Believe it or not, dropshipping can be started for $0.00. Yes, you read that absolutely right! An hour of spare time every day is all you require to run your dropshipping store with a carefully evaluated and chosen combination of free trials, starter plans, and smartly marketing your dropshipping web store. However, you must clearly and completely understand the basics and complexities behind running a profitable dropshipping eCommerce store.
There is no denying the fact that dropshipping has indeed lowered the barrier of entry to start an online business. In the bygone days, budding entrepreneurs of online retail businesses have to spend countless days and had to endure long waits before they could even come up with a semi-structured web store. Then, they had to spend a month or two extensively to finalize store customization, layouts, themes, design, etc. Today, you can buy best Shopify dropshipping ecommerce premade websites and ready made turnkey websites and start drop shipping in as less than just 24 hours. No hidden terms and conditions! No technicalities!
With a Shopify expert like BE BIGGY on your side, you can get your ready-to-go-live web store in absolutely no time. The best thing is that your drop shipping eCommerce store comes populated with some of the best, niche-specific, latest, and popular products from some of the best suppliers around the world. Not only this, you can start your online business without ever holding inventory. Isn’t that just awesome?
So awesome that in fact most budding entrepreneurs often get carried away and start dreaming of a secondary income stream that can instantly become a six-figure business without any investment. However, they forget that starting a profitable business has never been FREE and that’s still in the case today and it will stay the same in the years to come. It’s true that starting a dropshipping business will not mean taking a mortgage but you will have to put in some real and hard-earned money into the business before expecting it to churn out money for you.
Store Infrastructure Costs
To get started, you would ideally require:
- A Shopify account
- An Oberlo account
Shopify is the world’s most preferred choice for eCommerce as it is reliable, safe, exhaustive, and successful for years. Good news! You can get a free trial of 14 days with Shopify to test your instincts, skills, and marketing expertise! After this trial period, you would still not to have a spend a fortune as it will cost only $29 a month that is quite a reasonable amount when you consider that Shopify provides you with free SSL, backup, security, etc.
On the other hand, Oberlo comes with a forever free option. However, there is a cap of 50 orders per month. But, you can always upgrade it to the basic package at just $29.90 a month if your web store starts making enough money.
The only thing that you must purchase to be successful with dropshipping is a domain. For this, you can simply buy a domain at a nominal price.
It is highly recommended that you should not empty your pockets for custom logos, images, and website designing. In other words, your startup costs should be kept to the minimum. The only basic and suggested upfront costs for your Shopify dropshipping web store will be buying your store and domain registration. A good look at the wide range of free trials by Shopify and Google will help you easily create a custom email address for customer support and get your store up and running.
Marketing Costs
Ideally, the budget for your Shopify dropshipping websites for sale for the initial four to six months should be around $1000. A big chunk of this (let’s say about 50 to 75 percent) will definitely go to marketing to identify demand and potential customers, collect leads, prepare marketing collaterals, and send promotional materials. The rest should go into store costs, plugins, and some beginner and advanced courses, especially if you are new to the world of Shopify and selling products online without inventory.
It is important for you to carefully analyze and interpret marketing strategies to keep the levels of brand and product awareness on a high, forever. For this, you have to make engaging, relevant, and awesome advertisements. Moreover, you should emphasize on a rich and wide range of content marketing by creating a plethora of marketing collaterals (infographics, articles, blogs, newsletters, etc.).
The better your collaterals and ads, the lower your cost per click (CPC) and marketing budget. Moreover, you should always emphasize on creating and maintaining the highest standards of user-friendliness by designing easy-to-navigate products pages that can be extremely useful to convert potential customers into buying customers.
It is always good to remember that spending money to launch an eCommerce store only backfires if we are of the view that it would be absolutely free and if for heaven’s sake we somehow forget that we are doing everything to make money in the short as well as the long run. You may also engage in upselling and cross-selling apps for increasing the average order value. Yes, this will cost you some money but upsells will pay for themselves if you have a few good of them every month.
If you really want to make money with eCommerce, you should never ever stop pumping money into your Shopify dropshipping eCommerce store. You should get a cross-selling app if the price breaks app is able to do the trick for you. Similarly, you should ideally invest in some kind of marketing automation technology if you notice that the Facebook campaigns are growing exponentially.
It is difficult to say the exact quantum of returns you can expect or how long it will take for your web store to recoup them. All you need is to remember that there is surely not a FREE way to launch a good business. Try to use your profits wisely once your web store starts generating sales. Keep a predefined amount of the profits to cover the costs of returns and unforeseeable costs that may happen over a period of time. With the remaining profits, try to grow your business as much as possible!
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