Do you have an online drop shipping business? Unlike a traditional retail business, you don’t keep an inventory in a drop shipping business. So how do you know which products will sell more than the others?
In this article, you’ll learn more about drop shipping and some tips to help boost your sales growth.
What Is Drop Shipping?
Drop shipping refers to a retail fulfillment method where the seller doesn’t keep the products or goods in stock. If you have an online store using the drop shipping model, you purchase the items from a third-party company and the company will ship the products directly to your customers. Hence, you don’t have to handle the products directly.
There are many online marketplaces where independent business owners can source the products they sell in their online stores. Supplier databases are available worldwide. Independent business owners can also use supplier databases and apps to order the products their customers order online.
What Are The Benefits Of Drop Shipping?
Venturing in a drop shipping business provides plenty of benefits for independent business owners, such as the following:
Less Capital Investment
You don’t have to invest too much money in a drop shipping business because you don’t need a huge inventory upfront. Unlike traditional retail businesses, you don’t need thousands of dollars to sustain an inventory.
The good thing about drop shipping is that you don’t need to pay for a product unless one of your customers has already made a payment. Even with low capital, you can start a drop shipping business without any inventory.
Easy To Manage
When you manage an eCommerce business, you don’t have to worry about physical products. You don’t need to manage a warehouse, pack or ship orders, track inventory, handle returns, handle shipments, or manage stock levels.
Flexible And Scalable
You can manage a drop shipping business anywhere and anytime with a reliable internet connection. It’s easy to communicate with customers and suppliers in this type of business. If you have a good customer base, you can easily expand your business by offering more related products to your existing customers.
Drop Shipping Tips To Boost Your Sales
If you want to boost the sales of your drop shipping business, you might want to consider the following tips below.
Make Your Drop Shipping Store Appealing
Your drop shipping store is the face of your business. Your drop shipping store needs to have the right features in managing orders and other business operations.
A drop shipping website or store should have the following features:
Choose A Great Store Design
When designing your drop shipping store, you can use the colors or theme of your business logo. Think about the general appeal of your store based on the demographics and characteristics of your target audience.
It’s important to make your online shop easy to use, intuitive, fast, and responsive. Even if your customers buy products using their mobile devices, they should be able to navigate your website easily.
Automation Software And Rules
Even if your supplier handles the workload, it’s important to take note that you have many responsibilities too, such as managing an eCommerce site. You need to email customers, update order status, and sort them into membership tiers. These tasks can be tedious and time-consuming, thus, choosing an eCommerce platform that offers automation services is a good idea.
An online store guided by automation rules makes website management a lot easier. You and your customers can use templates to fill out personal details without requiring human input. It means that you can focus more on the strategic and creative aspects of your business, such as your marketing strategies.
Customer Service Options
Because your customers are the most crucial aspect of your drop shipping business, you should provide excellent customer service. Aside from the ‘Contact Us’ page or providing your email and phone number, it’s also a good idea to integrate a helpdesk platform.
As much as possible, try to be creative in how you engage with your customers. For instance, you might want to reach your customers through live chats, allowing online users to get answers to their queries more quickly.
Customer service isn’t limited to providing channels for communication. It’s a good idea to have an eCommerce software that can categorize customers. Take time to create an email list to categorize customers into different tiers. This way, you can provide special offers to prospects and reward your loyal customers with discounts, coupons, and freebies. You can even automate rewards based on how much a customer already spent buying products in your store and other rules.
Promote Your Drop Shipping Store On Social Media
Social media marketing and drop shipping are great partners. They should always co-exist to attain sales and marketing success. It’s not enough to build an aesthetically appealing and functional drop shipping store. If you want to boost your sales, you should consider promoting your eCommerce store on social media channels.
You can promote your drop shipping store on social media by:
Creating A Fan Page: First, you need to create a fan page for your drop shipping store. Next, ask your family and friends to share your social media page with their contacts.
Publishing Posts Regularly: It’s important to be active on social media by publishing related articles, images, or videos regularly. You can publish infographics or images with information such as the latest or hottest trends related to your products.
Boost Your Branding: You can boost your social media branding by working with social media influencers in endorsing your products.
Create A Blog Section
A blog section in your drop shipping website is important in attracting more prospects and customers and boosting your sales. You might want to grow your organic traffic or unpaid traffic brought about by the helpful articles and other web content you publish on your website.
Despite the countless online stores nowadays, one aspect that can set your store apart from other stores is having a helpful blog section. When online users have questions about using a product you sell online, your blog section should be there to provide answers. Your blog section serves as an information hub or resource that people can check from time to time.
The topics you write in your blog depend on the products you’re offering and the needs of your target audience. For example, if you’re selling home gym equipment, you can write blogs about choosing the best products for women who want to stay healthy and fit at home, such as an exercise ball or a treadmill.
Below are some tips when creating a blog section for your drop shipping store:
Answer Questions: You can create a Q&A and FAQs section to answer the most common queries about your products and services.
Create Unique Content: Other online stores also have their own blog section. Hence, if you want to stay above the competition, you should publish engaging, informative, and unique content pieces. Never copy and paste what your competitors put on their websites. You can hire ghostwriters to help you create the best content for your blog.
Optimize Your Blogs: When creating content, you also need to think about search engine optimization (SEO), which should make up a major part of your marketing budget. You should have a list of the right keywords to use when creating unique content for your blogs to increase your web page ranking and visibility in search engines.
Sell The Right Products
Are you wondering why your sales seem stagnant? You’re probably not selling the right products. If your products do not appeal to your target audience, advertising them would be useless. Before you even think about putting up a product on your website, you should do some research first.
It’s important to determine what your intended audience needs and wants. You can do this by:
Surveying: Get the feedback and comments of your verified customers about the product line you’re offering. Are they happy with the variety of products you have in your store?
Checking What Your Competitors Sell: You can check the top products of your competitors. How are they different from yours? Compare the prices, quality, and customer service your competitors provide and learn how you can improve yours.
Use And Test Your Products
With the many suppliers available worldwide, you should also be wary of checking the products you sell in your store. Since you don’t manufacture the products, you should be extra careful in scrutinizing the quality of the items by using and testing them first before selling them in your store.
Conclusion
You can boost the sales growth of your drop shipping business by knowing what your target audience needs and wants. Aside from having an appealing, functional, and user-friendly online store, you also need to promote your store across social media and online marketing platforms to boost your sales.
Finally, check the products your competitors sell and make sure to use and test the items before listing them in your store to ascertain that they’re of high quality.