How to Start a Dropshipping Business in 2020

So you want to learn how to start a dropshipping business? For all it’s worth, here’s everything you need to know as a beginner.

Starting your own dropshipping business is worth the grit. There are thousands of success stories behind this ecommerce business model.

We have dropshipping stores selling a single product, yet making six-figure sales each month.

Let’s take Scott Hisle, as our case in point. The spirited millennial dropshipper who’s also featured on Oberlo’s success stories category is such a huge proponent of one product store.

And that goes the effortless way to say that dropshipping isn’t all about mimicking Amazon and spamming your ecommerce store with different kinds of niche products.

Instead, you can focus on one winning product and build a six-figure dropshipping business.

Dropshipping is easily considered as a plausible online selling option due to its low barrier to entry. And perhaps, that’s part of what fuels most beginners to open a dropshipping business.

But here’s the whole story.

To build your dropshipping brand, you’ll need to meet this 7-step guide:

1. Find a niche
2. Run a competition analysis
3. Contact your suppliers
4. Pick the best dropshipping platforms
5. Build your brand
6. Promote your store
7. Optimize your online store

Well, that might seem a little daunting for anyone who wants to learn how to start a dropshipping business from scratch.

In this guide, we’ll try as much to loosen up the learning curve and help you launch your ecommerce business without any patent strain.

So let’s take a deeper dive.

What Is Dropshipping?

At its simplest, dropshipping is an ecommerce business model that’s pretty novel for one significant reason; you don’t need to hold any inventory.

An online store that employs the dropshipping model uses a third-party supplier to fulfill orders from customers. Whenever you make a sale, the supplier ships the products directly to the customer’s address.

So you don’t need to own a warehouse or do any picking and packing services. This cuts down your operational costs by far.

The dropshipping selling strategy allows the online business owner to decamp from upfront costs similar to those incurred by retailers who run storefronts.

In that context, dropshipping is significantly the opposite of what traditional retailers and other ecommerce merchants have to deal with. You only need to build an online presence and create product listings.

How Dropshipping works

The dropshipping business model is centered on three solid players; the dropshipper, the supplier, and the online customer.

The manufacturer/ supplier in this instance, does hard work which includes sourcing raw materials, creating a product from scratch, shipping ordered products to the customers, handling returned items, updating the stock levels, and paying close focus on the product’s quality.

The dropshipper pays the wholesale price to the supplier and sells it to the online customer at a retail price. Since the customer buys a product straight from your dropshipping store, the price point allows you to keep a fitting profit margin per sale.

Most savvy dropshippers adopt a rebranding strategy where the product is packaged using their designs and logo. That’s a differential strategy to gain ground on the market since customers get to identify your brand.

More newbies who are ready to learn how to start a dropshipping business tend to probe so hard on how profitable it is to run this ecommerce business model.

While you don’t need to incur any shipping or manufacturing costs, your profit margins all depend on the buying frequency of your target audience.

You need to put in some hard work on your online store’s visibility and build the customers’ confidence in your ecommerce business.

Is Dropshipping a valuable model to tap into?

Well, like the experts always say– it all depends.

Let’s first look at the numbers and see whether everything adds up.

First off, there’s an anticipated ecommerce growth rate of about 16% in 2020, according to eMarketer.

Millennials (67%) and Gen X (56%) are two demographics that seem to take an upward trendline on account of choosing to shop online over visiting brick-and-mortar stores.

This suggests that the ecommerce market is growing exponentially over time. Projections show that about 27% of retailers have progressed to dropshipping.

That alone should give any beginner who wants to learn how to start a dropshipping business a sense of security and some level of excitement to jump right in the bandwagon.

Shopify, which currently stands as an in-demand and the most popular ecommerce selling channel by merit, hosts over 1 million active users.

A larger share of these online stores is owned by dropshippers. Despite that, the competition is hard to crack. It’s even worse than it looks if you have a strapped marketing budget.

