You already know what dropshipping is if you clicked on this article. But if you still don’t know, here’s a short summary. Dropshipping is a way for online stores to sell goods from third-party suppliers (or wholesalers). The best thing about dropshipping is that retailers don’t have to keep track of their stock or fill customer orders.
A third-party provider does all of this. In essence, the dropshipper acts as a manager of marketing. Their main job is to make online stores that look good, are reliable, and attract customers. Now the question is how to make a dropshipping store on Shopify that makes money.
Why Use Shopify for Dropshipping
Before explaining why Shopify is good for dropshipping, it’s important to know what Shopify is and if it’s really good for a dropshipping business. So, Shopify is basically software that you pay for by the month that makes it easy for anyone to set up an online store. It has become known as the most popular e-commerce platform on the market because more than 1,000,000 companies (customers) use it.
Shopify is a favorite among many people because it is more than just a tool for making dropshipping stores. It also has a large ecosystem of apps and services, both free and paid, that can help you run your dropshipping business from A to Z. In fact, Shopify has been a big part of the rise of dropshipping in general.
With Shopify, a drop-shipper will get:
- Online Store Hosted with Multiple Templates
- There are tens of thousands of apps for selling on the Shopify App Store.
- Integration of a powerful checkout system and a free dropshipping tool like dropship-empire 24/7 Customer Support
- Shopify Shipping
How much does it cost to open a dropshipping business?
On average, each person will need between $230 and $250. The main costs of a Shopify dropshipping business are:
- Shopify’s basic plan starts at $29 per month. dropship-empire get a free version for life (Best dropshipping tool to find products directly from AliExpress)
- Samples of the product, which cost about $100 (will depend on the niche or products you have)
- The marketing of the product will cost an average of $100 per ad.
- Of course, if you want to make more money from your online store as it grows, you need to spend more money. If you want to know more about how to save money and cut costs when dropshipping, there’s a detailed blog post about it. Read this, please.
How to Make a Dropshipping Store on Shopify
Use the step-by-step guide below to learn how to start your Shopify dropshipping business from scratch. Our short and useful guide tells you everything you need to know, from choosing your niche to getting your first client.
The first four steps are about getting ready to start a dropshipping business, and the next five steps are about the more technical parts of getting a business up and running.
Pick-Up Your Niche
Whether you use Shopify or another e-commerce platform to make a dropshipping store, the first thing you need to think about is selling.
Here’s how to choose which items to sell:
Think about the things you like.
When you like what you sell, it’s easier to make a brand for your business and get the word out. Passion and strong interest help you connect with your customers on a deeper level and build a loyal customer base.
Find out if your product is popular.
Just being interested is not enough. Use the best-selling items on AliExpress and Google Trends to find out if your product is popular.
Figure out the possible margin.
Once you have a list of products that are popular and that you might want to buy, go to AliExpress to see how much you can buy. Compare the price to what it is on Amazon or another popular shopping site and figure out the difference. Subtract any possible shipping and marketing costs to find out which products could make you the most money.
Set Your Target Audience
Next, you should think about who you’re writing for. Who is most likely to buy what you’re selling? No matter how often your product is used, you need to make your store feel different from the others. If you try to reach “everyone,” none of this is possible.
Because of this, you need to make a buyer persona, which is a made-up version of your ideal customer. See what the buyer’s persona looks like in the example below.
First, your buyer persona should probably be based on some assumptions and Google search results. Think about what might make a customer want to buy from you, what worries or problems they might have, and how your product could help them.
With each sale, you can learn more about your customers and make your buyer’s persona better. Make sure to add Google Analytics to your store so you can learn about your customers’ demographics and how they use it.
Keep an eye out for Branding
Once you know who your ideal customer is, you need to start thinking about how to brand your business. Many people who drop-ship skip this step and just make another store. If you want to make money, this is a big mistake. Shopify dropshipping is so easy to get into that we sell the same things that other dropshippers sell. To get customers, you need to find a way to make your business stand out.
Go back to your customer profiles.
What kind of logo would speak to your ideal clients? What kinds of things and moods might interest them? How should they view themselves? Your Shopify brand name, logo, social media content, and product descriptions should reflect what your target audience wants.
Find the Best Name for Your Shop
Then give the shop a name. Shopify gives all new stores this name as a starting point: your-store-name.myshopify.com. But to make it look more professional, you should take out the “myshopify” part and make a custom domain name.
