It’s no breaking news that the E-commerce industry has been on fire lately. Selling online is now the new norm, with consumer spending reaching a whopping 250 Billion dollars in the second quarter of 2022 in the US alone, and expected to grow by as much as 7.39 TRILLION in sales by 2025
It’s pretty wild.
So how can you get in on the cake? Simple — Dropshipping!
If you’ve been aching to profit from this E-commerce boom, then dropshipping is the perfect start and you’ve just landed in the best place to Get Started Now.
In this article, we’ll show you how to set up, grow and build your very own, brand new Shopify dropshipping business from scratch for 2022
We’ll also share with you how we’ve made dropshipping 90% easier (and faster) to manage for you than it already is. If you simply can’t wait to start, check this out.
So What Is Dropshipping?
Dropshipping is a low-cost, low-risk and low-stress way of dipping your feet into the E-commerce market potential with virtually no experience required.
With dropshipping, You get to make your own brand, your own store, choose your own products, your own prices, your own sellers, your own marketing channel and the best part?
Unlike traditional E-commerce, you don’t have to keep any inventory or worry about packaging and shipping.
All you do is handle the marketing and the customer support, while the supplier keeps the inventory and ships out the products to your customers.
This helps you make a sweet profit for every item sold, right from the comfort of your home — all while eliminating the huge huge capital required to store inventory, handle refunds, deal with shipping issues, delays and the nasty risks that dissuade a new entrepreneur from moving forwards with their ambitions.
Dropshipping is the perfect business to eventually leave your 9-5 behind, or build up towards some extra cash on the side at the very least.
That said, starting a shopify dropshipping business and building your first ever store is a GREAT step towards entrepreneurship, as it lets you explore and experience the E-commerce world with very little to lose.
Now that we’ve established what it is and why it’s a great idea, let’s jump right into how you can set up your very own Shopify dropshipping business from scratch!
How To Set Up A Shopify Dropshipping Business From Scratch: Prerequisites
Step 1: Decide A Niche
They say that “The riches are in the niches” and that couldn’t be more true. Ideally, you should select one niche but if they’re related or complementary, you can go for up to 3 or 4 at most. When picking a niche, think about whether…
Is it a trendy and growing industry? How often will your customers buy from you? Are you selling expensive one-time products like furniture? Is your profit margin good enough? Is competition too high? Do you have a good amount of suppliers to access? Are the products fragile?
Whatever you do, pick a niche or two that is a good balance. Not too ambitious, or way less ambitious than it needs to be. Here are some top dropshipping niches in 2022:
- Gym and Workout products
- Baby Products
- Pet Supplies
- Jewelry
- Beauty
- Women’s wear
- Home improvement
- Tech and other gadgets
- Cosmetics
- Survival or adventure gear
Luckily for you, you can find over thousands of hot selling products in all these niches and more to instantly add to your store, right over here.
Step 2: Pick The Best Name & Domain
Now while your business name is important, don’t spend too much time thinking of one (because chances are, it’s domain has been already taken). Instead, use a free name generator like Shopify Business Name Generator to help you save time. You can also use their Domain Name Registration tool to look for dot com domains that are available right now.
PRO TIP: Always go for a .com domain.
Remember to keep it short, sweet and memorable. Add a keyword or two according to your niche if you really like. Here’s are a few examples of some nice and simple store names:
If you’re struggling with this, it’s always good idea to find out how to choose a store name for your dropshipping business.
Step 3: Make Your Shopify Account
Now, while there are dozens of websites and store builders out there, shopify takes the crown as the best.
Shopify, without a doubt, has simplified the process of putting up your very own store and starting a home-based dropshipping business. With its wide range of available apps and customizations, you don’t have to worry about servers, maintenance… none of that.
Just go to Shopify.com, click ‘start free trial’, select “online store”, follow the steps, enter your store name plus URL, select your country and click on “create shopify account” after entering your Email and password.
Now you’ve only created your store, but there’s a few more steps to go before it’s complete and ready to show to your customers.
How To Create A Shopify Dropshipping Business From Scratch: Getting Started
In this section, we’ll guide you how to tweak your Shopify store settings to perform best with the dropshipping model. Towards the bottom left corner of your Shopify store, click the ‘settings’ gear icon button.
Navigate to ‘General’ and fill out your store details over there, such as store name, description, account Email, etc. Before moving onto payments.
At this stage, you can create your ‘About us’ page too and describe what your business is about, what kind of products you sell, where you ship, etc. You can choose to tell your or your brand’s story, to give that touch of personal branding to your business.
