So here we are, I know some of you want to step out from the corporate world and start your full-time business now. And maybe, some of you might have heard from a friend that this kind of dropshipping business is really profitable, well, yes that’s correct. But don’t get me wrong, there is a high chance that you can still fail in this kind of business. So today, I want to discuss with you some common dropshipping mistakes dropshippers make that make them fail in this industry. As the saying goes, “Prevention is better than cure.”

You don’t need a penny to start 

Not just in dropshipping, but in any kind of business, this is one of the most enemies of everyone, having a wrong expectation. Maybe some of you heard that the dropshipping business doesn’t require any investment to start with. Well, that’s correct, but it may require you a lot of hard work and effort.

Since your mindset is not investing a penny, you might not hire an assistant to do the other tasks for you, so you have to do all the tasks by yourself. So you have to spend long hours working and sleepless nights just to build your brand.

Since your mindset is not investing a penny, you might have a hard time advertising your products. With that, you need to do a lot of hard work to get enough traffic and sales with your products.

You can still be successful by not investing in an assistant or even with paid advertisements. But if you can afford it, why not right? And you will be surprised about the conversion rates and additional sales in your business.

Spending too much money on the wrong advertisement

Now that you heard that dropshipping business can provide more results when you have paid advertisement, now you are willing to invest all of your money in ads. But the question here is, is it guaranteed? The answer is a big NO! I want to tell you this, there is no 100% guarantee in this world!

Since you’re willing to invest money in a paid advertisement, I suggest you do some research first on how you can have effective ways of paid advertisement. There are a lot of free articles out there on Google or video tutorials on youtube that you can learn from. Or if you want, you can also purchase some courses on how to land an effective advertisement that converts.

If you are not willing to invest time for this, what I can suggest is that you can hire a freelancer like an FB Ads expert or social media manager that can provide more results and conversions for you. It might be an additional cost, but I assure you, you’ll have a better chance of having more sales!

Not Effective Customer support

And now, you have set up your business, you have your website, you already have your social media accounts and all your ads are running. So, what now?

The next thing that you have to consider is to have effective and great customer support. This is very important. Customer service is the face and backbone of the business. Bad customer service means bad business.

Unsatisfied customers can give you bad reviews on your social media accounts and they will not even recommend you to anyone. And good customer service means good business. Once you have satisfied and happy customers, aside from they might recommend you, they will also be returning customers.

Most of the time, it doesn’t matter if you have the best product or not, as long as you have a good product and excellent customer support, success is near your business.

Unclear Return and Refund Policy

Since you are in dropshipping business, you should always expect that there is always a chance for delayed orders, damaged orders, wrong orders, or even untrackable orders. And you should know how to explain and handle this kind of concern to your customers. You have to give them an assurance that they should get what they paid for, it’s either a refund or a resend of their products.

If the customer asks to resend the products, some sellers ask their customers to pay the shipping fee again. If I am a customer, I should be angry. Why should I pay another shipping fee if I already pay for the first one? This is not my fault why you can’t send and I didn’t receive my products, why should I pay for the shipping fee again?

So most sellers come up with the solution for this, instead of asking their buyer to pay for the shipping fee again, the seller will be the one that will shoulder the shipping fee.
It might be a little bit of loss for your income, but imagine, you will still have a happy customer and he might return in the future to buy products again.

Choosing the wrong supplier

There are a lot of suppliers dropshipping companies and suppliers out there. So how will you know what would be the best one for your business?

I’ll try to explain to you some things that you can do when choosing the right supplier for your business. The next thing you have to do is research with the supplier and which one can provide your needs best. You can check their reviews on Google or even on their Facebook page.

You need also to check if their customer support is offering 24/7 support which can be very helpful with your business. So just in case, you have any concerns or if your customers have any disputes, you can contact them easily.

After that, you can try to put a sample order for yourself. With this, you can test yourself the quality of their service, packaging, delivery time-frame, and also the response rate of their customer support just in case you have any questions. And after that, you can decide for yourself if they are a good supplier for your business or not.

Hope that this short article helped you. And since you are already in dropshipping business, I highly recommend to you CJ Dropshipping to give it a try. CJ Dropshipping got 24/7 support with dedicated private agents, we have no setup fees or even monthly fees! What we charge is just the product cost and shipping fee. With CJ Dropshipping, you can send a sourcing request and we can process your orders the same day!

If you have any questions and concerns, please leave a comment below and we will be more than happy to assist you!