how to make money dropshipping

Make Money with Dropshipping

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Today, dropshipping is a popular way to make money online. Dropshipping makes it easy to start selling online.

Dropshipping makes it possible to sell products without creating, buying, stocking, and shipping inventory. You can have thousands of items for sale without investing in inventory. You only pay for the products after you sell them. You don't have to ship products.

Here's how it works:

  • You can find dropship items from manufacturers, other retailers, and wholesalers.
  • You promote the items you want to sell.
  • When you get a sale through your site, you'll send the customer's order and shipping information to your supplier's store or app. This can be done automatically through Shopify and WooCommerce.
  • The supplier ships the sold items directly to your buyers from his location, factory, or warehouse.

You want to find quality dropship items that you can sell at a good markup. You want to make sure that you make a good profit after paying all expenses which include merchant/payment transaction fees and shipping costs.

When starting out, you'll want to put a large part of your profits back into the business for advertising so you can grow your business quickly.

But you need to be willing to work hard to promote and grow a dropshipping business. To market your business, you either have to pay for advertising or spend your time on social media and other free promotions.

Some disadvantages of dropshipping:

  • You're at the mercy of your suppliers and many situations can affect your brand reputation.
  • The product may not be as described or the quality may be bad. Returns or exchanges may be a hassle.
  • The customers may not always receive the product they paid for.
  • When selling products from China, the delivery time can vary between one week to 60 days.
  • Because dropshipping doesn't require buying inventory and is inexpensive to start, it's a very competitive business.
  • You have to set up your own online store.

Dropshipping Suppliers

AliExpress is probably the best-known drop shipper. It's an online marketplace with mostly Chinese suppliers. It’s owned by Alibaba, but you get close to wholesale pricing without buying in bulk, making it perfect for dropshipping. It offers millions of dropshipping products at cheap prices so you can resell them at a higher price and make good profits. It also allows dropshipping companies to sell a product globally with free shipping worldwide, so you don't have to pay or calculate the shipping costs.

This site provides a large list of dropshipping suppliers.

How to set up a dropshipping store

  • You need to set up your own online store.
  • You need a domain, website, and hosting. I recommend bluehost for hosting. If you use Shopify, hosting is included. For more information about setting up a website, you can read my article, How to Set up a Money-Making Blog.
  • You upload products you want to sell to your online store.

Shopify and WooCommerce are two of the most popular ways to set up a dropshipping store.

1 –  Shopify

Shopify is one of the best platforms to create an online store – especially for a dropshipping business. The Oberlo app of Shopify streamlines your dropshipping set-up.

But you can do more than dropshipping with Shopify.  You can sell products online and in a physical location. You can sell both digital and physical goods.

Shopify is one of the more established e-commerce platforms out there. Shopify provides everything you need to build and run your online store. It includes hosting, web design software, a shopping cart, and a wide range of templates.

Because Shopify is a hosted solution, you don’t need to buy web hosting or install software.

Shopify provides a shopping cart to set up your online store and handles everything from marketing, secure payments, shipping, and inventory.

You have complete control over the look and feel of your site. Shopify provides high-quality, great-looking e-commerce templates (themes) that give you a great selection of designs.

Shopify’s interface is user-friendly. Even people who don't have good technical or design skills can create a store with Shopify. You can easily customize the templates to fit your branding. People who want additional customization of a Shopify store can do so by using custom code and through apps.

You pay a monthly fee to use Shopify and can manage your store through the Internet.

Shopify offers a 14-day free trial. The basic Shopify plan starts as low as $29/month. Check it out here.

2 –  WordPress

Another way to set up a dropshipping site and automate dropshipping is with WordPress and the free AliExpress WooCommerce WordPress plugin, Ezusy.

The AliExpress WooCommerce plugin makes it easy to sell both regular and drop-shipped items.  This plugin allows sellers to synchronize their product catalog. You will be able to sell your products with a single click and synchronize AliExpress categories with your WooCommerce categories.

When receiving an order through AliExpress, this plugin will download the order into WooCommerce and you will be able to manage your shipment and assign a tracking number to the order so that it is notified to AliExpress. You must have a seller account on AliExpress,

Ezusy links to AliExpress, helps you find AliExpress suppliers, and automates the dropshipping process. You can browse AliExpress products and pull them into your product catalog with full product descriptions, pricing information, and images. When you get an order, the system sends a message to the supplier who then sends out the product to your buyer.

You can import up to 150 products and fulfill 50 orders per month with the free Ezusy plan. You can upgrade to their paid plans to promote additional products.

If you want to find non-AliExpress suppliers, then you’ll have to create the product pages yourself. You can automatically send out product orders to any dropshipping suppliers by using the WooCommerce Dropshipping extension.

This article provides more details about setting up a dropshipping store with WordPress.

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