What Advice Do You Have For Someone Just Starting Their Dropshipping Business?

As the creators of Dropified (with over 44,000 customers and who have also run our own really successful dropshipping stores) we’ve learned a thing or two from our customers about what it takes to be successful.

With that in mind, here’s the advice we give to those who are just getting started:

• Don’t overthink things to the point that you aren’t launching
• Test out your suppliers, they can help make or break your business
• Understand that you won’t be making money right away.
• The majority of your sales will come from just a few products.
• Don’t focus on cheap products, it’s hard to have enough margin to scale winners
• Build your email list from Day 1, it’s one of your most important assets.
• Don’t be afraid to fail

Here’s a deeper dive into each of these points on how to get started with drop shipping the right way:

Don’t Overthink Things To The Point That You Aren’t Launching

This is a common thing for new drop shippers to experience. They get so caught up in finding the “perfect” product or products to sell… that they never launch any products at all.

Whether it’s getting stuck in analysis paralysis over the numbers, or not feeling confident enough in the products they are considering, they ultimately fail to set up and promote products in their stores, and give up before they ever get started.

Here’s how to overcome this issue:

Just launch it! Seriously, you won’t hit a home run with the first products you choose, so stop trying. The most important things the first products you choose are most helpful with is learning the drop shipping process from start to finish.

Just the act of learning how to add your first products and having everything in place so that you can start selling them already puts you ahead of most people in the world that dream of running a business.

Why?

Because you just took action on making your dream a reality by launching your first product.

Test Out Your Suppliers, They Can Help Make Or Break Your Business

One of the biggest things that can determine your success is the quality of the products you are selling.

Unfortunately, there are many vendors that hop on a popular product trend and manufacture them as quickly and cheaply as possible. As a result, you end up with a sub par or faulty product that will only end up in lost sales and refunds. Even worse, they could end up costing you your entire business if you sell a lot of poor-quality products.

Here’s what you need to do to prevent this from happening:

Order any products that you are considering selling and check them out yourself. Make sure they are high quality, that they work, and that they give you confidence that your customers would be happy receiving these products.

Sure, it may delay your ability to start selling them right away, but wouldn’t you rather sell high-quality products that make you money and give you happy customers that want to buy from you again and again?

Understand That You Won’t Be Making Money Right Away

It’s true – you probably won’t be making money right away. The fact is, even if you do make some money on your early campaigns, that money will most likely be put right back into your business in order to buy more advertising.

Unless you hit a “home run” with the first few products you find and sell (which isn’t likely that you would), you’ll need to focus on constant research to find new products…

…and finding new ways to bring in targeted traffic that are more likely to buy what you’re selling.

Here’s how to plan for success:

In speaking with our most successful Dropified customers, most of them said that they didn’t really start hitting winners until they were 20 – 30 campaigns in.

That means that they didn’t stop testing and tweaking the products they sold, or the ads they ran.

Bottom line, they just kept working their business and fine-tuning it until they started seeing positive results. Then they kept going to build on the progress they were making.

It’s simple, but it’s not always easy to stick it out. However, our successful users would say that it’s totally worth it to stick it out and be patient, because success will come.

The Majority Of Your Sales Will Come From Just A Few Products

We see stores that range from selling one or two products, all the way to stores with thousands of products in them.

At the end of the say though, regardless of how many products you list, it’s always just a small handful of them that will bring in the majority of your sales.

So how do you make this work for you?

Once something starts selling, work hard to make that product awesome and different from competitors.

Take better and more unique pictures, write out better and more compelling descriptions, record videos demonstrating the product in action, maybe even create unique product bundles.

Anything you can do that is unique to you and how you are selling your products that your competitors are not doing will give you competitive advantages and help you sell more products.

Don’t Focus On Cheap Products

At the end of the day, how much margin you have on your products will determine whether or not you can grow and scale your business.

If you focus on selling cheap products, then you’ll struggle to grow in most cases. That’s why you need to look into solid products that you can indeed build a nice margin into so that you make enough to buy more traffic and grow quickly.

So what should you do instead?

While this will take time, money and patience, finding and selling products with good margins for profit is the key. It’s how the most successful dropship businesses out there became successful.

It doesn’t mean they don’t sell low margin products… because many do sell them as loss-leaders to get people to their storefronts.

But it does mean that they sell a lot of their really high-margin products as the key to their growth.

Build Your Email List From Day 1 – It’s One Of Your Most Important Assets

I’ve heard it said before by successful colleagues – if you took everything in business away that made them successful, but they got to keep their email subscriber list…

…they could have another successful business up and running quickly simply because they had a list they knew they could market and sell to.

What does this mean for you?

Whatever you do, always make building your email customer list a number one priority.

When you have a list of buyers, you can sell to them directly over and over again, with little to no additional marketing costs.

That means if your Shopify store was deleted and you couldn’t sell through it anymore…

…you could still email your list of previous buyers and sell directly to them again and again, and be right back in business.

Bottom line – if you do NOT currently have a list of your customers, stop what you’re doing right now and go set up a customer email list and start building it today. It’s simply one of the most important and profitable parts of your business.

Don’t Be Afraid To Fail

If there is one trait that every successful business owner we know has, whether they are doing dropshipping or any other kind of business…

…is not being afraid to fail.

How can you stop being afraid to fail?

• You have to be willing to try to sell products you’re not sure will sell or not
• You have to be willing to put in the work to set everything up
• You have to be willing to drive traffic to your products
• You have to be willing to run into tech issues and things not working right
• You have to be willing to run into customers that complain about something (like shipping times, wanting a refund, etc)
• You have to be willing to do what others will not do.

In the end, this is the main advice we give people when considering a dropshipping business. And most of the advice applies to any business you’d want to start.

The good news is that when you use Dropified to power your dropshipping business, we equip you with the training, tools and automations that helps you overcome most of the obstacles listed above.

Even better, our team is always here to help you if/when you’re feeling stuck.

So, if you’re ready to get started with Dropshipping the right way…

…then claim your Free Dropified Trial Now: