The Ultimate Guide To Starting A Shopify Dropshipping Business

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Are you an entrepreneur looking to take your eCommerce business to the next level with a Shopify dropshipping store? Look no further! In this comprehensive guide, we’ll walk you through the process of setting up and launching a successful dropshipping store on Shopify.

From choosing the right products and suppliers to creating a visually appealing website, we’ve got you covered. Plus, with the power of the Shopify app ecosystem at your fingertips, you’ll have all the tools you need to streamline your business and provide an exceptional shopping experience for your customers.

So if you’re ready to take the plunge and build your dropshipping dream, let’s get started!

 

So, how do Shopify and the dropshipping business model make a great combination? Shopify’s unique platform provides an excellent solution for dropshippers to list and sell their products. Aside from being an easy-to-use online store builder, Shopify also has an entire dropshipping ecosystem of apps and services to assist dropshippers like us.

Before building a Shopify dropshipping store, we must grasp how Shopify fits the dropshipping model.

Shopify is a leading eCommerce platform that hosts our online stores. Its functionalities help us design and set up our dropshipping website, market our products, handle payments, and much more. Moreover, the Shopify platform is incredibly user-friendly, meaning we don’t need coding skills to build or design our store.

As a trending business model, dropshipping enables us to sell products globally without holding inventory. When we receive an order in our store, we simply order it from our supplier, who delivers it to our customers. Finally, we only have to pay after the customers buy from us.

Shopify dropshipping legal

From a legal perspective, Shopify dropshipping is a legitimate business. However, before dropshipping, we must be aware of specific laws and regulations.

Abiding by the rules and regulations helps us avoid legal troubles later. Plus, we should also avoid dropshipping illegal products such as copyrighted or dangerous products. Overall, if we follow the eCommerce regulations, we can dropship smoothly.

How To Make Money Dropshipping On Shopify?

Essentially, we can make money easily with Shopify Dropshipping if we follow the right strategies. Shopify is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms and makes dropshipping easier than ever before. Plus, we can quickly create a professional-looking store from scratch and start selling items in no time. Furthermore, Shopify offers a range of helpful integrations.

To make money dropshipping on Shopify, we should focus on refining our product selection, setting up our store, and optimizing our shipping strategies. Additionally, launching effective marketing campaigns and providing top-notch customer service is also a must. Besides that, we can also learn how successful Shopify dropshipping businesses operate their stores to adopt key strategies. 

The Advantages & Disadvantages Of Dropshipping On Shopify

To understand Shopify Dropshipping better, let’s look at the advantages and disadvantages of dropshipping on Shopify:

Advantages

  • No selling limits
  • Fully customizable & easy to use
  • Multiple store themes 
  • Built-in blogging feature

Unlike some platforms, Shopify has no selling limits. Additionally, we can easily customize our dropshipping stores with custom themes and designs to stand out from the competition. On top of that, it has a built-in blogging feature that we can use to promote our products and drive organic traffic to our store. 


How To Start Dropshipping On Shopify

Now that we know dropshipping and Shopify complement each other, we’re ready to learn how to implement their benefits in the real world.

Here are seven steps to building a winning Shopify Dropshipping store:

  1. Find Trending Products To Dropship On Shopify
  2. Set Up Your Shopify Dropshipping Store
  3. Promote Your Products: Online Marketing
  4. Fulfill Customer Orders On Shopify
  5. Managing Returns & Refunds
  6. Provide Excellent Customer Support

Scale Your Shopify Dropshipping Success

Let’s understand how to carry out these steps in-depth for excellent results.

shopify dropshipping product research AutoDS

When building a Shopify dropshipping business, the first and most fundamental step is to do proper product research. Additionally, choosing good products to sell consistently can skyrocket our sales and help our store take off quickly. With that in mind, here are some essential product research methods:

For instance, finding out what’s trending gives you an idea of what sells. The AliExpress Dropshipping Center is an excellent place to get ideas for trending dropshipping products. Similarly, another method is to use spying tools like Koala Inspector to check a product’s performance and import it directly to our store.

How To Find Products For Shopify Dropshipping With AutoDS

Another great way to find in-demand products is by using AutoDS’ product research tool. In essence, AutoDS has an advanced product research tool that helps us to find trending products from US and Chinese suppliers. Moreover, it allows us to import products directly from the same tool and helps handle returns in a single click. 

While we might find many products with these tips, adding all of them is impractical. Even when we find plenty of good products, narrowing them down is still crucial to get a clear idea of what to sell.

Here are six things to keep in mind while searching for products:

  1. Products should not be available in something other than local stores.
  2. Customers should not be able to guess the product’s price.
  3. Find a problem-solving product that makes our customers’ lives easier.
  4. Ensure that the product supplier offers fast shipping and delivery times.
  5. Products that customers can buy impulsively without putting much thought into it.
  6. The product should cost under $30 per item.

