Looking for Customer Caring and Refunds Best Practices In Dropshipping (9)
Looking for Customer Caring and Refunds Best Practices In Dropshipping
Hello everyone,
I'm seriously looking to start a dropshipping ecommerce site after being a full time native affiliate and having some success with it.
The main reason is investing in building an asset and being able to run white-hat on Facebook; I saw the main road to start a dropshipping is through Aliexpress merchants, selling their products with my
How do you more experienced guys deal with these matters (refunds, customer care, shipping)? Are there more quality merchants other than Aliexpress ones granting a better user experience in terms of refunds and shipping time?
Thank you very much,
Alfo
Use a fulfillment company and get the products to US if they are proven. Aliexpress also shows you if the supplier has a warehouse in US. Look for those.
Originally Posted by pain2k
Listen to pain2k, that's what we do as well.
Dropshipping should only be used as a risk minimization strategy for testing products. There's way more value in keeping your customers happy and building rapport with them (acquiring new customers is 5-10x more expensive than monetizing existing customers).
Long-term gains over shortsighted cash-ins.
I made the mistake of shipping around 250 packages directly from vendor with epacket during peak holiday season. More that 175+ has not delivered as of yet.( Been more than 45 days )
Yep, find products fulfill first few with epacket.
Later bring products to US and use local fulfilment service.
Why use Aliexpress or do any import business in the first place?
Reason for importing can be lower cost of a product or being able to sell a locally non-existent product.
But importing comes with a lot of headaches as well, some of which you have already identified.
When starting a business, the real power lies in being able to reach buying customers. If you can get them, you've got the biggest hurdle. Being experienced in affiliate marketing, you should be able to do that.
Still, start with gathering info / knowledge first. Buy from local suppliers (some samples), get to know these suppliers, painpoints in the market, customer concerns, the supply chain. Competitor price points, quality, customer service. Buy something from them. See how they deal with things, where they buy, how fast they are etc.
With that info, decide where you will position yourself in your market and how you will be different from the rest. That will determine where you need to buy, at which quality and service levels and at which price.
This might be top of the market with local suppliers, but could be importing too.
But before you are clear about your position, the rest isn't as important as it seems.
We have a low 7 figure ecommerce turnover and none of our products come from the far east. Which works for us and our market.
If you need any additional advice / info, let me know.
In any case, good luck.
Livechat, help desk, a FT CS person, a phone #, and a way for customers to msg ur company on fb.
Our support stack is this:
Help desk = zendesk ($5/month)
Live chat = Zopim ($20/mth)
Support agents = supportninja.com (2k/month per ft agent, GREAT company)
We also have aggressively transparent refund/cancellation strategies (60day, no questions asked policy) so that we dont run into any issues with our merch processors. Hope that helps!
As johnaff said, you don't need more than that. Just refund and save the headaches and stay away from low quality products.
We do that same strategy. Small tests for new products with epacket on an unrelated store site. Don't want to tarnish the brand of the good site.
Then when we find winners we move to the primary store and import. We use freshdesk and grasshopper for VM. But don't answer calls directly unless it's escalated from an email. It just got too expensive in the end.
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