Help - Dropious

Publish your products for other stores to sell.
Publish products from other brands to sell them in your own online store.
Synchronize inventory, product information and orders automatically between your store and the stores with which you are connected as a seller or supplier.

This sales system is known as “cross-store selling”, and it’s inspired for both dropshipping and brands partnership ways to sell.

Roles in Dropious

You can be a Supplier: other online stores will be able to sell your products.
You can be a Retailer: sell products from other brands.
Both roles: expand Dropious capabilities as a supplier and as a retailer.

Advantages and Benefits of Dropious

Increase your main KPIs (CR, AOV, LTV).
Sell products from other brands with no stock or purchases.
Boost your product sales by allowing other stores to sell them.
Introduce a new sales channel in your online store, cutting acquisition costs and improving your expansion to new customers and geographical areas.
Partnership with similar brands with same values and products.
Everything happens automatically: you do not need to manage orders or products manually.

Basic Working

Dropious is based on the dropshipping system, whereby the supplier has the stock and process / ship the order:

The supplier publish and sync products & stocks.
The retailer find the supplier and send a request to them.
The supplier accept or refuse requests from retailers.
Once approved, the retailer import the products to its Shopify store, and sells them to the end customer.
The supplier receives the order automatically.
The supplier prepares it and sends it to the end customer.

Multiple Orders

Keep in mind that, if you are a retailer on Dropious and your customers place orders that combine products from you and those from Dropious suppliers, these products will go in separate packages and will be delivered differently.

When you publish Dropious products in your online store, a “disclaimer” about this will automatically appear in the description. However, our recommendation is that you also include this information in the Purchase Conditions of your website, and / or that you make the notices that you consider appropriate to your customers.

Real time synchronization

Dropious synchronizes all product, inventory and order changes between connected stores in real time.

In this way, we ensure the following:

Have new or re-stock product available to sell on Dropious the moment you upload it.
Keep the inventory updated.
Keep the product catalog updated.
Avoid stock out of stock.
Submit orders and order updates in real time for processing.

First Steps: Install, Setup & Account Activation

Installing the App

To get started with Dropious, the first thing you should do is install the App from the Shopify App Store.

Install the App

By installing our Application, you are not incurring any monthly cost, since by default all installations start with the Free Plan.

Like all Shopify Apps, you can access Dropious management through your Shopify Dashboard > Applications.

Keep in mind that Dropious processes and setup takes place on our own platform, not on Shopify, so you will be automatically redirected to our account with us.

When installing the application, we will automatically create a user linked to your Shopify store, with the email with which your store is registered in Shopify.

Activate your Account

To start using Dropious, you will have to complete some simple and easy steps that will take a few minutes, but which will be absolutely necessary to start selling through our system.

Sync your products
Add Brand Information
Setup Supplier and/or Retailer Options
Choose a Plan
Add a Payment Method for Retailer/Supplier operations
Publish your products
Accept Terms & Conditions

Throughout the help section we will break down the main ones in detail.

Synchronize your Products

When you install the App, Dropious will automatically begin to synchronize your products in our database. It usually takes a few minutes for stores with less than 50 products. Above this product quantity, sync process may take longer.

Most likely, while you continue the process of setting up your account, your products have been synchronized. In any case, we will notify you by email when all your products are synchronized.

Your products will be available for a maximum of 1 month until you finish activating your account. If you do not activate it, this data will be deleted from our servers.

Providing Basic Information of your Brand

At Dropious, the greatest value is in our brands. For this reason, we ask all brands, whether they are suppliers, retailers or both, to give a minimum information so that the rest of the brands that use the platform can find you and better value the partnership.

In Settings> Brand Information section you can:

Upload your logo or reference image to present your brand. We suggest that it be a photo where your product is seen and / or your brand value is perceived.
Add basic information such as your brand name, year and country of creation, short description and extended description.
Select a maximum of 6 categories where your products will be shown.
Add your social networks.
Add extra links that brands can visit. For example, direct links to key sections of your website, such as “Mission”, “History” or “Values”, or links to downloadable files such as “Catalog” or “Press Kit”.

