16 Dropshipping Tips For Beginners To Make Your Life Easier

Dropshipping is a grand business model. It’s low risk, low cost, easy to start-up, and highly automated, but if you’re brand new to entrepreneurship, there’s still quite a bit of a learning curve. And today, I’m going to give you different dropshipping tips for beginners.

All right, let’s jump right in. 

Marketing

You need to focus on mastering marketing, with several aspects of dropshipping already automated, you’ll have plenty of time to concentrate on marketing. Indeed, you’ll derive lots of joy tweaking your website, designing logos, and creating graphics. 

However, if you’re not actively working on getting the right products in front of the target audience at the right time, all that time spent making the “perfect” website will go up in smoke. 

A beautiful website with zero visitors compares to “A tree falls in the woods” scenario where if no one sees it, does it even exist?

Don’t get it twisted; the design is imperative, but if you’re also not focused on getting your stunning website in front of the right people. You’ll never make any sales. 

That’s why there’s need to invest in driving traffic, and you can do that through paid ads in the shape of 

• Video marketing  
• Social media 
• SEO
• Influencers. 

Honestly, there is a plethora of different marketing strategies and tactics you can employ.

Still, I’d often urge new marketers to focus on a small handful of techniques that comes the most naturally to you. Luckily for you, we’ve got lots of resources to help you get on the right path.

Let us check the next dropshipping tips for beginners that can help you launch successful dropshipping business.

Compelling offers

It would be best if you create compelling offers. You know what’s fascinating about online shopping! Sales. 

Do you know what cuts even better?

Bundle deals with complementary products. 

And because dropshipping can get highly competitive, consider how you can make buying from you and build a relationship with you even more enticing.

It could mean anything from selectively offering let’s say:

• Buy one get one deals Bundles: Bundling multiple complementary items at a discounted rate
• Discounts on registration: Offer significant rebates to your visitors first purchased if they register for an account 

Look at your offer from your visitors’ point of view and ask, “What’s in it for me?” 

In case the offer isn’t objectively excellent or mesmerizing, you should rethink it.

By making offers that prove difficult to ignore, you stand a much better chance of converting more of the traffic you’re driving.

Consider having products in bundles as one of the best dropshipping tips for beginners that anyone can leverage on.

Monitor your competition

Monitor your competition. Here’s a suggestion for you. Start a spreadsheet and make entries of links to your leading competition websites, social media accounts, and wherever else they’re selling online.

• Sign up for their email list 
• Buy their products

Once a week, checking in on how they’re positioning their products, what they say in their emails, and what kinds of sales rivals run and how they retarget their ads. 

This type of low-level competition monitoring will provide you some insight into how your competitors run their business.

The insight can help expose the loopholes in your competitors’ strategies. It may also feature some precious lessons along the way. 

Presentable Website

Make sure your website is presentable. You’d be just stunned by shocking numbers of entrepreneurs who launch their dropshipping website with missing images, placeholder text, and no discernible categorization to their products. 

Sadly, an entrepreneur would send traffic to a website that’s unnavigable or looks terrible.

Also read: How To Find Best Dropshipping Suppliers on AliExpress

That reeks unprofessionalism, and your brand soon sheds any trust and credibility your brand may have had.

Before you launch your store, take a look at other web sites in your niche. Ask questions around:

• Home page– what does their home page look like? 
• Images with logos-do their photos include logos on them?
• Types of pages-What types of pages does their website have?
• Features-which features or apps does the store include on their website?

Once you’ve taken notes on the look and layout of different stores in your niche, head over to the Shopify app store, browse through to find the apps that will mimic the most common functionalities you found in your research.

Email capture, product reviews, and rating count are among the most common features of any eCommerce store. You can also add pages to feature shipping info, your refund policies FAQs, et cetera.

This dropshipping tips for beginners compilation aint over yet,lets dig in further,shall we?

Automate your Business

Automate your business as much as you possibly can. With dropshipping tools like Oberlo, several aspects of your dropshipping business will already be automated; however, there is always room to take more off your plate.

Tools like buffer can help you automate tasks like scheduling social media postings. Other tools like Kit can help with advertising, emails, retargeting, and more.

In contrast, tools like Zapier can help link your Shopify store to other tools like HubSpot for customer relationship management and Google Sheets for order backups, QuickBooks for bookkeeping.

For in-depth info on e-commerce automation, check out our other resource on the same. 

Be Hands-on

You must be active daily. This business model isn’t an automated business, and there is no overnight success. Possibly, you won’t need to put in eight hours a day.

You do need to spend at the bare minimum, an hour a day, to grow your online business each day. 

On every day, you’ll need to process orders, respond to customer inquiries, and perhaps ramp up traffic and basically, ensure that everything runs without a hiccup.

Dropshipping requires work, each & every single day, to ensure that the business runs well.

As part of these 16 dropshipping tips for beginners,telling your supplier the nature of your business is vital.The next step addresses it perfectly.

Oberlo Custom Note

Change the Oberlo custom note. As a dropshipper, you need to change your custom note to your suppliers. Under Settings, hit Suppliers, and at the bottom of the page, you’ll find Custom Note. 

You can craft a message for all of your suppliers, and you’ll want to say something that speaks to all your suppliers. The note can read along the lines of “Ship with ePacket only! We dropship, no promotions or invoices“. 

Because you’re only importing ePacket products, you must remind suppliers to use ePacket shipping this way, and you ensure customers receive their orders asap.

 It’s also vital that you indicate that we’re dropshipping. As such, they don’t add invoices or marketing materials to your Packages. 

Ideally, if you do this, issues of suppliers adding their invoices or promotions to your packages shouldn’t arise.

