Two Ways to Start Dropshipping
Now listen, there are 2 ways you can start dropshipping, it’s either with a low budget or high budget. And believe me or not, it IS possible with both of these ways, because having made over 20 million dollars in dropshipping myself over the course of 5 plus years, I have practically been through it all, which is why I will go over these 2 ways you can start, so you can decide which one is the best for you. I will literally put everything down on the table with full honesty and transparency, so make sure to stick till the end. Now, let’s begin.
Defining Low and High Budget
Before I go over the 2 ways you can start, I want to quickly tell you what I mean with low and high budget. Low budget in my eyes is anywhere from 10 to 50 dollars, and high budget, 50 to 250 dollars. You don’t need more than that to get your first sale. But of course, with a low or high budget, the methods to start will be different, but I will talk about that later, because I want you to firstly understand WHY dropshipping is the best business model to pursue, statistically speaking of course.
Dropshipping’s Growing Popularity
With a quick search on Google Trends with the term Dropshipping, you can clearly see that in the last 12 months, dropshipping has kept growing rapidly and gathering more attention all around the world, meaning that more people are interested in pursuing this business model. And before you think about it. No this does not mean that dropshipping is getting more saturated, or that it’s too competitive, because let’s be honest here, every business model you pursue will always be filled with competitors and it’s just a matter of how badly you want it, and the effort you’re willing to put in to outcompete the others.
Standing Out in Dropshipping
The ONLY difference, or ”price you need to pay” if you are going to start dropshipping at this time, is to be way more different in how you do things than the others, so you can stand out. Now even though I run multiple dropshipping stores till this day that are generating millions of dollars, I still have to face new upcoming competitors, and make small changes to still maintain my position in the industry. But that isn’t a big deal as long as you keep your foot in the industry, stay updated with changes happening, and implement them into your own stores.
Key Factors in Dropshipping
Anyway, now that you have an understanding of why you should start dropshipping and what to expect, let’s get to the real value. The whole dropshipping operation consists of 4 factors, and that is, finding a product to sell, building a store, marketing the product, and lastly, fulfilling your orders. That’s the key factors you need to master in order to operate a successful dropshipping business. And back to the main topic of this article, I will now go over the low budget and high budget ways you can start, and it’s your call to decide what’s next for you.
Finding Products to Sell
Let’s start with the first factor, and that is, finding a product to sell. There are a bunch of different methods you can use when it comes to finding a product to sell. AliExpress and TikTok for example are what the majority of new dropshippers use to find products. However, in reality, it’s just endless hours of scrolling and purely guessing if the product will sell or not and this method can work but there is more risk involved with it since you are relying on low-quality data as a research method.
Low-Quality Data in Product Research
And with low quality data, this is what I mean. Imagine yourself going to AliExpress, and let’s say that you found this product that you deem is interesting to you. You do not have any data about this product that will validate if it is worth selling. You just have to go with your gut feeling, which is of course what you should always go after, but having some sort of validation will increase the chances of succeeding with a product.
Limitations of Facebook Ads Library
I mean of course, going to Facebook Ads library to look at the engagement and reach that an advertisement for a product has, does give some sort of validation since no one is going to be spending money on ads unprofitably. But then you have to remember the engagement you see does not reveal data about the geographical location of the consumers who saw the ads. And this is really important, an advertiser targeting countries with a low purchasing power may get 10 million views on the advertisement and generate $5000 in revenue while another advertiser targeting countries with high purchasing power, such as Switzerland, Qatar or the United States with the same amount of views would generate minimum $500k in revenue for-example.
Data-Driven Product Research
And if you want to approach this with a high budget and have a great advantage, it’s through data driven product research, to see if a specific product is actually selling for the other dropshipper. Which is how me and the other pros do it, one of my favourite tools to use for this is Dropship.io You just go to any product you find interesting from a Shopify store, copy the link for it, paste it in Dropship.io and it will show you the sales revenue that the store owner is making every single day. This is not 100% accurate but it at least gives you an idea that the product is worth pursuing.
Key Metrics for Product Selection
And there are the 3 key metrics to finding a good product to sell. Problem solving, make sure that the product solves a problem and provides a solution for your customers that actually benefits them Ever-green product, make sure that the product can sell well throughout the year and doesn’t rely on any seasons, such as Summer or Winter And lastly, Uniqueness, the product itself is unique, for example, it gives a wow-factor, high perceived value, and is not easily found in local stores If you follow these 3 factors when doing product research, your chances of finding a winning product is much higher.
Example of a Good Product
And a great product that actually follows these factors is this Mini Sewing Machine, it solves a problem, sells throughout the year and is very unique, and I’ve seen many sell this product successfully. So what’s the conclusion for finding products? If you are on a low budget, you should use AliExpress or TikTok to find a product to sell, but again, the chances of finding a great product isn’t so high. Don’t get me wrong, it works, but it will take more time, if we compare it to the high budget method where you use a tool to rely more on data.
Building a Store
After you have found a product, the next step is building a store. The majority of dropshippers including myself use Shopify to build our dropshipping stores because it is easy to use and they have multiple different store themes that you can pick from to design your store. There are 3 types of stores you can build in dropshipping, a general, niche, or one product store. A general store is basically a store with a bunch of products from different categories, a niche store is focused on 1 niche only, and a one product store is what it sounds like. A store with only 1 product.
