 If you're looking to get started in the dropshipping game, or if you've already started, then you've probably noticed that it comes with its own unique set of challenges, a lot of unique challenges, some that you won't necessarily find in any other business model. Yes, very true. But don't you worry because in today's video, we're going to be covering the top 10 most common challenges that typically arise when somebody starts dropshipping. Of course, we're not just going to leave you hanging there. We're also going to go ahead and give you a few different solutions that you can use to overcome these challenges. So you can get started on a strong foot. And isn't that so very exciting? Now, even if you are a veteran in the dropshipping game and you've been around for a while, some of these challenges might still arise for you. So it's definitely worth your while to check this video all the way through. Now, before we do go ahead and get started, if you all want a little bit more information on some of the different topics that I'm going to be covering today, then just go ahead and check out the description down below. There's going to be a link to a relevant article down there. Also, I want to know what your biggest challenge has been starting dropshipping. Have you started dropshipping? What challenges have you come across? What are the biggest challenges you've had to face? What's one challenge that you think could pose a problem? What could potentially stop you from starting your dropshipping business? Let me know down in the comments below. I would love to hear your thoughts on this. And with that, let's go ahead and get started. The first challenge that we're going to cover today is how hard it could potentially be to start building brand awareness. As dropshippers, we are going to be selling pretty much mass manufactured products, products that anyone has access to sell. And because of that, building a brand around our store could potentially pose a problem. So when two, three, four, 50 different stores have the same exact product, it's kind of hard to build a brand around that product, specifically because everyone's going to be selling it. It could be pretty hard to stand out with the same exact products that everyone is selling. But there are a few different things that you can do to help you actually build a brand. Now, one of the first and most important things you can do is actually build a customized website for your brand. Don't make a generic. Don't start a generic store. Start a store based around your brand name with your brand goals in mind. Make sure that everything falls in line from the logo to the colors to the product and niche. Everything has to fall in line with your brand identity. Aside from that, you also have to focus on your marketing. So when you start marketing your products, make sure you have your brand name behind that. Try taking custom pictures, try doing custom videos for your products, everything is going to add to building brand awareness. There's also private label and white label dropshipping. Now, when it comes to private label dropshipping, essentially what happens is you get your products customized, you get your packaging customized, and the only person that's going to be able to sell this product is you. Now, when it comes to white label dropshipping, these are pretty much going to be generic products that everyone has access to. But you can find suppliers that offer customization on white label products, in which case you can ask them to start including your brand colors or simply your logo in its packaging. This way, even though the item itself isn't necessarily customized, the packaging will be. So that way whenever your customer receives a package, the first thing that they're going to see is your brand and your logo. One thing that I cannot stress enough when it comes to building brand awareness or just ultimately trying to build your own brand is not to be too generic with your products. Don't try to sell anything and everything that everyone is selling, because then it's going to start to get a bit more complicated to actually focusing on these different products and start to brand them, start to make them unique and start to make them your own. Now, the next most common challenge that you're going to come across is probably the most famous one that dropshipping is known for. And that is it's hard to find reliable suppliers. Now, I have to disagree with that. Maybe two or three years ago, that was the case. But in today's day and age, in my opinion, it's actually harder to come across bad suppliers than good suppliers now. Coming across a good supplier is extremely easy nowadays. So get this out of your mind, stop thinking that it's hard to find good suppliers, because really, it's not. It's a lot easier than it's ever been. And nowadays, most suppliers are trying their best to be able to actually meet the customer's demand or the dropshippers demand. With that being said, though, there are some bad suppliers out there. There's a few that are not really reliable. And those are the ones that you want to avoid. So what you need to do is you need to know what to look for when you're looking for a reliable supplier that ships out quality items quickly. So the first thing that you need to start looking out for when choosing your suppliers is going to be reviews. Reviews are going to be the most important thing that you need to look out for. Now, when you are reading reviews, be a little bit weary of what you're actually reading. If you start to read different reviews on either a supplier or a product itself, that's very generic. So let's say there's an LED dog collar, and you start reading through all the different reviews, and they simply say, I love it. My customer loved it. My grandson loved it. My dog loves it. This is a great product. We'll buy again. Reviews like that are very generic. And those are also really easy to fake. What you want to do is you want to look for specific reviews, either product specific