Dropshipping Tips For Peak Season: Shipping, Tracking, and Customer Service

With the holiday season just around the corner, dropshipping stores may be already experiencing high demand and pressure to fulfill orders quickly. While the holiday season brings joy to people, it may be challenging for some novice dropshippers to deal with ceaseless incoming orders. You need to manage orders, inventory, shipping, discounts, and customization services. Isn’t it hectic?

Don’t worry! We have brought you some valuable dropshipping tips for peak season. Check how you can handle shipments, orders, and customer service.

What Are The Challenges Faced During Peak Season

In place of directly discussing the dropshipping tips for peak season, we have explained the challenges that dropshipping businesses might face as well as the solutions to these issues. You can find more details in the following section.

Cart Abandonment

Cart abandonment is a common problem that occurs when your user leaves items in the cart. There are many reasons for this, such as high shipping, poor payment structure, unreliable portals, etc.

During the peak season, as much as people want to buy dedicated products, they also want to order them from a reliable source. You can reduce cart abandonment by offering free shipping or discounts. Also, ensure that your payment portal is secure for transactions.

High Traffic

Many times, your site may experience high traffic during the peak season. Are you equipped to handle this load? If your site goes down unexpectedly, you may end up losing many of your visitors who were on the site at that point.

To avoid this during the peak season, improve your resources, and ensure that your site can handle the projected load.

High Demand Fulfillment

When you are receiving a high number of orders during the peak season, how would you handle fulfillment? Isn’t it hectic to place orders manually and then track details? When you delay holiday orders, your customers' experience reduces automatically.

To eliminate the issue, you should use a dropshipping tool like DSers or relevant technology to automate activities.

Quick Delivery

Most of your customers will ask for quick deliveries. Even if your AliExpress dropshipping store can’t offer this, you need to plan ahead. Check if you can offer quick deliveries at additional shipping charges. If so, then it won’t hurt to provide this offer to customers.

Don’t promise quick deliveries if you can’t fulfill the promise. If your seller has agreed to meet the deadline, then only promise your customers the same.

8 Top Tips For Dropshippers To Handle Peak Season

Let’s learn some handy and  advanced dropshipping tips for peak season. Explore how you can manage your sales during the time of the year.

1. Strengthen Your Systems

The first step to handling the peaking dropshipping season is to prepare your systems. From order placement to fulfillment, every phase in the supply chain should be strengthened. This includes:

• Your ability to identify issues should be top-notch. You don’t want your customers to keep waiting on the checkout page.
• You should be able to track the metrics of orders and customer queries. Based on this, you can put offers on trending products.
• Every page on your website should work like a charm. If your user needs to wait for the cart to load, they may leave. So, less loading time is imperative. Your website should be able to handle the load.

2. Keep The Customer Informed

This is a dropshipping tip for peak season as well as every season. You need to keep your customers informed. Whatever the situation is, you need to inform your users of it.

For example, the shipment is delayed. As soon as you have the information, write to your customer, apologize for the inconvenience, and accept if they want to cancel the order. This honesty should be in your basic policy. It helps you create long-lasting customer relationships.

3. Manage Suppliers

Another dropshipping tip for peak season is to manage your suppliers. You need to keep track of your product suppliers and coordinate with them for peak season. In dropshipping, where you are sourcing products from AliExpress, this can be challenging. Here are some tips to help you manage your suppliers for peak season:

· Coordinate with more than one supplier. You can find more than one supplier for different products on AliExpress. Add these products to your website for better inventory and risk management.

· Pick products carefully. If almost every seller is offering delayed shipping for one product, then that may not be a good choice for the peak season. For quick deliveries, you should select products accordingly.

4. Create Return Policy

You should create a return policy, peak season or no peak season. The reason behind this is that you run a dropshipping store with no warehouse or inventory. If a return request is received and the seller doesn’t accept returns, you will be stuck with dead inventory.

• Check the return policy of AliExpress sellers.
• Evaluate what competitors are offering.
• Create your own return policy.
• Add clauses for products that are not returnable.
• Add a clause that you can deny a return without offering a reason.

5. Plan Ahead

Always plan two months before the Christmas or the holiday season. You need time to plan the marketing and pricing strategy, prepare your inventory, and prepare for everything else. Further, many people like to shop ahead in time for holidays.

So, it may also be a smart choice to offer pre-holiday discounts or sales, where you are making huge profits.

6. Deliver Shipping Details

Firstly, decide the type of shipping you can offer. Here are some formats to look forward to:

· Real-time rates, where you have a pricing formula that increases or decreases rate as per the popularity of the product.

· Flat-rate, where your rate remains the same unless you manually change it.

· Per-type rate, where the rate depends on the number of products ordered. If the user orders more, the discount is more and vice versa.

Apply these pricing strategies to different products on your website. Once the order is placed, you should create an email and send shipping details to your customers. This can be done through email, message, or both. You need to attach a link to track the order, if possible. If the user can’t track the order or you don’t have a link for the same, add details manually or inform the user with an automated dropshipping tool.

7. Ensure Quality of Products

Before you enter the peak season, you need to ensure that the quality of your products is top-notch. No one will tolerate a damaged or poor-quality product during the holidays. People usually order these things for gifting purposes and it is disappointing to receive a damaged product at this time.

So, if you are adding new products to your list, you should plan ahead and order these products for samples. This will allow you to click pictures as well as check quality. It is absolutely necessary to ensure this because poor quality has many repercussions.

8. Take Feedback

Lastly, try to ask your users to offer feedback. They will give you valuable feedback which will help you improve your processes.

Create a feedback form and send to your customers once the order is completed. You can add these star ratings on your website as well, which will guide other customers to make a purchase.

Conclusion

Dropshipping businesses face challenges during the peak season. Dropshippers may find it hard to send details to customers, manage user queries, and offer quick deliveries. For this reason, we have explained some expert tips to manage your dropshipping business during the peak season. Have a look and write to us if you want to know more or offer your inputs.