So you have just started your dropshipping online store! And looking for ways to create recognizable brand landing sales every now and then.
Well, there is indeed a learning curve you will adapt to over time.
But starting out can be really daunting, especially when you don’t know how to go with things initially.
Dropshipping businesses require daily few hours of work consistently, and you’re good to go for creating a perfect opportunity for additional income.
All you need to do is move in the right direction. There are certain practices and strategies you should follow at the beginning of your dropshipping journey.
This can give a real boost to your online store to generate your first sale and many more shortly.
Well, if you feel a bit intimidated, don’t be. As some pro tips helped many drop shippers grow their online stores to recognizable brands.
Below are a few helpful hints for aspiring drop-shippers
Focus On Learning Marketing
Dropshipping makes various aspects of e-commerce business automated and much easier than the usual online business.
This gives you more time to focus on the marketing, branding, and advertising of your business.
And that should be what you should be focusing on too. Because with dropshipping, marketing is everything!
Surely, it is tempting to get absorbed in a lot of fun stuff with your Dropshipping website, but it is the marketing that brings you the sales for the business.
Beginners in Dropshipping should focus on mastering the marketing strategies so they can drive maximum traffic to their respective Dropshipping stores.
Website Traffic Converts Into Sales
Image Source: Ecommerce Guide
Search Engine marketing and paid advertisements are the two key components of marketing you need to learn.
You have to understand that eCommerce stores or dropshipping stores convert at the rate of 1% to 2%
That means if you have less than 100 visitors, there won’t even be any sales conversion on your store.
The more traffic you get to your online store, the higher sales conversion you are going to get.
Paid Ads are the Key
Image Source: Practical Ecommerce
Ads can be a real booster for your dropshipping website, especially when you are still learning and working on your organic traffic to your website.
It is great for instant gratification for your store as it will bring a significant amount of sales conversion in a very short time.
However, make sure you go slow with the budget initially because you’re most likely to make mistakes.
Organic Traffic is Long-term sales
Image Source: Oberlo
This is what you need to focus on, especially as a dropshipping beginner. This is a long-term sales strategy for your website.
Search Engine Optimization is you need to learn and apply optimizations on your website to receive maximum traffic.
SEO will help you rank higher on the search results driving the maximum traffic for longer durations.
Writing a blog for your store, optimizing product images, and social media shares are some best search engine optimization and marketing practices you should go on with.
Practicing Is The Key To The Successful Dropshipping
Dropshipping often gets a huge attraction to aspiring entrepreneurs for all wrong reasons. The advantages of dropshipping seem to discount the fact that it is not an easy or quick money business.
Image Source: Oberlo
There is indeed a learning curve. Luckily, the internet has answers for everything. You can literally learn anything on the web.
But just learning, reading endless dropshipping articles, tips, tricks, and strategies, or buying drop shipping ebooks and classes won’t make you a successful drop shipper.
Learn & Practise By Trial & Errors
All those learnings will help you succeed when you practice dropshipping and when you do trial and error. Maybe invest and lose some money too.
But the point is that your whole endeavor to learn dropshipping through practicing, trying, and trying again, applying different strategies, and coming up with new solutions will eventually lead you to a successful sale.
If you get lucky, you might get one or two sales early, but then sticking long enough when sales are not coming your way will help you succeed.
So don’t fall into the trap of just keep reading and learning. Do your own trial and error. Try making online stores. See what works and what doesn’t.
Pro Tip: Do not buy dropshipping courses or invest any money to learn dropshipping. There are enough free resources. Rather invest that money in running ads for your online store products.
Give Your Customers An Amazing Offer
One of the best dropshipping tips you can receive from any successful drop shipper is to create a compelling and irrefutable offer for your customers.
Many store owners fail to utilize the significance of presenting better offers to the target customers.
Image Source: Fiverr
In fact, many newbie drop shippers do not add any kind of offers, sales, or bundle purchases and hence fail to attract new customers.
People might lack the motivation to buy your product if there is no additional benefit or apparent better offer to explore.
