You’re Fed up with your 9-5 job and you’re seriously thinking of launching your dropshipping business to ensure your financial independence? It is time for you to make goals of your dreams and step towards their achievement. The good news is that you neither need to invest too much money, nor to seek help from experts. And with more and more users shopping online, you have no excuses to delay your entrepreneurship plans.
To help you start, we created this blog post where we share with you the best tips you can use when creating your store, starting from the platform and sourcing choices and ending with the decision-making.
How to create your online store?
Before you start thinking of what website builder you’ll need to choose, you should decide first what to sell. Things are easier when you already have a niche you’re passionate about. You’ll only need to focus on the products you’ll sell within your niche, and that users are more likely to buy. Click here to learn more about how to find winning products.
Now that you made your choices, you can move to the next step and start creating your online store. The best way to build it is by using ecommerce platforms. These are software solutions that are available online and which help you build your store with almost no IT skills requirements. You’ll only need an innovative idea, a laptop and a good internet connection.
There are plenty of ecommerce platforms on the web. However, the best amongst them and the one we would highly recommend for its reliability, ease of use and large community is the following:
Shopify: A complete ecommerce platform where you can easily create your website, customize your store and manage your different business processes (inventory, payments, shipping…). The good news is that you can run your business from anywhere as long as you have good internet connection. In fact, the platform supports multiple languages and payment gateways.
Shopify offers a 14 days trial for free with no credit card required, and you can choose the pricing plan that suits most your business by the end of the 14 days.
After you sign for Shopify, you’ll need to decide about the pricing plan you’ll go for, a basic one will be good as you’re a beginner. You’ll then need to get a domain name (Shopify offers its services for 10USD to 20USD per year), then pick a suitable ecommerce template and personalize it, add your products to your website and finally set up your payment methods and shipping settings. Don’t forget to preview your store and test it before you publish it.
How to best source your products?
There is a various choice online, but before you decide what directory you’ll opt for, consider the following criteria:
Make sure that the supplier you choose is trustworthy and that the products they offer are of a good quality. Read other customers’ reviews to decide.
Pay attention to products diversity the supplier you chose offers. If you’d like to sell large variety of products, your supplier needs to have a large inventory at his disposal.
Don’t ignore your supplier’s return policies. In fact, running a business means also that you’ll probably have to deal with return issues. So, make sure your supplier’s procedures are in line with your business strategy.
Opt for the supplier who has the shortest delivery time. The sooner your customers receive their orders, the better for all.
Remember that your supplier is your business partner. Hence, building a good relationship with him is a must.
Drophippo proudly responds to all the criteria mentioned above and even more. Click here to discover why we are the ones to choose to best source your products.
How to best take decisions?
Your business growth is closely tied to your decision making. Thus, being careful when acting is a must. Fortunately, Google puts at your disposal its web analytics service to help you take your decisions based on factual data rather than making choices based on assumptions, while planning your growth strategy. In fact, thanks to Google Analytics, you can easily track your store’s traffic and know how many users have visited it, where they are from and how do they behave while on it.
Find here the complete guide Google created to help you better exploit its web analytics service. Note that you need to have a basic HTML knowledge to use it. If not, let your webmaster do the job.
Besides, signing for Shopify means you automatically have access to their Shopify Analytics. This service provides you with an overview dashboard, a live view, key financial reports and acquisition, behavior and marketing reports. You can access more reports if you upgrade your pricing plan. For instance, the overview dashboard provides you with the following metrics: Total sales, online store sessions, returning customer rate, online store conversion rate, average order value and total orders.
5 common mistakes to avoid
Thinking that all you need is to create a store. There’s too much work to do before, when and after you create it if your aim is a sustainable business.
Selling bad-quality products to cut the prices. Disappointing customers will only have disastrous consequences.
Not using metrics to make decisions is a huge mistake. If your assumption worked once, it surely won’t always.
Not setting a relevant marketing strategy and integrate a good social media plan to drive traffic.
Having an online presence with no SEO strategy. It’s like sailing in the ocean with no destination.