Here’s one of my favorite examples to get inspired by.
Step 4: Set Up Payments & Checkout
Shopify payments is your go-to, as it offers a variety of payment methods to accept from the customer, such as PayPal, Credit cards, Google pay, Apple pay and more. Plus, it also works no matter where you live!
PayPal is a very popular methods customers use to shop online for goods and services, so make sure you add your PayPal email by going to Shopify settings > Payments section.
You can always change or add more payment methods later.
When it comes to checkout, make sure you keep customer accounts as optional, so customers can check out as guests as well.
People don’t like signing up just to place an order. If you want to capture their Email address opt-in for nurturing the customer and send limited time offers, we recommend providing a freebie, discount or offer in exchange for their Email (It’s a win-win).
You can also let them decide how they want to be contacted for their order (Email, SMS…). That’s also a good way to build your email list.
Additionally, you can also set up automatic reminder emails for ‘abandoned shopping carts’ , people who reach the checkout, but don’t pay and purchase the product for any reason. Setting this up will signal Shopify to email your customer 10 hours after they’ve abandoned their purchase at checkout.
Step 5: Get Some Required Policies In Place
Shopify gives you some neat tools to get your terms and conditions, privacy policy and refund policy in place.
Navigate to Shopify settings
➣ Policies (at the bottom)
➣ (scroll down) Refund
➣ Terms of Service
➣ Shipping statements to get lots of different policy samples.
Step 6: Set Up ‘Free Shipping Rate’ & Taxes
What’s more attractive than ‘FREE’ anything?
Free shipping allows you to gain more conversions and eliminate buyer indecisiveness. They’d happily spend a $100 for a product, but will think twice if they have to spend $95 on an item and $4.99 additional in shipping.
One sneaky way to get around this is by adding in the shipping price to the price of the product itself (along with your profit). Then you can gladly set free shipping to default on your shopify dropshipping store.
Navigate to Shopify settings > “shipping and delivery” and click “Manage” on the left, under “General Shipping Rates”. Now delete all the shipping zones that are “domestic”. After that, click “Create shipping zone” and if you’re offering free shipping, simply type that in and choose “rest of the world” if you want to ship globally. Go to “Add Rate” under “price based rates” section and select the “free shipping rate”.
Don’t forget to hit save!
If you’re NOT offering free shipping, always let customers know how much it will cost. Find out more info at Shopify Shipping.
About Taxes: Now If you’re running an Ecommerce store, you’re required to collect sales tax from your customer. Shopify auto-calculates taxes based on ongoing sales tax in different parts of the world, but if there are specific tax requirements in your region, you can override the default settings.
Go to settings > Taxes and Duties to set up your regions. Here you can change up the default tax settings as you wish.
NOTE: Shopify doesn’t remit or file your sales taxes for you.
Step 7: Create Your First “Online Store”
Shopify gives you the option to sell your products across multiple channels including online store, Facebook store, brick and mortar and more.
Now since we’re focusing on Ecommerce and dropshipping in particular, we’ll select the online store route. Go to Shopify settings > Sales channels and add “Online Store” as your sales channel.
This may be there automatically, but I recommend checking it out nonetheless.
How To Make A Shopify Dropshipping Business From Scratch: Add Products & Ad Content
This is the part where most dropshippers hit a stand-still and give up. How do I know which products are selling right now? Which products do I add? Do I need to create individual ad Content for all of them?
Now most dropshippers (the ones that barely hit profitability and burn themselves out) do this entire part manually… which is, well…
A terrible idea to say the least.
The manual way costs you time, effort and money. Finding out what products are trending right now, which sellers are the best, how to spy on competitor stores and products.
If you go this route, you’ll probably be spending 10-12 hours everyday on your shopify dropshipping store.
But luckily, there’s a better way to do things. A way where you won’t have to worry about all this fuss, because we’ve taken care of it all for you — with Adserea.
Step 8: Add Real Winning Products (+Reviews)
Adserea offers you thousands of hottest shopify dropshipping products, in various growing niches around the world. We provide you with
- 2 new trendy products daily
- 1000+ Product library access
- One-click product import.
- Authentic reviews for every product
We also give you all the ad content and data you’ll ever need, including:
- Video ads for all products
- Descriptions for every product
- Ad copies and thumbnails for each product
- Facebook targeting information
- Audience Builder for Meta
- Loads of competitor data, analytics and live insights with our exclusive tools
Our innovative team gets you the top selling dropshipping products of 2022 to add to your store. With Adserea, It’s all done for you. Check out how you can get started here.
