How To Start Dropshipping with Shopify and Aliexpress

Dropshipping is a lucrative path to online income. Your revenue can be skyrocketing if you do it correctly. In this article, I will explain what dropshipping is and how you can start.

Drop shipping is when you are selling products online without storage. When you receive a sale, you notify your supplier the order details. The supplier will then send the order directly to your customers. This way of doing business has a very low start cost and lower risk.

You can also start an online store where you are buying products that you have in storage. You need a lot of products, and you also need room to store them while selling your products. And do you think you will sell everything? You will most likely lose some money on some of the products. Dropshipping is the preferred method to start a store if you are on a budget.

To start an online store is cheaper than doing a brick & mortar store. First, you need to rent a location, then you need to equip it. After that, you need to buy goods to sell. You need to work long hours and probably also hire staff. A brick & mortar store has high risk, and high start cost. Then an online store is a preferred method if you love to sell.

How to start dropshipping

With drop shipping, you can do it as I will describe now.

1. Start a Shopify store
2. Find products you can sell from aliexpress.com
3. Add them to your store
4. Do marketing on facebook
5. Sell your products
6. Collect the money
7. Order the products on Aliexpress with the customers shipping information.

There are many methods to do this, but the way above is the most popular one.

How to find dropshipping products to your store - 4 popular research methods

To sell online, you usually need to find niches and products that have some of the features below:

1. Solve a problem
2. People are passionate about it.
3. Already selling

If you find products that have all the features above, you have found something that will probably work and make an income. There are many ways to find these products. I will now mention some of them.

Research products in a niche that interest you

One advice is to start with what you are interested in. This will help you to find the correct terminology to use on your sales pages and advertising. You also know what people want and can easier find the products that will sell. You will also find the work more interesting, and you will most likely find products easier. To start a business, you will struggle and discover many roadblocks. Try to make the struggle as enjoyable as possible. If you do something you enjoy, you will manage the roadblock easier.

To find products in a niche that interest you is something you should strongly consider. You don't need to be passionate, but have some interest will help you.

Do your research on Facebook after products that are already selling

One popular method is to research niches and products on Facebook. What are other stores selling? On facebook you need to check what is advertised and if they have many likes and shares. If an ad has thousands of likes and shares, they are probably selling a lot of that product.

So how do you find ads? One method is to use the search function on Facebook. Search for niche/products + free shipping / Buy now / Get your here / get yours now. There are many words you can use to search for. With this method, you will find public posts that are used as page post ads.

Stores can also use posts that are not public and then you can't find them before they are in your newsfeed as a sponsored post.

When you find products that interest you, you can click on the page name and then go and check if they have more ads running. If they are advertising, they are most likely making some money and its worth to test.

Do product research by spying on Shopify stores

Find new and unique products that none have seen

The last method I will write about is to find unique products. Go to aliexpress.com and search for the products you want to sell. Find a seller with a high rating (97%+) and have been active for 3 years+, this shows ut that they are probably a high-quality seller.

They are probably selling products in a niche so go to their store and check out their other products. Go to new arrivals and see if they have added some new products lately. Since they probably are a high-quality supplier, the product is also high quality. Since they are new arrivals, this product is perhaps not seen by too many on facebook.

To find suppliers to your dropship business

The most used suppliers for dropshipping is on Aliexpress.com. Only use sellers with a rating of above 96% and have been selling for above 1 year. When I have found a product I want to sell, I often just sort by orders and choose the supplier with the most orders. This supplier is usually the one with the best quality and price.

Some of the suppliers also offer free shipping, and you should exploit this to maximize your profits.

Use of reliable and highly skilled and professional suppliers helps to ensure that you cut down on costs as there are minimal returns and potential reshipments.

So now you have a product and a supplier. Now you want to check out his store, and maybe he has more you want to sell? To ship from one seller will save you in the shipping cost. Your customer will also, most often, receive their whole order in one packet. You will also build trust with one seller that may help you with more products so you both will sell even more.

Research your audience on Facebook Audience Insights

Facebook audience insights is a great tool to be used to identify your audience for the products and niche that you want to sell. This will help to give you pointers to decide who will buy your products.

Check your audience and find out who they are. Are the most men or woman? Educated or less educated? High income? What other pages do they like? All this information can you find on Facebook audience insights. This is important information to find out who your audience is and how to do the marketing.

Go to Facebook and do your marketing

Since competition is very stiff in the dropshipping business, you need to stand out from your competitors. The best way to attract a huge pool of engaged customers is to improve your marketing and the offer. Your sales page should also be designed for conversations.

The best tips are to check out what your competitors do on facebook and try to model what they are doing. Find their ads as I described above. Like their page. Do they post a lot? Engage with the page by liking some of their posts. Go to their website and check how they organize their store and write their product pages. This will give you useful information on how you can do it. When you have something that is working, then you can try to improve what they are doing.

How to do shipping when dropshipping

Always be clear upfront on shipping time. There are different methods to do this, but I like to have it on every sales page, but no need to put it right below the add to cart button. Be clear on shipping times, but don't stick it in their face. At least in the beginning when you want your first sales.

For most of the times, epacket is the preferred method to ship the orders to your customers. With epacket, you also have a tracking number that helps a lot when a customer is asking for their order. A tracking number will also help you in a dispute with your customer. So try to use epacket shipment so much you can. If you are only selling in the US, most sellers offer epacket.

Dropshipping without epacket is riskier, and you lose a bit of trust from your customer when they are asking for their order.

Can dropshipping be automated?

Dropshipping can be semi-automated, but not completely automated. Drop shipping is not meant to be like office work where you need to work day and night. Therefore, it is very vital to ensure that everything is so automated you can do it to avoid too much work.

So you want to use apps and other software to automate most of your store. I will recommend Dropified to manage product imports, ordering and tracking. With Dropified you can easily import products from Aliexpress. Remember always to modify the product description, don't use the one from Aliexpress.

Once a day you can do the order fulfillment and Dropified to this automatically for you. You need to click some buttons, log in to Aliexpress and Dropified do almost everything for you. All you need to do is to pay for your orders after Dropified has placed them for you.

After you have placed your order, you want to update the order information. Dropified will then go through all the orders in Aliexpress and extract the tracking number and order status. Then the order status in Dropifed is updated, and the tracking number will be added to your orders in Shopify.

Can dropshipping be successful?

Drop shipping is a very lucrative business and can be very enjoyable. Dropshipping can also be a long and hard path to your online income. Many struggles to find the right products to sell to the correct audience and gives up. Others struggle for a long time and test above 100 products on facebook before they find their winners. Most people are lucky and find a winning product early, or they struggle and gives up without results.

If you are interested in starting with dropshipping, I highly advise you to read my review of Ecom Elites. With a dropshipping course, your success rate will improve significantly.