Top 5 Strategies for Success with High Ticket Dropshipping

What's up guys, Trevor here with eCommerce Paradise. Today I want to talk about five things that you need to succeed with high-ticket dropshipping. If it's your first time watching one of my videos, definitely check out the subscription button. You'll be able to get lots of more content that's super helpful. So subscribe to my YouTube channel, guys. And also check out my podcast, eCommerceParadise.com slash podcast will take you right to the iTunes podcast.

And check out the blog, eCommerceParadise.com, where I post content on a weekly basis and have lots of free guides, as well as a free mini course for high ticket dropshipping. So check that out. Alright, so with high ticket dropshipping, you really have to focus on a few very important things. The number one most important thing is customer service, and just building trust with your customers.

So with high ticket dropshipping, you're selling expensive products, which means usually they're big or bulky or complicated or something like that. And so it takes more work to sell sometimes. And you know, that just means you've got to get on the phone with customers, or you got to go back and forth between customers and suppliers to find the right type of product that the customer needs. There's a lot of different things you'll need to do and you just need to be trustworthy dealer.

And so it really starts with the authorized dealer agreement. So every single supplier you work with, you're going to get an authorized dealer agreement with them to work with them. And it's basically a contract that spells out who's liable for what and what the deal is between the two parties. You'll sign it and then you'll get a price list from them and all that. And usually it includes a minimum advertised price. And by sticking to that MAP map price, you will build trust with your supplier.

And then with your customers, you usually have a low price guarantee. That means that you have the lowest price online, you'll be able to match all your competitors with that map pricing. If a supplier does not have that, then of course, you should exclude that particular brand from your low price guarantee. But the key is that with customers, you just want to provide good customer service.

Service sometimes your customers will try to take advantage of you and try to do things that you know aren't right and so you just kind of have to stand your ground sometimes and have really good firm policies but for the most part it's important that you you know just really focus on taking care of your customers when something goes wrong especially it's a good idea to really focus on taking care of them because those are the moments when your customers will

either freak out or you know be super happy with you and then refer you to their friends and all that stuff you know and leave good reviews. So it can go either way. So if something wrong happens, just try to take care of your customer because the worst thing you can do is try to charge them fees or something like that because usually they're gonna freak out and they're gonna say, they're gonna report it to their bank or something like that. You'll get a charge back and that's not good either.

So just make sure that you're just doing the right thing. Okay?

Number two is with suppliers, you've got to choose your suppliers wisely. You need to make sure that number one, that they have enough traffic and that their products are selling on your competitor's sites and make sure you do enough research. If you get a supplier on board that doesn't have products that are selling very well, then obviously you're not going to get sales and it's just going to be kind of a waste of time to onboard them to your website.

So make sure even though a supplier is willing to offer you an agreement that you only onboard them if their products are selling in the marketplace. And the way you can do that is just look at your competitor's site, go to the collection pages, the category pages and sort by best selling. And if they're not in the top like two or three pages, usually like in the top 50 to 100 products that show up, then the products probably aren't selling very well.

Or if it's a newer site, it might just be totally random because they haven't sold that many products. So I wouldn't really even look at newer sites. I would always look at either the Wayback Machine, which is archive.org, or just use like SEMrush or some SEO tool to figure out which of your competitor's sites are the oldest and have the highest domain authority, and then only use those for competitor research and just try to get the brands

that they're selling. Okay. The other thing is, you know, after you start selling a brand is if your, if your supplier takes care of you and your customers or not, because sometimes they will, sometimes they won't. The thing is some suppliers, especially with their warranty policies, when things go wrong, maybe they have problems with, you know, shipping damage or, you know, some sort of defects with their products.

