How to Start DropShipping Business with Shopify in 2024? (Guide)
Quick Summary
Dropshipping is a retail fulfillment method where an online store doesn't keep any inventory itself.
In Dropshipping, a customer orders the product and the eStore owner forwards the order to the supplier. Then, the supplier fulfills the order and sends it to the customer, and you receive the profit.
This model lets you start an online store with minimal upfront costs since you don't need to invest in inventory.
To start the dropshipping business on Shopify, first, find a profitable product niche and start a Shopify trial. Then, choose the supplier, add the products to the store, configure the design, set up payments, and launch the business.
Entrepreneurs that are becoming dropshipping suppliers; are the ones looking to ease down their e-commerce selling shell, establish a client base around the globe, and gain a profitable margin per sale without making big investments.
Which are currently 6.76 million+ worldwide (Source: BuiltWith). But the core of running a successful Shopify store has an ideal dropshipping business model.
If you are just getting started with Shopify, you better start building by checking the current consumer trends, most selling domain niches, and demanding services/products. These practices will help you set up an online store and establish a lucrative dropshipping cycle for your online store.
Ready to get started dropshipping with Shopify? Today’s ‘Shopify Dropshipping Business Guide’ is tailored just for it, helping you with easy steps to set up your Shopify store and additional tips to make your dropshipping business successful.
What is Shopify DropShipping?
What if we offer two plans to invest your capital in; in the first one, you have to make products pre-purchasing, recruit staff members, and take out pay bills from your pocket until the store starts making a significant profit.
In the second one, all you need to pay is $1.00 for the first 90 days, which is currently offered by the largest e-commerce platform – Shopify, after 3 days of free trial completion.
Additionally, without pre-purchasing products and zero pay bills for store location and staff. Made you pick, just in a snap of time? Great! Then let us help you with a detailed overview of ‘What Is Shopify DropShipping Website?’.
Shopify is an e-commerce business scaling platform where you get a medium to market your dropshipping ideas and start selling your dropshipping product across the globe by launching an online store without any hosting fees.
Once you’ve signed up for a Shopify account, multiple domain niches exist for starting a Shopify dropshipping business.
This Shopify dashboard also includes additional features to customise the entire online store per your brand guide, Google rank-improving SEO tools, and easy yet secure payment integration.
The lucrativeness of your dropshipping store depends on the consideration of the product to sell, as most Shopify store owners earn an average of $1,000 to $5,000 per month and $100,000+ annually.
Additionally, your dropshipping business idea earns more with the Shopify website, as you don’t need to cut off your profit margin for showcasing products/services or shipping.
Ideally, Shopify dropshipping is a business model with low risk. If you launch Shopify dropshipping for selling affiliates, e-commerce, or third-party products, even the huge manufacturing cost won’t be added to your payout checks.
Shopify offers a profit margin calculator helping you determine gross profits to save money and increase profits with many other analytical approaches to level up supplier scalability.
Checkmarks to Start A DropShipping Business
‘What do you need to start Shopify dropshipping business?’ – when you step into the huge community of the eCommerce industry, there are huge growth graphics you’ll get to see. Still, to reach such heights, there are several steps you must consider taking:
Choose Scalable Dropship Products
To drive high traffic to your Shopify dropshipping store and convert them to customers, you must conduct market research, which might be similar to opening an offline store.
This research must include the most-selling product in your region, the top supplier of a similar product, and which marketing strategies are making them stay on top of all in the entire drop shipping industry.
To help you with the same, Shopify itself curates a trending list of products to pick the best in the domain and gain shoppers’ attention in a shorter period of time.
Here are the current top 5 selling products on Shopify:
Peel-off face mask under the Cosmetic domain
Nail polishes under the Cosmetic domain
Exercise bands under the Fitness domain
Water bottles under the Healthy Lifestyle domain
Blankets under the Home & Interior domain
Do Competitive Research
When you start an online store, this list of competitors works as a guide to starting a Shopify store that scales higher, understands the market’s current needs, and better customer support offering suppliers.
Let’s say your dropshipping store includes competitors in huge volume, then rather than diving into the deep pool of Google searches, you better pick the top 5 well and 2 big players of your business domain for following their footsteps.
