How to grow your dropshipping business with new markets and strategies

May 13 2021 | PayPal editorial staff

You’ve chosen your products and set up your ecommerce store. Now, how do you grow your new dropshipping business? Steve Tan discusses marketing and expanding into new international markets in his latest videos.
Don't miss the first two parts of our dropshipping series: How you can reach the world with a dropshipping business and How to set up your dropshipping business.

As with any business, growing your dropshipping business is a combination of getting – and keeping – the basics right while adding new strategies that help you build on a solid foundation.
 

Maintain a healthy seller profile.

Having a healthy seller profile is one of the basics for any ecommerce business. As Steve Tan says,

“The last thing you want to happen is getting limitations on your PayPal account while you’re scaling your business,”

A poor seller profile can lead to funds being temporarily unavailable for withdrawal from your PayPal account. This makes it difficult to pay for product or marketing campaigns to grow your business further.

To prevent this, read the PayPal Online Sellers Best Practice Guide, available on our dedicated dropping site. It contains information on reducing customer disputes and chargebacks (a common cause of poor profiles) along with other guidance to help your business run smoothly.
 

Invest in customer service and support.

When you run a dropshipping business, customer support is one of the few areas within your control. It can be an important differentiator that sets you apart from your competitors, so make it easy for customers to contact you with any questions or concerns. Consider offering live chat or using a chatbot on your site and make sure you set a service level to ensure all queries are dealt with in a reasonable time, ideally less than 24 hours.

Common complaints such as shipping times and product quality can often be avoided completely by having accurate information and descriptions prominently displayed on your site.

With these basics in place, you can begin to add new target markets and marketing strategies.

As Steve says, it’s a good idea to “focus on growing one traffic channel before going on to the next one.” That way, you can understand which approach is working best for your business.
 

Explore new international markets.

Many dropshippers focus only on the US or the larger, English-speaking markets but, as Steve says, there so many other markets you can target and these often have less competition.

To help discover international opportunities in other key markets around the globe, and to understand the cultural and seasonal nuances that will help you connect with buyers in these markets, you can download a copy of PayPal’s recent Borderless Commerce Report.

You may also find our ebook How to Sell Internationally to be a useful additional resource.
 

Reach new customers with targeted ads and marketing.

In this video, Steve describes his top 4 strategies for reaching new customers: Facebook ads, Google Shopping, influencer marketing and SEO.
 
 

Turn browsers into buyers with SMS and email marketing.

Only 1-3% of visitors to your site will be buyers,1 on average. The rest will browse and leave. Some customers may purchase once but forget to come back again.

Email marketing and SMS marketing can be powerful tools for building a following of loyal, repeat-purchasing customers. If you use an ecommerce platform for your store, you even find that email and SMS marketing tools available as a simple “bolt-on” service.

In the last of his video series, Leap Vista CEO Steve Tan describes 5 strategies, like email and SMS marketing, that you can use to plan for future growth.
 

If you’d like to learn more about creating your own marketing strategy, read our BRC article, How to have a winning online marketing strategy.
 

Grow your dropshipping business with PayPal

The PayPal dropshipping site is a useful, one-stop resource for growing your dropshipping business.

As well as our PayPal Online Sellers Best Practice Guide, there’s valuable information on preventing fraud, streamlining your processes, and building your business.

You can find the PayPal Dropshipping site, here.
 
1 Econsultancy (2018), What is a good ecommerce conversion rate?, https://econsultancy.com/what-good-ecommerce-conversion-rate-average/
 
The contents of this site are provided for informational purposes only. The information in this article does not constitute legal, financial, IT, business or investment advice of any kind and is not a substitute for any professional advice. You should always obtain independent, professional accounting, financial, IT and legal advice before making any business decision.

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