The COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic has affected dropshipping businesses and suppliers across the world. Go on a fact-finding mission to expand your awareness of products and audiences. When researching lists of successful dropshipping products, you may discover specific corners of the market you never noticed before.
Know what would be the proper strategy is to run your dropshipping business smoothly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Over the present situation of COVID-19, a positive response is been seen around this sector. If you don’t have a lot of money to invest in your business, don’t have inventory space, and not sure what you want to sell, then yes, Dropshipping could be right for your fledgling business. Your first (and arguably most important) task is deciding which products you want to sell.
As the pandemic has reshaped life as we know it, it’s also accelerated many trends – but the biggest of these trends may be e-commerce. The shift toward e-commerce was happening before COVID-19, but according to new data from IBM, the pandemic has accelerated consumers’ shift toward e-commerce by five years. Ecommerce is projected to grow by nearly 20% YoY in 2020. This growth was even more pronounced at the beginning of the pandemic, with U.S. retail e-commerce up 44.5% YoY in Q2.
If there’s one thing that most of us have lived through recently, it’s the experience of working from home! For many, this has happened entirely by accident due to COVID-19 restrictions and an extended period of lockdown. To start, it’s always a good idea to think about your audience and the problems that you solve for them. But sometimes dropshipping can be about capitalizing on a trend.
Here are a few principles to guide on how to run your dropshipping business during the COVID-19 pandemic:
1- Choosing a Selling Platform
There are a few leading platforms in which you can sell your products online, such as eBay, Amazon, and more. eBay has a large and loyal customer base that brings tons of organic traffic to your store, so it saves you a lot on costs compared to running ads. A user-friendly platform, starting off on eBay requires no initial start-up cost.
2- Modify Shipping and Logistics
As e-commerce shipping costs surge by 60% in some areas, drop shippers are seeing diminished margins. This is happening because of fewer international flights and shippers have limited space. With more folks staying at home, shippers don’t have the extra capacity (or workers) to handle an influx of e-commerce orders. Dropshippers need to streamline their shipping and logistics properly in order to maintain an undisruptive supply chain of their business.
3- Communicate Directly with your Customers
It is important to communicate honestly in these difficult times. If it is foreseeable that delivery problems may arise in the future, inform your customers at a good time. Try to be transparent from the very beginning that will help you in the long course. If a problem arises with an order or product, your customer needs to be the first to know. If not, you are doing something wrong.
4- Make the Most of a Bad Situation
If you do decide to wind down your dropshipping activities for a couple of weeks, use this time to be productive and think about your business. Work on that to-do list you’ve been putting off for months and make some plans for the future. That way, when normal operations resume, you’ll be ready to hit the ground running.
Final Thoughts
After the end of COVID-19, the scenario is going to change. This is because we have learned a lesson that we can’t rely on the conventional system without technology. Many businesses like yours will have to consider transforming their business models for improved viability in a situation like this