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Starting an online business can be a challenge, but an e-commerce store has its own pros and cons. Did you know that many successful brands have built a fortune with drop shipping store ideas?
If you’re reading this, then it’s probably because you want to know more about drop shipping and how it can work with Shopify.
Drop shipping has been around for a while, but it has gained popularity in the past few years — largely brought about by more accessible suppliers like Aliexpress and e-commerce platforms like Shopify.
In fact, 33 percent of online sellers use the drop-shipping model for their stores. In 2011, 34 percent of sales on Amazon were fulfilled by drop shippers.
There’s no doubt that drop shipping is a profitable business model, but it’s not easy as people would have you believe. Just like any business venture, it requires money to start — but not a huge amount compared to starting a brick-and-mortar store.
What is drop shipping?
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In a nutshell, drop shipping is a business model wherein you act as a middleman between the customer and the supplier.
You, the seller, build a store and put products that are from a supplier (or different suppliers). When a customer orders a product from your store, you order it from the supplier and the supplier ships it to the customer. Drop shipping store ideas will help you find stores that help you with dropshipping.
How do you make money with drop shipping?
As a seller, you make money with drop shipping from the markup that you put on your products. This markup can be x1, x2, or x3 and higher.
Drop shipping does not require you to maintain inventory, so the overhead costs are pretty low. In fact, most retailers who drop ship have the potential to be 50 percent more profitable than those who follow traditional online selling (with inventory).
Note that pricing your product can make or break a sale and some customers might be turned off by an overpriced product. They might also be suspicious if the product is priced too low.
Drop shipping store ideas – Choosing a Supplier
Before you even start building your drop shipping store, you need to decide on a supplier.
Most drop shippers use Aliexpress which has a huge amount of products and suppliers all based in China. Most products that you see on Amazon, you can find in Aliexpress for a lower price.
Another advantage of going with Aliexpress is that most product-sourcing apps that work with Shopify support Aliexpress. You can download an app and a browser extension and add products to your Shopify store while browsing the Aliexpress website.
Some people have reservations about going with Aliexpress because of the long delivery time. Delivery times range from a week to a month, depending on the customer’s location.
If you’re in the United States, it’s best to select ePacket as your shipping method because orders arrive in a week or two. Most drop shippers don’t mind the long wait time and claim that most customers won’t mind as long as they want or need the product.
If for some reason, you don’t want to work with Chinese or international suppliers, there are also suppliers based in the United States. However, note that products will cost significantly higher and you won’t be able to make as much profit.
Drop shipping store ideas – Why Shopify is a good option
There are many platforms that you can use to build your e-commerce store. You can use WordPress, Magento, Squarespace, etc. However, the most user-friendly and common selling platform specifically used for drop shipping is Shopify.
This is for a few reasons:
- There are apps designed for sourcing products for drop shipping that only work with Shopify
- It is easy to use and great for beginners
- It comes with a free SSL certificate needed for an e-commerce store
- Built-in feature for taking credit card and PayPal payments
Please note, this article may contain affiliate links. I only recommend products or services and have received positive reviews from independent sources.
How to build a drop shipping store with Shopify
Building a store with Shopify is easier compared to other platforms. If you haven’t used any content management platform before, then this process won’t be too difficult for you.
To start a Shopify store, you need to sign up for a Shopify account. Shopify offers a free 14-day trial, after which you can upgrade to a monthly plan (starts at $29/month) or get the annual plan.
Go to Shopify.com and click on Start free trial.
On the next screen, enter an email address, password and store name. You can change the store name at a later time — but this really does not matter as your final store name will be the actual name you will get a domain for (more on that later).
The next step will ask you a few questions about your store.
Finally, on the next screen, put in your address. This will reflect as your business address in your store’s Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy page.
When done, click Enter my store.
Now you’ll see your Shopify dashboard for the first time.
Before you start adding products to your store, there are some settings that you need to set up first.
Go to Settings (bottom-left corner) and click on Payment providers.
If you are in the United States, you can select Shopify Payments. Shopify Payments is powered by Stripe and enables your store to collect credit card payments.
Click Complete Shopify Payments setup to do this.
You would need to connect your bank account details and provide the last four digits of your SSN to verify your identity.
Other alternate methods of payment are PayPal (also needs your PayPal details) and Amazon Pay. Manual payments are also possible, but this is not used for a drop shipping store since most customers prefer to pay by credit card or PayPal. Remember when choosing drop shipping store ideas to use a platform you feel comfortable with putting in your payment information.
Click on Save when you’re done.
The next step would be to check your theme and add a logo. Shopify has great free themes already built in and you can use any of these for your store.
Click on Online Store and you’ll see the default theme setup. Shopify currently uses Debut as the default theme. Click View your store to see how it looks like.
If you want to see other themes, scroll down and click Explore free themes or Visit Theme Store.
