We know that a dropshipping business is very easy to start, as you don’t have to pre-stock or manage the shipment, it requires not too much budget to create an online site and run your business.

Every day, there are a lot of people learning about dropshipping and starting their businesses. But most of these beginners gave up after getting no sales in the first few weeks.

Why your store isn’t making any sales? It’s about marketing, it’s about your product page, it’s about pricing, and many details can make your potential customers give up paying for the bill. 

Now let’s see what mistakes you could avoid which may lead to poor sales for your dropshipping business.

1. Little traffic to your site

Without targeted traffic, your store isn’t going to generate any revenue. You can’t wait for customers to come to you, especially when you are running an online store, traffic means everything.

It would help if you created ad campaigns to draw traffic to your site, most dropshippers run Facebook ads to draw traffic. Facebook ad is some kind the easiest way to draw traffic for beginners, but if you don’t get much budget, there are many other marketing ways like influencer marketing, social or content marketing, and more options.

The point is, that you have to draw as much traffic as you can to your store, generally speaking, more traffic means more sales.

2. Poor quality product content

Product content usually contains product images, videos, and descriptions. Usually, you make a video ad or an image ad to attract customers to your site, then visitors learn more about the product by the images and descriptions on the product page to decide whether to buy the product or not.

So the product content is very important to the conversion rate. Imagine when you spent tons of effort to attract people to your site, but few sales were generated, people go away because of the poor quality of product images and descriptions or even the bad design of your product page. You don’t want that to happen.

Images and descriptions should be designed to attract buyers to the item. If you have shoddy photos or rely solely on technical descriptions, you’ll lose a lot of sales because you’ll fail to generate interest in your products.

Showcase your products from multiple angles, with quality images, and create unique descriptions that show buyers the value of the products and how consumers can benefit from them. And make a unique creative video is a popular way, for now, to showcase your product comprehensively.

You can make the content by yourself, or go to Fiverr to find a professional photographer to do it for you, or just find the link on the description below to send an inquiry to CJ to get the excellent photography service.

3. Target the wrong audiences

Sometimes, you may get no sales after spending lots of money on ads or tons of time and effort on content marketing. If that’s the case, just stop and check. Are you targeting the right people?

Make sure you do your audience research every time you create a marketing campaign so that your marketing is targeting the right crowd. For example, if you are selling mother and baby products, it is not wise to spend time and money on pushing ads to school teenagers, who are not the right audiences.

4. Not pricing properly

Pricing products properly counts much in your dropshipping business: if your prices are too low, customers may think your products are of poor quality. Price too high, and they’ll shop elsewhere.

When you factor in tax and shipping costs, it’s even more challenging. Market research and trial and error can help you find the pricing sweet spot you need to gain and keep customers.

Check out our previous video on 5 websites to spy on product data. On these sites, you’re able to spy on your competitors’ pricing and offer a competitive price.

5. Hidden shipping costs

There is an interesting online shopping preference: customers are more willing to buy an item priced at $40 with free shipping than the same item priced at $35 with a $5 shipping cost. So when your customers see the hidden shipping costs when checking out, they are very like to abandon the cart.

Shipping rates are one of the biggest reasons for shopping cart abandonment, people aren’t willing to pay for shipping. But it’s an easy issue to fix, just add the shipping cost to the product price or set free shipping for orders over $49 or $99.

6. No contact information

Contact information may seem like a small detail, but it’s a very important set to build trust with your customers. Customers have no sense of safety if they are not able to have timely communication with the seller if there’s a problem, and lack of security leads to abandoned carts.

That’s why customer service is so important to e-com businesses. Make sure the customers can reach you conveniently, and always respond the first time

7. A complex checkout process

A complex, multi-step checkout process is a frustrating experience for customers. Generally speaking, more than 80% of potential customers are gone each step to the final payment.

So if you want to increase the transaction rate, you need to create a very short checkout process. Likewise, never require registration for checkout.

Let customers go through the process and choose the option to register and save their info at the end, in case they want to come back again. You can find more checkout options here.

8. Poor navigation

Nowadays, as nearly everyone has a smartphone, shopping online with a smartphone is trendy, and more and more people will shop online with smartphones. If your online store has tiny buttons, small product images, or a cluttered design, navigation can be incredibly difficult.

Small-tap targets make it difficult to hit the target link or button on a shrunken mobile screen, which can sour the shopping experience and drive the customers elsewhere.

So make sure your mobile design is responsive, with large images and properly sized buttons. Like Google recommends tap targets and buttons that are at least 48 pixels tall/wide.

9. You’re not engaging with your customers

Engagement counts a lot in the dropshipping business. Whether you are running ads or doing content marketing, social media marketing, and others, more engagement means better performance.

For instance, like the cases I shared in this video, the seller of the post got the most engagement and answered the comments below the post one by one. The questions were like, how much is the product? Where can I get it? What’s the shipping to somewhere? And the like.

By answering the questions, the seller built trust with the audience, and he sent the audience to the product page by leaving a link to every comment. Besides, Engaging your customers and followers on social media or blog is a budget-saving way to keep your brand front and center and to keep them coming back.