Everyone wants to earn extra income online, and for those who know what they are doing, dropshipping can be a great way to start. However, no matter how many ads you see that promise you’ll make $10,000 per month from home, it’s not as simple as printing money. You have to create a complete, efficient, and effective business in order to be successful.
Fortunately, others have made the major mistakes, so you don’t have to. Keep reading to learn from their (and our) mistakes, plus how Shop1 can help you.
Challenges in Dropshipping
Marketing
Marketing is perhaps the most important aspect of a dropshipping business to get right. While making a mistake with other parts of your business can cost you sales, inefficient advertising can also flat out siphon money out of your marketing budget.
It is not uncommon for new dropshippers to lose money with inefficient, ineffective, and costly marketing campaigns that don’t work. Some people think it is as simple as plugging a keyword into a few pay-per-click (PPC) ads and raking in the customers. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy – or everyone would be a dropshipper. Whether you put too much into Facebook ads, created ineffective marketing materials, or didn’t focus on search engine optimization (SEO), if your marketing isn’t working, you won’t last long.
To successfully market yourself, create a marketing strategy that addresses all major aspects of an online presence. Your website should be built with the best SEO practices in mind (site speed, responsiveness, and on-site tagging), you should use social media to create shareable content for free advertising, and you should optimize any PPC ads you put out to ensure you aren’t just throwing money away.
Creating and Running a Dropshipping Webstore
If you want to be successful in eCommerce, your dropshipping store needs to be up to par. With website builders being more advanced than ever, the bar for your average online store has risen. If your store isn’t looking good and running well, you’re going to turn customers off. Your store should have simple navigation, mobile responsiveness, and a clean design that makes it easy to use.
Dropshipping also requires immense stock management, including importing products to your site to be sold. Then, as availability changes based on sales, the site needs to be updated to reflect that. The last thing you want to do is make a sale you can’t honor.
Finally, your online store should make payment processing as simple as possible. Multiple methods of payment make a customer more likely to confirm the purchase, and efficient backend payment processing can keep your cash flow consistent.
When it comes to creating and maintaining a dropshipping store, Shop1 makes it easy. You can choose from various website templates that can be customized to match your business and brand in just a few minutes or hours instead of days. You’ll also have access to tools that make it simple to import products from suppliers, including stock, pricing, and more to save a ton of time on getting started. Lastly, Shop1 has payment processing available out of the box, even handling refunds and returns for you to make post-sale support simple.
Picking the Correct Products
Your products are your business’s selling point. They are the reason customers buy from you, and the inventory you offer can determine whether your business is rolling in sales or struggling to get by.
While having more products for people to potentially buy from you isn’t the worst thing, the quality of your products is equally (if not more) important than your selection. It’s important to audit your product catalogue to ensure that you are selling higher-quality products that provide value. Options with poor quality, poor reviews, or incomplete listings can do more harm than good to your store’s image, so consider removing them.
You should also conduct market research to keep up to date on trends and viral products. A product that goes viral can be a great way to increase sales in the short term. Plus, if you know what to look for, you can add that product to your store’s catalogue and enjoy the increased traffic it brings to potentially increase sales of other products.
With Shop1, product importing is simple. You can choose the niche of your store and import hundreds or even thousands of products from US suppliers. These suppliers have higher-quality products and have been vetted by Shop1’s supplier relationship management team, increasing the reputation of items sold on your store.
Read more about: Best Dropshipping Products
Pricing
Finding the right pricing for your product catalogue is a balancing act. You don’t want to undersell yourself and lose out on profit, but you also don’t want to overprice and lose out on entire sales. So, when it comes time to price your products, your profit margin should be your focus.
Business – especially online business – is incredibly competitive when it comes to pricing. There are hundreds of stores that you are competing against to sell a similar product, so it’s tempting to try to undercut everyone else you can find to steal the sale.
However, when you cut your prices just based on competition and not on your own margins, you’re taking money out of your own pocket. If your customer reaches your store, you want to sell them on more than just the price being a bit lower. Your service and the unique customer experience should be the selling points.
Read more about: Shop1 Pricing
Fortunately, when you work with Shop1 as your dropshipping platform, you don’t have to worry about other expenses related to inventory management. You are getting access to continental suppliers in the US at near-wholesale prices thanks to our relationships and order volume, without needing to store or ship on your own.
This means that you can price effectively based on your profit margins without worrying about other expenses, creating better value for your customers.
Read more about: Dropshipping Profit Margin
Suppliers
Trustworthy suppliers are a dropshipper’s best friend. Dropshipping doesn’t require you to handle packing, shipping, or processing fees for sending out orders because suppliers take care of it. Because they are so involved in order fulfillment – a major part of selling products online- qualifying to work with high-quality vendors can take a lot of stress out of the business. These relationships can also lead to cheaper pricing for your business, lowering the cost of goods and increasing the profit margin. But, it’s not easy to pick the right vendor when so many are international.
When you use Shop1 for your dropshipping platform, you don’t have to worry about cultivating relationships, pushing for better pricing, or worrying about inventory mismanagement.
Shop1 connects you with reliable suppliers in the United States that provide quality processing and exceptional pricing thanks to the relationship Shop1 has with their vendors. Even better – you pay no fees to the supplier, making it easier to manage your cash flow and margins.
Dropshipping Platform
Dropshipping doesn’t have to be so complicated. When you choose the right platform for your new store, it can cut down on startup time, management time, and customer service time required to operate. Shop1 does all of this – and more.
With Shop1, you get flat monthly pricing with no additional processing fees to worry about. What you see is what you get, and you can plan your business around no surprises to throw off your budget.
Shop1 also handles all return processing and payment processing, taking most of the administrative work out of the job so you have more time to focus on selling more. You can even receive training and support to ensure you’re making the most out of Shop1’s platform.
Shop1 creates a simple, responsive, and SEO-ready site that connects you with exceptional US suppliers to enable competitive pricing, all in just a few clicks. For new and seasoned dropshippers alike, Shop1 can make your business better.
Conclusion
If you want to give your dropshipping store the best chance at success, it makes sense to use the best tools available. Dropshipping is a simple concept that is hard to execute perfectly alone.
Luckily for you, Shop1 is an all-in-one dropshipping platform that handles everything from website creation to post-sale support, taking much of the work out of opening a store. You’ll be able to spend less time (and money) on designing a site, setting up your catalogue, and managing orders and more time on improving your business as a whole.
You don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars, multiple days, and sleepless nights to make an effective dropshipping store. Get started with Shop1 today and start selling now.
