Value-Added Dropshipping

1. Why adding value is important?

Adding value is the most crucial factor for creating a successful ecommerce business, otherwise, your store will be just another "Me Too" store, selling the similar products with millions of other stores out there.  

People look for products because they run into problems and they have the needs of getting them solved. If your products can meet the needs, add value and help them, you are going to taste the sweetness of success.

2. What products are more suitable for adding value?

The successful ecommerce business owner knows that he/she is not just selling products, but providing guidance, knowledge, information, insights and solutions. If you can provide customers with professional advise or expert guidance within your niche, you will differentiate your store from other competitors. 

For some products, it will be much easier to add value, compared with other products. Basically, you will be looking for: 

a). Products that have many components: 

Which products need more support, a necklace or an entrance excess device? The more complicated and confusing a product is, the more likely people will search for solutions and answers, and that's where you can jump in and offer your value. You can provide detailed information about what the functions of these components are and how to assemble them together, etc. 

b). Products that are adjustable / customisable: 

If your products can be adjusted and customised, according to customers' specific condition or needs, it will be a great way of providing guidance and adding values.

c). Products require technical setup: 

The customer who purchased an entrance access device is very likely to be confused and feel frustrated by the complicated installation and setting up procedures. If you can provide a short & clear instruction video, presenting the setting up procedures in an easy-understanding manner, you are helping customers to a great extent. 

3. Ways to add value:

Educational content is the most widely used and popular strategy for adding value. You can: 

a). Create a comprehensive buyer's guides:

Explain to customers in details about what they need to watch out or check, in order to choose the right products;

b). Prepare a detailed product descriptions and listings:

Let customers have clear and thorough information about the products you are selling. 

c). Prepare installation & setting up guides: 

Create a short video with a clear presentation, guide the customers through the whole process of installation and setting up the products. Solve the nightmare for the customers.

d). Create a comprehensive users / maintenance manual: 

Explain clearly to the customers about the how the products work, what they should do to keep the products in good condition for a longer time, etc.

Conclusion

Adding value with quality information, guidance, educational content is the most effective and crucial way of creating a successful dropshipping business. Think hard about it and you will get the business rolling bigger and stronger.

5 Proven Ways To Increase Online Sales + Things You Need To Do Now

So you are operating an ecommerce store and you want to make more sales? The good news is people want to buy more online. Nowadays, people spend more and more time browsing the internet. Is your store optimised for this great opportunity? If not, there are 7 simple things that you can implement in your store and experience the efforts getting paid off. 

1. Choose one ecommerce goal. 

Identify which stage is your online store now. Is it at planning stage? Or no visitors, no sales? Or you get tons of visitors, but no sales? Know your current position clearly, then choose one main goal to focus on, such as making more sales or attracting more traffic. Step by step, you will achieve your goals. 

2. Plan for mobile shoppers. 

It's a great trend around the world that people spend more time with their phones, quite sad though. However, it brings the opportunity for the online store owners to optimise this trend and sale their products. To achieve this, efforts are needed in making it more user-friendly and attractive for the mobile visitors. Add more visual contents and re-size the website to fit the mobile devices are essential for keeping the mobile visitors. 

3. Choose the right landing page. 

Choose the right landing page to keep your visitors and convert them into customers. It's recommended to set the parts of the site where they can purchase your products as the landing page. And it's important to make sure that the landing page is clear and visitors won't get distracted or loose their interest in your store and quit. The main purpose of the landing page is to get customers to pay your products.

4. Free shipping. 

Studies have shown that free shipping is the best and most effective way of convincing customers to willingly purchase online. It works for Amazon, ebay, etc. Adjust your product prices and apply this model to convert traffic into sales.

5. Focus on SEO.

Invest more time and efforts on SEO and focus on the right keywords that can bring your store ranking to a higher position in Google search. For a new store, Google search is an effective way of bringing new customers. 

Videos have more influences than text and they have longer effects on search engine. Besides, you can also upload videos to Youtu, which is another powerful platform for attracting traffics. 

