Best 9 Tips for Drop Shipping

by Sharline Shaw, Guest Contributor

Are you planning to start an online business? Good! Nowadays, it’s very easy for you to start and run an online business. The easiest one to go for is the drop shipping business model.

What is dropshipping? It is a product fulfillment process that ships the products from the manufacturer or the wholesaler to customers directly.

It means that customers place an order with drop shipping retailers who pass the order to the manufacturer. This process means that the manufacturer has to deal with the product inventory, packing, and shipping instead of the drop shippers.

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Why has drop shipping become so popular? The first reason is that it is easy to get started. You are free from managing or paying for warehousing, order fulfillment and inventory levels. Drop shipping gives you a wide choice of products and a low-cost but entirely scalable business model.

Do you want to give it a go? How can you make a success of a drop shipping business? We will explain and give you our best nine tips for a successful drop shipping business. Let’s get started.

1. Know Your Product
To be successful, choose a niche that you are familiar with and make sure you get to know almost everything about the product. Next, you need to do market research. Examine your preferred platform to find out and understand the product on the market. Remember to avoid fake brands, copycats, and knockoffs.

Figure out the pros and cons within the market so that you can be creative and make your product unique via your marketing. Try to offer something different to motivate customers to buy from you.

2. Don’t Limit Your Suppliers
As we know, suppliers are the key part of your drop shipping business. As such, getting the right supplier matters to the success of your business. They are the lifeblood of your business because they hold the product you market. Look for a responsible supplier that always provides great communication.

What if there is an accident and you only have one supplier partnership? In this scenario, you have no business. To avoid this situation, it’s good to have additional suppliers for backup to cope with an unpredictable market and unforeseen circumstances.

3. Create a Competitive Pricing Strategy
As we know, the profit earned in a drop shipping business comes from the price discrepancy. You can set the price, but it needs to cover the product cost, shipping price, stocking price, and include your profit.  

A bad pricing strategy will leave little for you as profit. You have to take the product cost, shipping cost, marketing cost, and the average market price into account when pricing your niche. Don’t underprice your product.

4. Build Social Credibility
From the outset, it’s important to gather customer feedback as it builds the social credibility of your product. You also need to take relevant measures to address possible problems during your marketing.

You can create high-quality customer-focused content to win the customers’ trust. Sharing great content is a great way to stand out amongst your competitors.  Remember to keep the content helpful and relevant to assist potential customers.

5. Automate Your Drop Shipping Process
Generally, a drop shipper will deal with several different suppliers, and this can lead to a frustrating amount of data to process. There are various automated platforms to help you with this. You can choose the best one for you based on the variety of functions that they offer. Normally, these platforms offer a certain level of data integration with other business tools too.

Do your research and choose the platforms best fit your business needs.

6. Offer Excellent Customer Service
Customer service is one of the key things that affect customers’ buying decisions. Try to make customers happy with their shopping experience by maintaining excellent customer service.

As a result, you need a great system for addressing all your potential customers’ inquiries plus you need a well thought out and easy way for them to order and receive your product.

Create an FAQ section on your store page to answer key questions related to your shipping method, time, and other details. Make sure the customer can find the answer to their questions instantly, and you will deliver great satisfaction.

7. Learn Marketing
When you decide to engage in drop shipping, you will have more time and energy to focus on marketing and branding. Try to learn various marketing skills to promote your products.

Ads and SEO are great ways for you to marketing to your store. You can advertise on different platforms to reach target customers to increase sales. Advertising instantly delivers traffic and boosts sales. For the long-term marketing, you have to optimize your website to rank top in the search results page.

8. Monitor the Product Inventory Level
As a drop shipper, you don’t need to worry about your order fulfillment and product stock, but you cannot ignore the inventory level because you have to update the number of available products on your website regularly.

If you are still showing stock levels but have no inventory, you can still get orders from customers. However, with no stock, you can’t ship your product, and this is frustrating for customers. Stay in regular communication with your supplier about the stock of your products.  

9. Keep an Eye on Your Competitors
As a drop shipper, you have to monitor the market competition. Markets change and fluctuate, so you have to keep an eye on the marketing, products, and pricing of your competitors.
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Monitor the sales performance of your competitors; get to know their sales performance. Knowing your market and your competitors will give you a better insight when planning your business marketing strategy in the future.

Hopefully, these tips give you some clarity and ideas to run a successful drop shipping business. If you get confused as you start your drop shipping business, look at some of our tips and put them into practice. What are you waiting for? It’s time for you to get started.
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Bio Info:
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Sharline Shaw, the founder of a leelineSourcing.com, is an expert on Chinese export trade. With 10 years of experiences in the field of sourcing in China, she is familiar with all relevant regulations and laws about China's exporting. She'd love to share her experience with people and has written many helpful articles.  

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