How to Start Dropshipping Business From Home: The Ultimate Guide for Beginners

Starting a dropshipping business is a fantastic way to earn a good income while working from the comfort of your home. Because the dropshipping business can be run from anywhere as long as you have a good laptop and internet, giving you an ultimate sense of freedom.

You are no more stuck in a tedious 9-5 job that would grind you for life and still won’t be worth the time or effort. Moreover, the entrepreneur/businessman feeling you get is just unexplainable in words.

Like any other legit business, dropshipping is not all roses and cakewalks. You do have to put in some time, effort, and money to make it successful, although which and how much of these you need to invest depends on your work ethic and financial condition.

In this article, you’ll learn everything about dropshipping, including but not limited to what is dropshipping, who is the dropshipping business for and not for, how to find the correct dropshipping ideas, and how to start and grow your dropship business step by step.

But let’s first clear some basics here.

RELATED: How To Launch Your eCommerce Dropshipping Store Without Shedding Too Much Money And Sweat.

Disclosure: This article about the best premium themes for your Shopify store contains affiliate links in the form of text and images. If you click through them and make a purchase, I’ll earn a commission at no additional cost to you, which will support the blog.

---

What is Dropshipping Business and How Does it Work?

---

Dropshipping is a business model in which the seller doesn’t keep any product stocked in their warehouse.

Instead, when a customer places an order from these sellers, they simply forward the order details along with the customer’s address to the product’s manufacturer, wholesaler, or sometimes another retailer.

And then, these suppliers blindly deliver the ordered product (also known as Blind Dropshipping) to the customer’s doorsteps without leaving their company’s trace in the package.

What is The Difference Between Dropshipping and Ecommerce?

Overall general dropshipping and eCommerce are an essential part of each other. So, the actual question is… “What is the difference between online dropshipping and eCommerce?”

In the eCommerce business, the sellers stock the product inventory, deliver the ordered packages, handle the returns, and provide customer support.

But in the online dropshipping or eCommerce dropshipping business model, the source suppliers handle the product inventory and shipping of ordered products. The front-end seller is responsible only for managing the website, taking and forwarding product orders, and handling customer support, and refunds.

So, because the significant physical work is out of context, you as a seller can efficiently and ethically launch and run this dropshipping business right from the comfort of your home.

Who Pays for Shipping in Dropshipping?

Indeed, as a seller, you pay the supplier for the shipping. But most of the time, these shipping rates are pretty low unless you are going for a DHL or other priority shipping. And even then, you can add these shipping costs right to the total selling price of your products.

The companies that sell their products at extremely high prices, like Gucci, Louis Vuitton, etc., can easily hide $70 to even $200 worth of DHL shipping fees in their selling price. That’s why they can easily ship their product with even one-day delivery facilities. 

I’m not saying that Gucci and Louis Vuitton do their shipping this way; I’ve no clue about their product delivery system. But in general, this is how companies selling expensive products can afford super fast deliveries.

On the other hand, the low ticket ($0 – $50) and medium ticket ($50 – $200) dropshippers can’t hide such big delivery rates in their product prices because then their products will look unreasonably expensive to your potential customer because let’s face it:

Most customers neither know nor do they care about how and why these product prices are set. The only thing they’ll do is compare two sellers on their prices and delivery time.

The only way to resolve this is by finding and signing a deal with the local suppliers in the target customer’s area.

For example, if you’re selling to US citizens, find US-based suppliers instead of shipping products from China.

RELATED: Launching Your First Dropshipping Store.

Will People Buy Even at These Slow Delivery Times?

The average delivery time taken by the ePacket method (fast, trackable, and cheap delivery system provided by Chinese suppliers) is mainly in the acceptable time range for the customers, given that you’ve mentioned it on your product page and shipping policy page.

So, you don’t need to freak out about these relatively long shipping times than what that giants like Amazon provide. But having a faster delivery system will entice more people to buy from you, resulting in lower advertising costs and higher sales revenue.

How to Compete with Amazon Sellers that are Selling the Same Products as Yours?

To buy things from Amazon, people first need to actively feel like buying something. But you can immediately show your products to them on their social media.

Alongside this, you can also add a screenshot of the same product being sold at a higher price on Amazon than what you’re selling it for on your website.

Even if someone is selling there at half your price, still, someone else might be selling at double your price. But after seeing that screenshot on your product page, most people won’t feel the need to go to Amazon for price hunting especially.