You can use Shopify’s free store name generator to come up with a name for your store and see if it is available.
Here are some important things to think about when giving your business a name:
- Shorten
- Use the most important words
- Should be simple to write
- If you’ve found the perfect name for your business, but it’s already being used on social media, try adding “social” or a similar word to the name. Try to have the same name on all of your platforms so that customers can find you easily.
So, let’s move on to the more complicated part of making a Shopify dropshipping store.
How to Set Up a Shopify Account
Don’t worry if you don’t know which Shopify plan to use. You don’t need to make a decision right away. Just start the 14-day free trial and start setting up your store.
After you enter the information, Shopify will ask you some questions on the next screen. For example, it will ask what industry you are in and if you already have a product for sale. Your answer will tell Shopify how to help you make your store.
Once you have the Dashboard for your store, you need to do these three things to set up your store:
- Add Product
- Change your theme.
- Then, add your domain name.
How to Set Up Your Shopify Store
The next step is to make the store look different from the others.
Shopify has more than 100 paid and free themes. You can look through them by industry to find the one that will work best for your brand. You can also change each theme to make it fit your needs. You can easily add or remove the content you want. If you know how to code, you can make your shop even better.
Tips for designing your store:
- Always use high-quality images. Remember that even if the product supplier has cool images, all dropshippers can access them. So, if you want to stand out, buy a sample of the product you want to sell and get your photos in order. If you need photos to set the mood of your store as a whole, you can find great free stock images on sites like Unsplash, Pexels, and more.
- Good photo of the product – dropship-empire
- Be Specific: The less your customers have to worry about in your store, the more likely they are to buy something from you. Don’t use pop-ups or make your store too bright.
- Social Proof for Happy Customers: Plan where to put user-generated content and customer reviews. People will be more likely to buy from your store if they see other people happy with what they bought. Also, it would be great if you could make a logo for your store. If you don’t know how to use PhotoShop, you can use any online logo maker to make it (PS). *
- Social Proof for Happy Customers: Plan where to put user-generated content and customer reviews. People will be more likely to buy from your store if they see other people happy with what they bought. Also, it would be great if you could make a logo for your store. If you don’t know how to use PhotoShop, you can use any online logo maker to make it (PS).
Put in your goods
You can add your products to your Shopify dropshipping store in a few different ways. Here are some examples:
- Importing a Catalogue from a CSV File in Bulk
- Upload one by one (Time Consuming)
- Link your Shopify account for drop shipping to dropship-empire. It’s the best platform for dropshippers because it makes it easy for them to find products and add them to their stores. dropship-empire also lets you import products from AliExpress to your store using the three methods listed above.
You have to describe your product, and this is where you should pay more attention. Go back to the buyer’s persona and think about what your ideal customer might want to achieve. Make sure the title of your product is short and easy to click, and that the description focuses on the benefits rather than the features.
Choose how you want to ship and pay.
Lastly, you need to fill in a few more technical details. It’s important to remember the following:
Check out Shopify’s shipping costs page, which will help you figure out how much shipping will cost. You can also use it to handle orders. Mostly, you have three main options:
- Offer Shipping at MRP
- Don’t charge for shipping
- You can add extra shipping costs (don’t say it outright; just add it to the price of shipping).
- Payment: Shopify Payments, which is already set up in your account, is the best way to pay. Just turn it on.
- Policies: You also need to tell people how to get a refund, how to use the product, and how it will be shipped. You can use Shopify’s free privacy policy generator to make a shop policy, or you can hire a Content Writer.
You’re almost good to go!
Get programs from the Shopify Store
Shopify has a lot of apps that dropshippers can use to run their businesses. The Shopify App Store has everything you need to find things to sell, run automatic ads, and fix SEO mistakes.
Some Shopify Store apps that can help your dropshipping business grow are listed below:
- Automizely: Offer Ad Campaigns You Can Customize
- Dropship-Empire: is the official dropshipping solution from AliExpress.
- Loox: Get Product Reviews, Photo & Video Reviews, and Referrals
- Tidio: Chatbots, Messenger, and Instagram have made live chat better.
At the Finish
If you want to use Shopify Base to build a dropshipping store, you’ve come to the right place.
In the guide above, we talked about everything, from choosing a product category to figuring out how popular a product is to researching keywords, designing a website, making it mobile-friendly, and much more. Hope this guide helps you make your own dropshipping store that makes money.