Hey!
This is an online marketing forum and people here want to learn how to make money online, so I decided to create this step-by-step blueprint so that newbies can learn a new way to make money online. I created one a few months ago on Kindle Publishing and people loved it, so here is one for drop shipping using shopify!
There are no affiliate links in this post
Introduction
In this post, I’m going to show you step-by-step how to start an e-commerce business by drop shipping on Shopify. When I started online marketing a few years ago, I started with kindle publishing. At the time it was the easiest & fastest way to make money online but things have changed. Right now the best way to make money online without having to invest a lot of money upfront is by drop shipping using shopify. You can literally start an e-commerce business with less than $100 and you can start making an income of a few thousands per month within only a few weeks!
Because I am drop shipping, I don’t even need to buy the inventory upfront (I’ll show you how to do it in this post). This is by far the easiest & fastest way to make money right now and you can do this business from your laptop from anywhere in the world. Oh, and you can basically outsource everything so you can live a life of freedom at the same time.
What is drop shipping?
Drop shipping is both a sourcing a fulfillment business model where the retailer (you!) never actually own the inventory you’re selling (Meaning you don’t need to buy the inventory upfront!).
With drop shipping, you are acting as a middle man that sells the goods on your own website and when you receive an order, you pass that order onto your supplier (I will show you how to to do it) for them to process the order and send the product directly to the client. Your profit is the difference between what you charge your customers on your website and what your supplier charges you. This is an AMAZING WAY to get started online.
As you can see, this business model pretty much eliminates ALL THE RISK when it comes to the inventory. I used to sell on amazon FBA, and with this business model, you have to order a bunch of products upfront and then send them to the Amazon warehouse. Not only it is nearly impossible to pay less than $500 for an order, but you have to pay for the shipping, and THEN YOU HAVE TO PROMOTE YOUR PRODUCT so it ranks well in the Amazon search engine. It literally costs minimum $800-$1000 every time I would want to test a new product.
With drop shipping, and with the strategies I’m about to show you, you can literally test a new product on your store within 20 minutes, WITHOUT having to wait for the shipment (minimum two weeks), and WITHOUT having to buy units upfront. Within 20 minutes you can start doing Facebook ads to test your product and within about one week you will know if this product will make you a lot of money in the future. I have products that have made me tens of thousands of dollars…And I didn’t have to buy one single unit upfront. Do I have your attention now?
How Making Money With Drop shipping works
The process of drop shipping is really straightforward. Here is how it works:
1)A visitor arrives on your store (I will show you how to create one) and buys something.
You will get a notification that you received an order and you will get the money directly in your account.
2)You will also have the shipping address of the client. You will then forward that order (You can automate all of this) to your supplier and pay with the money the client just gave you (Yep, you basically use the client’s money to buy the product!).
3)Your supplier will then prepare the order and send it directly to the client on your behalf.
The amount of money you can make with this business model is absolutely insane. You can scale super quickly because you don’t need money to get started! You are literally using the money of your clients. I’m going to show you one place where you can find high quality suppliers and where you can buy products for SUPER CHEAP. On some of my stores, I’m selling products for about $100 and I pay these products about 4$, shipping included. This is a markup of 2400%!!!!
The internet made it super easy to buy products DIRECTLY from the suppliers. When you go to a store and buy something, the store owner probably bought his units from a supplier and that supplier probably bought these units in China. With the power of the internet, YOU can buy units DIRECTLY from China. This is why I quit my job in finance a few years ago, I saw the potential of having an online business, and I don’t regret my decision AT ALL.
Now not only can you buy directly from the suppliers in China, but with drop shipping, you don’t even have to buy the inventory upfront. It really doesn’t get any better than that. This is business on steroids. No need for inventory, no need to pay for a warehouse, pay rent for a store, etc. This is the power of the internet, and if you implement this method, you will have the same results.
Shopify
Shopify is the platform I use do to my e-commerce websites. I HIGHLY recommend you guys to do the same. Not only it is SUPER EASY to build your store with it, but EVERYTHING has been optimized in a way that you end up selling more. They have tons of templates that you can customize super easily and all of these templates have been made in a way that converts super well and you will end up making more sales. This is by far the best e-commerce platform out there and the easiest to use.
General vs niche store
There are two types of stores. There are the general stores in which the seller (you) sell ALL KIND of products, and a niche store in which the seller sells only a particular kind of products. A store selling accessories for dogs is a niche store, whereas a general store could sell accessories for dogs, but also shoes, electronics, clothing, toys etc.
