How To Sell Expensive Products From AliExpress In Your Dropshipping Store

How to sell expensive products online? Does it make any sense to add them to your dropshipping store? Today, we’ll take a look at the pros and cons of this broad type of dropshipping products. Let’s find out whether it’s a good solution for you personally!

When it comes to selecting the best products for a dropshipping store, we commonly rely on the most common basic recommendation: pick the cheapest items of the highest quality possible, and set a solid price markup. This way, both store owners and their customers are happy with every purchase. The buyers feel great because they pay a moderate price for their orders. Store owners, in turn, enjoy the deal because even this moderate price provides them with some earnings.

But what happens when a store owner switches to more expensive products? It’s not a rare thing – typically, entrepreneurs have 3 reasons to up their game:

• Higher profit

What do you get from selling one expensive item? Ideally, your revenue here equals the profit that you would receive from selling 5-10 affordable products. Naturally, this idea seems exciting to business owners who want to earn a considerable sum of money in no time at all.

• Broad product offering

AliExpress is full of wonders. Worldwide, it’s widely known as the platform offering the most competitively priced items. Still, it never ceases to amaze a curious researcher! Each product category here features dozens of quite expensive items. Even if you rule out the most extravagant options, you will still have plenty of luxurious items to choose from.

• Challenge

If you’ve been involved in dropshipping for a long time already, naturally, you will get bored eventually. For some entrepreneurs, selling the same inexpensive and undemanding items over and over again doesn’t seem exciting any more. At some point, they start making more ambitious business decisions.

But does the strategy of selling luxury products really work? Let’s ask the entrepreneurs who already have some experience in the field.

How to sell expensive products in a dropshipping store: real-life experience

If you have read the success story shared by Kingpin, our famous forum contributor, you probably remember his curious approach to product strategy.

One of Kingpin’s stores is all about higher class products that cost at least $10 each. Mostly, he combines several items into a single offer in order to sell them in a small bulk. And if the total order cost exceeds $100, he offers free shipping as the buyers’ bonus.  Supposedly, it happens often enough even though the store is rather young: it was launched in the middle of February 2017.

Kingpin targets retail shopkeepers across the USA and Australia. The business shows pretty fine results: in the first month of the store operation, he got $28,000 in sales and 14,5k in profits.

Another interesting example of a successful dropshipping store selling expensive items can be found on AliDropship forum. Here, we can read the story of the entrepreneur nicknamed Chokomelks: she sells high-end dropshipping products with an average price exceeding $100, and generously shares her store address with the forum readers. In several weeks of the store running, she managed to achieve 7 sales with the total cost of $655,41. The revenues were quite satisfying, too. For example, in one particular case she got $40,5 in profit from ONE sale of ONE product only! She increased the initial $112,5 AliExpress price up to $153, and the buyers were ready to pay this price.

Compare it with the average profit per product that you get from selling cheaper items. Of course, $40,5 is definitely a heart-warming sum of money!

But wait defore you rush on AliExpress to import chic items to your store! Ask yourself the following question: why exactly did these 2 entrepreneurs succeed with this expensive product strategy?

How to sell expensive products in an online store: what do these 2 cases have in common

Let’s take a careful look at these sellers’ profiles once again.

Kingpin’s experience

As of the summer of 2017, Kingpin had 7 dropshipping stores aimed at different customer audiences (end buyers and retailers). He has a more than 9 years experience of using WordPress. So, there is no wonder that he decided to build his stores with the help of the AliDropship Woo plugin. It is traditionally recommended for the use of highly skilled online entrepreneurs only.

In order to achieve the best business performance, he runs a beta test store. He uses it as a ‘playground’ to implement and test the newest technical solutions before approving them for use on the main stores.

Kingpin has a solid Internet marketing background, and it makes a noticeable impact on his approach to the business promotion. In order to promote this particular store, he used Facebook ads that are now generating 80-85% of the whole traffic. Knowing the typical behavior of Internet users in general and his target segments in particular, Kingpin concentrated on creating catchy videos and making them go viral.