Always remember:

You just can’t succeed in dropshipping by competing on prices. So don’t try too hard to please the price hunters. They aren’t your target customers.

What is Dropshipping Profit Margin?

Like any other business, the prices are divided into 3 parts: the product cost, the marketing costs, and the profits.

This means you must sell your products at least 3 times the product’s sourcing cost, including the shipping fee. But you also have other expenses like website, domain, apps, etc.

So, try to sell at 3-5 times the product cost, including shipping, but make sure that your product doesn’t start to look unreasonably expensive. And you do this by comparing the prices of this same product and similar products on other websites, including Amazon.

In a nutshell, you should be generating at least 25% – 30% profits on your sales revenue before taxes.

How to Find Suppliers for Dropshipping?

One common hub of these suppliers is at Aliexpress website. It is almost similar to Amazon, except that it has only Chinese suppliers (who may also have a few warehouses in other countries). And most of these sellers are either the wholesalers or the manufacturers themselves. That’s why you can buy products from there at dirt cheap prices because they don’t have to pay 20 middlemen and advertisers to generate sales.

The second place to find your suppliers is by purchasing this Salehoo online directory with a long list of outstanding and trustworthy dropship suppliers. I haven’t looked inside it, but a few reliable dropshipping coaches like Sarah from Wholesale Ted vouched for this directory. So feel free to check it and see if you click with something in there. And if you still don’t feel satisfied, you can easily get a full refund of your money.

The third place is to search for them on Google. Because they are not SEO experts, you won’t find them in the first few pages of your search results. And the ones running ads on Google to promote themselves are not the original manufacturers or wholesalers because they don’t know how to run online ads. So, I would not suggest using this method unless you already have some experience in dealing with manufacturers and wholesalers.

What is the Difference Between Aliexpress and Alibaba?

Both are the properties of Jack Ma, the CEO of Alibaba group.

The Alibaba website is used to order products in bulk, mostly over 1000 units of an item. You can use Alibaba if you plan to sell your business privately. So, you can understand that Alibaba is a B2B (business-to-business) model.

Aliexpress website, on the other hand, is a B2C (business to consumer) model. Here you can directly buy even a single unit of the same product. That’s why you use Aliexpress to fulfill your drop shipping orders.

Where do I Register to Get Aliexpress Dropshipping?

You do not need to register anywhere to get Aliexpress dropshipping.

That said, whenever a customer places an order on your dropshipping store, you’ll simply go to that product’s page on Aliexpress and place an order for your customer’s address while paying through your own credit/debit card.

Then that Aliexpress seller will deliver the product to your customer’s doorsteps without leaving any trace of his own company inside the package.

Can a Customer Find Out that the Product Came From Aliexpress?

The straight answer is yes. The sellers must stick a copy of the bill on the packages to get them cleared through customs departments. This bill looks similar to what you may have seen on the packages that come from Amazon. 

However, it’s all written in a small font size, and most customers don’t even care to read it. Even I never read what’s written on the paper glued on my Amazon-ordered packages. 

But still, if a very tiny percentage of customers see it and demand a refund, then do not try to argue with them. If they decide to charge back the money with the help of their bank, PayPal or Stripe, it can cause your payment account to get disabled, and you would never want that to happen.

So, you shall avoid all that by quietly refunding them their money and moving on while considering this as a small extra business expense.

How to Process Your Customer’s Orders?

There are 2 ways to process and fulfill your customer’s orders:

One, that you would be doing, in the beginning, is placing orders on behalf of your customers by putting their address while checking out on Aliexpress. You can automate this process to some extent by using apps like Dropified. But it’s still a tremendous amount of manual work once you start getting lots of daily orders.

The second easier way is to download a CSV file (which can be opened in Microsoft Excel and similar software, including Google Sheets) of all the pending orders and email it to your supplier. To make this deal with an Aliexpress-based supplier, you’ll first need to place consistent orders from their page using the above first method.

But if it’s a local supplier whom you found through Salehoo, Google, or by calling or meeting them in person, you may send the CSV files from the beginning.

After dispatching all the orders from their warehouse, they’ll add the tracking codes in front of each order and will send back the CSV file to you so that you can send those tracking codes to your customers.

Is Dropshipping Legal and Legit?

---

Dropshipping is an entirely legal and ethical business model.

