I know there's a dropshipping thread out there, but I wanted to make a new thread for doing it with Oberlo, as well as a quick quide.
Oberlo has been around for a little bit, but not enough people are using it. I dropshipped before without Oberlo, and frankly it's an incredible time-saving product.
Oberlo cuts the time required to setup your store down by 10+ hours easily. It allows you to import products to your store within seconds, and takes care of inventory/order management. It automates a lot of the tedious aspects to dropshipping. Setup is the most time-consuming part of dropshipping. Once it's setup, and your advertisements + affiliate network are set up, it's smooth sailing.
This is a quick step-by-step rundown, and is not exhaustive. If you have any questions, PM me or do a google search!
1. ProductOberlo has been around for a little bit, but not enough people are using it. I dropshipped before without Oberlo, and frankly it's an incredible time-saving product.
Oberlo cuts the time required to setup your store down by 10+ hours easily. It allows you to import products to your store within seconds, and takes care of inventory/order management. It automates a lot of the tedious aspects to dropshipping. Setup is the most time-consuming part of dropshipping. Once it's setup, and your advertisements + affiliate network are set up, it's smooth sailing.
This is a quick step-by-step rundown, and is not exhaustive. If you have any questions, PM me or do a google search!
The first stop obviously, is to pick a product. I picked clothing targeted towards students (if you want to see my site, PM me). There's a lot of information out there saying pick a product that you can sell for $20-$70, but as long as your margins are good, it doesn't really matter. My products cost me anywhere from $3-$10(including shipping), and I always make around a 50% margin. Just browse Amazon + Aliexpress, see which products have a lot of orders, five-star ratings, all that jazz and build a store based on that. Pick a theme and stick to it. I sell womens fashion, and unisex accessories; I didn't both with mens clothing as women do most online shopping.
You can really make a store selling anything. I've seen fishing lure stores, women's cosmetics, yoga mats, paper, pens. As long as you can target a certain niche with your advertisements, you'll be fine. The problem most people have, is that they pick a product but don't know how they'll target that niche.
2. Setup Shopify
Once you have your product idea, set up a shopify. They offer a free trial, so you can test your store for a few weeks before actually paying. My favourite theme for online stores is 'Venture', and it's free. It's very non-programmer friendly, and you can set up a store within a day no problem.
Note: If you're selling clothing, make sure you add a sizing chart in the product description; it seems simple, but for a week I completely forgot to add a sizing chart, and lost a bunch of sales because of it..Rookie mistake.
Shipping rates: I use $5 within the U.S, $8 to Canada, and $10 international - but feel free to adjust those depending on your products, audience, and discounts.
3. Sign up for Oberlo
On Shopify, click on 'Apps', and search for Oberlo. They offer a month-free trial, so again - it's fantastic for testing. Sign up takes one minute. It automatically connects to your shopify. Use Oberlo with Google Chrome (it's an extension).
4. Upload Products to Oberlo
If you're on aliexpress, make sure your Oberlo plugin is enabled. Sort your product category by orders (the most ordered products will appear first). Only choose products that are highlighted in green (an Oberlo feature), and are available to ship via 'epacket'. Epacket is a quicker, cheaper way to cheap that is offered between Oberlo/Aliexpress. It cuts shipping time down by 10-15 days in most cases.
To upload to Oberlo, you'll see a blue circle with a white price tag in the middle - press that, and your products are directly uploaded to Oberlo. Fill in your own product details, choose which pictures to use, set your price and then hit 'Push To Shop'. Make sure you choose a collection in Oberlo so your products upload properly (i.e Women's Shirts, Mens Shoes etc).
If you're doing clothing, don't upload every variant. I chose 2-3 for each product. Your goal is to not give the customer too many options...people get overwhelmed easily when it comes to online shopping.
When someone buys with Oberlo, you simply need to click 'Fulfill'. You can choose to automatically do that whenever someone buys a product, but it's a bit iffy if the variant is suddenly not available, so I choose to manually do it.
5. Setup Social Media (Facebook, Instagram), and offer (optional) product to Affiliates
Create a Facebook and Instagram account for your store. Fill it up with content, use related hashtags. You may think it's not worth it, but spending a couple of bucks to buy some followers is important; social proof is big in the eyes of buyers. The same product can be offered by two accounts, one with 100 followers and the other with 5k, it's obvious who they'll buy from.
Most of my sales came from affiliates. Contact people (in my case, babes) who are related to your product with a lot of followers. Offer them a % per sale (Affiliatily is an app on shopify for this). I offered 15% per sale, but you can do more or less depending on the price of your product. I messaged about 50 affiliates, 15 got back to me. I sent the product express, and within a week I was receiving sales from my affiliates.
Download any app for instagram that allows you to preload pictures. No use going on yourself every day to post a picture. Preload like 30 pictures with hashtags and you'll be good for a few weeks.
6. Run Facebook Ads + setup your facebook pixel.
Facebook ads are powerful. Take a week to test ads at $5/per day. Target based on your product. I targeted women who shopped online for clothing, so an example of interests I used were: Zara, forever21, H&M etc...And make sure that your picture in your advertisement is good quality (use an image resizer).
Set your ads up for conversions and clicks, then track using your facebook pixel, which can be easily setup to connect with Shopify. I'd even recommend using a google analytics account. Test for a days, check results. If people are getting to checkout but not buying, it may be your shipping is too expensive.
Discounts - 10% off, 15%, free shipping discounts all lead to a lot of sales. 10% off $20 isn't much, but people go crazy for discounts. I'm currently offering a 'Summer16' discount on all clothing which is for free shipping, and I've already receiving 200 orders with it this week alone.
If you want to see my advertisements, PM me and I'll send you a screenshot.
7. Test, test, and test some more.
If some products aren't selling - remove them. If you have a good theme, and a good target niche, you will sell products, so keep testing. Took me a week to figure out exactly what my target niche wanted.
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In the end, I really like dropshipping. I know this step-by-step guide isn't everything you need to know, but it's a general idea. On my journey to location independence I've tried a lot of things; and this is by far my favourite. It's scalable, automated and relatively easy to setup with little cost. It takes some time in the research-phase, but it's an easy business model to learn.
Once your store becomes profitable, you can easily sell it and start a new one. I run two stores at the moment, and while I can't replace my current income, it's getting there.
In general, the process is: Research > Set up Shopify/Oberlo > Promote > Scale > Automate.
Links:
Oberlo - https://www.oberlo.com/
Shopify - https://www.shopify.ca/
Image resizer - http://resizeimage.net/