Plus, he now uses the opportunities of email marketing as well: he contacts the store visitors who didn’t complete the purchase and abandoned their shopping carts, and offers them a discount to persuade them to finally place the order. Also, Kingpin follows the strategy of establishing a repeated contact. He sends his buyer’s related product suggestions to lure them into making more and more new purchases.

Chokomelk’s experience

Chokomelks, in turn, has 2 years of experience in dropshipping business management. She has 2 more stores apart from this luxurious one. She started it as a marketing experiment in order to find out whether the audience will be willing to buy expensive dropshipping products with the cost of $100 and higher.

Over the course of her market research, she found out that people don’t mind buying costly items as long as they trust the store and find the items, as long as the store brand, exclusive enough.

Relying on these findings, Chokomelks took major branding efforts to create the desired appeal of this exclusive store. To be more specific, she made up an easy-to-remember and catchy website name that would get affluent customers interested, designed a logo that shows exclusivity, and edited product names and descriptions in order to make them sound more appealing for wealthy buyers and to show the exclusive store identity.

Then, she set up automatic social media posting with Social Rabbit, and waited for several weeks to see the results. All the sales that occured during this period of time were generated thanks to the Rabbit actions, and originated from Pinterest. Chokomelks makes it clear that the promotion turned out to be successful because of well-researched hashtags that she included in the Rabbit’s posts.

What’s the outcome? Why do both of these entrepreneurs sell expensive products successfully?

• It’s not the first store they launch, so they have both the experience and money to start the business in the proper way
• They perform a thorough market research, and build their promotional strategy upon the basis of their target audience knowledge and general Internet marketing skills
• They use a range of semi-automated solutions to help them arrange the business in the most beneficial way possible.

As you can see, if you want to include luxury items in your dropshipping store offer, it’s necessary to meet certain conditions.

So, how to sell expensive products in an online store with the best results possible?

Taking into account everything we have previously mentioned, we can give the following recommendations to the dropshipping store owners who consider selling less affordable items:

• Make sure you know the basics

Want to dive deep into a high-profile luxury business? First, make sure you perfectly know how to manage your store correctly in terms of technical procedures and routine daily operations.

• Don’t change your direction immediately

Even if cheaper products seem boring to you, don’t get rid of all of them at once. It would be a better idea to add several higher priced products to your store offer now and then in order to research the impact of the changes.

• Learn your buyers

It’s vital to understand how exactly your customers react on different price levels. When you understand the preferences and queries of your target audience, you can make a well-reasoned decision on selling more expensive items.

• Don’t look at the price only

A high price shouldn’t be the only parameter to consider while importing items from AliExpress: read this article to learn what kinds of items will be the best addition to your store offer.

• Make sure the visitors trust your store

When it comes to buying something expensive online, people, quite naturally, experience doubts. They are not always sure whether it’s reasonable to place a costly order in an unfamiliar store. In this guide, we list the issues that might scare your visitors away, and explain what you should do to fix all these troubles. Also, you will find it useful to read this article on social proof: here, you will learn how to increase your conversions with the help of positive experience of your previous customers and certifying organizations.

• Make sure you have a financial backup

How do you buy an expensive item on AliExpress and arrange its delivery to your customer? That’s right – you need to already have a sufficient amount of money. Plus, some savings will also come in handy if you need to cover the expenses of making a refund or a product return. Usually, at the beginning of their dropshipping journeys, the entrepreneurs can’t afford such costly operations.

• Make sure you know how to work on branding

If you’re building a high-profile business, it is vital to convince your buyers you’re asking money for nothing. That’s exactly what Chokomelks tells in her story. You need to plan and execute all your marketing decisions and promotional activities in a very careful way. Even though they won’t necessarily require lots of spending, they will certainly require some profound Internet marketing knowledge.

• Upgrade your customer service

If you run a luxury store, your buyers definitely expect you to be extremely professional and polite in your communications. Read this article to learn how to deal even with the toughest clients in a way that supports your good reputation.

That’s it! Now, you know how to sell expensive products in your dropshipping store with the highest business efficiency. Will you use this challenging yet rewarding opportunity?