Many dropshippers are driving sales, and fairly quickly building their business to at least a 4-figure level with relative ease.
However, many are failing to scale up to that lucrative 6 figure more profitable business.
There could be a number of reasons why businesses aren’t hitting those large scale heady heights that entrepreneurs dream of.
Maybe it could be a cost-efficiency problem, failing to find a larger audience, or the dropshippers biggest nemesis, too many disputes, and refunds.
In this article, we are going to show some proven ways to grow and scale your dropshipping business and see some great results.
Let’s start with the short takeaway;
How to Scale Your Dropshipping Business?
In order to scale your dropshipping business, make sure you have researched and fully trialed your supplier. This, along with outsourcing the day to day activities such as taking and fulfilling orders, websites, and scaling Facebook ads will enable you to spend time growing your business successfully.
So now we’ve hit the brief, let’s discover a little more about some of the everyday issues that you might face so you understand a little more about how to build, scale and grow your dropshipping business.
Problems and solutions
Time drain
When dropshipping, it can be difficult once your business starts to build to find the ever-expanding time demanded to run it successfully.
When you start your business, we all know the long hours spent donning your customer service hat and sacrificing many hours of sleep to ensure you are available to answer customer service calls and emails at any time of day.
You may be more than capable of handling a multitude of tasks at the beginning of your dropshipping journey, where pure adrenaline keeps you high enough to pull a few all-nighters, but it might become just too much when daily orders are rising to 50 and over.
As your business begins to scale, it will become clear that this is not something you can do without help.
Solution:
Build a team of virtual assistants and even think about hiring a manager to coordinate your assistants.
The initial draw on your time training your new team is well worth the payback which allows you To step back and focus on the bigger tasks needed for scaling your business.
You will need sufficient and professional help in order to scale up and start enjoying the rewards of your hard labor. We recommend you begin with hiring a remote team to handle time-consuming tasks.
Tasks such as:
- Analytical product research
- Copywriting
- Website Design
- Listings editing
- Fulfilling orders
- Customer service
- Disputes
- Spreadsheet editing
These tasks can prove a drain for one person alone even though the drop-shipping model itself is a simple one.
“Build a team of virtual assistants
and even think about hiring a manager to coordinate your assistants.”
So what about your suppliers. Are they holding you back?
Suppliers can’t scale
As you grow your business and begin to process a larger volume of orders, it’s crucial to make sure that your suppliers can keep up. If you don’t, you could hit a wall with big rewards and learn the hard way.
Solution:
Make sure you fully understand your supplier’s capabilities.
If your supplier doesn’t have an automated order fulfillment then you might be disappointed in a big way when your orders are coming in fast and furious.
Suppliers who aren’t able to effectively fulfill your orders will not only limit your ability to scale but could also leave you in a really difficult position with account freezes and disputes.
“Make sure you fully understand your supplier’s capabilities.”
Automate order and tracking update
Suppliers who offer an up-to-date status on orders and make sure tracking codes are offered timely will ensure both you and your customers will be less anxious.
This of course will lead to much better reviews and those desirable five-star ratings.
Manual automation also eliminates errors likely to occur from manual input and ensures the whole process is swift and efficient for you and your customers.
In order to scale to those huge 6 figure rewards, it may be you are taking up to 400 plus orders a day, so automated orders are a must for any dropshipper scaling their business.
No due diligence performed for suppliers
It can be really difficult for dropshippers to know exactly what they are getting when booking up with suppliers.
Ordering a huge number of products that your supplier may struggle to service, is a sure-fire way to lack ongoing sales and find yourself with a raft of upset customers.
Solution:
If you choose a new supplier, make sure you make a low order value at the beginning of your relationship with them.
Try a mini order such as 10-50 pieces and trial your new company for a short period, say for one month, and see how it works out. Once you have properly tested your supplier, then you can go ahead and order more.
Customer support issues
It can be a never-ending situation trying to deal with customer issues. Even if you are simply giving helpful details on your product.
Customer service can be the make or break for your business and if you are a one-man army, it can seem like a mountain to climb keeping on top of it.
Also, managing your own customer services can stop you from having the time to develop new product lines and other important tactical managerial jobs while you work in the business, rather than on the business!
Solution:
Hire professional customer support.
Your first customer support rep will probably be a part-time employee who can jump in and respond to customer inquiries when needed.
They might also help you out with writing FAQs, social media, and other projects. Going forwards you may well need the help of professionals.
Your aim is to take care of pre-sale and after-sale inquiries and offer the best customer experience that brings customers back.
For this, you can use one of the huge arrays of online chat programs or a support system such as Zendesk.
“Your aim is to take care of pre-sale
and after-sale inquiries and offer the best customer experience.”
Customer base too small
You might be struggling to find the customer base you need in order to scale up to six figures.
Maybe your social media accounts such as Facebook and Instagram aren’t bringing you the revenue you expected.
Solution:
Scale Facebook advertising.
After testing products you may have found the products that sell and the strategy that works but you need to scale up to a larger audience.
Start with setting up ‘lookalike’ audience. Using Facebook’s CBO or campaign budget optimization, you can aim to hit a much wider audience base, that’s still lucrative with the best CPR.
And finally…
So there it is. Everything you needed to know about how to scale your dropshipping business and start to reap the big rewards of a successful enterprise!
Trying to outsource where you can, will leave you the precious time to do what you do best.
Along with making sure you trial and test your supplier and know they will have the ability to scale up as you rise above your competitors so your dropshipping business is able to build to a profitable 6 figure income.