How Does Dropshipping Work With Shopify? Step by Step Guide

Introduction

In this post, I shared my case study on how dropshipping work with Shopify and everything you need to know about finding dropshipping products that sales, Instagram shoutout and building a good dropshipping store

It all began after one beautiful afternoon I visited a friend who is also jobless like me, on getting to his house I saw some group of guys, some are new faces I haven’t seen before, they were discussing mini importation, I listened to them, but didn’t get the full list.

After the whole discussion I went back home, and I started searching more on mini importation online, and some searches pop out from google, and one exciting thing I saw was drop shipping, shortly I got confused. I quickly google ” how does dropshipping work with Shopify? Step by Step Guide “

I started searching for more information on how dropshipping work with shopify, and at that time dropshipping in Nigeria wasn’t that popular. I couldn’t find someone doing Dropshipping in Nigeria

I have to compare it with mini importation and without even giving it a second taught, I settle with dropshipping with 1million reason that convinced me. To cut the whole stories and struggles short, I met a mentor after 4months, who opened my eyes on what I was doing wrong and changed my mindset.

My case study is for everybody, especially for anyone passionate about building a Dropshipping works in Nigeria and willing to give it their best.

To help get them on the right track, I have to write this report on one of my new Shopify store, how, I made my first sale, which brought me profit in the first month. I want to prove that with the right knowledge and a little hard work, anyone could build a profitable dropshipping business.

So I built a brand new one from scratch, with a $50 budget, and documented every single step — no secrets, and no holding back.

What you’ll learn from this case study will tear down the all-too-common misconception that you need to “spend too much money to make money.” It will show you that making sales isn’t nearly as difficult as you think. And most importantly, it will prove that success is possible for anyone.

By the time you’re done reading, there won’t be a single excuse left to stop you from getting started. My case study is actually on ” how does Dropshipping Work with Shopify? Step by Step Guide. “

My Mindset

With my years’ of my experience in Dropshipping and so I have decided to do a case study on how dropshipping works with Shopify. To achieve my goal, I have to be offensive and keep things very simple. So everything I did is simple and to no time to get classy.

Here’s how it shaped up:

Day one

The first Day, I decided to do this three things:

• Find a dropshipping product: The first thing I do is to find Dropshipping products that are profitable and trendy.
• validating the product: I validated the dropshipping products using different tools like Google trends, Aliexpress Dropshipping centre and Facebook research tools.
• Choose products: finally, I will be picking my dropshipping products after I’m satisfied with the result.

Day Two

• Setting up a Shopify Store: I used Shopify to build my Dropshipping store, then bought a good domain and connected to my shopify store

• Importing products: To import products from aliExpress, I used tools called oberlo to import products with images, reviews, description and price from Aliexpress to my dropshipping store

• Designing my dropshipping store: I will use boundless as my store theme when designing the store. Is free you can check it out

Day three to Last day of trial: HUSTLE

After I have finished writing out my plan, I kick-start my journey.

DAY 1:

Finding my Dropshipping Products

At this point, I had no idea what to sell, but I tried to avoid the following:

1. Electronic-based products (potential to break)
2. Food-based products (potential to spoil)
3. Heavy and large products (expensive to ship)
4. Cosmetic products (can not be sure what they’re made of)
5. And Products with a price above $24.

What type of Dropshipping product I’m going to look for?

• Product that Improves confidence
• • Product that Improves convenience
• • Product that Fills Void/Solves a Problem
• • Product that Saves people money over time (investment)
• • Product that Saves people time
• • Product that are Extremely Unique (New Product not on the market yet not much data for it)
• • Product that Improves Quality of Life
• • Product that have High Perceived Value
• • Woman Dominated Product* (Note, this type of product takes less money to find buyers)
• Product that are cheap and light in weight

NB: My Dropshipping Products must meet 3 out of the 10 criteria to pass product index.

Because I’m dropshipping from AliExpress, which is easy to sort out products

I check out the top-selling items and filtered for products that matched the criteria I listed above:

Here was my finding . When I ran a research on Aliexpress.

Note: This product is hot in demand at the point of writing this Article.

