For those with the entrepreneurial spirit, dropshipping is an exciting opportunity for bringing your knowledge, expertise, and enthusiasm to a ready-made model for business. By leveraging contacts and marketing experience, you can build a successful dropshipping business in no time. However, it’s a competitive market out there. There are so many tricks, tips, and dropshipping hacks that there’s always something you can be doing better.
1) Use The AliExpress Dropshipping Center
AliExpress is a Chinese online marketplace with hundreds of thousands of products, it is just a great place for you to get some trend ideas, what products are selling the most, and what are the hidden gems rising fast. The products on AliExpress are pretty popular – and you can use this popularity to your advantage, to analyse trends and to choose the perfect dropshipping product to sell on your store.
However be careful: you can use AliExpress for product research but we do not advise to source your products there, too many dropshippers in the bast had awful headaches due to retailers shipping low-quality products with the slowest method available, despite having paid for the fastest. Also do not forget that AliExpress is a B2C marketplace, which means that if you sell their products on your store, that leaves you very little profit margin, if you intend to be competitive.
You will be better off with a private supplier, one who can source your products at B2B prices directly from manufacturers, perhaps someone who can also provide you with a store automation that will take most of the daily workload off your shoulders. Someone like Yakkyofy, we will source your products and fast ship them directly to your customers, without any additional subscription or monthly fee.
2) Connect With Customers Through Discounts
Your dropshipping pricing strategy is an essential way of winning customers. Keeping customers happy, however, is all about your discounts. Offering tailor-made discounts is one of our powerful dropshipping hacks that will have your customers coming back for more.
The trick to offering winning discounts is to strike a balance between access and exclusivity. Everyone loves a good deal, but a really good discount is something that stands out against the norm. By making your dropshipping discounts time-limited and exclusive to certain customers, these offers will seem especially valuable.
Nevertheless, you need to make these discounts widely available to your customers to ensure that you’re reaching the widest market for your products possible. “By building a low bar for eligibility, you’ll ensure that exclusivity and access aren’t in conflict and maximizing the number of customers who connect with your brand through these offers,” says Casey House, an eCommerce blogger at Writinity and Last Minute Writing. “For example, offering free shipping with a minimum spend will encourage customers to bulk up their basket.” Further, a great way of connecting with your customers through discounts is to offer a voucher after a new customer’s first purchase – this makes them feel valued and incentivizes a return to your store.
3) Combine Both Ecommerce And Digital Products In Your Store
Perhaps one of the best things about dropshipping is that, since you do not have product stocks or inventory to handle, you can switch on new products as often as you want. But there’s more, as the store is essentially yours, you can decide not to focus exclusively on selling physical products. You can also offer digital products, for example games and sell with them items that are complimentary or essential to play this game. In this way you catch two birds with one stone! As there is an equal market for digital products and by offering them in your dropshipping store you can increase your revenue without ever worrying about the supply chain.
“Digital products can be offered at no additional cost to your business as there’s no need to rely on external factors,” says Stacia McClure, a business writer at Draft Beyond and Research papers UK. “What’s more, manufacturers of digital products often offer exceptional commission when you sell their products, allowing you to keep 50% – 75% of the takings.” Everything from software to ebooks can be sought after digital products, so set up your store today.
4) Facebook Ads Hacks
Frankly, Facebook is a huge asset for dropshippers. Advertising through Facebook is simple, cost-effective and can introduce your store to a huge audience. Making the most of Facebook ads is key to growing your store – here are a few ways to optimize your Facebook ads.
Facebook Video Demo Ads Are Your Secret Weapon
Chances are you’ve been building compelling images to use in your advertising, and whilst static adverts can help narrate your brand’s mission, they’re never going to be as eye-catching as dynamic video content. A number of platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, offer the opportunity to sell your brand your video demo ads and these are a solid dropshipping hacks that will see your ads hitting home.
You don’t need to invest in a production company to produce attention-grabbing Facebook Video Ads – customers love the folksy feel of self-produced content as it feels authentic. They are naturally inclined to trust something that comes from the heart. You can create a great ad in under a minute using just your smartphone – give it a try!
Midnight Magic
This dropshipping hack is all about getting the most out of your marketing budget. If you’ve found some success through your Facebook ads (and we’re sure you will have) then it’ll be time to scale up your operation, investing more in digital marketing to get as many eyes on your brand as you can.
However, Facebook’s advertising algorithm spends the money you invest across the day, and if you increase your budget in the middle of the day then Facebook will be rushing to spend your daily budget by midnight. That means you’ll never get an accurate report of how your advertising worked, as it was front loaded to the end of the day. Night owls will love this hack – change your Facebook ad budget at the witching hour and the algorithm will have a full 24 hours to spend and test your ads, giving you an optimized account of when and where the spending made its mark.