But with the right blueprint on the table, learning how to start a successful dropshipping business should be a fun thing to do.

How to Start a Dropshipping Business in 7 easy steps:

Step 1: Find a niche idea

You need to take a deeper dive at suitable insights to choose the best dropshipping business idea.

The market is huge and you can easily get lost in highly saturated and low selling products. You need to conduct proper research to avoid getting stuck in the product testing phase for so long.

At its best, the dropshipping business model works perfectly well with niche products as compared to commoditized items.

Your goal should focus on selling a product to a specific customer base. There are tools to help you spot an untapped market with remarkable growth potential. Let’s check them out:

Amazon Keyword Tool: This research tool is made of four well-connected metrics; search volume, trend, CPC, and competition.

Each KPI aims at boosting your Amazon’s SEO and you get to draft nifty product descriptions that help customers discover your products quite fast.  Its autocomplete feature feeds you with keyword suggestions from the Amazon keywords listing database.

If you plan to start dropshipping with Amazon, this tool should help you find products that customers want to purchase. You need to do keyword optimization to help buyers find your products on Amazon with ease.

Google Trends should also help you brainstorm on seasonal and popular products across various regions. It’s a one-stop-shop for the ‘Johnny-come-lately’ who wants to learn how to start a dropshipping business and has no idea what to sell.

To cut it simple, Google Trends allows you to analyze all necessary competition factors that are hard to debunk.

While it’s typically not the only tool you need to measure the search volume of a product in the market, it’s still a handy analytics tool that’ll help you settle on a steadily growing niche.

Alongside the above-mentioned tools, Ubersuggest gives you the same benefits to help you make an edge over your competitors. You can rank your dropshipping business ideas based on what people look for on the search engine.

To make sure your dropshipping products have a massive potential to generate sales, you’ll want to heavily validate the search volume via keyword research. And that’s exactly what Ubersuggest is designed to – help you find a profitable niche.

The cool factor about starting a dropshipping business is that you’re not restricted to the technical side of niche hunting alone. You’ll be thrilled to find how useful other ecommerce websites can get while trying to carve a niche.

As a dropshipper, your key goal is to make a profit on each sale transaction. That's pretty straight to the point. But not every niche is lucrative. An optimum solution here is to learn from thriving dropshipping stores.

Pro Tip: It’s worth settling the customers’ flawed points and solving a consumer problem in the market. This way, you’ll escape over saturated niche products and beat the bold competition.

How to Start a Dropshipping Business – Step 2: Conduct a Competition Analysis

There are limelight factors that go into successful dropshipping. And the battle to outsmart your competition can’t be won overnight.

For the typical freshman looking to start a dropshipping business from scratch, there’s a hulking need to conduct a thorough debrief. In a bid to run a deep competition overview, you need to find answers to some of these questions:

1. Where do my competitors sell their dropshipping products at? (Amazon, eBay, third-party channels)
2. To what extent is my dropshipping competition in the market?
3. What are their strengths and weaknesses?
4. Are my competitors' websites and overall customer experiences solid enough?
5. What’s their marketing position and pricing like?

Well, that sounds like too much hard work – we get it. But the comforting prospect is that there are many proven tricks to help you face the competition head-on.

And they’re nothing too rocketry.

The first step is to sign up for a Google Keyword Planner account. While this tool is largely used of SEO and ad campaigns, it’s still a top of the range channel for keyword research.

With deep insights on what customers are looking for on the search engine, you’re able to analyze the competition and the prospective revenue your dropshipping business is likely to generate.

As a dropshipper, you're able to have a sneak peek at long-tail keyword suggestions before your competitors get a hold of them.

To put in order data from different locations, you can try out other tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs or Moz to monitor all gaps in a niche market. A winning dropshipper is one who’s bullish and savvy on customer demographics.