The main thing you need to change or add here is your store logo. To do this go back to the Themes page and click Customize.
On the left pane, select Header. Find the Logo image box and click Select image.
Click Upload an image under the Library area.
Click on the image for your logo and click Open. Click Select to confirm your action.
If you want your logo to appear at its maximum size, adjust the slider under Custom logo width to the maximum (slide to the right).
Make sure to click on the Save button on the top right corner.
The other details on your theme can be modified at a later time.
Your store, at this point, is protected by a password. This means people can not see your store just yet. When you are ready to launch your store, you need to remove this password by going to Online Store>Preferences.
You would also need to pay for the Shopify plan before you can remove the password.
Drop shipping store ideas – How to add products
Drop shipping, as explained earlier, involves adding products from a supplier.
If you plan to use Aliexpress, you can easily do this by installing an app called Oberlo.
Got to Apps>Visit Shopify App Store and search for Oberlo.
Click Add App. Click Install app on the next screen.
Once Oberlo is installed, a new tab will open and you will be led to your Oberlo dashboard. Here you can search for products, transfer them to Shopify, and fulfill orders. Oberlo also has competitors in the drop shipping store ideas niche, so be sure to do your own due diligence.
Searching for products from the Oberlo dashboard is not recommended since you only get a few products that show up.
To see all available products, you need to go to Aliexpress.com. Installing the Oberlo Chrome extension will let you import products that you see in Aliexpress to the Oberlo app.
Once installed, you’ll see the Oberlo icon hover over every product you see on Aliexpress. Clicking on the icon will automatically import that product to Oberlo which you can then transfer to your Shopify store.
You can also click on the Oberlo icon on the top right of your browser and click on Add to Import List.
Note that the Oberlo extension only works in Aliexpress search results pages and individual product pages.
When you’re done importing products, you can go back to Oberlo and click on Import List on the left menu panel.
This brings up all the products you’ve imported. You can edit some details about the product here such as the title, images, variants, etc. Click Import to Store to load the product to your Shopify store.
Now you can go back to your Shopify admin and click on Products. You should see the products you’ve imported from Oberlo.
Drop shipping store ideas – Setting Pricing rules for your products
By default, Oberlo adds an x2 markup on your products. If you want to change this, go to the Oberlo dashboard.
Go to Settings>Global pricing rules.
You can change the multiplier on both your product price and the “Compared at” price. The Compared at price is a made-up value that is supposed to appear as the product’s original price and the product price is the discounted price.
If you don’t want a “Compared at” price, just click on the toggle to turn it off.
A markup can either be a value to multiply the original price or a fixed amount that is added on top of the product’s original price.
For more advanced options, click on the Advanced pricing rules to assign different markups for different price ranges.
Changing your site to a custom domain
By default, all Shopify stores will have www.mystore.shopify.com as their web address.
This does not look professional and is not reflective of a trustworthy site. To fix this, you need to get a domain, which will change the web address to www.mystore.com. If you use another platform for your drop shipping store ideas they could use another domain process.
You can buy a domain from Shopify itself or from other domain registrars like Godaddy or Namecheap. If you’re not technically savvy, then it’s best to do this within Shopify.
Go back to Home. Click on Add Domain.
On the next screen, select Buy new domain.
Type the domain name you want and click the Buy button if it is available.
Now your site will show up in the more professional format of www.mystore.com.
Shopify store settings – Drop shipping store ideas
There are more details to set up on your store before you launch.
These include:
- Shipping for drop shipping store ideas- Are you going to offer free shipping? Shopify allows price-based and weight-based shipping. You can set different shipping rates for every location in the world — if you plan on selling worldwide.
- Checkout – Customize the checkout process. Add your store logo, change which address is added as the billing address, allow the customer to add a phone number for shipping updates, and give the option to opt in to email offers from your store.
- Notifications – You can customize the look of your emails at each stage of a customer’s transaction. The Abandoned checkout feature allows you to send follow up emails to visitors who added a product to their cart but did not finish the checkout process.
Drop shipping store ideas – Now What?
There is more to learn about drop shipping. Setting up a Shopify store is just the tip of a massive iceberg.
If you choose to go with it, the next step is to advertise your store on Facebook and/or Instagram. You can also learn Google Ads so your store shows up on search results with your products’ keywords.
Paid ads are great and it does wonders for many store owners. If you don’t have the budget and you’re not sure how to do it right, then there are always free ways to make sales from your store.
Some free methods for getting sales and drop shipping store ideas are:
- Adding a blog to your store
- Email marketing
- Optimizing content for SEO
There are lots of ways that you can find success in drop shipping. The key is to not give up in the false expectation that this is a get-rich-quick scheme.
Have you tried your hand at drop shipping? We’d love to hear how these drop shipping store ideas for Shopify have helped you.
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