How To Keep Day-To-Day Dropshipping Operations
Managing A dropshipping Store
It may sound obvious, but you need to actually run your dropshipping business every day if you want it to be successful.
It’s not enough to simply own a store without doing anything to it. There are a lot of things to consider when starting and running a store.
Consistency is the key to a thriving dropshipping business. By actively managing your store on a daily basis, you ensure its success and growth. Also, the e-commerce space is very competitive, so providing excellent customer support is paramount. You’ll have to address issues like shipment, returns, and inquiries promptly, which builds trust and satisfaction among your customers.
Stay on top of your inventory and maintain strong communication with suppliers. This helps prevent stockouts and ensures timely order fulfillment.
Let’s dive into some of the main challenges and operations any serious dropshipper does on a regular basis. This is what you should expect if you’ll decide to run one.
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Table of Contents
Day to Day Tasks for a Dropshipping Business
1. Make sure the core workflow is working - Manage orders, inventory, payments, refunds and track delivery
You have to keep an eye on the orders coming in, the price fluctuations and the inventory if you have any (let’s hope you don’t). Keeping the prices up to date is also very important, so that’s another thing on the to do list for a manager. Who and how often is doing the markup for the products?
One of the main benefits of a dropshipping business is the absence of many product-related problems. You don’t make your own things, you don’t buy them in advance, and you don’t keep them in a warehouse. However, all you have to do is stay in touch with your chosen suppliers and promote their products on your dropshipping site.
But what if your supplier decides to modify any of the goods’ features and characteristics, cease producing them, or even run out of stock?
These and other scenarios will have a bad impact on your client relations if they opt to order these specific things. Customers’ loyalty and trust are critical to your store’s success, so disappointing them is just harmful.
Order fulfillment: One of the main benefits of a dropshipping business is the absence of many product-related problems. You don’t make your own things, you don’t buy them in advance, and you don’t keep them in a warehouse. But, you have to stay in touch with your chosen suppliers and promote their products in your dropshipping site.
The supplier may decide to modify any of the goods’ features and characteristics, cease producing them, or even run out of stock.
These and other scenarios will have a bad impact on your client relations if they opt to order these specific things. Customers’ loyalty and trust are critical to your store’s success, so disappointing them is just harmful.
Can you fulfill a spike in a high number of requests? Let’s assume a customer lands on your website and places an order.
You need to recall the seller who’s provided you with this item description, then get in touch with them fast.
Then, the seller needs to get the order details (quantity and specification of the items, the buyer’s name, and address, etc.) to pack and ship the product to your buyer.
You also need to notify your customers that their orders are dispatched, and provide them with the tracking code so they could monitor their package location.
Can you do all these short notice and efficiently if your store receives lots of orders?
Do you have a procedure for this? Any assistants that can help you with all these operatons?
As soon as your store becomes popular, managing multiple orders can become complicated and complex. You even start thinking you need to come up with an entire management team.
Do you have a procedure for refunds and returns? Who pays the shipping if your customer decides to return the product?
2. Stay in touch with your customers and get feedback
You want to make sure that your customers are happy and you always improve your business, products and website. So how will you get feedback from your clients? Do you have surveys that go out regurarily? How about collecting testionials? It is highly recommended that you have a process for all these.
3. Keep your website up (alerts), fast and keep driving traffic to it
As you grow, your website traffic will grow too, and your technical infrastructure must take on the load of new and existing customers. You want to make sure that the host where you have your website can handle that load and deliver the website quickly to your visitors.Â
Optimising loading times for the pages of your ecommerce store is something you have to do on a continuous basis if you want to be competitive.Â
What strategies do you have to increase the traffic to your website? Social Media, blogging, video content? You want to make sure you spread the word out there about your products so you always have to attract new traffic to your site.
4. Always be looking for the next hot product and stay on top of the trends
The day-to-day operations of dropshippers should also include frequent product research, up-coming trends, and new products and variants.
It is important to do it regularly; this is how you will keep your existing customers enthusiastic about new offers and upsells. Trends and fashion—technologies and interests change quickly, and it is vital to go with the flow. Nobody likes outdated and boring items!
5. Shipping Costs and Tax - Be Mindful of them
A lot of e-commerce platforms do not automatically import shipping costs, however they have a feature where you can manually upload them. In some cases, the AliExpress sellers offer free shipping.
You can add up to four different shipping options (including free shipping) to any or all products.
6. Ensure that both you and the customer have the tracking number of the shipment
If you use Aliexpress as a source for your sellers, once you placed and the supplier shipped an item, you will get a tracking ID.
If you are using a third party seller, you will have to do this manually or integrate with their APIs.
