While the American market is dominated by the big names in the game like Amazon, dropshipping in Europe has many businesses sharing the market almost equally with each other. Therefore, dropshipping businesses in Europe have a much greater chance of standing out by implement industry best practices and unique strategies. Any effort made to stand out in the European eCommerce dropshipping market can turn much better results compared to the ones made in the US market.

The US market is almost completely dominated by a few big names that are unrelenting and have a lot of consumer loyalty to help them maintain and even increase the market shares that they currently have. The situation is not the same in Europe – as clarified by the various lists of notable European dropshippers available, one of which we ourselves have released.

Therefore, being an European dropshipper, it is important for you to understand how you can maximize on the opportunities that you do have and stand out from the crowd of competitors to target a specific market for a specific niche or a few focus product categories.

There are many things that contribute to the net revenue, growth rate, day-to-day sales, and the popularity of an e-commerce dropshipping platform. We will discuss the five most important factors from among those and help you understand how you can use each one to your dropshipping company’s benefit.

Website Functionality and Design

What is the thing that decides the fate of a business organization or even a product? The response that it elicits and the attention that it gains from the community that it is directed at – the end-users of the product or the customers of the business. That is what makes user-experience and user-interface optimized services gain more scope and increase in demand every day. To improve the website’s ranking, you must modify it in a way that makes it as user-friendly as possible while keeping it intact in terms of efficiency.

The web design should focus on simplicity and professionalism at the same time, being tailored to the needs of a specific audience. Web design agencies are also providing such web design services to clients that make their websites more engaging and SEO-friendly. For example, there have been multiple studies and reviews concerning the effects of loading speeds on the behavior of users, visitors, or buyers. Here’s an account of the results obtained from such a survey:

• Slow-loading websites cost the U.S. eCommerce market more than $500 billion annually
• A one-second delay in site-loading will result in a 7% loss in conversions
• 51% of U.S. online shoppers say slow site-load times are the number one reason they leave a product purchase
• Decreasing page loading time from 8 to 2 seconds can boost conversion rates by up to 74%

It is clear from the facts mentioned above that speed is the prime factor that builds or destroys the reputation of your website and attracts people to it. This is the era of speedy technology and mobile. People are continually moving up on the ladder of speed, looking for the quickest way to get a job done, and it won’t help your website to be lacking efficiency when convenience is the thing that is most prioritized and prized by your visitors and competitors.

This is an issue that can be solved by using different techniques and tools that web hosts usually provide and web development and design agencies can use to make your site load at the right time for your users to be engaged by it the moment they click on it.

SEO & Marketing

The first thing is to build a website, but once you have it – how are you going to be found by Search Engines and appear in the relevant search results when people look up services similar to yours? How do we make sure that ours is the website that appears on the top when people look for things that we have to offer? That is where SEO comes in. Search Engine Optimization is the technique – or rather, the plethora of techniques – employed to put certain websites above others in organic search results on search engines like Google.

That’s exactly what SEO techniques, strategies, and optimization can do for you. To make your platform on the web rank higher than others comparable to it in terms of market competition and scope. You can have it done by a team of professionals and experts, who gather at one platform to provide you with top-notch SEO and web design services to make your website rank higher in search results.

When it comes to SEO, everything from your websites content to its loading speed and user-friendliness matters. Search engines rank websites and web content on the basis of the attention that they gain from the target market and that is the result of the web content’s and design’s effectiveness and quality. For any corporation or even a small blogger who is looking for a way to pique people’s attention, SEO and web design are the main things that can drive customers and increase conversion.

Most of us have an urge to click at the search result that is at the top before moving onto the lower ones when we are looking for something. Therefore, something that is at the top will inevitably get more visitors and get loaded more frequently. Not only the number of visitors but also the amount of time that they spend on a certain webpage or website decides its SEO ranking.

Why are people not going far enough to actually buy your product? They look at it, they discuss it, but why don’t they buy from you? This is an obstacle that many businesses face. Learn why this happens, and how to tackle this problem. A book that has got tons of useful information inside may not sell. A car that has a great mileage may not sell. An e-commerce service or product that can produce miraculous results may not sell. Why? Buyers are increasingly inclined to make purchases under the influence of certain factors. Research is easy, and everybody wants to make an informed decision when they are spending money.