If they're willing to offer return labels and reship products if they make a mistake and they take care of it right away that's great if they don't and they aren't willing to do that and you know they totally are screwing you over one way or the other as a dealer it's definitely you should consider getting rid of them taking their products off your site another thing i've found is that some suppliers they like to you know have a map price but

not enforce it and those are the types of suppliers also that i don't really like to sell because you're always going to be just like like competing with your competitors on price. And that's not the best way to compete. So those types of suppliers, you should also consider letting go. Another type of supplier is ones that charge shipping costs and maybe charge you sales tax, even though you're not in the state that it's shipping to.

And they might not even be in the state that they're shipping to, but they just want to adhere to the new rules and regulations 100%. So in other words, they're charging you sales tax when they shouldn't be charging you sales tax. And that eats out of your margin. And then you have to call the customer and explain to them somehow, for some reason, they have to pay sales tax when really they shouldn't because maybe you don't have an economic nexus in that state.

So it's a really good idea to only work with suppliers that are good, solid suppliers where their policies make sense. They're not trying to screw you over and they're not trying to make your life a hassle and they're trying to take care of you. And they refer customers to you and stuff like that. Those are the best ones to work with. Unfortunately, it's really hard to figure out which ones are like that before you start working with them.

So you just have to start working with suppliers and figure out which ones are good, which ones are bad, and then get rid of the bad ones and keep the good ones and try to work more with the good ones. Another thing is also a supplier usually has multiple products. They don't just sell one product. So a supplier will have a bigger product catalog, sometimes thousands of products. Those types of suppliers are more difficult to deal with because you have too many products to deal with.

The smaller suppliers, the ones that have like five or 10 or 20 products are much easier to deal with than the ones that have hundreds or thousands of products.

Okay. So keep that in mind too, when you're researching a niche and suppliers is to see, like get an idea of how many different types of products they have and how difficult it's going to be to, you know, to upkeep your store, upkeep pricing, upkeep inventory, you know, add new products, get rid of old discontinued products, that kind of thing. You know, just onboarding in the first place is going to be difficult when you have hundreds or thousands of product SKUs.

Another thing to consider is, you know, how many different types of customization options are there with these products. Sometimes niches with a lot of customization options are great to get into because if you already have experience selling those products, then you can be one of the best ones. And there's not going to be as many competitors when there's niches that have so many customization options, because big box stores just can't sell those products.

They would have to have their own niche store to do it. And a good example of that is safes. Safes have a ton of customization options, everything from color to the type of lock to, you know, different customizations of many different types of colors and different parts of the product, designs. You know, interior, exterior, you know, it's just, it's wild.

There's lots of different options with of safes. And so it's a good niche to get into if you have experience with those products and you're willing to dive deep into that. A lot of big box stores aren't going to be carrying safes because safes just have too many customization options. There's some types of safes they will, like the really simple home safes, maybe like the small ones, but not the big ones, not the big gun safes that have a lot of customizations options and stuff like that.

So some niches have sub niches, like a niche of like safes and security and stuff like that will have multiple sub-niches like gun safes or like safes for hunters and safes for people that have guns and things like that. Or there's going to be like jewelry safes or business safes or tons of different types of safes. So- Just consider like what you're willing to put more work and effort into, how much competition there is.

And the main thing is just really like, are big box stores able and, you know, willing and currently selling these products, you know, because it's very difficult to compete with big box stores. They have way more capital to spend on advertising and marketing and SEO. So they're always going to outrank you, you know, almost always. They have way more money to spend it in customer service and warranty support

and things like that. And so if somebody gets a product that they bought online and they don't like it, they're probably going to have a better return policy than you can have as a smaller dealer. So just keep that in mind and try to look for niches where big box stores either are not selling it or they are, but they're not very well equipped to sell it. So you can always outdo those types of people, those types of businesses.

All right. And then the next tip is to focus on SEO and conversion rate optimization from the very start. Okay. SEO is just search engine optimization, and it's where you put content on your website. site that's keyword optimized. And you have, you know, you do keyword research so you can figure out exactly what keywords you want your site to rank for. You create pages for each main high ranking keyword, lots of good content, good offers, that kind of thing.

