Dropshipping allows you to source the products directly from the product supplier or manufacturer, the products selling in the online store go directly from the supplier to the customer without ever having to go through your hands. This feature is one of the many upsides that make dropshipping so appealing in the first place – not having to purchase and keep stocks. However, it also poses a major problem that could cut short your profit or even damage your business.
Since you don’t have to handle the products, the quality control is gonna be really tricky, which is crucial for the online business cause once you fail at the product quality:
· Not being able to meet the customer expectations
· Selling inferior goods will get you negative reviews
· Hard to get repeat customers to your shop
Everything comes with a cost, the advantage of not having to handle the products that you sell also implies that you might be unknowingly sacrificing the quality of the products that you are selling. But again, since everything comes with a cost, isn’t selling products with better quality meaning a bigger cost and hence a thinner profit margin?
Well, not necessarily. Put the brand reputation and the juicy lucrative repurchase rate along with it aside. Your business can stay profitable by selling quality products because sometimes, quality supply doesn’t equal a higher cost invested – as long as you get the recipe right.
The recipe for quality dropshipping
· Find Reliable Supplier
· Perform Test Order
· Prepare High Quality Images
· Follow Customer Reviews
· Execute Aftersale Service
Find Reliable Supplier
Your suppliers are one of the most fundamental factors of your business, they should be considered as your business partners who play a supporting role. Ideally, when you get into dropshipping, you would choose the supplier who can provide you with high-quality products at a relatively cheap price, and who’s dedicated to your supply chain’s sustainability and fulfillment efficiency.
Perform Test Order
Practice makes perfect, if you are invested in the idea of growing a healthy business with happy customers, the only way to truly assure the product quality and the fulfillment service is by putting yourself in your customers’ shoes, go ahead and place a test order from the supplier as a customer.
Test order can be critically important for dropshippers because with which you’ll be able to tell the most genuine customer experience by actually being a customer. Having the physical product in your hands, you’ll have a better understanding of the quality, function, and also the shipping process, maybe even aftersale service as well. On the other hand, a test order can also help you write a more authentic and engaging product description which will be very useful for marketing.
Prepare High-Quality Photos
For online shoppers, the first impression of a product is important, nice and neat product photos will trigger the purchase impulsion and increase your sales.
Getting the product images can be pretty easy, just copy the picture from your suppliers and remove the watermark with a tool like Photoshop. However, while it’s convenient, it might get you in trouble if the image is copyrighted, not to mention that, more often than not, the quality of these images is not very good.
Another less convenient but more recommended way is to prepare product photos by yourself. No need to have fancy equipment or professional skills, with a smartphone and handy editing tools such as Photoshop and Canva, you can be your own product photographer. Of course, this method requires placing a test order beforehand, but except all the pros mentioned above, the extra benefit of the test order is that you can start creating as many appealing and original visual materials as you want, which is useful for both optimizing your product description and advertising.
Tips: Find a supply platform with an aesthetic looking, this kind of supplier normally has tailor-made product images with good qualities which you’ll be able to use for free if your products are imported from them.
Follow Customer Review
Customer reviews increase the conversion rate, trust, and ranking in the search engine. Your prospective customers are reading product reviews all the time, positive reviews are a powerful determiner of whether they will make a purchase or not.
Following up on customer reviews keep your business in check, analyzing reviews helps you understand the overall customer satisfaction and make the adjustment accordingly in a timely fashion.
Click here for more tips on how to get and optimize your customer reviews.
Get Efficient After-sales Support
There’s no need to over-emphasize the importance of after-sales service, as we all know an efficient post-sale system is essential for generating customer loyalty and better conversion.
While the major cost of brick-and-mortar business is avoided by pushing your store online, the cost to maintain your customers’ satisfaction is now higher as one of the biggest persuasion of online shopping is to enable customers with the trial-and-error purchase with a flexible and convenient return-and-refund policy.
Under many circumstances, customers may require the after-sales service, such as frozen orders that take a long time to be shipped, deliveries that never arrive, products arrived in poor condition or broken, deteriorations or problems that arise shortly after the purchase…we could cite dozens of similar scenarios.
Is a bad after-sales service the seller’s problem? Sometimes yes, but not necessarily always. Especially, as dropshipping sellers, it’s hard to make sure of the product quality and agree on every return-and-refund request. Dropshipping products are normally from China, and not every customer can be patient enough with the back-and-forth shipping process, not to mention, that most suppliers forbid the returning from the beginning.
Well no more worries, iYoowe got your back! We offer:
· Thorough quality inspection of every product before shipping
· Careful packing to erase info about the source and original price of the product
· 24/7 instant customer support
Extra Tips: What defines a good supplier?
According to the above, a reliable supplier should have the qualities as follow:
1. Fast shipping
2. Quality control
3. Friendly refund-and-return policy
4. High-quality product images
It ain’t no lie, the fate of your eCommerce store rests in their hands, so you’ll be needing suppliers that you can rely on.
To wrap it up
When it comes to shopping online or any kind of shopping really, products may disappoint your customers one way or the other. Because of this, it is also your duty as a seller to make sure that you provide all the pertinent information about your products so as not to cause any unpleasant surprises that may lead to negative reviews. It is your job as the seller to also educate your consumers about the products that they are buying.
But above all, only choosing the right products with good quality can enable you to build all these nice decors around it – product is always the core.
