Over the past few years, dropshipping has vastly increased in popularity among young entrepreneurs. One of the main reasons being, that online marketing and resources to learn about online marketing are becoming so much more accessible. And online marketing is the bread and butter of why dropshipping as a business model works.
There are many reasons why dropshipping is such a lucrative industry these days, one of which being you never actually have to hold stock of the products you are selling. This makes it very easy for e-commerce store owners to start a store or start a business with limited funds. E-commerce websites that utilize the dropshipping model only facilitate customers’ orders to their suppliers, either in China, United States, or Europe. And then you, the seller, get to cash out on the profits. Dropshipping not only significantly decreases your operational costs, but makes it so easy for you to scale even with limited funds.
Today, I’m going to teach you, start to finish, how to create a successful dropshipping store. So if you’re ready to create the career of your dreams, quit your 9 to 5 and scale a business larger than you’ve ever perceived, stick around and keep on reading.
There are a lot of moving parts that come with starting a dropshipping store. In fact, I could probably list over a hundred different things you need to do before publishing your e-commerce Shopify store. So in an effort to not overwhelm you, we’re going to simplify this process into five main steps.
However, Zendrop offers a completely free resource called the ZenRocket Challenge. The ZenRocket Challenge is a fully comprehensive, step-by-step detailed course, all about creating a successful dropshipping store. Register for the ZenRocket challenge and with that registration comes one month free on our Zendrop Pro membership.
The first, and most important, step in creating your very first dropshipping store is going to be selecting your niche. Now, with the millions of products being sold online every single day, it can get quite overwhelming to think how saturated the market is. There are so many different types of products you can sell, different categories. Literally, the possibilities are endless. So where do you start?
If this is your very first dropshipping store, I recommend starting with a niche that you know, products that you understand, and maybe are even passionate about. If you’re a fitness junkie who loves living at the gym, I suggest selling fitness products. If you’re a mother of three who understands what your children need, you should probably go with children’s products. If you have the cutest and fluffiest dog at home that you love spoiling, pet products might be your go-to. Again, the possibilities are endless and there is no right or wrong answer. So do your research! Do some very serious self-reflection on what types of things you enjoy buying online.
The reason why this is so important is that when you’re starting your very first dropshipping store, you want to simplify the process of creating your ideal customer. And if you are your ideal customer, it makes it so much easier to cater your descriptions, copy, and your product images to the right customer.
So remember, pick a niche that you are either passionate about and/or have extensive knowledge in, in order to start a successful dropshipping store.
Step #2 in creating a successful dropshipping store is performing competition research. With the rising popularity of dropshipping these days, you should expect some major saturation within your market. Now, this is normal and nothing to be scared about; we just need to get ahead of the game. It’s important to remember that you will not only be competing with thousands of other dropshipping stores, but also major retailers, such as Amazon or Walmart. So there’s a lot of variety for your potential customers to choose them. We just need to make sure that they are getting to your store first.
Oftentimes new dropshippers love to start with products that don’t have a lot of popularity, thinking that they can corner the market. Now, as ideal as this concept sounds, it’s not very scalable. You don’t have much market research in terms of what products are performing well or not performing well because you’re starting with products that might not even be popular yet or used to be popular. No competition means no demand for the product, which in turn, means no sales. Do your research and find products that have high competition. This means that these products are in high demand and therefore you have a larger potential for success with your first few products.
Zendrop does an awesome job in curating popular products based on industry trends. So if you’re searching for products on Zendrop, be sure to click trending products. You will see some high-performing products that we have found do really well on our platforms, as well as scale your stores.
Once you have chosen your store niche and done extensive competition research, it’s time to choose a fulfillment partner. This is probably one of the most important steps in creating a dropshipping business because if you choose the wrong partner, it can quite literally ruin your dropshipping business. With most dropshipping suppliers being located overseas in China, it is very important to pay attention to communication, customer service, and shipping times when it comes to choosing your supplier. So be prepared to ask extensive questions when vetting various suppliers. Make it a goal to learn about the production capabilities of your dropshipping supplier.
As a baby dropshipper you might not have many sales coming in through your Shopify store yet, but when your store starts to grow, you want to make sure that your dropshipping supplier can scale with you instead of holding you back.
Zendrop is committed to providing the fastest shipping, auto-fulfillment, world-class customer support, and even US fulfillment. Personally, I think it’s a brainer. Your dropshipping supplier should be Zendrop. If you haven’t already signed up for your seven-day free trial to our Pro membership, the time is now to do so!
You can quickly launch an e-commerce website using platforms such as Shopify, which is our preferred e-commerce store builder. There’s no need for any tech experience or website development; it’s pretty much “do it yourself.” And the capabilities of Shopify are very extensive for how easy the platform is to learn how to use. You can build the most beautiful, eloquent, and high-converting e-commerce store on Shopify within days. It’s very simple, easy to do, and easy to customize.
When it comes to building your Shopify store, you really want to think about branding. You want to think about what types of colors, fonts, aesthetics work best with the ideal customer you are trying to attract.
In the ZenRocket Challenge, we go into major detail in terms of how to build a converting Shopify store. So again, if you want your free trial to Zendrop Pro and a step-by-step guide to creating a successful dropshipping store, sign up for the ZenRocket Challenge!
Okay, so you’ve picked your store niche, you’ve done extensive research on your products, you’ve chosen your supplier and you’ve built your Shopify store, so how do we make sales? Well, customer acquisition, of course. Let’s get into it.
Customer acquisition can come in many different forms for e-commerce businesses, but the most obvious and simple to execute is going to be Facebook advertising. Facebook advertising is the best friend of dropshippers because it makes it easy for you to test multiple products at once in order to find winning products, scale the ones that are successful, and get rid of the ones that aren’t doing so well.
If you are new to dropshipping and new to paid advertising, Facebook advertising can definitely look very, very intimidating at first. There are lots of moving parts, the backend can sometimes be confusing and Facebook changes it on a weekly basis, so it’s hard to keep up sometimes.
There are many free resources online to learn all about Facebook ads, but Zendrop has a resource right inside your Zendrop dashboard called Zendrop Academy. Zendrop Academy is an extensive Facebook mastermind tool. We have spent hours consulting with hundreds of experts to give you the most efficient and successful Facebook advertising tactics. Zendrop Academy goes into all of the Facebook fundamentals, landing page optimization, creating custom and lookalike audiences, five whole scaling strategies, and many other Facebook algorithm tactics in a six-part series.
Truly you cannot go wrong in terms of becoming an expert in Facebook advertising with Zendrop Academy. But you don’t have to take my word for it. You can take the word of the hundreds of users we have signed on at Zendrop that are currently scaling successful products.
It’s also important to think long-term with customer acquisition and marketing. You cannot put all of your eggs in the Facebook basket, even though it’s the easiest thing to do. I also recommend implementing email marketing as well as social media and influencer marketing as well. These are also things covered in the ZenRocket Challenge.
So do you feel like a dropshipping expert yet? Well, you’re halfway there! Now it’s time to get started on these steps and start creating the dropshipping store of your dreams so that you can create the career of your dreams.
Today, we went over defining your store niche, doing competitor research, choosing a fulfillment company, building your Shopify store, and customer acquisition. These five key features of the dropshipping business model are very important to take extensive time to master. With how rapidly growing the dropshipping industry is and how cheap it is to create a business, the time is now to enter the e-commerce space.
I can’t wait to see the dropshipping stores that you create, and I can’t wait to watch your success grow!
