5 Steps Guideline to Start a Dropshipping Business in 2021

Want to start a dropshipping business in 2021? Here’s the 5 steps guideline that you should read. Let’s dive in!

What Is a Dropshipping Business?

Dropshipping is when you sell your products online without keeping them in your stock. When you receive an order from your customers, you just need to transfer the order detail to your dropshipping agent or your suppliers. They will process the order, do packaging and ship the products directly to your customers. You don’t need to manage your inventory nor rent a physical store.

This retail model has huge benefits for you:

• It’s less risky for you to start a dropshipping business as you don’t worry to lose money when maintaining unsold goods and you cannot sell them anymore.
• It’s also much easier to start a dropshipping business. And anyone can do it. You just need a laptop and internet access. And you’re all set to create your own store.
• There’s less burden on you as you don’t need to keep the products in your inventory, don’t do packaging and shipping. You have more time to focus on other important activities like sales, marketing, advertising, customer service, branding,…

How to Start a Dropshipping Business?

Now that you already know how dropshipping works and its benefits, we will explore what you need to do to start a dropshipping business. Briefly, there are 5 steps as below:

Step 1: Create Your Dropshipping Business Idea

Good ideas are where every business begins. Before you start a dropshipping business, you should create your own business idea first. First of all, pick the niche that you love. That is the most important thing. It’s much easier and more enjoyable when you sell something that you have passion about.

The next thing that should be taken into account is research. If you pick a niche that you like but it’s not selling really well, then it makes no sense. It should be a combination of passion and profit.

There are many tools that help in your research such as Google Trends, Social Media, Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, Dropshipping blogs, or a dropshipping agent’s advice. There are tons of potential products nowadays. You might feel overwhelmed a bit but as we mentioned, follow your heart first. Pick a niche that you have passion about and then research the products.

Step 2: Competitor Analysis

When you start a dropshipping business, it’s necessary to know who your competitors are, what they sell, how they price and market their products,… In doing so, you will have an overview of how tough is the competition and prepare yourself to beat them.

Just one click on Google and you will see who are your biggest competitors in your location. Go to their store, look at their website, look at their best sellers and product list, how they design everything. Also, have a look at their social media profiles and see how many followers they have, how they advertise themselves and their products, how popular are their posts, how their audience interacts with their posts.

You can learn a lot from doing so and know your competitors better. But don’t copy exactly like them. Research mostly will get you some insight into what is trendy right now, what people are interested in, and how you can apply this information to develop your own strategies.

Step 3: Find a Reliable Supplier or Dropshipping Agent

One of the most important steps to start a dropshipping business is finding the right supplier or dropshipping agent. Choosing the niche or the products for your store is critical. But to find the one who provides the best product is just as important.

The quality of your products matters. If you sell poor-quality products, no one wants to buy from you. Furthermore, your suppliers or dropshipping agent will handle all the sourcing, branding, packaging, shipping. You always need the best quality, best service, fast shipping, and a great support team who are highly responsive when you need any assistance.

Step 4: Create Your Dropshipping Store

After you have chosen the products, suppliers, or dropshipping agent, you can begin to create your dropshipping store. You can build your own website or create an online store on marketplaces. If you build your own website, you will need a domain name. You also need to design your own logo, background picture, color, and everything.

Step 5: Build Your Marketing Strategy

The final step to start a dropshipping business is to build your marketing strategy. This is the part where you can be creative and freely think of new ideas. You can research to see what content people love right now, how other brands market their products. But the key thing is to keep inventing new ideas and test new ideas constantly.

By testing new ideas, new ads constantly, you will know what works for your store and what does not. You will have more excellent ideas to market your products. Just keep in mind, it’s about winning marketing rather than winning products.

Beside running paid ads on social media like Facebook or on Google, you should also develop SEO, content marketing, email marketing to drive more traffic to your site, increase the conversion rate and boost your sales.