How To Dropship and Scale Your Business (The Growth RoadMap)

How to dropship is still one of the most asked questions in the community of dropshippers. Innumerable benefits make dropshipping a lucrative business model. But, a lucrative business turns profitable when your queries are answered. Hence you can make the best decisions without a shred of doubt.

This blog delves deep into ins and outs of what exactly is required to start and scale dropshipping business.

Dropshipping Stages

Lets understand the most challenging phases of how to dropship that discourage you from raising your ROI and how to overcome them like a pro.

• 01. How to Choose Right Supplier
• 02. Let Your Customer Trust You (A Definite Competitive Edge)
• 03. Shipping Time
• 04. Return to be Seamless not Painful
• 05. The Out of Stock Scenario
• 06. Product Promotion (Video Boost Chance of Product Shared Upto 1200 times)
• 07. Competition Analysis (What You Plan to Sell is Being Sold By Someone Else)
• 08. A Website To Multiply Product Visibility (Create Your Store To Create Your Story)

01. How to Choose Right Supplier

A trusted supplier is no less than the backbone of your dropshipping business. Adhering to below parameters will segregate good suppliers from an ordinary one.

• A well trained support team ready for serve 24/7 (a must not ignore for how to dropship successfully )
• Supplier should reveal price upon ensuring your business is legally incorporated.
• Good reviews about suppliers on independent sites.
• Never hesitate to share sample products.
• During trade shows you have the opportunity to catch up with major suppliers.

Did You Knew? Genuine Suppliers Aspire Below Attributes in Retailers/Dropshippers

• Flawless and fast customer service
• A high quality website with good amount of traffic

These parameters make your dropshipping store stand out in case an experienced supplier has to choose one among multiple retailers/dropshippers who approached for partnership.

Signs of Fake Dropshipping Suppliers

• Never Asks for business related and tax related documents
• Has an outdated website with poor navigation
• Extremely high pre-order fees

Look for suppliers on leading marketplaces who have earned accolades in form of reviews and ratings consistently. This will justify their position as established players in their domain.

02. Let Your Customer Trust You (A Definite Competitive Edge)

Trust is the key ingredient that can’t be an overlooked cornerstone in dropshipping. Trust strengthens customer confidence. A confident customer is more likely to complete the purchase.

Here a few tried and tested tips to win customer trust

• Respect their security concerns. Ask for personal info as much required and justify how it will be secured.

• Include trust badges that depict strength of website security. As a result, customers feel safe upon browsing your store.

Image credit: instapage

• Free Shipping and Free Return are two very customer friendly approach that can win you trust of new customers as well
• Social proof is another effective tool to spark high level trust instantly. Because, customers consider reviews by other buyers as highly valuable and authentic.It will particularly help in converting first time visitors on the site.

Image credit: revelbot

The Pro Tip: Best form of social proof is one that depicts social media influencers endorsing your products. Shoppers love to follow whom they admire. Hence, such social proof increase your odds of convincing customer and not lose it to competitors.

• Craft a customer friendly return policy and highlight it. It reflects your confidence about the product. Buyers relate excellent return policy as sign of super customer service.
• Include contact form, email, and social media profiles on the store website. Next, be proactive in answering their pre-purchase queries about product, shipping, and more.
• Giving away free samples of newly launched products is another tactic to build trust and collect positive feedback.

03. Shipping Time

41% customers are ready to pay an extra fee for same day delivery. Same day delivery by e-commerce giants has set the expectation bar a bit higher. Therefore, a long shipping time simply adds up to customers’ frustration.

It can be truly said ,it is the single most important factor that can make or break the deal. Hence, Shipping time always deserves to be the primary focus.

Best Practices to Optimize the Shipping Time

• Share a tracking code to help customers stay updated with the whereabouts of products.
• A high quality product takes upto a week shipping time. But,customers can bear it as they consider it worth the wait.
• A written contract with a third party courier will be a big relief. Hence, the chances of delayed delivery is reduced significantly.
• Be upfront and reveal the realistic shipping time at the checkout page. If required, mention the reasons or delay with an apology.
• Offering free shipping is another effective way. It delights the customer and they overlook shipping delays.

