How Long Does It Take To Run A Drop Shipping Store

OK I'm going to talk about a question we get a lot and that is how long does it take to run a drop shipping store, let's dive in.

So running and setting up are two completely different things, firstly I'll cover setting up really quickly, I'll give you a good idea of how long it took us to set up our first store.. Now look It only took us about three weeks to a month to actually set up that first store, we really ripped in and went for it this is from knowing literally nothing to getting up, running and advertising a completed store.

That being said it may take you a shorter and longer period of time based on your experience but I'll leave that aside that's just the set up. 

A lot of the questions we get are what does it take or how much time does it take per day to run a successful drop shipping store... how much extra time am I going to have to put into this outside of my "normal hours"?

So to be honest this is going to vary big time depending on the price range of what your products are because a lot of times people will get orders pretty frequently if they are selling a low ticket range of products, so the lower priced products generally the more orders and they will need to be fulfilled and that can take up a lot of your time for very little return. You could spend all day long fulfilling orders, answering calls and dealing with issues if it's not automated which isn't ideal.

That's why we recommend and personally sell high ticket items, so if you're going off what we say and you've got products around about the $200-$2000 mark you will get less orders (which means less work) than if you were selling $5 items but making more money. it makes more sense to spend less time and making more money wouldn't you agree?

Okay, so that being said four things you really need to focus on when you're actually running your store.

Fulfilling the orders, so when the orders come in you've actually got to go into the back end every day check your orders make sure everything's good with those orders and fulfilling them as you go. When your selling high ticket items you will usually have between 1-20 orders come through per day so it usually takes around 1-2 hours to get this done if you are doing it manually.

Second, would be to go through and look at all of the emails and messages that you've got with your customers, if there are complaints or if there's queries you need to start going through those and dealing with all that, you need to do every single day as well. Depending how much traffic your getting across your store and how complicated and/or techinical your products are will determine how much customer service will be involved, with that said we only usually spend about an hour a day on this.

Third is monitoring and optimising your ads, this is an ongoing process that never really ends and I'm not going to deep dive into this now but it's very important to be constantly reviewing and checking how your ads are preforming. If everything is set up well you only really need to spend 30 min on this task.

Forth thing and this usually doesn't happen every single time you log in or even every day for that matter but you'll have to go in and make sure that your products are all up to date, if your supplier has emailed you and sent through an updated product list then you all need to go in and sort out those products & update them. This can be time very consuming if there is items out of stock, a lot of new products or they have dropped a line of products for what ever reason.

These are the four things you really need to focus on when you're actually running your store from day to day and stay on top of it to build and sustain a successful drop shipping business in Australia. 

So the million dollar question, how long does all that take you're asking that's the whole point of the blog post.

Basically I would say around about the two - three hour mark depending on like I said if you've got variants, updates and other things to do, so if you've got an extra hour to two hours every day which I'm sure every single person does, anybody is working a job, running another business you can probably squeeze another hour or two out of your day.

I know I could even when I was working our other full time business and I was doing 12+ hour days, I still had time to come home and do more work on our drop shipping stores after that. I think everybody does have that sort of time to be dedicating to their business just depends on how bad you want to change your curcumstances.

Okay, also if you have some money to invest into your business and you don't want to do the day to day tasks, if know you don't have the time then there are always ways of outsourcing everything and hiring VA's to help you...

Lastly at the end of the day time should not be a factor in you getting started make time take massive action, just rip in and make it happen...

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