Complete Guide to Dropshipping

 What is Dropshipping?

Dropshipping is a form of e-commerce that does not require a warehouse. All e-commerce logistics are managed by suppliers who send the goods directly to the customers. The owner of the digital store is mainly responsible for product marketing and customer service.

Over the years, dropshipping has gained a bad reputation due to poorly managed online shops and gurus with great promises and a course to sell you hidden up their sleeve.

If you’re tired of fumbling for answers, you’ve finally come to the right place!

How does dropshipping work?

First of all, in order to be able to buy the product, you must be aware of its existence. It is no coincidence that the most successful dropshipping products are unique and tend to be unseen. When the average customer sees something new and desirable, he gets caught up in the shopping fever and wants to buy.

After all, the ideal price threshold for a dropshipping item is between $10 and $30 to the public. It’s the kind of purchases you make on impulse without wasting too much time doing research.

Another critical element in the equation is your online store. You always hear about sales funnels and tricks to increase conversions. The most important thing is (and always will be) the shopping experience you can guarantee your customers. 

Your online shop should give your customers the impression that they can leave their worries behind for a few moments, and ease them to treat themselves to a well-deserved gift.

Most people are willing to pay a higher price to enjoy that moment. If you have ever bought from AliExpress, you know that they will never be a competitor in that sense.

Losing customers because of the price is a problem that only applies to online shops who believe in bombarding them with pop-ups as soon they land the page.

 

Advantages and disadvantages of dropshipping

The advantage of this business model is that it allows you to launch an online store quickly and without any significant expense, even if starting from scratch.

If you already have an online shop up and running, you can test new products without investing in a warehouse that risks being unsold.

The great challenge of dropshipping is long delivery times and customer service management. In this regard, we at Sendcloud provide the tool to manage these critical issues. 

Dropshipping Tools: Social Media Marketing

Whatever variant of dropshipping you decide to use, there is always one thing that remains unchanged: the dropshipper is basically a marketer, and the bulk of the job is to sell the product.

This means becoming an expert in social media marketing.

Instagram and Facebook have completely changed the way we do online marketing. Through their platform, you can target the most suitable audience for the type of product you want to sell with extreme precision.

Let’s see how.

Facebook

Facebook is where things get serious.

With Facebook’s Business Manager, you have access to the ultimate marketing platform to create targeted campaigns.

Here’s how it works: Facebook has 2.5 billion users and knows a lot about each of them. It knows where they live, what interests they have, the extent of their family, what kind of devices they connect to, what kind of income they have, what type of content they click on, and so on.

I know it’s a little creepy, but if you have a nose for business and want to sell something, it’s an unprecedented opportunity!

I mentioned the Facebook pixel earlier. The pixel is nothing more than a string of code to install on your store that records incoming traffic and cross-references it with Facebook databases.

Pixel allows you to distill your buyer’s ideal profile and, above all, show your marketing content to people with a similar profile.

This is crucial because launching campaigns on Facebook can become extremely expensive, and concentrating the focus only on those who are more inclined to buy allows you to keep your return margins high.

To work best, the pixel needs data. The more traffic it receives, the more data it has to process, the better it can optimize your campaigns.

The best part about Facebook campaigns is that when the product works, it can be increased exponentially. Just raise your daily budget.

To scale a campaign, it’s critical to make sure your provider can keep up with the surge in demand. You need to have enough cash to keep the campaign running and buy products to ship while customer payments are processed by banks.