Contact Emails

In Settings> General Information you can add emails for different purposes:

Contact email for Customer Care & Shipping: this email will be public for suppliers and retailers. It will appear in your profile in Dropious, and it will be provided to the supplier when and order happen. Suppliers will contact you to know, for example, the status of an order, or ask for some Customer Care questions.
Contact email for Settings & Admin: the email where we will send you notifications or setting questions regarding your Dropious account.

Supplier Configuration

Suppliers on Dropious will need to complete, confirm or review the following information in Settings> General Information.

Return Policy: a brief description of the instructions for exchanges and returns.
Shipping Information: basics about your areas, costs and delivery time that serve as a guide to your retailers.
Shipping From: country where your warehouse is located, for the reference of your sellers.
Retailer Requests: by default, retailers will have to request permission from suppliers to sell their products. But if you want your products to be available to anyone without having to accept it, you can activate the option “Auto-approve retailer requests”.
Product Margin: general discount margin that will be applied on your PVP and that will be shown to the sellers of your products. The wider the margin you put, and therefore the more possibility of profit for the sellers, the more sales potential you will have in Dropious. By default, a 50% margin will be applied, that is, for each sale you make through Dropious, you will receive 50% on the PVP. We usually recommend discounts of 40 to 60%, although you are free to put the margin that you consider. Important: you can make changes at the individual level in each product that requires to have a different margin than the general one.
Reserved stock: percentage of stock that you will make available to sellers on Dropious. By default it is 100%, that is, all your products stock would be available in Dropious. If you want only 50% of your stock to be available for Dropious, you will put 50%. We recommend keeping the maximum stock available to maximize sales opportunities. Important: you can make changes at the individual level in each product that requires to have a reserved stock than the general one.

Retailer Configuration

Retailers on Dropious can choose where they want the sales to ve delivered to in Settings> General Information.

By default, orders are send to suppliers and processed to the end customer’s contact and delivery information. If you prefer to receive the orders in your warehouse to send them to the customer at the end, you can mark the option “Send to my warehouse“, and complete the information related to your warehouse.

If you activate this option, all orders will be sent to your warehouse instead of to customer address. The supplier will only see the delivery information for your warehouse.

Important: keep in mind that this option does not cancel the supplier’s shipping costs if it does not have “free shipping”. Therefore, activating this option, you could incur additional shipping costs.

Setting Shipping Costs

Shipping costs in Dropious are automatically synchronized with the shipping rules and prices that each supplier has configured in their Shopify store. You do not need to configure anything related to shipping costs in your profile on Dropious or in your Shopify store.

A “Location App” will be created in the Locations section, which will automatically synchronize, calculate and add the shipping costs of an order at checkout to be paid for the final customer.

Important: do not delete this Location! If in any case you do not want to continue using Dropious, follow our instructions to uninstall the App before deleting this Location.

If you want to see the shipping costs of the suppliers before adding their products, in the profile of each one in Dropious you will see a brief version of their areas, prices and delivery times.

Connecting your Payment Methods

At Dropious, all payments are processed securely through the Shopify Payments and Stripe Payment platform.

The operation of the collections / payments in Dropious is as described below:

The retailer charges PVP and shipping costs to the final customer.
Dropious captures the Retail Price set by the supplier and the shipping costs at the moment an order is done.
Dropious payout the product payment and shipping costs to the supplier 7 days after the purchase.

To setup payments correctly:

Suppliers: we will need you to connect with your Stripe account or create an account on this platform to receive the payouts for the products you sell through Dropious. Payments will be made from Dropious to your bank account linked with Stripe.
Retailers: you will have to add a debit or credit card where we can capture the charges the Retail Price for every Dropious product you sell.
The monthly subscription will be charges through Shopify Payments if you select a plan higher than the Free Plan. It will be part of your monthly Shopify invoice beside other App charges you could have.

