In the great age of the side hustle, how to start dropshipping for free is the million-dollar question. It’s true, starting a dropshipping business isn’t technically difficult. However, doing it well so that it becomes a money-making machine while having minimal overhead is quite a niche skill set.
Dropshipping is defined as an online business that takes the shape of a virtual store. The contents of that store are entirely up to the owner, who might elect to start a general, niche, or one-product store. A general store is just that, a store that sells a multitude of items that are seemingly unrelated but that can bring in lots of orders. A niche store is somewhat more focused on what, perhaps, the business owner is passionate about, such as fishing in the Pacific or Japanese fashion trends, while a one-product store focuses exclusively on selling a single item, like a particularly good toothbrush. This crucial decision is an essential guideline for what your dropshipping store will be.
Start dropshipping for free
Deciding your products
The seemingly simple next step in the dropshipping business is to decide on exactly which products to sell in your store. For instance, sticking with the example of a Japanese fashion store, you could offer sets of niche jewelry that are quite cheap on AliExpress but that model customers will happily order regardless of the cost.
It’s important to choose dropshipping products that have the best reviews on your supplier’s website, and good business practice to even order one of each item to check for things like quality and clothing sizes. If you really have no idea what products to sell and don’t want to spend money on a platform that decides for you, you can look at the list of best-selling items on your supplier’s website and build a store based on the results. The AliExpress Dropshipping Center is a free guide to help you make the right decision to get the maximum number of orders from your customers.
Choose the Right Supplier!
Electing the right supplier will make a huge difference on your journey into ecommerce. Make sure that whoever you choose, though it will likely be Amazon or AliExpress in the end, has good customer service. Some elements to look out for are how they handle returned products from your store and the time it takes from sale to delivery. Be aware that some suppliers may be based in a different geographical location, and so it might take longer for people to receive their dropshipped items. This is an important factor since you will be the one getting angry phone calls from people demanding to know the whereabouts of their new bamboo toothbrush.
Find the Right Ecommerce Platform
The next step is to find the right platform for you. Though there are many options, free ones can be hard to come by. An excellent solution is to take advantage of free trials and plans by various platforms such as Shopify or WordPress plugins like WooCommerce to hold your inventory.
If you’re feeling like you can spend lots of time and energy on building your store quickly, accept the help from Shopify and sign up for the free three-day trial. Even if the ecommerce platform will often block the checkout section of your new store, you can still get a feel for whether starting to dropship with them is right for your business. As an added bonus, Shopify often runs a deal wherein you can use their basic plan for $1 per month for three months, and in this case, you have full access to the store and can even start making money if you make good decisions in your selling practice.
WooCommerce also allows you to create an ecommerce store. The platform hosts dropshippers for less money than Shopify, but it’s a slightly more technical process to build the store online. WooCommerce is hosted on website creator giant WordPress and is technically free to use. However, you still need to pay for hosting alongside your domain name, theme, and add-ons. While you may choose free domains and themes to try and save money, you may find that they aren’t as high in quality and therefore less helpful as a business product.
How to Run Your Store Efficiently
It’s all fine and well to have created your model ecommerce store for little to no money, but the trickiest step is yet to come. Ecommerce businesses need to be maintained, without which customers will either stop buying your products or not start in the first place.
An essential element to keep on top of is your inventory. You wouldn’t shop at a clothing store that never changed the content of its racks, and your Shopify ecommerce store works the same way. Introducing new products regularly and running sales on them is an excellent way to maintain loyal customers. For example, you could offer combo deals to help guide your customers online when they are deciding between different sets of folding chairs.
A common gripe with buying from ecommerce stores that rarely comes up when shopping with business giants is the issue of shipping. While suppliers such as Amazon and sometimes AliExpress are able to and often do offer free shipping, as a budding dropshipper you probably won’t have that luxury. Your host platform will generally take a small cut of your earnings, as will your supplier, not leaving you with much wiggle room to be so generous as to offer to ship for free. As such, it’s essential that you make up for that inevitable cost by offering the best quality products with amazing customer service. Small details such as friendly assistance and a genuine “Thank You” email to your customers with each purchase will go a long way in ensuring dropshipping success.