or supplier specific reviews. And if you can find some with pictures, even better social proof is everything. So what you want to look for is instead of I love this product, you want to look for somebody that says something along the lines of my dog loved this LED collar, he didn't find it uncomfortable. My cousin loved the collar that I purchased for his dog. It makes it a lot easier for them to, I don't know, walk the dog at night. Things like that specific reviews with specific details are a lot more trustworthy and notable than the very generic reviews. Another thing that you want to look out for is their product range. You want to make sure that the suppliers you work with have a wide range of products. You want to make sure that they have a lot of products. If they have too narrow of a selection, it could potentially mean that either they're new or they're not necessarily as big or as reliable that you might want them to be. Now, speaking of wide range of products, you also want them to have a wide range of warehouses. You don't want a supplier that is simply in just one country, unless you're only dropshipping in that particular country. But as dropshippers, we want to expand our horizons as much as possible. So we want to make sure that our suppliers can keep up. We want to make sure that our suppliers have multiple warehouses in multiple countries, for example, some in the US, some in Canada, some in Europe, some in China, and so on. What this does is ensure quicker shipping to different countries. If you only have one supplier and they're located specifically in Europe and you're dropshipping in the US, that shipping time will be a lot longer than it really should be. And at the end of the day, remember, customers are spoiled by Amazon, so people want their items literally tomorrow. But the good thing is, is that most customers understand that not everyone and not every business is as big as Amazon. Not everyone or every business has the resources that Amazon has. So customers typically are okay with waiting one to two weeks for their product. But anything more than that is a big no-no. Dropshipping products that take over a month to get to your customers is so two or three years ago. That is no longer the case. You do not want a supplier that takes that long to get their items to your customer. And the last thing that I want to touch on when it comes to what you need to look for in a supplier is customer service. As dropshippers, our customer service is essentially going to be a reflection of our supplier's customer service. If a customer sends us an email asking about a particular product, and we don't have that information on hand, we're going to have to reach out to our suppliers. If our suppliers take three or four days to get back to us, unfortunately, that's how long it's going to take us to get back to our customers. And by that time, our customers are going to be long gone. Either they already forgot about us or they made their purchase somewhere else. So always make sure that the suppliers that you work with have good customer service. And one easy way to ensure this is simply by sending them a message, send them an email and see how long it takes for them to get back to you. On top of that, check their grammar because a lot of the times, certain things can get lost in translation, especially if we're working with international suppliers. So we want to make sure that our suppliers one, get back to us pretty quickly again within 24 hours and two, we can understand them clearly. Another big reason to make sure that communication is clear is because if it's harder for them to understand what you're saying, it's going to be a lot of back and forth between you and your supplier that's ultimately going to end up being extra time that you take to reply back to your customer. Now just to name a few different suppliers that you can work with here are some of the top ones that we recommend. So for one, you have AliExpress. Now we all know everything that everyone says about AliExpress, but just take into consideration everything I just mentioned and look through their different sellers. AliExpress has come a long way in these last few years and their customer service has gotten a lot better. Their shipping times have gotten a lot better and their prices are just as good as always. So AliExpress is a highly reputable supplier. Aside from that, there's also Banggood. Everything that is sold on Banggood is shipped from Banggood. On top of that, they always have some sort of promotion or some sort of deal or some sort of coupon going on. So you can save a couple bucks. And one thing that I always say is a dollar saved is essentially a dollar earned. CJ Dropshipping is also another huge supplier with a ton of features. One of them being one of my favorite services, Prince on Demand, and just to toss a different one into the mix, you can also source your products from Redbubble. Redbubble offers a ton of customized items in a variety of niches. This is essentially an all in one Prince on Demand service that other people use, but you can use Redbubble as a supplier and resell the items you find on there. Now all of these different suppliers and more are fully supported for automation through AutoDS. So what that means is you can connect your dropshipping store with all of your different suppliers and you can automate your entire store. You can essentially start to become hands off with the whole process. So for one, you can automate your product importing. The easiest way to do this is simply going to add products and you can either add a single product or multiple products. What I like to do is go to multiple products. And what you're going to do is you're simply going to take the links from the items that you're going to add to your store. So items that you want to dropship and you're going to go ahead and paste them on here. So there's one press enter. Let's go to another one. Let's do this vacuum thermos right here and paste the link there as well. All you