Just buying something cheap and selling it for higher rates won’t make you a thief or scammer. It is an everyday retail business. The only difference here is that, unlike retail businesses, you aren’t stocking and delivering the products yourself. And there’s literally nothing wrong with that.

The only time this whole business becomes a scam is when dumb kids and adults don’t bother about the quality of the products and when they don’t even respond to customer emails and queries. They forget that it’s not some time pass joke… instead, it’s a real business. And you can be sued if you show such careless behavior.

So, as long as you can ensure good product quality and respond to your customers (as fast as you can without giving any excuses), then you’re good to run this business.

Is Dropshipping a Good Idea?

With drop shipping, you don’t have stressful overhead costs like shop rent, warehouse maintenance, staff salaries, etc. You can start your dropshipping business with as little money as you want to… although investing more money will yield you more profits at a faster speed.

And you don’t even need to leave your home… you don’t even need to worry about how to ask your boss for vacation leaves, sick leaves, etc. You can provide as much time as you want to yourself and your loved ones.

So,

Why dropshipping is not a good idea? You tell me!

How Much Does it Cost to Start a Dropshipping Business?

As I mentioned earlier, you can start the dropshipping business even with no money at all. But eventually, you’ll have to spend some money. And these expenses are:

• A monthly fee for hosting your eCommerce website
• A minimal fee to get your logo created (if you can’t make one by yourself)
• The monthly fee for the premium apps that you may use on your website
• The annual domain fee
• The advertising costs if you want to use paid methods to promote your products and website.

How Will You Pay for Fulfilling These Dropshipping Orders?

Generally, you’re expected to have some extra budget to pay for your initial orders. Doing this will also avoid adding a few more days to the total delivery time.

But if you don’t have an extra budget, you can wait for your customer’s money to get settled into your bank account or PayPal account and then use that money to pay for the orders on the supplier’s website.

Most of these payment gateways settle the payments to your account within 2-7 days. The only requirement for you to still keep your customers happy is by mentioning at the bottom of product pages that it can take 2-5 days to process and dispatch orders from your warehouse.

How Much Money Can You Make Dropshipping?

Dropshipping is a very lucrative business model. Imagine a number, and you can make it if you take the correct steps with the proper willpower. But it’s also true that only around 5% of all the people who try their luck in this business get a success.

The reason is simple:

They’re just trying their luck like a time pass, like a fun activity in their free 5 minutes.

You guys need to understand that eCommerce dropshipping is a real business and treat it like that… Otherwise, you’ll fail badly.

Can Dropshipping Make You Rich?

In theory, the dropshipping business can make you rich, but it is not some get-rich-quick scheme. Most people who see any success in this business either have a smart mind & incredible luck or they’ve invested a reasonable amount of time and sweat in learning it.

Now, how fast you can learn and apply the skills varies from person to person.

Can a Lazy Person Succeed in Dropshipping?

---

To be honest, this depends on what kind of lazy you are. If you think you can outsource all the work from the beginning, you can never succeed unless you have thousands of dollars to waste.

But on the contrary, if you’re lazy enough not to try to make everything look perfect from the very beginning… and instead, if you try to present the product in the right way while hitting the right nerves of your potential customers, then you’ll succeed.

I know about at least 3 to 5 guys who barely invested even 5 hours into the whole process and still got results within the first 24 hours.

But understand that being lazy doesn’t mean that you create a crap-looking store. The website must look professional and trustworthy enough for potential customers to buy something from you.

Is Dropshipping Profitable?

Well, if dropshipping wasn’t profitable, why would anyone think of pursuing it?

Actually, the problem is something else. The dropshipping business model is profitable, but most new dropshippers lose a great deal of money. This happens because they either start with literally no guidance, or they are following a lousy teacher. 

I’m telling you by experience… when I saw the Shopify stores of some of these newbies, I felt like smashing their heads on the wall, LOL. Yes, this sounds too aggressive, but if you had seen their stores, that’s what you would feel like too. The irony was that they were following some coaches… and still, this happened.

Anyways, the store design isn’t the only part of running a profitable dropshipping business. More on that later.

What are the Best Niches for Dropshipping Today?

Based on the trends I’ve seen in the past few years, the best niches to start your dropshipping business around are:

• Personal Care: Face care, skincare, haircare, etc.

• Physical Fitness: Abs building, gym gear, yoga gear, etc.

