Have questions about chosing an Agent in China? If so, read this. It is a bit of a long read but trust me, it is worth it.
I’ve seen a lot of posts containing screenshots of tracking numbers with fast delivery times but it does make me wonder what else is missing as I know from experience that relying on screenshots isn’t always the best thing to do. Sure, I can post up screenshots of deliveries being super fast but that doesn’t give you the full picture when it comes to choosing a reliable Agent to ship your goods from China. In fact I would say that it is only a small part of the bigger picture that is DropShipping.
You might see from some of those pics that USA delivery is only 4 days but is that being entirely truthful? In short it isn’t which I will explain here. If you see these super low delivery times from USPS then one of two things is happening;
1: Your agent is using a virtual warehouse so they send to USA using DHL etc and once it arrives in USA they get opened then sent on to your final customers. This is a great thing so your customers don’t see anything coming from China but on the flip side neither do you as we know that it will take a few days to source and ship your items to the virtual warehouse in USA. Suddenly your 6 day delivery actually becomes close to 2 weeks but it can still be a good customer experience.
2: Of course there are some agents like us at DropHippo who are lucky to have an actual warehouse in USA where we can arrange for your winning products to be sent to for delivery within as little as 48 hours.
I have also seen more and more posts about some competitors who it looks like have caused issues with sending the wrong product and going silent when things go wrong. For us this is what sets us apart from 99% of other Agents as we are native English speakers and we also have Arabic and French support available on our live chat. What’s that you say – “Live Chat”? YES! we do have live chat on our website (www.old.drophippo.com) where you can reach out to us at any time and we also have a Slack support where larger sellers have their own private Slack channel where not just our staff but the directors of DropHippo actively participate.
So, what happens when the proverbial crap hits the fan? This is where we are massively different to 99% of other Agents in that we will always be open and transparent with you even at the cost to ourselves. Take the recent COVID issues that were impacting delivery times, especially anything that went through LAX during the height of the Pandemic. We ended up refunding a lot of customers as there was no movement for packages but even though this did cost us several thousand dollars we know, and most importantly the Store Owners who we work with know, that finding a reliable and trustworthy Agent can be worth it’s weight in gold.
I know that this is a long post but I want to speak about 2 additional very important points that shouldn’t be forgotten about as this can kill your business. The first one is communication. We believe that it is one of the most important things to communicate with your customers (in our case Store Owners) as a long term partnership relies on clear and effective communication. An example of where we differ from most others is that we fully quality check every item that you sell to ensure that it is as described and most importantly, works as intended. We had one customer who reached out to us with over 2500 orders recently and asked us to source the product for them as their existing Agent let them down. As soon as we ordered a sample to our warehouse we quickly identified that the item didn’t meet our strict QC and what the Store Owner was selling was in fact a lot of trash. What did we do? We told him straight that the item would lead to massive chargebacks down the line and provided a video to him so that he could make the decision. In the end he refunded the orders which cost both him a lot of money on advertising and us with money in potential profit for an item that we refused to send. So yeah, it’s all fine having an Agent on the ground in China working for you but what is the point if their only concern is about getting as much money off of you as they can?
My final point is closely related to the Communications point I made above and that is Trust. How do you know that the Agent you are using doesn’t run their own stores or have an arrangement with someone else who does? At DropHippo we had 2 pretty successful Shopify stores but closed both and used the profits to create the ultimate Agent experience with DropHippo. The one thing that caused us to re-evaluate and launch DropHippo was when we were scaling a product and the Agent we used started to come up with all sorts of excuses due to a quality control issue, well lack of any quality control really. That is when both Stefan and myself realised that there was a gap in the market for a trustworthy sourcing and fulfilment Agent and this is when DropHippo was born.
Thanks for reading, I know that it isn’t a short post but why gamble your future and your business on an unreliable Agent? Any questions please post below in the comments and we will do our best to answer 🙂
