Starting your own business has never been easier. With e-commerce, you can run your business from home while looking after the kids, at your favourite cafe, even half way around the world at your favourite holiday spot. As long as you have an internet connection, you can create a full time income from anywhere in the world.

I’m going to show you how you can setup, run and maintain your very own online store with minimal outlay using drop-shipping as our method of choice.

What is drop-shipping?

We are all familiar with how local stores operate. It doesn't matter what products they have - they are bought at a base price and sold at a profit. For our store, we will be purchasing products cheaply from a well founded source abroad to sell on our own website.

What makes drop-shipping different is that we don't handle any of the products or keep any inventory. No rooms in our house or expensive warehouses are stuffed full of products and no way are we going to be queuing all day at the post office to send everything. For our business, the items will be sent directly to our customers.

Here’s the outline:

Customer visits your store and makes a purchase -> You order the item for your customer from the supplier -> Product is delivered directly to your customer from the supplier

This is why drop-shipping is so appealing; we are able to test potentially best selling products quickly without worry of being stuck with boxes of unwanted items as trends change (fidget spinners anyone?). With the distribution being handled for us, all you have to concentrate on is driving visitors to your store.

With the concept all drawn out, let’s put this into action; step-by-step

Setting up our Facebook page

First things first, we need to setup our Facebook page so we can run our adverts.

Click on Pages -> Create Page -> Brand or Product -> Website

Once you’ve decided on a name for your store, fill out some info for the about page, add a profile and cover photo, a link to your site and you’re done for now!

Sourcing our products

We need to find items to sell which are affordable, interesting and going to sell like hot cakes. Let’s look at one of the most popular vendors who are extremely easy to deal with.

Aliexpress

The home of pretty much anything you can possibly think of buying. Call it the Amazon of China. Just by having a quick look around, you will recognise plenty of the products and lots of potential for the next best seller. The only problem is the long shipping time, so make it clear to the customer that they need to be patient. Look for products which offer e-packet as a shipping option as this is the quickest, safest way to get items to the customer’s door.

When scoping out potential products, check the seller’s feedback rating and reviews carefully. Buyers are encouraged to leave honest feedback, so you will soon find out whether you are working with a reputable company or not.

Another bonus is that all items are insured. Should the item arrive broken or not at all, you are entitled to receive your money back or a replacement product.

Print on demand (POD)

If you prefer not to use Aliexpress to source your products, a popular alternative would be to sell printed products such as t-shirts, shoes, gym gear, swimwear and other items. These are typically manufactured closer to home and usually delivered in a much shorter timeframe.

The concept is the same, your shop is connected to the supplier via their Shopify app. All are very easy to upload your designs and use.

Here are some popular vendors if you prefer to base your business on POD products:

  • Printful
  • Teezily
  • Gear Bubble

-   Teespring

-   Viral Style

Quick note - Please only print original artwork or graphics you have permission to use. Many shops have been shut down due to copyright infringement. It’s not worth the risk!

Now that we have a source for our new best sellers, we need somewhere to sell them. Say hello to my favourite platform - Shopify.

Shopify

Easy to setup, a doddle to manage and very secure to use. Shopify also has Paypal and Stripe integration to make transactions a breeze. They also provide a fully featured free trial to get you going. When you sign up, don’t worry about the name of your domain as we will change it for a custom domain shortly.

General vs niche specific store

The discussion which never ends. In my view, unless you know a lot about the topic and are passionate about the theme and type of related products you can find, just stick to a general store. With a general store, you are also able to test a variety of different niche products at once to find a winner. Just create a new category for each niche; you can always specialise the products at a later date once you get traction.

Setting up shop - quickly

It’s very easy to spend a huge amount of time tweaking and perfecting your store, deciding colours, logos and layouts. However, we just want to open our store as quickly as possibly for now, so here is a quick checklist of things to do so we can start driving visitors to our doors.

  • Domain

A custom domain doesn't cost much and adds more credibility to your store. It also removes the ‘.myshopify’ part of the name in the url. It does have a small cost attached but it very much worth it. You can choose a new one by going to:

Online store -> Domains -> Buy New Domain

One you’ve purchased it, set your primary domain to the new one you have chosen.

