Dropshipping is a way to run a business in which you don’t keep inventory in your warehouse.
Instead, you sell a product online, and when someone buys it, the manufacturer sends it to that person.
The product could be yours, but it could be sitting in the warehouse of the manufacturer. It could also be the manufacturer’s product, but he could have just changed the brand name to yours.
Often, you will sell someone else’s product without changing the name of the brand at all.
So, how does dropshipping make you money?
Basically, all you have to do is find a product for sale online, buy it, and sell it in your dropshipping store for a higher price.
When someone buys something from you, you ask the seller to send it to the buyer, and the difference in price is your profit.
Dropshipping is a good way to run a business if you don’t know how to make things or don’t have a lot of money to buy things in bulk.
In a normal business, you need to buy a lot of things. You keep them at your house, then sell them online. If you make a sale, you ship the item. If they don’t sell, you will lose money.
That’s not how dropshipping works. If you don’t sell a product, it doesn’t really matter because you didn’t pay for it in advance.
This is a simple explanation of how a dropshipping business works.
- You find a product online but don’t buy it right away, so you don’t have to pay for it right away.
- You put the item on your own online store, like Shopify, and sell it for more.
- When someone buys something from you, you get paid.
- You use that money to pay the supplier for the product, and the supplier sends it to your customer.
- Your customer gets the product, and the difference in prices is how much money you make.
- Looking to get started? In this free dropshipping course, you’ll learn how to start your own online store. By the end of this article, you’ll know how to run a dropshipping store that makes money.
The Plan for Dropshipping
Now you know a little bit more about how this business model works.
The next step in this free training is to learn how to build a store so you can sell your products. In this video, you will see step-by-step how to do that.
How to Get Your Online Store Started
To start a dropshipping business, you need a place online where you can sell products. We do this on a platform called Shopify. It’s very simple to use.
You can also post your items on Facebook and Instagram if you want to. But if you do this, you won’t be able to do as much.
Also, if you sell on social media sites, how will your customers pay you?
So, what should we do?
The solution is for you to build your own online store that you will run on your own. We use Shopify because of this.
Don’t worry if you don’t know how to write code. Shopify was made to make it easy to set up an online store in just a few steps.
All you have to do is upload a picture of the product and write some information about it, and it’s ready to sell on the internet.
Why Shopify, though?
Shopify is a good platform for building a store, even if you don’t know anything about computers.
If you use Shopify, it’s easy to change the colors, themes, and brand name of your store. Here, we’ve put together a list of the best Shopify themes so you can see how beautiful it is.
Even more, we have a custom theme that was made just for dropshipping. Ecom Turbo can help you sell more things faster and make more money.
If you use Shopify, you don’t have to worry about how to get paid and send the money to your bank account.
This is built into Shopify, so you can charge your customers online with their credit cards. You don’t have to apply for credit card payment processors, which is a hassle.
Shopify was also made to make it easy for you to upload your products, make collections of products, change prices, add product sizes, and even add a blog page so you can give your readers and customers more value.
Want to know more about how to open a shop? Here is a step-by-step guide to getting started.
How to Find Things to Sell on Your Store
AliExpress is a Chinese-based online marketplace. Compare it to Amazon or eBay, but in Asia. AliExpress is a safe place to shop, and you can find great items at very low prices.
AliExpress is different in that you can buy things without having to keep them in stock. So, your supplier, not you, is the one who sends the goods.
On Amazon and eBay, you pay full price, and most sellers only ship internationally.
Find a seller with a good rating as your first step. There are three main areas that are used to rate sellers.
All of these are rated from one to five stars, with five stars being the best.
These things:
- Communication – This is how quickly and helpfully a seller answers questions.
- Shipping timeliness is a term for how quickly the seller gets the shipment ready. This doesn’t mean how long it will take to ship, because that depends on the courier and the rules of the country where the package is going.
- Item quality: This refers to the quality of the item and whether or not customers are happy with it.
- Carefully read the product details, because what’s written there is what you’ll promise to your customers, like refunds or what the package will actually contain when it arrives.
Once you find a supplier whose work is good enough, you can start adding products to your store.
You can quickly add products with apps like Oberlo that help with fulfillment. Here is where you can check out the best app. Once you’ve done all of this, you can start advertising your products to sell them online.
You can use an app called Spocket to speed up the time it takes to ship something. In our review, you can find out more about Spocket.
How to Start Dropshipping Facebook Ads
After you’ve set up your Shopify dropshipping store, the next step is to get people to visit it. People don’t walk by a brick-and-mortar store and decide to go in and buy something when they see it from the sidewalk.
If you don’t make yourself known on the Internet, no one will be able to find you.
So, how do you make a name for yourself online?
Facebook ads are the answer. More than 1 billion people use Facebook every day around the world.
Just think about how many people you could reach with ads on the platform. Your reach is unlimited, but how you run your ads will determine how far you can go.
Facebook is your best option, not only because it has so many users, but also because you can change how your ads look. You can set it up this way if you only want your ad to be shown to teenagers.
You can also choose to only show it to a certain state, county, city, or province.
You can also choose to run video campaigns, still photo campaigns, or carousels where customers can swipe through pictures of different products without leaving their Facebook profile page. You can also run advertisements on Facebook without spending a lot of money.
Here, you can run an ad for as much or as little as you want. You can set your budget however you want, such as $10 or more per day, and you can stop it whenever you want.
You don’t have to sign a contract to use Facebook ads. You have to pay a certain minimum for TV and radio ads, and they only play them for a certain amount of time.
This is not how Facebook works. You can turn on your ads today and turn them off a week from now. Facebook also lets you change the text of your ad at any time, in case you want to send a message to people who might buy from you.
There is also a market place on Facebook where you can sell things. You can find out more about this in our guide to the Facebook Marketplace.
How to get people to your store for free
If I don’t show you how to get traffic, this free dropshipping course won’t be complete.
If you don’t have any money to spend on ads or aren’t ready to put one up yet, you can get free traffic instead.
People come to your website for free, not just to buy, but also to read your blog and look at your products.
Why does this matter?
In the real world, you want to put your business where there are a lot of people walking by.
People are more likely to buy when there are more people around.
The same thing happens in the online world. You want thousands of people to visit your store at least once a day and look around.
Just think about how the numbers work. If 1% of the traffic turns into a sale, 10 out of every 1,000 people will buy something every day.
That’s 300 sales in a month, which isn’t bad for a dropshipping business that is just getting started. As your traffic grows, so will the number of sales you make each month.
How can you get people to visit your site for free?
- Blogs about search engine optimization
- Product list and description that are optimized for keywords
- Social media posting
All of these are free, and you can use them to bring people to your site for many years.
With these free ways to get traffic, people will be able to see your website. With advertising, your website and products will only be shown as long as you are paying.
Putting an end to this free course
Now that you know how to start a dropshipping business and what it takes, the next step is to decide what you want to sell.
It should be something you care about, something you love and are passionate about, because that will keep you going on your dropshipping journey.
Do not think that dropshipping will make you rich in a day. People who do well in this market are those who are determined to make their stores work, even if it takes them months of hard work.