Doing an online business or making money online, in general, have never been this easy. We are blessed with many opportunities to make money online, create new connections with people around the world and get access to the knowledge and information on how to be successful. We can do so much, yet not every one of us does that. Creating an online business or having an online job still takes a lot of time and effort, until it starts to pay off.
On the other hand, when people have stubbornness, creativity, and motivation to reach their goals, they have many options to choose from. They can start writing a blog, do affiliate marketing, create a consulting or social media marketing agency, write a book, make an online store, etc. Selecting your excellent option might be frustrating, that's why in this article we'll cover a short guide on WordPress dropshipping, to see whether it might suit you or not.
What is Dropshipping?
It is a business model where you sell your products online, without actually having those products. Whenever you get a sale, you simply use the money given by your customer, to order the same product from your supplier for a lower price and make him ship the product to your customer. Doing this way saves a lot of money.
First of all, you don't need to have a warehouse or place to store your items; moreover, you don't have to ship every order yourself either, because you have your supplier who is doing all the work for you. Your supplier also has better logistics and has a lower shipping cost because of the high volumes of sales. Secondly, you no longer need money upfront to buy your products for the wholesale price, because you won't be using a retail business model.
Finding Your Niche
Before you start, you'll need to consider what you'll be selling. There're millions of products in the market, with thousands of dropshippers who are selling the same exact products. This makes dropshipping a very competitive market. That's why creativity and stubbornness to keep working despite the results, will be the critical elements in your success. What you should ideally be aiming for are the products that have demand, but not enough supply. Your second-best pick should be products that are in demand, already has enough supply, but there is a lot of place for improvement.
Finding niche is one of the toughest parts in starting an online store because there are already so many stores out there. Coming up with new ideas might be hard, that's why digital entrepreneurs are starting to choose print on demand service to sell t-shirts, mugs, hoodies or paintings with custom designs that are hard to copy. This not only creates value for their products for being unique but also sells very well. Moreover, there aren't much POD suppliers to choose from, thus making it easier to find your supplier. Lastly, POD suppliers like Printify.com are motivated for you to succeed and because of that, they have lots of useful guides and tools like a mockup generator to help you out as much as they can.
Starting Your Store
There are many platforms where you can make your online store. Nevertheless, WordPress is a popular choice among more experienced sellers, because of the broad functionality of the platform. To create your store, you'd need to find a hosting provider with a friendly looking domain and install WordPress on it. Don't worry; there are a lot of guides on YouTube how to do it correctly, you'll be fine. When you have your website, you'll need to make it look like a store.
To do that you'll need to select a theme for your webpage (there are also many free themes to choose from) and then adjust it however you want. Afterward, you'll need to have some plugins installed to make your store functional. These plugins should be WooCommerce that allows you to create an online store from your website, WordPress form builder plugin from Captainform that will enable you to accept money from your customers and few other plugins that are necessary depending on your marketing and sale strategy.
When you have all that, you'll need to find your supplier and upload their products to your store. This part might be tricky if you're having a hard time coming up with your niche. That's why you can start with an online t-shirt business until you feel comfortable to sell something else. Moreover, selling t-shirts is easier because you can convey emotions through your ads a bit simpler.
Lastly, you'll need to have a marketing plan. This is the hardest part of every digital business. You need to consider a lot of different things, but most importantly you need to answer two questions: who your customers are and how you will reach them. There are a lot of different strategies on the internet how to do it correctly, but this is left for you to discover because there's simply too much to cover in one article.
