Ordering a Sample
Many merchants that are using Oberlo wonder how they can order a sample product from a supplier. Rightfully so! To successfully run a business, it’s always smart to do a test run before you’re working with the real thing.
Ordering a sample/one of your own products, is very important to know how to do if you’re dropshipping, especially when you’re first starting out. It can help you accomplish the following:
- Verify the quality of the products you choose to sell
- Verify the reliability of the suppliers of your products
- Determine the value of a product to set the appropriate markup price
- Learn how the fulfillment and shipping process works
- See what notifications will look like for the customer when they have ordered something
- Take your own professional photos of the products to use on your website
- Most importantly, it lets you make mistakes and learn what not to do!
Today, I’m going to walk you through all the steps of how to order a sample so you can accomplish everything listed above. Let’s get started!
How to place an order in your own store
Suppliers aren’t able to send you samples for free in most cases, so you essentially need to create an order in your own store and add yourself as the customer. To get the order to feed into Oberlo, it needs to be created in Shopify first.
You might be thinking that the next step would be to go to the checkout on your own website and buy something, but this isn’t necessarily the quickest method of placing an order in your own store. Plus, it would mean you have to put your payment gateway in test mode so you aren’t making a real payment in your own checkout. Let’s avoid that hassle! The better and quicker method is to simply create a Draft Order from your Shopify admin.
Follow the steps below to see how to create a Draft Order:
Step 1: First, you’ll need to go to the Orders section on the left-hand side of your admin:
Step 2: Next, you click the Create Order button at the top right:
Step 3: You’re now in the screen where you can build the Draft Order. Add the product(s) you want to make up the order:
Step 4: Since you’re shipping the product to yourself, add or create yourself as a customer to the order:
Step 5: Since this isn’t a real payment from a customer, Discount the order 100% so it doesn’t throw off your financial reporting in Shopify:
Step 6: Lastly, to finish creating the order Mark it as Paid:
Great work! That’s all folks! Now that the order has been created, it should appear in the Oberlo orders section so you can fulfill it.
Fulfilling the Orders
Now that the order has appeared in Oberlo, I recommend following one of the applicable guides below to see how to place the order with the supplier. The steps are slightly different depending on whether the products were sourced from Oberlo Supply or AliExpress.
Awesome! You’ve just created your first sample order! Please share some of your own experiences ordering a sample in the comments below.
