How to Start a Dropshipping Business from Start to Finish in 2022

Ever wonder how to start a dropshipping business? In this guide, we cover the process of building and running a dropshipping store from start to finish.

In addition, we talk about if a print-on-demand shop is right for you, along with other questions about the legality of dropshipping, how much money you need, and more.

Keep reading to learn all about how to start a dropshipping business the right way.

What is Dropshipping? And How Does it Work?

The term dropshipping refers to an ecommerce fulfillment method where a merchant partners with a supplier and that supplier makes, stores, and ships the products. Therefore, the merchants (or retailers) are not directly responsible for the overall movement of inventory. In fact, warehousing and shipping are all completed by the supplier.

The Pros and Cons of Dropshipping

How to Start a Dropshipping Business: The Steps Required

  1. Choose a Lucrative Product Niche for Your Dropshipping Business
  2. Decide if You’d like to Create Custom Print-on-demand Products to Dropship
  3. Select an Ecommerce Platform and Build Your Store – We recommend Shopify
  4. Choose a Supplier That Dropships
  5. Run Marketing and Advertising Campaigns that Work Specifically for Dropshipping
  6. Handle Essentials like Permits and Taxes
  7. Continuously Optimize Your Site

The Ultimate Guide on How to Start a Dropshipping Business

Are you ready to learn how to start a dropshipping business? If so, remember that dropshipping is simply a form of fulfillment method. It’s still a full-fledged business where you must put in a considerable amount of work with website customization, product sourcing, customer support, and more. We encourage you to avoid dropshipping as a “get rich quick scheme,” since it’s far from that in any way.

In this guide, we’ll outline everything you need to know about how to start a dropshipping business, from choosing a lucrative product niche to figuring out the demand for products, and choosing an ecommerce platform to running the right marketing campaigns to bring in customers.

Here are our top picks when it comes to the absolute best ecommerce platform in the market:

Step 1: Choosing a Lucrative Product Niche for Your Dropshipping Business

I’ve seen far too many people write blog posts or request advice on forums on how to find “ideal” dropshipping products.

I have some news for you: There’s no secret recipe that’s being hidden by all of the successful dropshippers out there. They simply went through steps to locate products they may enjoy, have great shipping times, solid margins, and have found success in the past.

Dropshipping puts you in the position of a middleman. That means the vast majority of the products you can choose from have been sold in the past, are currently being sold, and will continue to be sold by others. You’re not going to stumble upon some hidden invention before everyone else gets their hands on it. Suppliers are selling all sorts of products, from wireless earbuds to wigs, and essential oils to luxury leather bags.

The key is to avoid making a “General Store” and instead find a unique selling proposition with a few useful, everyday products. 

What does that mean? Here are some steps to help you get there:

  1. Look around your own life and figure out what interests you, or something you can get into. For instance, I play softball every Tuesday, like going to the movies, and ride my bike or go camping on the weekends. Those are four huge categories that I can start looking into. All of them have wonderful products for dropshipping.
  2. Narrow it down to a specific market, or something special. Sometimes you must test these out to see if there’s any interest, but the idea is to take a general category, like camping, and narrow it down to a group with certain needs. For instance, maybe I could sell to female campers? Maybe I could only sell stylish hiking bags to female campers who also want functionality like a place to put their water, clothes, and maybe a toiletry bag?
  3. Research keywords to see if anyone’s looking for this type of stuff. Go to Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner, and the various other search engine analysis tools and start testing out keywords that may apply to your niche. This gives you some perspective on the competition and how much traffic comes in for those words.
  4. Check places like Reddit, Facebook, and YouTube to see if people are talking about these products for those types of people.
  5. Finally, we want to make sure the idea is lucrative. This is when you go into apps like Spocket, Modalyst, or AliExpress to see what margins look like for new products in the category.

As an example of checking the profit potential for a product, I found this bike trainer that costs anywhere from $460 to $627. That’s the cost that you, the merchant, would pay after making a sale.

And a quick search for similar, or comparable bike trainers shows price listings of anywhere from $700 to $1,400. At a minimum, your profit could end up at around $70 per sale. That’s not bad, but the higher price ranges could produce close to $1,000 in profit. Keep in mind that this is a higher-priced item to begin with, so a cheaper product, like a backpack, would still look like a high-quality choice if you could buy it for $20 and sell it at something like $50.

Step 2: Decide if You’d like to Create Custom, Print-on-demand Products for Your Dropshipping Store

The dropshipping world offers two means of sourcing your products:

  • Standard dropshipping: With previously designed and created products, ready to be sold and shipped to your customers.
  • Print-on-demand: A setup where you make certain designs and have them printed onto products once a customer orders them. Then, the print-on-demand supplier also ships out the item.