Which one is best? Both. I know plenty of people that are doing amazing with general stores and I know plenty of people doing amazing also with niches stores. With a general store, it is super easy to test all kind of products on your store and you never have to worry about NOT BEING ABLE to sell a particular product on your store because it doesn’t fit the rest of your store.
With a niche store, it is easier to build a brand quickly and have raving fans that will always come back to your store and buy more products. I’ve tested a lot on my stores and with niche stores, the cost per conversion when doing ads tend to be lower also.
How To Find A Good Niche?
First of all, I don’t recommend you to come up with something original. This is simply not the best way to get started. If you want to do that in the future, once you are making a lot of money online that’s fine, but if you are just starting out, I recommend you to see what kind of products sell, and sell the same thing.
There are 2 main websites we are going to use for this. The first one is Amazon.com and the second one is aliexpress.com. Let’s start with Amazon.
There is a way to search all the best selling products on Amazon by categories. To do this, just google: Amazon best sellers and you will find it.
As you can see up there, on the left side you can choose a category and you will see all of the best selling items in that category. On this picture, you can see that Amazon is showing us products in the Toys & Games category, because it is the one selected. If a product is ranked #1 in its category, it means people on Amazon are buying this product massively so there is a huge demand for it. If it sells well on Amazon, chances are high that it will sell well on your website also, especially if you do your marketing the right way.
Grab a pen and a paper and take notes about the kind of products you might be interested of selling on your website.
Another good website is Aliexpress. There is a way to see what products are selling the most. Just google : Aliexpress best sellers and you will find the link for that.
As you can see in the picture above, you can see the best selling products for the current week and you can also see the number of units sold. This gives you an idea of what kind of products are selling. If it sells well on Aliexpress, it means there is a huge demand for these kind of products. Again, don’t be afraid of competition. Competition is great because it means there is a demand.
Just browse through the best sellers on Aliexpress and it will give you ideas on what kind of products you could sell and ultimately, what niche you could pick for your store (If you want to do a niche store…If you do a general store, it doesn’t matter )
The main strategy: Facebook and Instagram ads
I use Facebook ads every time I want to test a product from my store. Facebook allows me to target my perfect audience really well for a cheap cost. In Facebook, it is super easy to target people based on what they are interested in, so if you are selling shoes for example, it will be super easy for you to target your ads in a way that ONLY people interested in shoes see the ad. It takes about 5 hours to teach someone how to become really good at Facebook ads, but just remember that Facebook allows you to target your audience SUPER WELL.
Another good thing with Facebook ads is you can target people based on their behaviours. Facebook receives A LOT of data from various companies and trust me, they pretty much know EVERYTHING. There is a way to target people based on what they bought in the past…So if you are selling Iphone cases for example, well there is a way with Facebook ads to ONLY show your ads with people that actually bought an Iphone…EVEN BETTER, there is a way to target THE SPECIFIC MODEL THEY BOUGHT. You are doing an Ad about an Iphone 6s Plus case? Amazing, there is a way to only show your ad to people that actually have an Iphone 6s Plus. Do you see the potential? This is why Facebook ads are so amazing, you can target so well that you don’t waste money showing your ads to people that are not even potential buyers.
Same thing with Instagram ads. Instagram is owned by Facebook so you can promote on Instagram directly inside of Facebook. You can target your target audience the same way, the only difference is the ad will be on Instagram.
Here is how I do it. I usually start with a budget of $5 per day and let my ad run for 4-5 days. This means that I can test a product for about $20-$25. Yep, with only $20-$25 I will know if this product sells or not and if I’m going to make a killing with this one in the future. If this is a good product, I will slowly increase the budget so I can make more sales.
Facebook ads can be super tricky and this is just an overview, but just keep in mind that with this method, you can literally test a product for about $20-$25, WITHOUT buying ANY inventory upfront!!
You created an Ad and you are making sales? Great! Use the money from the customer and buy the products from your supplier…Your supplier will then send the products to your customer. It’s really this simple and this amazing.
Retail and Free + Shipping Offers
There are two main types of offers you will use on your store: Retail offers & Free + Shipping offers.
Retail Offers: This is when you sell the product on your store at full price. So let’s say you buy a product for $4 on Aliexpress, you could sell it $80 on your store for example. This would be a retail offer. It simply means that you are selling the product at ¨ full price ¨.
