How to Start Drop Shipping From Scratch
Tags: Ecommerce, Shopify, Dropshipping, Money, Online Marketing

This is probably going to be the most valuable in-depth drop shipping article that I’ve ever posted online. We’re going to go through step by step as to how you can start a drop shipping business. Today, I’m really excited about writing this article. At this point, I’ve made quite a variety of different drop shipping videos/articles in which I’ve tried new marketing methods, started new stores and challenges, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually sat down and clearly explain how someone could start their own drop shipping business from scratch. I’ve made videos where I started them up and gone through the whole process but in this article, I’m going to explain it step-by-step how you can do the same even throw in some case studies. I helped a friend set up the kind of business we’re talking about here just last week and they were able to get sales when they launched. So, everything in this article, everything I’m talking about is up to date and should work very similarly for the foreseeable future. Let’s not waste any more time and jump straight into what Aliexpress Shopify Drop shipping is and clear up any misconceptions people may have.

AliExpress Shopify Drop shipping.

What is drop shipping? AliExpress Shopify Drop shipping is a business in which you find a product on a Chinese website called AliExpress. There’re other websites you can turn to, but AliExpress is the biggest and most popular one. For example, you can find a face cleaning removing vacuum, which is a really old winning product but just as an example, it costs $12.39 on AliExpress. Once you found your product, you then head over to Shopify, which is a platform that allows you to create an e-commerce website and accept payments and orders. You create a website on Shopify in which you sell this face vacuum for a higher price, let’s say you sell it for $34.99. Now we’ll get into more details later, but you would then advertise your website on social media and when someone orders this product from your website, they give you the $34.99 cents, as well as their shipping information. You take that and head over to AliExpress, where you proceed to order this product directly to your customer’s address for $12.39 cents. And just like that, your customer paid you $34.99 so after paying for the product you’re left with $22.60 cents profit for basically being the middleman and marketing the product.

Once you find out that this product is actually selling it, you would start paying more money for ads and scale this operation up. I’ve had multiple products that was able to scale into the hundreds of thousands and even into the seven-figure range. So, don’t worry, you’re not doing all this for $20, it’s a scalable business. So that’s just the overall summary. This is an easy concept that’s a lot more difficult than practice, so before you go out there, you’re going to need to know a few more things to do this successfully. There’re four pillars to a successful drop shipping business so we’ll break this down into four sections. Pillar one is your product, pillar two is your website, three you have your advertisement and four, your marketing. So, let’s start with the first pillar, your product.

Pillar one, product.

Arguably of the most important parts. If your product sucks and one would ever impulsively buy it from an online store, you won’t get very far. With drop shipping, you usually selling stuff on social media so you have to have a product with some sort of wow factor that people could see think, hey, that’s really cool and buy right there on the spot. It also helps to start with products that solve some sort of problem that poor vacuum helped clean people’s faces and remove blackheads. When people first started drop shipping it and no one had really seen it before so it had a wow factor to it. People would see it on their Instagram feed, they’d stop scrolling and would want to check it out. This pet hair roller. Pet owners would see this side where to remove pet hair in one swipe, boom, a little wow factor, and it solved the real problem.

Now your product doesn’t absolutely have to solve a problem, but my best products and ones that have been the easiest to sell usually would solve a problem for people kind of help with an insecurity or make their life easier. You can sell products that don’t solve a clear problem if the product is very novel and has a huge wow factor, or if it’s something people have a passion for. The ceiling stress balls, as an example, they just seem kind of fun and unlike anything people have really seen before. This penguin board game, most people have never seen it before so when they see it pop up, they might be a little intrigued because it’s so novel. This dog toothbrush solves a problem and people are passionate about their pets. So, they’re willing to drop money on them. This baby cushion chair helps newborn baby sit down and play with their toys without falling over and hurting themselves. Parents are usually hopefully pretty passionate about babies and wouldn’t want them falling, boom sold.

And I’m not saying you should sell any of these products right now, but all of these products at one point or another have been hot selling products, and it should give you a better idea of what really works. If you haven’t had any success with drop shipping and are trying it for the first time, I would recommend not reinventing the wheel and finding a brand new untapped revolutionary product. Instead, I would hop on a product that is currently selling well. You can search for ads on Facebook and Instagram, find current ones that are performing well and see the product they’re selling. You pay attention to the products you get ads for. There’re websites that compile lists of potential winning products.

You can look at AliExpress products with a lot of orders and cross-reference to see if any drop shipping stores are selling and just in general, do a lot of research. And I’m going to leave this section off by saying, you want to find a product that you see yourself being interested in, or at least know someone in your life who you can see buying the product. If you can’t think of anyone and can imagine anyone in your life that would want to buy it, well, congratulations, you played yourself.

Pillar two, website.

Not going to spend too long in this park. You basically have to create a store that doesn’t look like a five-year-old just scribbled crayons all over their screen. Shopify has templates that you can use to create a nice, simple, clean, easy to use website. You don’t need anything too fancy, just make sure it looks like a legitimate online store. Shopify also makes it very easy to buy a domain through them so think of something clean and simple, and you usually want to go for the .com ones as people trust those domains the most. Now that’s the design aspect of it, but you also have to choose between making a general store that sells everything, a niche stores that sells products in a particular niche or a single product store that only focuses on one single product.

