You always hear of drop shipping from other sites or probably when you apply for work as VA, right?
So to start, Let’s define first for the benefit of those people who doesn’t know about it or not familiar with it.
What is Shopify?
An e-commerce website or platform where you can sell your products online. It’s pretty much similar to Easystore but Shopify is more popular and you can start selling without or less capital. What I meant on no investment needed or less capital is by drop shipping. If you already have a business selling products then you can reach out to more customers interested through Shopify.
What is Drop Shipping?
When you want to start selling a product or products online but doesn’t have any money then you can use drop shipping. No investment is needed, when a customer purchases a product on your online store, you then purchase it from a third party online store or site and ship it directly to the customer. You don’t have to worry in regards to storing the products or worry about inventory.
To better understand here is an example.
A customer orders a product on your store and pays you on your retail price of $50. You will then forward the order to your supplier and you will pay them a wholesale price of $30. Your supplier will deliver or ship the product to you. So instead of buying a bulk product from the supplier, the supplier will manage it all for you and ship it directly to your customers.
In this example, you earn $20 without having an inventory of the product or have the actual product itself. Your customers won’t know that the product they order was shipped directly from your supplier.
This is pretty much similar to what you see on Facebook in Buy and Sell groups where a reseller sells a product to their customers but what mostly happen is customers will scam by not paying or reseller won’t ship or deliver the item.
You will see this also in drop shipping but entirely different like, the product was not shipped, not shipped at the said date, damage on a product, product not is different from what is posted and more.
But don’t worry we will discuss that later on.
How to Start?
1. Sign up for Shopify.
Click the link to get a 14-day trial for you to start creating your website and customize store. No payment will be asked during the trial period and credit card information.
2. Fill out the form below, You need to choose one for each.
3. Personal information will be filled next. Click “Enter my store” once done.
4. You will then now enter your store
5. As you can see from the menu on the left, you can check out your store by clicking “Online store“
There is not much to see since we haven’t added a theme yet as well as products and apps.
6. So let’s go ahead by choosing a theme first.
Go to the main page and choose “Customize theme“. You can choose either the free ones or the paid ones. Paid ones range from $140 to $180.
7. Install the theme of your choice.
8. Go to “Apps” and Install “Oberlo“
9. Click “Get” and install.
Purpose of Oberlo app is to import products from the third party site AliExpress to your website.
10. Search and install Oberlo Chrome extension.
Reason for installing this extension beside the app is for you to see which product on AliExpress has or accepts shipping delivery through epackets.
So you might ask, why Oberlo?
Reason for this is for drop shipping and import products from the third party site which is AliExpress.
and what is ePacket delivery?
It’s an agreement between Hongkong post and US postal service to enhance e-commerce development. Products usually on AliExpress are from China and Hongkong so by using ePacket delivery your product will arrive 7-30 days. As what Oberlo website has stated that some of the packages arrived in NY around four days due to a high volume of orders in the US.
Some of the product on AliExpress have free ePacket shipping to a specified location like in the US. This is a very useful strategy that you may use to increase sales on your website. You just have to add a couple of bucks on the wholesale price.
So Which Countries can take Advantage of ePacket Delivery?
Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Gibraltar, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, UK & Ireland, United States. If you’re asking for the Philippines, it’s not available yet but hopefully, soon it will be available.
So How to do Drop Shipping?
1. Choose a category on AliExpress that you want to sell depending on the niche you want. Whether it will be gym clothes for weightlifters, Bluetooth speaker for musicians and so on. These are just examples.
Here is an example showing you on the site AliExpress with a product showing ePacket available.
The red ones are showing no ePacket delivery available.
2. Choose a product which has a highest rated seller and reviews.
3. Check the seller by sending a message to see how fast the seller responds. This is useful in the future in case you have more questions or problems like returning of items, refund, products not delivered and more.
4. Import your chosen product on your website using Oberlo by clicking the blue tag located on the lower right side of the screen.
On the upper right, it will show Imported Successfully.
5. Click “Open Import List“
6. Customize imported product
Customize the imported product
1. Change the name of the Product under Title tab. On collection put the right category. (Collection AKA Category) and place the right tags.
2. Under Description, you can change it or add additional information.
3. On the Variants tab, choose which are you going to sell. On the example above its Sandisk OTG, variants are 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, 64GB, 128GB,. Just uncheck which you’re not going to sell.
4. Finally the last tab “Images“, just choose which images are you going to use.
5. Once done you can click “Push to Shop” button to add it on your website.
You can customize first your theme, adding pages for categories, blog page, and other pages. Start first with the theme and categories so that you can import products and add specific categories to it.
After that, you can customize more your site.
Free ebook to download below to get you started, get ideas and learn strategies from successful people.
1. Dropshipping Store Design Best Practices.pdf
2. The Ultimate Guide to Starting your First Ecommerce Business.pdf
3. How I built a Profitable Dropshipping store in 14 days (w/o spending money on ads).pdf
5. The Dropshipping Business Launch Checklist.pdf
Owner at Be Visible Media
Dale Basilla is a content writer for various niches, SEO (Off-page & On-Page), and lives in a location where there are lots of beaches in the Philippines. He loves to watch anime, TV series (mystery and solving crimes), and movies. In his spare time, he plays chess, plays the guitar, and spend time with his ever busy girlfriend.
After the 14 day free trial what happens
you can continue your drop shipping business or not, it will depend on you. Just tell me if you have registered for the 14 day free trial so that i can send you an invite on email and also for the password for the Facebook group where all people who also started drop shipping are gathered. You can get ideas and help with other people also or you can just ask in regards with something
Is Dropshipping available in the Philippines and where can we market the products? I mean I lived here in Ph and the customers are in US, is this doable?
Dropshipping is still not available in the Philippines but a lot of us are hoping it will come. For your second question, Yeah, it’s doable.
So basically, what you mean is, that we can set up a store, but need to target market outside the PH where dropshipping is possible? (ie. me selling apparels to US market).
Mr. Ben’s question is exactly what I was trying to find an answer to for the last couple of hours over the net. I would like to start a dropshipping business and my preferred target audience are Filipinos. However, I wasn’t able to find decent dropshippers. If you could also point me to something/someone, that would be great. TIA!
Yes, we can set up a store targeting outside PH (selling to US market)
As of now, no dropshipping is available to the Philippines. I’m also waiting for this update and when it does, I’ll be updating this post.
I’m working a workaround on this temporarily to set up an online store where I would contact local stores here in the Philippines then purchase and the local store will be the one delivering but the usual problem here is they usually put their brand in the package. There are available local stores who don’t put their brand in the package but it’s not the item/product I wanted to sell or only a few items or product are the ones I like to sell.
My other workaround is to have my own delivery service and be the one buying and delivering to the customers (but this plan of mine needs capital)