At Dropious we charge 6% on each sale made on our platform. This commission is already added to the Retail Price set by each supplier, so neither suppliers nor retailers will see extra charges related to this commission.

Choosing your Plan

By default, accounts created on Dropious start on the Free Plan. This means that we will not charge you any monthly fees, although you will have certain limits on syncing, publishing and importing products.

If you wish, you can upgrade to higher or lower plans at any time, as explained in the section “Plans”.

Your Account Information

In Settings> Account you can configure information related to your personal profile and access login:

Profile picture
User
Full name
E-mail
Password

Access to your Dashboard

You can access your Dropious dashboard directly from your dashboard at Shopify> Applications> Dropious: Cross-Store Selling.

You can also access from our login section.

Important! When creating your account, we assign you an internal password. If you want to access through the login section, the first time you must click on “Forgot your password?” and configure your password for access. Otherwise, you can also modify the password in the Account Settings section.

Accounts under Review

Some accounts needs to be approved or are paused before installing. This happens for one of these reasons:

Dropious is still not available in the store country
The kind of store is still no available in the platform (e.g. dropshippers)
The type of products is still no available in the platform (e.g. b2b products)

During the pause period, stores won’t be able to publish products, send requests to other stores, or add products from other stores.

Search and Publish Products

Search and Add Products and Brands

In the Explore section you can search for products and brands for your online store. You can choose to use the Brands view or the Products view depending on what is more comfortable for you to locate.

You can use filters to search brands and products, for example:

Product Category.
Values.
If you have the autoapprove vendor requests option active.
If you ship to your geographic area of reference.
Where do you ship from.
If you have any free shipping option available.

In addition, by clicking on the “More Info” button, both in products and brands, you will access to a Supplier profile, where you can see much more extended information about the products, exchange and return conditions, shipping costs and areas, delivery times, contact email, extended description, links, social networks, etc.

Send a Request to a Supplier

To sell on Dropius, as a general rule you will have to request permission from the providers. To do this, when you are in the Explore section and decide which brands or products you want to sell, you will simply have to click on the “Send Request” button.

We will automatically notify the supplier that you want to sell their products, and we will notify you when they decide whether or not to accept you.

If suppliers are not accepting your requests, review some of your key points, such as the relationship between your online store and the brands or products that you are requesting to sell or the visual look&feel of your store.

You can see all your requests, approved or pending, in Explore> Requests.

Once a seller approves your request, their products will be uploaded directly to your Products> External Products > Inactive section. From there you can select them and publish them in your online store.

Suppliers with the Option of Auto-approval

If a supplier checks the option “Auto-approve vendor requests” in their control panel, their products will be available for all Dropious brands without the need to request access or approval.

Retailers will be able to add them to their dashboard and immediately import them into their Shopify store to start selling them.

Suppliers’ Requests Management

If you are a supplier and you have not selected the “auto-approve vendors requests” option, your brand and active products will be available in the Dropious list of brands and products, and other brands may request to sell your products.

All the requests you receive will be available at Explore> Requests. From there you can approve requests, cancel them, or revoke access to your sellers.

Every time you receive a new application, we will notify you by email. We will also notify the seller of your decision via email, whether you approve or reject it.

Important! Requests are a measure of control for brands in Dropious, allowing them to choose who sells their products. It is important that you always manage requests, either to approve or deny them. Accepting or denying requests can only be done from your Dropious dashboard or from the notification email you receive, not through Shopify.

Managing Products

Publish Your Own Products (Suppliers)

In Products> My Products, you can see all the products you have available for sale in Dropious will appear.
In Products > My Products > Active, you will see the ones that are currently published in Dropious.
In Products > My Products > Inactive, you will be able to see all the products you have in your online store synchronized with Dropious, but not published for sale by other brands, either because of your preferences, or by plan limit.

