5 Reasons Why Your Dropshipping Business Fails

You could not easily succeed with dropshipping right in the first month. And to find out the reasons why your dropshipping business fails, right in the beginning, could save you tremendous effort and a great deal of money.

You probably have read a lot on the internet on how wonderful dropshipping model is. But in those articles, they never tell you that you could fail even when you have tried all the great advices and tips to run your business effectively. Why? As these advices and tips are not always right.

Like any other retail model, it is not a gold mine that you can dig in and get the treasure out of it effortlessly. If so, everyone will be successful with this. Sound crazy, isn’t it? The truth is, only 10% of people succeed. Can you be among this 10%? The answer is yes.

And to understand the reasons why your dropshipping business fails as below will help you to create a winning campaign for your own store:

5 Reasons Why Your Dropshipping Business Fails While Others Succeed

1. Wrong niche

The first to come is the wrong niche. If you did not choose the right one, the probability is that you never grow your dropshipping business with it. With so many people are competing to have a profitable dropshipping business, the market is so tough.

That’s why you need to choose your niche carefully to make sure you are selling the winning products. It is worth taking some time to do research on the current trends and even products of your competitors. Since if you could find a trending product but unique enough, the competition is not high. It means you can stand a good chance to make more profit out of it. Or else, even you have done everything well, a bad niche is one of the reasons why your dropshipping business fails surely right from the very start.

2. Untrustworthy suppliers

Dropshipping does not always go smoothly all the time just because you have ordered some products from certain suppliers and have them dropship for you. To know why your dropshipping business fails, you may want to look at your suppliers.

Keep in mind that you have to completely rely on your suppliers for picking, packaging, and shipping the products to your customers. The whole process cannot go as well as your expectation. It can take a long time until your customers can receive the cargo or the suppliers cannot track the products using the tracking numbers. Or to add more problems to this, the overall quality of the products may not good or the suppliers provide no support about refunds and return. There’s a lot to face when you do dropshipping.

However, even if you are working with reliable suppliers, troubles may still arise. One problem is that you cannot control the inventory while you do not keep products in our own stock. You may be informed that the product is available but when orders are received and sent to your suppliers, it may have run out.

In this case, you need to apologize to the customer and ask if they can change to another product of the same kind. It may cause offense sometimes and arouse disbelief in your customers.

Hence, to be successful in droshipping, it is necessary to build a good relationship with your suppliers. So that they may give the greatest support to you and care about your business, though it is still a difficult thing to find a reliable supplier. Once you have found one, try to keep in contact with them through skype, email, or meet them in person to make sure you understand their quality, their service, and policies.

3. Bad customer service

You can have a good niche, trustworthy suppliers, and have tried your best to take care of your customers, but you still don’t figure out why your dropshipping business fails.

Here’s the reason. Though you can have a good customer service team, you still have little control over the process. You are not the one who directly proceeds with the order and so never know when your customers will receive the products. A lot of issues may come out of this like delayed orders may happen.

To solve this, you’d better contact your supplier at once to find out the reasons for the delay and together come up with a quick solution.

Apart from that, you may encounter other problems like wrong or damaged products sent to your customers and so on. You should be prepared for all these troubles before starting up your business. Also, remember to keep your pre-sale and post-sale service at the highest quality. Since customers will rate you better if you can keep them in touch and answers all their queries, sometimes even give them good advice to choose a suitable product for them. Do ask them if they are satisfied with the product and your service as well. That will help build success for your dropshipping business.

4. Long shipping time

Among the reasons why your dropshipping business fails, long shipping time may be the most offensive.

One of the biggest problems is the shipping time. Some suppliers may take 20 days or more to deliver a product to customers. Most people, especially in America, cannot wait such a long time to receive their products. And they will not order if they know that the products will not arrive on their doorstep within 1 week. This can happen all the time.

The best solution to this is that you should provide your customers with the tracking numbers of the products shipped to them. So they can actively check the process on their end.

In addition, acknowledge your customers the shipping time by displaying it on the product and checkout page.  To send an email or text message informing the customers of the shipping process as well. This can give your customers the impression that your order processing is professional and responsible, and that they can keep track of everything.
If your customers ask about the shipping process, try to respond as soon as possible to them.

Even though you cannot make the shipping process shorter, you can make customers feel comfortable and respected when they order from you.

5. Poor marketing strategies

The last reason why your dropshipping business fails is ineffective marketing strategies. If people don’t know about your brand, they are less likely to order from you. So, it is critical to have a good marketing campaign.

However, don’t narrow the definition of a good marketing campaign by mere posts on Instagram or Facebook. It is more than those things. For example, beside posts and texts, you can focus more on video ads to drive more attention and engagement from your target audiences.

You’d better put enormous effort to promote your store if you want more people to know about it and buy more from you.

Conclusion

Dropshipping is interesting and not so difficult to start. But it doesn’t mean that you will easily succeed with little effort.  Knowing the reasons why your dropshipping business fails will give you a more overall look. Then you may get enough preparation to run your business successfully.