The Pro Tip: Partnering up with regional delivery partners speeds up shipping time by optimizing the last mile delivery time.

Shipping Time Optimization is Key To How To Dropship

• Fast shipping encourages shoppers to finalize the purchase. It translates to a high conversion rate.
• Including a free shipping banner on your dropshipping store helps in grabbing customer attention. A wise approach to boost product visibility without investing in paid campaigns.
• Shipping time is key to generate trust. Trust means more loyal customers. Loyal customers bring value in form of
  • Increased order value
  • Repeat purchases

Adhering to above mentioned strategies will generate loads of hope for your business in the long run. Because, you will be able to convince a huge chunk of buyers to return back to your store who consider poor shipping experience to abandon the site.

04. Return to be Seamless not Painful

Lack of proper product return policy makes customers skeptical about the reliability of the dropshipping store. Knowing there is an option to return the item (in case it doesn’t work as per expectation) prepares the customer for purchase.

Therefore, a customer friendly return policy (preferably better than of competitors) is the need of the hour.

The Keypoints to keep product return process easy and quick

• Don’t ask customers to send back the defective item. Why bother him?
• Let customers choose to go with a refund or product return. It will calm them as well
• Explain the conditions of accepting a product for return in layman’s terms without use of jargons.

The Pro Tip: If you observe, a return request is raised for products that mostly originate from a particular supplier. It’s high time to termite your professional relationship with

05. The Out Of Stock Scenario

Definitely, one of the annoying scenarios in dropshipping is, the customer has the products added in the cart but dropshipper doesn’t have it in the warehouse. Nevertheless, it can be managed in following ways

• Offer alternative products that solve similar problems. Choose one that is relatable with buyer preferences.
• Use it as an opportunity to reflect your customer friendly attitude. Inform the customers about scarcity ofitems but assure them about informing about it as soon as it is available.
• List down the most sold items of your store and items whose demand spike significantly during a particular season. Now procure sufficient quantities to ensure you never have to deny the customers or lose them to your competitors.

06. Product Promotion (videos are bound to get your product shared 1200 times)

Product promotion is often misunderstood or overlooked step in the making of a perfect dropshipping store. Listing high quality products and setting the right price is only half the job done to get customers’ attention hooked on your store.

Therefore, it is crucial to share the ins and outs of products through in-depth demonstration. Hence, the bite size how-to videos are your best bet.

It is an effective approach to showcase your product potential without exhausting the buyer. Moreover, a customer is upto 85 percent more likely to convert with product videos.

The Checklist to Making A Killer Product Promotion Video

• Depict a person using the product and answering common queries related to it.
• A thumbnail in the form of professionally taken product photos makes it click worthy. Because it increases the perceived value of your products.
• Include a call to action button at the beginning. The attention span is short
• Test your video user experience on a mobile device. Video consumption over smartphones is shooting through the roof.
• Add transcript to make your video meaningful to those who are watching it with sounds turned off
• Try to keep a video as long as 15-30 seconds maximum. A huge video can be broken down into several smaller parts instead of one long 15 minute video.

The Pro Tip: Take a deep dive into your Facebook Business account. Navigate to high engagement posts. It will reveal key metrics of engagement that made your post stand out. These metrics can be leveraged to craft impressive bite size video.

07. Competition Analysis (What You Plan To Sell is Being Sold By Someone Else)

Image credit: martech

Simply perform a reverse image search. It reveals every other seller (your competitor) selling the same item.

image credit: Google

Another effective way is to add myshopify after the product name.

image credit: Google

The Pro Tip: Try replacing product name with product niche if you don’t find many competitors on product name.

You will find so many other merchants with the same or similar product idea. It is high time to stay a step ahead with following

• Embed a short explainer video on your product page. It is far better than simply text to boost product understanding. Thus, your page stands out.
• Keep your store design professional. It generates trust and projects you as authority in the domain.
• Go through comments on your social media handles. Take a note of the negative comments. Here lies loads of info to enhance your product, customer service and marketing campaign for a personalized shopping experience.
• Social media on which competitors marketing campaigns are negligible or very little. These platforms have better chances for high engagement.
• Visit the price comparison websites to decode the type of pricing customers find attractive. It will better.
• Reward your loyal customers with personalized offers. As a result, they will prefer to return to your dropshipping store instead of trying a new one.

