The main reason why Drop shipping websites and businesses fail

Of course there several reasons why business in general fail, these reasons can be the same for both online and offline businesses.

When it comes to drop shipping online businesses, there tends to be a bit more specific reasons for drop shipping website businesses failing. This article will aim to take a look at a few of these reasons, with a view to deciphering exactly what the differences between the business that fails and a business that succeeds

Trying to rush the process & lacking patience

If there’s one essential element that website owners must have before they set about on the entrepreneurial journey of building a successful online drop shipping business it is patience.

The truth is that drop shipping is quite a competitive industry, and few things will happen instantly, even if you want them to. Everything takes time.

So, from when you set out on the journey of building a drop shipping website, to finding potential suppliers and whittling them down to the final few, to dealing with your eventual customers, nothing about this industry is likely to happen exactly when you want it to.

The learning curve is steep

There is undoubtedly a very steep learning curve when you are just starting out in drop shipping.  There is so much to learn – and learn fast if you don’t want to make silly mistakes and possibly end up losing yourself several hundreds if not thousands of dollars during the process of learning the ins and outs of drop shipping.

We hope to be able to lessen the learning curve for you here at drop ship businesses for sale, but there ate just somethings that not even we will be able to prepare you for and you will just have to experience and then learn from them by yourself and in your own time.

Opting for the wrong product niche in the first place

Ok, this I s a very common one. It can be the very first hurdle that you will need to overcome as a drop ship entrepreneur – choosing the wrong product to drop ship in the first place.

I have lost count of the number of times an ex drop ship store owner quoted “not doing enough product research” as the main reason for the failure of their online store. Do not allow yourself to become of the failures that this it’s ok to just use this excuse.

Very quickly after you start your drop shipping business, you will begin to get an idea of how your product is performing. Do not be the type of person that is too stubborn to change and give up on a failing product. If one product is not working and not bringing in the income that you had thought that it would, then you need to be willing to move on and adapt to trying something else as soon as you possibly can.

Focusing on too many products too early

Another killer of otherwise potentially successful online drop shipping businesses is trying to focus on too many untested drop ship products at the same time & too early in a businesses journey.

Far too often business owners will get too excited about the range of available items from the supplier after viewing a catalogue of their goods – and instead of just ordering one item at a time, monitoring how it sells before deciding what else to invest in, far too many will just plough all of their available funds into as many items from the supplier as they possibly can it once – which is much more likely to lead to disaster for the business owner.

Product delayed shipping times from china

Drop shipping website online business times

One of the most common reasons for a drop shipping website business to fail is the long shipping times from China. The majority of products sold online that are shipped from China will be sent to either the USA or UK via the slowest shipping method possible –  which is sea freight. Sea freight shipped items are likely to take anything from between 30, 60 and even 90 days to reach their UK destination. Products are sent via se freight mostly for cost reasons. It is so much cheaper to

Uncompetitive pricing of drop ship products

Among the major killer of potentially successful drop shipping website is having on competitive pricing on your products. The truth is that before making a purchase your customers are now likely to shop around on Google and other price comparison websites to try to find the best possible price of the item they are looking to buy. If your product is not priced competitively against your competitors, then the chances are that you will lose a sale for this very reason.

With the above said, you also did not want to get into a two-and-fro pricing competition with your competitors…. (they lower their price and so in response you lower your prices).

You need to try to find the sweet spot from the outset when thinking of how to price your products fairly while still being competitive and still being able to turn a profit.

Lack of patience and not sticking with things

If there’s one thing that’s needed to be the owner of a successful online drop shipping business, for sure one of these things is incredible patience. The chances are that after you set up your online drop shipping website, for the first few months you are likely to be receiving precious little free traffic from the search engines. If you are lucky, you will be receiving a trickle of traffic but definitely nothing that will enable you to be are to retire from a 9-to-5 job any time soon.

One of the most important traits of a drop shipping entrepreneur is patients. You must have the ability to persevere, wait and keep going in your business efforts even though in the beginning you are receiving little to no reward for your efforts. Perseverance is key

It may be that you have chosen the wrong products to drop ship and no one is really purchasing your items for sale. It may be that you are getting a lot of customer returns of your product and customers are just not happy with what they are receiving. All of these things are likely to really frustrate a budding drop ship entrepreneur – but in order to succeed in the business of drop shipping it is very important to keep going through all of these set backs.

Bad communications with customers

Long product shipping times are just a natural part of running a drop shipping business, unless you have the money available to be able to invest in lots of stock and to pay the associated storage fees.

You need to have excellent communication skills when it comes to keeping your customers happy in the long-term because there will be the inevitable contact from your customers asking ‘where is the item I ordered?’ … and your response (or lack of to this ) could be the difference between your customer waiting patiently or filing a chargeback claim with their credit card provider stating that they have not received the goods that they had ordered..

In my vast experience of drop shipping products online I have found that customers don’t actually mind waiting 10/20 and even 30 days to receive their order, especially if it’s an item that will be custom made for them and according to their exact specifications. But what they do mind is not being pre-warned about the possible wait time of their order. Getting this element alone correct could help you to save so much hassle and prevent so many credit card chargebacks.

The wrong choice of suppliers

When you are in the business of drop shipping, choosing the wrong suppliers could be detrimental to your entire drop shipping business and ultimately lead to it’s failure.

If you are unlucky enough to have a bad relationship with your suppliers, then you can expect many other important elements of your business to be negatively affected by this. Things like product shipping times, quality control and customer experience can all be adversely impacted based on your choice of suppliers. This is the exact reason why in the beginning, you should not commit to any one particular supplier until I have tried multiple suppliers and I am totally contented with my final choice of supplier

Bad marketing and promotion efforts

It never fails to amaze us the amount of people who think that they can just set up a website and they will then be flooded with endless amounts of traffic – more than they can handle. This more often than not is just not the case.

The fact of the matter is that every website and online business needs marketing. The better your online marketing, then the more visitors and customers that you can expect to receive for free from the search engines. Too many people stuck in the mentality that if they build it 10 website visitors will come, but this is just so untrue.

AT Drop ship businesses for sale we like to justice slightly and say that if you build it, promote it in the right way, then and only then can you expect those website visitors to come

Conclusion to why Drop shipping websites fail

As you probably gathered by this article, there can be a wide range of reasons why drop shipping online businesses fail. If you would like to use our done for you drop ship website building service then we will be able to help you to avoid many of the pit falls that will trip up those that are new to drop shipping.

Be sure to contact us if you are ready to get started in the wonderful word of drop shipping with your own online drop ship website business that is fully turnkey and built for you.