Why sell beach toys and towels

Next to walking - swimming is the second-most popular beach activity, making beach inflatables a popular item for those looking to hang out in the water. With sun-bathing being the third most popular beach activity, you’ll find that beach towels and blankets can also quickly drive sales for your online store.

As a seasonal product, this is a great niche for those who want to create a summer business such as students or teachers. You can sell a range of products - from beach toys, inflatables floats, beach towels, sandals, and swimwear. There’s plenty of variety within the beach accessory niche, allowing you to offer your customers a greater selection of products.

How to drop-ship beach toys and towels

Dropshipping beach toys, inflatables and towels allows you to start a low risk business. As a seasonal product, buying inventory can leave you with unsold goods at the end of the summer. With dropshipping, you only buy goods as you sell them to customers - saving you money.

You can start a business without the need for warehouse space by taking advantage of dropshipping, which allows you to sell and ship products directly from AliExpress. Just add product images and text, then process your orders. The manufacturer will create, package, and ship goods right to your customer.

Choose products with high order volume and positive reviews. While proven products are more competitive, they’re also more likely to make you money. Look at picture reviews to ensure that the customer image matches the main image.

How to Market Beach Toys And Towels

Marketing for your beach toys, inflatables and towel store should be fun, with blue skies and sunshine to brighten up your customer’s day.

To build up your blog content, you can create copy around summer activities. From planning the perfect summer vacation to having a picnic in the park, you can subtly mention your products. The blog goal should be to entertain by providing fun ideas. Use a retargeting ad to remarket to blog visitors at low costs. You’ll want to present the right product based on the blog post they read.

Facebook ads will also work best for this type of niche. As beach accessories and towels can encourage the impulse shopper, you’ll want to run ads to grow your sales. Once you have a successful ad, you’ll want to scale your ad to bring in more money.

As a seasonal product, you’ll want to make the most of the season. Create a customer referral program. Give your customers a commission for promoting your products to their friends. You'll also want to have a minimum spend to ensure that your business remains profitable.

Business Model

Beach toys, towels and inflatables tend to have great profit margins. An inflatable basketball hoop can be purchased for under $20 and sold for as much as $65 - $80. A beach towel can be bought for around $10 and sold for between $40-$60. Remember to include costs of marketing, employees, goods, taxes and business expenses when pricing goods.

Dropshipping tips

If you decide to dropship through AliExpress, here are a few tips to set yourself up for success.

Free shipping can be exceptionally slow on AliExpress, and the express options are often prohibitively expensive. Try to find sellers that offer epacket shipping; it's an affordable alternative that allows trackable and quick shipping from China to most developed countries including USA, Canada, and some of the United Kingdom.
AliExpress can sometimes seem overwhelming because there are so many products. If you don’t know where to start when it comes to product selection, sort your search results by “Most Ordered”. This will put the best sellers at the top of the list and give you a general idea of what’s selling and what’s popular. You can also use Oberlo to drop-ship products directly from suppliers.
To get a better idea of what the cases look like in real life, check out the Reviews tab for product listings and view “Reviews with Photos.” Be sure to read the reviews as well, to see what others are saying about the product. Also, you’ll want to check out the “Transactions” tab within the product listing on AliExpress. If you see several purchases from one person, it’s likely they’re dropshipping the item. This tells you it’s likely a good item to sell.
Even though you might be paying next to nothing on AliExpress, don't under-price your products. You’ll want to leave enough margin for marketing, so try to sell products for three or four times your cost.
Try bundling your items into themed sets, or offering complementary products. Check out what the competition is selling to get a better idea of what product categories might be particularly relevant to your audience.
Platforms like Facebook allow you to target very specific attributes or behaviours. For example, if you use Facebook ads to drive traffic to a cell phone store, you can target iPhone 6 users for iPhone 6 phone cases and target LG V10 phone users for LG V10 phone cases. These device-specific options can be found in the ‘Behaviour Targeting’ section of your Facebook ad manager. Hyper-targeting can be applied to a wide range of behaviors and demographics.

Start your own beach towel and toy store!

From beach toys to inflatables floats, beach towels to sandals - download any of the royalty-free photos from Burst to start your beach business today!