How Many Hours do Dropshippers Need to Work?

The dropshipping business model is fast becoming one of the most popular ways to create a successful online business. The startup costs are low, you have the flexibility to work from anywhere in the world and it’s easy to grow and scale your dropshipping store without drastically altering your business hours or increasing your workload. If you're looking to make money online, then the dropshipping industry is definitely one of the more lucrative business models you should consider.

But how many hours do dropshippers work? And how long does it take to achieve success in the dropshipping industry?

The most important thing to remember is that the number of hours you need to work on your dropshipping business will always vary. There is no specific timeline that every business owner should stick to by the exact second. Time investment is all dependent on how much a retailer is willing to do and how much success they want to have.

If you want a steady stream of income on top of your current job, you will not need to put in as much effort as someone looking to make their dropshipping business their only source of income.

In this blog, we will give you the best idea of the hours you should put in based on the maturity of your business, and the kinds of responsibilities you can expect to have if you’re just starting out or if you’re wanting to grow and scale your business.

Is dropshipping a high maintenance business model?

Dropshipping allows retailers to sell a wide variety of products on their websites without having to worry about keeping physical inventory. This removes all the jobs that are associated with stock, like choosing what packaging to use, how much stock you should order for a particular season, or what the best shipping strategy will be.

When it comes to physical inventory, dropshipping is considered the lowest maintenance business model. However, as a retailer, you still have to be in charge of the other aspects of your ecommerce business, like customer relations, building a website, and deciding and implementing marketing campaigns. These responsibilities take time and are a requirement of any online business model, so there’s no way to avoid them.

The maintenance level of dropshipping business models depends on a few choices you will make along your journey:

What kinds of products you sell on your online store

The potential for what you can sell as a dropshipping store is limitless, there are so many great suppliers and options for you to choose from. For example, you can sell appliances like vacuum cleaners or products like baby and kid's toys, the most important thing to keep in mind is how popular the products you choose to sell are and how passionate you are about your niche. Choosing a product niche makes it much easier to narrow down your target audience and create effective marketing campaigns.

While most products will have the same amount of maintenance as others, there can be some that offer differing levels of upkeep. For example, selling something like car GPS systems may present an opportunity for customers to have more questions or issues with the technology or product quality compared to a lower risk and cheaper item like clothing or beauty. Products that require a higher investment from customers may mean you see a higher influx of customer questions you have to answer.

Including in-depth instructional guides for how to set up your products will help to lessen the number of customer queries you get and will therefore save time. If you advertise that your products come with these things, for example, a detailed manual for how to set up a standing desk that includes solutions to commonly faced problems, you will be less likely to get as many questions about that product.

Replying to customers should be one of your main priorities as a dropshipper, so it’s important to be aware of how much time it might take to answer questions or solve customer issues based on the products you are selling.

How many employees you have

One of the biggest tips for people looking to start a dropshipping business is to hire at least one employee as soon as the online business starts making a profit. It’s a valuable way to invest your money and will save you a lot of time and energy.

Because of the nature of dropshipping, your first employee can work remotely and take care of admin tasks like customer service and fulfilling orders. This person can answer emails or calls and respond to customer queries on social media. These admin-type tasks take a lot of time on their own, so if you have a trusted employee doing them on your behalf, you can save a lot of extra time each week.

What kind of software you use

Automated systems will be one of the main things to help cut down the number of hours you work each day, and your orders will be processed without you having to manually put each one through to your third party supplier. This is great for when you start selling more, as you won’t have to sacrifice sales because you can’t keep up with demand.

With Dropshipzone, you can integrate your dropshipping store with Shopify and Sofortig, an in-house app built to automatically sync your stock levels to provide a seamless fulfilment experience.

Time investment for new dropshipping businesses (0-6 months)

For a new dropshipping business, the time investment is going to be a bit higher because of the initial time you need to spend setting up your business. You’re not going to magically see success in just a few days. You will have to spend time setting up your store, and this includes researching product niches and deciding on yours, picking your platform and developing a website, finding suppliers to work with and getting used to managing traffic and marketing your products in the most effective way.

