Hi I’m Praneeth Kumar.
Here is a step-by-step and detailed guide on how to start a dropshipping business for free in 2021 and beyond.
In the complete process of starting and running a dropshipping business you don’t have to invest even a single penny on this project for some time,
So without further ado let’s get started.
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How to start Dropshipping for free?
There are five important steps you need to take in order to start and run a dropshipping business for free in 2021.
Let’s take a look at those Strategies and steps in detail.
Let’s dive right in.
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Select a Niche market.
The most important step of starting a dropshipping business or any other online business in general like blogging and affiliate marketing is to select a topic/niche on which you target and market.
There are lots of things you can consider while selecting a topic or niche for your dropshipping business like,
- You can choose any specific demographic of your audience.
- You can choose or niche down the age and gender of your niche and target audience.
- You can choose and decide the characteristics of your target audience like their likes, employment status, and their pains in their life.
But above all the factors, you should be highly interested in selling the product to your audience on your website because if you are not interested then it becomes quite hard to continue dropshipping because,
you will have to put a lot of effort and time to make your business successful in such a highly competitive industry.
By selecting a highly targeted audience for your dropshipping business you can increase the conversion rates and build the trust and credibility of your online store with your audience faster.
Another benefit of choosing such a targeted niche is competition is going to be relatively low for you to succeed compared to other topics.
And as your dropshipping business grows by time you can eventually target the larger group of audience.
You need to decide what is the important problem that your audience is facing and what is the right product that can solve your audience problem.
While deciding the product make sure that you follow things below,
- While deciding and finalising a product for your dropshipping business make sure that you get high margins through the sales of the product, you can do this by using products which have higher price so that you can get better margins.
- You should also make sure that the product has low shipping costs in order to maximize the sales by offering free shipping charges.
- Also make sure that the product you choose is not complex and complicated, they must be used in daily life and must appeal to impulse buyers.
Another important thing to remember is that make sure that your target audience is searching for the product or trying to solve the problem on search engines like Google and
you can use tools like Google trends to find the trend of the topic on the internet to decide whether or not you should select the topic/niche for your dropshipping business.
Apart from this you can also search for different topics in keyword tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs to identify their estimated search volume and you can also see your potential competitors through this strategy, you can analyse their products to finalize which products you should start selling on your store.
Here is a list of some of the popular products you can sell with your dropshipping business;
- Head scarf.
- Fashion clothes and beauty products.
- Men watches.
- Sweeping machines and other cleaning equipments.
- Mobile phone cases and accessories.
Amazon is the largest E-Commerce giant so you can search for what products are trending in different categories in the best sellers of Amazon stores which gives you more ideas on what type of products you can start selling.
These are all the things you need to know in order to select a niche for your dropshipping business.
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Choose a Supplier.
Now that you have decided the target niche and audience for your dropshipping business you need to now find and select a good supplier for your product so that you can start the business.
Your supplier is the most important person in your dropshipping business because he is going to take care of the important tasks of your business like,
- Product shipping and delivery.
- Product quality, refund and maintenance.
- Your profits.
Because your supplier is the most important person in your business model, you should be very careful in selecting the supplier for your business,
There are various qualities you check in your suppliers like,
- How do they handle the actual customer support?
- What are the real customers reviews and ratings?
- How is their product shipping and delivery?
Make sure that you select a trustworthy and reliable supplier because your entire business is based upon him.
You should have a good communication, partnership and good relationship with each other.
If you are confused in deciding which supplier you should choose for your business then what you can do is to order a sample product to your address from the suppliers and check the following factors of their deliveries like,
- Their delivery time accuracy.
- Their products packaging style and shipping costs.
- Their products maintenance and Quality.
- Do they offer any frauds protection.
You should place and think of yourself as a potential customer of your business and feel how your customers will think when they purchase the product and get it from you, this will help you in deciding which supplier you should choose for your dropshipping business.
You can refer this guide to learn more about how to find a dropshipping supplier in detail.
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Create an online Store.
Your online eCommerce store is going to be the biggest asset of your business and through this ECommerce store you can promote different types of products online and build a brand.
