Dropshipping is dead for all intents and purposes, but Why Unified, a Clearwater-based dropshopshipping company’s innovation and insight is reviving it, one successful entrepreneur at a time.
For many, dropshipping sounds like a dream come true. However, despite all the success stories across social media and how-to videos on platforms like YouTube, 90% of all new dropshipping businesses fail within the first month of operation. There is no one single reason for the downfall of dropshipping; rather, myriad problems plaguing the industry have led to its untimely death.
Why Dropshipping Is Dead
One of the biggest problems plaguing the dropshipping industry today is oversaturation. Back in the 2000s, new dropshipping tools and outlets like AliExpress made it easy for anyone, anywhere to get started with very little investment. In fact, it’s estimated that there are roughly 100,000 dropshippers in the world. Many of them operate within the same industry, which means competition is incredibly fierce. Of course, if competition were the only obstacle, it would be easy to overcome. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, and dropshippers face a bevy of problems that halt their success in its tracks.
- Lack of Quality Control – Consumers are always excited to find cheap solutions to their problems, but in today’s world, extremely low prices often equal extremely low quality. Dropshippers don’t stock their own inventory, and in many cases, they never even handle the products they sell. Quality control is lacking, and when a business sells its customers a low-quality product, trouble soon follows.
- Long Shipping Times – AliExpress, one of the world’s largest and most well-known dropshipping platforms, made it incredibly easy for dropshippers to sell products from Chinese brands and manufacturers. However, when consumers buy these products, they’re forced to wait weeks – or sometimes even months – for their products to arrive.
- Complete Reliance on Third Party Suppliers – When suppliers have problems, dropshippers have problems, and there’s not much that can be done. Dropshippers who rely on platforms like AliExpress are often completely reliant on third party suppliers, and if there’s a hiccup in the supply chain, they might find themselves holding their breath for longer than anticipated.
- The COVID-19 Pandemic – The social distancing regulations put into place to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic led to significant supply chain disruptions. Manufacturing and warehousing facilities worked with skeleton crews, which drastically increased fulfillment and shipping times. Furthermore, it quickly became difficult to import items from China, which caused even more delays.
- The Prevalence of Bank Chargebacks – As time went on and e-commerce giants like eBay and Amazon grew, consumers wanted faster shipping, better quality, and more reliability. Many dropshippers simply couldn’t provide it due to the limitations of the platforms they were using, and this led to a massive uptick in bank chargebacks that caused countless virtual stores to close their doors.
- Complicated Dropshipping Tools – Numerous companies offer a wide range of tools and plugins designed to help dropshippers become successful. These tools are expensive and complicated, which means that entrepreneurs who are new to dropshipping are faced with an extensive learning curve. Dropshippers buy the tool they think they need, only to realize later that they need three other expensive plugins just to make it work as intended. Soon enough, they have spent thousands of dollars on dozens of plugins and tools that they don’t know how to use. The frustration alone drives many to simply give up.
- Inefficient Marketing – Dropshipping Marketing is a crucial part of any dropshipping business these days. Almost every industry imaginable has become oversaturated, so whether you’re opening a baby boutique or a model train shop, you’ll be competing with dozens of similar stores. Most entrepreneurs don’t have marketing degrees, so they struggle to even get noticed – and that means they struggle to sell.
- Misleading “Success” Stories on Social Media – Social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube are filled with videos of people who claim they earned millions in their first two weeks of dropshipping by purchasing a specific tool or following a specific set of guidelines. Often, these videos are disingenuous. The more people watch their content, the more the content creator can earn, so they often aggrandize their success for views. In some cases, these creators are selling courses to teach people how to use the expensive tools they’ve already purchased, and in others, they sell even more complicated and expensive tools that are no better than the existing ones.
- Failing to Treat Dropshipping Like a Business – Entrepreneurs who fail to take their e-commerce stores seriously and treat them like real businesses are the most likely to fail in the long run. All too often, people open stores and expect the sales to fall into their laps overnight, and when it doesn’t happen, they give up. It’s imperative to treat a dropshipping business just like any other business.
- The “Get Rich Quick” Scheme Stigma – Thanks in part to the misleading success stories on social media, many people view dropshipping as a “get rich quick” scheme. Some people fail to take it seriously and never even get started; others go into dropshipping fully expecting to get rich in a matter of weeks. When they don’t, they blame the dropshipping industry rather than their unrealistic expectations.
Breathing New Life into Dropshipping
Dropshipping might be dead now, but Why Unified is breathing new life into the industry as tens of thousands of successful dropshippers can attest. The Why Unified platform seeks to solve the issues above in a simple and transparent way. They offer four individual plans that suit every dropshipper at every stage of their journeys.
- Ads – Perfect for dropshippers who already have existing stores, the Ads plan is designed for the creation, execution, and maintenance of advertising campaigns. It includes audience building, personalized ads, and real-time optimization.
- Funnels – The Funnels plan includes everything in Ads, but it’s designed to help dropshippers build revenue-generating sales funnels. It includes smart emails, optimized checkouts, professional product and promotion suggestions, and more.
- Dropship Lite – Dropshippers who are starting from scratch can choose the standard Dropship plan, which offers a full-fledged store filled with trendy products offering fair margins and low returns. It includes professional photography and branding, numerous pre-vetted suppliers, chat- and email-based customer service, and same-day payments with Stripe. It includes Ads and Funnels, too!
- Dropship Plus – Dropship Plus is Why Unified’s flagship plan, and it’s the plan that is forever changing the game. It includes everything in Ads, Funnels, and Dropship Lite, but it also gives dropshippers the ability to sell products from trusted names like Crest and Starbucks. Suppliers are located in the US, so dropshippers have access to two-day shipping that allows them to compete with big names like Amazon and Walmart, too.
Dropship Plus Will Revive Dropshipping
Why Unified’s Dropship Plus plan solves all the major issues with dropshipping and gives entrepreneurs all the tools they need for success. Brand-name products are known for their quality, and because suppliers are in the United States, fulfillment and shipping is lightning fast. The very nature of dropshipping includes some reliance on third-party suppliers, but Why Unified has worked hard to develop relationships with numerous suppliers to reduce and even eliminate supply chain hiccups. Because customers are satisfied with the quality and timeliness of their purchases, the risk of chargebacks drops significantly.
With Dropship Plus, Why Unified clients have everything they need to succeed at their fingertips, and it’s a hands-off process. They just answer a few simple questions, and Why Unified handles the rest: branding, advertising, store development, product research, inventory management, supply chain management, and more. Clients get weekly reporting as well as access to their Why Unified dashboards, which provide up-to-date information about sales and marketing performance at a glance.
In conclusion, Why Unified is the world’s first and only fully-fledged dropshipping platform that truly gives dropshippers everything they need for one flat monthly fee. The only “extra” fees are for advertising, but it’s easy to get started with paid ads for just $10 a day. Dropshipping is dead, but the team at Why Unified is breathing new life into entrepreneurism and paving the way to success for tens of thousands of people across the globe.