Step 9: Product pricing, inventory & Collections
For each product, shopify gives 3 pricing options: Price, compare at price and the cost per item. “Compare at price” is useful to create urgency for your customers, by letting them know there’s a sale.
For example, if the “compare at price” is $100 and the “price” is $60, then your customer will be saving 40% thanks to the discount you’re offering.
Inventory: In the inventory section, you can track inventory by clicking the “track quantity” checkbox and enter the number of available items (considering your seller). Shopify will display “out of stock” once the given items run out.
Collections: Setting up product collections can be a good idea as well, as it lets your users shop quickly, easily and find what they’re looking for ASAP. This also allows you to offer exclusive discounts or sales on a particular collection.
If you want to create collections (product categories), then navigate to Products > Collections > Add new collection, and enter your collection name and select the conditions.
How To Launch A Shopify Dropshipping Business From Scratch: Design
Shopify automatically assigns a default theme for your store, but I recommend customizing it a bit to really give that feel of uniqueness.
Your store needs to look simple enough to navigate, yet beautiful enough to explore.
Use a free logo maker to get started and some of the best free Shopify themes to cut your costs initially. Once you start making handsome profits, you can always upgrade!
Step 10: Navigation, Banner and Featured Products
Your Main Menu (navigation) also helps customers explore your store and get familiar with your brand. To set up main menu, go to Shopify Admin > Navigation section > select edit ‘Main Menu’ and list your collections.
You can choose multiple drop-down levels for each collection too. For example Mens shoes > Sneakers, Formal, Slides > Running shoes, Gym shoes… Etc.
Banners: Get a little creative and design a store banner or two. You can also use this banner to show off some new products or sales in your store.
Pro Tip: You can make some amazing banners in just a few minutes with Canva or Visme. I recommend going for a 1200 x 360PX size.
To add your banner, go to Online Store > Themes > customize theme > Edit homepage slideshow.
Featured Products: To add featured products, go to Customize Theme > Home page > Featured Products and choose your top selling products to show off to your customers. You can also use the “Featured” tag on individual products.
Footer: To add a footer, go to Online Store > Navigation > Add menu. Write “Footer Menu” and place whatever titles you want there. Then go to the Online Store > Navigation > Footer menu and list the previous pages (collections, about us, etc.) you’ve created here.
Usually, footers contain your privacy policies, terms and conditions, refund policy, cookie policy and contact support plus sometimes an email box to catch subscribers (hey, it works).
Conclusion
And there you have it, your very own brand new Shopify dropshipping store with fresh winning products for 2022!
While this is a good achievement, it’s only the starting line. It takes some time, patience and a little bit of a learning curve to really grow just about anything (whether it’s business, relationships or anything else). So give your store some time and dedication and you’ll surely see it flourish.
But wait, what about the products? The ad content? The marketing? After all, you didn’t create a store just for the sake of having a store, right?
Well… most dropshippers go the difficult route of ‘doing it all by themselves’ and that rarely ever works out. They end up over-exhausting themselves, juggling a dropshipping business with their usual 9-5 and ultimately giving up in a month or two.
If you have all the time, you can go for this. But what smart dropshippers do is, they save their time, effort and money by accessing thousands of winning products in top performing industries, complete with their ad content, videos, targeting and one-click product import.
… and they do that thanks to Adserea
Adserea gives you a head-start in the dropshipping game with new hot selling products each day, which you can add to your store in just a few minutes.
Take out a few minutes of your time every day to explore, experiment and keep learning bit by bit and your Ecommerce store will one day surely make you proud! Just don’t forget why you’re starting a dropshipping business in the first place, okay? Whether it’s more time, more money or more freedom in general…
If you want to start selling ASAP, Adserea is your ticket to the skies. You’ll find over thousands of products with their complete ad content, spy tools, analytics and targeting audiences all in one place.
Summary: How To Launch A Shopify Dropshipping Business From Scratch In 2022
Step 1: Decide A Niche
Step 2: Pick The Best Name & Domain
Step 3: Make Your Shopify Account
Step 4: Set Up Payments & Checkout
Step 5: Get Some Required Policies In Place
Step 6: Set Up ‘Free Shipping Rate’ & Taxes
Step 7: Create Your First “Online Store”
Step 8: Add Real Winning Products (+Reviews)
Step 9: Product pricing, inventory & Collections
Step 10: Navigation, Banner & Featured Products
