How to Dropship: Here’s How to Start a Dropshipping Business

In 2018, then, if you’re looking to monetize your WordPress skills, it may well be a wiser decision to look into using WordPress to power a dropshipping business than sell WordPress products.

This is exactly what this post will look at. We’ll look at the what, why, and how to start a dropshipping business.

What is dropshipping?

Dropshipping is done by listing and selling products from an online (eCommerce) store without storing those products yourself.

No warehouse overheads, no garage stuffed with stock; and no dud products destined for clearance sales. You create business partnerships with suppliers, who receive orders from your website, package the products, and then send directly to customers on your behalf.

You primarily add value through product marketing, customer service, and advertising, and you leave the logistics – storage, packaging, and shipping – to the supplier. You’ll have to choose the right supplier (we’ll cover this later), but once that’s done, you don’t have to worry too much about logistics.

Conveniently, if you were thinking about running a WordPress product business, these are exactly the same skills you’d need. And, as we’ve already discussed, the opportunity from eCommerce is huge. WordPress is big, but eCommerce is bigger.

You won’t be spending time coding a product, but you’ll still need to offer a product or products. You’ll also need to undertake market research, develop a WordPress site, set up WooCommerce (or another eCommerce plugin), and then get stuck into marketing channels from SEO to content marketing. These latter steps are identical to running a WordPress product business.

That’s what dropshipping is. It’s a way of doing business which wasn’t even possible a couple of years ago.

Dropshipping is hard in the same way running any business is hard, but it’s a world of really exciting opportunity.

Let’s now explore some of the potential benefits and setbacks of starting a dropshipping company plus how to dropship.

What are the advantages of setting up a dropshipping company?

Beyond the fantasy of seeing revenue roll in as you roll out your beach towel in a remote tropical paradise ?, there are countless other benefits to running a remote dropshipping business.

Here are some advantages in convenient list format:

The upsides are pretty great, but they’re not the whole story. In the interest of balance, let’s also look at some disadvantages on your way to learning how to start a dropshipping business.

The disadvantages of a dropshipping business?

Some of these potential setbacks may only apply to certain industries, and others are risks which can be remedied, simply by taking the right steps. Nevertheless, it’s important to keep these pitfalls into account as you learn how to dropship and work on building up your business:

These are risks which aren’t to be taken lightly. It’s tough running a business in any commodified environment, and the nature of dropshipping is you’re more likely to be exposed to commodification.

There are obvious ways round this which we’ve highlighted and the rest of the post will focus on, but you’ll need to be really careful about this.

Dropshipping for eCommerce: Getting started and how to dropship

Now we’re fully aware of the pros and cons of setting up a dropshipping business, it’s decision time!

• If you have existing WordPress skills and are after a business where you primarily add value through branding and marketing, then go ahead. If you want to spend time making your product, this probably isn’t for you. You could always start a blog if the WordPress product space really doesn’t appeal.
• If you’re okay with the caveats and excited about building a great store, brand, and customer experience, then let’s go!

On the assumption you’re still reading because you’re at the very least curious, let’s move on to the best approach to how to dropship and setting up your dropshipping business: from honing in on your winning business idea to sourcing your supplier and finding your first customers.

1. Market research: Find a niche & choose your product

Perhaps you love sourcing highly unusual, attractive artwork and you also enjoy photographing birds. Or you’re a new mother, but don’t want to give up your passion for golf. These are both great niches because they sit at the intersection of two categories. If you’re an expert in both, you’ve got an immediate competitive advantage. This sort of an approach is a great way to learn how to dropship.

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Explore lots of possible ideas, choose the best.

Try and find a couple of ideas to explore. The next step is to do some keyword research and look for existing products (high-quality bird prints? Baby golf buggy?). These are the same SEO techniques you’d use for deciding what to blog about and promoting your WordPress product business; we weren’t making it up when we said this requires similar skills ?

Happily, we have plenty of help: read our practical SEO guide and check the start a blog guide for general info. You’re looking for a reasonable volume of searches per month across a range of keywords. Ideally you want a niche without too much keyword competition so that you can reach potential customers on the first page of Google.

You might need to go through four or five ideas before you find a really good one, so get a pen and paper, and spend some serious time on this. With dropshipping, the costs of starting the wrong business aren’t absurd – it’s mostly your time involved – but you can certainly save yourself a lot of hassle by doing your research properly.

2. Sourcing the right eCommerce provider and dropshipping supplier

Whether you already have an eCommerce store or learning how to start a dropshipping business from scratch; it’s absolutely essential to find a good match between your eCommerce provider and dropshipping supplier.

These services will be sharing information day in, day out and compatibility issues can cause untold problems. Shopify, for example, has its own dedicated dropshipping app, Oberlo. It’s pretty impressive, but you’re stuck inside the Shopify ecosystem. With your existing WordPress knowledge, you’ve got space to carve out a competitive advantage by using the more customizable WooCommerce.

WooComerce has its own dropshipping integrations: we’ve had success integrating WooCommerce and AliExpress with WordPress. AliExpress is a sister site from Alibaba, the Chinese eCommerce giant. The site has hundreds of thousands of products at wholesale prices, so it’s perfect when first figuring out how to dropship. The post linked above shows how to do the full setup; we’ll thus skip this step here.