7. Customer has not received the order. What to do?
Unfortunately, this happens quite a lot. And it’s another part of your regular dropshipping management operations.
Maybe something went wrong within the postal service, or the customer provided a wrong address, or a seller is shady( did you do your due dilligence?).
You have to treat your customer like a king and communicate the steps you’ll take and that you are looking into it.Whatever happened, you (or your team) can fix it. Your behavior towards your customers will matter in the long term so try to be as professional as possible.
FIrst thing, talk to the seller. The seller should respond quickly and offer different solutions to fix it. The reputation of the sellers is rather exposed and they are willing to do anything to maintain their feedback rating.
8. Get ready to handle refunds - It will happen!
If your customer is not satisfied with a product and asks you for a refund, you should dispute the purchase with the AliExpress seller.
If you are selling inexpensive products, your AliExpress suppliers usually refund you quickly and don’t ask you to return the items. They don’t want to waste their energy on managing disputes and receiving returns for relatively low-value items
As a result, you can give a full or partial refund to your customer through PayPal without asking them to return the product. This is why we recommend that you don’t spend all your earned money at once – keep a small fund just to be safe.
Otherwise, if the item is expensive or Ali Express doesn’t reimubers your or the client, you will have to cover the return shipping cost when the customer sends it back.
How does the dropshipping business model work?
Dropshipping is an innovative order fulfillment method for online product sales, where the business owner, known as the ‘dropshipper,’ focuses on marketing and operating the eCommerce store while entrusting inventory management and shipping to reliable third-party suppliers like manufacturers, wholesalers, or retailers. It is one of the most preffered business models by remote workers and digital nomads.
The dropshipping process seamlessly unfolds as follows:
- A customer makes a purchase on the dropshipper’s online store, paying the retail price set by the store.
- The dropshipper immediately forwards the order details to their trusted supplier, as per their prearranged agreement.
- The dropshipper pays the supplier the wholesale price for the product, allowing them to retain the profitable margin. For instance, if a customer pays $200 for a product with a $150 wholesale price, the dropshipper keeps $50 in profit.
- The supplier takes charge of efficiently processing the order and directly ships the product to the customer, completing the seamless transaction process.
In this way, dropshipping facilitates a smooth and efficient pathway for entrepreneurs to thrive in the digital market space while leaving inventory and shipping concerns in the hands of reliable partners.
Here is a an extended video explaining the model
how to start a dropshipping business with no money
Technically, you can start selling products with no inventory. Some eCommerce marketplaces also allow you to display items for free, like eBay and Amazon. However, you will compete with many brands that have similar goods on those platforms, hence, you need a powerful brand. That’s why it’s recommended to have a website and use an eCommerce platform with no transaction fees, good design, content and own management.
Let’s think of all the possible costs you might have in this business:
- Hosting payment – You will need a host to put your store on. Shopify offers hosting, otherwise, if you decide to go with WooCommerce (WordPress), you can buy hosting from Bluehost. We couldn’t recommend them more.Â
- First order payment – you need to order an item on AliExpress to get it delivered to your customer,, so you will use your own money until you get some cash flow running. Hence, at the beginning of your dropshipping journey, you will spend your money first to get paid later by your customer.
- Marketing activities – sky is the limit here in terms of channels, creativity, and budgets. Maybe you will launch a full-scale campaign that will cost you hundreds of dollars or do a product exchange with some influencers.
The hosting is about 70 USD per year, and we recommend an initial amount of 1000 USD in the bank to be able to pre-order the products until clients pay.
Running The Manufacturing Company On The Move
One of the biggest issues with not being on-site during production is that you can’t see the end product or the production line in person. Videos are an option, but they aren’t as good as seeing a product in the flesh.Â
If you are going to be away from the office, you need to be more vigilant about quality control. First, use the appropriate materials and components for your products and ideally, you want to either order samples or hire an agent to go to the factory and inspect everything for you. Then will then send you a report.
For example, for any dropshipping product you want to manufacture under your own brand, you want to make sure that your supplier can create it at the quality they advertise. Hence, when starting dropshipping, it is recommended that you hire specialists (you can find agents on Aliexpress and Alibaba that inspect products for you) to test your products and send reports on their quality, including pictures and so on. Or just let’s say you want to produce fans, and you want to use high quality brushless motors to create a product your customers will love, and so on.
Keep in regular contact with your employees. Just because you are away doesn’t mean you should be an absent manager.
Stay professional, even if you call yourself a digital nomad or are not the corporate type. It  still pays to be professional. If you take your business seriously, then your employees will be able to follow your example.
You will have to delegate some of your responsibilities if you aren’t there in person, but make sure that you are regularly updated about what’s going on in your company. This way, you can keep your finger on the pulse and make sure it’s on the right track.