You also need a picture-perfect marketing strategy that’s way beyond that of your competitors. For this reason, you need to have such tools in mind.

Again, keep in mind the fact that your competitor's ecommerce store is a worthwhile hunting ground for all the bits and pieces you need while starting a productive dropshipping business.

Key takeaways

1. Subscribe to your competitors’ newsletters and social media accounts to learn how they engage with their customers. If your dropshipping competitor runs a blog have a look at their call-to-action and conversion optimization strategies.
2. Pick an item from your competitor’s product page but don’t check out. Observe how they deal with cart abandonment. Monitor how effective their recovery emails and ads retargeting can get.
3. Monitor all their order fulfillment options. This will give you a fair understanding of how to manage the shipping process on your dropshipping business.
4. Review all the user-generated comments/reviews by your competitors’ customers on factors like product quality, delivery, and customer engagement. In the end, this should give you insights on how to improve the relationship with potential shoppers.
5. Look at your competitors’ pricing structure. Your business model should factor in how much the target market is willing to pay.

To beat your competition by a landslide, you can issue incentives such as loyalty programs, gift cards and giveaways to repeat customers. Yet again, make perfect use of SEO tools to spy on relevant keywords that your competitors rank for.

While on the subject, you need to choose an ecommerce platform that has in-built SEO functionality. While creating content for your own business, you need to find what performs best as far as social shares are concerned.

BuzzSumo is the ultimate marketing tool for dropshippers looking to monitor their competitors’ best performing content so they can improve on what to post on their blogs.

For brands mentioned on social media, Social Mention would be an amazing competition analysis tool to start with while launching your dropshipping business.

Social media monitoring is one way to find how your competitors position their brand to engage with their target audience effectively. This way, you’re able to benchmark your marketing ranking against that of your competitors.

Further Reading: How to Choose the Best Ecommerce Platform for SEO.

How to Start a Dropshipping Business – Step 3: Find the right dropshipping suppliers

Now, this is the most exciting part for starters ready to learn how to start a dropshipping business.

All the same, finding the right supplier for your dropshipping store isn’t a wheel of fortune. You need to run a rigorous background check on all variations across all suppliers that sell your niche product.

A supplier's reputation in the market will either build or break your dropshipping business. Above all, experience and product quality are two prime factors to look at before settling on a specific supplier.

So you might need to order samples and test the shipping speed and kind of materials used on a product. If you want to start a dropshipping business, you need high-quality product photos, SEO focused product descriptions and effective return policy.

You need to recollect the fact that your business model heavily depends on the supplier’s capacity to maintain a successful order fulfillment rate.

Where to Find Experienced Dropshipping Suppliers

Oberlo

Oberlo is an exclusive marketplace for dropshippers looking to sell their products on Shopify. At its core, Oberlo dropshipping is a low-cost technique for any ecommerce business looking to find unique products and automate the order fulfillment process.

This free app lets you find high selling products from verified suppliers from AliExpress. You're able to import items, together with their variants and product descriptions to your ecommerce store in just a few clicks.

To make products look more professional in your Shopify store, Oberlo allows you to make changes before you import them to your Shopify dropshipping store.

You also get markup the prices in your store. This allows the dropshipper to set adjustable profit margins on products. Once the customer pays for an order, you can choose to fulfill it right from Oberlo.

Oberlo’s automated system pushes real-time notifications to your customers to keep them on tabs with the shipment status and tracking information.

Meanwhile, the dropshipper gets a tracking code update right from Shopify’s dashboard and once the supplier ships a product, the order is marked as “fulfilled”.

For one niche product, Oberlo typically lists about five reliable suppliers. Alongside product information, you’ll find unbiased reviews and ratings for each supplier. You’ll also view the number of times a product has been imported to various dropshippers’ stores.

Even better, you can order samples right from Oberlo’s dashboard to test product quality, packaging and the average shipping speed of different suppliers.

