18 tips teach you how to be successful in dropshipping as a beginner

An inner tutorial for a new dropshipper!

Dropshipping is a low-maintenance business model that enables entrepreneurs to sell products without keeping inventory by having the product manufacturer create, package, and send the product out to your customer on your behalf. This article will teach you 16 successful dropshipping tips and explain why you should dropship.

What is Dropshipping?

Once you’ve made a sale, your supplier will send your products from their warehouse, right to your customer’s doorstep, using the dropshipping business model, allowing you to operate your store without ever having any inventory. You won’t ever have to stress about how to pack, store, or ship your goods.

Why You Should Dropship

Dropshipping is a fantastic business model for new business owners because it is low risk, inexpensive, simple to start, and it can be automated.

1. Low risk business: You only pay for goods sold to customers. There’s no need to buy bulk inventory to get wholesale prices as dropshipping prices are already pretty low.
2. Low cost: Since most goods come from China, the cost of goods is generally rather low. Since product costs are low you can price your products at market value and run a profitable business.
3. Easy to start: You’ll be able to start selling the same day you sign up. Products can be imported quickly and since you don’t won’t carry inventory you can start promoting them right away.
4. Automated business: Products can be imported to your store in only a couple clicks. Orders can be processed in a couple clicks too.

Dropshipping Tips for New Entrepreneurs

1. Focus on Mastering Marketing

While tweaking a website, designing a logo, and creating graphics can be a lot of fun, marketing is the money maker, and with so many aspects of a dropshipping business being automated, you’ll have more time to focus on them. You’ll need to dedicate time to mastering ads, increasing traffic, and converting website visitors into paying customers.

Keep in mind that most ecommerce stores convert at a rate of 1–2%, so if you have less than 100 visitors on your site you probably won’t be getting any sales. Ads and search engine optimization can help drive more traffic to your store. However, by enabling you to rank highly in search, SEO can aid in the growth of your long-term sales. Creating blog content and optimizing product pages can aid in the development of a search audience while requiring little ad spend, thereby lowering your cost per acquisition. Most people focus on advertising because it’s immediate gratification and can drive a lot of sales in a short period of time, but the more traffic you can get to your store, the more likely you are to convert the sale.

There are many steps you can take to make sure you’re optimizing your online store correctly. For example, do you use scarcity and urgency to compel people to buy in your store? Have you added customer reviews to your store to give it the social proof that it needs? Is your website presentable from a customer’s perspective? Are there any missing images on your homepage?

2. Create an Amazing Offer

When creating a bundle deal, concentrate on selling more of the same product. For instance, if you sell hair extensions, your bundle would include more hair extensions. Bundle offers are one of the best kept dropshipping secrets. The difficult part is convincing your customer to pull out his or her credit card, but once it’s out — upsell, upsell, upsell.

3. Avoid Underpricing Your Products

Dropshipping enables you to maintain lower product costs and allows you to sell products at market value and make a profit because the cost of goods is typically quite close to the wholesale price. If you’re selling a five-dollar product, you should be charging around $19.99 for it. You need to take into account the cost of goods, marketing, business expenses, and eventually hiring a team.

Develop tactics that will enable you to generate more revenue overall. As long as your prices are reasonable and within market value, you should maintain a profitable price point. You should also work to increase the average order value so that you can profit more from each order.

If you have no idea about how to price either profitable or appealing tariffs, SimplyTrends is a good tool for you to gain some inspiration.

By tacking the hot stores which are similar to your store’s insight into their price strategies. You can learn what price range the most popular item falls under. What price escalations are included in it and when the merchant will change an item’s price. This is all pricing stuff. You will be aware of how the retailer changed the price before and after as well as how well the product sold. You can learn to apply the same insight to your own pricing so that you don’t have to waste time trying different rates; instead, you can utilize the information you obtain here to assess and determine the best price. You can increase your earnings if you have this knowledge in hand.

Check out our article on Ecommerce Pricing Strategies if you want more information about this dropshipping tip.

