How Failure Led Me to a Perfect Dropshipping Business?

Almost every business fails at some point, which helps them understand a few important things about businesses. This helps grow and succeed in the future. So, what is our failure story? How did it lead us to create a perfect dropshipping business?

Our story is everyone’s story, and in this article, we will discuss how many dropshipping business owners end up making the same types of mistakes. Don’t worry, you can make it right. Here’s how:

Dropshipping Failures: Mistakes We Make

Dropshippers, or people in general, are extremely emotional. We all love the idea of generating money passively, but the part where the risk comes in is difficult to manage. So, we may make mistakes, follow ongoing trends, and emotionally assess our ability to work around certain ideas. This paves a way for challenges and failures.

Some common dropshipping failures are:

1. Wrong Niche Selection

The topmost reason for dropshipping failure is the wrong niche selection. This means that you are trying to sell a niche that is exhausted, not popular, or not dedicated.

For example, you want to create a marketplace for bedding elements. There already been too many marketplaces for the same. Why would a customer prefer you over marketplaces like AliExpress? Selecting the right niche is an art, and you need Google Trends for it.

Read to learn how to select your niche from steady and trending products:

Steady vs. Trending Niche: Things to Know When Dropshipping

When you are starting a dropshipping store, finding the right niche is imperative. Here are some tips for selecting the right type of dropshipping niche.

DSers BlogLaura Danes

2. Not Patient

The second most common reason for dropshipping failure is a lack of patience. When you start a business, you need to give it time to succeed. In fact, we need to give anything time to succeed. Nothing goes from zero to a hundred overnight. We need to slowly nurture the business, improve the marketing, build an audience, and patiently work to grow the dropshipping business.

How do you patiently wait for your dropshipping business to grow?

Analyze your efforts. You should have some type of metrics or key performance indications (KPIs) that help you assess your growth over time. If you see numbers increasing and changing, then you are moving towards the right direction. If not, then you are making any of the other mistakes, which we can mitigate with suggested methods.

3. Wrong Marketing Platform

How are you marketing your dropshipping business? It is likely that you have not really created your buyer’s persona and you are randomly using Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc. What does this mean exactly?

Many people would check on Google when they need a product; we all know that. For this audience, you require Google Ads. However, what if a large section of your users is on Facebook? Wouldn’t it be better to use Facebook Ads instead?

You need to create a persona for your ideal buyer. This should include demographics, age, preferences, gender, and other such factors. When you know what your buyer looks like, you will be able to utilize your promotion and marketing platform correctly.

4. High Prices

As a customer, we are also programmed to find similar products on different websites to know the lowest pricing of the product. Hence, if you are keeping the pricing of products too high on your dropshipping store, then you are set to fail.

Why? If the marketplace is selling the product at USD 10 and a competitor at USD 12, then what should be your pricing? We'd say somewhere in the same ballpark. But, if the price is USD 15, then why would the customer buy from you? Wouldn’t they prefer shopping somewhere else where they may get a better deal and lower price?

But, this is not to say that high pricing is always a bad thing. Sometimes your product is high-quality or luxurious, and other times you are selling to high-end customers. Many times, we increase pricing when we have already created a name in the market. Only when you fulfill these conditions, then you can work with high pricing. Otherwise, high pricing may only lead you to failure.

5. Shipping Issues

If you are dropshipping with AliExpress, then shipping time may be more. It usually takes 30-60 days for a product to reach a customer. Now, you know the time of delivery, so what can you do to make it work for your customer.

There are two options:

• You can purchase and manage an inventory. This is not acceptable to many dropshippers initially as it requires investment.
• The second option is to create a shipping policy and inform the customer of the expected shipping time. When buyers make a calculative decision with all the information, they are more likely to accept this shipping time.

6. Product Quality

You may be wondering how you can control the quality of the product in dropshipping. In the dropshipping business model, the suppliers will directly send the product to the customer. So, how can you control the quality? It is true, we can’t fully manage the quality or know the quality of the product reaching the customer.

But, there’s one thing that we can do. Before putting a product on your website, order one of each product. This will help you understand the packaging as well as the quality. This way, you can know which seller may send good quality products, which will mitigate your risks to a large extent.

7. Website Design Issues

Your dropshipping business runs on your website’s look and feel. You need to create a good-looking, feasible, and user-friendly website. If that is not the case, you may face issues in retaining users.

Following issues on your website may create a challenge:

• Poor page loading speed
• Poor UI
• Poor landing page design

A Perfect Dropshipping Model

While we have already discussed solutions with every failure in the previous section, we still require some insights into creating a perfect dropshipping business. Hence, here we are with some success-oriented tips and tricks.

1. Niche Selection

The art of selecting the right niche starts with Google Trends.

You need to find niches through various methods and then validate the same on Google Trends.

• Check popular niches on AliExpress
• Look for competitor websites
• Evaluate popular products on Twitter and Instagram
• Use your knowledge and find trending products

Now, the list should be evaluated on Google Trends:

• If the product is sharply on the rise, it is likely a short-term trend. You can have a few of these products.
• If the product is consistently in the top charts, it is likely a long-term trend. You can have many of these products.

2. Supplier Selection

Supplier selection is another important part of dropshipping business success. You need to search for different suppliers on AliExpress and check which one is offering a favorable deal.

You need to look after a few factors:

• The price
• Shipping time
• Customer reviews
• Quality of the product

3. Dropshipping Tool

You are creating a perfect dropshipping business with the right dropshipping tool. For example, DSers AliExpress dropshipping tool helps you manage your supply chain, select the right supplier, and track your orders.

Here are some features of DSers that you should know:

• DSers has an in-built AI engine that allows selecting the right type of seller for a product order.
• You can integrate your tools, AliExpress account, email tool, and other things with DSers for a collated view.
• Once you place an order via DSers, it is automatically added to the tracking list. Now, you can get all the data on one dashboard.
• It is even possible to create a pricing rule, according to which the product pricing is automatically updated.

4. Changing the Mindset

You may do everything right, but still, failure becomes a pattern. Can you relate? If you do, then it may be time to change your mindset. You need to aim for smaller goals and celebrate when you achieve them.

Sometimes, we are becoming successful or leading towards our goal, but our mindset stops us from seeing it. Our idea of success hinders our actual successful steps. So, in this case, the only thing that you can do is change your mindset and believe the numbers. If your revenue is increasing slowly, you are winning.

Conclusion

Failure is a part and parcel of our lives. In every venture, career step, or academic decision, we are expected to experience some failures throughout our journey. It is not possible to correctly assess every move and only lead towards success. However, fortunately, failure is also a method to moving towards success.

With the above failure, you learn, you grow, and you become successful. Even if you have already made these failures, you now know your dropshipping business better. If not, then you can avoid these dropshipping failures and find success.