• Physical Pain Relief: Foot massager, neck massager, acupressure devices, etc.

• Makeup: Most items in the makeup niche are common. So, you need to find unique items that provide the same functions but with added benefits, like mermaid makeup brushes, magnetic eyelashes, unique makeup kits, organizers, etc.

• Apparel: More specifically, leggings, hoodies, and bikinis have the highest sale trends in the Apparel niche. After the few others are caps, t-shirts, socks, etc., but all these come under the print-on-demand drop shipping model, which we’ll explore further in another article. The major problem in apparel is that there are lots of size-related issues unless the clothing is the fit-all size.

• Baby Products: Babies are born every few minutes, and everybody loves them, especially their parents.

• Pet Products: You know how aggressive people can behave if someone tries to hurt or insult their pets. These folks care a lot about their pets. You’ll be swimming in money if you can sell them amazing, unique, and helpful products to make their and their pet’s life easier.

• Kitchen Products: I’m not talking about the usual kitchen products. I’m instead talking about really unique products that you and your potential customers may have never seen before, but you know, and they know that those products will make their kitchen time a lot easier and fun.

What are the Best Products for Dropshipping Today?

If you were hoping for me to tell you the exact products to sell, then, unfortunately, that’s not going to happen over here because products keep coming and going.

Whenever I mention any such products here, they’ll be copied by a good number of my readers, and then they would compete with each other while making Facebook richer in the process.

So, I’ll instead tell you what type of products you should sell in your dropshipping store.

First, you should know that the 2 major derivatives to influence sales are – Pain and Excitement.

Whenever someone buys something, it’s due to either of those 2 reasons at the root level. So, based on this confidential information, the products you should sell in your dropshipping store are:

Problem Solving Products: The problem doesn’t necessarily need to be physical pain or stress-related. Instead, it can be as simple as the problem of not being able to take all the fishing gear from your car to the fishing point. And the solution is the Fishing Tackle Bag.

Beneficial Products: These are the type of products that are not solving any active pain point. Instead, these products would be an extra bonus point to have. For example, Fishing lovers have no problem getting their legs wet. Otherwise, they wouldn’t love fishing. But still, having waterproof pants is like an added bonus to it. They’re not actively looking for these pants, they don’t even need them, but they don’t see a reason not to buy them either.

How to Find Dropshipping Products?

The first and best method is to list down some problems of yours and of your neighbors, friends, family, etc., and then try to find some unique and not-so-commonly available solutions for them. This way, you’ll be able to easily talk your customer’s language, which means it’ll be easier for you to sell those dropshipping products to your target market.

The second way is to find a unique and/or trending product (using one of these methods) and then try to see what problem that product can solve exactly. And then promote to the target market while explaining and showing them how that product will solve their situation.

What Products Should You Not Dropship?

Theoretically, you can sell anything in the dropshipping business because you don’t have to stock those products with you. But there are still a few types of products that you can’t sell at all, and these products are:

Copyrighted Items

---

You can’t sell anything that has a copyrighted design or print, like products related to Star Wars, Marvel movies, Harry Potter, etc. You can’t even sell those fan art types of stuff.

The only things you can sell in this category are the non-trademarked dialogues used in those movies, tv-series, etc. 

If you still want to sell this stuff, then you’ll need to get written permission from their authorities, and you’ll also have to pay them a good chunk of your profits as a royalty fee.

You’ll always risk getting sued if you try to sell these products without permission. I’m sure you don’t want that to happen.

Fragile Items

---

You should not sell any items that are prone to damage during delivery. Because you’ll have to either refund the customer’s money or send them a replacement. Either way, it will be a loss on your face.

Big and/or Heavy Items

---

If the products are big in size and/or heavier in weight, you’ll be charged higher shipping rates, and sometimes these rates will deeply eat into your profits. Now, how big is bigger and how heavy is heavier depends on the product that you intend to sell.

You can easily check the shipping fee on the Aliexpress product pages. If you’re using another supplier, you can email them asking about the shipping for those products for your target countries.

Boring And Common Products

If your target product has nothing unique about it, it won’t excite your audience to stop what they’re doing and buy it. Also, if your target product is commonly available in local stores, nobody will want to buy it from you at a higher price alongside a long waiting period.

The only possible way to sell these products is by using Google Shopping Ads in conjunction with heavy discounts and product bundles.

How to Price Dropshipping Products?