Printful is one of the most popular solutions to configure a print-on-demand dropshipping store.

printful homepage

This method has its advantages and downsides, but in general, print-on-demand dropshipping allows you to differentiate your brand from the rest, create entirely unique products, and still eliminating the need to store or ship your items. However, there’s also extra work involved, since you have to make the designs.

Printful, and other print-on-demand platforms, let you upload designs to various types of products such as:

  • Apparel
  • Bags
  • Phone cases
  • Jewelry
  • Keychains
  • Shoes
  • Pillows and blankets
  • Coffee mugs
  • Pet products
  • Stationary
  • Posters and canvas prints
  • Much more

Step 3: Select an Ecommerce Platform and Build Your Store

An ecommerce platform serves as a way to build an online store and a complete website all in one place. These platforms offer features for creating product pages, collecting payments for your sales, and even completing marketing tasks like social ads and email marketing.

Therefore, it’s essential to get set up with an ecommerce platform, since it’s the main way you’ll sell your products as a dropshipper.

We like Shopify the best when learning how to start a dropshipping business since it offers some essentials you can’t find anywhere else.

shopify homepage

Why Shopify is the Best for Dropshipping

  • It offers premade templates for various industries, allowing you to design a professional-looking online store within minutes.
  • The payment processing is free (besides credit card processing fees) and integrated directly into the platform.
  • Shopify integrates with a wide range of dropshipping and print-on-demand apps like Spocket and Printful.
  • Shopify has superior advertising tools for launching ads on places like the Microsoft Search Network, Google Search, Facebook, Snapchat, and more. Advertising is the main way you bring in sales for dropshipping, and no other platform has this many advertising options.
  • You can start selling your dropshipped products on places like eBay and Amazon.
  • They let you almost instantly make a Facebook Shop, which is great for dropshipping.
  • Shopify has various automations for bringing back dropshipping customers like email marketing workflows and abandoned cart emails.
how to start a dropshipping business with advertising and Shopify
Shopify has numerous advertising options for marketing your dropshipped products

Read our guide here on how to configure a Shopify store in less than 15 minutes. You can go to the Shopify website to start a free trial for 14 days, then walk through the steps of linking a dropshipping app, adding product descriptions, linking your payment gateway, and designing the shop.

Other Ecommerce Platforms that Work for Dropshipping

  • Wix: About as simple as Shopify for dropshipping, but not as many advertising tools.
  • BigCommerce: Offers a wonderful interface for dropshipping. The main dropshipping apps are Spocket and Printful, so it’s solid but limited compared to Shopify.
  • WooCommerce: You can integrate with just about every dropshipping app but WooCommerce runs on WordPress and requires more technical knowledge.
  • Magento: Similar to WooCommerce, where you gain complete control over the site but technical knowledge is usually required.
  • OpenCart: Requires some technical knowledge, and it has a few decent AliExpress dropshipping apps.

Step 4: Choose a Supplier That Dropships

As mentioned before, you don’t have to get on the phone anymore to start calling suppliers in your desired industry to make it as a dropshipping professional. In fact, that’s probably a waste of time, unless you’d like to get really specific with the type of product you want to sell and where it’s coming from.

Several reputable dropshipping apps are available that integrate with Shopify and the many other ecommerce platforms.

These dropshipping apps provide:

  • A full marketplace for finding suppliers and products
  • Filtering tools to hone in on specific categories
  • Information like the cost of products, potential margins, and sales
  • Instant syncing with your ecommerce platform to transfer product details, photos, and pricing
  • Automated messaging to the supplier (and you) when an order comes in through your store
  • Direct linking with everything your ecommerce store offers, like stats, marketing, and social ads

Start Your Journey With Spocket

Spocket is the most effective dropshippping app for all skill levels, considering it links you to AliExpress, which has the largest collection of worldwide suppliers who dropship.

Therefore, you can install the Spocket app on your Shopify store, and filter for products based on what you need.

spocket - shopify app store

We recommend filtering for things like shipping times, where the products get shipped from, and potential margins.

Some customers don’t care if they have to wait a few weeks to receive a quality product. But in our experience, it’s troubling when you see shipping times around 15 to 30 days. We encourage you to skip those products and opt for ones with shipping times ranging from 1-14 days to the country of your choice. It takes some digging but there are plenty to choose from. We also find that it’s sometimes easier to find these faster shipping rates by directly browsing on AliExpress instead of Spocket.