If you want to grasp how to start a dropshipping business real quick, Oberlo is a handy boost, especially when you need to work with trusted dropship suppliers.

Takeaway

One landmark pointer to note is the shipping times from various suppliers. If a product takes longer to get delivered, your store might suffer a spin-off effect that damages the overall customer confidence.

Further reading:

1. Oberlo Dropshipping: Super Dropshipping, the Way it Should Be.
2. How to Sell With the Shopify Lite Plan and Oberlo.
3. The Best Oberlo Alternatives for Shopify and WooCommerce.

Printful

Printful is the secret sauce for an ecommerce store owner looking to dropship print-on-demand products.

If you want to print custom designs on t-shirts and sell online, Printful has a low-cost fulfillment service to get your dropshipping business on the move.

Customers can order POD products with your brand straight from your dropshipping store. Printful integrates with ecommerce platforms such as Shopify, Etsy, WooCommerce, and Squarespace.

All you need is to sign up and connect Printful to your dropshipping store. You’ll, thereafter sync products to your store and promote them on social media platforms using your brand.

Printful mockup generator allows you to create fetching product photos for your dropshipping store. There’s also a heavyset product listing to choose from. You can customize and dropship print-on-demand products from categories such as:

1. Men’s clothing- beach shirts, hoodies, hats
2. Women’s clothing- tank tops, long sleeve shirts, crop tops
3. Kidswear- leggings, baby bodysuits, swimwear
4. Accessories- tote bags, laptop cases, iPhone cases, bracelets, fanny packs
5. Home & Living- coffee mugs, wall art, throw pillows, bean bags, beach towels

As soon as the order notification checks in, Printful automates the order fulfillment process. So you don’t need to deal with any shipping, warehousing, or packing services. Put another way, the POD service handles all your inventory.

You only need to be mindful of the marketing and customer engagement priorities. Both of which are aspects that you can handle at the convenience of your ecommerce store’s dashboard.

Further reading:

1. Printful Review: Higher Quality Printing and Dropshipping
2. Printify vs Printful: The Ultimate Print-on-Demand Services Comparison

Spocket

Spocket is a vast marketplace with dropshipping suppliers who sell genuine products from the United States and the EU. This free tool is the best option for dropshippers using WooCommerce as their ultimate ecommerce selling channel.

If you’re a small business in the dropshipping space, Spocket gives you unlimited access to a directory full of niche products ranging from:

1. Apparel
2. Smartphone accessories
3. CBD products
4. Custom designed jewelry
5. Drones
6. Weight loss products

The list is way longer than you can imagine. Spocket comes with no upfront costs whatsoever. It’s largely designed with the dropshipper in mind. So your dropshipping company doesn’t need a budget for any inventory.

Like other dropshipping apps, Spocket limits its marketplace to only suppliers who sell high-quality products and recognize how the dropshipping model works.

If you need an oversimplified channel to help you know inside out, how to start a dropshipping business, Spocket is perhaps, a comparable alternative to look at.

Further reading:

• An Exhaustive Spocket Review: Everything You Need to Know About Dropshipping from the United States & EU.
• Modalyst vs Spocket: Which Should You Go for?

This guide also has extra insights on where exactly to find the best dropshipping suppliers. Other handy marketplaces to find legit wholesale suppliers include:

1. Salehoo (read review)
2. Doba (full review)
3. Wholesale Central
4. Modalyst (full review)
5. Dropified(complete review)

Deciding on what niche products to venture in can be a knackering exercise since there are a bunch of options out there.

This part is more like making a smoothie.

Your dropshipping blueprint is a blend of running competition research, choosing the right suppliers, and launching your store on the most suitable ecommerce platform.

How to Start a Dropshipping Business- Step 4 Define your Brand.

Branding your dropshipping business isn’t all about having a logo and a name attached to your ecommerce store alone.

Your branding efforts should be felt on all corners of running your dropshipping business including email campaigns, and checkout pages.