The benefits that you can deliver post-purchase may never be discovered. People may not even reach that stage where they actually take the money out of their pocket and make the purchase. They need something to motivate them through the sales funnel or sales cycle. They need an “incentive” to spend money on something. People want testimonials, they want reviews, they want ratings, they want proof.

But for you to have enough ratings, reviews, or testimonials – your business needs an initial push or kick start. Will buyers take the initiative and take the risk and start buying your product just to try it? No. Buyers don’t take initiatives unless they are incentivized by something great. Something impressive. Something that looks, sounds, feels promising. What could it be? Where do you get the chance to incentivize your buyers like that? At which point, exactly? It is when you are marketing your product, branding it, or designing it’s cover.

That is the time when you can make efforts and incentivize those first few buyers of yours, giving your product/service the kick start it needs. Well, how do we market or brand a product in an incentivizing, alluring, persuasive and compelling way? That is exactly what proven marketing techniques can do for you. Learn the art of marketing with the help of customized and unique solutions from seasoned marketing professionals. Leverage the kick start that your business requires.

Niche Selection and Product Marketing

Another important thing to do is to target a product that has a low-price tag but a high and continuously escalating sales volume for a kickstart. It is better to sell 100 pens a day than to sell three books in a month. Sales volume eventually matters more than profit margin as well as the total price of the product you are dealing in. It is always preferable to choose a niche to focus at and then choose a highly specific product in it that you can use to achieve higher sales volumes because it is of interest to a wider audience.

Marketing those products that are of interest to a wider range of customers will inevitably improve the chances of marketing success and marketing success is obviously and evidently followed by sales success and growth. Therefore, choosing the products that you want to stock and market is one of the most important decisions you can make as a dropshipper.

Cost Leadership

Cost leadership involves continuous monitoring of the profit margins, competitors’ listed prices of the same products, stock prices, discounts, and everything else related to costing and budgeting. Sometimes, reducing your profit margins by even 25% allows you to be well ahead of your competitors in terms of sales volume.

If a 75% profit margin can be maintained with 3 sales per day, then it is better than maintaining a 100% profit margin with 1 sale per day. That may sound like common sense, but it is a logic that is rarely ever implemented right by dropshippers. They don’t change the price tag at all and still expect to be preferred above others for different reasons.

The truth is that your marketing mix has to involve all the right factors and the right decisions about those factors from supply chain management to costing – for you to excel in the market and beat major competitors quickly. There is no royal road to success, and you will have to put in the required work, nonetheless.

The only difference that having all this information can make is that your efforts will be better guided and directed in the right way – focused on each one of the important aspects in the perfect proportion. You will be able to make informed, realistic decisions about what you are doing and what you can expect to achieve by it.

Website Security

As COVID-19 has impacted many aspects of the business world already, eCommerce fraud is one of the most deeply affected sides of the world of online business. The reason being that people have been left with much more free time on their hands and a lot of extra energy to waste trying all kinds of tricks. That is why eCommerce fraud seems to be increasing at a much higher pace now, and strict measures must be put into place to prevent it.

A majority of eCommerce websites use WooCommerce – a WordPress plugin that leaves many well-researched and recognized loopholes to allow many kinds of fraud even though it makes things very easy for people to integrate their websites with eCommerce.

During the lockdown caused by COVID-19, not only are users more prone to finding new ways of committing fraud, the number of online businesses is also increasing at a very fast pace. Therefore, the emerging businesses in the industry need an additional layer of protection which they appear to be lacking currently. That is why it is imperative for new tools and techniques to combat eCommerce fraud to be introduced into the market and used effectively and at a wide scale.

To avoid WooCommerce fraud, you first need to be well-informed or educated about it – how the fraudulent techniques have evolved, what tools are available to cover for those loopholes, what effect WooCommerce fraud has on businesses, what kind of psychology the modern fraudsters have, and how frequently certain loopholes are used by them to commit WooCommerce fraud.

Then you can resort to tools like the WooCommerce Antifraud plugin to protect your e-commerce platform against all kinds of potential risks and threats.