There are several other approaches you can consider as best research dropshipping tools to track information about your competitors, such as their top traffic sources, number of monthly visitors, and social media platforms:
Go For Keyword Based Google Research:
The top ten are your competitors! Let’s say you start with a simple search for “bicycles”. There will be more than a billion results for you; visit and analyse the first ten, including answers to the following:
Which are their top dropship products?
How are they offering the product to the visitors?
Do they offer any weekend or festive-based discounts?
Is there any post-dropship support?
How can you offer them a better version of the same product to your web visitors?
Use Competitor Insights Analysis Tool:
Semrush and Similarweb are the two most popular tools for analysing the current Google searches, keyword research, PPC insights, and many other marketing insights your competitors are driving on their online sources.
Check On Their Social Media Platform:
You have started dropshipping with Shopify, but having multiple sources to drive traffic to it is necessary. So, you better analyse if your competitors are running a personal business page for the product or creating influencer reels and daily content they are sharing to keep the audience connected.
Choose a Responsive Dropshipping Supplier
To scale your business with Shopify, rely on the theme, customization, ease of payment checkouts, and multiple other factors, but customer experience still stands at the top.
As you might have the top Google ranking Shopify store, but once customers have experienced inconvenience, you are losing not only one but 50+ customers at a time you were able to get by mouth-to-mouth marketing.
To ensure that this cycle won’t repeat with you, setting up Shopify dropshipping with a well-established and trusted supplier is crucial; it provides quick support, a return policy, and minimal shipping fees.
Now, time to start building your store for drop ship!
Steps To Start DropShipping on Shopify
Being a dropshipping industry beginner, everything might initially sound quite complex. But don’t worry – our Shopify dropshipping guide will break down each tricky tactic into a simple step-by-step procedure for you.
If you are considering using Shopify just on a trial basis to check on the weather, dropshipping is a great option for you – you may go for a Shopify free trial plan. Next, let’s move to further steps for building your dropshipping store.
1. Choose A Dropshipping Store Name
Have a little opaque one in your head, right? But Shopify has made this process even easier by offering a free tool for generating business names for your online store.
All you need to do is visit Shopify’s Business Name Generator, type your service keywords, and tap on the ‘Generate Name’ to get the list of available domain names.
Here are some tips to follow to get a better business name:
Keep it short, simple, and easily spellable.
If possible, do add a keyword.
Don’t add numbers or hyphens, as it seems unprofessional.
2. Create a Shopify Account
Well, it’s extremely easy and straightforward. All you need to do is visit www.shopify.com and start your free trial of Shopify by tapping on the Start Your Free Trial option in the top right corner of the web.
After that, there are several steps to complete describing you the best as a drop shipper – this information gets used by Shopify to suggest you well-tailored business themes and add-ons.
If you are the one having extensive experience with the dropship and just switching to Shopify, there are multiple other Shopify plans you can pick from :
Shopify Starter: $5/month + 5% and 30¢ per transaction.
Shopify Basic: $39/month + 2.9% and 30¢ per transaction.
Shopify: $105/month + 2.6% and 30¢ per transaction.
Shopify Advanced: $399/month + 2.4% and 30¢ per transaction.
Shopify Plus: Starting at $2,000/month, + transaction fees
3. Optimise Your Shopify Payment Settings
In this guide to dropshipping with Shopify, we are about to step in the most important step, which is setting the payment method for receiving customers’ payment, establishing shipping rates, and setting store policies.
Steps to add your payment information in Shopify first includes navigating to the Shopify setting page and selecting the Payment tab under the general settings.
Occasionally, some banks don’t enable your account international transactions by default, which can lead to glitches in receiving payments. To avoid such consequences, you better integrate your PayPal account.
4. Make the Required Design Customization on Shopify
If you have your business logo, brand guide, and selected fonts/colours, then you are all set to make the customization. But what if you don’t? Shopify dropshipping app offers free logo creation tools too.
Visit www.shopify.com/tools/logo-maker, choose your business space and the visual of the logo you want, and there you go with multiple logo options to pick from.
Once you finish it, it’s time to start customising the store theme and design per the logo’s colour, as that will reflect your business name on all the social platforms you upscale your Shopify ecommerce platform on.
There are multiple free/paid theme templates you can pick from the marketplace, such as Envato and Themeforest.
5. Launch A Shopify DropShipping Store
After payment settings, design customization, and additional add-ons have been added per your business needs, you only need to launch your Shopify dropshipping store.
To Do So:
Log in to the Shopify admin dashboard.