  • Logo

A neat logo can tie things together nicely. A quick search for free logo designs can find you some good ones but If you decide to pay someone to create an original one for you, don’t go overboard. Your money is better spent on more adverts! Head over to Fiverr for something cheap and cheerful.

  • Images

A few good, themed images in a carousel helps to create the professional look we are after. Again, there are lots of royalty free sites to find images to use. Pexels is a great one.

  • Theme

Just like with Wordpress, there are many cool themes you can buy for your store. I highly recommend looking into them but for now the free ones will do just fine. The Brooklyn theme is one of my favourites; clean, modern, functional and mobile friendly.

Go to Online Store -> Themes -> Free Themes -> Brooklyn

  • Shipping

A little tricky to create but here’s a chart you can copy for your store. It includes shipping rules for two types of products.

Find it under Setting -> Shipping

Regular priced items - Just change the weight of the product to match the shipping cost you want to use e.g. 0.03lb item weight will result in a $6.95 shipping cost.

Free + shipping type offers - You advertise the product as free but then charge for shipping and handling. Change the product weight to 0.1lb for the item you wish to sell under these offers. It automatically accounts for multiple items added to the cart and also has a catch all incase someone decides to try and buy more than 10. You can add more to the chart and change the shipping costs accordingly.

If you wish to include free shipping for any item, just set the weight of the item to 0.0lb.

  • Apps

There is a huge marketplace for apps to do whatever you want with the store, from re-marketing, exit popups, email capture, coupon generators and many others. For now, we will only look at the two key apps we need to start our business.

Oberlo is our drop-shipping app of choice. It’s easy to use and includes a neat plugin so you can quickly see which products on Aliexpress offer e-packet shipping by the addition of a green or red indicator. A true time saver!

Oberlo does all the hard work for us, from importing products directly to Shopify (with the big teal tag button shown above), tracking inventory of our chosen suppliers to even ordering the items for us with the correct addresses and tracking codes.

BEST Currency Converter

Even if you target your adverts to a specific country, people like, comment and share your posts reaching many parts of the world. This currency converter app lets users select the currency of their choice with a handy drop down menu. Once chosen, all prices on your site are automatically converted for them. Winner.

  • Choose 10 products for the main page

The original description for each product you import into your store is pretty terrible and usually is just a list of facts and poor written features. This must be changed. Write something enticing, create a sense of urgency and a compelling reason to why they need to buy the product. Go to:

Products -> All Products -> Select One -> Change Title and Description

For each product, you need to change the weight to match what shipping costs you want according to the chart we saw earlier. Just scroll down on the product description page to find the Variants section. Click Edit and scroll to the bottom to change the product weight.

  • Legal requirements

Since we are handling payments and customers sensitive data, we are required to display pages about the terms of service, privacy policy and refund policy. Handily, Shopify does a lot of the work for us. Go to Settings -> Checkout scroll down and click Generate Sample to create these forms.

Next, add 3 pages to your store by going to Online Store -> Pages -> Add Page then copy and paste the generated samples from before into it’s own page. Feel free to add or tweak the info about shipping times or refund policies.

To display these pages on our site, we are going to add them to the footer, which is a neat way to show them. Go to:

Online Store -> Navigation -> Footer Menu -> Add Menu Item -> Select Required Page

  • Facebook pixel

This little bit of code is our life blood. Without this we are just guessing. It learns and grows with your store and if you follow the strategy below, it will start to do the hard work for you. Here’s how to set it up:

Facebook Business Account -> Select Pixels (Top left menu) -> Create Pixel -> Manually Install The Code Yourself -> Copy & Paste Code Into Your Store

To install the pixel on your Shopify store, go to Settings -> Checkout -> Scroll Down To Additional Scripts. Paste the code here all we are all set!

That’s pretty much everything we need to do to get started. Here’s a simple shop I quickly set up in the meditation / wellbeing niche for you to look at for some ideas:

https://www.mindful-store.com/

Finding great products

There’s no magic bullets here, it’s all about research then testing, testing and more testing. You'd be surprised at what has previously been my best sellers: fountain pens, firefighter key rings, cat socks, wooden watches, small jewellery with dolphins on them, bracelets, all items I wouldn’t have expected to do so well! So, let’s take a little guesswork out of things.

