Dropshipping as an online business (aka E-Commerce business) sounds fantastic. It has significant perks, but drop shipping is somewhat problematic. You must overcome huge hustles and issues if you want to become a successful dropshipper, whether you choose Shopify drop shipping, Amazon drop shipping, or Wayfair drop shipping.
In this article, we’ll shed light on some main problems & challenges a successful dropshipping business faces & has to overcome to blossom as a dropship supplier, or else it’s fruitless.
- The Supplier Challenge
Perhaps the most prominent challenge in dropshipping is establishing a trustworthy grid of suppliers that meet the high standards of customers and are inexpensive at the same time. Suppose you’re looking to vet potential drop shippers. In that case, a couple of options like MyDepot, Alibaba, Ali Express, etcetera are available, but you have to study your niche to choose your related E Commerce platform wisely. For example, if you are attempting to drop ship Home and furniture, etcetera, MyDepot.com may be the best place to look for the supplier because of its wide range in such niche.
Aspects one will want to consider when looking for a supplier are prices, minimum order, reviews, speedy delivery, and the supplier’s past performance.
Tips: Starting small with the supplier is the best way to ensure that it can handle your order needs before you build a long-term relationship. This will minimize the risk of crumpling huge orders.
- Customer Returns
Customer returns are possibly the second-biggest challenge drop shipper faces, and it’s kind of complex since the drop-shipper is the middle man in the whole process. Every dropshipper has some rules for handling returns, some don’t offer returns, but it ranges from supplier to supplier.
Inevitably, for returns, almost all of your customers are expected to come directly to you & not the suppliers. To overcome this challenge, you have to put explicit guidelines and policies for the return methods and how they will be entertained. The policies must be simplified and easy to understand. You can also guide the supplier to include the return information with the order when it’s shipped.
Returns are sure to occur, but if you handle the returns smoothly and swiftly, without saddling the customer, then your business is bound to bloom rapidly.
- Numbers (Account) Management
Managing the numbers is one hell of a challenge in the drop shipping business, and it gets messier when your sales are increasing, but you have to learn and practice techniques to govern it somehow.
Pricing is another crucial aspect of getting it right with the numerals. Evidently, regulating everything about numbers will pitch at you. The wise thing to do is to find and apply appropriate technologies for this issue. Apparently, most of the Ecommerce integration helps you by giving powerful automation tools to overpower this hurdle. Still, of course, these options are a bit costly, so you have to study and be wise with it. Automating each process will make things a bit easier and give you the time to focus on making important decisions to grow yourself as an Ecommerce Supplier,
Tips: Use a trial version of automating features before buying the paid version; this will help you understand the features beforehand and save you some money.
- Delayed ordered or Shipped to the wrong address
As clumsy as it displays, some orders get shipped to either the wrong address or addresses that don’t even exist; this is one of the most common problems you’ll have to face in dropshipping business. Furthermore, when placing an order, the customers expect the order to be delivered asap. Most of the time, customers don’t really think about how deliveries can be uncontrollably postponed for reasons like public holidays, weather, etc.
The soundest way to handle such problems is to double-check the addresses from your end before redirecting the order to your supplier and keeping a copy of the order details saved in a file or something.
And keep making inquiries to the supplier, so you can notify your customer if the delay has a high possibility. It will keep the customer informed and satisfied and result in positive business ratings.