Above are the 5 proven ways that have been used by many successful ecommerce store owners. You can implement these methods to your store, by start taking actions to do the following things now: 

a). Browse your competitors' online store, who have been successful in operating ecommerce business. Check their websites out, learn from them and improve your own store. 

b). Look at your Google Analytics data, to get a sense of which part of your current site is attracting people, how long they stay, and how many of the visitors become customers ( the conversion rate). 

c). If possible, talk to people who work in the companies that are selling the products related to your niche. Ask them which product has worked well and which hasn't. 

Don't let your visitors or customers leave your website without purchasing products. Create your site to make it user-friendly and really easy for them to buy quickly. Give your best to your goal, though it might take you 6 months to achieve so. 

Top 5 Ways of Attracting Traffic & Making Sales Online

The biggest challenge for the online store owners is getting traffic to their stores and converting visitors to customers. Besides, ecommerce store owners shall know their position among thousands of other ecommerce sites. It's crucial for them to figure out the effective ways of standing out and making their stores well-known.

The explosion of growth in the ecommerce world has only made it tougher for ecommerce sites to attract the critical mass of visitors needed to stay in business.

In this post I will share with you 12 different strategies that you could use to increase your online community and get more sales. Pick the strategies and tactics you find most interesting and suitable for your business and start seeing your business grow.

1. Update content / blogs regularly.

It's important to keep your customers / followers being interested in your store. You could use the following methods to update the store content: 

• Add the latest and trending products; 
• Post interesting blogs that are related to your products;
• Create discount or sales activities; 

2. Using images while posting Ads.

Images tend to get people's attention fast. The best way to increase Ads engagement is by including images within the Ads campaign. Images help to make the ads connect with people's emotions & feelings, which are the vital factors for making purchase-related decisions. Studies show that posts with photos on Facebook generate 50% more likes than the normal text posts. Same effects happen for the Google Adwords. Image ads are generally more attractive and more easily to stir up people's curiosity, compared with text Ads.

With the help of Google Shopping free apps, it becomes convenient and simple to link the shopify store with the Google Merchant Centre, which simplify the process of advertising with product images to a great extent.

3. Make it easy to link your ecommerce site with other social media.

The more impressions that people have about your ecommerce site, the more likely it is for your site to gain traffic and customers. Make sure that you have embedded the social media icons (facebook, instagram, pinterest, twitter, google+, linkedin, etc) into your webpage. And make sure that they are displayed properly to the visitors, not hidden or blocked. And you could always be the first to like, share, or link your webpage with your other social media account. Do your part to bring your site to the friends, families and communities. 

And you may want to consider to place social media icons in the following places of your website: 

• Footer of the website & blog
• Header of the website & blog
• On the left/right hand side of the website & blog
• In your newsletter
• In you email signature
• Within specific blog posts

Check out this example of an outdoor product website. They list the social media icons on the side of the home page and make them stick there. Neat and tidy. A great idea!

4. Enable UGC (User Generate Content).

It is a great way to create trust and provide insights on your products by using UGC (User Generate Content), which will result in sales increase.

Yotpo is a popular free social review app that's available in Shopify's app store. Yotop helps you to increase sales by generating more site & product reviews with Yotpo’s signature in-mail review form. Besides, with it you can boost your customers' trust and increase conversion rate with tons of verified reviews & customer photos.  The app helps convert over 8% of customers to reviewers through their mail after purchase email which results in a large number of reviews being created. The best part is that this process is automated so you don’t have to spend time reaching out to customers to try and get new product reviews. Here's how it works:

5. Create micro content.

Nowadays, a great amount of people admit that they often feel overwhelmed by the overloaded information out there. World is changing too fast and too many things happen each day, leaving people helplessly, unable to digest such huge information. It means people have less patient and less time to consume content. An increasing trend among marketers which should be considered seriously by the ecommerce store owners is the creation of bite sized chunks of content, for quick and easy consumption. 

Vine is a great, free app for creating an up to 6s short video. Facebook also provide such video creating tool by using up to 10 images. 

Conclusion

Above listed methods have been widely discussed and introduced on other Ecommerce blogs or courses. And a great many of online store owners have won traffic and made great sales over their competitors, by applying one or more of the these strategies. 

Many people have heard some ideas, but only a few are willing to work hard and try them out. Take actions today and fight your way up in the ecommerce business!