In this section you will be able to handle some simple actions on the products, specifically:

Setup a different the product margin. By default, the general margin that you have configured for your store is applied: if you change product margin in a product, that margin will be applied exclusively in that specific product.
Setup a different reserved stock quantity. By default, the reserved stock rule that you have configured for your store is applied: if you change this percentage in a product, that reserved stock will be applied exclusively to that specific product.
Enable or disable products for sale. Important! Keep in mind that if you deactivate products for sale, they will no longer be available to Retailers who have them added to their store.

Important! Products that have no stock will be automatically disabled.

Any change in your Shopify products such as changing description, photos and videos, stock level, variants, etc. … should be done in Shopify, and it will immediately synchronize with your account in Dopious, so that you have the changes available there.

Import Products from other Brands to your Store (Retailers)

In Products> External Products, you will be able to see all the products that you have available for sale by other brands:

Approved products that you have already imported to your online store.
Products approved but not incorporated into your online store, either because you are not interested in selling them, or because of the limitation of your plan.

When a supplier accepts or accepts the sale of some of their products, all their possible products will become available in your “External products” section, so that you can activate their sale whenever you want.

From Dropious you can only enable or disable products to be imported into your Shopify. Any other product edition, such as modifying the description, deactivating variants, etc… should be done in your Shopify store.

Recommendations when Publishing Products from other Brands on your Shopify

When you enable approved Dropious products to sell on your Shopify store, they will automatically sync with your Shopify store as “draft” for you to review and publish.

Some recommendations about working with products from other brands in your online store:

The products will be imported in “draft”. You will have to review and post them.
All products are automatically uploaded with vendor information, variants, photos. They also include a “disclaimer” phrase that specifies that the preparation and shipping process is performed by another brand.
Translate the elements and descriptions into your language.
Adapt the descriptions to your brand style, so that your customer profile understands it better, and to avoid duplication of product descriptions for search engines.
Do not edit key information such as product IDs or SKUs, as it could cause Dropious to malfunction.
Each Dropious product that you incorporate will have “Dropious” as a vendor and will also incorporate the “Dropious” tag, so that you can have them located and generate statistics.
The stock of each product / variant is kept synchronized in real time via Dropious, so you will not have to worry about maintaining the stock.
We recommend that you keep the original RRP of the seller, in your currency.
If a seller disables a product that you have imported, or its stock reaches zero, we will automatically transfer it to draft and notify you by email.
To better understand third-party brand products in your ecommerce, we recommend creating a specific collection as “Collaborations” or “Friendly Brands”.

Managing Orders

Supplier Order Management

The orders received in Dropious can be seen in the Orders section with exact details of products, units, delivery information, and the link to see it in your Shopify store.

However, the orders received will be automatically synchronized with your Shopify store, so that can be processed as any other regular order. These orders will be tagged as “Dropious” to identify them.

Any management that you need to do about an order, you must do it directly in your store in Shopify, and Dropious will synchronize it. For example:

Modification of product or delivery data.
Mark it as fullfilled.
Add tracking tracking.
Cancel the order.

By default, you will receive a notification from Dropious every time you receive a new order, as well as reminders in case you don’t process them within 48 hours.

Important! We highly recommend to fulfill orders in your Shopify and add tracking link. This way retailers will have more control of the order and trust in your online store, which will have a direct impact on your evaluation within the platform and your ability to generate sales.

Important! If there is any problem or delay with the preparation or delivery of an order, you can contact the retailer directly to the email provided in the Retailer profile in Dropious, or contact us so that we can help you at info@dropious.com.

At Dropious we take great care of the quality of the brands that use the platform, so our commitment is to guarantee that the preparations and deliveries of orders are carried out in the expected deadlines and times and without incidents. Recurring problems in deliveries or delays in shipments will lead to the block of a supplier on our platform.

Retailer Order Management

In Orders section you can see the history of orders received, their main data, and link to see it in your Shopify store.

