10 Common Drop shipping Mistakes To Avoid

23:22:00



Dropshipping is a convenient way to test products in the e-commerce marketplace without having to invest a lot of money on inventory, warehouse space, and staff to handle customer's orders. It is also a great way to sell large, expensive, or hard to handle the merchandise.

However, dropshipping is not an easy, no-effort way to make a lot of money selling on the internet. It takes a lot of hard work to do your market research to select potential profitable products, hard work to check out your competition so you can price your items properly, hard work to develop unique and creative advertising and marketing methods to convince potential customers to buy from you, rather than from your competition.

Top 10 Dropshipping Mistakes

Choosing a Niche

Many people choose a Niche by reading some posts or by some recommendations. This can create a problem sometimes. If the owner doesn't know much about a niche like having no interest. Then a store owner can find difficulties in finding demanded products. It can create a problem in product research.

Chasing the money

98% of the marketers out there get into this business and chase the money. I know, because I was one of them. I had a jewelry store and did very well with it until I got burned out. I couldn't do it anymore and walked away from it. Learn from my mistakes, and go into a niche you have an interest in.

Confusing Website Structure

Store structure should be simple. So, if the consumer wants to buy a T-shirt then there should be a proper URL structure that will list all T-shirt. If the site structure is not good then this will lead to low conversion.

General Store

Design a store in such a way that even a layman can easily understand site design and can easily browse it. This can increase conversion rates.

Store Design

You pay for the convenience of having someone else handle inventory and service, and often you pay a heavy premium for that convenience. Suppliers add a mark-up to the cost of packing materials, they will add a mark-up to shipping costs, and often they will mark-up their labor costs. After all, nothing is free

Information

Your dropship supplier must keep you informed about inventory levels and any price changes. If you are selling on Amazon, eBay, or other similar sales platforms and you cancel too many orders because of a back order situation from your supplier, your service ranking will be affected and if your metrics drop too low your selling account may be suspended or even canceled

Convenience

Dropshipping can be executed on a global scale. However, if you are buying and selling worldwide, you need to be sure you understand that each context you enter is not the same. So if you pick a local marketplace, understand their local clientele, price level, buying behavior, payment terms, profit margins, level of after-sales service.

Items are not always cheaper

People perceive DropShipping as a high margin and easy to do business. This is not always the case, due to the low barrier of entry, it is easier and easier for people to create a website, find some products and start advertising them!

Because the cost to start up was so low, some stores sell their products with very small margins, and sometimes will even accept a small loss just to get customers and revenue.

You can mitigate these problems by providing value above and beyond the physical product. For example, providing an easy to navigate store, with simple to use tracking pages and good customer service will instantly give you an advantage over a website that has rock bottom prices, poor sales pages and awful customer services.

Bundling items doesn't always work

When creating your store, you will more than likely work with more than 10 different suppliers. One of my stores has over 100 different suppliers, and they each have their own warehouse, shipping companies, and time frames.

This makes bundling customer orders together impossible. If your customer buys Item A, B, and C, and they are all from different suppliers, you will firstly incur 3 different shipping charges, you will then also be given 3 different tracking numbers and lastly, you will have 3 different potential time frames for the items to arrive.

You can mitigate or at least make this issue smaller by using a fewer number of suppliers as well as explaining to customers beforehand that shipping in smaller quantities or separate packages can reduce tax. When creating your store, you will more than likely work with more than 10 different suppliers. One of my stores has over 100 different suppliers, and they each have their own warehouse, shipping companies, and time frames.

Someone makes a mistake

DropShipping does add a new level of complexity when it comes to making mistakes.

Suppliers do and will make mistakes when it comes to orders, they might send out the wrong color, the wrong size, sometimes the completely wrong item and you are the faces of that company. You are the one who has to sort out the issue by talking to both the supplier and the customer, you have to find a way to solve the problem and fix it for the customer.

By finding a good supplier you can reduce this risk, so look for ones who have lots of orders, high feedback ratings and have a good store pages. Ones who are just starting out or don't have much in the way of feedback or reviews may cause you problems and sometimes can't handle the sheer volume of orders that you can be giving them (trust me, it's happened to me)

You Might Also Like

1 comments

Like us on Facebook

Flickr Images