Drop-shipping done right, what you need to know before you start

Drop-shipping done right, what you need to know before you start

We've all tried to do drop-shipping at one point or another. If you haven't, I'm sure you've thought about doing it but just haven't pulled the trigger yet. For those people on the fence about drop-shipping, I understand your worries. You don't know what to offer and once you're all set up with an item or two, you don't know if it will sell anyway.

Drop-shipping is getting easier year after year because of all the systems out there that basically help you set up your website in order to drop-ship whatever you want. When I started out, I had a small electronics website that I was drop-shipping with. I would make a sale then go over to the original website and purchase the item with my clients information. Now a lot of you who already do drop-shipping know there can be information leaks, which I'll cover in this discussion, just not right now I had plenty of them because I didn't know what I was doing in the beginning. I didn't know what to price my items at, I didn't know how to figure out what items to sell and I didn't know how to get people onto my website and keep them there for the sale.

Now I've been doing SEO and Marketing since late 2003 and I've loved every minute of it. What I don't love is drop-shipping in some niches because of the charge back rates. I basically avoid certain types of niches because the charge back rates are 10x higher than anything else, which I'll be covering

Now then, let's get to it.

What you need to know about drop-shipping in the beginning
1. Where to get items
A lot of people will argue on this point, but I like to source my items from aliexpress since they are usually coming right from the manufacturer which means I will get a really good price. Sure, not everything is super branded, so if you want to sell Prada handbags you'll need to look somewhere else obviously lol.

Aliexpress has a ridiculous amount of items on their marketplace, which makes it easier to find the best price for a single item since manufacturers will be making the same item and pricing it different in order to get your sale. You can find one manufacturer selling a toy at $10.00 and another selling it at $9.00 just to undercut their competition on the marketplace. Another reason this could be happening is that the higher priced manufacturer could just be a re-seller using the original manufacturer as a source. I've seen this happen a few times, but aliexpress usually cuts these people and if they don't, you can filter them easily.

I like to filter out any manufacturer or seller who doesn't have 5 stars on the items I'm looking for. I will then sort the items by how many sales it has had, and now I usually have the main manufacturer where the re-sellers are getting their items I will also make sure that the item has epacket shipping available so that I don't get charged an additional $10 for shipping.


2. The Setup
When setting up my websites, I will use alidropship to import anything I want to my website. I use it for WordPress, not woocommerce, because that's just what I'm more comfortable with. It comes with multiple free themes and if you use the developer for hosting, you will get a good discount and a free SSL

What you'll now do, after everything is set up and installed, is log into aliexpress in a different tab and then close it. Go back to your plugin and type in the keyword you want to search for. You'll now have a list of items you can import and that's it lol. You can select as many items as you want for your store and the plugin will import the images, variations, descriptions, ratings, reviews, etc. Some other plugins will limit you to 25, 50 or even 500 items for a monthly charge. The alidropship plugin has a one time fee, which I love, and lets you upload as many items as you want to your store.

After I get all the items on my store, I will now go through them and edit the titles and descriptions. This will take a while if you have a lot of items on your store so I would suggest you do this in waves. Upload 25 items and then go through them to edit the descriptions and titles. This way you'll have 25 items ready to go on your store and you can then begin on the next 25. What I love is that the items aren't live right away, you can have them unpublished until you've edited everything you want, then make them live for everyone to see. I usually have 100 unpublished items ready to go at any given time just so I can release a few here and there for the "New Arrivals" section that shows up on my homepage

After you get all of this done, you're ready to sell


3. Where to get your traffic
This leads to conflict usually, because everyone has their main source of traffic for websites where they sell something. I'm here to tell you that they're probably all good for your website, but facebook ads is what I like to use in the beginning because I can get super targeted and sometimes my items go viral with little effort

What I use:

• Facebook Ads
• Adwords (not right away)
• Bing Ads (not right away)
• BuySellAds
• ProjectWonderful
• Social Media

