Dropshipping is one of the most popular methods of earning money via e-commerce. The biggest perk is that you don’t have to worry about keeping and managing the inventory and post-order operations such as picking, packing, shipping, and tracking. In dropshipping, you just need to find some products, add them to your site, and promote them.
When a user orders the product from your website, you can buy the product from its real retailer and ask them to send it to your customer. In the process, you can get a reasonable profit, which can not only fulfill your kitchen income but can also help you in creating wealth and assets.
Aliexpress is one of the leading websites where you can find low-cost products with high margins that you can list in your store for selling. However, proper research is required before building a profitable business out of dropshipping. Please keep on reading this article for an in-depth understanding of the process.
eBay and Amazon used to be reliable marketplaces for those individuals who loved to enjoy profit markup attained from selling third-party products and services. With time, their policies suffered a drastic change and made it difficult for people to generate handsome profits by restricting the dropshipping business model.
To be honest, eBay used to be so good once; it was a friendly marketplace where buying and selling products were easy even for Dropshippers, unlike now when you can be kicked out of their server for dropshipping. The best alternative to this is Shopify, a famous E-commerce website builder, and professional shopping portal, allowing everyone to start their shops by exhibiting their company’s products and services.
Instead of depending on eBay or Amazon, you can create a very professional website on Shopify, list your products and services for earning a handsome amount of money every single day.
How to Build a site on Shopify:
To create a Shopify website, you simply need to go to Shopify’s official website, enter your email address and start your 14 days free trial. However, certain limitations are attached to the trial, so we recommend you to select a subscription package on the very first day if you’re planning to go for long-term business. Very affordable and flexible packages are available depending upon your needs and the size of your business. If you’re a completely new person to dropshipping, you may like to go for their basic package, which is a mere 29 bucks.
After the registration, you’ll be provided with a dashboard where you can manage all the stuff related to your website. You can add products, set the pricing, customize your site’s design and pages, manage inventory, set the shipping pricing and rules, and many more things. The interface is easy to navigate and user-friendly.
The best thing is that you can use Shopify’s payment method for receiving payments from your customers if you don’t have a stripe, PayPal, or custom payment processor. However, you can also use more than one payment method simultaneously. Thus, you can say that Shopify provides you with everything you need to start a successful dropshipping business.
However, you cannot get success overnight. You need to do extensive research on finding the right products for your Shopify store.
Product Hunting and Finding The Best Products
It is not difficult to create a Shopify store; you can do it within a matter of minutes. The real challenge is to find the products that would sell like hotcakes without your having to invest much money on Facebook ads and Google Adwords. In other words, if you find and list hot selling products, you would not have to allocate a lot of budget for marketing of your website because it may get viral once you list and sell only those products which your buyers need. Understanding the market trends is so much important; you need to keep abreast of all the products which are hot during a particular season or month.
Here are some most straightforward ways of finding winning products for your Shopify dropshipping store.
Use FindNiche
One of the very best tools for finding high converting, trendy, and most profitable dropshipping products is FindNiche. The database contains more than two million dropshipping products whose selling trends are regularly updated. You can find products, niches, or Shopify stores related to your business, i.e., your competitors.
The best thing about this wonderful tool is that it’s completely free to use till a limit; all you need is to signup with a valid email address and get started using the tool. You can extract the required data from the massive pool of big data in a matter of seconds. Many filters are available to find the products that exactly fit your desired scales. You can filter based on the category, top country, no of orders, price, number of times the products have been added to the wishlists, votes, shipping country, recommendations, Payment method, and either the product contains a video or not.
People who have used FindNiche are really happy with their decision, and the user’s database is increasing day by day. If you’ve not tried it yet, why don’t give it a try, you’ll surely get addicted to it for your product research.
Proper Keyword’s Research
Any product that offers a solution to a problem or helps your customers in some ways might have the best chances of generating more sales in your store. All you need to do is your research and find out what people need in their daily life.
After you’ve found the product on FindNiche, it’s time to go for its marketing. If you’re going to promote it on Facebook, you need a better ad-creative and targeting strategy. You can use tools like BigSpy to get massive data of your competitors in the matter of a few clicks. You can find their ad-copy and creatives along with details of targeting and demographics. This is not just limited to a single advertisement channel. Instead, you can track your competitors from almost all popular channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Admob, and Yahoo.
However, proper keywords research is required in order to write a description and title for search engine optimization and Google’s shopping ads. You can do this research via Google ads’ keyword planner tool. You can check search trends via Google trends.
After you’ve found the right product, it’s the launching phase. List that product on your site and go for any promotional method you’re best at.
How can we neglect the site design! So let’s learn about selecting a better theme to make your website stand out from the competition in terms of its design.
Finding Out Right Theme
It is so imperative to find out the right theme for your Shopify store. The design of the theme must be related to the niche of your store and products. The design of your Shopify store template has to be fully equipped with great features. Here are some essential elements that you should look for when buying or having a theme developed for your store.
Friendly Interface
Many Shopify themes are being sold online these days that are a copy of each other with minor changes, but you should refrain from using these templates because they are not unique. Who knows how many stores have the same themes. You should always use the new design, and it must be very friendly for viewing on Computer and Mobile devices. Since you would be uploading products, descriptions, and sliders, your design must not overload your pages.
It has to have at least an 80% page speed score with hidden CSS, Html, and stylesheet resources. You should either find a high converting theme or hire a web developer for having a great theme developed with user-friendly features and interface. Some add-on plugins/apps should be designed with the template so you can upload pictures with ease and add more information in less time. You can import your products directly from Aliexpress via Oberlo, which is one of the very best applications for dropshipping.
Clear Navigation
Navigation works like a map on a Shopify template, and you must have it in a clear form, something that your customers can understand. Navigation helps buyers to understand the structure of the website and its content; they would find it easy to look for a particular product that they need. If your store revolves around one niche product, you should make separate pages with clear navigation to allow customers to find the products they want to buy. If you intend to promote multiple products, they have to be listed under appropriate categories with a perfect layout.
You might be looking for recommendations from our side, so here is our favorite Shopify theme –Debutify. The theme comes with all the features that can help you in creating a highly professional Shopify store without spending any money on the developers or designers. It has all the features that a search engine and user-friendly website should contain. There is Clear Navigation, Mobile-friendliness, a perfect product page, and continuous updates from the developers. Above all, you can get Debutify for free. All you need is to visit the official website and click on the download button. However, a paid version is also available for more advanced features.
Secure Cart and Check Out
The most common problem with the many Shopify stores is that the cart does not work effectively as soon as the customer is on Check out page to pay for the product. Your checkout page should allow all modes of payments such as Card, Escrow, and PayPal. Since your store is more of an individual product selling website, you need to write a page on Privacy Policy for ensuring your customers why your store is safe for online shopping? And what measures are taken for securing their privacy and personal data they would enter on the Check out page? Also, it’s a better idea to add a disclaimer page and a shipping policy page.
Let’s now sum it all up; In this guide, we have learned how we can use different tools to make drop shipping easier, hassle-free, and more profitable. We hope that you’ve enjoyed reading this. If you have any queries, please don’t hesitate to ask in the comments section.
Author Bio:
Waqas Nazeer is a Digital Marketing Consultant. He has worked with different companies around the globe and helped them in making their business prosper in the Digital world as well. He loves to write about the topics that add value to a business’s online presence. All his pieces of writing are well researched and based on practical case studies.