08. A Website To Multiply Product Visibility (Create Your Store To Create Your Story)

Ensure no pop ups on your website (especially the landing page). Too many pop ups is the worst thing you can offer to a buyer on your site upon his first visit. No doubt, the first visit will be the last as well.

Optimize the page load time to be upto 3 seconds maximum. Anything beyond that will irritate the user experience at the very start.

Pointers That Dropshipppers Wished They Know Before Starting Dropshipping

• Simply one supplier is never sufficient to cater to high demand surge.
• Have your store website developed before approaching a reliable supplier. It boost your chance of partnering up with professional suppliers.
• Add a price guarantee page stating the below

“We put our best effort to set the best pricing, if you find a lower price in less than three months of product purchase and inform us. We will refund your money. Striving hard to ensure customers get product at the best price ”

• A price guarantee page is helpful in building trust and harnessing your image as customer friendly merchants. Now this is a competitive advantage you can count upon with very few competitors having focus on it.
• Place a test order to examine product quality. Hence, you will never ship substandard.
• Rely on multiple sources to drive traffic. In case one source gets expensive or is temporarily unavailable, you still have customers.
• These are a few tried and tested dropshipping tips. Ambitious dropshippers should embrace them to put business on an upward trajectory.

After all, learning from successful guys in your domain reduces the risk and speed up the process to success.

Next Big Thing, How To Scale My Dropshipping Business

The obvious next move for any business is to scale.

Add Value

Firstly, understand that it is not simply the product that you are selling. Just like you, many other merchants are offering similar items. Therefore, adding value will differentiate you from your competitors.

Adding value in the form of a user friendly e-commerce website is a crucial step to offer a seamless shopping experience. Your customer will be delighted to find out:

Personalized offers and deals that are inline with your customer buyer persona. Quick Sign Up/Sign In process for an impressive start A robust in site search option to ensure what customers want is just a click away. Enable various payment options by incorporating different payment gateways.

SEO & Marketing

Another necessary step to scale your business to new heights is the right approach for SEO & marketing.

• Optimize product page with keywords used to search product by customers.
• Upload how-to related product videos on Youtube. It has one billion active users. An excellent platform to remove doubt from buyers minds about product usability and quality.
• Run PPC campaigns (paid ads) for your best product pages. It ensures potential customers find your products before they land on competitors’ websites.
• Custom packaging during festive season, customer birthday, or anniversary is bound to make customers feel good. Customers feeling an integral part of your brand praise your service among family and friends.
• Networking with big players in industry will create a positive buzz about your brand.

Don’t Be Bound To Single Product/Niche Dropshipping Store

• Single product dropshipping stores are good for newbies trying luck or testing the waters in dropshipping business but, multiple product dropshipping stores are far more suitable for scaling the business to attain the next level of success.
• Firstly, a single product store involves tons of product research. Furthermore you have no alternative item to keep your profits growing when that product is either out of stock (due to some shipping bottleneck) or demand goes down (for some inevitable reason) .
• Also single product stores rob you of cross selling opportunities.Now that’s a big hurdle in raising your store ROI.
• Nevertheless, a multi product store will not only multiply your store ROI with cross selling opportunities but will also benefit your dropshipping business in numerous ways

How Multi Product Store Multiplies Your Success Rate

• • Appeals to a Wider Audience.
  • Builds a Bigger Customer base
  • Multiple Winning Products Turns Your Business to a Brand in Less Time
  • Eliminates Stress Due to Fear of Store Closure
• There’s an opportunity to test multiple products and find the winning products for different demographics, target audience, and season.
• You become a brand in a short duration. As more products attract buyers from different demographics and age groups.
• With so many reliable products you will always have business going forward. Dropshipping store getting closed won’t be your nightmare anymore.

In a Nutshell – How to Dropship is Easy With Best Strategies and High Awareness

The aforementioned techniques collectively sum up for various answers to how to dropship. It paves the pathway to seamlessly navigating the challenges as well as gain a competitive edge. It’s time to get your dropshipping business off the ground to the sky before your spot is taken by competitors.