Customer service for your dropshipping store; how to do it correctly in 2023?
Did you know that customer service is important for keeping your store alive? Did you know that it's better to put your customers in first place instead of your own pocket? I will give you a short answer below, then give you a complete guide on how to do customer service when dropshipping!
Customer service is important for keeping your customers loyal to your dropshipping store. It will even help you with getting fewer refund requests. Always try to be as polite and understanding as possible when you reply to a customer with questions or demands. You can also make less work by doing things like creating a FAQ page.
Now that we know that let's begin by understanding why customer service is so important.
Why is having great customer service important when dropshipping?
I think seeing the screenshots below will make you understand why great customer service is so important for your dropshipping store.
Like they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.
And here is one more from a general dropshipping store named Shopolis.
And this one is from a dropshipping store called HYGO Shop. I also included this dropshipping store in my best dropshipping store examples article, but I see now that they are also getting a lot of negative reviews.
So, what do these dropshipping stores above have in common?
Do you know what they have in common? Their customer support is bad or non existent. So many of these bad reviews could have been fixed before they were published.
Many dropshipping store owners make the mistake of making a quick buck instead of caring for their customers.
This will almost certainly be the end of your dropshipping store. Maybe not today, but it will happen. Just look at the example above, Shopolis; they are currently offline and will probably not come online again.
Did you know that 89% of consumers have stopped shopping on online stores after experiencing poor customer service? (Source)
Consumers are also two times more likely to share their bad customer service experiences than they are to talk about positive experiences. (Source)
In the article above, they also talk about how much more it costs to attract a new customer than to retain an existing customer. It's seven times more costly to get a new customer!
This makes you want to keep your customers, right?
But how do you make sure that your customers stay with you?
Well…
With offering great customer service at your dropshipping store! Go to great lengths to help your customers with anything related to their order.
Show them that you want to help them, and don't ignore them!
Below you will find one more example of a Trustpilot page from a dropshipping store named Smileyhomey.
Hope that convinced you that you need great customer service on your dropshipping store if you want to succeed!
What do you get in return for having great customer service at your dropshipping store?
Before we dive into how to have great customer service at your dropshipping store, I will explain to you what you will get in return for offering great customer service!
- You will start to gain reviews, and not these negative reviews as you saw in my screenshots before, but reviews from people that are happy with their product or everything you did for them so they could get their order.
- Less chance of getting banned by PayPal. If you're using PayPal, you're less likely to get banned by them if you take care of your customers correctly. (You can learn more about that here.)
- You will gain more loyal customers. 86% of customers will pay up to 25% more when they have a good experience with customer service. This means that your customers will spend more money, which will then increase your average order value (AOV).
- You will have to deal with fewer refund requests! Happy customers mean fewer customers will complain and ask for a refund.
Do you see now that putting your customers first will have an enormous effect on how well your dropshipping will do now and in the near future?
Are you ready now to learn how to have great customer service at your dropshipping store?
Then let's go!
How to have great customer service when dropshipping
To start off, you need to treat your customer as a real king or queen while trying to stay as calm as possible.
Yes, your customer might be angry, might scold or even threaten you, but your job here is to stay calm and try to resolve the problem that your customer has as fast as possible.
Always try to be as polite and understanding as possible, but how do you do that?
I will go over a few different scenarios below!
How do you respond to a customer asking for a refund?
The best tip I can give you for writing the first response is to not mention a refund yet, because this will mean that you lose all your profits from that customer.
This doesn’t mean you should never refund, but if they accept waiting for a replacement, this would almost always be better for you profit-wise.
So what to say then?
First, check if it’s cheaper for you to let your customer return the product to your supplier or to let your customer keep the product and just be sent a new one. You can learn more about this in my article here.
If you figured out that it’s cheaper for you to send a new product to your customer, I suggest you write something like this to your customer:
Hello “First name of customer”,
I’m so sorry to hear that your bracelet was not the same as we described in our description.
What I can do for you is send you the correct bracelet, free of charge. You won’t have to send back the bracelet you got from us now!
Let me know if that would be alright for you.
Greetings,
“Your information”
From my other article here
But what if your customer still wants a refund after that?
Then I suggest clicking here to learn what to do then. You will also learn some extra things that you can do to turn a refund request into a lifetime customer.