Create A Custom Audience
The customization options on Facebook ads are one of the things that make this tool essential for dropshippers so you need to be leveraging customization in your ads. Facebook lets you tailor your audience using the vast analytics they’ve gathered and this ensures you’ll get the most bang for your buck.
Creating efficient Facebook ads ensures the right audience are finding your store and you’ll have a higher hit rate driving traffic to your store. For example, you can tailor ads to target anyone who has visited your store in the past to mine the rich vein of return custom, or put your ads in front of specific demographics that you’re trying to reach. Don’t waste time advertising to the wrong audience!
5) Grow An Instagram Audience First
Newcomers to dropshipping often don’t have a huge ad budget – if they have any money to invest on ads at all. And although there’s a lot of received wisdom out there saying that you need ads to reach people, that’s not the only way. In fact, starting out with ads before you’ve built a big social media presence can be putting the cart before the horse.
Instagram is a great platform for growing your audience organically and making strong connections with a dedicated user base. The advantage of starting out with an organic strategy for growing your Instagram audience is that once you do start advertising you’ll have the instant social proof that people seek before investing in your store. Grow your Instagram following by engaging with the thriving dropshipping community on the platform – commenting and liking other posts and tagging folks in stories.
6) Plant Decoy Prices
Decoy prices – also known as bundle conversions in the world of marketing strategy – are incredibly effective at incentivizing customers to buy. A decoy price contextualizes the cost of products on your website, demonstrating to customers the great value of certain products or bundles of products. Here’s how it works.
Let’s say you’re selling yoga mats on your store for $9.99 each – customers browsing your store have no way of knowing if this price is good or bad, so they need something to compare it to. Now, you don’t want to drive them away to other stores looking for better prices, so here’s where the decoy strategy comes in. Bundle two yoga mats together for the price of $19.99 and then bump the single mat up to $14.99. Customers will now see a great deal when they look at the yoga mat bundle – the single mat is a pricing decoy that indicates better value, even though you aren’t really offering any discount.
7) Think Over Your Shipping Costs Strategy
Customers are always looking for a good deal, and shipping costs stand out as a major barrier for them making a purchase. After all, they perceive the value of the product as what it costs – and then shipping is an extra charge unrelated to the goods they’re going to receive. You can undermine this calculus by offering free shipping and slightly bumping up the price of the goods on your store. Pricing your products higher can actually have the effect of making them more desirable to your customers (especially when you combine this strategy with decoy pricing, outlined above). And then free shipping offers an added incentive for your customers to make the purchase. An effective shipping strategy is essential to a successful store.
8) Implement Personalized Branding
If your ultimate goal is to have a long-lasting business, branding is essential. However, if you do not choose the right supplier, branding can be a big bad headache, as you would have to:
- Get an agreement with the manufacturer to personalise your products, depending on the personalisation he can ask any MOQ, going from 100s unities up to 1000s;
- If the manufacturer does not offer personalisation, you would have to get in touch with a third-party company that can provide these services;
- Once the personalisation is ready, you would need to find a place to store your products, which means even more money spent;
Don’t forget also that you would have to do all of the above with suppliers who have a limited vocabulary in English.
But do not worry, we have the solution for you, as Yakkyofy provides personalisation services, from application of your logo on the products themselves up to the personalisation of packaging and Thank You Card – the latter being a cheaper version of the personalisation, equally effective.
But it’s not over: we will also keep your packaging or products for free in our warehouse in Shenzhen, ready to leave as soon as orders arrive from your store. Pretty insane, isn’t it?
Now that you have your products sorted, don’t forget to ensure that every page of your website and your social media presence is consistent in its branding to bring your dropshipping business the instant-recognition of your customers.
Personalizing your products through branding can take your storytelling to the next level. Through personalization of products you can take your brand from a digital entity into a living and breathing being. Personalized products serve to expand the reach of your brand in the physical world.
Dropshipping hacks: Conclusion
These dropshipping hacks are quick and easy to implement and guaranteed to help your revenue soar. By leveraging the user experience across your store and marketing you’ll create a strong connection to your users that keeps them coming back. And diversifying into digital products can give you profit margins you never imagined. This dynamic industry is perfect for the entrepreneur in you.
And if you are looking for the perfect supplier that will have your back, well, don’t forget to:
BIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR:
Ashley Halsey is a professional journalist at Lucky assignments and Gum Essays with fifteen years experience in eCommerce. Her mission now is to share the wealth of knowledge she has generated in her career to help others reach their business goals.
