Dropshipping Secrets: 13 Things Beginners Must Know

If you’re just starting out in the world of dropshipping, knowing what you’re about to see below can make a huge difference between success and failure. So take these dropshipping secrets to your heart and remember them well.

With this in mind, let’s have a look at the top 13 dropshipping secrets for Amazon, Shopify, WooCommerce, or any other store that you may have.

Learn more: Dropshipping vs Ecommerce: What’s the Difference and Where to Start?

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Dropshipping High-Ticket Items Is 10X Better

The first of our 13 dropshipping secrets is selling high-ticket products. But why are dropshipping high-ticket items so much better? 

There are several undeniable reasons for this:

• You only need a few customers per month. When you dropship high-ticket items, you don’t need to deal with thousands of different customers and their complaints or requests every single day. Instead, you can enjoy serving 5-10 quality customers who have money to spare.

• It gives you more freedom. The ultimate goal for most of us as dropshippers is to improve our lifestyle and enjoy more freedom. Well, everything I just said above results directly into this when you dropship high-ticket items.

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Pinterest, Pinterest, Pinterest!

Why do so many dropshippers undermine Pinterest? It’s literally one of the most powerful product research and advertising tools today. 

Sure, Facebook ads for dropshipping are great and easy, but they don’t always bring you the right type of traffic early on.

Well, Pinterest is among the best at bringing highly targeted traffic at an early stage.

So, here’s why Pinterest is one of the best secrets to dropshipping success.

• It lets you quickly spot upcoming trends for various products
• Your posts can go viral and bring highly targeted traffic for free
• You can create highly engaging ads
• It offers amazing analytics for your business
• You can accurately predict if a product or niche will do well by examining pins

GUIDE: How To Sell More With Free Traffic From Pinterest for Ecommerce?

Don’t Try to Beat Offline Retailers (Because You Won’t)

Trying to compete with offline retailers will almost never work unless you have an enormous dropshipping budget and a whole marketing team behind you ready to use every branded dropshipping strategy out there.

This is one of the most important dropshipping secrets out there.

Why is this?

In short, it’s because major offline retailers will easily outperform you. They offer better prices, faster shipping, and have a reputable name behind them that does most of the work.

As a result, try selling something unique, or at least don’t sell the exact same items that most offline retailers are making money from.

Build Your Store Before Contacting Suppliers

The main reason why you need to have a fully built store before reaching out to dropshipping suppliers is to increase your success in working with them.

This is one of the best dropshipping secrets that many people overlook. You want to work with good and reliable suppliers. And, most good suppliers will only work with you if you’re serious and if you actually look like someone who can sell their products.

As a result, you need to learn how to set up your first Shopify store, implement a few branding strategies, import a few dummy products to look more authentic, and then start contacting suppliers.

Don’t Do Backward Testing

What is backward testing? 

It’s the process of doing lots of hard work building a dropshipping store and trying to sell a product and waiting to see how it does once you’re done.

This is not how you test. It will almost always result in wasted effort and a lot of wasted time.

Instead, you can do this – RESEARCH.

1. Scour social media like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok to find viral videos or ads of products that are getting tons of engagement.

2. Use dropshipping ad spy tools to discover products that are trending more quickly. This may not always be free like the first method here but it’s much, much faster.

3. Search for unique products that are selling exceptionally well on AliExpress.

4. Browse the huge winning products list on dropshipping.com.

Getting More Traffic Isn’t the Key to Success

It’s the type of traffic you get that matters, not just getting as many people as possible to visit your store every day. 

To put it differently, what would be the point of getting even 100.000 visitors per day in your online store if none of them convert? It’s completely pointless.

Now, let’s say that you get a thousand visitors into your store every day and about 10 of them convert every single day. This may be a higher conversion rate (10% compared to the average of 2.5%) but it’s still totally possible if you learn how to find winning dropshipping products.

To sum up, this would result in 10 sales every day on average. This can be even more once your ads optimize as people buy more from your store. 

After a while, you’d be getting highly targeted traffic that has high chances of converting. It’s one of the all-time best dropshipping secrets I can give you.

