Shopify Dropshipping — How To Do It Right!

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In this simple guide to Shopify dropshipping, I’m going to explain how dropshipping on Shopify works, the best way to get started with it and the key pitfalls to avoid.

Let’s start with a brief overview of what dropshipping is.

Dropshipping: a quick overview

Dropshipping is an ecommerce model where you don’t manufacture, purchase, store or deliver any of products you sell. Instead, you take orders for products via an online store, and pass them onto a supplier. The supplier then charges you, and delivers the products to the customer.

But how does all this work when you’re using Shopify?

How dropshipping on Shopify works

Given that Shopify is fairly synonymous with dropshipping these days, you might be thinking that dropshipping with the platform is simply a matter of creating a Shopify account and listing some products on your store.

It’s not quite that simple, though.

First, Shopify doesn’t actually give you any dropshipping features straight out of the box — in order to dropship with the platform, you’ll need to connect it to third-party tools (more on this shortly).

Second, to dropship effectively with Shopify, you’ll need to give a lot of thought to finding a profitable niche to sell products in, and marketing your store once it’s live.

To start a successful dropshipping business on Shopify, you need to do four key things:

Let’s look at these steps in turn.

1. Get a Shopify account

The first thing you need to do to start dropshipping is get your hands on a Shopify account.

Once you’ve set up your Shopify account, it’s time to think about what you’re going to dropship (and to who!).

This is where finding your niche comes in — so let’s take a look at that.

2. Find a niche

No business becomes a success unless it successfully manages to tap into the right niche — and dropshipping on Shopify is no exception.

If you pick a really saturated niche to sell products in, you’ll find yourself competing with a huge range of established dropshippers selling the same items as you (and possibly cheaper, too).

There are three main ways to identify a good niche to dropship in:

Let’s drill down into each of these.

Keyword research

As its name suggests, keyword research helps you understand what people are searching for on the Internet — and how hard it will be to rank highly in search results for the phrases that they’re using to do so.

Keyword research also gives you a great way to identify potentially profitable niches. If you find out that a lot of people are searching for a particular product each month, but that it’s going to be relatively easy to get your store to the top of the search results for that item, then happy days — you’ve just found a niche.

But how do you actually do keyword research?

Well, it involves a three-step process:

Once you have this data you can then make a decision as to what keywords — and by extension inventory — are going to work best for your dropshipping business, and optimize your online store’s content for the relevant phrases.

To get the data necessary for keyword research, you’ll need a dedicated SEO tool like Ahrefs or Semrush.

To understand how all this works, take a look at the video below — it walks you through the basic process. You can also read our keyword research guide.

Google Trends

Another way of identifying potentially lucrative dropshipping niches involves using the free Google Trends service.

Google Trends analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages, and then displays charts showing the search volumes for these queries over time.

There are two main ways to use Google Trends to identify niches: first, you can enter phrases into the tool and see how popular they are (and how popular they’ve been over time).

A ‘related topics’ list underneath the main Google Trends graph helps you identify phrases and products that you might not have considered concentrating on initially.

The key thing to watch out for when using Google Trends is not to be sucked into starting a dropshipping business on the basis of a product search that’s trending right now, but might not realistically do so in future.

Think about the fidget spinner craze back in 2017. As the spike in the Google Trends graph below shows, this amounted to a one-off explosion in popularity of an item that wasn’t at all essential to everyday existence — and for which there wouldn’t necessarily be long-term demand.

So, when using Google Trends data to identify your niche, always look at the past performance of a particular product search phrase (was there demand for the product before a craze started?) and ask yourself if the product is something that fulfils a genuine need, even when the craze is over.

Ultimately, the best business ideas tend to be those that solve a problem — for it to work well in practice, your dropshipping business concept should too!

Advertising data

Now, unless you are very lucky — and very good at SEO — it’s unlikely that a brand new dropshipping store is going to rank highly in search results particularly quickly. You’ll need to show adverts to potential customers that encourage them to buy your dropshipped products.

This is where the advertising data comes in — it tells you how big the audiences for particular products are likely to be, and how expensive it will be to display ads to these audiences.

When it comes to online ads, there are a lot of services out there that can be used to promote products. However, the two that most new dropshippers gravitate towards are Google Ads and Facebook Ads.

There are two main reasons for this.

First, they have a huge reach. They both let you put your products in front of huge audiences, and relatively easily too.

Second, they give you access to a vast amount of data that you can use to find niches and plan campaigns.

Google ads

With Google Ads, you get access to a keyword planner — this shows you how many people are searching for particular phrases, and how much it is likely to cost to bid on each one. It also shows you the search trends of the keywords you’re considering.

Significantly, it also gives you a list of really useful keyword ideas — and these can help you with niche selection.

Facebook ads

With Facebook Ads, you’re not dealing with particular search phrases but interests — you’ll be advertising your products to people who have indicated to Facebook in one way or another that they like particular items or brands.

Facebook gives you a tool, ‘Audience Insights,’ that lets you learn more about its userbase.

Using this tool, you can explore…

…and more besides.

The Audience Insights tool won’t give you data on how much it will cost to advertize to particular groups on Facebook (to get this, you’ll have to run some test ads).