Orders sent to other stores if you are a seller.
Orders received from other stores if you are a supplier.

Every time a new order is generated in a seller’s store, it is automatically processed through Dropious to the supplier’s online store.

Therefore, due to this automatic synchronization, no extra management is required from the Retailer: the supplier will receive it and process it as one more order from their online store.

When the supplier update any of these actions, we will notify the retailer by email:

Order fulfillment.
Tracking number update.
Order cancellation.
Order refund.

We also take care of notifying suppliers to remind them that they have pending preparation and shipping orders from Dropious, if applicable.

Important! If there is any problem or delay with the preparation or delivery of an order, you can contact the supplier directly at the contact information that appears in their profile in Dropious, or contact us so that we can help you at info@dropious.com

Order Shipping Information

The information or shipping tracking depends on each provider. They must be the ones to include it in the Shopify order. When this information is added, it will be updated in the order in Dropious and the Retailer will be notified by email.

For any problem arising from the delivery of an order, suppliers and retailers will always have at their disposal contact information for each one in their Dropious profile.

Edit or cancel orders

If the request to edit or cancel orders comes from the final customer, the retailer must contact the supplier in the official email published in the supplier Dropious profile.
If the request to edit or cancel orders is made by the supplier, you must cancel the order in the Shopify dashboard (not in Dropious) and notify the retailer in the contact email that appears in the retailer Dropious profile.

Refunds

If an order has been canceled, the refund will be made automatically. However, if for any reason a seller needs to request a refund, they can do so by going to the contact methods published by the provider in their Dropious profile, or by contacting Dropious support service directly at info@dropious.com.

Customer Data

When a customer places an order through a seller, that customer’s full data will be sent to the supplier in sync. This action is done in this way because the supplier needs to be able to send the order consistently, and provide customer data to the courier company.

Customer data is synced to suppliers’ Shopify stores as customers that do NOT accept marketing.

Commercial use of these customer data by providers is strictly prohibited, and will result in suspension or blocking of the supplier’s account on Dropious.

Payments

Retailers Payments

Retailer payment would be captured automatically after a new purchase is done. This payments should be necessary for the order to be processed, and will be captured to a debit / credit card give by the retailers in Settings > Payments.

The payment quantity matches exactly with the Retail Price fixed by the supplier for each product when configuring product margin (this price includes Dropious commission). It includes also shipping costs (if applies).

These payments would be processed in a safe way using Stripe.

Supplier Payouts

Payouts to providers will be automatically done 7 days after the order was placed by the retailer. This payout will be made to the bank account linked to the supplier Stripe account which should be connected with Dropious in Settings > Payments.

The payout quantity matches exactly with the Retail Price fixed by the supplier the supplier for each product when configuring product margin (excluding Dropious commission). It includes also the total amount of shipping costs (if applies).

These payments would be processed in a safe way using Stripe.

Monthly Subscription

The monthly subscription for the Basic and Unlimited Plans will be made through Shopify Payments, and it will be shown in your monthly invoice from Shopify.

Commission per Order

A 6% commission will be added to he Retail Price setup by the supplier, and shown to the retailer before adding a product. This percentage is calculated over the Retail Price (not PVP). This commission does not apply to shipping costs.

Example:

A supplier sets $20 as the Retail Price of a product.
Dropious calculates 6% of $20 = $1,2.
Dropious shows the seller a Retail Price of $21,2.
When the sale occurs, Dropious captures $21 from the seller.
Dropious holds $1,2.
Dropious sends a payment of $20 to the provider.

This commission only applies when an order is placed, and none suppliers or retailers will be charge for this commission. This % is retained by Dropious when a transaction / order hapens.

Additional Options, Settings and Information

Reports

In the Dashboard section of your control panel in Dropious you will be able to see some general revenue statistics, as well as product ranking.

For more detailed statistics, we recommend that you access the Analytics section of your online store and use the tag “Dropious” to filter the performance of Dropious for your online store in your Reports.

