For e-commerce starters who own small drop-shipping business, the upcoming holiday season is a good chance to expand the business. From Halloween to New Year, it’s the most important months of a year. According to 2015 U.S. Census data, almost 20 % of annual sales for some retailers happen during this period. There are a lot of things can be done to push your business to next level in this holiday season.
Send gift packs.
One of the most important steps of expanding a small drop-shipping business is creating a good brand image. Sending gift packs during holidays can convey the image of thoughtful and bond with consumers, which will emotionally make your business distinctive from competitors. Gift packs can contain promotional items such as holiday gifts, gift cards, thank you cards, free samples, coupons, etc. Although consumers will love the gifts, asking drop-shipping suppliers to put multiple items in a package seems impracticable, most of them don’t have the time or professional packing skill. Not only that, the gifts and products may be from different suppliers, and it will be harder to manage the inventory.
This is the situation when the business owners need kitting service. Kitting service means putting multiple products in one box and send them as a pack. It requires packing skills, effective inventory management and optimized manual operation process. Only dedicated fulfillment centers like ChinaDivision are capable of doing them well, especially in peak season during holidays.
Order in bulk, keep some products in stock.
It is known that drop-shipping is money saving because it doesn’t require inventory. But no product in stock may become a big disadvantage during the holiday season. When the long awaited big amount of orders come to you during Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year, etc, stock products will speed up the order processing and give you a head start. Not only that, ordering products in bulk also increases profits because wholesale prices are more discounted. (drop-shipping business) If you haven’t stock enough products for the Christmas sale, it’s still not too late to do it now. ChinaDivision provides 90 days free warehousing service, long enough for every small business owner to be prepared for all the holiday orders.
Improve the after-sale service to delight the consumers.
The holiday season is also a good opportunity for small e-commerce business to stand out of the crowd by providing good after-sale services.
Track all the orders. The holiday season at the end of the year is the traditional rush hour of global logistics, shipping delays and parcel lost happen more often than usual.(drop-shipping business) So it’s essential to provide the tracking numbers on time and keep an eye on the shipping status, it helps the business owner to solve shipping problems in the first place and shows the consumers a professional attitude.
Provide easy and fast return/exchange service. Explain the return/exchange process clearly in the return policy, it will really speed up your after-sale process and make the consumers place order without worries.
Sync the data to update the order status on time. As I said above, it’s essential to update tracking numbers on time. In fact, besides tracking numbers, order processing status and inventory changes also need to be updated in real time. It’s better to sync all the data automatically, or you have to spend a lot of energies&time on dealing with numbers.(drop-shipping business) ChinaDivision has developed order fulfillment software for Shopify, OpenCart, Woocommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, eBay, etc. The easy-to-use apps/extensions are good helpers during holiday seasons, which avoids data mistakes and update delay.