We understand that most people won’t be able to give up full time work with a stable income to focus all their time and energy on their dropshipping business within the first six months of having their own online store. This just means you may find juggling both more challenging, but success is still possible, and once your small business starts earning a significant profit you can reward yourself by making dropshipping your full time job.

If it’s feasible for you to focus your full time energy on your business, the likelihood of creating success within the first year will be higher.

The highest rate of failure in dropshipping companies is in the first six months, so this is the most important time to invest your time and energy. Most dropshippers just starting out spend anywhere from 30-90 hours a week, and after they have created success, that is when they can drop down to working on a much less intense schedule, sometimes as little as five hours a week. However, to get to this point, you must put in the work consistently over a decent period of time.

To get past the first six months without feeling discouraged, you should set reasonable expectations and understand what kind of time investment will be needed for your desired profitability rate. According to experts, entrepreneurs can expect to earn $1,000-$2,000 a month when working 10-15 hours per week.

Some of the things you should focus your time on each day to ensure the success of your dropshipping store include:

• Posting to each of your social media platforms once or twice a day.

• Researching market trends and coming up with new product ideas that will help boost sales.

• Creating advertisements and planning and executing marketing strategies.

• Replying to emails, social media comments and messages and generally interacting with your customers.

• Processing orders and handling returns and complaints.

• Managing your website and ensuring usability.

Time investment for established dropshipping business

Once you’ve put in the work to become successful, you can start to relax the amount of time you invest in your business.

With an established dropshipping business, you have already built a website and are in the thick of selling products to customers at a high rate. You’re in the groove of dropshipping and understand the ins and outs of what you need to do every day to keep your online store on track. This is where you have some financial freedom and can balance work with your personal life, and you don’t need to spend every waking minute focused on your business.

You might have multiple employees who take care of things like customer service and various marketing campaigns and strategies on your behalf, and you can relax a little knowing day-to-day procedures will more often than not run smoothly with you overseeing things from afar.

Based on studies, it will take 12 months of full time work, that is at least 40 hours a week, to replace an average income of $50,000 USD (about $75,000AUD) a year. These experts also noted that this was with dropshipping businesses who focused a lot of their time on marketing strategies, so you can’t just wait for the sales and customers to come to you, you have to go looking for your potential customers and create excitement around your brand so people keep returning to shop with you.

This might seem like a lot of effort for minimal payoff, but keep in mind that creating your own dropshipping business is something that can continue to grow and eventually become a valuable asset that can be sold in the future to another retailer or company.

If you’re wanting to earn more than this, obviously your annual profit will increase with the more hours you put in, but make sure your time is being spent in the right areas. It’s no good if you spend all your time choosing a specific font for your website when you should be researching upcoming trending products or creating effective marketing strategies.

Dropshipper responsibilities

There are a few responsibilities that take up most of your time when running a dropshipping business, so we’ve explained each one to give you a rough idea of what your day might look like as a dropshipper.

Managing suppliers

Managing inventory and suppliers is perhaps the task that takes the most time when owning a dropshipping business, and this is because the dropshipping business model relies on your third party suppliers being aware of what customers they are shipping to and what products.

Choosing the dropshipping suppliers you want to work with will be important to the level of success you have and how quickly. There are many untrustworthy online retailers out there who market themselves as wholesale suppliers but aren’t offering the best prices. You want to look for wholesalers buying directly from manufacturers to ensure you are getting the best deal.

Luckily, Dropshipzone only works with legitimate wholesalers and suppliers to get your customers the highest quality products with low shipping costs. Unlike non-genuine wholesalers, Dropshipzone doesn’t charge ongoing membership fees or service fees or have minimum order quantities for first orders.

