How to Start a Dropshipping Shopify Store- Step-by-Step Guide

A dropshipping shopify store is the perfect choice for starting an eCommerce business with a small budget. With Shopify, you can literally build a high converting store within a week. However, it is essential to have proper guidance.

If you want to be amongst the best Shopify dropshipping stores, then you must take each step very carefully. Remember that building an eCommerce store is not a get rich quick, it requires hard work and dedication.

In this article, we will provide you with a brief overview about initial research, getting started with Shopify, and how to proceed further.

Let’s go forward and start exploring!

shopify dropshipping store

Why is it preferable to choose Shopify for creating a dropshipping store?

There are numerous eCommerce building platforms out there and, you must be wondering, “Why should I choose Shopify for a dropshipping store?”

From our experience, Shopify is the best platform to create dropshipping stores because all the plugins, features, and user-interface make starting and growing a dropshipping business easier.

Applications such as Oberlo, Modalyst, Spocket, etc., will bring fruitful results to the developement of your Shopify dropshipping store.

Moreover, Shopify’s features minimize your dependency on third-party applications. With Shopify, you can handle the sales, analytics, payments, and every aspect of your dropshipping store.

 Now that you are convinced that Shopify is the best choice for you, let’s dive in!

Shopify Ecommerce Dropshipping

The Initial Step- Choose a Niche for your Dropshipping Shopify Store

When you are getting started with a dropshipping business, you must know what you are planning to sell. A niche defines your brand identity. Actually, you will probably choose your website design and advertising templates depending on the niche chosen so it’s important to pick wisely.

At Mark we do not recommend you to go for a general store because it is very clear that niche store performs better.

Your niche selection must be backed up by solid research. The product research is the most important step. Find a product with a high perceived value, it needs to grab the attention of people and not be found easily on the internet.

You can conduct keyword research to check what people are searching for. Apart from this, there’s Google Trends too. With its help, you can identify the trending products. Such research is necessary to provide a base for your product types.

Also, create a TikTok account and scroll it everyday, you will find a lot of very profitable products that you can advertise before everybody else.

You can check out the best dropshipping niches for 2021 and choose the niches that go along with your interests.

Shopify Dropshipping niches

Sign up for Shopify to create your own Dropshipping Shopify Store Website

Shopify offers a straightforward way to start your dropshipping journey with it. While signing up on Shopify, you need to add your store’s name. You won’t be able to move forward without that.

Find a name related to your niche. For example, if you advertise a product for dogs, you generate more conversions if the name of your store is MyAwesomeDog.

After adding the name, you will need to provide details about the type of products you sell. Choose amongst options available in the drop-down list. Once it’s done, click on next, and you will be redirected to your store’s backend.

The default URL of your store should be (thestorename).myshopify.com/. We highly recommend you to add a custom domain name to make your store appear professional. Stores with “myshopify.com” do not convert.

If you already own a domain, you only need to connect it to your Dropshipping Shopify Store. You can even transfer the domain from other domain providers to Shopify.

However, if you don’t have a domain while starting the business, you can purchase one from Shopify at minimal pricing for only $14 per year.

start a shopify store

Adding Products to Your Dropshipping Shopify Store

You can choose first to design the website and then add products or visa versa. We suggest that you add the products first. There are two major reasons for that:

  1. It won’t take a lot of time to add products after the product research is done. Once you set up the products, you can start selling through your Shopify dropshipping store. It lets you take your time to experiment with different designs and choose the best one.
  2. The design of your store often depends on the products. With products already added, you can choose a design that fits the products and niches.

You can use Oberlo or Dsers for finding and adding dropshipping products. Visit the Oberlo/Dsers interface and search for the products.

Dsers is very popular at the moment and is a great solution to start with so we recommend you to experiment Dsers first instead of Oberlo.

You can select any product from the interface, define its pricing, and add it to your store. With such simple steps, it won’t even take an hour to add one hundred products. However, at the beginning you must focus on quality rather than quantity. Be very picky in your product selection and start product by product.

After adding a product, you need to change its details. You can change the title and description to align it with the store’s identity. Adding a description that triggers emotions and makes the product appear more attractive is the key to grow your dropshipping business. The product description must be very easy to read.

Oberlo Tool for Dropshipping

Set up Your Collections

On Shopify, a collection is nothing but a group of products. It makes it easier for you visitors and customers to browse different categories of product. In addition, you can include a product in more than one collection.

A Shopify owner can create collections based on gender, type of product, and taking many more aspects into consideration. There are two ways of creating a collection: manual and automatic.

The manual collection provides a higher control over the products in a collection. However, it demands the effort of adding & removing products manually.

An automatic collection adds products depending on the conditions that you set. For instance, you create an automatic collection with the name: discounted products and set the condition that a product will automatically be added when you add the “discount” tag to it.

A tag on the Shopify store signifies product features. When your store users search phrases that match with the tags, items appear as results. It helps a user to identify a product with ease.

best dropshipping niches 2021

Designing Your Shopify Dropshipping Store

For your Shopify dropshipping store, there are numerous themes available. If you want to start without spending much, it is preferable to choose a free theme. However, if you are ready to invest in a high converting theme, then there are unique paid themes to make your store appear exclusive.

After you select a theme, you can customize each element of it using the Shopify theme designer. The elements that you can edit depend on the theme you choose. For adding images, you can use Shopify’s free stock photo plugin- Burst or custom your own using tools like Canva.

There are theme settings as well, which will let you change the basic features of your theme. Through these settings, you can customize the color, layout, favicon, add social media thumbnails, and much more.

Top 10 themes Shopify

Adding Website Pages

You must not forget to add information about your business. It makes your business appear credible in front of prospects. For example, an “About Us” page is always a good idea.

Add the information about your unique selling points and business goals. Besides that, provide multiple effortless ways by which someone can contact you.

Moreover, adding information about shipping and returns would help someone to strengthen his purchase decision. Adding such information improves transparency between the business and customers.

Apart from that, adding an “FAQs section” is an excellent option to decrease customer support costs. A thorough knowledge base and advanced search features will be enough to solve 90% of useless customer queries.

About Us Shopify Best Practices

Setting up Payment for Shopify Dropshipping Store

There are multiple options that you can use for payments such as Stripe, Shopify Payments, PayPal, Amazon Pay, and numerous others. You only need to add the bank details and account details of different payment methods.

Shopify Payment

We recommend you to have many payment options on your store. For example, a customer might want to pay via Stripe (credit card) and another one via Paypal so letting options is always a good idea.

By doing so, you are now ready to allow customers to visit your store, engage with your products, and purchase them by going through a few steps.

You can check out our exclusive guide to dropshipping Shopify store to know more about setting up and stabilizing your store.

Remember, setting up a dropshipping Shopify store takes no time. However, you must not stop here. There are many Shopify applications and plugins such as Spreadr App, Collective Fab, Mark AI, etc., which can improve your store’s growth.

Mark for Shopify

Keep discovering the applications and features. Start investing time in designing, advertising, and other aspects to experience growth and profits.

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