Transaction History

In the “Billing” section you can access the history of payments of Dropious:

Monthly plans (if applicable).
Product charges and shipping costs to sellers.
Payouts for sales to suppliers.
This section is for informational purposes only.

Important! Dropious only acts as an intermediary. Taxes over the PVP or the Retail Price must be declared by retailers and suppliers.

Upgrade & Downgrade Plan

You can upgrade to higher or lower plans at any time. In Settings> Plan you can choose a higher plan.

For higher plan, the upgrade will be automatic applied, and at that moment you will be able to update your published and imported products to the maximum number of products available in that plan.

For lower or free plan, as a previous step to the downgrade, you will have to adjust your published and imported products to the maximum allowed by the plan to which you are going to downgrade. Once this is configured, you can download the Plan automatically, also including the Free Plan, for which you will not be charged any monthly.

Change Role in Dropious

If at any time you want to change your role in Dropious as a supplier or seller, you can do so in Settings> General Information> Shop Type.

Keep in mind that the variation of these characteristics can lead to important changes in the platform that affect the stores that are connected to you.

Wholesale Orders

Although Dropious is not specifically prepared for this, you can use our platform to place wholesale orders with physical delivery to your warehouse or store.

In these cases, we recommend that, even if the supplier has already approved the sale of their products, you contact them previously to inform them that you are going to make a purchase of stock for physical sale.

Uninstall the App

If you want to stop using Dropious, you can uninstall from Shopify> Applications.

Anyway, we highly recommend you to take a few steps in order to a better uninstalling process and deleting data.

Go to Products > My Products and disable all your published products.
Go to Setting > Plan and download to free plan.
Go to Settings> General Information and use the “Delete account” option. Through this option, we will begin the process of erasing all your data, we will cancel your plan if necessary, and we will notify your sellers that your products are no longer available. Once all the data on our platform has been removed from our system, we will notify you by email.
Final step, uninstall the App from the Applications section of Shopify.

Behaviors not Allowed on Dropious

At Dropious, our main avlue is to take care of the quality of the brands and products that are connected to our system, for the benefit and trust of all the connected stores.

Any of the situations described below will lead to the cancellation or suspension of the Dropious account for quality reasons:

Sale of products or brands of which you are not a manufacturer. For example, if you are a multi-brand store, you cannot sell third-party brands without their written permission.
Use of end customer data from Dropious for commercial purposes. Neither by subscribing to your newsletters, nor by using their data in advertising systems.
Recurrent issues with order cancellations, delays in preparations or problems in deliveries. A maximum of 3 situations in this regard will cause you to receive a warning and your account will be closely monitored. A maximum of 5 situations in this regard will cause your account to be suspended.
Execution of aggressive discount or price policies that may harm the supplier’s image or sales.
Brands rated less than 2.5 stars by other Shopify stores you work with.
Repeated complaints from other Shopify stores about a vendor or seller.

Important! Any supplier may revoke access to a retailer that carries out policies or practices that it considers harmful to its business, without the need for Dropious intervention. You will be able to do it on your seller list.

Retailers who do not want to continue working with suppliers will be able to disable their products on Dropious and their online store, and remove them from their supplier list to remove all their products, active or approved, from your profile on Dropious.

Report Abuse

If you detect any improper use of our platform, please let us know at info@dropious.com so that we can study it and take the appropriate measures.

Next Steps and Changelog

Beta Version launch (2022, February).
Official launch (2022, March).
Enable the option to “add more stores” from the same owner.
Dropious visual enhancement.
WooCommerce connector development to be able to sell in this system and between Shopify <> WooCommerce stores.
API development for integration with custom cart stores or other systems.

If you miss any functionality or find an error, write to us at info@dropious.com so we can assess it.

Contact

For any questions not included in this guide, suggestions, bugs or feedback, you can contact us at info@dropious.com.