Right off the bat, I’m not a fan of general stores, I think that conversion rate is a little low on them, it’s tough to sell car products and beauty products on the same website, I just personally wouldn’t recommend it. Single product stores have highest conversion rates. They feel very branded, you can make it like very sleek, but it’s hard to test products on them since you have to create a brand-new website, every time you want to test a new product, which is very time consuming, can be discouraging, and those new domain costs can add up. Now niche stores are what I would probably recommend to a beginner since you can make them feel like a brand and have a really nice fitting design throughout the entire store, while being able to test new products in the niche very quickly. If you have a baby store, you can name it, “Munchkin Bloom”, something broad, but fitting to the niche and then you won’t have to create a new website for every product but instead, just add new products into the store that you want to test and just build up the product pages for them.

And then if you have a product to really pop off, you could take it and create a one product store around it really make it branded and get those really high conversion rates. But I will say some products work incredibly well with one product stores and there’s just no way around that. You might have to pop them into one product store right off the bat, but that’s for you to decide.

Pillar three, advertisement.

Your advertisement is the first thing people see in regards to your store. It’s the thing that gets them to your store and can make or break your whole drop shipping business.

You’ve can’t just screenshot an AliExpress product, pay someone to posted on their Instagram page and expect to make money. A little janky slideshow won’t cut it either. So how do you create a good ad? Well, first off you need footage of your product. When you’re first starting out and are testing a bunch of products, it would be tough to order the product every time. Plan an ad, hire actors, film footage, and edit every single time you find a new product. Most beginners will start off by scouring the internet for footage of their product, then editing it together, just to start testing the product. Once they see that it’s selling, they then can start paying for content creators to film themselves using their product or ship it to yourself and film your own ad with people you know, are actors you hire. Keep in mind though, the footage you find online and use for your ad can be copyrighted so you might get complaints with ads.

Be very careful. I’m not endorsing this; I’m just saying that’s what a lot of beginners do. If you decide to go the scouring the internet for footage route, make sure that once you see that a product is selling well, you switch over to your own ads. Not only is this going to make things way safer, but it’s going to make your store stick out since all these other stores that’s selling the same product, don’t have custom footage.

Footage from Other Video: Everything they don’t have I have. It’s called jealousy, one’s envy.

With custom original ads, you’ll be able to scale things and really build something more sustainable. You constantly want to be filming new ads if you want to keep selling the product for longer than a month or two since people will quickly get tired of seeing your original ad and it’s going to stop converting. Last thing on this is make sure the first couple seconds of your ad are very attention grabbing. You’re fighting for people’s attention here. You’re fighting for people to stop scrolling and view your ad and really you only have the first couple of seconds of your advertisement to do so.

Pillar four, marketing.

Now if you have those last three pillars on lock, this last part should not be too difficult although it will take some practice and experience. You’re going to be marketing your product through social media, that there’s of different ways you can do that so let’s go over a few basic ones, as well as maybe some new and innovative ones. First up the one I started with was Instagram pages. You can pay either actual influencers on Instagram or theme pages to post your product/ad. If you have a beauty product, you can pay some beauty theme pages to post your ad. If you have a fitness product, there’s plenty of fitness pages, a baby product there’s baby and parent pages. The big thing with this is to make sure you’re using pages that have really good engagement and that all of their followers are not dead.

And I mean that figuratively, not literally. Then from there, I personally went to Facebook ads, which is where you kind of want to eventually end up. This is where the big bucks are made to the major leagues and you can really scale things, but it’s a little more complex than just paying an Instagram page. There’s also a lot of limitations with what kind of products you can actually sell through Facebook ads as they are incredibly strict with approving your ad copy and what you can even sell. I absolutely don’t want to discourage anyone from going straight to Facebook ads, it’s very possible to succeed with them or right off the gate, but again, that’s something you got to decide for yourself. So those are the two main ones I’ve mainly used, however, there’s also Google ads, Snapchat ads, Pinterest, and now even TikTok.

I’ve seen people post videos of them using their product on TikTok and just have that ad. It doesn’t really look like an ad but it really is, go completely viral organically getting them millions of free views on TikTok that otherwise would cost tens of thousands of dollars. Latest example I’ve seen are those ceiling balls that keep on going viral on TikTok and one of the stores that sells them is apparently sold out so it definitely works. You can even pay pages or influencers on TikTok to promote your product the way you do on Instagram. I’m telling you, if you get creative with your marketing, there’s so many different things you can do, but those are the kind of main routes you can take.

In conclusion.

Those are the main of four pillars summarized. Hopefully this gives you a good idea of how you can start drop shipping. You’re probably going to want to do more research into all of these little things separately. This is kind of just the overview, but there’s plenty of videos online regarding specific topics and I even have a course link below where I break down everything that I do to start my stores in detail. So, drop shipping is not dead, people are still buying stuff online. Sure, eventually drop shipping from AliExpress might get a little outdated, but all of these principles can be applied to an in-house brand or even to drop ship from a different source. So, drop shipping as a whole is not really going anywhere, but that’s Shopify AliExpress Drop shipping for you. This is how I started. I know people having success with it for their first time right now personally, and from getting tons of DMs on Instagram. You just really have to have some patience and keep testing things until something pops off. You can’t expect to make millions on your very first go. Really hope that you guys enjoyed this article and found it helpful and I hope that you have an amazing rest of your day.