3 Underrated Tips to Help Double Your Dropshipping Revenue

Dropshipping can be a lucrative business due to the low investment involved, but your success in this field depends largely on how much work you put in. If you’ve set-up an online store with the idea that “if you build it, they will come,” you’re bound to fail. Because this business model has plenty of competition, what makes you different from all the rest who are doing the exact same thing is how smart you handle your business from inside and out.

For online store owners who have had mild success with dropshipping, but are experiencing roadblocks, here are 3 unpopular tips that could help double your dropshipping revenue:

1. Automate the Process, but not Customer Service

Dropshipping has been a business model for decades, even before the web existed. The difference with today’s online dropshipping version is that online store owners don’t need a warehouse to stock products because the wholesaler/manufacturer/dropshipper does everything from fulfillment to shipping for you. The downside is that you receive a smaller profit per transaction. The only way to succeed with this business model is to scale, and in order to sell as many products as possible, you have to automate operation.

Using automation software is a widely-known and extremely effective dropshipper technique. With a dropshipping automation software, you don’t have to:

• Forward sales orders every time a customer places his/her order
• Manage inventory by connecting to your supplier’s inventory system
• Choose which suppliers to fulfill a product (if you’re dealing with multiple suppliers offering the same products)

Automation is the key to scaling your business to another level, but in order to double the number of return customers, you have to leave the customer service side of your business as human as possible. If your budget permits it, hire someone to handle e-mails, live chats, or other contact options. Customers feel better if they know a real person is trying to solve their concerns.

2. Offer as Many Payment Options Possible, but Skip Bank Deposits

You won’t believe how many people cancel a potential sale when they discover that their chosen mode of payment is not available.

There are plenty of payment gateways that can be used for your standalone ecommerce site, Shopify store, or other third-party hosted stores. Examples of payment gateways that accept cash, credit card payments, Bitcoin, and other currencies include Authorize.net, 2Checkout, Payza, Payever, Stripe, and PayPal, among others.

As many dropshipping businesses would point out, it is best to choose a payment gateway that offers would-be customers numerous ways to pay. However, an uncommon tip is to stay away from the bank-deposit option. Here are several reasons why:

No more impulse buys

When customers choose bank deposit, many of them don’t follow through in transferring payment. This can be due to various reasons from procrastination to buyer’s remorse. Whatever their reasons may be for not fulfilling payment, the result is the same: your business suffers from unfulfilled orders left open.

Checking bank payment is a lot of work

You may argue that online banking makes it easier to check bank deposit payments, but here’s where it gets tricky. Some customers use their spouses’ bank accounts for deposits; others don’t include notes when fulfilling a payment, which means you’d have to check with customers every time a payment arrives.

If given a choice, customers will choose bank deposit over credit card payment

Everyone knows that the bank deposit option is one of the safest ways to pay, so if you give customers this option, they are more than likely to choose this route, even if they have PayPal or an active credit card.

3. Learn all about On-Page SEO

SEO should be a part of any website, but not many dropshipping online stores implement these useful techniques to increasing traffic. If you’re trying to double sales, or increase visitors to your store, why you should be learning all about on-page SEO because:

• Planning keywords give you an edge over your competition
• Using a manufacturer’s product title and description not only limits your store’s potential to be seen as “different than the rest,” it can also cause Google to label your store as ‘spam’ and not include it in search results.
• URLs, META tags, internal linking and planning site navigation based on a comprehensive keyword research can dramatically improve traffic to your store.
• Usability is a deciding factor for most site visitors. The more user-friendly your online store is, the higher chances a customer would trust your store and make a purchase.
• Bad links may cause customers to leave your store completely.
• Search engines love sitemaps – build one for your store.

The Bottom Line

Follow these three underrated tips seriously and watch how your sales improve over time. What’s great about these methods is that they’re long-term: implement them on your dropshipping biz now and you’d still be reaping what you sow for months or years.