What Do Entrepreneurs Do When They Fail?

Newcomers, self-taught entrepreneurs, even experienced dropshipping business owners – everyone might fail at some point of their lives. And that’s absolutely natural!

Never be afraid of a failure.

As Janet Fitch once said it, the phoenix must burn to emerge.

In other words, any dropshipping mistake is a chance for you to start over, and to make better, greater business decisions that will bring prosperity into your life.

So, it’s a good thing to know what do entrepreneurs do when they fail with their dropshipping business. You know, just in case 🙂

What do entrepreneurs do when they fail: check the stats

What are the chances an archer will hit the target when blindfolded? Same goes for your web store. You can’t expect to succeed if you don’t know what’s going on there.

Before making any decision, you must know where the problem lies. To do that, you can use Google Analytics as the most popular tool for gathering statistics and analyzing traffic and visitors’ behavior.

Sounds complicated? In fact, it’s easier than it looks.

Here are the most important metrics you want to check with Google Analytics:

• Sales funnel – tracks the visitor path to purchase and may help you understand how many obstacles your potential customers face on the way and where they drop off.
• Conversions – tells you about how many visitors turned into buyers in percentage terms.
• Traffic sources – shows you what channels actually attract the biggest share of visitors or customers.
• Bounce rate – reflects the number of people who only visited one page and then left for whatever reason.
• Exit pages – the pages of your website from where visitors leave.
• Popular products – show you the performance of products which is important for understanding the reasons behind their success.
• Google Analytics Goals – shows you specific details about the performance of your website. Learn more here.

These data will show you the weak spots of your dropshipping store and give you a clue as to what to do next.

What do entrepreneurs do when they lose customers?

Conversion rate is one of the most important metrics in your statistics as it demonstrates the percentage of actual buyers out of the total number of your store visitors. When everything is fine, you can relax. But when conversion rate drops, it’s time to find out why.

Proper analysis of exit pages can show you where exactly visitors lose interest in the web store.

Example: John has a dropshipping store and it demonstrates good traffic, meaning it attracts a lot of visitors. But only a few of them buy anything. Google Analytics shows that a lot of people leave the site after typing a request into the search bar. John concludes that he either doesn’t have goods visitors are interested in or his search box needs better tuning.

As you can see, knowing when your visitors exit the site may or may not explain why they didn’t complete the purchase. Sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes it’s unclear and requires verification. For that purpose you can use A/B testing.

To put it simply, A/B testing lets you compare two versions of the same page – one version is the original unchanged page, while the other has some specific little amendments. The goal here is to test whether these edits will attract more traffic or raise your conversions. The pages are randomly shown to visitors in equal proportions, and after a while you can see the results. Different platforms, such as Google Content Experiments, VWO and many others, let you run such tests and improve your conversion rate.

Revise the target audience

Sometimes the reason behind your store’s bad performance may be the approach to targeting. In this case, if possible, you might want to switch to another category of customers.

Example: Jane is selling stationery materials of all kinds, but it’s getting worse. Initially, she defined her target audience as school students. After revising it, Jane realizes that in most cases it is the parents (adults) who buy stationery for their children, but not the kids. She decides to switch to another target audience and starts promoting her goods to office workers and creative adults who like to draw and write. Soon the new strategy pays off.

Another important issue here is your approach to the ads targeting. On Facebook, for example, you can both build a target audience from scratch and use various smart tricks to expand your ads reach. Quite often, such things as custom website audiences, dynamic remarketing audiences and lookalike audiences can be just the perfect addition to your existing customers’ base.

What do entrepreneurs do when they fail: reconsider promotional channels and marketing strategy

Example: Jane is promoting her dropshipping store in social media such as Facebook and Instagram. She also created a YouTube channel, but it didn’t make much of a difference. After a while, Jane notices that her organic traffic is very low and realizes that her store needs better search engine optimization.

Just like in this example, entrepreneurs may want to try alternative promotion methods and channels whenever they face a problem. But you can also readjust your strategy simply to attract more traffic.

The use of channels largely depends on your target audience and niche. Some products are easier to promote by using video and photo, while others are totally impossible to advertize this way, but are good for promoting with Google Shopping.

Think carefully about your own web store and what it sells. Can you make useful and interesting videos about your products? Can you write interesting articles in a blog or a run a professionally looking account on Instagram?

Using a different approach may fix the situation. Check out this poll about the most popular promotion methods used by other dropshippers, and see what’s the experience of your colleagues.

What do entrepreneurs do when their goods don’t sell?

Example: John was very busy the last two months and had very little time to manage his dropshipping store. After a while he realized that the web site has lost several positions in search engines and its traffic has dropped significantly. Having coped with the initial shock, John starts to revise his stock – he adds new goods, deletes some old products, transfers certain products from one category to another and so on. After a while the traffic and conversions come back to normal.

The reason John’s store was having problems is because it was abandoned for some time. For any online shop, it is crucial to update its stock, always add new products and revise its categories and subcategories. Why? Because it makes the store alive!

First of all, when visitors see new goods every once in a while, they can be sure that the shop is working and developing. Besides, the more products you offer, the more likely you are to achieve a bigger amount of sales. Even if someone can’t find a certain product, he or she may come back later knowing the store regularly updates its stock.

Second, the more pages your store has (thanks to more products), the better it is ranked by search engines. Besides, any activity on a website is a good sign for such engines as they see it as a demanded resource.

Lastly, fashion keeps changing so you should always keep an eye for new trends.

Rethink your store niche

Another way to improve your dropshipping store’s performance is to revise your niche.

Example: Jane created a store selling merchandise of a specific anime. But the shop doesn’t bring a lot of income, and Jane decides to broaden her niche by adding products devoted to other anime series. As a result, she attracts a larger audience and her sales rise.

But broadening your niche excessively may have the opposite effect since it may turn your website into a general store which isn’t always a good idea. Read more about pros and cons of general and niche stores in this article.

Narrowing your niche may improve your dropshipping business as well.

Example: John sells sport and outdoor activity goods in his dropshipping store, but he notices that most of his income comes from selling bicycles and related accessories. He does not remove other products and keeps updating his stock, but he decides to focus more on the bicycle theme by adding more products in this particular category and its subcategories. This move results in more sales.

What do entrepreneurs do when nothing works?

Sometimes whatever you do, nothing works. Why? The problem may be much more serious than you thought, or it may be more complicated, or you may be having a number of problems at the same time. What do you do? Call for help!

To get help, you can join Dropship Club and order a store review.

The most important thing you must know is that failure doesn’t mean that you can’t fix it. Stay calm, analyze your current situation, strategy and other aspects of your business. Find possible weak spots and try using a different approach. Analyze the results. Keep it up. And never ever give up!