Tip #2 Properly understood, drop shipping can be an ecommerce and eBay come true as it offers a host of benefits: (1) You don’t need to keep stock or inventory. (2) You don’t need to bother with packing and shipping. (3) You can make money easily by just taking orders. (4) Your profit margin could increase. Even though drop shipping can have many advantages, however, there are some things you need to consider: (1) Any product or service you intend to sell online must be in demand. (2) The product you choose must sell in high volumes: the fact that you could sell the profit cheaply and make a good margin doesn’t mean anyone is buying. Research the market for any product line you’re considering. Try to determine demand for the product, how much competition there is, and what they’re charging. (3) Signing up with a well-known supplier offers you many benefits. For instance, you will probably find it easier to return unsatisfactory products. Some drop suppliers will even pay the return costs in these cases. As a promotion, some suppliers will even offer you products for free if you meet their targets. (4) Target one or two products at a time — don’t be in a rush to sell lots of different ones. Maintaining a large drop shipping business is often difficult and can become unmanageable.
Tip #3 Not responding to customer service issues is a pretty quick way to destroy your credibility. Many people won’t buy directly from the sales page and will have questions about your product or service that they want answers to before they consent to the purchase. Delay your reply to them and you lose the sale. Many customers may have a problem with the sale itself and if you don’t reply quickly, they will ask for a refund, and what’s worse is they will never buy from you again.
Tip #4 The most difficult decisions are made in the beginning as you prepare to open your store. Make your first orders from your suppliers well in advance of that opening day, by at least 4 to 6 weeks. Most suppliers will promise receipt on your end within a week. If this happens, you then have ample time to inventory and prepare the items for sale. However, you don’t know yet who is slow and who is not. Secondly, backorders can be a nightmare. You often will not know that an item is on backorder until you receive an invoice. Some companies will automatically send you the backordered items as they replenish their stock (and that can take months) and some will not. Make sure that you know that supplier’s policy in advance.
Tip #5 Use an autorespsonder to broadcast a newsletter to site subscribers. The concept underlying autoresponders is that people rarely buy on their first visit to a website. Research has shown that most people need repeated contact with an advertising message before they respond to it and purchase the product or service. Autoresponders were designed for just this. You can load a series of advertising messages into your autoresponder and adjust it to send the messages at set intervals. That said, people react badly to advertising; in fact most people just plain ignore advertisements. To get round this, you have to design your email series so that it is not perceived to be advertising. A good way to do this is to design your email series to include plenty of useful information; give your subscribers some good quality free information in each email and weave your advertisement into it