These e-commerce hacks will show you how to price your products correctly for maximum conversions, and the sale tactics you can use to get more from your customers.

Is a “Free Shipping” online store the best choice for dropshippers? Is “50% OFF” discount really works or customers are already accustomed to it? These questions and more will be answered in this week’s article so you can get the maximum from your customers!

This is the third and final part of the ultimate e-commerce hacks for dropshippers blog series which will show you how to do it like the pros. If you missed the first two parts, make sure to read them before going through this one.

Click here for part 1.

Click here for part 2.

Enjoy!

1. Know Your Margins Before Pricing Your Product!

1. Every payment processor out there and almost every platform takes a small bite from your sales. If you use PayPal to accept payments from your customers, it will take a small percentage(depends on your account) + a few cents from every order you get. Shopify too is doing the same by charging a monthly fee AND a small percentage + a few cents from every order you get.

So if a product on Aliexpress costs $7 including shipping and you plan selling it for $15 including shipping, your final profit will not be $7. Forgetting about these “hidden” fees can lead to a loss instead of a profit.

Just doubling up Aliexpress selling price is not the way and you should always take into account your monthly and commission fees.

2. Don’t expect cheap conversions… Facebook is not like it was a few years ago where you could get sales after spending fifty cents or a few dollars. The platform has changed a lot so if you’re expecting to get $2 conversions for your $20 product, it probably won’t happen(Unless of course there’s some kind of trend going on and you’re one of the first ones to sell the trending product).

In most cases, conversions will be higher so you need to price your products accordingly. If a product costs $15 + shipping, a good selling price will be $40, $50, or even $60 which will leave you with enough profit. Even if your average conversion is $15, it will leave you a few dollars profit if your product is priced for $40. And if it’s $50 or $60, then you’ll be killing it!

Pro tip: Not sure if the product will sell for a higher price?

Duplicate the sale page, keep everything as it is, and just change the price. You can create a new ad which will point to the product page with the new price, and later keep the one which performed the best.

3. Sometimes the product you’re selling is simple which doesn’t leave you too much room for profit. In this case, do everything you can to increase your AOV! Upsells, downsells, quantity discounts, scarcity, and more tricks to make your customers spend more(These will be discussed later in the article).

2. Is A Free Shipping Store Really The Best Choice For New Dropshippers?

In short: Yes. It’s no secret that customers hate paying for shipping, especially when the product is not that cheap. A customer can add $150 worth of products to his cart, but when he sees that he has to pay for shipping he’ll just leave. Even if the shipping is like $10…

Shipping often ruin the checkout flow – It’s important for us dropshippers to get a sale as fast as possible! One of the ways to achieve that is to make it clear that there are no extra fees like shipping or taxes. The customer visits our product page, sees the product price, and proceeds to checkout when he knows this is what he’s going to pay. No extra fees to make him stop and think again…

If we also charge shipping, which is usually not displayed anywhere on our product page(aside from the shipping page in the footer), the customer gets surprised by it and it ruins the “smooth” checkout flow. At this point the customer starts to think about the price and other stuff which we don’t want to happen.

So like I said, as of now, free shipping is definitely the best choice if you want to start dropshipping.

Here’s how to set up your store and offer free shipping for products you want:

1. Go to Shipping settings in your store(General -> Shipping & delivery):

2. From there, edit the existing general Shipping rates or create a new profile.

I prefer creating a new profile and just dropping there each product I’m testing.

3. When creating a new profile, set the name to Free Shipping or to Free Insured Shipping which sounds better.

You will have to choose the country/countries you’re shipping to when creating your profile. Base it on order price, write “0” in minimum price and keep the maximum price blank. When finished, click on Done and it should look like this:

All’s left to do is drop the current product you’re testing right now and the next ones if you want to offer your customers “free insured shipping”.

Important:

Sometimes lowering the price and adding a small shipping fee can work much better. It usually works better when selling cheap products so instead of selling a product for $19.99 + free shipping, you can try and sell it for $16.99 and $2.99 shipping.

This happened some time ago when I was selling a pretty cheap product which didn’t do so well for $20 + free shipping. When I tested the same product for $16.99 + $2.95 shipping, the conversion were much higher by far!

Note: I did not edit the original product price but duplicated the same product page again with a different price. This way I could compare both prices and see which one worked best ?