But make sure you also have a great product to make this work, as the right product with the right offer makes the purchase more likely to get converted.
Image Source: ProfitWell
Another top secret for successful dropshipping stores is bundle offers. So create a bundle offer for your products as well.
Focus on offering more of the same product in the bundling. Include more quality of the same product at the supposedly lower price.
The hardest part for any dropshipping website is to make an offer and convince enough to make them pull out their credit card.
But once they purchase, you’re more likely to get another sale or more sales. Just upsell as much as you can at the moment.
Try Not To UnderPrice Your Product
It is highly recommended to use a tool to maintain the pricing of your product. Pricing is a crucial strategy as well as a cautionary tale to work with.
Usually, the cost of your products is relatively close to the wholesale price, so one can sell those products at a higher value in the market and make a profit.
Dropshipping is successful when you make profits. So you need to ensure the cost of the goods you sell never gets so close to the actual price that you lose profit.
Image Source: Bold Commerce Blog
But it is not just the cost of the product you need to consider but the whole expenses of marketing, business operation, tools, and even hiring a team in the near future.
One of the grave mistakes for newbies in dropshipping is reducing their pricing to beat the competition.
Image Source: Path to Purchase IQ
Even if you see other brands reducing their prices, don’t undercut your prices. As long as you are selling the products at fair prices and according to the market value, you need to go for a profitable price point.
Rather focus on increasing the average order value to get higher profit from every order you get. Reduce the customer acquisition cost as possible.
Don’t Limit Your Store With One Supplier
If you are limiting yourself or your online store to just one supplier, it will create a long-term problem for your business.
There are huge chances that one supplier might discontinue your best-selling product or run out of the products amidst a sale.
Always go for multiple product suppliers to have backup options always ready. Any issue with a supplier can leave you hanging dry and cost you a huge loss of customers and sales.
Also, multiple suppliers allow you to choose the best product from the samples you order. So you know that you are getting the best product in the market.
Automate Your Dropshipping Business
Yes, more of it! Even if multiple aspects of dropshipping are automated, you should definitely look forward to automating as much as possible.
Automating your eCommerce business gives you consistency in the streamlining of business operations. It allows you to give more time to the marketing aspect of the business, which actually brings you higher ROI.
Image Source: Help Docs
Also, ideally, you would want to get more profit from your dropshipping website with spending less time possible.
This is especially when you are working on a full-time job and have just started out dropshipping. Automation also generally makes you free to pursue more things in your life.
All you need to look for is some great automation tools for eCommerce platforms.
These tools are miraculous in automating tasks such as social media marketing, retargeting, newsletters, advertising, and so much more.
Make Sure You Have A Visually-Optimized Website
A visually optimized website isn’t just about making your website attractive but user-friendly. It is definitely the most common and yet often overlooked tip for dropshipping.
You need to visually optimize your website to make it more customer-friendly and attractive for potential buyers landing on your store.
Image Source: ShivarWeb
Figure out what kind of look you want to give to your store. What layout of web pages do you want to choose?
Make sure the images used on the website are high-quality, sharp, and detailed. Use highly relevant and copy-driven images.
The branding you present here is going to be the first impression of your business, and so for your product as well.
Your store website should consist of all the required web pages and information such as About, Shipping, Return Policy, FAQ, and more.
It is about improving the interface of your website, so customers feel compelled to navigate through easily. Everything in your store should be well-placed and aligned.
Deciding Between General and Niche Store
General or Niche store – This might be one of the first questions you come across while creating your new dropshipping website!
Why To Create an Online General Store?
Well, to begin with, if dropshipping is more like experimentation for you and you are not sure about which niche you want to get in, create a general store.
Even if you are just too soon to get focussed on one particular niche to sell on, creating a general store to grasp the idea is a good way to go.
Image Source: Do Dropshipping
However, you will still need to create different product categories for every particular product type you choose.
This is because potential customers can easily browse your store for their desired product category.
Most successful dropshipping websites indeed start with a specific niche, but you should also consider the fact that it is your first store.