With Dropshipzone, you can use multiple suppliers on the platform, which is a huge advantage. This way, you can ensure you are offering your customers a wide range of products and reducing the risk of stockouts. You can also easily see all available inventory in one place, helping you keep track of the availability of products.

Working with exceptional suppliers will often mean retailers have access to experts and support representatives to help with any issues that may arise. Suppliers who actively problem solve will help to cut down a significant amount of time spent by retailers each week resolving supply chain issues. Most dropshipping suppliers invest in technological advancements and will be able to provide real-time inventory snapshots so retailers can easily streamline the delivery process.

If you’re doing manual orders with your suppliers, the thing that is going to take the most time is placing orders with those suppliers with customer details and addresses. From there, you have to get a tracking number from the supplier and send it to the customer, making sure you have receipts for proof of purchases and are keeping track of your orders in case anything goes wrong.

If you choose to use software to automate most of the ordering process, this will make it much easier for you and cut your time in half. Instead of spending 10 hours processing 50+ orders, you can get those orders done in less than two hours.

Customer support

You will be in charge of maintaining relationships with customers, and this responsibility is extremely important because without customers there can be no sales.

Returns are a common occurrence with any retail store, and if you handle them well you will ensure that you minimise your losses as a company and keep your customers happy. The refund process for dropshipping is just the reversed steps of the fulfilment process, so you will have to organise the return and make sure the customer either gets their money back or gets a replacement item. This is something that will be a part of your daily tasks, and the amount of time you need to spend on a particular refund will vary from case to case.

Customer support includes things like answering questions, resolving issues and replying to comments and customer reviews, all of which take time to complete each day. To begin with, you might want to do these things yourself to build relationships with your consumers, but over time it will begin to become overwhelming when your sales grow and there are too many customers to reply to. This is when hiring or outsourcing employees is a great option. You can implement live chat features into your website where customers can get immediate help and answers and you don’t have to spend eight hours a day replying to each query or problem.

Phone support might be something you choose to offer once your business is established. This calls for a need for staff to resolve customer issues over the phone, and extra time will be needed to monitor calls and employ staff to make sure your business values are being upheld.

Keeping your customers happy is one of the best forms of marketing, and word-of-mouth is a powerful force in the online world of retail. There will be times when you have to sacrifice some money to keep a customer happy, but that is completely normal. Spending your time on customer support will prove to be invaluable when you find that you can rely on your dropshipping store for your full time job and you can work from anywhere.

Marketing

Marketing is extremely important in the early days of your dropshipping business as it is required to bring brand awareness and build momentum, so you should divide up your time to focus a lot of it on your marketing strategies.

Your marketing efforts will need to be substantial if you want to be successful and create longevity for your ecommerce store. Like your product descriptions, your marketing strategies need to include relevant keywords, so some of your time will be spent researching SEO to apply to your campaigns.

Marketing is extremely important, but it takes a lot of time. You can’t just slap some words onto an image and expect that to do the job. Extensive research about the market and your target audience is needed.

There’s no use spending the first couple of months designing a website to have it launch to a customer base of zero. Marketing creates excitement around products, and you can start pushing out campaigns before you’ve even launched your website.

Most people spend about 75 per cent of their time on marketing strategies for at least the first four to six months of owning a dropshipping business. Strong marketing campaigns, especially for new dropshipping stores, will be important to help you create a solid foundation. From there, you can drop down the amount of time spent on marketing once you are well established.

Product research

It takes time to decide what products you want to have to represent your dropshipping business. Your products are what makes your ecommerce store and ecommerce business unique, so the decision of what products you want to sell is an important one. Research needs to be conducted about trending products so you can choose the ones that are the most likely to succeed with your target audience.

Product research doesn’t stop once you have decided on a dropshipping niche and the items to go with it. Seasonality changes mean retailers have to constantly be prepared for different trends throughout the year, so working on this each day with your supply chain is essential.

Researching products also includes thinking of ways to add value to your products, which is one of the ways to ensure the profitability of your dropshipping store.

