The holiday season is right around the corner, and apart from candied days, happy moments, lots of festive food, and there’s a high demand for gifts. This means a huge opportunity for your dropshipping store to cross your sales target and break your revenue records.
In 2020, the holiday season eCommerce sales in the US are projected to be $135 billion.
This shows how holiday season purchases still hold immense value despite the pandemic and can be a game-changer for your dropshipping store.
Dropshipping is gaining momentum and slowly becoming a more preferred choice than traditional eCommerce businesses as it helps businesses profit by selling products online without managing inventory on their own.
Combine it with the holiday madness, and you’ve got yourself a perfect strategy to double your revenue and to take your dropshipping store to the next level.
But, before we get into our toolkit to prepare your dropshipping business for the holiday season, let’s understand what dropshipping is and why exactly you should invest in it, now more than ever.
What is dropshipping?
Dropshipping is a method to fulfill orders by listing products online and passing them to a third-party supplier responsible for shipping them to the customers.
This business model does not require the store owner to keep a stock of the products but rather get involved in other aspects like management, customer service, and store maintenance.
While we’re talking about dropshipping, it’s safe to say it’s not a get-rich-quick-scheme.
It may look like a great way to make recurring money as you’re just listing and selling products. But, you still need to put in a lot of work in creating a properly functioning store, marketing it, taking care of listings, and customer service, above all.
But if you have a solid dropshipping strategy, it can take off your business profits massively.
Before you start dropshipping, it’s best to know some pros and cons:
Pros of dropshipping
- Great source for building a passive income: Once you’ve listed the products, started marketing them, and have organized your processes to work on auto-pilot—you can earn money with little to zero further effort as orders will be placed and fulfilled automatically.
- No inventory management worries: Since a supplier takes care of inventory and shipping, you can focus on marketing your store and getting more visitors to your website: more visitors, more sales, more profits.
- Low overhead costs: You don’t have to maintain a brick-and-mortar shop or a warehouse for your products. There’s also no need to hire a full-fledged team to manage the store; you can hire a few freelancers on a project basis—and this way, you won’t have many overhead costs.
- Lots of scope for experimentation: When you’re the supplier and seller, you need to take care of launching a new product line, but with dropshipping, you can introduce a whole line and if it doesn’t take off, simply remove it from your store. Since you’re not buying wholesale or committing to someone, you can experiment with different products and see what gets you sales.
Cons of dropshipping
- Lots of competition: Dropshipping requires low capital investment initially, making it an easy entry point for anyone who wants to start a store
- Low-profit margins: There’s only so much you can make by selling third-party products, and the expenses of creating and managing a store along with advertising hardly allow high profits
- Minimal control over products: Since you’re just coordinating the efforts, and the supplier is sending the products to your customers, you hardly get to see the product condition or packaging. This gives you little to no control over the quality, which significantly impacts customer loyalty and store reputation
- Hard to build your brand: When customers receive the product, they only care about the product, and not the shopping experience since you’re just the messenger. This makes it difficult to build retention for your business and build a sustainable brand for it.
6 top tips to prepare your dropshipping store for the Holiday season
Now that you’ve understood dropshipping from its roots, it’s time to understand how to prep your store for the holiday season. Consumers wait for festive sales because just for the gifts and discounts, hence the surge would be high during these times. This means your store needs to be ready to accommodate a high amount of visitors, checkouts, payments, and orders.
So, let’s fail-proof your dropshipping store and set it up for ongoing purchases for the holiday season with these 6 preparation tips:
1. Talk to your suppliers in advance
Managing the status of your inventory will possibly be the most difficult yet important aspect to handle. Suppose you suddenly start getting a massive number of orders, and your supplier is not prepared for it, you could end up losing customers, or worse, providing a bad customer experience.
Delays in orders, unavailability of a product even if listed on the store, poor packaging owing to order influx are some ways things could go wrong. So, the first step you should take to prepare your store is to have a conversation with your suppliers.
Quite often, dropshipping stores work with multiple suppliers, which makes this step even more crucial. Talk to them about how much they can accommodate and set up a process for the organization.
For example, you could use Google sheets to manage inventory and add them or hire a virtual assistant or intern to help manage the process.
This should be done weeks before the holiday season begins, so you have a clear understanding of what needs to be taken care of and a fallback plan if anything goes wrong.
2. Review your policies
You cannot have your standard store policies running during the holiday season if you don’t want to exhaust your operation on sorting out exchanges, returns, and other order issues.
To avoid the hassle, clearly state store policies telling users how to proceed with refunds and returns during sales. Not only will this ensure consumers are informed about your policies, but it will also instill trust in your store and shows you are committed to an excellent customer experience.
Here’s what you should clarify during the holiday season:
Returns and refunds
Many stores don’t offer returns or refunds during holiday sales.
This is because these products are already discounted, and engaging in returns or refunds can get expensive given the shipping and logistics involved. However, if you still want to offer them, ensure transparency on timelines and processes.