Validating my product – Using Google

Because I don’t like to work solely on intuition, I started the validation process to determine if the wood resin necklace had real sales potential. To start, I plugged the term “wood resin necklace” into Google Trends. Then I fell instantly in love.

Although it looks like up and downtrend, there’s still a lot of demand for these wooden necklaces! Using only Google Trends, it won’t show me the monthly search result, so I moved over to the Google Global Market Finder to learn more

Over 150,000 monthly searches for a single keyword in one country is some kind of jackpot! Due to high competition on Google, I don’t think My new Shopify store would have a good ranking on Google, but who cares? 1 month is too few to rank anyway. So, I won’t depend on Google alone for the source of traffic but will try an alternative. So far so good, everything is looking good, but we’re not done researching yet!

Validating my product – Using Social Media

The next step was to validate my dropshipping products on social media and find out how popular wood resin necklace are on social media. I took a look at Twitter engagement, and within just thirteen days, 850 tweets Included #resinnecklace. Even if I assume that 30 – 40% of those were posted by stores promoting their products, but I look further and I saw people posting pictures of their resin necklace.

I’m still not satisfied with the result on Twitter. Then, I move over to Instagram

Based on these results, it seems like resin necklace pendant has pretty high engagement, especially considering they’re just necklaces, not some crazy world-changing product like the iPhone.

Day 2:

Building my Dropshipping store using Shopify

Now that I had finish validating my dropshipping product, Next is to build my store, Which I did use Shopify. I’m always going for simple and easy to understand website, No fancy. I moved over to Shopify to register my 14 days free trial and spent little time setting it up. I didn’t spend any money on any new theme because I picked a free theme.

Here’s how I set up my shopify store:

1. I used Boundless as my theme
2. I gave all countries free shipping
3. Integrated Paypal as my payment gateway
4. Wrote all my Privacy policy, Contact us, terms of service, refund policy
5. Imported product using oberlo and write a good product description and pricing.

Now, things are looking great and almost ready to kick start. The is simple and nothing fancy, just a good store that does not distract customers when their land on your store to buy eg Pop-up notification. I know this stuff are necessary, but, I only had a few days to build a good business store and start to make sells immediately from it without initial capital.

Never you worry about the Top Players.

Since 2018, I started dropshipping as a business, I knew that there were probably thousands of Amazon sellers doing exactly the same.

A quick search showed me I was right. Before I continue, I will like to mention something. At this stage, many new entrepreneurs start to struggle.

Instead of them thinking about their future customer, They divert their thinking on who their potential competitors are. Can I ask one thing? Have you come across to a person who has made a strong, positive and meaningful connection with a massive, multi-trillion-dollar marketplace? Unlikely. If anything, they will bring up how affordable they can be, or how it is almost impossible to not find a product there.

Always note that Top players can’t build good, real and close relationships with their customers because they are already big. They don’t have a good customer care that responds to customer queries. They are not interested in making something like $10,000, They can’t send direct messages on Facebook to look for customer because It’s doesn’t worth their time. They already have the customer base.

In this kind of business competitors are not people to worry about, you need to keep focusing on things you can do better, like building a better Shopify store, establishing real relationships, Creating a copy for your Ads, picking a good supplier etc. I’m very sure there are many people out there who will never buy from these top players and would rather support small businesses like yours.

Finally, Not every buyer out there compares prices! Some have enough to spend, but that doesn’t mean you should make your price much higher. but if you still doubt, I will prove you wrong in the course of this my case study “how does dropshipping work with Shopify? Step by Step Guide”.

Finding and Importing Products

To find other popular products that I can sell Resin necklace pendant with, I headed back to the Global Market Finder to conduct another search. After clicking on “Showing more Additional keyword suggestions from google Keyword Planner” I found a bunch of good product opportunities for my shopify store.

Here are some of the more popular searches findout:

• wooden pendant
• resin wooden pendant
• resin pendant
• resin necklace pendant

Finding Reliable Supplier For That Product I want to sell

I then head to AliExpress to search for suppliers selling “resin necklace and pendants” and then sort them by these Credentials:

• checked out if the supplier offers Free Shipping
• looked for this sign ★★★★☆ (over 4.5 is good)
• checked for supplier number of Orders
• looked for Feedback Score, must be > 2500
• Finally, Checked for Positive Feedback and it most be > 90 %

Most important one, I looked at real customer reviews within the product page.