This is where you will have to probably invest money even either today or in the upcoming future in this dropshipping business,
But currently we are only focusing on creating a dropshipping business for absolutely free so let’s look at some options for doing that,
There are many platforms and websites which offer you a free trial and a free plan to create an online eCommerce store and some of them are,
- You can start building an eCommerce Store on wix free plan.
- You can start building an eCommerce Store on shopify 14 day free trial and even extend the trial by talking to the shopify support if you can.
- You can also start building E-Commerce Store on free plan of Ecwid.
For now, because you are starting an e-commerce store for free it is highly recommended to begin with shopify because it also offers a free trial of 14 days.
You can click here to learn step by step on how to create a shopify store.
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Do the Marketing.
Your marketing strategy is the most important part of your dropshipping business success and failure,
Look you must understand the basics that all you’re trying to do is to get people to your website so that they can buy products from your store and that is how you make money.
In order to drive traffic to your website and make people to purchase on your store you need to first build the trust and credibility of your store with people online.
To say in other words you should build a brand of your online store, the best way to build a brand is by increasing the visibility of your online store on the internet to your audience.
If you can invest money you should definitely invest money in different marketing strategies like,
- You should run Facebook, Instagram, linkedin, Pinterest marketing ad campaigns of your products which depend upon the pay-per-click model.
- You can write and publish blog posts on your website related to your niche to drive traffic from search engines and you can redirect the search engine traffic to your online store.
- You can also pay many influencers to promote your products on their social media platforms.
Because we are trying to start a dropshipping business with no money in hand to invest in marketing strategies,
The best form of marketing strategy at no cost is by doing the following things,
- Influencer affiliate marketing-you can partner with relevant influencers on Instagram and Facebook and ask them to share your products and promote them on their social media channels and give your website link in their profile description & whenever people buy products from their referral code, you give them a commission of money and any bonus, this creates a Win-Win situation for both of you and influencers and helps you build a brand.
- Social media marketing- you can start your own business social media profiles on different platforms like Facebook Instagram and Pinterest and upload content, testimonials, reviews related to your product on these platforms and build brand awareness, you can use graphic design tools like canva to edit content like pics and posts before you publish on these platforms like making beautiful graphics, you can read canva review here.
- Content marketing- you can also create and publish blog posts on your online store and drive traffic from search engines which you can later redirect to your online store, this will also give your customers a reason to stay engaged on your website other than buying or browsing for products.
These are some of the popular ways you can do the marketing of your online store for free.
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Analyse and optimize your store.
Now most of your work in Creating your dropshipping business is almost completed, it’s time to analyse and optimise your online store according to your data and analytics.
After you have some traffic coming into your store and get some data to your store through different tools like Google Analytics and Google search console, you can start analysing your data and see how things are working.
This data can help you figure out a lot of things like,
- It can help you decide the pricing of products.
- It will help you know what type of products you should promote more over others.
- It will give you a heat map of your website to make necessary changes in the website design and improve User experience.
With proper analysis you can increase the sales of your business and get more income.
Important note;
Even though I have shown you the exact process you can use to start dropshipping business for absolutely free of cost and make money but because dropshipping is one of the highly competitive businesses and it is an online business so like any other business you need to invest money before you expect to make money from it so,
even though if you start a dropshipping business without investing any money,
you will have to spend money in creating your eCommerce Store or in store hosting and other important places like buying domain name and investing in marketing of your online store through,
paid advertisements on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest to build a brand.
If you are not willing to spend money or not willing to take even a little bit of risk and stay consistent with the project you should probably not start the dropshipping business because,
it is not meant for people like you, dropshipping is just a business and treat it like one, you cannot escape from investing money if you want to make money from the business in the long term.
With that being said let’s conclude the blog post.
Ending remarks;
There you go these are all the things you need to know on how to start dropshipping for free in 2021.
Do comment down what do you think about dropshipping and whether or not you are starting the Drop shipping business.
Share the blog post with your family and friends to let them know how they can start any online business like dropshipping for absolutely free of cost and make money.
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I will catch you next time till then keep learning and keep growing.