Shipping and taxes
Ask your suppliers if their method can handle surge orders and how much time it would take to ship and deliver them. It would be best to keep a buffer time.
For example, if you generally ship orders in 24 hours, mention you’ll ship in 48 hours. This way, the supplier would have enough time to accommodate the surge.
Similarly, be transparent about the shipping costs, and check with the supplier if the earlier rates can continue to stay or if you need to revise them.
3. Develop an advertising plan and budget
You’ll indeed see loyal customers buying from you during holidays, but you’ll also acquire many new customers. To maximize the results of your efforts, it’s best to prepare an advertising plan and budget before the season kicks in.
91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands and stores that provide relevant offers and recommendations—which makes advertising crucial.
Before you lay out your plan, it’s essential to assess your most profitable channels. Understand where you get the most customers from—organic search, paid social media promotions, email marketing, and social media channels.
The holiday season is not the time to experiment and invest in new advertising channels. Instead, you need to double down on methods that have worked best for you in the past and optimize them for better results.
Here are some steps you can take to do this:
- After assessing your advertising channels, create and allocate a budget to different channels
- Create an advertising strategy that allows you to prioritize channels as per past traffic and conversions
- Hire a team or assign tasks to an existing team of full-time employees or freelancers so you can put your strategy into motion
- Set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure the effectiveness of your efforts like traffic, sources, conversions, channels, clicks, etc
- Create great content, and use a solid social media strategy to build buzz around your sale and store.
- Use innovative strategies like contests and giveaways, partnering with influencers, and creating a loyalty program so you can promote your holiday sale in the best manner.
Get your advertising strategy in motion well ahead of the holidays. This would provide you with time to create awareness around your store.
Once you launch your deals, people would come in for the familiarity and purchase.
4. Plan your holiday site theme
Holiday sales are not just about listing products at slashed prices on the website. It’s also about creating a memorable store experience for the consumers, so they’re pulled towards making a purchase and referring them to their friends.
Refreshing your website with a holiday theme is one of the best ways to show your store is ready to bring in some festive cheer. If it’s Christmas, customize your store with candy canes, snow trees, and red and white colors to help customers relate to the holiday. Such personalized experiences can go a long way in building customer retention.
In addition to the theme, you can also festively stack your products or bump up those related to the holiday like streaming devices, loaf pans, candles, new dining sheets, and winter clothing for Thanksgiving.
You can also use data from your previous sales and festive store surges to study customer behavior and see how you should optimize and organize the store for more sales.
5. Learn about your top-selling products
Not all products sell the same, and if you can identify and bump up your top-selling products, you could end up making higher sales.
More than offering a range of products, curating and positioning your best-selling products will help you drive more conversions and make the consumers curious to explore your store further.
To discover these products, here’s what you can do:
- Study customer purchase history for the past 9-12 months and pick the products with the highest sales. Identify if the product would be relevant during the holiday season, and include it accordingly.
- Analyze your previous holiday season purchase history, and cherry-pick those products which sold like crazy. Consider bringing them in again or including an upgrade to those products to push sales.
Once you’ve made a list of your top-selling products, you can position them strategically throughout the website and run promotions on them to attract more people.
Alternatively, you can also study Google trends, communities, and industry reports to understand potential best-selling products that you can also get supplied and listed on your dropshipping store.
6. Conduct a load test to handle the traffic surge
The holiday season can put a lot of pressure on your website regarding increased site visitors, fast checkouts, overburdened servers, and glitches in third-party integrations.
This can show errors to your customers or lead to a slow load time, among other issues which can severely impact their shopping experience, and thus your sales.
The best way to avoid this is to conduct a load test to ensure your site servers have enough capacity to handle sudden spikes in traffic
This will allow you to assess how your website will react to traffic surges and give you an idea of the potential bugs that can cause problems. You can use load testing tools like JMeter and LoadView to help you out with it.
Once you identify issues after running the load test, you can make improvements and optimizations to create a seamless shopping experience for your customers.
Wrapping up
The holiday season offers massive scope for eCommerce stores to ramp up their profits. With dropshipping, you can take it even further with innovative marketing strategies, sales promotion tactics, website optimization, and product experimentation.
Unlike regular eCommerce store owners, you don’t have to worry about the products so that you can optimize the store and overall experience for more sales.
Focus on personalizing the shopping experience for your customers with holiday themes and promotions, which can pull them in further for making purchases.
You can turn the holiday season into a highly profitable quarter for your dropshipping business, but only if you are prepared for it. Use this article as a checklist to prepare your store for the festive surge, and get ready to welcome happy shoppers!
This is a guest post by Hazel Raoult
Hazel Raoult is a freelance marketing writer and works with PRmention. She has 6+ years of experience in writing about business, entrepreneurship, marketing, and all things SaaS. Hazel loves to split her time between writing, editing, and hanging out with her family.