For Free Plus Shipping Products

In the free plus shipping dropshipping model, you give away the products to your customers for free but charge a small shipping and handling fee. This shipping and handling fee will cover the product’s cost, ad cost, and a small profit margin.

But you can’t charge the shipping and handling fee of more than $14.99; even then, it may look like a scam. You must ensure that the product’s value (in the customer’s eyes) should be at least $x or more, where ‘x’ is the shipping and handling fee you intend to charge your customer.

For Example: if you’re charging your customer a $12.86 shipping and handling fee, the product should have a perceived value of $12.86 or more. Otherwise, your comments section will get filled with hate comments and scam allegations.

Also, make sure to put random numbers like 12.86, 9.71, etc., for shipping fees instead of retail numbers like 7.99, 8.95, 9.97, etc. Retail numbers signal to your potential customers that you’re not really giving away the product for free – so they won’t buy from you.

To get good profit margins in this free plus shipping model, you’ll need to sell products that cost you less than $4 – $5, including the shipping fee.

For Regular Retail Products

Pricing these products is relatively more straightforward and simple. You need to make sure that after taking out the product cost, shipping cost, and advertising cost, you’re left with at least a $10 profit margin.

The other simple way is to multiply the product cost (including the shipping fee) by 3 and then sell your product at that price. But make sure that this multiplication has not taken the product price to unbelievable levels. 

For example, if a product costs you $100, then you may not be able to sell it at $300… instead, the correct price might be $200. You’ll have to create your price based on –

• For how much are other stores selling it?
• How do they present the product?
• And if they offer anything else along with the product as a bundle?

What is Dropshipping Store and How can You Create One?

---

A dropshipping store is an online eCommerce website that you use to sell your dropshippable products. Without this website, you can’t run your dropshipping business. Although you may still run the business on platforms like Amazon, eBay, etc., you’ll have barely any control over anything.

Moreover, they won’t let you collect the emails of the customers. As you may know by now, email marketing is one of the best free forms of marketing to generate profits for any business. So, you shouldn’t start your dropshipping business on such platforms.

The best way to start and run your online dropshipping business is by setting it up on eCommerce shop-supported platforms like WordPress, Joomla, Volusion, etc. But all these need a tremendous amount of time, money, and coding skills before you even begin to sell anything.

What is the Best Dropshipping Platform?

As a beginner, you need an extremely easy platform to use and manage single-handedly by you alone, even if you don’t know the first thing about any coding. If you haven’t guessed it yet, then it’s Shopify. And you can start for free by claiming your 14 days free trial here.

This 2-week free period is enough for you to go through everything in there and to get used to this eCommerce platform. Once your trial period is over, you can simply pay for the basic plan and move on toward your success.

RELATED: How To Smoothly Launch Your Shopify Dropshipping Store.

---

Can You Automate Dropshipping?

Dropshipping is already an excellent and extremely easy business model to pursue. Just imagine how cool it would be if you could also automate this dropshipping business! 

Well, to your delight, you can actually do this. Some part of it is already automated by using the apps like Dropified, which automatically syncs all your orders and speeds up the order fulfillment process for you to a great extent.

But to further automate your dropshipping store, there’s a specific prerequisite requirement for you to fulfill. You must first learn and get your hands dirty doing everything in and about your dropshipping store. 

If you try to automate your dropshipping store by hiring assistants before you yourself learn and experience the business by yourself, you won’t be able to judge if your assistants are doing right or wrong. You won’t know if you could actually make more profits. Moreover, if your business suddenly starts to lose, you’ll have no clue what’s causing that loss and how to fix it. 

Imagine it like this:

If I present you with cuisine you have never even seen before, let alone eating it, how will you judge if I cooked/made it correct or not? Comment below if I’m making some sense or not here?

Anyways, once you figure everything out, you can easily screen prospective assistants and hire the correct ones among them. Knowing everything will also make your life, and your assistant’s a lot easier because you’ll be able to give proper and straightforward guidance in the right direction.

General Store vs Niche Store vs One Product Store: What to Choose?

It is one of the highly asked questions in the eCom dropshipping industry and is a valid concern. But to make a decision, you first need to understand the difference between these 3 store types:

General Store

No, it doesn’t refer to your local general grocery store. Instead, a general store in the eCom industry means a store where you can sell virtually anything. Meaning you can sell dog collars, acne remover, and leggings, all in the same online store.