And then, you know, you go out to the web and you try to get backlinks. You get backlinks from other blogs or, you know, maybe some marketplaces and things like that, social media sites. You just want to build a net of backlinks. Conversion rate optimization is where you are just focusing on having the best offer that anybody out there in the niche is selling. So again, it's like this starts with price. So low price guarantee is one of the best things to do.

Having a supplier that offers map pricing is great. The other thing is having a limited time sale that's going on is really good. You can have it exclusively only for email subscribers. So having a pop-up that offers like a discount coupon code in exchange for email is great. Another thing is having reviews on your website and social proof and like, how many of these products have sold, that kind of thing.

People wanna see if your site is a legitimate site. So showing them that it's legitimate is great. Trust badges like Trusted Site are also really good too. And, you know, there's lots of great techniques you can use for optimizing your offer with conversion rate optimization, you know, taking things that are already built into the product and kind of offering them as like a free gift kind of thing when they're not really a free gift, but they kind of are.

So you can just kind of put that in the forefront and make sure that the customer realizes that you have a really great offer in the form of this, but you know, it's already baked into the product and you just kind of like put a dollar value next to it, that kind of thing. It's an old marketing trick and it works great. Right.

You know, another thing is just making sure that those coupon codes are limited time coupon codes and, you know, throwing flash sales or weekend sales or, you know, seasonal sales or, you know, sales holidays like President's Day, Memorial Day sales, those types of things work really good too. And then just doing email marketing to follow up with your leads is a great way as well.

You know, going along with the customer service thing, it's always good to have the phone, the email and the live chat going because and somebody managing it all the time, because those are the things that are going to close sales. So you got to have a marketing and advertising funnel to bring in leads. And then you got to have a sales team and customer service team to close those sales and to follow up and to get those sales done.

And then to make sure that the orders get fulfilled. And then to make sure that customers are happy on the back end and anything that's get as messed up gets taken care of. So it's a it's a lot of different things going on. But it's not too difficult to figure out, you just have to, you know, have a good customer customer service mindset and sales mindset.

All right. And then as far as advertising goes, running the right type of ads will make or break your business for sure. It's a really good idea to run Google Shopping ads as well as Microsoft Shopping ads. These types of ads show up in the very top of the search engine results. And a lot of people use shopping ads to find high ticket products, you know, and shop around for the best price and the best deal for high ticket products. So it's a great place to be.

There's lots of other different types of ads you can use, but those are the main ads we use to bring cold leads in. Once you build up your audiences, then you can retarget using shopping ads as well. Maybe the person's visited your site and they go back to shop for more. You can bid higher when people then have done that because they're in your audience. There's also retargeting ads you can put on other websites like blogs and things like that and other e-commerce stores like big marketplaces.

You can show display ads that retarget people to the specific products they saw on your site. You can also run Facebook retargeting ads, things like that, but definitely run ads for people that are at the bottom of the funnel. Those are the main ads you want to bid the highest on and then kind of the middle of the funnel and then the top of the funnel. But usually for top of the funnel, you want to focus on SEO for free traffic because that traffic tends to not convert as quickly.

It takes them a lot more time usually. And so free traffic is great for top of the funnel, for middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel paid ads work fine. And what I mean by that is, you know, your keywords. So like every product is going to have a top of the funnel keyword, middle of the funnel keyword, and the bottom of the funnel keyword. The top of the funnel is going to be like the product category, like safes or business safes or gun safes. That's the top of the funnel keyword.

The middle of the funnel keyword is going to be the brand of the safe, like Amsec or Guardall or something like that. One of the big safe brands, if you're doing safes. And then the bottom of the funnel keyword is going to be one of the product specific keywords or SKUs, you know, so you would just like see on the the competitor's site, what the product model and SKU numbers are, and things like that. Those are the bottom of the funnel keywords.

