How to Start a Dropshipping Business in 2024 (The Smart Way)
Introduction
If you have been reading my articles, you’ll know I am obsessed with finding ways to create multiple income streams working online. This allows me to work for myself, have complete freedom to travel and enjoy everything life has to offer.
In this article, I am sharing one of the best ways to make this possible without much investment — dropshipping. And the easist way to start in 2024.
What is dropshipping?
Dropshipping has been a popular method of running an ecommerce business in recent years. It’s become more and more common for people to start their own dropshipping business as a way to avoid investing capital into inventory and logistics on the front end, and then make money on the back end by selling products through their store.
The basic idea is that you don’t have your own inventory of any products; instead you buy from third-party suppliers that helps to handle logistic when someone orders something from your store.
Your website receive an order, place an order with one of these suppliers, who ships it directly to your customer without having gone through any other intermediary steps along the way — thus “dropping” it off at their door just like they requested!
In the past, starting a dropshipping business was harder than it is today. You had to find suppliers who would ship your products and then create an online platform where potential customers could purchase them.
Nowadays, there are some great tools that make this process easier for anyone who wants to start their own dropshipping business in 2024. If you’re interested in learning more about dropshipping, then read on!
How to Start a Dropshipping Business in 2024
Starting a dropshipping business means you will have to find the right suppliers, set up an online store then use social media to market and promote your products to the right audience.
Supply sourcing is one of the most important, and difficult parts of starting a dropshipping business. You’ll need to find suppliers who offer quality products at competitive prices so that you can offer your customers great deals without sacrificing margins. This can be challenging if you’re new to ecommerce because there are so many options out there!
You’ll also need to find suppliers that can help you with the shipping of your products when they’re ordered by customers.
After you found great products from the suppliers, you will have to setup an online store. Easiest way to do that is to use online store builder such as WooCommerce or Shopify .
Once you have an online store and have products uploaded to the store, it’s time to start marketing your dropshipping business!
You will need to promote your store and products on social media, or using paid ads such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads to attract customers to your website.
Sourcing Products with Spocket
Like mentioned, finding trending products from suppliers that can handle all the logistics for you is not easy. Sometimes they charge too much delivery fee, sometimes the communication takes a long time, and sometimes there’s no profit margin left for you to run your business.
Thankfully I found a great online marketplace tailored for online entrepreneurs who wants to start the dropshipping business.
Spocket is a dropshipping app that helps you find trending products with suppliers that offers worldwide shipping. It integrate seamlessly with WooCommerce and Shopify so you can import selected products directly to your online store and add margins to your pricing.
A lot of toturials online shares how they make money dropshipping products from China by using suppliers on Alibaba.com. The problem with that, is the shipping time takes at least 10 to 14 days before your customers receive the products, since the products will be shipped from China.
Spocket allows you to easily start dropshipping top products from US and EU suppliers. So delivery time is much shorter compare to the products from China suppliers. It helps reduce your product shipping time within the US and Europe. It also allows you to order samples so you can examine the quality of the products before selling it.
Once the customer orders products on your online store, Spocket automatically complete fulfillment and send the order to your customer directly.
Set up your online store or marketplace.
After you found some quality products, now it’s time to setup an online store. There are several different options available, so I recommend using one of the following:
- Shopify — Shopify is a popular ecommerce platform that includes more than 8,000 paid and free third-party apps in its app store. It is beginner friendly as it requires no coding skills and you can setup an online store in less than 10 minutes.
- BigCommerce — Another great option for building an online market place is BigCommerce, which offers similar functionality as Shopify but more scalable if you want to build multiple storefront and have large volume for transaction as it charge 0% transaction fee. This is great if you already have an established audience or business and just want to add the shopping feature as an addition to your existing website.
Use AI-Powered Writer for Content Creation
In order to attract customers to your online store, you have to market and promote it online. To speed up this process, you can use AI generated text to generate product descriptions, blog posts, social media content and the like.
It’s the most cost effective way to generate large amount of marketing content in a short time. AI-powered writer, such as Copy.ai and Jasper, can help to generate SEO friendly product descriptions, blog posts, engaging Instagram captions, newsletter, sales copy, and more.
Then you can add a personal touch to the AI-generated content to make it more unique and engaging. This is a great way to improve your online presence without spending too much time on content creation.
This saves 90% of your time and money so you can focus on other things to build your online business.
Step Up with Customized Packaging
If you want to build a personal brand for your dropshipping store, having custom packaging will boost your credibility and brand image.
Packhelp is a company that helps to design and produce custom packaging for ecommerce companies and brands. It comes with built-in tools that makes package design easy. The company also focus on eco-friendly packaging so your brand can be more sustainable and environmental friendly.
Market Your Dropshipping Business
Social media is the best places to promote your dropshipping business. Depend on your niche and where your audience hang out online, post frequently to install that online presence. Tiktok is also a good option for promoting your products, because it lets you create viral videos that can be shared with friends and family members who are interested in what you’re selling.
Another way to promote your dropshipping business is by using Facebook ads to test specific audiences. For example, if you want more women customers who live in metropolitan areas and earn over $100K per year, then target those users with an ad campaign! You can also build a community of customers by creating a Facebook group where you can share your experience using your products.
In Short
The first step to starting a dropshipping business is finding suppliers for your dropshipping store. Luckily, there are some great tools that can help with this process.
I recommend using Spocket to find suppliers that are well-reputed and reliable.
The same goes for Packhelp if you want to design custom packaging for your ecommerce store.
Copy.ai is also a useful tool that helps generate product content so you don’t have to manually create it when you upload new products!
Lastly, social media will be the key when promoting your brand and getting customers interested in what you’re selling. Try posting about unique products on Instagram reels or testing different Ad copies and audiences through Facebook ads.
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Hello, 👋 It’s Vicky. I’m a YouTuber & writer based in Yunnan, China, and looking forward to sharing my story with you.
