A Step-by-Step Guide to Deal with Your First Dropshipping Order

Getting the first real customer is an important milestone for every entrepreneur. There are hundreds of channels and ways to promote your business. What are they? You could check in the How to Get the First Order for Your New E-commerec Site article.

You have received your first order with your efforts and time. Good job! This is a good start to your e-commerce business. Still, you have some work to do with your first order. You should try your best to ensure that your customer will get the products as smoothly and rapidly as possible. There are two ways you can deal with your first order. The article will show them to you:

Manual Method - Deal with Your First Dropshipping Order

With this method, you need to place the order on AliExpress for products that are the exact same as the products ordered by your customer. Then, you need to provide your suppliers with the correct information, address, and details, and then pay for it.

Following, we’ll detail how the process works step by step.

Step1: Accept Your First Order

Once your customer placed the order on your online store, the first thing to do is to accept the order. This step is the beginning of the dealing process.

Step2: Check Your Customer’s Order

After receiving the order, another part of your work begins. Firstly, you need to check whether the order is correct or not. Please be careful you get all the information, including both the products and the customer. Keep in mind, the shipping address is significant, because it will influence the delivery time. If your customer receives the delayed products, they will complain about it.

Secondly, you have to check the status of the order. This step is time-consuming, but always remember to pay a lot of attention to it to ensure the following steps go smoothly.

Step3: Confirm the Order

Before confirming the order, you have to make sure that everything is correct from the customer's side. Then you can confirm the order. And once you have received the payment, you can go to the next stage.

Step4: Place the Order on AliExpress

Now, you need to find the product your customer placed exactly on AliExpress. This process might be a big problem for you.

Why? During the process, you should take the shipment time and shipment method into account. It requires you to find out the most suitable supplier, who can ensure a prompt delivery and support the shipping method your customer requires.

It is a complicated process. Although there are many suppliers on AliExpress, discovering the most suitable one might be an issue for you. You may sometimes have to find out a warehouse for your products. It can be costly and time-consuming.

What’s more, When placing the order on AliExpress, you may need to contact your supplier. Why? To make them know you are doing dropshipping. It is vital because you should ensure your customer receives the same product without third-party information in it, such as logo, invoice, and brand name.

There are many risks in the process. You must be careful and spend the necessary amout of time working on this step.

Step5: Choose the Most Suitable Shipping Method

Now, you have placed your first order on AliExpress. You and your supplier will agree on a suitable shipping method, then ship the product out. You don’t have to ship the product by yourself. However, there still might be a lot of things to do. You need to contact your supplier to ensure that the product ships out on time and get the tracking number after the shipment.

Step6: Track the Order Status

When you get the tracking number, it’s time for you to send an email to inform your customer you have shipped the package. Then you should contact your consumer from time to time, aiming to share the order status with them.

Getting a connection with your customers is necessary. It suggests that you are serious about this transaction. They will have a good impression, which might bring you more sales.

Step7: Handle the Post-sale Process

Now, your customer has received the product. Next, what should you do? Ask for reviews. Since it is your first order, you need to know what your customer thinks about the product and the services. And if the consumer has complaints, solve the issues and give some compensation, you will benefit from it in the long term.

Automatic Method - Deal with Your First Dropshipping Order through DSers

A better way to deal with your first order is to handle it through DSers automatically, especially if you will have a large number of orders in the future. Once you set everything up correctly, DSers will save you a lot of time and energy by syncing your orders from your stores, placing orders in bulk to your suppliers on AliExpress, and pushing tracking information to your store after the order is shipped, etc.

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The only thing you should do is to click on the “Place order to AliExpress”  button and make the payment for the order.

Step1: Connect Your Store

After registering an account on DSers, the first thing to do is to Install DSers from the Shopify App Store and connect your store to DSers.

Click “Install app”, then add your store information on this page.

Click "Yes" when the page asked are you sure want to bind DSers with the email you use which to register your Shopify Store.

You will be redirected to choose a pricing plan to continue. For dropshipping novice, the free Basic plan is enough.

After connecting the store, DSers will help you go to the next stage - synchronizing your order to DSers automatically.

Step2: Synchronize Your Order to DSers

This step is not your work. It's DSers'. Once you receive the payment for an order, that order will automatically synchronize with DSers along with your customer’s information to DSers "Awaiting Order" tab.

With DSers, you will avoid misclicks and errors. DSers synchronizes orders from your online store automatically, so you don’t need to worry about making mistakes, miss customer shipping address information, enter the wrong contact information, etc.

Step3: Place the Order to Supplier

Under the "Awaiting Order" tab, you can place the order to AliExpress, you can choose to place one order at a time, or place 100s of orders together.

And since it synchronizes information of products and customers, you do not need to spend too much time checking for errors. DSers is here to help you save time.

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Step4: Make the Payment

Now, you can access the “Awaiting Payment” tab, then click “Make Payment”. DSers will automatically redirect you to AliExpress payment page.

Once you are on AliExpress - My order page

Click on Awaiting Payment

Choose the order you want to pay for. Then click the "Pay for the selected order(s)" button.

A window will come up and you just have to complete the payment.

After the payment, DSers will take care of the rest.

Step5: Make the Delivery

Your supplier will deliver the product according to the information you provide. During the process, you don’t need to do anything.

What’s more, since you are running a dropshipping business, it is your supplier who makes the shipment. The delivery time of the product can be a big problem for you. However, with DSers, you can use its shipping settings to make sure the shipping method is the best match according to specific delivery time and shipping cost range to certain country or region.

Pro Tip for Dropshipping

No matter how you deal with your first order, there is one thing you should know about - dropshipping taxes.

According to the new EU VAT policy, all e-commerce companies must pay product tax. It has been effective since July 1^st, 2021. So if you are doing dropshipping inside or outside the EU, you need to pay attention to this. For more information about EU VAT, please check our Influence of EU VAT Reform on Dropshipper article.

Besides, in order to avoid the risks regarding taxes, you can read our Dropshipping and Taxes: Do You Have to Pay Taxes for Dropshipping?  article.

What Else You Should Know about Your First Order

Since your first sale is vital for rolling in more sales, it deserves your time and attention. You should make sure everything goes well with your order. In other words, you must ensure that your products arrive at their destination promptly and safely.

Otherwise, your customer will complain about the delivery and ask for a refund. There are two things you can do to reduce the complaints:

1. Be Careful about the Address

Remember to double-check the address before shipping the product. It may sound simple, but really, buyers can make such mistakes at anytime. This is especially true if they use a tool to fill the information automatically in the browser. It would always miss vital information, such as the customer’s secondary address, door number, etc.

The checking process takes several minutes, but remember that dealing with wrong order can take you much more time.

Since your business is based on the dropshipping model, you can do it by heading to DSers - Order - Customer details. You can take a look at the following example to familiarize yourself with it.

2. Make On-time Delivery

Prompt delivery does bring a good reputation to your store.

And the best way to avoid customer complaints about delayed delivery is to ship your products out as soon as possible. After making the shipment, you should share the status of the shipment with your customer via email or any other way.

If you are running a dropshipping business, prompt delivery might be a little difficult.

What you should do is placing the order on AliExpress as quickly as you can. Once you receive the payment, place the order, so that your suppliers can ship the product as fast as possible.