How to make your drop ship vendors happy

Drop ship vendors are essential for selling your wholesale products. They manage the ecommerce sites and create the marketing campaigns and customer service offerings that bring in sales and customer loyalty for your products. Maintaining a great partnership with your drop ship vendors is imperative to the long-term success of your wholesale supply company and the drop ship businesses. At Skyrocket, our experience and success stories have enabled us to offer some advice to wholesalers, on how to make your drop ship vendors happy. Follow these tips to succeed in the increasingly-popular, highly competitive drop ship marketplace:

1. Be a Great Communicator

In any relationship, good communication is necessary to keep both parties on track and happy. If you have changes to your products, such as pricing, available quantities, discontinued colors, and more, it is of utmost importance to communicate that information to your drop ship vendor immediately, so they will not be trying to sell something that is not available or at a price point that does not make sense. Be available to answer your drop ship vendors’ questions and schedule weekly “check-in’s” or virtual chats to keep everyone on the same page with the details of product inventory and shipments. If you can dedicate a staff member to support individual drop shippers, that will help immensely.

2. Offer Fair Pricing and Fees

The per-order fees that cover the shipping and handling of your products should be relative to the complexity and size of the items ordered. An industry standard, these fees need to be fair to account for the amount of time involved with larger orders verses small orders. Your drop ship vendors will be happy when they feel like they are being charged a reasonable fee, and that the pricing is honest and helpful for them to make a profit doing business with you. Minimum purchase requirements may be necessary, just be sure to keep those at a level that can be agreed upon by your drop ship vendor, to promote successful drop shipping of products. If the pricing and fee structures that you present are concise and easy to understand, that will promote a greater understanding of your policies and procedures for doing business.

3. Invest in High Quality Technology

There are numerous software programs and fast processors that will speed up the order management process for your business, shipping products out quicker to customers. Being able to run reports in a variety of formats to check on order histories and fulfillment will help you to analyze the business functions more clearly and provide better order tracking capabilities. Real-time inventory controls will help you and your drop ship vendor to keep accurate quantity information available at all times. Invest in new technology that will help your drop ship business to grow and prosper and keep your drop ship vendors happy.

4. Review and Revise

Step back and analyze how things are going on your end of the business. Is the order fulfillment working as planned? Do the shipments arrive on time as expected? Is the supply and demand at a nice balance or could you adjust it to increase sales? Take the time weekly or monthly to analyze your business, especially in the busiest times, to keep tabs on how you are doing and to stay on track with the drop ship business plan. You and your drop ship vendors will be successful with thorough analysis and flexibility.

At Skyrocket, we encourage you to communicate frequently with your drop ship vendors. Call them regularly to see how they are doing and find out if they need anything. As a drop ship vendor, we appreciate the constant communication because it keeps us involved and aware of any issues and changes. Long periods of time or gaps in communication can result in lost business opportunities and misinformation. Follow our advice to stay ahead of your competition, maintaining great communication to increase the value of your drop ship partnership. For more details about how to keep your drop ship vendors happy, call us today.