4. Automate More of Your Business

As this dropshipping tutorial demonstrates, many aspects of your business can be automated by using dropshipping tools like DSers. You can conduct product research prior to launching an online store, and DSers is the perfect tool for the job. Learning how to automate more processes in your business will give you more freedom to follow your passions whether you work a full-time job or want to generate a more passive income.

Buffer allows you to automate social media posting; Kit automates marketing tasks like advertising, retargeting, emails, and more; you can also check out marketing automation software and Shopify tools, to help simplify your marketing tasks. Ecommerce automation tools can help you grow and scale your business quickly.

5. Ensure Your Website is Presentable

Making sure your website is customer friendly — by which I mean that it shouldn’t turn a customer away — is one of the most crucial dropshipping tips. Many new store owners start marketing their stores when their home page is devoid of images, has placeholder text, and all of their products are grouped together in one broad category.

Before launching your store, look at other websites in your niche to see how their home pages are designed, how their product pages are written, whether their images have logos, what kinds of pages they have, and which features or apps they have on their websites.

After making notes about the design and layout of various shops in your niche, search the Shopify app store for programs that let you model your store after popular companies. You can also add pages to your website such as refund policies, FAQs, shipping details, and more. You can use countdown timers, shoppable Instagram galleries, affiliate programs, and more.

There are a ton of free resources available online if you’re looking for additional stock image websites. You can find images for a variety of niches and they’re free to use and modify on your store, so feel free to use relevant stock photos from Burst when it comes to banner images for your homepage.

You can look to other Shopify stores for more information about this dropshipping tip.

6. General Vs. Niche Store

An online general store would be intended to serve as your first store, even though the majority of prosperous businesses start with a specific niche focus. You’ll still need to make distinct product categories for each product type to allow for easy browsing if the sole purpose of opening a store is to experiment and find the right niche.

Use Simplytrends to Find your Niche

In order to start dropshipping, you must first identify a product that would benefit your target market. SimplyTrends is a third-party tool that gives you access to market data. By selecting Trends from this book, you can search Google for fresh eCommerce opportunities and seize the following big break. You may gain more insight into the types of things that are in demand and in high fashion by checking for these data shows. Select the term that would bring the most visitors to your website by studying and focusing on various facts. This is a quick way for you to have a grasp of the current market.

Therefore, you should work on developing a niche store if you’ve already done your research or have validated your business idea because this will help you concentrate on finding the right audience for your products. If you’re curious about how to pick a niche for your dropshipping store, check out how niche companies on your radar do things to get some good ideas.

7. Prepare to Pivot

Even though starting a dropshipping business is simple and great for new business owners, it is still a business, and as such, it will come with challenges and obstacles that you’ll need to find a way to get past.

As your store expands, you’ll need to make several pivots. A new trend might emerge in your market that you need to add to your store right away to capitalize on sales for. A really successful ad might require you to scale quickly and necessitate the removal of a product you really like from your store; a product that you really like might not be well-liked by your customers, necessitating a loan negotiation with your bank.

You’ll need the intuition to know when to take action in your business to ensure its continued growth. Pivoting is not a good or bad thing; it’s a necessity if you want your business to last for years to come.

8. Offer Exceptional Customer Service

Even though providing refunds and answering customer questions is important, it doesn’t really set you apart from many of the major brands in the market. One of the best ways to stand out when selling the same products as everyone else is to provide excellent customer service.

Make each customer feel valued and appreciated by making jokes with them, writing them thank you notes if they shop at your store more than once, and holding monthly giveaways only for past customers. Start cultivating these customer appreciation habits from the first sale; customers may not always remember what they purchased from your website, but they will always remember how you treated them. Without them, you wouldn’t succeed.

9. Always Choose ePacket

From personal experience, I’ve seen ePacket deliveries reach customers within a week making it the best delivery method for dropshippers. On average, ePacket shipping costs under $5 for most products, allowing you to still make a profit when selling goods at market value. Since ePacket shipping is the fastest reasonably priced shipping option, you’re free to group products according to it as a dropshipper and can guarantee prompt delivery to customers without spending a fortune.

