Dropshipping

If you have been on the internet in the last few years, then there is a good chance you may have heard of a trend called drop shipping. Drop shipping is very similar to reselling but you never actually touch the products that you are selling, and it is typically done all online. Essentially what you are doing when you are drop shipping is finding a supplier that has a product people want for cheap and taking orders for that product on your platform while taking a finder’s fee. You never even see the product other than receiving samples to make sure your customers are getting quality products in a timely manner. Once you receive an order on your platform you simply have your supplier ship the order directly to your customer.

The first step to starting a drop shipping business is finding good products that you can market easily from a reliable supplier. Let’s first focus on finding the products we will sell. One of my favorite ways to do this is by searching on TikTok “ttmmbi” or #tiktokmademebuyit and looking at the products that are getting a lot of likes and engagement. You can even search “drop shipping product” on Tik-Tok, Instagram, or YouTube and you can find some people that are giving away good drop shipping ideas just to grow their followers. Another way to find great products is by joining reddit groups like Wholesale Products To Sell, Shut Up And Take My Money or you can check out websites like bestproducts.com to get some good ideas. You can also check what is trending on Instagram and Twitter and try to find products to dropship that are related to those trends. Once you put together a list of products that you can sell it is time to analyze how profitable each one can be and where you can get those products from a reliable source.

The most common sites that you can find almost any product on for cheap are aliexpress.com, alibaba.com and dhgate.com. These are all Chinese based sites that can connect you to wholesalers in China. The only downside to these sites is that your customers may have to wait a month or more to receive their product which can lead to them not coming back or even requesting a refund from their bank when the product takes too long to arrive. Because of this I recommend either testing out the shipping time of your Chinese suppliers extensively or simply using a wholesaler in your country that stocks inventory from these sites so that your customers can get their products in a timely matter. It can be very helpful to be able to advertise your products as being shipped from your country and they will be happy when they receive them quickly. In America wholesalecentral.com is a great website that can connect you to dozens of different wholesalers that specialize in different types of products. It is also a good place to search for products that may drop ship well. Some other good U.S. based suppliers are Sunrise Wholesale, Tasha Apparel (for clothes), Inventory Source, Brands Distribution, Spocket (Also in Europe), BryBelly, SagerBrook Home (for home décor), and US Direct. Once you have found a product and drop shipper that works for you, be sure to reach out to multiple suppliers by phone or message in order to get multiple quotes and then negotiate on price based on these quotes. Even getting $0.10 off per item can make a big difference when it comes to selling a product over another drop shipper selling the same product. Never pay the price that is listed on these sites, they are always willing to go lower and you should renegotiate frequently as you begin filling orders.

Now that you have a list of products that you can sell try to separate them into categories of different niches so you can build websites around these niches. Then create a brand name for your store and a professional-looking logo. If you are not good at graphic design you can always use fiverr.com to find someone to make a logo for you. Once you have created your brand it is time to build a site that you can sell your products on. The easiest and most common way to set up a drop shipping site is with shopify.com. You can even use Shopify with a software called Oberlo that can automatically communicate with wholesalers like AliExpress so that you don’t even have to fill out your orders. However, the fees that they charge each month for Shopify are pretty high and can cut into your profits especially when you are first starting out. I recommend using WordPress to build your online store, buying your own domain from godaddy.com or from a hosting site like bluehost.com. Learning how to build a site with WordPress and host your site with a service like bluehost.com is the cheapest way to start and learning how to build sites with WordPress will be a valuable skill you can use for the rest of your life. I would suggest searching on YouTube “How to make a drop shipping site with WordPress” and you will get some amazing tutorials that will show you how to build a beautiful site and set up your payment processing.

Once you have a professional-looking site to sell your products on it is time to start marketing your products. The best ways to market your products are with platforms like Instagram, Tik-Tok, Facebook, and YouTube. These are the marketing platforms that we will be going over in detail. The first type of marketing you should focus on starting out is creating short form videos to sell your products on all of the platforms we mentioned. Every one of these platforms has a place to post short videos that will be pushed to more and more people that are scrolling based on how many likes and comments your videos get from the people it shows it to. The short form content on these platforms might get shown to 10 people automatically to see how they react. If 5 people like your video it will get pushed to another 20 people and that cycle will continue until it gets pushed out of the algorithm. Keeping this in mind it is important to sell products that solve problems or evoke emotions that people can relate to. Your product and videos should capture the attention of people in less than a second and create an impulse so that they click your profile, click the link in your bio and fill out their payment information. Making sales with short form content is all about volume and consistency. Because of this you will want to make 2 accounts on each platform, focusing mostly on Tik-Tok and Instagram reels. Once you have made a bunch of accounts you should begin making 3 videos of your products each and posting them all to every one of your profiles. If you do this every day, you will see results if you have a good product and have a clear call to action as well as a link to your products on your profile. As always you can also invest in some more phones with service as you start making money so you can have even more accounts and extend your reach.

Another way to get people to order your product is to create a YouTube channel that is focused on your main niche of products. You may be drop shipping kitchen gadgets for example and you could make a cooking channel or a channel that reviews different kitchen products that you sell. Then you can build a following how we outlined in the become a YouTuber section and put your product links in the descriptions of your videos while showing off your products in the videos themselves.

The most common and effective way to market drop shipping products is with paid ads on all of these different platforms. Facebook ads have always been the go-to for drop shippers and is still a great option if you are using videos only and are creating good openings to your videos that capture people’s attention. Another piece of advice that is important for your ads is that you may want to think of creative videos that do not even feel like ads to the viewer in order to set yourself apart and keep people from scrolling. The nice thing about Facebook ads is that they allow you to target your customers very well and you can even target people that follow certain pages that pertain to your niche. Once you have seen some success with free advertising with short form content you will definitely want to start with some Facebook ads. Even better than Facebook ads though nowadays are Tik-Tok and Instagram ads. Ads that are shown while people are already scrolling through random videos from people they don’t know have a much higher chance of being seen. It is much harder to pick out a video as an ad on these platforms especially if you are creating your videos well. Take the videos that have done well when posting your 3 videos a day and use those as paid ads on these platforms. Once you see what your conversion rates are with these ads, you can ditch the ads that are not working as well and begin to scale the ones that are profitable. For this reason it is important to start your ads with a low daily budget just to get an idea of what works and what products are selling well. Once you find a product and ad that is performing well, you can go all in on that.

If you follow these steps and stay persistent you will be sure to see success in the drop shipping industry. Just keep in mind that drop shipping is not typically something you will become rich with overnight and it will take a lot of time researching and adjusting your products and ads to find a system that works well. Always continue to watch videos on YouTube for tips on drop shipping as it is a community that loves to help one another. Most importantly keep a disciplined routine for your marketing and practice the free marketing options we went over first until you have an ad and product that works well for you.