Let’s do a quick search using this operator: site:myshopify.com

This will pull up a load of results for shops using the Shopify platform. Go and look at some stores, get some ideas as to what products they are selling and note down anything of interest you can use with your store. 95% of the products you see can be found on Aliexpress.

Other ways of finding best sellers is to go to the suppliers themselves. Check out Aliexpress -> Bestselling -> Hot Products to see a real time updated list of best sellers by category. You can do a similar search with Amazon and eBay. Find and choose 10 interesting products for now so out store has a complete homepage, we can always add more later.

Facebook adverts and strategies

It’s about starting small and growing big. The strategy is to start by using $5 a day as our advertising budget. This will be the only cost involved for our store until our trial is up, which is not a lot to invest!

Choosing our audience

In order to make effective adverts, we need to select an appropriate audience. Let’s take the meditation niche from earlier; I would think about topics and hobbies which are associated such as yoga, mindfulness, minimalism, spirituality, buddhism etc. Facebook takes these interests and matches people with them. Come up with a few ideas of your own to match your chosen product to use shortly. Effective advertising comes down to putting the right product with the right message in front of the right person.

Creating our first advert

Facebook adverts aren’t as scary as they first appear; we are only investing $5 into the advert which will hopefully generate a couple of sales too! When you create an advert, there are a lot of options on offer but here are the key points to creating an effective first advert.

Facebook Business -> Ads Manager -> Create Ad -> Engagement -> Post Engagement (PPE)

On the next page is where we will use that list of interests you have come up with for your product. For the country, use your own or the USA, where e-packet shipping is supported. The age and gender should match your product. Are you selling jewellery for women? Drones? T-Shirts that say “I’m the best Grandpa" on it? Choose accordingly. Choose the language of your audience.

As we scroll down we see Detailed Targeting, this is where we put in our interests relevant to our product. Keep adding them until you have a sizeable audience of about 3 to 5 million. For example, I added a few to create an audience based on living off the grid / minimalism / renewable energy.

Carry on and we are asked for our advert placements. For most adverts you are going to choose mobile devices only and edit the placements so only in feed Facebook adverts are shown. De-select Instagram and Audience Network adverts.

On the next page select Create New Ad and Single Image. Use one of the Aliexpress product pictures unless you have your own to use. Select Shop Now as the call to action and link in the product url. Under Pixel Tracking, select the newly added pixel.

For the text, we want to come up with something that stops people from scrolling on their feed. It needs to be attention grabbing and create a sense of urgency. For example, phrases such as “limited stock” and “not found in stores” work well. “Tag a friend who would love one!” has worked well for me in the past. You are trying to get everyone to share your content. A huge bonus is that Facebook won’t charge you if someone is tagged and then sees the advert that way!

Starting with a PPE advert will give us the social proof and valuable data to teach our pixel. After a couple of days, we will have the evidence we need to see if the product has the potential to be a winner. You may get a few sales from these adverts, but it is not the true aim of the campaign.

If the product has been working well (check the relevancy score in the ad manager; 8-10 is ideal), it’s time to start moving onto different types of adverts.

Ad Strategy

When we are ready, we are going to duplicate the ad set and then create a new advert. The new advert will be virtually identical to the last one, but we are now going to start using the Facebook pixel to the fullest.

The new advert is going to be a Conversion type advert, with View Content (VC) as the conversion type. Let this run for a few days until you get about 10 sales or 100 clicks.

Then just as before, duplicate the ad set and create a Conversion advert with Add To Cart (ATC) as the conversion type. Let this run again for a week until you get 10 sales or 100 clicks.

Lastly, duplicate the ad set again and create a Purchase conversion type. Each step is to mature and grow our pixel to let Facebook find the perfect buyers for our product. It does require some good management of your adverts (label everything!) but this technique is effective and will reward you with lots of traffic to your store. Sometimes it’s worth running a ATC advert alongside your PPE one but it’s worth experimenting for yourself as everyone’s audience will have a different result.