What About Branding?
Like any other marketing project, to start promoting your ecommerce store as a dropshipper is a multipronged process. To market your store, a great first step is to start by building up your brand. This means creating a specific vibe that matches the shopping experience you are offering in your store and identifying who you are and the image that you would like to project. Returning to the example of Japanese fashion, your customers will probably be in their 20s and 30s and appreciate a bright and colorful online store alongside affordable and niche products. This ensures that your customers will have a pleasant time and will associate you as a business to return to. Similarly, you will find that using best SEO practices in your shop will serve you well since it will draw in the intended customers. As such, you should strive to build the best ecommerce brand that reflects these traits.
Keep it Local
One interesting and not-so-obvious way of marketing your store for free is to start to focus on your local customers. Why? Simply because you know them best. If you make most of your money employed at a pet store, you know how animal lovers think and can therefore create a great niche store offering luxury dog collars. On that same note, you will be able to market more easily to a group that you know well, so keep that in mind when you are choosing what products to sell. For instance, if you are a mild-mannered software engineer with a penchant for Tchaikovsky, maybe reconsider selling those sets of Iron Maiden coasters from Amazon.
Another interesting marketing mechanism for making local sales is via your email list. This should ideally be at least a hundred people deep, but the right twenty people (and their twenty friends) can also make a huge difference in your sales as potential customers. Creating an account with MailChimp is free and easy, and their basic newsletter templates are also complimentary. Send out a couple of emails announcing that you’ll soon be launching your dropshipping ecommerce store and to look out for the upcoming launch date.
The Social Media Method
If you really don’t want to market your store to your local posse, it’s quite possible to be a highly successful dropshipper by turning to social media to sell your products. Using Instagram’s link in your bio is a great way to get free clicks from your current followers, who will likely be the first customers to your shiny new Shopify store.
It can also be a good idea to build separate social media accounts for your dropshipping store, just to avoid mixing your personal and professional lives. That way, you can get people who are already interested in your store to follow the new profiles and be in the know with every update to your website.
Making Your First Sales
Speaking of your website, offering great discounts and offers upon your launch is a useful way to get your first customers for your business. You might lose a little money on these sales, but the potential reward is more than worth it. Holding a couple of flash sales throughout the year in conjunction with holidays is a great free step to make money dropshipping. That being said, don’t hold these sales without being prepared. Check with your suppliers on inventory, choose the right products to offer a discount on, and keep the time period short, as in less than three days.
Also, generally try to keep things easy for yourself by making full use of your ecommerce platform tools. Another method is to perhaps offer less but better quality products and to use as few suppliers as possible to not confuse yourself with different shipping policies. Even though selling better quality products will probably slim down your profits, it is ultimately a good idea because you will build up your reputation as a reliable source for dropshipped products.
Final Words
Starting your own dropshipping store can be an incredibly rewarding experience, primarily in terms of earning money. Doing so for free or nearly free is all the more exciting since more sales will go straight into your pocket and less to suppliers, costly hosting platforms such as Shopify or WooCommerce, or social media powerhouses if you were to start blasting paid advertisements for your marketing.
Be warned, however. There are huge numbers of dropshippers going online at any moment. Keeping that in mind, it’s important to do your marketing research so that your ecommerce store model stands out from the crowd and serves a sufficient niche purpose with its products.
Mental preparedness is another key factor in how to start dropshipping for free: obstacles will come your way, be it through unexpected costs in WooCommerce, or a supplier who stopped carrying that universally flattering holiday dress on December 1st. Taking the right steps in educating yourself on best practices will help negate some of the issues, and you will come out stronger in the end.
Finally, if you are looking to start dropshipping long-term, there will be a certain number of costs involved, if only to pay for your hosting platform. After all, those free offers don’t last forever, so be prepared to cough up those fees each month. Still, if you apply best practices, those fees will become more than negligible as you grow in success.
That success will come with lots of hard work, so outsourcing certain tasks in your dropshipping business is an excellent solution to save time. ComeUp is full of talented online freelancers who are eager to help so you can accelerate your growth by focusing on the steps that matter most.
