Starting a drop shipping business is a good choice if you want to find a simple and profitable online business. However, with thousands of items to drop ship in your store, you should be mindful of the product you are listing!
In this series of blog posts, we are looking into how you can increase the sales in a drop shipping business. We have already discussed how you can boost sales with high-quality pictures on your website in our last post. However, today we will venture into the varieties of products you should NOT dropship if you want to make a profit!
Why Drop Shipping Everything Is Not A Good Idea
Drop shipping is like the gold rush of the old times. Back in the days, gold rushes came with the feeling that anyone might become wealthy almost instantly!
Nowadays, drop shipping is comparable to the gold rush era. With the increasing outreach of the internet, people think of drop shipping as an easy and fast way to get rich. Nonetheless, you might get burned if the product you chose is not suitable for drop shipping.
Drop shipping the wrong item can place you in a hole that could be hard to get out of. As a drop shipper, it is easy to pivot your business if it doesn’t work out. But you are losing out on valuable time that you could use to earn some money. So, finding profitable products, and avoiding the troublesome ones is the best practice of the drop shipping world.
Let us look into why fragile products are best left alone in drop shipping.
Fragile Products- What Are They
In layman’s terms, any product that does not survive a four-foot drop is a fragile product.
You might think that it is only the electronics like computers and flat-screen TVs that are fragile. But it’s not just these items that fall under the “fragile shipping” category.
In fact, simple things like lamps, crystal glasses, wooden photo frames, and light plastic could fall victim to damage too. Even paper products can be considered fragile as they can get creased in shipping!
Fragile Products – Why You Should Avoid Them
Shipping fragile products are expensive.
Fragile products need extreme care on the packaging. So it is a no brainer that fragile product’s packaging will cost you more. You will have to pay for the packaging materials if you want to drop ship fragile products. This will drive up the cost of that product quickly.
On the other hand, even with extreme care on packaging, these products will get damaged on shipping. This, in turn, will lead to more returns and dissatisfied customers. They might leave negative reviews, and this will hurt your sales.
Another thing that all drop shippers want to avoid is the shipping cost. If you want to keep your product price competitive, then your shipping cost must be low. It is even better if you can offer free shipping.
The shipping expenses can also quickly add up when you fill your store using multiple drop shipping suppliers.
For example, you drop ship fine china showpieces, and you use three different shops to source your products. Then a customer orders showpieces that you have to source from all three of those shops. As a result, you’ll have to pay for each individual shipment instead of just grouping those items together.
While this scenario is not exclusive for fragile products only, it can lead to significantly higher shipping expenses. You will find it hard to make up for those added costs. You might have to pass along that expense to your customer, but that could backfire on you. Such a high shipping cost will likely cause customers to abandon their carts and you will end up making fewer sales.
End Words
As a drop shipper, you need a clear product selection process to identify which items actually have profit potential. People often pick drop shipping product ideas on a whim without any careful consideration. This wastes a lot of time and effort! Take the time to properly research the best drop shipping product ideas for your store, and avoid the fragile ones to succeed in your venture.
