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[MUSIC PLAYING] COREY FERREIRA: There are a lot of little things and nuances that happen when running our dropshipping store using Oberlo. My goal now is to cover as many of them as I can in this module. This includes going through some of the settings within Oberlo, as well as optimizing your store for success. The first thing is to price products appropriately. So consider pricing your products at about twice the cost.
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Shooting for a 50% margin will make running the business worthwhile as well as cover for marketing expenses. Oberlo recommends 200%, when possible. I'd much rather price my product too high than too low when I'm starting out. Products with prices that seem too good to be true can hurt conversions. This is why perceived value is so important. Next, let customers know about delivery times.
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It's a good idea to include in the product page, or elsewhere on the store, that your customers may need to wait at least 20 days, depending on the supplier, for their order to arrive. Since most suppliers in AliExpress are located in China, shipping times can be longer than average. Next, use an order tracking app. With longer shipping times than most people are used to, you'll often receive emails from customers asking where their purchase is.
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Use an order tracking app from the Shopify app store to keep your customers up to date with the status of their purchase. This will give them peace of mind, as well as make it easier for you to address these questions for your customers. Next, offer free shipping. This can become one of your competitive advantages. So I highly recommend offering free shipping to your customers by taking advantage of the free and low cost shipping methods offered by many suppliers on AliExpress.
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It's a strong value proposition that you should proudly display anywhere you can. Stick it to the top of your store, within the product page, and even at checkout. Next, offer returns and refunds. So there are two scenarios where you might want to give a customer a refund and have them return a product. The first is if the customer receives the purchase and the product is either damaged, missing, or the order is wrong. In this case, I complain to the supplier, they refund me, and I refund the customer.
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No return is necessary. The other scenario is the customer receives the item and they're simply not happy. If we offer a money back guarantee, we're obligated to offer the customer a return. It's up to you whether or not your store offers this, but I highly recommend it. When a customer isn't happy, I don't want to keep their money. Plus, a money back guarantee is another great value proposition to display on our product pages.
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It transfers the risk to us and can help increase our conversions. The question you might be having at this point is, OK but where does the customer return the product? Well it won't be back to the supplier. Most suppliers will not accept returns. In these cases, I would have the customer return the product to my personal address or a PO box I set up for the business. What do I do with the product after?
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I keep it, I give it to friends, or I send it to influencers to take photos of themselves using it. Next, replace products that sell out or get deleted from AliExpress. Once in a while, products in AliExpress get deleted or sell out. If the product you're selling-- or worse, your best selling product-- it can cause a panic. Fortunately, many suppliers sell many of the same products. So finding another supplier for your product is generally not a problem.
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Even more conveniently, Oberlo allows you to override products. This means it will sync up all orders for that product with a new supplier. So when looking at my products within Oberlo, you'll see an option under Action called Override this Product. It will then prompt you for an AliExpress link to the product you want to override, and then from here you can choose what else you want to replace-- such as variance or images-- before pushing it to your shop.
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You'll even have the chance to replace any pending orders with your new supplier. Next, create an order note that's sent out to all suppliers. When fulfilling orders on AliExpress, you'll have the opportunity to leave a note for your supplier. Here you can ask them to not include any invoices or promotions in the package. Instead of manually filling this out every single time, Oberlo can do this for you.
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So within Oberlo, under Settings and Suppliers, you'll see the option to add your custom note. Here's mine, "Ship with EPACKET only! We're dropshipping. Please no invoices or promotions!" Next, ePacket shipping only. As I mentioned earlier in this module, there is an economical, fast, and reliable way to ship packages from China to around the world. It's called ePacket.
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As the name implies, the shipping service was designed for e-commerce to make it more affordable and quicker for consumers to receive their purchases from online stores and marketplaces that shipped out from China and Hong Kong. So this was a deal created between USPS and eBay China back in 2011. They started off with the United States, and has since expanded to 30 countries. EPacket delivery gives customers end-to-end tracking at no additional cost.
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Allowing them to easily monitor and locate their package on official websites such as EMS and USPS. Any undeliverable mail is returned for free as well, which means merchants will have no issues refunding customers that never receive their purchase. What this all means for you, is that you get an affordable shipping option that arrives to customers within 12 to 20 days that can be tracked as soon as it leaves China.
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And this is why I recommend only adding products to your store from suppliers that offer ePacket shipping. Especially if you're targeting a country that supports ePacket such as US, Canada, Australia, and the UK. Lastly, go through all the settings within Oberlo. I highly recommend going through every single available option made available to you within Oberlo.
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So let's go through them together. First, under Settings we see Shop settings. Within Shop settings we see the General tab. And I recommend enabling Notify customers about order fulfillment. I also recommend adding a custom shipping tracking URL if you're using an order tracking app, like I suggested earlier. Under Auto updates, we can choose what Oberlo does when a product disappears, when a variant disappears, and when a cost or inventory changes.
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I personally have these all set to do nothing, but to notify me. I don't want Oberlo to mess with my products or inventory. Especially when I'm paying for traffic to these products. If a product is removed, I can also replace that supplier later even if I continue getting orders for it. Back to Settings, we see a few more options on the side. First go through Global pricing rules. Global pricing rules makes it easier to automatically price products when we're importing dozens into our store at a time.
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First, I recommend Assign cents. This ensures all the prices for imported products are consistent. They should all end in the same number, whether that's $0.99 or 00, is up to you. Next you might want to set up Automatic pricing rules. It's not required, but it's nice when you're importing many products and don't want to manually set the price for all them.
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I generally recommend that the lower the price, the higher the markup. For example, $0 to $10 USD, 6.5% markup. $10.01 to $30, 5.5% markup. And so on. Next, let's click on Suppliers. Here we should set the default shipping method as ePacket, override the phone number with our own, and add a custom note, like I suggested earlier.
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Next, Reporting allows you to set how frequently you will receive sales reports via email from Oberlo. You can also choose to disable this if you wish. Next within Other, set a Reply to email address. I recommend a support email. And set your time zone, the same one you use on your store, to match up reporting of sales. OK. We're all set up and now we're ready to learn about order fulfillment within Oberlo.
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I'll see you next lesson. [MUSIC PLAYING]