Free + Shipping Offers: This type of offer is when you give the product for FREE to the customer, but they have to pay for the shipping. If you charge $11 for the shipping, because of the fact that you paid the product only $4 on Aliexpress, you are making a profit. This type of offers CONVERTS SUPER WELL because in the mind of the customer, you are giving them the item FOR FREE. The only thing they have to pay is the shipping, but they are used to it because most of the time when they order online they have to pay for the shipping. I use free + shipping offers a lot in my Facebook ad because they sell like crazy and then I can upsell the clients with more expensive products, so I end up making a lot of money.
Aliexpress
Aliexpress is the best way to find suppliers to do drop shipping. There is a way to filter the suppliers according to their seller’s ratings. If you select high quality suppliers, you won’t have to worry about them not sending the items or the items being late all the time.
The picture above shows the rating system Aliexpress uses. A seller with 5 crowns would be the best seller you can find and a seller with only one medal would be the worse. I never use suppliers with a rating lower than two diamonds and I’ve never had a problem with my orders.
As you can see on the picture above, you can see the rating of that particular supplier. Again, I never use someone if their rating is lower than two diamonds and I highly recommend you to do the same.
When it comes to shipping, a lot of people heard crazy stories about people not receiving products from Aliexpress, or sometimes the client only receive the product after 2-3 months. The REASON IS THEY DIDN’T USE EPACKET.
As you can see from the picture above, when you buy the product on Aliexpress, you have to select a shipping method. YOU HAVE TO SELECT EPACKET. With epacket, the client will receive the product in 2-3 weeks at most AND YOU WILL GET A TRACKING NUMBER.
For this particular product the option epacket is free, but sometimes you will have to pay about $1 to get it. DO IT. This will make sure your client get the product quickly and you will get a tracking number.
The reason why some people think Aliexpress is not reliable when it comes to shipping is because they DON’T SELECT EPACKET. Also, some of them do business with suppliers WITHOUT looking at their ratings. If you do these two things correctly, you WON’T have any problems drop shipping using Aliexpress.
Uploading products to your store
Uploading a product to your store is super easy. You can do it manually or you can use an app that does it for you.
I use Shopified App to do this and it takes me about 1 minute to upload a new product to my store.
Just keep in mind that you can literally upload 50 products to your store QUICKLY and start testing them using Facebook ads in a matters of minutes. You can even use the pictures from the suppliers on Aliexpress so you don’t have to worry about this. With Shopified App, it automatically uploads the pictures for you on your store too so you save a lot of time.
As you can see in the picture above, when you use Shopified App, the only thing you have to do is go on the product page of the product you want on your store, type in the name of your product, type the price you want to sell it for, and then you click on import to my Shopify store and it will automatically do it for you. It literally takes less than one minute.
Fulfilling orders
Again, you can do this manually or use an App. Shopified App allows you to do this, but you can do it manually too. If you do this manually, the only thing you have to do is to go to Aliexpress and go to the product page of the product you just sold. Then you have to click on BUY NOW and you will see a page similar to this:
Then you will want to select the E-PACKET OPTION for the shipping and leave a short message to the seller saying: ¨Do not put any invoice or any type of promotions inside, thanks¨. The reason you want to do this is because you don’t want the client to know you only paid a few dollars for the product and if there is an invoice they will see it. You also don’t want them to add promotions inside the box because you don’t want your client to know where you bought the product from. If you add this little text, your suppliers will comply and you won’t have any trouble.
Here is an example of what to do below:
This is how you manually fulfill orders. I personally use Shopified app to do all of this and it makes me save a lot of time. There is a way to automate ALL OF THIS with this app, meaning that by clicking on one bottom, the address of the client will appear automatically, it will select e-packet automatically, and even the text you have to write to the seller will appear automatically!! The only thing you have to do is press one bottom and then the app does everything.
Here is an example below:
The only I would have to do with this order would be to click on place order and then the app would do everything for me!
How Much Money Can I Make?
There is no limit to the amount of money you can make with this. You could literally have 20 stores and automate each one of them. As I said before, it takes less than a minute to upload a product to your Shopify store and about one week to see if this product will make you a lot of money or not.
It really depends of how much money YOU want to make and how much hours you are willing to spend on this business.
Conclusion
Again, this is an amazing way to make money online and this is what I focus on now, but there are other ways to make money online. The reality is that EVERY METHOD WORKS. They all do. Obviously some method are easier to get started with, but all method works.
In the end it is about EXECUTING the system, learning everything about the method and implementing it PERFECTLY.
Anyways, I hope you learned something about this method and if you have a question, just reply to this thread and I will help you!
john moro