Underpricing your products

You should avoid underpricing your products. Now, I appreciate this might sound counter to the tip on creating compelling offers, but avoid racing to the bottom on price to remain competitive.

Offering a lower overall cost on bundled products or through “Buy one get one half off” sales is not the same as selling your entire inventory at just above cost. It is a huge mistake. I see new eCommerce entrants make all the time. 

Whereby they are not making any sales and then precipitously, everything in their store is on sale, severely discounted.

Offering everything at rock-bottom prices can prove severely detrimental to your store and your brand risk looking cheap. 

In case you’re not making sales, don’t jump to the assumption that it’s your prices that are holding you back. Instead, re-evaluate how you’re driving traffic, and the offers are making. 

It’s better to find new ways to drive traffic than to slash prices because for one, it’s hard to raise them again and two, you still have to pay the bills. 

Remove Bad Suppliers

Remove the bad suppliers asap. Whereas most AliExpress suppliers are reliable, easy to work with, and offer quality products, sometimes a bad apple or two can slip through. 

Since there’re thousands of AliExpress suppliers, you can easily replace an awful supplier.

Many suppliers carry similar products, thus providing the latitude sometimes even to sell the same product, though from another manufacturer. 

If you notice suppliers, don’t use your shipping delivery method of choice, or consistently ship faulty products, you can easily remove their products from your store.

Again, this rarely happens. Suppliers know that by offering outstanding service, you’ll continue bringing them more business.

If you want to minimize your chances of partnering with a bad supplier, check out Oberlo Supply, a network of pre-screened suppliers who have proven track of consistency in their quality support and service.

Oberlo Supply

Use Oberlo Supply. When launching your first dropshipping store, consider using Oberlo Supply. 

Oberlo Supply helps you dropship quality products from trusted suppliers with a wide variety of products from popular and hidden niches. 

The best part about Oberlo Supply is that incoming orders quickly get sent to your supplier, making it excellent if you’re working around a busy schedule. 

You’ll have much time in your hands to focus on marketing to rake in more revenue. If you’d like to learn a little more about Oberlo Supply, check out our resource on the same.

General Store vs. Niche Store

A lot of advice out there, including our own, will tell you to start with a niche store. The fact is, sometimes you don’t want to sell just one type of thing. 

In reality, general stores are superb starter stores as they force you to think more broadly; and they can pose a lot more work between marketing to different demographics, keeping products organized and categorized.

Conversely, if you want to put more work into researching and validating a niche, a niche lets you narrow in on finding and marketing to the target audience.

The “Running” niche would be a fitting example of a niche within the fitness vertical.

Whereas there’s still an intensified competition for running gear and accessories, it’s not nearly as broad as if you were to sell a wide variety of Fitness Gear. 

And it all boils down to one question. “What do you have the tolerance for?” If you can have an upfront answer to that question and feel confident enough to drive traffic, you should be good. 

Dynamics

It would help if you prepared to adjust and pivot fast. There are all sorts of unanticipated dynamics and adversity that will come your way because, at the end of it all, you’re running a business.

Suppliers may stop carrying a product, a new trend may emerge precipitously, your customers may hate an item you’ve added to your store, or perhaps one of your ads scales real good.

You’ll need a loan facility to continue financing that growth.

Pivots mostly are neither good nor bad. But they do require an element of flexibility and decisiveness on your part when a moment calls for it. 

Leverage Data

Use data to inform your inventory. It would be best if you were selective about the products you add to your store. 

Don’t just add products simply because they look beautiful, and you’d like it for yourself. Instead, look at the data.

Are the products getting sales and positive feedback? 

When evaluating products from your supplier, you must check the order volume, reviews, customer photos, and seller ratings to ensure you are partnering with authentic suppliers. 

Import limited Items

Work to import a limited number of items say 10 to 25 items to start. Here’s a problem for you.

You’ve started a dropshipping business in your delight, and you’ve imported 500 items to your store. 

That’s a fantastic selection you have now, right? But then once you look at your store, it hits you that’s 500 product descriptions to write, five hundred titles that you need to rewrite, infinite tags you need to add and thousands of photos you need to comb through to see which ones you’ll have to crop supplier logos out of.

What do you do? Most folks, myself included, will give up. Never mind the “This wasn’t for me, this is too much work.” cliche I quit! 

It’s much easier to start with a small collection of 10-25 products; this way, you efficiently manage the workload, especially if you’re doing this after your 9-5 day job.

Choose ePacket Delivery

Always choose ePacket. As a dropshipper, you get to sort products based on ePacket shipping. 

Because the ePacket shipping is the fastest, affordable shipping method, you’ll be able to ensure quick delivery to your customers without spending big.

Ordinarily, ePacket shipping costs under $5 for most products, and it will make sure your customers get the merchandise inside 7-20 business days and often much faster.

 If you wish to learn more about ePacket, check out our other resource on the same. 

I hope you are learning form the 15 dropshipping tips for beginners I have already shared with you.

Customer service

You must offer exceptional customer service. There are myriad ways to stand out when you’re selling similar products to other companies. 

At the same time, it’s common to think that providing refunds and responding to inquiries is the role of customer service. 

But if you look it, that’s where the real job begins. I mean, tell jokes, write thank you cards, send surprises and go the extra mile to make clients feel special. 

Dropshipping tips for beginners Conclusion

Take a cue from the poetic adage that goes: “People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Maya Angelou. 

All right, that’s all we’ve got for now. If you have any questions about dropshipping tips for beginners or want to share your own experiences with dropshipping, drop them in the comments below, and I’ll be sure to get back to you.

 And if you like this post, consider hitting the share button. Thanks so much for reading and your support, and until next time learn often, market better, and sell more. Adios.

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