Our first sale

Whether it takes you 30 minutes or a 30 days from launching your store, it’s a glorious moment to see everything coming together! Enjoy the buzz and use it as motivation to grow your new business. Now, we need to fulfil the order and keep everyone happy.

Thankfully, Oberlo will take care of the heavy lifting for us. Here’s how:

Apps -> Oberlo -> To Order -> Order Product

This initiates Oberlo to order the items from Aliexpress and fill in all of the required shipping information for us! Once processed, all the orders are synced to your Shopify dashboard with the tracking code when dispatched. A few clicks and it’s as easy as that! I would add a small note to the Aliexpress sellers in the message box, something along the lines of “this item is being drop-shipped. Please don’t include any paperwork such as receipts or promotional material. Thank you” as sometimes you get little adverts thrown into the package.

Scaling and Growing

Now that we have a store, been testing a number of products (2 to 3 a day) and making some sales, it’s time to move into the big leagues.

Adverts

Winning adverts are the ones which have a high relevancy score and are generating you sales. Take these winners and duplicate the advert. With the new advert, slowly start to increase the budget. Here’s a rough daily increase - $5 / $8 / $12 / $20 / $30 etc. We scale slowly as this has shown to be more effective at keeping the Facebook pixel happy than a sudden dramatic increase.

Create a lookalike audience

Here is the big secret to getting great results with Facebook and the whole reason why we spent the time and money to feed the beast properly. We are going to get Facebook to work for us.

We are going to click Create New -> Lookalike Audience (in the dropdown menu) when creating a new advert.

With the next box that pops up, select the source as your Custom Audience you made previously and use 1% as the audience size for now. Once created, continue creating your advert using this new audience. Experiment with audience size as to suit the target country and niche.

Why this is a powerful tool is that Facebook takes the data we have given it previously (running the different advert types step by step) and extrapolates the positive results to find people who have same online characteristics as our buyers, to then show these new people your advert. Clever stuff!

Re-marketing

It usually takes a few attempts at demonstrating a product to convince someone to part with their money. Sometimes, visitors are on the verge of buying then something happens; they get a phone call, they were browsing your store during work and the boss walks by, whatever it is, we want another go at selling to them.

They already visited your store once before, so chances are they are already interested in what you offer. That’s why re-marketing is so effective. So, what is it?

We’ve all experienced it. We browse a website then for the next few days we see adverts from them everywhere - When watching Youtube videos, browsing Facebook, in our Instagram; we can’t avoid it. That is re-marketing - being shown the same or similar product multiple times, usually with another offer to tempt us into buying.

Yes, it can be annoying. Yes, we are using the same strategy. Yes, it works very well.

Remember our handy Facebook pixel we installed earlier? Well we’re going to put it to even more good use. Hop into the Pixels section of Facebook Business. Click Create Audience on the top left to create a custom audience. Select All Website Visitors and choose 180 days.

Now that we have created this audience, let’s create a new advert and select this new re-targeting group as our custom audience.

Create Ad -> Audience -> Create New -> Custom Audiences -> Your New Group

As we are only showing this advert to people who have already visited the site, this time we will create a new draw with our text, for example “forgetting something? Here’s a 20% off voucher for your next visit!” or “Stocks are running very low, don’t miss out!” A sense of urgency or irresistible offer works well.

You can apply the same technique to aim at visitors to put an item into their cart then left too, as shown above. Abandoned cart recovery is one of the biggest ways to get those sales up!

Summing up

If you’ve made it this far and followed all of the steps, you should be well on your way to creating a profitable store for the long-term. There’s a lot more you can do to get more from your store and money such as:

  • Experimenting with video adverts (which convert very well)
  • Testing 2-3 different products daily
  • Split testing our existing adverts
  • Trying different Facebook audiences
  • Installing re-targeting and exit pop-up apps
  • Adding more trust elements to your store
  • Create a stronger sense of urgency - countdown timers or limited stock counters
  • Email marketing

However it’s important when starting off to take action, continue testing products and keep your customers happy. Don’t get stuck with technicalities and details and keep moving forward. Here’s to your success in your new online business!