3. For How Much Should You Sell Your Product?

If your product is too expensive, you will get no sale no matter how good your ad or your product. If your product is too cheap, people will be afraid it’s of low quality and they’ll leave without buying. So if you have no experience, my tip is to spy on other successful stores and copy their prices.

If you’re on Ecomhunt, you can get a safe price suggestion for each winning product we recommend.

If you want to price it for more but not sure if you should, you can always check what other sellers are doing by checking their stores. Click on the “Hunt these stores” button and you’ll get a list of stores that sell the same product. You can compare the selling prices and adjust your price accordingly.

You can also price your product based on its reviews – If you find the product to explode on Aliexpress with a lot of good photo reviews, that just shows the product is of high quality. This means you can easily double, triple, and even quadruple the price and easily sell it.

Remember to check what others are doing or ask someone with more experience just to be sure the price is right.

Discounts:

One of the most popular discounts to display on your product page is 50% OFF. To some of you, it may sound a bit too much but the fact is that it’s working great! If you want to sell the product for $49.99, the “original” price should be $100.

The discount should be attractive enough so don’t go offering 10% OFF because this will just make you look cheap… Some dropshippers thought 50% OFF may feel like a trick but this isn’t the case at all.

4. Countdown Timers, Limited Stock Bar, Do These Scarcity Tactics Really Work?

These scarcity tactics are designed to make our customers more willing to buy our product by creating a sense of urgency. It can be a “limited time deal” that ends in 30 minutes, a “reserved order” that lasts only 10 minutes, or a limited stock counter.

These and more scarcity tactics do work really well BUT you shouldn’t activate them all at the same time – You have to use just the right amount for your customers to believe it and for your sale page to look legit.

If you’re selling a product with 50% OFF + Free Shipping deal, then a simple countdown timer on your product page(on cart page too) is enough. Adding Stock counters, and some other social proof popups will make your page look spammy and cheap.

If you’re selling a premium product, it’s better to keep your product page clean. Adding timers and other scarcity features will make your high quality product look cheap and it will lose all it’s magic in your customer’s eyes. People expect to see some sort of deal(like 20% off), but if they see a circus of timers and number they’ll just leave without buying.

Pro tip:

To save some money, search for apps that have free plans like the app above or Ultimate Sales Boost app(I personally use this one). These apps offer A LOT in their free plans so save your money and purchase the premium features after you make some sales.

5. How To Get More From Your Customers?

It doesn’t matter if it’s a one-product store or a general store, you ALWAYS have to look for a way to increase your average order value(AOV). This so we can profit more especially when the ad costs are rising every year.

Being a successful dropshipper isn’t an easy task and it requires a lot of things to go just perfect… You can have a professional video ad that goes viral, but your Shopify store isn’t that well optimized which makes your conversion rate pretty low. So if you can increase your AOV, this might keep you profitable and you won’t have to stop selling.

How to increase your Average Order Value?

1. Bundles – Offer another product that goes really well with the one you already sell for an additional discount. A big mistake new dropshippers do is to offer random “HOT” products as a bundle which just slows down the customer and makes him think. The chances of a customer taking this bundle are EXTREMELY low so if you don’t have a related product to offer, it’s better to just keep it clean.
2. Quantity discounts – Offer an additional discount if a customer decides to buy more than one piece of the same product. If you think your customers might need more than one item of the product you’re selling, then always offer quantity discounts.
3. Upsells – Offer an extra product for a discounted price. It can be on your product page(kinda the same as a bundle), or on your cart page. The most important thing is to offer a related product which goes well with the one your customer is already buying. Important: The best kind of upsell is a one-click post-purchase upsell. When a customer already paid for his order, just before he’s transferred to the thank you page, a new product pops up and he can purchase it with just 1 click. There are apps that can do that but it requires some work to get it working on your store.

There are a few more methods like offering “expedited” or “insured” shipping on the checkout page which can add a few more bucks, but I personally prefer keeping the checkout flow clean. If my customer is already checking out, I don’t want anything to stop him from buying!

Pro tip:

Avoid using apps that require the customer to manually add the product to his cart for the discount to work. For example: Apps that offer quantity discounts only if a customer manually adds more than one item to his cart. Instead, it should be a button(like in the picture above).

To Sum It Up:

This article should help you deal with the small issues that pop out when finishing your dropshipping store. Stuff like pricing which is something so small but can have HUGE impact on your sales if you do it wrong. Or scarcity tactics, which if done wrong, can have a big impact on how your store looks in your customers eyes.