A brand is such a powerful KPI and key differentiator with an immense potential to pull triggers that increase the repeat purchase rate and overall customers’ confidence in your dropshipping store.

To take and manage this part by the storm, here are some of the cues to note:

Pick a unique name: If you can’t think of something matchless, you can opt to check out for clues using automated name generators to help you come up with a name for your ecommerce business model.

Shopify’s business name generator is one of those rare tools to look at. You need a catchy name to make your business look more professional before your prospective customers.

Create a logo: You can use tools like Canva, TailorBrands or Hatchful to design a custom logo for your dropshipping store.

If none of these options sound compelling, you can jump straight to freelance marketplaces such as Fiverr or Upwork to order for a personalized logo design.

Personalize the customer experience: Your dropshipping store brand’s identity should aim at setting a unique selling proposition for your target demographic.

One relevant channel to boost your shoppers’ experience is to include a signature customer loyalty program. If you have a rewards system in your dropshipping business, then customers are more likely going to identify and interact with your brand more often.

To maintain the product demand, using branded packaging on all products should be a high-priority feature you need to consider while handling order fulfillment.

Shopify integrates with CRM tools such as HubSpot, Salesforce, and Metrilo. Using any of these customer engagement tools can help you elevate the productivity prospects and market positioning for your dropshipping business.

You’ll also need to monitor how your brand performs on the web as well as social media platforms.

Focus on the brand story: Ecommerce store builders such as Shopify or WooCommerce have easy drag-and-drop tools to help the dropshipper set up an “About Us’” page in less than 5 minutes.

Along with your contact page, customers also want to see a descriptive FAQ section. For consumer-centric products, the dropshipper’s brand needs to include an effective support platform that goes across the board to boost the customers’ satisfaction rate.

How to Start a Dropshipping Business- Step 5: Build your Dropshipping Store/ Seller Account.

You don’t have to replicate your competitor’s dropshipping store. Your needs may be outrightly different.

After all, there are so many options to work with. And you don’t need any web development skills to launch your dropshipping store.

You can choose to sell using an online marketplace or a third-party ecommerce store builder. Both ways are proven to work fluidly even for the novice category looking to start a dropshipping business from scratch.

Selling Products using Online Marketplaces

Online marketplaces are labor-saving and user-oriented platforms that new dropshippers can use to list their niche products.

Dropshipping products on Amazon, Etsy or eBay is one key strategy to maximize your profits. And here’s why:

1. You get to reach a wider customer base that’s at the cross-border level
2. Most shoppers have indestructible confidence in these online marketplaces
3. The barrier to entry is on the low-end
4. You get to hang on an already established website traffic. Prospective customers are more likely to flock in way sooner and you don’t need to bother so much on SEO and marketing.

To the contrary, these are some downsides which you may have to get along with:

1. A marketplace such as Amazon charges commission fees per sale transaction. For eBay dropshippers, you’ll need to part with a significant listing fee. Such operational costs tend to shift your anticipated profit margins.
2. Customer engagement isn't long-term. You’ll face considerable constraints whenever you want to market your brand and have returning customers.

How to sell Dropshipping Products on Amazon

By far, Amazon holds the repute as the most robust ecommerce retail platform for all sorts of product listings. Arguably, dropshipping on Amazon uses the same supply chain technique as that of other ecommerce stores.

To start a dropshipping business here, you first need to access the Amazon Seller Central page and complete the official sign up process. Here, you can estimate what it costs to start dropshipping on Amazon.

Amazon includes a well-expressed dropshipping policy. You must get to understand the ins and outs of what’s acceptable or prohibited.

With the advent of Amazon SEO– many thanks to its complex algorithm– you’re able to scale up your product rankings quite considerably. Starting your dropshipping business on Amazon requires you to outsmart other sellers using keywords that match potential shoppers’ search queries.