How do you respond to a customer asking where their package is?
This might not happen that much if you're dropshipping locally, like from the US, or Europe.
But if you're dropshipping from China where shipping might take 2-4 weeks, you have a high chance of customers asking you where their order is.
This will most likely be the question that you will get asked the most.
“Where is my order? I've waited since…”
So, how do you respond to this?
I suggest writing something like this as a reply:
Hello “First name of customer”,
I tracked your package for you at:
(link to tracking information of the order)(write something about the latest tracking information update)
As you can see, your order arrived in the UK already and is currently being processed in a distribution center close to you.(now you can write something about your estimate when the package comes)
We expect that your package will arrive before the end of this week.Please let us know if your package hasn't arrived by this time. We will do our best to solve this for you then.
Greetings,
“Your information”
From my other article here
Always make sure that you include the tracking information, and don’t forget to explain to your customer that they can follow their order on that site that you linked in your reply.
I always include the tracking information as a link to 17track or any other tracking site you’re using (like this: https://t.17track.net/en#nums=”tracking number here”). Otherwise, you might get questions about how to use the tracking number.
Your customer will have all the information he or she needs with a reply like this.
This will reduce the chance that this customer will ask for a refund. Most of the time you won’t even hear back from them after you send this response.
What channel should you choose to provide customer service on your dropshipping store?
With this I mean, how can customers reach you?
You have a few different options with this one.
Think about using email, social media, live chat and even having a phone number on your dropshipping store!
I will cover them below so you can make the best choice for your dropshipping store. Don't forget that you can have multiple ways that your customers can reach you.
You can use them all as well!
It doesn't have the be, for example, email support only.
1. Customer service channel: Email
Email is the customer service channel that is most common, and I suggest you use this for your dropshipping store (of course, you could use more channels as I said above).
I already gave you some templates above that you can use for responding to your customers by email.
If you don't have a support email address yet, you can check out this article here first to learn how to create one for free. For example, you can have ‘support@yourstore.com' .
One important thing is that you add a contact page to your store. This way, your store visitors and customers can easily contact you.
If you use Shopify as your ecommerce platform, I suggest reading this here to learn how to add a contact page to your Shopify store.
Otherwise, if you use WooCommerce for your dropshipping store, I suggest having a plugin like this one.
Another great tip is to add some “coolness” to your contact page.
This is so it doesn't look as boring as the default contact page (like the example above)! Make it fit with the rest of your store design.
See as an example these 25 awesome contact us page examples.
Also, you could add some text above the contact form. Like saying something about how long it might take before they can expect a response.
Another great tip is to link to your FAQ / help page to your contact page, as you can see in the example below:
This way, you have a chance that people will go to your help page first to search for their answers. If they find it there, there is a big chance that they will not contact you! This saves you in customer service time.
2. Customer service channel: Live Chat
Live chat could be another important customer service channel for your dropshipping store.
You have probably used a live chat before on a website.
It's that little icon that pop-ups, usually in the right corner of your screen, and if you click on it, you can chat with their customer support directly (if they are online).
For example, see the screenshot below of Intercom. You will see the icon in the right corner.
If you want to learn more about why live chat is great to have on an ecommerce store, I suggest reading this great article here.
3. Customer service channel: Social media
Did you know that 67% of consumers have engaged a brand's social media for customer service needs? (Source)
And did you know that 42% of consumers expect a response on social media within 60 minutes? (Source)
This means that the faster you are, the better your customer service will be on social media.
If you want to learn more about how to use social media for your customer service, I suggest reading this great article. That article will go over a lot of things, like how to use Facebook for customer service, and they have a lot of tips and tricks.
They also made that great reminder image above!
4. Customer service channel: Having a phone number
Offering customer service on the phone could be a great way to help your customers immediately, and it will build more trust if your customers see a phone number on your store's website, but it does have its downsides, like costs.
If you want to learn more about if you should use a phone number that your customers can call for questions, I suggest reading this great article here.
And if you're wondering what phone number to use when dropshipping with AliExpress, check out this article here.
3 tips for making the customer service at your dropshipping store create less work
Now that you know why having great customer service is so important and how to do it correctly for your dropshipping store, it's time to make customer service create less work!
