As the people who made Dropship Corporation (which has over 44,000 customers) and ran our own very successful dropshipping stores, we’ve learned a few things about what it takes to be successful from our customers.
Keeping this in mind, here’s what we tell people who are just starting out:
Don’t think about things so much that you can’t start.
- Check out your suppliers, because they can help your business succeed or fail.
- Know that you won’t be able to make money right away.
- Only a few of your products will bring in most of your sales.
- Don’t focus on low-priced items because it’s hard to make enough money to scale winners.
Your email list is one of your most important assets, so start building it right away.
Don’t be afraid to fail
Here’s how to get started with drop shipping the right way:
Don’t think about things so much that you can’t start.
This is something that a lot of new drop shippers go through. They spend so much time trying to find the “perfect” product or products to sell that they never start selling anything.
They don’t set up and promote products in their stores because they get stuck on the numbers or don’t feel confident enough in the products they are thinking about. They give up before they even get started.
Here’s how to fix this problem:
Just launch it! Seriously, the first product you choose won’t be a home run, so stop trying. The most important thing you can learn from the first products you choose is how drop shipping works from start to finish.
Just learning how to add your first products and making sure everything is set up so you can start selling them puts you ahead of most people who want to run a business.
Why?
Because you just launched your first product, which is a step toward making your dream come true.
Check out your suppliers, because they can help your business succeed or fail.
The quality of the products you sell is one of the most important factors that can make or break your business.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of sellers who jump on a trending product and make them as quickly and cheaply as possible. So, you end up with a product that isn’t good enough or doesn’t work right. This means you lose sales and have to give people money back. Even worse, if you sell a lot of low-quality goods, they could cost you your whole business.
Here’s what you have to do to make sure this doesn’t happen:
Order any products you might want to sell and try them out for yourself. Make sure they are of good quality, that they work, and that you can be sure your customers will be happy with them.
You might not be able to sell them right away, but wouldn’t you rather sell good products that make you money and make your customers happy so they want to buy from you again and again?
Know that you won’t make money right away.
Yes, it’s likely that you won’t make money right away. Even if you do make money on your early campaigns, you’ll probably just put that money back into your business to buy more advertising.
If you don’t hit a “home run” with the first few products you find and sell, which is unlikely, you’ll have to do a lot of research to find new ones…
…and coming up with new ways to attract people who are more likely to buy what you’re selling.
Here’s how to make a good plan:
When we talked to Dropship Corporation’s most successful customers, most of them said they didn’t start hitting winners until 20–30 campaigns in.
That means they never stopped trying out and making changes to the products they sold and the ads they ran.
In the end, they kept working on their business and making small changes until they started to see good results. Then they kept going and built on what they had done so far.
It’s easy, but sometimes it’s hard to keep going. But our users who have been successful would say it’s worth it to keep going and be patient because success will come.
Most of your sales will come from a small number of items.
We see stores with as few as one or two products and as many as tens of thousands of products.
At the end of the day, though, it doesn’t matter how many products you list—most of your sales will come from just a few of them.
So how do you use this to your advantage?
Once something starts selling, you should work hard to make it great and different from other products on the market.
Take better and more unique pictures, write better and more compelling descriptions, make videos showing how the product works, and maybe even create unique product bundles.
Anything you can do that is different from what your competitors are doing and helps you sell more products will give you an edge over them and help you sell more products.
Don’t worry about selling cheap things.
At the end of the day, your ability to grow and scale your business will depend on how much margin you have on your products.
Most of the time, you won’t be able to grow if you only sell cheap products. So, you should look for good products that have a good margin so you can make enough money to buy more traffic and grow quickly.
Then what should you do?
This will take time, money, and patience, but the key to making money is to find and sell products with good margins. It’s how the most successful dropshipping businesses got to where they are now.
It doesn’t mean they don’t sell products with low profit margins… because many stores do sell them at a loss to get people in the door.
But that does mean that they sell a lot of their really high-margin products as the key to their growth.
Start building your email list right away – It’s one of the most important things you have.
I’ve heard successful people say that if they lost everything that made them successful in business except their email list, they’d still be successful.
…they could quickly start up another successful business because they already had a list of people they knew they could market to and sell to.
How will this affect you?
No matter what you do, building your email customer list should always be your number one goal.
When you have a list of buyers, you can sell directly to them again and again without much or any extra marketing costs.
That means that if your Shopify store was taken down and you could no longer sell through it…
…you could still email your list of past buyers, sell directly to them again and again, and be right back in business.
In the end, if you don’t already have a list of your customers, stop what you’re doing and go set up a customer email list and start building it today. It’s one of your business’s most important and profitable parts.
Don’t be scared of failing.
If there is one thing that all of the successful business owners we know have in common, whether they do dropshipping or something else…
…is having no fear of failing.
How can you stop worrying that you’ll mess up?
- You have to be willing to try to sell things you’re not sure will sell. You have to be willing to put in the work to set everything up.
- You have to be ready to get people to buy your products.
- You have to be ready for technical problems and things not to work right.
- You have to be ready to deal with customers who complain about something (like shipping times, wanting a refund, etc.).
- You must be willing to do things that most people won’t do.
- This is the main piece of advice we give people who are thinking about starting a dropshipping business. Most of the tips can be used to start any kind of business.
When you use Dropship Corporation to run your dropshipping business, you get training, tools, and automations that help you get around most of the problems listed above.
