As the holiday season approaches, dropshipping businesses may already be under pressure to process and ship orders quickly in order to meet customer demand. While the holiday season is a joyful time for many, it can be difficult for inexperienced dropshippers to keep up with the seemingly never-ending stream of orders. Orders, stock, shipments, discounts, and individualised service management all fall under your purview. Isn’t it a lot of fun?
Have no fear! We hope these dropshipping strategies for the holiday season prove useful. Verify that you’re capable of dealing with deliveries, orders, and queries from customers.
What problems do people have to deal with during peak season?
We didn’t talk directly about dropshipping tips for peak season. Instead, we talked about the problems dropshipping businesses might face and how to fix them. In the next part, you’ll find more information.
Abandonment of Cart
When a user leaves items in their shopping cart, this is called “cart abandonment.” There are many reasons for this, like high shipping costs, bad payment systems, unreliable portals, and so on.
People want to buy specialised products during the busy season, but they also want to buy them from a reliable source. You can get people to stay on your site longer by giving them free shipping or discounts. Also, make sure your payment portal is a safe place to do business.
A lot of people
During the busiest times of the year, your site may get a lot of visitors. Are you ready to carry this weight? If your site goes down without warning, you might lose a lot of visitors who were there at the time.
To keep this from happening during the busy season, you should improve your resources and make sure your site can handle the expected load.
Fulfillment of High Demand
How would you handle fulfilment when you get a lot of orders during the busy season? Isn’t it a pain to manually place orders and then keep track of details? When you delay holiday orders, the experience of your customers automatically goes down.
Use a dropshipping tool like Dropship Corporation or other relevant technology to automate tasks and solve the problem.
Fast Service
Most of your customers will want their orders to come quickly. Even if your AliExpress dropshipping store can’t do this, you still need to plan ahead. Check to see if you can offer faster shipping for an extra fee. If so, then giving this offer to customers won’t hurt.
Don’t say you’ll get things to people quickly if you can’t do it. If your seller has promised to meet the deadline, you should only promise the same to your customers.
How dropshippers can handle the busy season
Let’s look at some advanced and useful dropshipping tips for the busy season. Check out how you can handle sales at this time of year.
Improve your systems.
The first thing you need to do to handle the busy dropshipping season is to get your systems ready. From placing an order to getting it done, every part of the supply chain should be made stronger. Among these are:
You should be very good at figuring out what’s wrong. You don’t want your customers to have to wait on the checkout page for a long time.
You should be able to keep track of how many orders and questions customers have. Based on this, you can make deals on products that are popular right now.
Your website should work perfectly on every page. If the cart takes too long to load, the user may leave. So, loading time must be cut down. Your website should be able to deal with the amount of traffic.
Tell the customer what’s going on.
This is a dropshipping tip for both busy times and other times of the year. You need to let your customers know what’s going on. No matter what is going on, you need to let your users know.
For instance, the delivery is late. As soon as you know what’s going on, write to your customer, tell them you’re sorry for the trouble, and let them know they can cancel the order if they want to. This should be one of your main rules. It helps you build long-term relationships with your customers.
Manage Suppliers
One more tip for dropshipping during the busy season is to keep track of your suppliers. You need to keep track of your product suppliers and talk to them about how to work together during busy times. This can be hard if you do dropshipping and get your products from AliExpress. Here are some tips for managing your suppliers during the busy season:
Work with more than one provider. On AliExpress, you can find more than one place to buy different things. Add these items to your website to better manage your stock and risks.
Choose items carefully. If almost every seller offers delayed shipping on the same item, it might not be a good choice during the busy season. You should choose products that can be sent quickly.
Make a policy for returns
You should make a return policy, whether it’s peak season or not. This is because you run a dropshipping store and don’t keep any goods in stock. If you get a return request and the seller doesn’t accept returns, you’ll be stuck with dead inventory.
- Find out what the AliExpress sellers’ return policies are.
- Check out what your competitors are selling.
- Make up your own rules for returns.
- Add clauses for items that can’t be sent back.
- Add a sentence that says you can refuse a return without giving a reason.
Think ahead.
Always make plans two months before the holidays or Christmas. You need time to set up your inventory, plan your marketing and pricing strategy, and get ready for everything else. Also, many people like to do holiday shopping early.
So, it might also be a good idea to have sales or discounts before the holidays, when you can make a lot of money.
Deliver Shipping Details
- First, figure out what kind of shipping you can do. Here are some upcoming formats:
- Real-time prices, where you have a formula that changes the price based on how popular the product is.
- Flat-rate means that your rate stays the same unless you change it yourself.
Rate per product type, where the rate depends on how many products are ordered. If the user buys more, the discount goes up, and if they buy less, it goes down.
Use these ways to set prices for your website’s different products. Once the order is placed, you should send your customer an email with shipping information. You can do this by email, text, or both. If you can, you should add a link to track the order. If the user can’t track the order or you don’t have a link to do so, add details by hand or use an automated dropshipping tool to let the user know.
Make sure the products are good.
Before the busy season, you need to make sure that your products are the best they can be. During the holidays, no one will accept a broken or low-quality product. Most of the time, people order these things to give as gifts, so getting a broken one is disappointing.
So, if you want to add new items to your list, you should think ahead and order samples of these items. This will let you take pictures and see how good they are. It is a must to make sure of this, because poor quality has many negative effects.
Ask for Comments
Last, try to get your users to tell you what they think. They will tell you useful things that will help you make your processes better.
Create a form for customers to fill out and send it to them when the order is done. You can also put these star ratings on your website, which will help other customers decide whether or not to buy from you.
Conclusion
During the busy season, dropshipping businesses have to deal with a lot of problems. Dropshippers may find it hard to send information to customers, handle questions from users, and make fast deliveries. Because of this, we’ve given you some tips from experts on how to run your dropshipping business during the busy season. Check it out and let us know if you want to know more or want to share your ideas.