Now there is a strategy I use when it comes to advertising and also getting traffic in. I will start with Facebook not to just get traffic to my website but to also build up my websites Facebook page. I do this because I can then post and basically get free adverts in front of anyone who liked my page. There's no guarantee that your post will be seen by anyone, but usually it does and gets a few likes which help get the ball rolling After Facebook is up and bringing in some traffic I will look through buysellads and projectwonderful to see if I can find some cheap ad spots with high potential. Buysellads sells ads based on the website owners pricing and projectwonderful lets the users bid for ad pricing for the day. BSA is good for bigger websites with a lot of traffic, but you better be ready to drop $100+ on an ad that may not work at all. ProjectWonderful is a good place to test some ad spaces because you can bid $2 a day and add $20 to your profile so it runs for 10 days. If the ad converts, I usually fund it for a minimum of 1 month and monitor it so make sure I don't get out bid.

For social media I just make my profiles on the big platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, pinterest, twitter, etc. and use the ones that are best for my niche. Usually this comes down to publishing more on Facebook and Instagram, but not always.

As for Adwords and Bing Ads, I only use these after everything else is working well. I will never invest in Adwords and Bing Ads in the beginning because you can't get as targeted as Facebook ads and if you mess up one little thing when setting up your campaign, you could be wasting a lot of money. I like to set these campaigns up over time and slow roll them so that I can get the best ads ready for when I do open up the flood gates lol.


4. Information Leaks
Some people have problems with information leaks and customers complaining because they just paid more for something they didn't have to. This is actually a pretty simple fix since the manufacturers on AliExpress have worked with numerous drop shippers in the past and know your routine.

All you have to do is simply add a little line of text in the "Additional Info" box for the item in your cart, and have it say something like "We are drop-shipping this item to one of our clients. Please DO NOT add any promotional material of business information within the packaging or on it. Thank You " Now I've been doing this for years and I haven't run into anyone saying "Hey! I could have gotten this for cheaper at AliExpress! I want my money back!" This is because the manufacturer knows that if they burn you, you're not going to be ordering from them again. If they burn your relationship with them, you won't be sending them any more sales, and you're more valuable than a single customer since you're the middle man for hundreds or thousands of customers


5. Niches to avoid
Now this might be obvious, but not everyone thinks rationally when drop shipping. You can't get the idea in your head the the more expensive an item is, the more money I'll be making, because it will come back to bite you in your butt (and your bank account).

Roughly 2 years ago I was drop-shipping hover boards and I was making a decent amount of sales. The only problem is that roughly 50% of the sales were fraudulent or filed charge backs. I couldn't afford to keep doing this because I was always afraid that if I invested too much of my money elsewhere, I would go bankrupt from the charge backs. To fix this, I dumped the website entirely and now avoid some specific niches.

Niches and things to avoid:
Electronics - Avoid these because they will almost never be name brand and you'll see charge backs because people will quickly figure it out and think you're scamming them.
High Ticket Items - Avoid these types of items because there's not much meat on the bone when it comes to profits. You might sell 100 fur coats a day, but you might only make $25 per coat. Now that's a good amount of money just for drop-shipping, but your charge backs might kill all your profits and possibly kill your business.
Fad Items - Items like hover boards, fidget spinners, shopkins, etc. I avoid these because the market is ALWAYS saturated when you're trying to advertise. People can find the cheapest one online and they will buy it. But pricing your items as low as you can, without giving them away, isn't always the best way to make money lol. And if you're targeting a high ticket fad item like hover boards you're almost always going to lose lol.



In Conclusion:
If you follow what I said above, you can have a well oiled drop-shipping machine set up within the week that doesn't cost you a monthly fee You won't have all the headaches of saving images, setting up your design, entering everything manually, etc. This is the most simply point and click drop-shipping system that I can think of, and I know it's profitable because I still use it today. I actually plan on setting up another website starting next week using exactly what I said above, because I know it works


Remember to follow me!
https://www.seoclerks.com/user/Razzy


Thanks!

Razzy