Different ways to add value to your products:

• Create buying guide blog posts.

• Post set up or installation guides on social media.

• Create videos that show how your products work.

• All of these options take time, so whether you have employees who focus on adding value to your products or you choose to do some of the work yourself, this is something you will be responsible for.

Website development & management

The best way to enhance your ecommerce website and make sure it is user-friendly and draws in customers is by visiting some of the websites of your competitors. Are they outdated or do they catch your eye? Is the site easy to use or do you run into problems as soon as you try to shop? If you notice that there is room for improvement, start there.

Spending the time making sure your website design is appealing will help your business look professional, as 48 per cent of people say a website’s design is the top factor in deciding if a business is credible.  

Mobile optimisation should be one of your main priorities when developing your website, as studies show 55 per cent of internet users say they prefer browsing on their mobile devices compared to laptops or desktops. If you only focus on developing your website for computers you will miss out on a huge margin of the online shopping community, and 40 per cent of people say they will immediately choose a different website if the first is not mobile friendly.

You will need to use search engine optimisation (SEO) tools on your website and in product descriptions to ensure the visibility of your dropshipping store and attract customers. You should also be doing regular research to update keywords based on current trends. For example, one month it may prove more beneficial to describe the chairs you are selling as dining chairs, and another month the trending keywords might be office chairs instead.

The thing that will take the most time is the initial set up of your website, and there are a few steps you can take to do so.

Steps to setting up your website:

1. Pick a domain name.

2. Pick the ecommerce platform you are going to use.

3. Pick a website theme that reflects your brand.

4. List your chosen products.

Hiring and managing employees

It’s important to hire employees once your online store starts to earn a profit, but you want to make sure that those employees are aligned with your business goals and are invested in your success.

To begin with, we suggest being the main influence on your dropshipping business. This way you are fully aware of every step of your business plan, the things you want to achieve and how you will achieve them.

Choosing where you want to sell

Along with creating your website, you can choose to sell on an online marketplace to help you sell products online to the existing customers on the platform. Marketplaces like eBay and Amazon require fewer marketing strategies and are easy to use, but they will require more time investment.

For people just starting their dropshipping journey, we recommend focusing your time on setting up your website and becoming a profitable business before considering selling on marketplaces.

However, if you are already an established dropshipping business, then splitting your time with an online marketplace can help you grow your sales and create more traffic with minimal effort.

Ways to save time

Overall, there are a few things you can do to save time as a dropshipping business:

• Hire at least one employee.

• Implement live chat features on your website.

• Automate your fulfilment methods.

• Choose the best suppliers.

• Work with a dropshipping company like Dropshipzone to have all your inventory needs in one place.

How much time is needed to achieve success for your dropshipping store?

Online shopping is fast becoming many people's preferred method of retail, so the potential for success is high. However, dropshipping success takes time and effort, and you can’t expect to see extremely high profits overnight.

Your dropshipping business could start making a profit in as little as one week, but after time you may see your sales start to drop if you don’t have adequate plans in place. Your dropshipping store needs to be set up and prepared for the long term so it doesn’t lose momentum after a couple of months like most dropshipping stores in the first six months.

The amount of time it takes to achieve success depends on how you define success. If you want a side hustle that earns you a bit of extra spending money each month, it may take just a few weeks or months to earn an acceptable profit. However, if you want your dropshipping business to be your main source of income, it will take at least a year of work, focused heavily on your marketing strategies, to replace a full time income.

Don’t get disheartened if you feel like you aren’t making much progress with your dropshipping store in the first six months. If you’re focusing your time on the right things, like marketing and customer service, your hard work will pay off eventually.

Using Dropshipzone, Australia’s leading B2B2C marketplace, will help you improve your chances of success. Dropshipzone works with Australian suppliers to bring you the best quality products and fast shipping times.

The hardest part of creating success is taking the leap to start your dropshipping business, so we’ve made it easy for you to sign up and start selling today.