Also, if you’re not sure and choose a niche for your store, it is more likely that you might not continue due to a lack of interest in the niche or get bored easily.
Why Choose Creating A Niche Store?
However, if you are sure about your niche or you have decided to sell products in a particular niche only, then creating a niche store is the best decision to go for.
But make sure you have come to a decision through extensive research and validating your idea, niche, or product.
Image Source: BigCommerce
Niche stores are hands-down the best way to go for dropshipping. It helps you find the right target audience for the products easily.
Also, since there are numerous online stores, having a niche helps you stand out from a significant part of the crowd.
It is easier to get successful as a niche store than a general store. However, you can always expand and include more categories or products in your niche store as you grow.
Selecting a niche also helps you with effective branding, easy targeting of customers, and more competent marketing strategies.
Presenting Extraordinary Customer Service
It can be difficult to stand out when you are selling the same product as everyone on other dropshipping websites.
But there are ways more than one which can differentiate your online store from others.
You might have been putting a great effort into offering good customer service by responding to as many queries as possible or offering refunds.
But you definitely need to do more than that to stand out. Extraordinary customer assistance is hard to forget.
Image Source: Do Dropshipping
It is the reason why you always buy some products from the same store or retailer.
Make your customer comfortable. Focus on building a long-lasting impression for your dropshipping brand and products.
Be gentle with your approach when dealing with your customers. Joke around with them to make a humane connection.
Image Source: Shoplo
Send a handwritten “thank you” letter when they purchase from your store, especially multiple times.
It is important to make your customer feel appreciated, valued, and remembered as well. You need to see how they are important for your business.
Don’t wait and begin this customer appreciation and gratitude habit at the beginning of your store only.
Even if the person does not buy from you, they will always remember the communication and experience they had with you or your business.
Always Choose The ePacket
You can sort your products based on the ePacket shipping, and you should always prefer to choose this option only.
Well, the reason is that ePacket shipping is the fastest and most affordable shipping method you get with dropshipping.
It ensures that your customer gets quick deliveries of your product without you spending a fortune of money on it.
Other shipping alternatives can be highly expensive for dropshipping businesses and also quite hassling to manage and operate.
The average ePacket shipping cost you will be charged for most of the products is usually under $5.
Image Source: Oberlo
With low shipping costs, you can still make higher profits by selling items at market value.
High shipping costs often compel dropshippers to increase their product pricing dramatically to secure their profits.
However, this often leads to insufficient sales or prevents more sales from happening.
ePacket deliveries reach your customers even within a week which is the fastest delivery method dropshippers can go for under a budget.
Keep Track Of Your Competition
You need to find your competition on social media. It is necessary you explore and find other dropshipping stores that are doing great and successful.
The best competition is to go for the dropshippers in your niche, similar to your products, and see how they are growing their social media accounts.
Keep tracking their social media profiles. Like their Facebook pages to get their product suggestions and retargeted ads.
The idea is to keep them as close as possible to study their strategies and see how they drive high engagement on their accounts.
What products are they advertising? What are their promotional strategies?
You need to monitor anything and everything they do and then learn from them. The more relevant case studies you understand, the better marketer you become over time.
Be More Active Daily
Running a dropshipping business requires consistency in your efforts. You need to spend more time on your business to build it from scratch.
You don’t need to work as much as your full-time job. However, it does require a commitment of at least an hour per day to grow your store over time.
There are a set of specific tasks you need to do daily to remain active on your website to receive any possible order you get.
Image Source: ChessTag
Then, there are tons of customer inquiries you will receive every day, and you will have only 25 hours or less to respond to them.
More than that, you might lose a potential buyer from those inquiries. Apart from all this, you need to consistently work on the marketing and branding of your store as well.
Image Source: Sprout Social
You need to automate your social media posts at the beginning of every week. Then, you have remained active for some time on your social media platforms daily.
And all these are the primary necessities that a dropshipping store requires to be run and grow.
