12 Common Dropshipping Mistakes You Should Avoid

As we have mentioned a lot in our articles, dropshipping is not so hard to start. However, it’s also common for starters to make some dropshipping mistakes if they don’t put enough effort into it. Luckily, that will not be a problem as long as you can learn from someone who has experience in dealing with those kinds of issues.

Today, we will help you out by giving you a little guidance through what we have done and researched. In this article, we have listed down for you the most common 12 dropshipping mistakes of all entrepreneurs and how to avoid those. Let’s check them out!

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1. Exclude the cost of conversion

The first common dropshipping mistake starters often make is that they will usually use the wholesale price on AliEpress plus shipping cost and taxes to calculate the expenditure for a particular item. So any difference will be your profit margin. It works most of the time, especially when your customers come from your organic traffic.

As you may know, free audiences can find you on Google, but they mostly buy from ads. And that’s not free. The cost of conversion is how much it costs you to make a customer buy from you. As per our experience, this cost can be as high as 20 bucks. So, you should also include the cost of conversion into your calculation so that you can get a close estimated expenditure.

2. Selling products in single units

For small businesses like dropshipping, it always appears to be a good idea that you can sell affordable products with a huge markup. Then you may think that you can get an enormous profit margin. But it’s not true and a common dropshipping mistake. You may soon realize that though the product might be cheap, the cost of conversion is expensive. You have to spend a fair amount of money to attract your customers. So if you just can buy a single unit of your products, it’s not worth it.

We’re not saying that you must not sell cheap products in single units, as long as your customers come from organic traffic. But it would be much more productive if you sell goods that your audiences can buy in quantities.

3. Spending little and expecting more sales

A lot of people have shared that they made a great amount of money from dropshipping. That thing might seem tempted to you. But no one ever shares with you what’s going on behind all of these success stories. Actually, you cannot get sales from nothing. Every dropshipper spends a lot of money on advertising to attract their customers.

So the truth is that you have to pay to make people buy from you. It’s quite understandable if you have to spend hundreds of dollars just on one Facebook ads campaign to get sales. If it does not, turn it off before it costs you too much. It’s a common dropshipping mistake for every beginner when they want to get more but expect to spend little. So be prepared to spend since it may cost you a lot before you can make a huge profit from it.

4. Wasting much without any results

Though spending too little is a common dropshipping mistake, spending too much while there are no results is also something that you definitely should avoid. Sometimes you should be patient and wait for the good things to happen. But when you realize that it’s been weeks and weeks and you don’t see any sales or just several ones, you’d better turn it off.

5. Jumping to conclusions

Though you should decide to stop when you see no results, hastiness is another dropshipping mistake. It’s understandable that when you see no sales a day after the launch, you feel the urge to increase the budget hoping that it can be more productive. But then things keep getting worse and worse, you soon realize that it’s a hasty and unwise decision.

It’s the same when it comes to turning off an ad. If you don’t have the experience to tell if a campaign works or not, don’t jump to the conclusion too fast. Instead, give it more time to see what will happen before making any decision.

6. Not well prepared for your dropshipping online store

Even when your ads campaign is going really well, a lot of people visit your website every day, but very few make a purchase. Why? Your site which is not working effectively may be the next dropshipping mistake. For brick-and-mortar stores, there are a lot of things that matter in terms of attracting people like their locations, the presence, the arrangement. But for online business, the site is almost everything you show to your customers. So make it as comfortable as possible.

After getting interested in your ads, people want to see more about you and click on the link, but if your page takes too much time to load or the payment gateway does not work properly, then they soon will get bored and leave right after that. So instead of getting the customer to buy from you, you accidentally lose them for a worthless reason.

So pay attention to your landing page and your website. And try not to scare your customers away.

7. Not testing

If you want to succeed in any business, testing is something that you must do. A lot of market research or analysis will not ensure any results. To figure out what is working and what is not, what will sell and what will not, you have to test a lot. And not testing is a huge dropshipping mistake. Inexperienced dropshippers may invest a big amount of money on some products that they think people will like to buy without any testing. And only when it turns out really badly, they will soon realize the importance of testing dropshipping products.

So don’t be afraid to waste money or time on testing out your ideas or products, it instead will save you a lot more.

8. Not remarketing

Let’s say your marketing campaign is really good and your ads are really attractive to your audiences. But people might just go to see your site and then leave for many reasons. So it’s a big dropshipping mistake if you don’t do remarketing to get them back to your store and offer them something more to encourage them to buy from you.

Actually, there are so many reasons that they don’t buy from you. Maybe they don’t need your products at the time, or they need to save money or they need to wait for a special occasion to buy. Whatever it is, just remind them of what your products can make a change to their life and make them go back to your site. You can make a lot of sales and a lot of money that way.

9. Relying on one dropshipping supplier

Sometimes it’s just so hard to find the right supplier for your store. So when you find one, you may not want to search for more. But it is another dropshipping mistake you should not make. Don’t just rely on only one supplier. Since it can bring you troubles.

Imagine if something happens to your only supplier, then you will be left with no choice. But if you have many suppliers to choose from, you can immediately switch among them when issues come up with one of them. So it’s really important to get some reliable suppliers on your list so that you can have more options for a rainy day.

10. Not trying to increase the average order value

Even when a customer bought from you already, there’s still a chance that you can sell more to them. Many beginners are making the same dropshipping mistake of not trying to increase the average order value. Average order value is the amount of money you make with one single sale.

If you want to make more profit, just try to make your customers buy as much as possible. Don’t be satisfied too soon if they bought from you once.

11. Too narrow audiences

It’s important that you can narrow down your audiences and target the right one. If you target a large group of audience, it will become ineffective and it will waste a lot of money and effort. However, narrowing your target audiences too much is also a dropshipping mistake. It causes low profit obviously when you miss on out many potential customers.

So, avoid targeting too narrow audiences but try to stick with an appropriate one.

12. Do not give up too soon

The biggest dropshipping mistake of all is that you give up too soon. You have to experience a lot of failures before success. So don’t expect to do it well on your first try. Instead, thanks to failures, you learn a lot of lessons, tips, and experiences to start out a new one. The latter must be better than the first one.

Everyone makes mistakes, even the most talented ones. The most successful ones make the most failures before things pay off. So, if you are really into dropshipping want to do it, be patient and don’t give up too soon. Results never come overnight.

Conclusion

Above are the most common dropshipping mistakes that all people can make. But it doesn’t matter when you make mistakes. It matters when you give up every time you make mistakes. You can learn from your failures and come up with a better plan the next time. Or you can learn from other experienced people who can help you on your first try. And we are really happy to make a list of those dropshipping mistakes to help you out with your dropshipping business. You can make other dropshipping mistakes when running your business. So please share with us if you have anything to add to the list.