I hope you liked the third part of this blog series!

Good luck.

Struggling to find good products to sell? Not sure who’s your target audience? Tired of losing money on products you were sure were “winners”?

Then Ecomhunt is what you need! Find hot winning products that are added daily, spy on their ads & stores and import them into your store in 1 click and Start Selling Today!

Must Read Articles:

• 3 Important Things You Can Learn & Discover From A Viral Facebook Ad
• 5 Shopify Apps Every Dropshipper Must Have In 2020
• This Winning Product Was Posted Less Than 3 Weeks Ago And Now It’s Exploding In Sales!

These e-commerce hacks will show you how you can improve your online store’s speed manually or by using automatic apps, and how to locate unseen problems on your store so you don’t lose any sales.

Welcome to the second part of the ultimate e-commerce hacks for dropshippers blog series which will show you how to do it like the pros. The second part is all about improving your online store speed and locating problems for you to not lose any sales. The example will be shown on a Shopify store, but can be replicated on every online store no matter the platform.

If you missed the first part, you can read it by clicking here.

Enjoy!

Running a successful dropshipping store isn’t an easy task… If you want to make sales, your ad, product, and store need to be perfect. If you miss just a single detail, there’s a chance you will lose sales. But there are some things that customers simply don’t tolerate, and in this case you will get no sales at all!

Stuff like slow loading speed which hold your customers from viewing your product, will quickly push them away from your store. So before you run any ads to your store, you have to make sure the loading speed is normal.

So just follow my tips below to check your store speed and improve it if needed.

Before We Begin… Beware of GIFs!

Before I go into explaining how to check your site’s speed and how to improve it, I want to first talk about GIFs. GIFs, as you all know, are these short animated pictures that almost every dropshipper out there is placing in his/her product page.

Using GIFs in your product page description is a great way to show the product’s features, and make the product page look more appealing to the eye. Sometimes you want to cover some extra features that weren’t show in the original video ad, or show different variations of the product, so adding 2-3 GIFs instead of multiple pictures(or more text) is a great solution.

BUT sometimes things don’t go as planned and the GIFs you have added to your product page make it load slowly. This issue is very common and the problem is that it can be easily missed, especially if you’re a beginner.

At first, the uploaded GIFs cause no issues at all and the product page, once published, is loaded normally at a normal speed with all GIFs working as intended. Then a day or two after that, when you already started driving traffic, you suddenly realize that some of the GIFs are loading slowly or don’t work at all.

When some of your GIFs doesn’t load at all, it makes your product page look unprofessional. When your GIFs cause the whole page to load slowly, this is already a bigger problem which can cause even the most passionate customer leave your store without buying…

So before adding any GIFs to your product page, here’s a few tips to do it the right way:

1. Upload your own GIFs – Don’t add GIFs from external links like Giphy and others. These GIF files can be suddenly blocked which will stop them from displaying on your site. Or a sudden server issue can make them load slower than usual, thus making your whole product page load slower than usual. Create your own GIFs, and upload them manually.

2. Keep them short – You just showed people a whole ad about your product so keep your GIFs short. Up to 5 seconds max per GIF is more than enough… And of course the obvious reason: The longer it is, the more time it will take to load.

3. If it’s too heavy, resize it – There are plenty of websites out there that can optimize your GIFs online. If it takes too much time to load, reduce the file size for it to load faster.

4. Check your Shopify apps load speed too – Sometimes your GIFs can make your Shopify apps load slower than usual. It can be a scarcity timer app, or one that just adds some trust badges to your page, which work fine up until you add some GIFs to your product page. The app features then load with a big delay which isn’t good… Always check if your Shopify apps load normally after adding some GIFs to your product page. If they load slower than usual, you can either fix the GIFs or remove them completely.

5. Don’t use GIFs at all – I personally don’t use GIFs in my product description and prefer to use text + HQ pictures only. I already showed everything about the product in my video ad so high quality pictures + text on my product page is enough. And I also don’t have to worry about loading speed or other issues.

Now that I’m done explaining about GIFs, we can finally move on and talk about store speed testing and optimization(if needed).

How To Check Your Online Store’s Loading Speed?

The first way is to use websites like GTmetrix and Google’s PageSpeed Insights where all you need is to type your store URL and their system will analyze it for you. These services also check if your images need some optimization, and look for JS and CSS code issues.