Consider Printful for Print-on-demand Dropshipping

If you decide to go with a print-on-demand dropshipping store, the most practical app to install is called Printful. The company has a wide range of warehouses located around the world, so your customers receive faster shipping, and Printful maintains higher levels of quality control (since they own their warehouses).

Check out our complete guide on how to make a print-on-demand dropshipping site with Printful and Shopify.

In short, you create both Printful and Shopify accounts, link the Printful app to Shopify, then start uploading your designs to Printful. After that, you’re able to choose products to place the designs on, set pricing for those products, and sync them with your Shopify store.

printful tee design

Not only that, but Printful offers beautiful product images where your custom-made designs appear on mockup pictures with human models.

printful mockup

Other Dropshipping Suppliers to Consider

Each of the following dropshipping apps has its pros and cons. For example, DSers and Modalyst specialize in dropshipping from independent suppliers and providing fast shipping to places like the USA, UK, and EU. Printify is an alternative to Printful, while some of the others are similar to Spocket with unique selling points.

Step 5: Run Marketing and Advertising Campaigns that Work Specifically for Dropshipping

marketing on Shopify

As any experienced dropshipping professional will tell you, you won’t see any sales until you establish a solid advertising plan.

Dropshipping is unique in that you’re not as worried about building your brand (although you should do that as well) but more about testing ads, finding the ones with the best results, and retargeting to people who have shown interest.

Therefore, the following types of marketing and advertising strategies usually work the best for dropshipping:

  • Facebook and social ads: Facebook and Instagram are the gold standards for dropshipping ads, but Shopify also provides options for advertising on places like Pinterest, Snapchat, and TikTok.
  • Retargeting: The retargeting campaigns on Shopify and Facebook utilize algorithms and AI to serve up ads again and again after someone has shown some sort of interest in your products.
  • Google Ads: Along with Microsoft Ads, these give you a chance to get your product in front of people browsing around on search engines. Although very competitive, the right products and keywords can help you out quite a bit.
  • Content marketing: Think about making videos, blog posts, and other content that features your products, shows pictures and videos of them in use, and explains details about how to use the products to your customers.
  • Communities: Although you don’t want to spam communities, it’s not a bad idea to become active in forums, Facebook Groups, or Reddit threads that talk about your products. You may occasionally be able to mention your website if it comes up.
  • Influencer marketing: Many dropshippers swear by influencer marketing, seeing as how these people have built-in platforms, lots of people who listen to their every word, and it serves as a way to advertise on social media without having to pay for Facebook or Instagram ads. In short, people are more willing to listen to another person they admire than a random ad on Facebook.
  • Selling on marketplaces: This is more of a secondary way of selling, but places like Amazon and eBay also tend to bring exposure to products that perform well or get quality reviews.

Step 6: Handle Other Essentials for a Dropshipping Store

Dropshipping presents one of the simpler types of fulfillment, but that doesn’t mean you can skimp when it comes to properly and legally setting up your business.

Here are some other essentials to consider as you learn how to start a dropshipping business:

  • Get your permits and licenses. Check your local laws to figure out if an online store needs standard permits or special business licenses to conduct business in the area. In general, this is almost always a requirement, so the last thing you want is to be running an illegal business.
  • Establish a business structure like a Sole-proprietorship, C Corp, LLC, or S Corp. Take a look at the requirements in your region, and speak to the Small Business Association or related organization in your area.
  • Get your finances and credit in order. Most payment processors (like the ones provided through Shopify) require a potential credit check or at least some sort of proof that you’re able to reach a certain number of sales to make the partnership worthwhile. Make sure you have all of this squared away to make the approval process easier. Also, think about how much money you should be saving in order to pay for things like ads, taxes, and investing elsewhere in your business.
  • Save money from your sales for taxes and paying the supplier. Not all revenue goes right in your pocket. A quick way to wreck your business is by taking all the money and forgetting that you must pay for taxes and the products themselves.

Optimize Your Website like Crazy

As time goes on, it’s wise to hone your website and further optimize it for keywords, improved media elements, and more creative product descriptions.

This is what we would call an ongoing task that you could outsource to someone else or simply work on it whenever you have free time.

And with that, you should be well on your way to learning how to start a dropshipping business and getting your first sale! But don’t get discouraged if your first or fifth or tenth dropshipping product doesn’t get the response you expected. That’s the whole game behind dropshipping. Rigorous testing separates the amateurs from the true professional dropshippers. So get out there and start testing.

If you have any questions about how to start a dropshipping business, let us know in the comments section below.