And so with shopping ads, you can actually create different campaign priorities and then create negative keyword lists and link them all together properly so that it shows that you want to bid higher on bottom of the funnel keywords and middle of the funnel keywords than you do on top of the funnel keywords.

If you want more information on Google Ads setup and stuff, definitely sign up for my masterclass at ecommerceparadise.com slash masterclass, where I go into depth on all this stuff from getting suppliers, setting up a really high converting website, doing SEO and content and all that stuff to running ad campaigns, building a team, managing a team, and even eventually selling your store. I got it all in there. 35 modules of content.

It's a really, really good course. I've built it over the last five, six years.

So definitely get in there, guys. Let's talk about the last one, which is building a team. When you first start out, you can do everything by yourself, but it's going to become overwhelming once you pass maybe maybe 10, 20, 30,000 a month in sales. So what I would recommend is definitely building a team. And all that takes is hiring a full-time virtual assistant. I would recommend going to one of the full-time virtual assistant marketplaces where you can find these people.

Onlinejobs.ph works great. Also upwork.com is great as well. You can choose between a Filipino VA or an American VA or an Indian VA. I personally use Filipino VAs just because you can pay them starting at $3 an an hour, you know, work them up to four or $5 an hour, that kind of thing. They speak English. And usually you can find ones that don't have too thick of an accent. And they're, they're, you know, some are quite smart. So you really want to find the A players.

If a VA is kind of screwing up making mistakes, or is not like communicating very well, I would definitely just let them go and find somebody better. And what you got to do before you hire somebody is you got to make training and you got to make SOPs, which stands for standard operating procedure. When something happens, you do this, that kind of thing. So make documents and spreadsheets that kind of show them what they should do in each case, and then they'll be able to better do their job.

So basically an SOP for order processing, an SOP for warranty, returns, an SOP for just basic sales, customer service. I have all these in the course as well. I've built SOPs and have template spreadsheets and everything's templated out. So it's really easy for you to understand what you need to do in order to run one of these businesses and what to do in case certain things happen, because I've been doing this for the last 10, 15 years.

So I know exactly what to do in almost every instance. since, you know, so definitely check that out, ecommerceparadise.com slash masterclass. But building a team definitely is a process and it takes a lot of time. And sometimes the one thing that will make your business worth more money at the end is actually the team that you've built more than just the business itself.

So what an investor is looking at really to buy a good high ticket dropshipping store, they're looking at the team that's behind it and how they're running it and how well they run it and what type of people they are and stuff like that. If you have a really good team built out, your store can definitely be worth a lot more money.

Whereas if you don't or you don't have a team at all sometimes they're going to look at that and you know be like well it's more like buying a job not buying a business right a business that has people running it already is going to be a lot easier to deal with and to onboard and stuff like that so definitely consider building a team i would recommend getting somebody for customer service right away that's the first thing and

then getting somebody for consistent onboarding of suppliers and products and updating catalogs like inventory and pricing that kind of stuff can really help too. And then having somebody to work on SEO and also, you know, can do email recruiting for you, supplier recruiting, outreach for blog backlinks, things like that. So that's the kind of team I have built out right now.

If you guys have any needs as you know, you have a high ticket dropshipping store, but you want to get it to the next level, I can help. I provide Google ad management services. I provide SEO services for high ticket dropshipping stores and suppliers. I provide a full done for you store build service. So if maybe you have one store, but you want to build a second one or you just want to get one built in the first place, I provide that.

Ecommerceparadise.com slash turnkey is the link to go for that one and learn more about that service and what we do. The rest of the services you can see at ecommerceparadise.com. And yeah, definitely check that out, guys. And if you are looking to learn more and get more ideas, definitely sign up for my email list and get my free niches list.

I have lots of good profitable niches and I'm consistently doing niche research so you can get on my channel on YouTube and just like look at the niche research videos I've done and try to find a really good product for you, that'll work. Go to ecommerceparadise.com slash niches to get that. Thanks for watching guys. And I'll see you in the next video.