Drop Shipping Business

Anything that reduces the customer’s cost or risk or difficulty in ordering, or increases the value or rarity of what he gets for his money, is likely to improve the number of orders received. The main inducements are represented by the price of the product itself and the terms of payment. But other minor inducements may just tip the balance your way. Not all of them can be used in all forms of advertising. Your common sense will tell you what is and isn’t possible — you obviously can’t include an order form in a classified advertisement, for example.

Money-back guarantee

This is one of the phrases that mail order has given to the English language — and one it can well be proud of. It is quite extraordinary to what lengths high street shops will sometimes go to avoid refunding to dissatisfied customers. Here at least mail order shows the way. It may be a commonplace of mail order advertising; BCAP and the MOPS may require it whether it’s stated or not; the general public may expect it as a matter of course. But still, always mention the money-back guarantee. You’re going to make refunds to dissatisfied customers anyway, so why not say so? The words are comforting to prospective customers, and their use is one of the simplest ways of attempting to turn ditherers into purchasers.

Free offers

Offering the purchaser something additional to the main product at no extra cost can be a powerful inducement to buy. BCSPP warns about the possible misuse of the word ‘gift’, and both it and BCAP require that anything described as `free‘ should be genuinely so, and that the price of a related product should not be increased in order for the ‘free‘ offer to be made.

However, we all know that nothing in life is free — somebody has to pay for it; and in all businesses except those that go bust, that `somebody’ is the customer. If you build the free gift into your advertised offer from the start, you will be able to pitch your product price accordingly without giving offence to anyone. If you add the free gift at a later stage, as a refinement to your offer, you should hold your product price steady, and aim to recoup the increased costs — and indeed enhance your profits — from the additional sales generated by the inducement.

While all markets are different, free offers work best if they have a genuine appeal to the purchaser of the main product. A piece of jewellery offered to purchasers of handbags, or blank cassettes with cassette recorders are the sort of offers to consider. Some advertisers seem to succeed with seductive offers of ‘mystery’ free gifts; and although the mystery, once revealed, is frequently trivial and disappointing — a packet of needles or a plastic comb are typical — the promise still retains its allure for some purchasers. Study the other advertisers in your own market and see what they’re up to.

Limited offers

Most mail order purchases are made on impulse. Your customers buy your product not because they have reflected long and hard on the matter, and have got up that morning thinking, ‘Right, today’s the day I’m going to send off for one of those Whatsits’; it doesn’t work like that at all. Your advertising forces itself upon the prospect’s attention, either because it happens to be on the page of the paper he’s looking at, or because it’s something that’s just dropped through the door. If your sales message interests him at all, his most likely response is to think that he might do something about it later; but ‘later’ almost never comes. Other things catch his attention, and your advertised offer is forgotten. If it is to succeed, it must succeed now.

Whatever the limit, it must be a genuine one; and that makes it something of a two-edged sword. While it may effectively create a sense of urgency, and thus produce a number of sales that might otherwise have been lost, it may also prematurely kill off the ad so that anyone noticing it for the first time after the deadline may well be discouraged from ordering anything at all.

to be continued