booster.

It monitors and lists your brand and website across the most crucial places throughout the web. Through this, your rank will go higher in the search results, you will have your business listed on platforms such as Google and Yahoo and Bing, and you can also add in your business details on other platforms to gain more contacts.

11. Wix Forms

Looking to create and add forms to your website? Wix Forms has got you covered. Leaving information and asking questions becomes easier for the visitors through this app. It has an easy integration with Wix CRM, due to which all the submissions under this app get stored in Wix Contacts.

Among the many templates are options related to contacts, leads, customizing and designing forms, etc. You also receive notifications on your mobile and email every time a form is a submitted.

12. Web-Stat

It’s not always easy to get an estimate of how well your website is performing. Instead of complicated tools, Wix gives you an app that lets ecommerce websites view how visitors interact with their website, perform activities, and in turn grow their business.

This app helps you create useful reports, get alerts regarding new visitors, and also gives you the choice to display a visitor counter. You can track the pages, thereby converting browsers into buyers, and also detect the location, screen size, and equipment of every visitor.

13. Wix Countdown Clock

Imagine it’s the anniversary of your business or website, or that you’re preparing for a sale or a big reveal or giveaway; how can you make your website appear more appealing? By displaying a countdown clock. With Wix’s countdown clock, you can enter the target date and time, and customize the look and feel of the countdown clock.

14. Wix Hit Counter

If you want to let your site visitors know of the total traffic you’ve had, you can do so with Wix’s easy-to-use hit counter. You can get a hit counter with just one click, and then add it to either one or all the pages of your website. This also lets you track the traffic to your website in real-time.

15. Wix Art Store

If you need to sell, showcase, or print your art, you can easily do so with Wix’s Art Store. Be it getting your art printed on different types of merch items or selling your digital art, Wix Art Store has got you covered with options related to packaging, shipping, payment processing, and so on.

16. Comments

Easy interaction with your customers is important for any business. Add the element of comments to your ecommerce website, through which your buyers can leave reviews, feedback, and have conversations with the rest of the customers as well. By customizing the look of the comments department, you can not only receive quick feedback from your visitors, but also increase the credibility of your brand.

What are the Benefits of Using Wix for Ecommerce Websites?

The features offered by Wix are accessible and easy to use. Let us take a look at several elements that make Wix.com a beneficial platform, especially for online stores and dropshipping in general:

SMB (Server Message Block)-Friendly: For SMBs and those who are the sole owners of a website, and are hoping to build a website without having to burn a hole in their pockets, Wix is a great way out. The features are accessible without having to pay anything, and the creation process asks for no technical or coding skills. You just need to choose the elements you wish to change, and you can accordingly drag-and-drop the items into the available templates.
Wix Code and Wix Artificial Design Intelligence: With the help of Wix’s Artificial Design Intelligence, all you have to do is provide the information of who you are and what you do, and the supply experts will build a website with all the content you wish to include. In addition to a personalized website, Wix also provides a Code module for the developers. This allows them to complete the set up and make use of their own database collections. The coding operations are fuss-free and intuitive, and everything given to you is SEO-compatible.
SEO-Catered Content: SEO-optimized content is the key to attracting users to your website, and Wix helps you develop that. Search engines can easily detect your presence on the web, and your offers become more prominently visible, too. There are several features you can choose from to upgrade your Wix site to the next level.
Effective Ecommerce Module: By subscribing to the ecommerce module provided by Wix, you can make your ecommerce store temptingly attractive. Equipped with custom checkout pages and three kinds of product catalogs, it improves the experience of your buyers by polishing the functionalities of the online shopping cart.

Wix also facilitates direct payments in the form of credit cards and even PayPal wallets (with the perk of no commissions being involved). It even takes care of your shipping operations and end-to-end your inventory.

Learn how to start a successful dropshipping business with Modalyst. Overnight.