Writing Product Descriptions

After I imported a few products. Next is to write some niche-appropriate product descriptions.

This section is important! For low-priced dropshipping products like wood resin pendant, long, technical product descriptions are usually a waste of time. I wanted to write an engaging (and very short) description for my dropshipping product. Here’s what I came up with:

Note, If you are importing product from AliExpress, DON’T leave the product descriptions as-is when entering products to your store. Make them unique and fit for your niche, avoid plagiarism. Don’t rich it because this section is very important.

DAY 3:

Setting Price for my Products

Setting product price is the most tricky of them all because it can build you or destroy you. Don’t set too high or too low. I was trying to make the most amount of money in the least amount of time, I chose to price my products at a premium(not too high) to earn more profit from each sell.

Here’s a breakdown of my pricing Guidelines:

• PayPal transaction fee (1.9% + $0.38)
• Affiliate commission (12%)
• Discounts (15%)

I ended up setting the price for the resin products from $4 at $72(depends on the quality and demands of each product). After removing all my costs, fees, and others, I would earn between $3 – $60 in net profit on each sale.

Note, most of these products are sold on eBay and Amazon for $24 and above. this set was selling on Amazon for around $75. If I were able to sell it for almost $72 more, and it should prove to you that price isn’t the only thing people think while shopping online.

After I was done calculating and entering prices for each resin necklace I was selling, NB: “I recommend doing this manually” (don’t trust any app even Oberlo)

Next Marketing :

Low Marketing Budget: Instagram Shoutout

Due to the main reason of this case study was to start earning money without spending much money, I didn’t go my normal route of spending a few dollars on Facebook and Google Ads looking for customers. Then, what is the easiest and cheapest way to reach the right audience these days?

Social media

I started on Instagram and searched for #resin. I looked through the results which is good and wrote about 40 – 50 direct messages to the people who uploaded them. even though the messages were badly written, I still got about responses. eg:

Making First (Real) Sale

Making first sale in a business always looks like a thing of Joy. I was in a mall when I receive a notification, I open it and it’s my first sale:

I made $14.35 in revenue and $13.72 in net profit. The original cost of this product is $0.63 — my strategy seemed to work! the order came from the UK.

FACTS

But more interestingly, and my ultimate proof that anyone can compete against a big player — the $35 wooden resin necklace I found on Amazon! Even with Amazon discount, My customer even go ahead to order from my store at a price of $72.00 more than what you can get it on Amazon.

Is this ethically wrong? No!
Like I said Initially, If you do things a Top player can’t, then you will be able to make a lot of sales

Closing Shop & Final Tally

Note, this case study was more of an experiment anyway, and considering that, it was successful! Here’s the financial report at the end of the month:

Like in this last month only, I earned $10k in revenue (~$8k in net profit). Wow, right!

The lesson here: is simplicity, Fist note out were your initial customers came from and the reason they bought from you. Doing this small research is just the beginning, The stage where you make real cashout is when you take action on everything you discovered.

Don’t try to sell to everyone. Be as specific as possible! Narrowing my dropshipping product from “resin pendant ” to “wooden pendant.”

NOW

Conclusion

Nothing fancy; just a shopify store with some real, honest work behind it., I hope this my case study on ” how does dropshipping work with Shopify? Step by Step Guide” was helpful ” to you.

I want you to have success with your business, and I genuinely believe that this is possible for everyone. The most important step is to stop dreaming about overnight success and instead, be willing to put the work into action! There is absolutely no reason why you can’t become successful doing dropshipping in Nigeria.

IMPORTANT: If You Enjoyed This And Hoping Or Already Into Dropshipping Business. But With No Sales Or Having Below Issue:

• Unable To Setup Converting Dropshipping Store
• Finding It Hard To Research On What To Sale
• Need Help To Scale Your Business including Facebook marketing and Instagram shoutout
• Don’t Know Where To Start But Really Interested in Dropshipping

Then Kindly Shoot Me A Mail Here So We Can Discuss Further On This:

Email: [email protected]

Our send a whatsApp Message: +2349016061680