So in the end, the final report will look like this:

This might scare you and I’m sure most of you will have no idea what it means and what to do after the report… So don’t do anything rash like deleting bunch of code lines or removing images. At Ecomhunt, we’ve reviewed thousands of online stores and in most cases the loading speed was normal.

Shopify doesn’t limit your store’s bandwith in anyway and they host your online store on fast, global servers. This means that your store will load fast, and your customers won’t have any issues browsing your store.

Still, there are some cases that can make your store load slower than average:

1. Installing private themes – Shopify theme store isn’t the only place that sells themes you can install on your online store. There are other theme marketplaces, like themeforest & others, that aren’t connected to Shopify where you can buy private themes and install them on your store. These can be not well optimized and thus cause your store load slower than usual, so to avoid that just choose themes from Shopify’s theme store.
2. Loading your store with Shopify apps – Even if the app is on Shopify’s app marketplace, this doesn’t mean it can’t slow down your store. When you install a new app on your store, it adds custom code to work properly. This custom code can sometimes make your store load slower and if you bombard your store with a lot of apps, it’ll definitely slow it down. Keep your store clean and install only the apps you absolutely need. If you want to experiment by installing a bunch of apps, open a new store and do it from there.
3. Installing private apps – Shopify allows its store owners to publish and install private apps. Same as with private themes, you can simply install a private app and start using it on your store with no limitations. Install only if you must and make sure you know the developers behind it.
4. Customer internet connection & device – Your store load speed also depends on your customer’s internet connection. If he has a slow connection, your store will load slowly for him no matter how well optimized it is. It can be also a slow device issue where it will take him forever to load your store… So if one customer contacts you about your store speed, it doesn’t mean it’s the same issue with everyone else.

Another issue is with badly optimized images you use on your store – From banner images to product images, these need to be compressed for your store to load fast. Like I said before, most of the times there weren’t any speed related issues when we reviewed the stores of our Ecomhunt users.

But when it comes to images, there were a lot of stores that needed some optimizing… Even if your store loads fast, you should always strive to make it load faster to increase your overall conversion rate.

Take for example Walmart – They found out that for every 1 second improvement in page load time, conversions increased by 2%. And plenty of other examples from big companies out there on how the conversion increased by reducing page load speed.

So how can you optimize the images on your store?

1. Do it manually with services like TinyPNG – TinyPNG allows you to optimize PNG and JPEG files by compressing them. You can use this service to compress your product pictures before uploading them to Shopify.
2. Use a Shopify app – Apps like AVADA SEO Image Optimizer OR TinyIMG SEO Image Optimizer can do it for you automatically and in 1 click optimize all your store’s images. These apps also improve image-related SEO, and do some more auto optimizing on your theme. Instead of doing it manually, you can use one of the apps to automatically optimize everything for you 🙂

Optimized images will make your store load faster, offering your users a better shopping experience!

Now that you know how to check your store’s loading speed and how to improve it, it’s time to check what your users doing on your store. If we can see exactly what they’re doing and how they interact with it, we can then improve it.

Introducing Hotjar – See What Visitors Are Really Doing On Your Store

Hotjar is a wonderful tool any store owner must have installed! This tool saved me at least twice by showing me an issue my users were having with one of my Shopify apps and by showing me an Add to Cart bug that was killing some of my sales.

Hotjar lets you record exactly what visitors are doing on your store, both on desktop and mobile devices, so you can monitor them and hopefully find a way to improve your store. For example, if you’re advertising your store with Influencers, you can check what products they click the most on your front page. Or just check the heatmap to see where most of your visitors look and click.

So if you know where most of the visitors lands on, let’s say it’s the “shoes” category on your front page, then you can expand it to show more shoes on the front page. Or if you know what product most of your users click on, you can add a special discount to convert more people into paying customers.

But maybe the most important role of Hotjar, in my opinion, is to find problems/bugs that can cause customer to leave without buying. I had 2 cases where Hotjar saved my ass*(excuse my french) and one of them would never be found without Hotjar.

So the first issue I had is with one of my installed apps that allowed file upload, in my case pictures, so I can later customize the product and send the ready product to my customer. The product was great, the audience was really passionate, but for some reason my conversion rate was pretty low with a lot of abandon carts…

When checking the recordings on Hotjar, I quickly noticed the issue was with how the uploaded files were displayed both on my product page and the cart page.