Winning Ad Creatives Exist

It’s not always about the product you’re trying to sell. In fact, in many cases, it’s about how and where you sell it. In other words, it’s about how you present it to the public.

What does this mean? 🤔

You must learn how to create winning dropshipping ads that will literally make the viewer say, “holy ****, I want to buy this right now”. Now, if you study some of the most viral videos out there, you’ll learn that you can create video ads like this for most winning products.

A few questions you must ask yourself after you’ve made your product ad creative are the following:

• Would I buy this product after seeing this ad?
• Does this really have what it takes to go viral?
• Is it interesting to watch from start to finish?

If the answer to all of these questions is an honest Yes, then you’ve just increased your chances of success.

💡 Pro Tip: In 2024, your best chance of going viral with your ads or posts is to learn and use TikTok marketing for dropshipping. Also, an interesting fact is that in 2024, videos are likely to stay strong and get even more popular in Facebook ads.

Target People Who Already Bought From Your Store

This is basically called re-targeting but it’s something most beginner dropshippers wouldn’t even think of doing. 

Many will say, “why would I show another ad to someone who already bought my product?”.

It’s one of the simplest secrets to dropshipping. In brief, here’s everything you need to do for this dropshipping secret to work.

1. First, you must import a few other products if you only had one before
2. Create a simple video ad offering a discount code or another enticing offer
3. Target the people who’ve bought from your store in the last month
4. Launch the ad

📝 Important: The first step is crucial here. It allows you to use the upsell and cross-sell strategy for dropshipping. It basically offers your previous customers more cool products to buy from you at a discount price for being loyal.

You Don’t Get to Keep All of Your Earnings

The average dropshipping profit margin is between 15% and 20%. A dropshipping profit is what you get to keep after all expenses have been subtracted.

To clarify, expenses include product costs, shipping costs, marketing costs, dropshipping taxes, and anything else you might be paying for to maintain your business.

As an illustration, if you make $10.000 in your first month of dropshipping, you’ll probably get to put only about $1500 to $2000 in your pocket.  

This one is kind of a bummer but it’s important to know before you plan your next trip to Dubai. Keep in mind, that your profit margin can also easily be 50%. It all depends on how you set up your business.

Finding a Winning Product Won’t Guarantee Anything

The main benefit behind winning dropshipping products is that they make your job of selling online easier. Most of them sell better, faster, and make you money without too much work.

However, you need to keep in mind that this is not always the case. If you don’t do a good job of marketing your product or you don’t create a high-converting e-commerce landing page, then you won’t have much luck.

Relying On One Sales Channel Is a Great Way to Fail

If you rely on only a single sales channel to drive traffic and get customers to buy from you, your chances of failing increase. 

Eventually, an obstacle is bound to come your way. This can be anything from a Facebook ad account getting banned, problems with your ad payments, and countless other issues. As a result, if your single source of getting traffic comes across an issue, that’s it, you’re done. 

What I would suggest is to set up a few other ways of marketing your business. They don’t have to be as impactful as your main one, but at least you won’t be dead in the water if an issue occurs.

It’s Hard to Get Rich Quick With Dropshipping

Out of all the dropshipping secrets here, this is probably the most important one.

“Dropshipping is not a get-rich-quick scheme that will make you a millionaire overnight”

This is a serious business that takes a lot of skills, patience, and knowledge. However, the best part about it is that you can learn everything about dropshipping completely free. It’s not that hard, it just takes finding the will to take that first step toward changing your life.

💡 Tip: Scour our dropshipping guides page for hundreds of free articles on everything related to the dropshipping business.

One Product Store Is a Beginner Dropshipper’s Best Friend

Instead of wasting your time and money on general dropshipping stores or even niche stores, a one product dropshipping store can make your job 10x easier.

To clarify, this is a store that literally sells only one product. 

Now, your job is to brand that product well, make it look like you’re the only store selling it, and create extremely high-quality product descriptions, images, and even videos if you find the need for it.

Summary

Use these dropshipping secrets to your advantage in order to avoid making some of the biggest dropshipping mistakes out there. 

In addition, many of these secrets to dropshipping will also benefit you when starting your store as well as when it’s time to scale.