You should do your due diligence when choosing a marketplace, and remember you’re choosing a marketplace and need a supplier within that marketplace. You’ll want to know about customer support, shipping fees, and which channels you can sell through. Other popular options are YouDroop and DropShix. We’ll proceed with AliExpress here for the range of products and WooCommerce integration, but go for the marketplace with the best options for your niche.

Now is the time to read the ThemeIsle post and get your site and store set up! Come back here when you’re ready to look at getting your first customers.

3. Finding your first customers: Getting eyes on the prize

Much like any WordPress product or blog, your dropshipping store needs visitors and customers to thrive – you won’t learn how to dropship without customers! To start with, keep things simple and focus in on marketing channels most likely to attract sales to your website.

You should think about possible marketing channels, and if you have access or skills for an unusual or unorthodox channel, then do that! That’s a great way of getting your first customers. Here, however, we’ll recommend content marketing because it’s scalable and fits closely with WordPress’ roots, so you’re likely able to do a decent job.

You can add things like tracking your search rankings, using UTM codes to track the sales results from each post, and building an email list, but those are things to look at once this is working (which you’ll know as you’ll have sales!). The key is to provide real value and useful information, which will keep customers returning to your site.

Try this out, and make sure to strike the right balance between committing for the right amount of time and tweaking strategy when required. This is a fantastic way to build out customers for your store and ultimately learn how to dropship.

4. Success stories: learn how to start a dropshipping business from the pros

Let’s check out some dropshipping for eCommerce success stories! This is a really exciting field, so we’ll see what we can learn from those already running successful dropshipping companies.

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? Simple idea to hundreds of millions of dollars.

One of the best examples in this space is Anker, the seller of phone battery packs and cables. You’ve probably got one – I do! Anker was started in 2011 by a Google engineer who saw space for “a line of reasonably priced accessories that would be better than the ones you could buy from Apple and other big-name brands”. It’s now the most popular brand for battery packs on Amazon.

Anker isn’t your classic dropshipping business, but that’s exactly why it’s a great example: it’s taken a commodified good – battery packs and accessories – and worked out how to add a huge amount of extra value through customer service, branding, and quality. Along the way, they’ve nailed basically everything we’ve discussed here. Here are some great insights from an interview with The Verge, linked above:

• The initial setup took a year as Anker wanted to find reliable manufacturing partners. Founder Steven Yang went to China to ensure their supply chain was rock-solid.
• Anker started with laptop batteries – not phone batteries – but found its nirvana of phones by testing lots of products.
• The focus was on building a great product! Their batteries were better than what you got in your phone from the manufacturer. This helped build out their reputation as a reliable brand.
• By selling on Amazon, Anker was able to shortcut some of the marketing requirements you’d have from self-hosting.
• After finding a product that was good enough, they focused on what was working. Anker went from selling 100 to 1,000 products every day in 2012. The rest, it turns out, has been a very good history.
• Read the full interview with Anker’s founder here.

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? From passion to profit in three weeks.

Just a few insights on how Nat figured out how to start a dropshipping business at Cup & Leaf in under three weeks:

• He registered the business on incorporate.com, which took 10-minutes. Within two days he had a fully-licensed LLC.
• To keep costs down, Nat used his own digital SLR and a collapsible light-box (which he bought on Amazon) to do the product photography. He also chose to package his own product which added a bespoke flair to the brand.
• Nat also made sure to implement marketing best practices, such as strategically-placed Calls-To-Action (CTAs) across the website, and interesting, SEO-optimized content on the blog. Integrating a few apps, such as Privy (for pop-ups), FOMO and Shopify’s built-in reviews app (to add social proof). You can replicate all of these with WooCommerce, too.
• Read the full case study here.

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? From $0 to $6000 in four months.

AliDropship is a whole site dedicated to people who want to learn how to dropship and build dropshipping stores with AliExpress! The site features plenty of case studies, and here’s one: Alex (not me!) was attracted by the idea of buying and selling goods at a high margin, without the need to pay for storage; the very essence of dropshipping.

Once he had decided on a niche, he set up the store to specialize in imitation-vintage jewelry and accessories. On the Alidropship blog, he said:

Some challenges Alex faced and how he solved them:

• A solid supply chain is important. This is the same point as with Anker, but Alex had a different solution: giving buyers a tracking code to see the parcel’s location. This gives them reassurance whilst not requiring a drastic change.
• Social media was initially “not the best use of one’s time”, Alex says – but he challenged this assumption and realized for his niche it’s a great marketing channel. Do this! Work out what’s best! Paid marketing isn’t the best fit for everybody’s store, especially when starting out, but it can clearly be a good fit sometimes.
• Now with three stores, Alex says the main issue he faces is finding time to deal with orders! A good problem to have. He’s now planning to hire assistants, who will deal with order placements and customer service. What else would a dropshipping store do? ?
• Read the full case-study here.

Ready to transform your WordPress business?

Whether you’re already adept at developing WordPress sites, or have a ton of experience with business but limited technical expertise, learning how to dropship offers a huge market opportunity! As an alternative to starting a WordPress product business – with the same skills – this is a sound alternative.

It is possible to start a lean, location-independent business, and gain high profits with dropshipping, but (though it may sound glamorous) it’s important to remember that how to start a dropshipping business comes with the same risks as setting up any other eCommerce company. You have to build a solid marketing operation and add value somewhere in the process.

That said, dropshipping is a relative newcomer to the online eCommerce space. Figuring out how to dropship in an approachable way literally wasn’t possible a couple of years ago! Now is the time to consider this disruptive business model.