In order to provide you with more information, we go into greater detail about ePacket delivery in our ePacket article.

10. Be Active Daily

You’ll need to process orders every day to ensure that your customers receive their orders on time, and you’ll need to respond to their inquiries as soon as possible — ideally within 24 hours — so that they know they can count on you. You don’t have to work on your business for eight hours a day, but as your sales increase, you’ll need to spend at least an hour a day working on your store.

You can automate your social media posting at the start of the week, but you should aim to be active on social media every day. marketing efforts will also need to be carried out every day. You should also make sure that your ads are active at all times.

11. Import 25 Items to Start

I know it can be thrilling to add a ton of great products to your store since it can be done in just a few clicks, but I made the mistake of importing 600 products to my store in one day when I built my first online store four years ago.

Writing copy for even 100 products can be time-consuming and exhausting, especially if you’re a student or work a 9 to 5 job. However, when you add too many products to your store, you need to rewrite product descriptions and possibly remove the logo from a few images. You can create high-quality product descriptions for 25 items in just a few hours, so start with that number.

One fantastic product will do; you don’t need a hundred to make your first sale. Once a week, you can add 10 to 20 new products so that you can expand your store’s selection while already turning a profit by launching your business with a smaller collection and getting up and running quickly.

12. Monitor Your Competition

Another dropshipping tip is to follow your competitors on social media, keep an eye on their websites, and like their pages so you can start receiving their products and retargeting ads. Which products do they advertise? Does that product receive a lot of engagement, such as comments or shares?

You can become a better marketer by keeping an eye on your competitors and learning which products you should be putting in your store.

13. Change the Custom Note

The majority of dropshipping apps let you or your customers leave notes when placing an order; you’ll want to write something that’s pertinent to your vendors. As a dropshipper, you should change your custom note to your supplier.

We’ve never had a problem with suppliers adding their own invoices or promotions in a package because we also let them know that we’re dropshipping, so they don’t add their materials to packages. We only import ePacket products, so we remind suppliers to use ePacket shipping when shipping products to ensure customers receive their goods promptly. Our message on my store reads, “Ship with EPACKET only! We’re dropshipping. Please no invoices or promotions!”

Which dropshipping tips would you recommend to new business owners to help them establish their first store? If you’re a new store owner, let us know which of these dropshipping tips helped you the most.

Visit our website for 50 e-commerce advice for startup business owners!

14. Create a Trustworthy Brand

Strengthening your brand position can enhance your reputation as a leader, so take a look at what makes your business unique and what part of it will help strengthen your brand image. This dropshipping tip is about taking responsibility for how you present yourself. Think of your brand as your company’s personality; entrepreneurs who understand branding have an advantage. A strong brand image will help increase the value of your business and make you memorable for your customers. Build that trust through your brand image, and raise brand awareness.

Our Brand Awareness eBook has more information on this dropshipping branding tip.

Bonus Dropshipping Tips

15. Be Seen Online and Offline

Be creative about how to get in front of your audience both online and offline to get ahead of the curve. Perhaps you can identify a subset of an influencer’s audience who would benefit from a product so a partnership can be created. Spend time learning about video marketing, participate in events where your target market is present, and use social media to promote your dropshipping business — it’s not the only platform you should be active on.

16. Create High-Quality Custom Content

If you update product descriptions, write an engaging about us page, or create images that are high-quality, functional photos that educate customers, you will stand out from the crowd by creating custom content that contains information that is new and valuable to your audience. Consumers visit hundreds of websites each month and grow accustomed to reading the same content repeatedly, which can be discouraging if they are learning about a new product to sell because they may feel they are not learning enough about it.

17. Focus On Holidays Like Black Friday

You probably think of Black Friday as a big day for brick and mortar stores, but in recent years, online retailers have also gotten in on the action, to the point where in 2020, Black Friday ecommerce sales exceeded in-store purchases overall. Follow these Black Friday tips to help your store get off the sidelines as this shopping holiday evolves into an ecommerce game.