This is how the uploaded file was displayed:

A customer who clicked on the Choose File button and uploaded his picture, saw only the file name as a line of text. When I tested it, I didn’t see any issue and was pretty happy with how the app uploads the product. I found it very simple and understood the file I chose was uploaded successfully.

But my customers thought differently… Once uploaded, they expected to see some sort of preview. Some of them clicked on the button again just to be sure they uploaded to correct photo. This prolonged the checkout process and only confused my customers.

On the cart page, the uploaded file name was clickable and some of my customers just had to click it again to be sure it’s the correct picture. In some cases, after opening the picture on their phones and clicking back, they just existed my store(I could not see that but I figured out this is what happened, because once they clicked on it the recording ended).

I then made a simple decision to delete the app I was using and install one that won’t confuse my customers. The app I installed is the only app from all the apps I checked back then that did exactly what I needed.

First of all, it displayed the uploaded picture like this(both on product and cart pages):

Now my customers could finally see a preview of the picture they uploaded and they didn’t have to double or triple check it again. Once they clicked on the picture, it opened up in a small window to keep my store open in the background so they don’t accidentally leave my store. This app also had a much better upload interface, I think the best one from all the apps out there.

A lot of confusion gone and I instantly saw an increase in my conversion rate – The customers easily uploaded their pictures and I was making some good sales.

Just in case, the good upload app I am using is Upload Fields by UploadKit.

The second issue Hotjar has helped me to discover was an Add to Cart bug where it was adding x2 of the original product. If a customer was trying to purchase only one necklace, it was showing 2 necklaces when he was already on the cart page.

This may seem as a small issue where the customer needs to just simply remove one of the necklaces but it left some of them confused instead. Some who tried to remove one necklace didn’t manage to do it properly and just hit the return button. Some were angry(I guess) because they thought this was a maneuver to pull more money out of their pockets.

This bug wasn’t there when I checked from my PC and phone so it was a problem on some other devices. Eventually it’s a bug that needed to be fixed and thanks to checking the recordings on Hotjar, I managed to find it and later fix it(This was a custom product page provided by a private app – Chances of something like that happening or normal themes are zero).

So now that you’ve seen how important Hotjar is, here’s a few tips to get you started with it:

1. Use the free, basic version – It costs absolutely nothing and requires no credit card to start using Hotjar for free. It’s limited to 2,000 pageviews a day which is enough if you’re only starting your dropshipping journey.

You can record a maximum of 300 recordinsg(200 after the first 300) and if you want to record more, you’ll have to delete the old ones completely. There’s also a very simple heatmap report for your store which I find enough for beginners.

2. Don’t skip recordings – You may find it boring a bit because nothing really happens, but there can be a bug when using a specific device so if you skip some recordings you may miss it.

3. Check your store’s heatmap – It always helps to see which pages most of your visitors click and where do they stop scrolling. It can be that most of them don’t scroll down too much so you have to make sure all the needed information is visible on top. If you’re using influencers to drive traffic, it’s important to know how visitors behave on your front page and on what products they click. Sometimes a product that you thought isn’t the best can be the one that draws the most attention.

4. It’s super easy to install – No need to edit existing codes and you’re only required with a simple COPY-PAST for Hotjar to work. If the Shopify installation guide on Hotjar seems difficult, you can always ask someone on Fiverr to do it for you. $5 or a maximum of $10 for this really simple task.

There are also other apps like Hotjar out there but I have no experience with them so I can only recommend this one.

To Sum It Up:

Follow this article’s tips to finally end the worries about your store’s loading speed, and most importantly to help you to locate any issues or bugs you have on your store. Then you can be finally sure your store is bug free and runs as it should.

I hope you liked the second part of this blog series!

Good luck.

Struggling to find good products to sell? Not sure who’s your target audience? Tired of losing money on products you were sure were “winners”?

Then Ecomhunt is what you need! Find hot winning products that are added daily, spy on their ads & stores and import them into your store in 1 click and Start Selling Today!

Must Read Articles:

• The Ultimate E-Commerce Hacks For Dropshippers – Optimizing Your Shopify Store For Conversions (Part 1)
• 3 Important Things You Can Learn & Discover From A Viral Facebook Ad
• This Winning Product Was Posted Less Than 3 Weeks Ago And Now It’s Exploding In Sales!