Go to Sales Channels Tab.
Select ‘Add An Online Store’.
And there you’ve set up your Shopify for Dropshipping business!
Pro Tips To Run A Successful Shopify DropShipping Store
Even the best supplier can make mistakes, and also the regular customer can return the product; you have to prepare yourself for both consequences.
Between this, you must remember to follow a safe trail that makes you an ideal supplier that cooperates and finds a way out that turns the table into a win-win situation for each individual involved during the procedure.
Here are some key points you can follow:
Managing Dropship Products to Sell:
When you step into dropshipping, you’ll find even high-profile drop shippers struggling to manage the inventory.
Taking in-loop follow-up from suppliers and constantly delaying your customers in dropshipping is the most alarming situation frequently faced in online dropshipping stores.
Such practices can lower the customer interest in working with you at the time or ever again, resulting in a poor client base. To avoid these consequences, you better stock up with many dropshipping products to sell.
Staying Connected With Multiple DropShip Suppliers:
That’s the best way to establish a successful store with Shopify;
Improve order fulfilment ratio.
It can offer multiple attributes in a single product/service.
If the option A supplier is currently stocked out, you can choose the option B supplier.
Reduce the risk of depending on a single source for shipping location, prices, and customer support.
Can compare privacy policy, return policy, and additional costs.
Analyse and Improve Dropship Offerings:
When you start your dropshipping business, there are multiple working areas you need to cover all on your own; if you have a helping hand in the form of a dedicated Shopify developer or ecommerce development company, then it is a plus.
Once you’ve set up a moderate drop shipping online store, you’ll start to see the traffic and sales analytics of your effort on the Shopify dashboard itself. Here are some factors to run your dropshipping business even higher:
FAQs About DropShipping Business On Shopify
Q1. Do I Need a Business License to Dropship on Shopify?
No, you don’t initially need a business license to start dropshipping on Shopify. However, as your business grows and starts making consistent sales, registering your business and getting a license might be required by payment providers and for legal compliance. Business registration requirements vary by country, so it’s essential to check local regulations.
Q2. How Can I Start a Dropshipping Business with Minimal Budget?
Starting a dropshipping business on Shopify is relatively low-cost. Key initial expenses include setting up your Shopify store, purchasing a domain name, and budgeting for marketing. A significant advantage of dropshipping is the lack of inventory handling, reducing upfront costs significantly. It’s way less expensive compared to traditional e-commerce businesses.
Q3. Can I Add and Import Products from AliExpress to Shopify?
Yes, you can add and import products from AliExpress to your Shopify store using third-party apps like Oberlo. Oberlo facilitates seamless integration with AliExpress, allowing you to import products, automate order fulfillment, and keep track of inventory and pricing updates. Alternatives include using CSV files for bulk imports or manually adding products.
Q4. How Can I Improve My Shopify Store's Speed?
To speed up your Shopify store, optimize image sizes, minimize the use of heavy animations and JavaScript, leverage caching plugins, and consider using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve your assets faster to users worldwide.
Q5. How Can I Increase Conversions on My Shopify Store?
Enhancing your site’s user experience and utilizing tools like Google Analytics and heat map tools such as Crazy Egg can provide insights into user behavior. Focus on optimizing product pages, providing high-quality images, and ensuring your pricing strategy covers marketing and shipping costs.
Q6. What Are Some Common Shopify Store Mistakes?
Common mistakes include not optimizing for mobile devices, providing vague product descriptions, neglecting product research, and lacking in customer support. Addressing these areas can significantly impact your store’s success and customer satisfaction.
Q7. How Can I Get Product Reviews on My Shopify Store?
Encourage customers to leave reviews by making the process straightforward. Consider sending follow-up emails with links to review pages after purchase. Product reviews can greatly influence new customers’ purchase decisions.
Want To Start Shopify DropShip For Your Business?
As you are all set now! With a detailed overview of the Shopify ecommerce platform, you have reasons to open a dropshipping store with Shopify.
If you still find yourself stuck somewhere, don’t forget our guide on how to start Shopify dropshipping, and also a team of dedicated Shopify developers are all here to help you out.
John Niles, a dedicated Technical Consultant at BrainSpate since 2023, specializes in eCommerce. With a global perspective, he crafts insightful content on cutting-edge web development technologies, enriching the digital commerce landscape.