Once your Amazon seller account is verified, the SEO keyword tool should be your next checkpoint. A tool such as SellerApp is designed to help Amazon dropshippers optimize their Ad management goals, monitor keyword performance and analyze historical sales data for future revenue growth.

JungleScout is yet another useful app for beginners looking to dropship products on Amazon. For any product you wish to sell on the online marketplace, this tool helps you set right these two variables:

1. Filter keyword categories using its feature-rich product database. This saves you tons of time while hunting for the winning product to dropship on Amazon.
2. Track the competition for any product sold on Amazon. You can forecast a product's potential sales and revenue at a glance.

Amazon FBA vs Amazon Dropshipping

Nomatter the course of action you want to take, both methods have immense potential to help you reap big profits from sales.

With dropshipping, you can ease the grinding part by adding all associated costs to the selling price. After all, you don’t need to worry about any inventory commitments.

To widen the price points, dropshipping gives you extra space to negotiate on wholesale prices from suppliers on mediums like Alibaba or its better-half, AliExpress.

Amazon FBA(Fulfillment by Amazon), on the other hand, comes with warehousing and fulfillment fees.

The FBA method allows the online seller to send their products to Amazon’s warehouse. Whenever the customer purchases your product, Amazon handles picks, packs, and ships the order on your behalf.

Other fulfillment services include order tracking, returns, and refunds. Depending on the type of product you want to sell on Amazon, you need to make clear the shipping costs and sales tax during checkout.

Points to note:

1. You need to promote your product listing. Proven methods to drive traffic, build leads, and push conversions include blogging, affiliate marketing, Amazon pay-per-click(PPC) advertising, email marketing, and social media campaigns.
2. Dropshipping with Amazon is legal only when the merchant isn’t in a position to hold any stock but the products bear their brand. Amazon restricts any dropshipper from selling items using the third party’s packaging information.

Selling on Third-Party Ecommerce channels

If you want to learn how to start a dropshipping business without writing a single line of code, selling using third-party ecommerce channels is such a perfect fit, especially for the newbie category.

Most dropshipping success stories have hinged on ecommerce store builders for these major league reasons:

1. As a dropshipper, you get unlimited control over your ecommerce business’s brand, the store’s design layout, and marketing options.
2. You don’t face your competition directly, unlike with marketplaces such as Amazon or Etsy. Instead, you can start your own dropshipping business at a more unconstrained and unrepeated level using a third-party sales channel.
3. You can reap higher profit margins since the fees are significantly low.
4. It’s much more serene to branch out your niche product on a third-party ecommerce store builder.

To start a dropshipping business on a third-party ecommerce channel, these are the writ large steps to follow:

Choose your preferable store builder

To properly solve your customers’ pain points, you need to sign up for a subscription-based software that matches your dropshipping needs. Besides the monthly fee, you should look at other features such as:

• It’s ease-of-use
• Built-in payment processing capacity
• Integrations
• Mobile-responsive design
• Shipping Options
• Inventory management
• Checkout security standards
• Reporting tools
• Flexibility to scale your dropshipping business

Since the primary linchpin of this guide is purely dropshipping, our best pick for beginners would be Shopify. The ecommerce powerhouse has strapping dropshipping apps and a robust theme store to help beginners grease the wheels while starting.

Shopify’s flexible pricing plans which range from $29-$299/ month are seemingly liberal, especially if you’re hanging on a frugal-ish kind of budget.

Other options in the market include:

1. Shopify (full Shopify reviews)
2. BigCommerce (full BigCommerce review)
3. WooCommerce (detailed WooCommerce review)
4. 3dcart (full 3dcart review)
5. Volusion (full Volusion review)

Related tips:

1. 11 Best Open Source and Free Ecommerce Platforms for 2020.
2. 6 of the Best Ecommerce Platforms and Solutions in 2020: Shopify vs Volusion vs BigCommerce vs BigCartel vs 3dcart vs Ecwid.
3. Shopify Reviews: Is Shopify the Best third-party Ecommerce Platform?
4. What is Shopify & How Does Shopify Work? Learn from scratch how to start selling on Shopify in 8 simple steps.

