But of an update for you guys. So with the dropshipping to me 1st then shipping to customers method I've used I have run into the sort of problems you might expect along the way. I've found that for me, my problem started to shift from (how do I get profits in?) to (how do I efficiently run the backend side of the business?). I got slammed by fraudulent chargebacks. Literally. To the tune of nearly $7K in one week alone! That s*** hurt. Thankfully there were only 1-2 orders that had actually been shipped out that I took a loss on the order + the products + the shipping fee + Shopify's $15 chargeback fee. Quite the load of bull*** right? I see you guys in here working so hard to build your stores and marketing, just to have it threatened by scamming a**holes! Really made me furious early on in April - May. So I'm going to lay out some tips for you guys to learn from and PLEASE BE AWARE OF THESE TIPS! If your business jumps in revenue this can very well happen to you as well. I'm on my 3rd merchant processor currently.
These Are The Tips NO ONE Tells You Once Your Website Finally Takes Off:
-SAVE THAT MONEY!
It's cool once you start making fast cash daily and almost alluring because you begin to feel like 's***, this money will never stop coming in because it's so easy to make!' Remember where you started! The money can and WILL stop for a variety of reasons. Our jobs as online marketers is to mitigate the bleeding and fix the problem as quickly as possible while learning from the mistake. I damn near received a death blow from my merchant processors withholding all of my money that I was generating for nearly 20 days. I was still getting lots of sales daily but now the only problem was that I was getting more and more lower on my cash. Almost to the point where I couldn't even pay for the items to be shipped to customers because my funds were being withheld. Essentially my business was being slowly strangled. Which brings me to my 2nd tip.
-DO NOT RELY ON ONLY ONE MERCHANT PROCESSOR!!!!
I was using Stripe because Shopify provides it pretty seamlessly, but once my chargeback ratio went above 1%, I was deemed a risk and all of my money was scheduled to be withheld. Most don't know this but if you get more than 1 chargeback per 100 orders processed, then you are deemed a risk. Once that number inches higher, your account will be suspended and all your hard earned money will not be released to you. To get the money back you will have to submit around 10 orders to show that you have fulfilled them successfully with tracking numbers etc. I think PayPal makes you submit 15. The random orders that they choose from are also orders that are up to 1 wk old. Meaning that if you're waiting in merchandise to arrive in USA you could be waiting a long time to submit the proper docs on those orders. I would recommend having 2-3 merchant processors. Some will give you a certain limit on how much you can process like $35K. So if you process transactions for $50K one month because you had a great month, then that will not be good. Having multiple processors enables you to spread the risk. I used PayPal but they had limited my account and are actually pretty s****y about working on the sides of businesses! I feel like they almost encourage their customers to file chargebacks.
-DON'T TRUST SHOPIFYS RISK ANALYSIS! So many times it's been absolutely wrong and I paid the price. It's not a bad tool to just view some important info like if the billing info is correct, but don't make it your sole tool to check for fraud. Tryout SiftScience, it's aggregates a SiftScore based on tons of data points to determine if the user appears high risk or low risk. They give a score of 1-100 and I'd say anything over the score of 40 I do a double check on. If it's still looking shady then I'll submit it to Riskified for a Chargeback guarantee.
-DIVERSIFY YOUR AD/MARKETING STRATEGY
I started off only messing with Instagram. Then I slowly but reluctantly got a Facebook page. I ran ads on my IG account and then ads on my FB account. The FB ads started to get more people and cheaper CPC than IG. I then started using Pinterest at the urging of another board member on this site and I was very reluctant too! But I did it, set my boards up, and have ads running now and have somewhat figured out what to do and am also driving traffic to my main site. I use Wanelo as well which has an easy plugin from Shopify and get me at least 1 new random sale every 1-2 days.
HAVE A CLEAR RETURN POLICY
Make sure your policy is on the website so customers can read it but also so you can refer to it. It's aggravating getting returns but it's part of the game.
That's really it for my tips and advice. Hope you guys don't have to invite anything like this but if you do. Omg it's a total bi*** no doubt!
I'm about to start a new push for ad sales here very soon so I can climb back up to the $55k-$65K sales months I was having. It's all doable. Just need to be smart getting there this time. As you all know $100k/mo. is the number I'm still aiming for and not stopping till I hit it. Becareful out there if your business is growing. Always going to be someone who wants to take it all away.