have to do now is simply click on add as draft and these products will be automatically imported to your draft section at autoDS.com. From there, you can make any necessary adjustments to the title, description, images, whatever it is that you need, and then they'll be ready in your store within minutes. This really takes a lot of time away from having to do things manually. For one, if you're importing your products manually, you're going to have to copy over all of the descriptions, all of the titles, all of the images, you're going to have to upload everything to your store. And if you're doing maybe one or two products, maybe even five or six, it's okay. It's going to take a little bit of time, but at the end of the day, it's doable. But if you're starting to import 10, 15, 20, 50 different products, then you're going to spend pretty much all day in front of your computer uploading products. And that's actually the next challenge that I was going to cover, importing products manually. Now I want you to picture a particular situation. So you're running your dropshipping store, everything's going smoothly, and suddenly you get an order. But when you go to place the order with your supplier, they ran out, they ran out of this particular product, and you pretty much just lost the sale. Either you lost the sale because it can't be purchased, or you lost the sale because you have to go to your customer now and tell them, I apologize, but I'm going to have to refund you your money because we ran out. That doesn't sound like a very friendly interaction with your customer now, does it? It can be a real pain when a supplier runs out of your items. Now because of that, that's our next challenge, suppliers running out of stock. Now there are a few different ways that you can combat this. For one, have multiple suppliers. This is probably my biggest tip when it comes to solving this particular issue. Always have multiple suppliers have multiple suppliers that offer the same exact product and make sure that they're of equal quality. So that way, if one day a supplier either runs out of stock or unexpectedly raises their prices, your butt is covered, and you can go to a different supplier to get that order fulfilled while you figure out what to do with the supplier that raised their prices or ran out of stock. Another thing that you can do is simply implement automation. Now if you're using AutoDS to automate your dropshipping store, then you also have access to automatic price and stock monitoring. What this means is if your supplier ever runs low on inventory or just flat out runs out of stock or changes their prices, that change on your supplier side will automatically reflect on your dropshipping store. So AutoDS will automatically change the prices and your inventory count. So that way you don't miss out on a sale or lose out on any money. Now one major challenge that most people are typically scared about because everyone's heard about this is potential supplier account locks. Now what I mean by this is if you're using your buyer account, let's say on Amazon to source your different dropshipping products. So if somebody places an order on your store and you place your order from Amazon and then have Amazon ship the product to your customer, you could potentially face an account lock for your buyer account, in which case you're not going to be able to make any purchases anymore. Now Amazon is kind of picky with their dropshipping and one of the best ways to be able to go around this is again simply by going through AutoDS. AutoDS has a service called fulfilled by AutoDS where what ends up happening is AutoDS will end up using one of its multiple buyer accounts on Amazon to make the purchase for your order. So that way your buyer account is never touched. Your buyer account is never going to be at risk and your accounts will never be locked. AutoDS has multiple buyer accounts to bypass this issue. So that way you never run into any problems with getting your accounts locked or restricted. Now in order to help you out a step further, AutoDS will also pay for your orders using a balance that you top up. So instead of using your banking details or your credit card or your debit card, you top up a balance on AutoDS and AutoDS will take that balance to make your purchases. Now speaking about Amazon as a supplier, one thing that Amazon is always going to be known for is obviously their quick shipping, but on top of that, they're also known for having quality products. And a lot of the products that you're going to find on Amazon are also for the most part best sellers. Now quality products and quick shipping can translate to best sellers, but you're not only limited to Amazon when you're looking for your best sellers. There's a bunch of different places where you can find popular and trending products that are currently in demand. One of those resources being the AliExpress dropship sensor. So on here you can find tons of different trending products that are currently in demand and people are actually looking for these are all products that people have purchased in the past. Now, if you start looking through some of the different details on the website, you can see that this electric teeth whitening dental Calcu, I don't know what that says has sold over 700 different units and has a 4.3 star review. So you can see that on all of the different products on here, you can see how many they've sold and you can see what the reviews are. Another way to find trending items is simply by going to Amazon and clicking on their best sellers tab on here, you can find tons of different products. And if a lot of the ones that you're looking for are branded, you can look for more generic products on a website like AliExpress. But for the most part, when you start to look through some of these, you can see a few that you can actually source yourself. For one, they have this air modal tire inflator. I've seen so many different variations of this on AliExpress going for so much cheaper, sometimes 