Pick a domain name

Your brand needs a visual authority on the search engine. A custom domain name gives your dropshipping business resolute credibility that’s rewarding and recognized by your customer demographic.

You can configure your domain and hosting services right from your Shopify account, so you don’t need to look out for third-party options.

For ecommerce platforms that don't offer an integrated hosting solution, you can purchase a domain name from widely known companies like GoDaddy, Bluehost, and Namecheap.

💡 Quick tips:

1. To achieve peak level Google rankings, your dropshipping store’s domain name should include keywords that are SEO oriented.
2. Your store’s domain name needs to be short, relevant, and cover a significant part of your brand’s persona.

Register your dropshipping business

There’s a legal aspect of running a dropshipping business similar to that of a brick and mortar store.

If you’re setting up your store in the United States or Canada, you must abide by the sales tax laws. You, therefore, need a sales tax ID. To get one, your business needs to be structured in the form of a company or a sole proprietorship.

An EIN number identifies your business entity. You need it for tax returns and whenever you need to source products from suppliers from marketplaces such as SaleHoo.

How to Start a Dropshipping Business- Step 6: Promote your online store

The goal here is to market your dropshipping store and create leads that build more traffic for potential revenue over time.

Of course, this isn't anything new to most beginners. But first, you need to identify your target market to avoid any slip-ups. After all, you don't want to spend money on ads on campaigns only to end up with zero ROI.

These are some of the tip-top marketing techniques to boost your sales and maintain a solvent dropshipping business.

Run Facebook Ads

The worst fear for most beginners is to spend so much on Facebook ads but miss out on potential conversion signals.

Running your first ad campaign requires you to target customers based on interests, demographics, and overall behaviors.

These indicators help you determine if your target base is highly likely going to purchase from your dropshipping store.

To get started, you need to set up a Facebook Business Manager account. This free tool allows you to manage your ad accounts, product catalogs, and pixels in one place. So it’s way easier to generate leads and monitor their performance from this end.

With Facebook ads, you can share engaging –from video to images, and target the right audience using its campaign manager’s interface.

Facebook’s algorithm keeps on changing infrequently. So you need to stay ahead of the game and learn all the useful tweaks. To optimize your ads for a better audience network, you’ll need to connect a Facebook Pixel ID to your dropshipping store.

This helps you improve your marketing results based on your target demographic. You can also use the ID to do conversion tracking, ads retargeting, run cart abandonment recovery, and calculate the cost-per-click.

Content marketing

Content marketing is by far, one of the low-budget techniques to promote your products organically, and introduce triggers in all your lead generation strategies.

This allows you to connect with your customers and boost your store's brand loyalty. The most successful sharing mediums for content marketing are blogs and social platforms like email newsletters, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

With content marketing, the dropshipper can share product updates via FAQ sheets, videos, and guides to keep up with the customer acquisition goals.

While customers need deep infographics to visualize how effective the product is, a dropshipper needs to refine the purchase funnels and focus on the workflows.

And that includes a great passion for SEO, a detailed resource center for customers, and setting key performance indicators in the content marketing strategy.  In effect, the dropshipper is in a position to ultimately convert that immense traffic into leads and sales.

Instagram marketing/Influencers

Instagram influencer marketing has helped so many dropshipping stores scale up pretty rapidly. If you’re looking to consider Instagram as a channel to promote your products, you’ll need to set up and optimize your business account.

With over 1 billion active users, the social platform gives the dropshipper potential to broaden the audience horizons.

Another way to market your niche product is to build your customer base from scratch. But meanwhile, you choose to work with an Instagram influencer who has a wide following in your niche.

