Step 1. The Beginning
You’ll need a Woocommerce or a Shopify store, if you do not have a store, luckily you can buy a ready made dropshipping woocommerce store or build your own woocommerce store right here or you can sign up for a 14-day free trial of Shopify right here. Once you’ve done that you’ll want to head over to Dropstore and install the Dropstore app.
Dropstore allows you to find products from South Africa, add them to your shop with one-click, with no upfront cost. All your orders will be automatically fulfilled. Dropstore suppliers are reliable, offer fast-shipping and high-quality products; you can even find products from your home town.
Step 2. Find Your Niche
The two big thinkers, store name and store niche. What do you want to sell? What gets you excited? Have a quick think and decide on a few products. Once you’ve decided on a few potentials, we recommend using Google Trends to find which one has the most traffic surrounding it.
Here’s an example:
At the top you can see 3 products we had in mind; Powerbanks, Inverters and Solar Panels. The graphed lines represent how popular these are, in this case we should choose between Inverters and Solar Panels over Powerbanks on account of how popular these items are in comparison.
A good tip to keep in mind is ensuring the product you pick is on an upward trend, rather than a downward trend, you can see all of these items are spiking upward, that’s a good sign.
Step 3. Product Pushin’
So you’ve decided on your product. It is the time to find those products on the Dropstore marketplace and easily import them with one click. Click on the “Add to import list” button for the products you want to push to your shop. Then head over to the list to make some last-minute adjustments before sending the products on their way.
Step 4. Design & Sparkle
Designing and tweaking. This is one of the more exciting steps, as you get to design your logo, choose your theme and start making visual changes. The Shopify Theme Store and Theme Forest have plenty of designs to choose from, you can purchase a theme or just choose from one of the many awesome free themes Shopify offers. Have fun working on the design and create something that suits your style.
Here are a few helpful resources:
Affordable Professional Logo Design
Step 5. Real Eyes, Realise, Finalise
Now it’s time to ensure your store is ready to sell, we’ve designed a checklist to help you do just that.
Dropstore Settings - There are a few options to modify here. In the "Profile" section, you can edit your profile to show the invoices that will be in the orders packages.
Domain - it’s important your store can easily be accessed and purchasing a domain is much more inviting than using a yourshopname.myshopify.com address. Domains can be purchased directly from any outside third party such as domains.co.za, afrihost etc.
Payment Settings - You’ll need to change how you accept payments on your store, whether you choose to use a third party gateway like Payfast or Paygate, configuring these is a must.
Shipping Settings - Here you’ll want to compare the shipping cost for Domestic and International with Dropstore and create shipping rules to match in order to ensure you’re not losing money on shipping. A bit more about Dropstore shipping cost here.
Feel free to play around with the General settings on your store, as well as your online store preferences, then pat yourself on the back because your store is ready to sell!
Join our 8,000+ member facebook group, share your shop, start sending it to friends, family and be on the lookout for our next blog post where we teach you how to market your shiny new store!
If you have any questions, you can find help here.
Happy Dropstore-ing.