However, you would still want to sell only trending products. This means selling LED dog collars instead of regular ones, camera lens-shaped coffee mugs instead of standard boring coffee mugs, glowing leggings instead of non-glowing regular leggings, etc.

Niche Store

A niche store only has products from only one category. Some great non-dropshipping examples in this category are Kylie Cosmetics, Petsmart, Gillette, etc.

I’m sure you can find dropshipping stores by yourself. Revealing such stores in this article would create unnecessary competition among you guys, which isn’t a good idea.

Niche stores can be further divided into 2 categories:

Macro Niche Stores: These eCom stores are selling only in one niche, but still, they are broad enough. For example, Petsmart… ‘pets’ is their niche, but they provide everything for every pet, making their target audience really broad. 

Micro Niche Stores: These stores niche within the niche. For example, instead of selling the whole Apparel line like FashionNova, you could be selling only the gym apparel like Gymshark. And there’s no limit to how further niched down you can get as long as you have a big enough audience to target your ads.

One Product Store

As the name says, you’re focusing on selling only one product in your store. One best example of this would be Blendjet. Now, you should understand that they’ve gradually grown their store to its current level instead of doing the whole work before launch.

I’m saying that you don’t need to create that level of homepage from the start, and you don’t even have to make a blog on your store when you’re just starting up.

Instead, just focus on creating an acceptable level of eCom store and start promoting.

Which store type should you choose?

Now, you understand the meaning and, therefore, the difference between general stores, niche stores, and one-product stores. So, to answer which store type you should choose to start your dropshipping business today… well, you can pick whichever resonates the best with you, your discipline level, and your work ethic. 

Creating a general store would save you from restarting everything from scratch whenever your niche store or one product fails. A general store can also generate the highest revenues because you can sell as many products as you can over there.

Niche store makes it easier for you to promote your store through ads and email marketing because your whole audience will have the same interests.

The one-product store guarantees the most targeted audience and profits with the least amount of work.

RELATED: How To Create Your First Profitable Shopify Dropshipping Store.

Marketing Dropship Business – How to Promote Your Shopify Store?

In a general sense, you can choose to promote your dropshipping store either through free methods or paid methods. Both have their pros and cons.

Free Methods

---

The most significant benefit is that you don’t have to spend money to promote your store. Some free methods can even provide you with fast results as well. Some of these free marketing methods are: blogging, signing up affiliates, creating YouTube videos, Facebook groups, forums like Reddit, etc.

But the problem here is that it usually takes a long time before you see sales; sometimes, it can also take a lot of time and effort even to get started.

Paid Methods

---

The most significant benefit of using paid methods is that you can start seeing results within the first hour as long as your product and the customer targeting are on point. If you want to generate more revenue, just invest more money in the backend.

Some paid methods to promote your dropshipping store are Google ads, Facebook ads, YouTube ads, Instagram ads, Influencer marketing, etc.

The only disadvantage here is that if not done right, you could lose lots of money before you even start seeing any sales in your online store.

In a nutshell, you can choose whatever marketing method resonates best with you. But just know every method requires different work ethics and different time frames. So, don’t freak out if you’re not seeing sales within the next 2 hours.

What is the Best Shopify Dropshipping Course Today?

To be honest, I’ve seen many newbie dropshipping stores, and there’s no doubt that most of them fail and get closed within their first month. Besides the impatient, non-business mindsets, the biggest reason behind their failure is not having the proper guidance.

To succeed in any business, you need to have some prior knowledge and experience that you’ll get only down the road with time. If you want to decrease this learning period, you need a trustworthy coach who can hold your hand toward success.

By now, I’ve seen around 70 dropshipping coaches; each one is good and bad at one thing or another. Some of them are good dropshippers but aren’t good teachers… some have their course fees too high… and some are just not responsive enough.

From my personal experience, I believe that Kevin David would be the best teacher for you to learn from and to follow in his exact footsteps to succeed in your dropshipping business.

---

But look, I don’t want to hard-sell you on buying his course because that’s not my style. Instead, I would suggest you watch his free webinar here, and at the end of the webinar, if you feel the right vibes coming from him, then sure you can buy his course.

Running a Dropshipping Business – Things to Know!