If you’re on a tight ad budget, you can create affiliate links for influencers and pay them a commission for every successful conversion.

Setting up an Instagram Business account is worth the salt since you can build an organic audience and include a quick link to your dropshipping store on the bio page. Shopify allows users to make shoppable posts on Instagram using its foolproof integration feature.

To set up an Instagram sales channel, you need to first make sure that you have a Facebook shop that’s linked to your dropshipping store.

SEO

Search engine optimization is the ultimate strategy to grow organic traffic on the search engine.

While so many dropshippers struggle with the dynamic SEO metrics, it still stands as the marketing strategy with the potential to yield the highest ROI in comparison to other options.

Best practices that have already been put to the test include keyword research and content marketing. Tools like SEMrush, Amazon Keyword Tool, and Ahrefs should help you catch up to speed with ecommerce matching keywords to use on your product descriptions.

Besides the paid ads, Google presents organic results once the online shopper keys in a search query.

That suggests that your SEO strategy should aim at ranking #1 on the search engine. There’s quite a lot of hard work that goes into leveling up your SEO game than merely running competitor research.

Google Keyword Planner is one of the best tools for competition analysis. As a dropshipper, you can use it to measure the buyer intent by running estimates on the search volume and the cost-per-click(CPC) of target product keywords.

Add customer reviews to your store

User-generated reviews are a good way to validate a product's dominance in the market. Before your customers hit the checkout button, high chances are, they’ll read a review to evaluate the rating level from previous buyers.

The next thing is deciding how to have genuinely published reviews on your dropshipping store’s product pages.

But that’s nothing overly complicated.

If you’re dropshipping from AliExpress using Oberlo, you can use a plugin to import reviews and set them up in your online store via a CSV file.

The best part is, you can also add photo reviews. Most customers are visual-centric. So putting your customers’ expectations aligned is such a valuable marketing technique with an in-depth potential boost to your sales.

How to Start a Dropshipping Business – Step 7: Optimize your store

If you want to start a dropshipping business with sales leads magnets attached to it, you need to set a few essential tweaks. These two laser pointers should be in your optimization checklist:

Integrations

If you want to start your dropshipping business using a third-party selling channel, you don’t need to work on any code while making integrations. Instead, nearly each API integration’s front-end and back-end are fully automated.

You just need to run a few clicks to connect your store to any application. For dropshipping suppliers, for example, you can integrate your Shopify store with Oberlo and import products to your store.

Then you want to make sure your payment options are well integrated. If not, you might face high cart abandonment issues. This guide points out the best payment gateways that integrate with popular ecommerce platforms.

You also need to integrate with apps designed to help you with email marketing, conversion funnels, inventory management, shipment tracking, customer relationship management, and marketing.

Set up Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the best tool for traffic assessment. When done right, Google Analytics can help fetch the right insights to optimize your dropshipping store.

It’s no secret that Google is a data farm with rich infographics to hang on. While running your dropshipping store, you want to monitor where your traffic comes from, the entire conversion funneling journey, and how effective your digital marketing efforts are.

Google Analytics gives your dropshipping company all the performance pointers it needs. To keep track of all actions happening in your online store, you’ll need to connect it with a Google Analytics ID.

If you have other tools for actions such as email marketing linked to your store, GA generates reports that help you interpret all signals from visitors' in your ecommerce store.

Conclusion

You just made it through! Congratulations!

We get it all. You’ve, perhaps picked the dropshipping model since it has a low barrier to entry and holds zero inventory commitments. The startup cost isn’t too inflated, compared to that of a brick and mortar store.

Starting a dropshipping business is easy. You just need to pick the right niche, a powerful selling strategy, and most of all, the right selling channel.

Whether you want to kickstart your dropshipping business on a marketplace or a third-party ecommerce platform, your selling technique has to focus on the customers’ pain points.

The post How to Start a Dropshipping Business in 2020 appeared first on Ecommerce Platforms.

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