With the coming of September, It is the time for dropshippers to begin to prepare themselves for Q4,2021, which is the peak time of eCommerce sales in a  year and it is also good timing for you if you are preparing to run your own online store.

There are so many big events in the Q4, such as Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas, which means great opportunities for promotion campaigns, especially in this year 2021, more and more people are going to place orders for items online compared with shopping on the street.

Source: Statista

• Why do you need to plan for your store in advance?

To get your dropshipping business well prepared for Q4, 2021 in advance, you need to know which aspects might be affected the most during the Q4 sales season.

According to the research, there are five main concerns: rising ad spend, customer service, inventory, shipping and fulfillment, returns.

Source: gorgias

-Rising ad spend

For the rising ad spend during Q4, which is the most concerned topic, dropshippers can choose to solve this by adjusting their marketing strategy such as marketing on cheaper channels or focusing on the average order value.

-Shipping

Shipping is a more objective element that is hard to control. Not only because that the shipping capacity is facing great challenges in the peak season with the increasing of dropshipping orders amount, but also many flights are canceled during the quarantine.

In such conditions, troubles like higher shipping costs, longer shipping times tend to be more likely to happen.

- Inventory

Situations like out of stock for products, waiting for restocking will also drag down the delivery. Customers’ experience will be easily affected because of these unexpected troubles. Moreover, it may also impact the confidence of the customers to place order in your store again.

Vice versa, if the inventory can be well-managed, other concerns including returns, fulfillment, and customer services will all be improved, because the processing time is shortened.

• How to prepare for inventory in advance?

1. Purchase private inventory for winning products.

The risk could be reduced by pre-stocking your own inventory for your products to make sure the processing time will not be impacted. It will be better if there are local fulfillment warehouses to stock and ship the parcels for your customers.

2. Stock your own products to the fulfillment warehouse.

If you have fixed suppliers for your products but they can not provide storage and shipping, you can choose one fulfillment center with both storage and fast shipping services available.

• Solutions for private inventory and storage.

- 7 Mature fulfillment warehouses from CJ.

Until now, CJ has been working on expanding the warehouses both in China and overseas to help dropshippers stock and fulfill the orders. Including three domestic warehouses, two US warehouses, one Indonesia warehouse, and one Germany warehouse.

Thanks to these warehouses, CJ can provide private inventory services as well as storage and fulfillment services for dropshippers.

Dropshippers can also purchase their private inventory and stock in CJ’s warehouses with no storage fee. When there’s a new order, the item will be picked up from their inventory and dispatched directly within 24 hours, which greatly shortens the turnover time.

- CJ’s new warehouse and more overseas warehouses are on the way!

To improve the capacity of fulfillment and the processing time, one more domestic warehouse has been completed and come into service.

This new warehouse located in Yiwu, China, occupied over 6000 square meters of space. With the new Yiwu warehouse, more products can be stocked, the processing time will be improved.

*Inside of new Yiwu warehouse.

CJ will go on expanding more new warehouses both in China and overseas in 2021, dropshippers will be able to pre-stock their private inventory both in the overseas warehouses and China warehouses to process their orders within 24 hours with even lower shipping fees but much faster shipping time.

Hopefully, preparing for Q4 will be more and more convenient and efficient for all the dropshippers in the future.