With less work, I mean that you will have to spend less time doing customer service. I don't suggest you just not respond to any customers anymore because then the same thing will happen to your dropshipping store as you saw in the screenshots at the beginning of this article.
Let's begin!
1. Have an FAQ page on your dropshipping store
Guess what most customers that contact you have in common?
They have questions!
So, what you can do is create a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page on your store. You will answer the most important questions on this page, like how long order processing takes.
And, as I said above, you can link your FAQ page to your contact page! This could save you even more customer service time.
What Shopify app can I use to add an FAQ page to my dropshipping store?
In case you use Shopify, I highly suggest you look at this Shopify app called HelpCenter.
This app is free to use and will make your FAQ page easy to read, and it will make it easy for your store visitors to find answers to their questions.
What questions should you include on your FAQ page?
This is a great question!
If you're interested in learning what kind of questions to include on your FAQ page when you're dropshipping, I suggest reading this article here.
That article includes everything you need to know about FAQ pages. It even contains a dropshipping FAQ template.
Plus, I suggest checking out this article here with 12 FAQ page examples from other ecommerce stores.
2. Have a ‘track your order' page on your dropshipping store
Having a ‘track your order' page on your dropshipping store will surely save you some customer service time as well.
Yes, some customers will still contact you first with questions about where their order is, but hopefully a few will fill in their tracking number here so you don't have to help them with tracking their order!
Look for example the screenshot below from an online store called Native.
Your customers can easily fill in their tracking number here. They will then get the latest information about the shipment of their order.
What Shopify app can you use to add a ‘track your order' page on your dropshipping store?
Here are some great Shopify app examples for you that you can use to create this page on your dropshipping store:
You can even use some of these apps, like AfterShip, to automatically send notifications to your customers when there are updates about their delivery.
This will save you even more time in customer service because your customers are less likely to contact you with the question of where their package is.
Just see the screenshot below to see what AfterShip does:
They will keep your customers engaged while their order is on the way. For example, this is what it will look like without using AfterShip:
And here you can see how much that changes once you integrate AfterShip on your dropshipping store:
Do you see how many more updates your customers will get after using AfterShip?
For more information about ‘track your order' pages, check out our other article here!
3. Don’t make your shipping times a mystery
Another tip to make customer service create less work is to be upfront with your shipping times.
This will most likely only be applicable for you if you dropship from China.
Like I said above, the most questions you will get are about where someone's package is.
The reason for this is because most people expect their package to come fast. They don't expect to wait 2-4 weeks.
Definitely now that some companies are even offering same-day delivery.
So how to deal with this?
I suggest you check out my article here. I will teach you five ways to deal with long shipping times when dropshipping from China.
In case you want faster shipping times for your dropshipping store, I suggest reading this article here.
Conclusion
Did you know that customer service was so important for your dropshipping store?
Well, I hope that if you didn't, this article opened your eyes!
I hope you will put your customers first instead of your own pocket.
This will help to keep your dropshipping store alive. Don't forget to look at other failed dropshipping stores sometimes (like from the screenshots above) and see what people are complaining about.
Can you serve your customers better than these dropshipping stores did with their customers?
If you have any questions or suggestions, let me know by commenting below or contacting me directly by pressing the “Contact Us” button at the top!
Getting started with dropshipping in 2023
So, are you ready to get started with dropshipping? Or maybe you have already started, but you’re looking to get some inspiration?
If so, I suggest reading my complete Shopify dropshipping guide!
It's a huge article, but it contains everything that you need to know to create your own Shopify dropshipping store in 2023. It's like a dropshipping course, but for free!
Reading this article will help you to get started and stay motivated while beginning and continuing your dropshipping journey!
Just don’t forget that success takes time. Keep improving each and every day!
Shopify Dropshipping: A 20-Step Guide to Starting Your Store
Here are some of our best articles:
- AliExpress Dropshipping: A 20-Step Getting Started Guide (2023)
- The Complete Guide: Can You Start Dropshipping Without Money in 2023?
- 12 Reasons Why Most People Fail With Dropshipping in 2023 | Beat Them!
- 23 Awesome Shopify Dropshipping Store Examples
Also, if you haven't created a Shopify account yet, then you can click here to get a free 3-day trial + pay $1/month for the first 3 months!
