Creating a Drop-shipping Business: An Analysis of Multiple Marketing Strategies and Tactics on the Impact of Product Sales

To begin our creative project/thesis we sought out a project that would allow us to combine our interests in Supply Chain and Marketing. We chose to develop a drop-shipping business and analyze the effects that marketing had on our product sales. After reading and researching multiple potential products, we chose to begin by selling Sea Turtle Charm Bracelets. After selecting our product we created a webpage where we would be able sell it. Once we established a platform, we began to test different marketing tactics to observe the impact that they had on sales. The primary objective of this thesis was to test and analyze different marketing strategies and see which one would have the largest positive impact on sales. We researched different social media platforms and discussed how to best market the website so that we could increase traffic to our webpage and generate higher sales. We implemented different marketing strategies and sent out two surveys, through Qualtrics and Google Forms to understand the relationship between social media marketing and a consumer's likelihood to purchase. This thesis presents the development of a fully functional drop-shipping business, our approaches to marketing, the methodology behind the survey creation, obstacles and challenges we faced along the way, and the overall sales results that concluded our product was not suitable for consistent, long term sales. Through this project we have gained invaluable insight on how a drop-shipping business functions and the impacts that marketing has on it; looking towards the future we have decided to shut down our current business and utilize our knowledge on drop-shipping and marketing to create a new business which will sell items catered towards a broader customer base.