There are hundreds of things, strategies, tricks, tools, and whatnot you will look forward to working on to bring more sales to your store.
Creating Custom Content
Custom Content is one of the highly effective ways to generate traffic on your online store.
You see a lot of dropshipping online stores doing live product reviews on their social media pages.
This marketing strategy works like a charm as potential buyers check out the product on their online while watching the live video.
The content-driven traffic has a higher potential for conversion than any other type of traffic you receive on the website.
Also, the live video needs to be very interesting and not straight away sale-sy at all. Or, you can go for just doing a live product review.
Then you can also start a blog around your niche or type of products. It should be highly informative or interesting to read.
The whole point of making such content is that it should be interesting enough to share or help, or both.
Make Sure Your Import Only 25 Items To Start
Most of the dropshipping beginners make the mistake of importing as many products as they can to their store at the beginning only.
Image Source: Shopify
You might think more products mean more chances of sales or more options for buyers to purchase the product.
But it doesn’t work like that! And importing hundreds of random products on your dropshipping website does not improve your chances for sales.
And this is true for whether you are going for a general online store or a niche-based store.
Why Not Add Too Many Products On Your Online Store?
When you upload too many products, even something like 100, it requires a lot of work to do at once.
You must write product descriptions for all those products, which is extremely time-consuming and strenuous.
Also, it hampers the quality of the product description you will be writing. Writing quality product descriptions for even 50 products will take a significant amount of time and effort.
Due to so much work, you are more likely to procrastinate the task and delay launching your business. Maybe even postpone or not do it at all!
Launch Your Business With 25 Products
So it is better to start your business with a smaller collection of items. The ideal number you can go for is 25 products.
Image Source: Shopify
Take a few good hours to write effective and quality product descriptions for all these 25 hand-picked items.
This will allow you to launch your business quickly and start making sales to move forward. Then, after every week, you can keep adding 10 to 20 new products to your collection.
Make sure you do that when you start making a profit from your business or landing sales from those 25 products.
First, Order A Product Sample From Your Suppliers
This is extremely important for dropshippers going for niche-based stores and looking forward to branding their business over time.
Before selecting your product and considering you are going to sell only a small number of items in a particular niche, you must order samples for yourself.
It is crucial you check for product quality before you vouch for a product to sell from your brand identity.
When you order your products, you can also take better product photos to upload on your dropshipping website.
Image Source: Ordoro Blog
It doesn’t only improve the chances of your sale tenfold but also, since you can experience the product yourself, it will give you more accurate details to write about in the product description.
You can use the sample products to shoot high-quality product photos, demonstration images, graphics, product videos, reviews, ads, and other marketing materials.
More than that, you will be able to get a true feel of what it’s like to order from your store and get the product delivered.
Here you have a chance to put yourself into customers’ shoes and see where you can improve and optimize the customers’ buying experience.
Know More About Your Niche
Choosing the right niche for your dropshipping store is important as you will sell your products under that niche only.
This decision will stay with you longer than you can anticipate. So select the nice that you know more about or are highly interested in.
Give yourself some very good reasons to pick a particular niche.
Prioritize Branding Over Direct Sale
The goal here is to generate as many sales as possible from your Dropshipping store. There are many ways to generate sales, like the quick ones running ads.
But most of the sales generation strategies that seem effective and quick have problems of being short-sighted and temporary.
Well, if you can generate higher ROI with ads where consistent investment on risk is no issue for you, by all means, go all in.
But you need to come to the point where you don’t have to work hard and hard to generate sales consistently.
It comes from reputation and branding. So focus on building branding, so generating sales will be much easier and faster.
You need to make your business unique and have a different voice to stand out. Work on your brand positioning and customize everything accordingly.
Business with branding always has a competitive edge over others.
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“Business, marketing, and Branding – these three words describe me the best. I am the founder of Burban Branding and Media, and a self-taught marketer with 10 years of experience. My passion lies in helping startups enhance their business through marketing, Branding, leadership, and finance. I am on a mission to assist businesses in achieving their goals.”