Recommended Store Type and Apps
And a one product store is what I strongly recommend you to create, because the conversion rates are much higher than the other store types, and it’s faster to create. Also, Shopify has a marketplace of apps that you can install to your store, to help increase your revenue even more and give the customers in your store an overall better experience. The 3 main Shopify apps that I use are UpCart, WideBundle, and BUCKS. I use UpCart to upsell different products, WideBundle to offer product bundles and bucks to automatically convert prices to the customers local currency. And no, I am not sponsored by any of them, these are just the apps that I use for all of my dropshipping stores to help increase conversion rate and the average order value. I’m just laying out everything on the table for you.
Low Budget Store Building
But here’s the thing, if you’re entering with a low budget, all of this can be really expensive and it’s not as easy as it seems to build a good optimised Shopify store. It takes time. Because of that, I’ve created a special link with shopify that you can use to access everything for just $1 a month to use their platform, and on my channel, I’ve also uploaded a video where I go over exactly step by step on how to build a highly converting shopify store. I’ll leave both of the links in the description. Believe me, this will save you a lot of time and make things easier for you.
High Budget Store Building
Otherwise, for a high budget. You probably want to skip this whole step of building your own store, which is quite frankly what a lot of dropshippers do nowadays because it can get really time consuming, or in other words boring to repeatedly build a store for each product again and again. So what dropshippers do is go to different ecommerce services to pay other dropshippers to build a store for them, and that costs hundreds of dollars, and even if you want to enter with a high budget, hundreds of dollars and even up to a thousand dollars for a store isn’t worth it. In fact, you’re getting overcharged. Yes, you can get your money back overtime but that’s only if you manage to make a profit with the store. So you’re basically putting yourself in a high risk low reward situation
Affordable Store Building Service
For that, I’ve put lots of time from my end into offering you the same service for a way cheaper price, at dropship.io/store you can get the same deal for just $49 and if you don’t make your money back after 2 months of trying, we will refund you the full amount without any questions asked. These are some examples of stores we build out for our customers: It’s just a no brainer, and if this wasn’t good, I would never mention it to you.
Marketing with Low Budget
Anyway, now that you’ve found a product and built a store, it’s time for the marketing part. If you want to market your product with a low budget, you need to make sure that it’s a low ticket product, meaning that the product is cheap to source from suppliers. You need to also make sure that the product is priced at a low and affordable amount, anywhere between $15 to $30. Because you’ll be promoting it through organic traffic on big platforms like TikTok and Instagram. And the audience there are mostly teenagers who cannot afford to spend much so make sure they’re getting a good deal out of this.
Content Creation for Marketing
The whole content creation industry is a field of opportunities, you can promote any product of yours without having to spend a penny on ads. Meaning that you’ll have a much higher profit margin than the usual dropshippers who go with paid ads to drive traffic. But here’s the thing you need to keep in mind. Content creation is not a walk in the park, it requires creativity, algorithm knowledge, and the ability to detect trends.
Setting Up Social Media Profiles
So when you first start with organic marketing on TikTok or Instagram, you need to make sure that The username is your store domain, The profile picture is your domain logo, a good call to action, and most importantly your website is linked in your profile bio because that’s where you will be redirecting your traffic. Now that you’ve got that setup, you might be wondering. How do I make content and how do I go viral? To save as much time as possible here, I’ve personally written a detailed Google document explaining how to start with organic marketing for your dropshipping store. I’ll leave it in the description as well. I go over all the steps there.
High Budget Marketing with Paid Traffic
On the other hand, if you want to pursue marketing with a high budget, it will be with paid traffic. Then Facebook ads is the way to go, believe it or not but facebook to this day is the best platform to advertise your products on. Because that’s where all the working class people spend their time. They have the money, and you have the product, which means there’s a lot of money to be made and that’s if you have the right product and ad creatives.
Challenges of Facebook Ads
And keep in mind, facebook is not easy. Don’t think that it’s just creating a campaign, setting a budget and publishing it. It’s way deeper than that. The first thing you need to understand is that there’s lots of upfront costs on ads and testing different ad creatives to see which one works and is profitable. It can honestly get very expensive, even I, who also use facebook ads for my dropshipping stores, spend anywhere between $200 to $250 dollars just to test and see if a product is worth selling or not.
Product Pricing and Perceived Value
The second thing you need to understand is that the product itself has to come across as a high perceived value, meaning that if you are selling a product that can be sourced for $5 and it has the perceived value of being sold for $50. Then that means you will have high enough profit margins to cover up for all the fees that come along with paid marketing. So now that you’ve understood those 2 things and are wondering, how do I set up facebook ads? Well, here’s the solution. I’ve uploaded a video on my channel where I go over from A-Z on how to set up a successful Facebook ad, I will leave the video in the description.
Order Fulfillment in Dropshipping
Now lastly, after you have found a product, built the store, started marketing it, and received a few sales, it’s time for the fulfillment part. With dropshipping, when it comes to fulfilling your orders, it’s all outsourced. Which is the beauty with dropshipping in my opinion. You never have to lift a finger for the fulfillment. There are a bunch of tools that you can use to fulfill orders and have it automated, but I’ll just save your time and give you my own suppliers that I work with for all my dropshipping stores. They will do everything for you.
Supplier Contacts
It’s 2 guys, David and William. I suggest that you message both on Skype individually, speak with them and see who you can get the best deal from. And please, only message them if you have orders rolling in, if you do not have any orders, then wait. Because I am giving you their contact and we need to respect their time. They are extremely fast at setting up everything with and get things going, so don’t worry. And for fulfillment, there is no low budget or high budget ways. This is it.
Conclusion
Alright, that was all for today. If you would have any questions, or if you would like to see any other type of dropshipping article, please let me know in the comments below.