• Choose The Right Store Name: You would want a name that is easy to read, spell, and pronounce. Speak and hear even for a dumb person, even in a loud, noisy place. Also, make sure to not include any numbers or hyphens or ‘the’ in your domain names because otherwise, you’ll only make your domain look weird, and by adding ‘the’ in your domain name, you aren’t fooling anyone… and you aren’t making it unique either. If your required domain name is taken, move on to finding the next best domain name instead of trying these weird tricks to serve your laziness.

• Highlight Your Shipping Times: Customers are okay with waiting for 2-4 weeks of shipping times, but only if you let them know before placing their order. Otherwise, they’ll get furious later and ask for refunds, and if you still don’t refund them, they’ll do a chargeback with the help of their bank or PayPal, which will lead to the shutdown of your payment gateway account.

• Ensure A Strong Refund Policy: Although Shopify provides a good refund policy, you want to make some required changes to resonate with your store. Provide refunds only if they received the damaged item or a wrong item. This is because you don’t want to give a refund just because someone didn’t like a product or just because the shipping time was long. If you have some extra money, I would suggest you get all of your policies created with the help of a lawyer.

• Setup Email Marketing: Not all customers buy at first sight. Many of them will buy after multiple encounters with the products and sometimes just wait for the extra discounts to magically appear in front of them through an ad or an email. So, you want to set up a follow-up email sequence to generate as many sales as possible from your website visitors. Of course, you first need to set up email capture boxes in your store, which is extremely easy.

• Create Exciting Offers: It is imperative for you to create discounts, sales, product bundles, etc., to entice your customers, even more, to make a purchase from your online store. You can get ideas for product bundles and sales from Amazon, as they’re doing a great job at this.

• Do Not Underprice Your Dropshipping Products: It is possible to feel like a scammer initially by charging 3-4 times the amount you actually paid for sourcing a product. But understand that it is a standard practice in the retail business. Considering the ad costs and other business costs, this pricing won’t feel like overpricing as long as you’re not overpricing your products. So, instead of competing on price with your competitors, you instead need to make the right balance between the price and the quality.

• Ensure A Nice-Looking Website: I don’t know what some of these new dropshippers think when trying to sell through a crap-looking website. But to tell you the truth, if you can’t create a nice-looking website on your own, then at least replicate the design of the demo store provided by your Shopify theme. I’m sure anyone of you can easily do that. Right?

• Provide Great Customer Support: If you don’t respond to your customers in a faster time, then they’ll get furious. This can lead them to ask for refunds or even give you bad reviews on your pages and ads. Also, make sure that your responses are helpful to your customers. Just imagine how you would feel if a company doesn’t reply to your queries or if they reply to you with a totally useless answer.

• Choose Trackable Shipping: If you noticed, you would know that some suppliers can even provide cheaper shipping methods, but they’re non-trackable. But this can cause confusion between you and your customers, and you may even have to face losses due to missing packages. And you won’t even know if the package is actually not shipped or if the customer is just trying to scam some money out of you. So, you always want to choose the cheapest trackable shipping method, and mostly, it’s ePacket shipping.

• Have Some Patience: Yes, sometimes people get so lucky that they get sales within 24 hours of their first ad. But most of the time, it takes a reasonable amount of time and money before you start seeing any positive results. So, you need to be a little patient; otherwise, this business may not be for you.

Do You Need a License to do Dropshipping Business?

Every country, state/province, and city/town has different rules for starting a business. So, the best idea would be to ask this question to a local chartered accountant in your area. Even I did this before starting my own dropshipping business.

If it turns out that you can’t get all the documents for getting those required licenses, then you can ask your parents or elder siblings to help you by letting you use their documents.

For example: if you’re under the age of 18, then you’ll need to ask your parents or elder brother or sister to let you create and use a PayPal account in their name. 

Make sure the person you’re asking this help from is living inside your own home and doesn’t have a shopaholic nature, because otherwise, you’ll lose all your money faster than you could imagine.

What Type of Business License Should You Choose for Running Dropshipping Business?

To start your dropshipping business, you can pick one of the 2 most preferred business licenses:

Solo Entrepreneur

You don’t actually have to register for this. But you would still need a tax identification number, a sales tax id/number (if your area rules demand it), and at least a savings account, if not a checking account in a bank.

Although it’s always better to have a checking account and a credit card to run a business in general. The benefit of running your business under this is that you’ll pay the least taxes. But it also comes with the highest liability.

