Dropshipping is a great leveler.
On the one hand, you have the product manufacturer who may have millions of dollars in their bank account. On the other hand, you have entrepreneurs (the dropshipping website owners) who might be one failure away from bankruptcy. Both of them are united by the lure of making profits.
Though how they’re going to make a profit differentiates the two.
While the product manufacturer has to take responsibility for creating, packaging, and shipping the product before he could see a dime, the dropshipper simply has to receive the order and process it to earn their share of the profits.
For this reason, innumerable people learn how to dropship.
Most of them do the right things at the start. They start with choosing a profitable-looking business idea, do competitor analysis, find a trustworthy supplier, create their dropshipping store, and finally optimize it in the hope that they’d soon be making sales.
Then, nothing happens.
While their competitors are making sales left, right, and center, their dropshipping store is struggling to make its first sale. A day passes, then a month, then a few months. Demoralized, the dropshipping business owner shuts down the website.
Want to avoid this route? Then check out our tips to increase your dropshipping sales.
#1: Start with 25 Items
Due to the excitement that follows building a dropshipping website, most new dropshippers want to start with hundreds of items. They do the same because they know that only a couple of clicks are required to import each item to their store.
Unfortunately, this approach leads to failure in most cases. After importing items to your website, you have to rewrite product descriptions for all of them. In some cases, you may also have to remove the logo from the images to stay free from copyright troubles.
While you can write copy for 500 products if you’re a full-time dropshipper, most people who dropship also have a day job. They cannot set aside more than a few hours every day to work on their website. If you’re one of them, stick to 25 items at the start and write quality product descriptions for them.
#2: Master Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Do you know that most dropshipping stores have a conversion rate of 1 to 2%? That’s one to two sales for every hundred visitors to your website. That simply means that if you want your business to become profitable, its website needs to attract thousands of visitors a month.
That’s why you need to master search engine optimization. Worth at an astounding $65 billion, the SEO industry helps websites rank high in Google searches. And with Google directing more than a billion users to websites every month, you can tell how ranking high in its searches would benefit your business.
There are two components of SEO: on-page and off-page. The former includes tasks such as using high search-volume keywords, internal linking, and constantly updating your content, among others. Off-page SEO, meanwhile, mainly revolves around backlinks.
You need to master both to increase your dropshipping sales.
#3: Try different Ecommerce platforms
Some of the most popular eCommerce platforms for dropshipping are as follows:
- WooCommerce: Apart from being completely free to use, WooCommerce has an easy-to-install plugin and is an ideal platform for beginners who don’t have any technical knowledge. New users can simply install it on their WordPress and set up their site in less than an hour.
- Magneto: Magneto is relatively complicated and requires users to have some basic programming knowledge at least. That’s why we don’t recommend it to beginners. Though, just like WooCommerce, it is entirely free.
- Shopify: Unlike both the previous platforms, Shopify is a premium eCommerce platform. It justifies the price that it charges for its services by offering pre-filled pages like Privacy Policy, About Us, Return Policy, Shipping Information, and Shipping Calculator.
- OpenCart: OpenCart is a free eCommerce platform that offers ticket, phone, and forum support to users facing any difficulties. It boasts a point-and-click interface which makes using it a cinch, even for non-technical users.
#4: Monitor Your Competitors
Here’s what we mean when we say that you should monitor your competitors:
- Check their top-selling products: If you haven’t done this already, add the same products (with different descriptions) to your website. After all, if they’re selling like hotcakes on your competitor’s site, they might do the same on yours too.
- Find their backlinks: As you might already know, backlinks help improve a site’s ranking in Google, provide it with referable traffic and, therefore, makes it easy to discover. You can use Google Search Console (free) or Ahrefs (paid) to check sites that are providing backlinks to your competitor’s website. Then approach those sites and see whether they can do the same for your store.
- Follow their social media pages: When you follow your competitor on social media, you will get to know which type of posts get the most traction. This knowledge, in turn, will make you better at marketing the products on your site.
#5: Be Creative
Here are some of the ways using which you can be creative in the dropshipping business:
- Sell products that encourage impulse buying: These are products that fall in the $20 to $70 range. Their price is big enough to generate a decent profit for the dropshipper. At the same time, it’s small enough to convince the buyer to purchase that product without taking a second opinion.
- Capitalize on trends: Remember fidget spinners? Patterns are a potential gold mine for dropshippers as they allow them to make a decent profit.
- Use Story Widget: This newly launched tool creates stores resembling the one you see/generate on Instagram. You can create such stories for your products to create a context in which the potential customers can use that product.