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Work Smart and Succeed at eBay Dropshipping
To be successful with dropshipping on eBay, you must be competitive as
dropshipping profit margins are low. Your aim is to sell as much as possible, but
more selling means more work for you to list, process orders through your
supplier, and ensure delivery of each sale one by one.
Streamline
The best way to streamline your eBay workload is to find products within your
chosen niche that you can list on eBay as bulk listing or listings with variations.
This lowers your workload drastically as you list these products only once. If
you are unsure of how to use these listings, you can access all the information
you need in their help section. You can easily minimize time spent on re-listing
your products by adjusting the listing period.
Availability
Out of stock and discontinued products are a dropshipping business’s nightmare.
Your business cannot afford a string of negative reviews from disgruntled
customers and a high volume of complaints do not go unnoticed by eBay and
this could jeopardize your eBay store. eBay has very strict rules regarding and
will terminate your account if you get too many customer complaints.
To prevent any of this is not difficult. You have to be on top of your game and
get daily stock updates from your suppliers. Regularly check stock movements
of the products you order from your suppliers and take note when stocks get low.
Your reputation as a reliable seller means everything and there is simply too
much competition in e-commerce for you to neglect this most important aspect
of your business.
Customer Demographics
Your success on eBay depends on many factors. It is like building a puzzle. Each
piece of the puzzle has its place and must fit perfectly. The demographics of
your customers play an important role in this.
Build a profile of the people that would be interested in buying the specific
products that you offer. Their age group is also important as this will most likely
determine their daily routines are like. These demographics will give you a good
idea of what time of the day and even which days they are most likely to do theirshopping on eBay. This will allow you to adjust the times and days you do your
product listings.
Timing Is Key
The time of day, the day of the week and also the day of the month are all
important factors for listing your products to attract the most customers. The aim
is to attract as many customers as possible, make the sale as fast as you can, and
maximize your profits.
Peak hours obviously attract the most potential customers and for many
dropshipping companies this is the way to go. This is both a benefit and a
drawback for several reasons.
● Everyone wants to list during peak hours, so you will have much
more competition than during off peak traffic hours.
● Because of the sheer volume of people active on eBay during these
hours, you may find that the site operates much slower than usual and
this can be a huge problem near the time that an auction closes. People
jump around eBay stores, looking for the best prices and products and
as the site is slow, you can lose out on sales as customers might not get
to your listings in time before the auction ends.
Your customer demographics will help you greatly to avoid overwhelming
numbers of competitors and the peak hour rush if you have done your
demographic research into when your customers will be most likely to browse
eBay.
For greater success, you need to balance the potential income during peak hours
and the time schedules of your target group. It all depends on what your niche
products are and whether your target group falls into the average shopper group
that will be shopping when just about everyone else is shopping, or whether they
will prefer other time slots to do their online purchases.
Customer Relations
At the heart of any business is the customer, and your goal for your dropshipping
business is not only to attract customers but also have them come back and place
more orders. It cannot be stressed enough how important it is to build good
relationships with your customers.
Key to building positive relations is to gain a reputation for reliability.
Customers must be able to rely on being able to get the products that you havelisted and that you will make sure they get the parcels quickly and that it will
arrive in excellent condition.
Should a problem pop up, your customers must know that you stand behind them
and will move mountains to make sure that you find solutions and that they will
be happy with the results. No matter how stressful a problem situation is for you,
you cannot afford to ever be abrupt with customers, even when they are being
totally unreasonable and shouting empty threats at you.
Price Control
People want the best possible price for whatever they are shopping for and will
hunt around for the best bargains. This could be a logistical headache for
dropshipping companies as you have to cope with all the various fees,
subscription costs and the prices charged by your suppliers. To be able to make a
profit, keep customers happy, and run your business effectively, you need to be
aware of how your prices are affected by these four basic variables:
● Supplier prices are fixed.
● Final sales prices fluctuate.
● eBay charges: listing fees and final sale price percentages.
To effectively control prices and still make the best profit possible, you should
implement the following strategies and use options to your best advantage.
● Use the Buy it Now listing option. You offer your listed items at a
fixed price, the benefit is that you then make the profit you aimed for.
● Buy it Now offers a fixed insertion fee that applies to multiple as
well as individual listings. The fixed insertion fee is usually lower than
other listing fees.
● Setting a reserve price on a listing is another way to control pricing.
The reserve price is the lowest bid that you will accept from customers
on that specific item on auction.
● When using the reserve price option you must make sure not to
forget to adjust your reserve price to accommodate the fact that final
value fees and insertion fees varies. The drawback of using reserved
pricing is that your customers cannot see what the reserve price is and
this can be very annoying for your customers.
● eBay offers a free calculator to assist you in calculating your
various applicable eBay fees. This is a very helpful tool to save time and
lessen stress when having to calculate all the fees and costs involved
with trading on eBay
.●To have more control over your profit margin, you can opt for
setting a higher starting bid in order for you to cover the fixed costs that
you have no control over. These include your eBay listing fees and final
value fees, as well as supplier costs and all applicable taxes and
shipping costs.
Product Fulfillment
Keeping track of the whole fulfillment process is critical as you are competing
with countless sellers daily on eBay. If your customers are unhappy, they will
very quickly go and find what they are looking for from another seller and your
reputation will soon be in shreds.
The fulfillment process can be frustrating for any dropshipping business as you
do not physically handle the products, you fully rely on your suppliers to
accomplish fulfillment smoothly and fast.
You want to source and retain suppliers that have their finger on the pulse of
their business and will keep you up to date during the fulfillment process and
immediately contact you to inform you should there be a problem or the
possibility of delays. This will allow you to communicate with your customer