Welcome to this brand-new section where we’re going to talk about how to fulfil orders on Shopify. How do we actually go about sending the product to the customer? Of course, up until this point, we’ve been talking about building the site and sending highly targeted traffic to your site. So now people are going to start buying.
The Customer Purchase Procedure: What Actually Happens?
Now, before I actually start showing you how to fulfill the order, first of all, I want to show you exactly what the customer goes through when they buy a product from your site. That way you can see the emails that go out, what it looks like in your Shopify admin and also what it looks like in Dsers.
That’s exactly what I’m going to show you in this video. In order to do that, I’m going to buy off of my own site the stunning dog necklace.
What you’ve seen in this video is the procedure the customers need to go through on our site: the confirmation page that they see once they’ve bought something and the email that they receive. You’ve also seen as the store owner how it looks on your order page, and you’ve also seen how it looks on Dsers.
In the next lesson, we will actually make this happen. We will buy this product and get the supplier to send it directly to our customer. Let’s do our very first dropship.
How to Order Products & Fulfill Orders
I know this is a very exciting moment because we want to dropship the product. Let’s actually order it on AliExpress and get it sent to the customer. So, how do we do it? Find out the process in this video.
Once you get good at this process, you’ll be making orders in a matter of seconds. It’s very straightforward. Now, having said that, once you start to get a lot of orders coming in, you’re going to get not necessarily fed up with making orders, but to want to use your time more wisely. And that’s why in the next lesson I want to show you what you can do in order to scale your orders in the most efficient manner.
How To Scale Your Orders (A Suggestion)
Fulfilling your orders in the beginning is great fun. It’s enormously satisfying. And of course, it’s very exciting as you’re building out a new business. But if you’re really following the lessons and taking action, it probably won’t be long before you have something of a luxury problem on your hands.
That luxury problem is going to be the number of orders that you’ll need to process every day, because it is, of course, a somewhat repetitive process. Now, whenever we have a repetitive process in business at the point in which we can afford it, then it’s a really good opportunity to look at how we can improve that process, how we can take that off of our hands and use our time more wisely.
So, I’ve entitled this section “How to Scale Your Orders (A suggestion)” because it is a suggestion. You don’t have to do this. You can just carry on yourself fulfilling those orders. But if you are looking for an alternative route as your business grows, then the tips I’m about to give you here may well be of interest.
So first off, whatever you do, I strongly recommend that you manually process your orders yourself until you reach ten orders a day, and I suggest doing that for two reasons. The first reason is it’s always a good idea to have a thorough understanding of a process before you look at alternative ways of doing it. And by doing ten orders a day, you’re definitely going to get very familiar with exactly what needs doing now.
Secondly, when you reach ten orders a day, you should be looking at a profit of about $3,000 per month. So, let’s be clear, that’s $3,000 in profit, money in your pocket, money that you can reinvest if you wish back into your business. Or to put it another way, your business can now afford it.
Whenever I try to make decisions about whether I’m going to buy something, (any product or service), I always look to see if my business can afford it. Do I have money in my business bank account to actually go ahead and buy it?
That might sound really obvious, but you’d be very surprised that the number of people who don’t do that, they might take money from other sources to finance their business in order to buy products and services, because they feel that it’s somehow going to accelerate the whole process. And it might. I’m not here to judge anybody, but generally speaking, I think it’s very good advice to only buy products and services from the money that your business itself has made.
Now, that doesn’t have to be $3,000. It could be $1,000 or $10,000 or whatever it is that you feel comfortable with. But the key point here is that you can now afford it. So, my primary suggestion for helping you scale your orders going forward is to consider hiring a VA (virtual assistant). In other words, somebody who is actually going to help you process those orders as you build your business.
It’s going to become probably obvious to you that using your time to process hundreds of orders every day or every month, whatever it might be, is probably not your best use of time. Yes, it’s fantastic to have the money coming in, but you’re going to start thinking, well, hang on a second. I could probably best use my time for, let’s say, web design, or product selection or whatever it might be.
But the point being that a virtual assistant can make an enormous difference to your business. So, a virtual assistant is perhaps not as virtual as it might sound. We are talking about a real person here, but they’re virtual in the sense that they’re not with you in your office. You can basically hire them from anywhere in the world.
Now there are plenty of websites where you can hire VAs, but there’s one in particular that I’ve had good experiences with. It’s one I would like to show you now in the next video. I’m not affiliated with it in any way, okay? You can choose any site you want, but I do think that this is a good place to start.
You can decide on the best person to help you out. And when you get the right person, it’s incredible. It’s a game changer because they’re going to take a huge amount of work off your hands and hopefully, they stay with you for years.
How to Handle Returns and Refunds
Now that you understand how the whole order fulfillment process works, we do now need to spend a few minutes talking about returns and refunds because it is an inevitability. It is simply a part of doing business. You will get refunds. You will get returns, but it should typically be around 1% to 2%.
Imagine you’re making $10,000 a month, then you’re looking at $100 to $200 in refunds and returns. So, it’s a very small percentage. With that in mind, you can very easily handle them. In fact, what I’m going to teach you in this lesson is exactly how to handle refunds and returns and, in fact, turn it to your advantage. But before we do that, let’s have a look at the most common reasons for returns or refunds.
Sometimes people simply don’t like the product. Another reason is it could be broken, or not what they ordered or it simply never arrived. Clearly, if it never arrived, they can’t return it. But we can certainly return for the other three and we can certainly refund in all four cases. So, in this video, we’ll have a look and see what we need to do.
Once you have done your part as explained in the video, at that point, your payment provider will take care of the actual refund itself.
I hope you’ve now understood how to fulfil orders on Shopify very well now. Next up: We’ll look at how to build credibility.