Furthermore, with the Product Research Spreadsheet, we can organize the information and analyze the products well. The spreadsheet has specific questions that you fill in to spot trending dropshipping products with the highest potential to become winners.

To create a new spreadsheet with your products, open the spreadsheet, click on ‘File,’ and choose ‘Make a copy.’ Finally, save the new spreadsheet and start working on product research to find your first bestseller.

2. Set Up Your Shopify Dropshipping Store

The second step is to set up your Shopify dropshipping store. Setting up a Shopify store requires plenty of time, effort, and focus, but it will pay off if you do it right. Here are the basic steps to set up a working Shopify store:

I. Sign Up For Shopify

Setting up our account for Shopify is an easy process. We should consider signing up with Shopify’s 14-day free trial to test before we buy.

To sign up, enter a valid email address, choose a password, and fill in a temporary store name. Then, we can finish the signup process by answering questions about our business.

At this stage, we don’t have to worry about subscribing or entering a payment method. We’ll deal with that once our store is all set up.

Tip: It is better to use our 14-day free trial after completing the product research phase. Instead of wasting the trial period on product research, we can use it to build our Shopify store.

II. Name Your Business

After making our Shopify account, we must choose a name related to our store. For example, if your store sells dog products, something like Doggy Hub or Doggyverse will make sense. Additionally, we need a simple yet creative name for our business.

That’s where the Business Name Generator comes in handy. It is a free tool that generates unique and original business names. Additionally, the tool saves us time by checking the domain availability of our business name.

The next step is to connect the domain with our Shopify store. A domain is a website address where people can find our business online.

Instead of using Shopify’s long and complicated web address, using our domain name is a simple way for people to find us.

For example, doggytreat.com is better than doggytreat.myshopify.com.

To get a domain name, we can use GoDaddy to reserve a domain name. The cost of hosting a domain for our Shopify store can range anywhere from $10-$20. Once you enter a valid domain name and follow Shopify’s instructions, the new domain name connects easily with the Shopify store.

If the automatic method doesn’t work, read Shopify’s tutorial on manually connecting a third-party domain.

Like picking a name, a creative logo helps differentiate our store and establish a brand. A good logo is a visual essence of our business that helps brand our store.

To create unique logos in a matter of minutes, Hatchful remains an excellent choice. As a free online logo maker tool, we can quickly create beautiful logos for our business.

Once we create our desirable logo, we should save all images and sizes in a folder later. They will be helpful to us once we get to the branding stage.

V. Get A Shopify Store Theme

The fifth step is to choose a niche-suitable theme for our Shopify store. That’s because themes are the visual and user-friendly interface that shapes customers’ experience while browsing and navigating our store. Also, a good, responsive, mobile-friendly theme converts viewers into buyers.

While there are paid themes, more than 100 professionally designed themes are freely available on Shopify.

After setting up a Shopify store theme, we must find a dropshipping automation tool to streamline our business operations. If you love letting dropshipping software handle most of our tedious manual tasks, then dropshipping automation is for you.

For an automated dropshipping Shopify business, AutoDS is an excellent tool. It helps us save time and scale our business with its wide range of dropshipping features, such as:

  • Quick Product Importing
  • Over 25 Suppliers
  • Price & Stock Monitoring
  • Automated Order Fulfillment
  • Tracking updates

To begin automating your Shopify dropshipping business, register for an AutoDS account. Next, fill in your payment details for the AutoDS subscription. Inside the AutoDS app, from the left menu, choose ‘Add Store,’ enter your store’s web address and click on the ‘Add Store’ button.

Then, install the AutoDS app on our Shopify store. Finally, click on ‘ Install app’ to integrate the AutoDS app successfully with our Shopify store. Well done! Now, we have a working automated Shopify store. 

VII. Import Products To Your Shopify Store

Next, we’ll import products to our Shopify store. Connecting a dropshipping software lets us easily import tons of products, saving us the time of doing it manually.

One of the many features available with the free AutoDS Helper extension is the one-click importer that helps import any products from our suppliers in a few clicks.

The one-click importer enables us to create and export a CSV file containing our product list from the supplier page. Then, we import it to our store via the AutoDS platform. Most importantly, we can complete the process in just a few clicks which is a huge time saver.

We’re almost there. After setting up our store and importing our products, it’s time to optimize the product pages. The product page shows the details of the product we are selling, like product description, specifications, images, the ‘add to cart’ button, and the ‘buy it now’ button.

Since customers directly land on our product pages from our ads, we should optimize the product page to attract the customers’ interest as soon as they land on our product page. Also, it should communicate the problem-solving capability of the product clearly to the customer.

If you need help optimizing product pages to increase sales, we recommend reading 10 Ways to Increase Your Product Page Conversion For Your Shopify Stores.

IX. Create A Professional Shopify Homepage

Shopify Dropshipping create a homepage