Dropshipping may be the answer for you if you launch your online business with little money to stock products and little time to manage orders. Dropshipping is an e-commerce strategy that makes it simple to launch an online business, especially for people with little free time.
Now, if you’re going to launch your dropshipping company, you might be interested in learning how to do so for nothing. Yes, you can launch a free online business. This article will explain dropshipping to you and show you how to launch a dropshipping business without any capital.
How Does Dropshipping Work?
Dropshipping is a way for retailers to keep track of the stock in their online stores. With dropshipping, you don’t have to worry about keeping stock of the products because your suppliers will ship the orders directly to the customer who bought them from your online store. In other words, you help make the deal happen by acting as a go-between.
You should do the following when running a dropshipping business: accept the order from the customer and have your suppliers fill the order. A dropshipping tool, like dropship-empire, the best dropshipping app on Shopify, can help you automate your dropshipping business quickly and easily.
With dropshipping, you can quickly try out different business ideas with a small amount of money and resources. This lets you learn a lot about how to choose and sell products that people want.
Dropshipping has a number of benefits.
- Less capital required
- Simple to get going
- Low costs and a choice of places
- Lots of different things to sell
- It’s easier to test products that are popular and on trend.
Easier to scale
Dropshipping is a good way to start an online business because it doesn’t take much time or money to get started. For more information about dropshipping, see our other article, “What is Dropshipping?”
How to start dropshipping without any money
Here are some easy steps you can take to start dropshipping for free. In addition to the free steps, the list also includes a few paid services that could help your dropshipping business grow and improve. You can plan how much money you want to spend and how much time you want to put into your dropshipping business.
Choose a niche and products to sell.
The first thing you should do to start an online dropshipping business is to figure out your niche and products. It is worth your time to do research on niche marketing for the people you want to reach. You can do product research with tools like Helium 10 and Jungle Scout. First-time users can get a 50% Coupon for the tool.
You can get ideas for the right niche and products by looking at the best-sellers on AliExpress. You can look at some of the best sellers on AliExpress. They could be from any category, and each one will give you an idea. For more information, you can also read our article on the 100+ AliExpress Best Sellers for 2021 that you can buy and sell to make money.
The following things may help you choose a niche:
- Interests and passions: Choose a niche where your interests and passions are unique. In other words, use your interests to help you start your dropshipping business and get the word out about it.
- Personal needs: You can find a niche based on what you’ve done in the past. When you’re looking for answers to these problems, you might meet people who have the same ones. They could be the people you want to reach, and making products that meet their needs could be your niche.
- Check out the competition. Choose a niche that has low to medium competition, if possible. If you have too many strong competitors, it might be hard to make money.
- Make sure the niche is profitable. Choose a niche where the profit margin after shipping costs, seller fees, and taxes is at least 40%. If the products don’t make enough money, you might not get as much cash.
Find Reliable Suppliers
Now that you know what you want to sell, you should find suppliers for your products. AliExpress has the most comprehensive lists of reliable suppliers. Most of them are in China, and their prices are very low. Just pick the one that works best for your online store.
It is a popular place to do dropshipping for a number of reasons:
- It is one of the best-known and most-used dropshipping platforms, and there are lots of sellers on it.
- The official AliExpress dropshipping partner, dropship-empire, can help dropshippers automate and make most of their work easier.
- You can do dropshipping with the help of a few tools and plugins, such as social integration, real-time insights, and more.
- AliExpress makes it easy to start a dropshipping business with a small amount of money.
- Check out our article How to Find a Reliable AliExpress Supplier with dropship-empire for more information on how to find suppliers on AliExpress.
Set up your online store for free.
Now it’s time to set up your online store, which is the most important part. The process includes designing your store’s homepage and images, adding products to your store, setting up payment methods, adding checkout, and setting up shipping, as well as buying a domain name and opening your store for orders.
When it comes to price, you can get an online store for free if you know how to build one yourself. If not, you have to pay for your website and the place where it is stored.
You could also set up your online store on your Facebook, Instagram, or other social media account. This won’t cost you any money, but you should also be aware of the risks. For example, if the account doesn’t have enough followers, it could be hard to promote your products.
If you want to make a lot of money, you should start your online store on a different platform. It will cost you money and time, but you don’t need to spend a lot of money on decorating, designing, etc. for your store.
You can choose from a lot of different platforms, such as Shopify, BigCommerce, Dukaan, Squarespace, and WooCommerce. Shopify is the most popular and is good for people who are just starting out.It lets you try it for free for 14 days.
Shopify
Shopify is a good choice if you want to open an online store for free or for a low price. Your store can be more appealing if it has a unique domain name, which you can get from Shopify, WordPress, etc.
BigCommerce
BigCommerce costs the same as Shopify, but if you sign up for a Shopify plan for one year, you can save 10% on your plan and save 20% if you sign up for two years.
That means that if you get a 20% discount on the Shopify plan, you’ll save almost $200 per year.
WooCommerce
WordPress is the base for WooCommerce. WooCommerce is a plug-in that can be easily added to your WordPress website. Your website can become a fully functional WordPress e-commerce site with just a few clicks.
From the comparisons above, it’s clear that Shopify has more pros than cons, especially for people who don’t have a lot of money to spend.
Since Shopify costs less than BigCommerce and WooCommerce, it is much cheaper to start an online store with Shopify.
Choose a free tool for dropshipping
A good dropshipping tool could make it easy for dropshippers to do their business by letting them find suppliers all over the world.
There are many helpful tools on dropship-empire that can help you reach most of your dropshipping goals for free. It will automatically sync order information, let you run multiple stores from one account, give you support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, send orders to AliExpress, let you pay in bulk, find multiple AliExpress suppliers with one click, and more.
Different e-commerce platforms, like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Wix, work with dropship-empire. The most important thing is that it’s completely free and has a few features.
Start selling your goods.
Now that your business is ready, you need to get the word out about your products. There are three best ways to market something to get more sales.
- SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” You should optimize it so that your online store site will rank higher in Google search results and get more traffic as a result.
- Social Media: Choose the right social media platform for your business. Not all products or stores should be advertised on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, for example. You should pick the social media that works best for your products.
- Email Marketing: As the name suggests, Email Marketing means that you can send an email to tell people about your new products or sales. It’s a strong and cheap way to attract and keep your customers’ attention. Check out the article What Is Email Marketing for more information.
- If you want to start your dropshipping business without spending any money, paid advertising might not be the best way to go. Advertising has a lot of power, but working with professional social media content creators, which is called “influencer marketing,” can be very expensive.You could find popular people through their Facebook or Instagram accounts. They have their own social network, and they may not cost as much as professional ambassadors.
You can also use the people you already know, like family and friends. Some of them might be interested in some of the things you sell. You could give them samples and ask them to talk about your brand and what you have to offer on social media and with their friends. The important thing is that you don’t have to spend a lot of money on them to promote your products.
Last Word
Dropshipping is easy to get started with, and you can also use tools to make your dropshipping business even easier and simpler.
Now that you know the steps to starting a dropshipping business for free, it’s time to put your great business idea into action without spending any money. And once you’ve started your online business, don’t forget to sell your products. Before you start dropshipping, you can do some research to find the best way to promote both your store and your products. Advertisements do bring people to a site.