If, for some reason, a customer sues you and wins the case, you can even lose your house and other properties under your possession. Whether the property under your parent’s name can be taken away is a question you’ll need to ask your local chartered accountant or a lawyer.

LLC or OPC:

LLC (Limited Liability Company) or an OPC (One Person Company) makes you pay more in the form of multiple types of taxes. It also provides you with some security over your personal assets.

So, if someone sues your business and wins the case, this time, you’ll have a good chance to protect your personal belongings from getting taken away. Usually, you’ll have only one of these 2 license types (LLC and OPC) available in your country.

To register for this license, you should ask for guidance from your local chartered accountant.

Brief Summary: How to Start a Dropshipping Business?

• Pick A Niche: List the niches of your interest and find the most trending products. Do competitor analysis and market research to see if enough people are looking for those products and if you can sell without competing with other sellers in your niche. Based on this information, finalize a niche to start selling… or you can choose all of them and create a general store to contain them all.

• Pick Your Supplier: Make sure that multiple suppliers provide that product so that if one goes out of stock or something else happens, you can easily shift to the next best supplier instead of doing product research again from the beginning. Also, ensure that your supplier has good ratings and reviews and preferably high-quality product pictures to use in your online store.

• Get Your Legal Stuff Online: It’s always better to ensure you’re legally OK starting your dropshipping business. This means having required licenses, bank accounts, credit/debit cards, PayPal accounts, payment gateways, etc., before you start promoting your products. However, to get started, you’re OK even with only an above-18-age identity and a PayPal account to connect with your store. You can gradually get the rest of the things in check later down the road.

• Pick Your eCommerce Platform: I’m sure by now you understand that it would be best to choose Shopify as your eCommerce dropshipping platform, for which you can start your free trial here.

• Pick Your Shopify Theme: Without a website theme or template, you can’t create an online store. Although Shopify provides 10 free themes to use in your store, which are really impressive, paid themes will be much more rewarding, especially for a dropshipping store’s success. My suggestion for you would be to choose either the eCom Turbo theme [review here] or the Turbo theme or Booster theme [review here]. And you don’t need to know any coding skills to set up these Shopify themes because they all have a simple drag-and-drop customization system.

• Pick The Shopify Apps: Apps are an essential part of online stores. They increase the efficiency of your store similarly to they would for your mobile phones. But if you get too carefree, you will install many apps that will rather heavily slow down your website, which is never a great business practice. That’s also one of the reasons I suggest you get paid themes, as most of these features are already built-in, not negatively affecting your page load speeds. To start, you should only install the GetResponse email autoresponder in your Shopify store.

• Setup The Analytics: You can’t improve your sales and fix the issues in your store if you don’t know where exactly the problem is. So, to solve this, you need to install 3 analytics tools – Facebook pixel, Google analytics, and this HeatMap Tracker. It is straightforward to install them, and each one has provided clear and simple installation instructions for you. Also, make sure to submit your domain to the Google Search Console. This will help Google rank your website faster in the search results.

• Start Promotions: Once your whole Shopify store is adequately set up, remove the password from the preferences section of your ‘online store’ named menu and start running the promotions through whichever promotional methods you prefer.

• Optimize: Once your whole Shopify store is adequately set up, remove the password from the preferences section of your ‘online store’ named menu and start running the promotions through whichever promotional methods you prefer.

RELATED: Follow Simple Steps To Make Your First Profitable Shopify Dropshipping Store.

Final Words: Is Dropshipping Worth it?

Dropshipping is not a new thing. It is probably in existence from the first day of the retail business. But it started getting famous only a few years back. If you look at the Google search trends, you’ll know that dropshipping only rises yearly.

There’s no limit to how much profit you can generate in this business that too while sitting in the comfort of your own home. And you can generate this money without compromising your lifestyle or the time with your loved ones.

What more could a person want?

So, although it is a fantastic idea to get into the dropshipping business, it would be wiser to get into it now before it becomes too competitive for you to enter.

If you didn’t know… then every year, the ad costs are rising, and more customers are losing trust in dropshipping stores by the day because of bad business practices used by a small number of dropshippers.

So, it’s best to get into this dropshipping business and make your unbreakable presence as soon as possible.

Make sure to comment below; what was the one major takeaway for you from this article, and how can I improve this article even more?

RELATED: Easy To Follow Step-By-Step Guide For Starting Your Own Profitable Shopify Dropshipping Store.