15 or even $20. And another option that I'm going to leave you guys with is the auto DS marketplace along with their winning products hub. Here you can find tons of different products that are currently trending and people are looking for. People have recently been purchasing these and searching for them. Now all of the different products on here are found by our expert drop shippers. All of these different products are backed by years of data, all proving one, their quality and two, their demand as a bonus. If you go into the winning products section and you click into any one of these different products, for example, let's say this microfiber duster, once the page opens up and loads, you can see all of the typical details. You can see the price, the color variations, or any other variations that there are where it's shipping from. And you also get a few extra bonuses. Check this out. So for one, you get a profit analysis. You can see what most people are selling it for in this case 1999 and how much you can potentially make. In this case, $16 and 54 cents is your potential profit. On top of that, you also have a Facebook ad. So this Facebook ad is currently advertising this particular product. This gives you an idea more or less of how you can structure your Facebook ads or how you can market your product. On top of that, if you are going with Facebook and you want to copy or mimic the demographic that they're going for, we also give you a target audience. So on here, you can see the genders, the age range, the marital status, the interests and even the occupation. All of these are different suggestions that you can use on Facebook ads to target a specific demographic. Of course, these are all just examples, and you can change this to suit your needs or to suit the demographic that you're trying to reach. And last but not least, you also have a website here that's selling this same product. So this website link right here, once you click on it and open it, you can see is for that same microfiber duster. So this is an actual website that's selling this product. Now, the last challenge that I'm going to cover in this video is one that a lot of people are very concerned about. This is one problem that arises even before you start dropshipping. This is one thing that everyone always thinks about. And that is the challenge of handling customer returns. How do you handle your customer's returns? Well, really, the most ideal way of doing things is having your customer ship it directly to your supplier. But if you do that, then that means your customer could potentially find out where you're sourcing your products from. So another option that you have is simply have them return the item to you, and then you can ship it back to your supplier. But that can also increase the price when it comes to shipping. So when it comes to returns, if you don't have a lot of them, a lot of the times my personal opinion is have them ship it back to you, whether it be to a PO box or an address that you have, and just refund them their money. Now, if you don't want to keep on hand that item that's returned, then if you're okay with it, and if you can afford it, just refund them their money and tell them to keep the item. I know it's not ideal, but trust me when I say that your customer will be very, very happy. Of course, one of the easiest ways that you can actually handle this, aside from letting them keep the item and giving them the refund is by reaching out to your supplier and speaking to them about how they can handle returns. A lot of the times what they're going to end up telling you is just have the customer send the item back directly to the supplier, and that's pretty much it. Of course, sometimes there is going to be somewhat of a process. The customer is going to have to reach out to you, then you're going to have to reach out to your supplier, explain to them why they're refunding the product, and then just take it from there. So just as a quick recap, some of the top challenges that you can potentially face when starting your dropshipping business are going to be the challenge of finding it difficult to build brand awareness, finding reliable suppliers, long shipping times, running out of stock, sudden price changes, supplier account locks, sourcing high quality items, handling your customer's returns, finding best sellers, and importing your products to your store manually. I really hope I was able to answer any questions that you had regarding any of the different topics on here. If I didn't, if there's anything that you're still wondering, or if there's any questions that are still hanging over your head, or if there's any challenges that you've come across that I didn't cover, let me know what they are down in the comments below. This is something that I'm very curious about. I really want to see if I can help any of you out with any issues that you're having. So if you are having any problems, if you are facing any challenges, let us know down in the comments below. And remember, if you do want help with anything when it comes to your dropshipping store, and you want to be in a community of like minded individuals, like minded hustlers, and like minded entrepreneurs, then you can check out our Facebook group on there. You can ask any questions and somebody from the community can help you out. If you want to check that out, if you want to join the group, just go ahead and check out the link down below. It's going to be in the description. And with that, I want to thank all of you for being here with me today. Huge thank you to all of you for watching. If you found this video enjoyable, if you found it informational, if you found it helpful, please make sure you smash that like button and make sure you subscribe, so that way you don't miss out on any future videos. Again, huge thank you to everyone for watching, especially if you made it all the way to the end. It truly does mean a lot. And with that, my name is Mario with AutoDS, and I'll catch you all next time.