But it will definitely tell you if there’s likely to be demand for your products amongst a Facebook audience.

Once you’ve identified your niche, and decided what sort of products you’d like to sell online, it’s time to find a supplier. This involves installing a dropshipping app.

So, let’s go through doing that.

3. Add a dropshipping app to your Shopify store

As mentioned earlier, you can’t dropship ‘out of the box’ with Shopify — there’s no built-in dropshipping tool available from the platform that lets you source products or pass orders onto anybody for fulfilment.

Instead, you have to work with a dropshipping supplier.

Now, you could just find your own supplier, get some product photos and details from them, put these on your store and then email any orders onto them for fulfilment.

This approach is fine, but it involves a fair bit of admin work, which in turn makes it harder to scale up your dropshipping business.

Accordingly, most Shopify dropshippers turn to a dropshipping app to do the heavy lifting.

Dropshipping apps simplify the whole process by:

There are loads of Shopify dropshipping apps available, and you can access all these in the Shopify app store.

Now, given the quantity of dropshipping apps available (around 640 at time of writing) it can be quite hard to choose which ones to use!

But a couple of particularly popular apps worth highlighting are DSers and Spocket — these two apps are commonly used in conjuction with a lot of ecommerce platforms in general, not just Shopify, and they let you dropship a vast range of products (including via the online retail giant Ali Express).

If you’re interested in print-on-demand dropshipping — which lets you add your own custom designs to products — Printful and Printify are popular, well-established solutions for this.

When choosing a dropshipping app there are some key things to watch out for, however.

You should try to ensure that…

Dropshipping apps on Shopify come with a ‘support’ section where you’ll find contact details and FAQ. You can use both to perform due diligence on app suppliers.

Once you’ve installed a dropshipping app, you can now select the products you’d like to sell on your ecommerce store; obviously, what you list on your store should reflect the niche you picked earlier.

The exact process for adding products and managing inventory will vary depending on the dropshipping app involved. However, using most dropshipping apps involves a process in which you:

When you’re finished adding products, it’s time to market your dropshipping store.

Let’s move onto that.

4. Market your Shopify dropshipping store

At this point you’ve got your Shopify account, found your niche and have added all your products.

But unless you have a strong marketing plan in place, your lovely new ecommerce business isn’t going to make any sales.

(Not good!).

There are four things that you’ll typically need to focus on to make a success of a Shopify dropshipping store:

Let’s take a quick look at each.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO may sound scary, but it’s actually easier than you might think, and there are lots of resources available online to help you with it.

For a basic understanding of Shopify SEO, I recommend that you watch the below video, and read our Shopify SEO guide — these two resources will give you a good understanding of the key SEO steps you’ll need to take to get a new Shopify store ranking in search results.

Content marketing

As its name suggests, content marketing is a way of using your content (typically blog posts) to attract visitors to your site. If your content is strong enough, it’s likely to rank highly in search results, and if it’s trustworthy and informative enough, it’s likely to encourage people to buy from you.

The sort of content that performs well here isn’t really sales pitches or product information, though — think instead of informative blog posts, how-to-guides, tips and advice, best-of roundups and so on.

Stuff that engages, basically.

Online advertising

While you can technically perform SEO and content marketing for free, online advertising always involves an investment.

However, the good news is that this investment can be small to begin with — the trick with online advertising is to spend small sums of money on test adverts, see which ads are delivering a return on investment (ROI) and then invest in these more heavily.

There are lots of platforms that let you run ads online, but Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok end up being the starting point for many dropshippers. They are easy enough to use and command huge audiences (there are also lots of resources available online to help merchants make the most of them).

For help getting started with these platforms, check out the below resources:

Email marketing

Email marketing is a hugely effective way to generate sales (especially repeat sales). Newsletters let you place your latest products right in front of the people that are most likely to buy from you, and have a really great ROI.

Using email marketing to promote a new dropshipping store is tricky however — because you won’t have an existing mailing list to send any newsletters to!

But it’s still worth spending time on developing an email marketing strategy. There are two key ways to build an email marketing list:

If you can build a large, high-quality email list, you’ll find that promoting new product ranges and making sales becomes considerably easier over time.

You can also use this mailing list to promote any new videos or posts that you produce as part of your content marketing strategy.

For more information on creating a successful email marketing strategy, check out our guide to e-newsletters and email marketing.

To learn more about advanced applications of email marketing, our guide to email automation is worth investigating.

Shopify dropshipping — further reading and resources

I hope you’ve found our guide to Shopify dropshipping helpful!

If you’d like to start dropshipping with the platform, a reminder that you can access a special extended version of its trial here.

For more information about dropshipping in general, check out our ‘What is Dropshipping?‘ and our ‘Dropshipping pros and cons‘ guides.

If you’re interested in setting up a print-on-demand business, make sure you check out our ‘What is Printful?’ article, our post on how to connect Printful to Shopify and our Shopify print on demand guide.

You may also find our post containing 25 ideas for a Shopify side hustle useful.

And finally, if you have any queries about setting up a Shopify dropshipping business, please let us know in the comments section below! We read them all and will do our best to help.

Good luck building your dropshipping business 🙂