What is dropshipping?
In a dropshipping business model, you promote physical products from a 3rd party supplier on an online storefront. When a customer places an order, you send the order to the supplier who handles the fulfillment process. As a result, there are virtually no overhead costs. Your profit is the difference between the price you set on your storefront and the price the supplier charges you.
Overview
Dropshipping all boils down to finding a great product, building a great store and then creating great ads. If you are not generating sales it means one or more of these areas is lacking, so keep iterating until you are.
As a result, we’ve split this guide into 3 sections:
- Product research
- Store setup
- TikTok Ads
But before we begin, go and start your free 14-day Shopify trial (No card details required) as this is what we will be building everything on - https://www.shopify.com/free-trial
Product Research
First, let’s talk basics!
What's a great dropshipping product?
- A 3x minimum Markup (eg buy for $3, sell for $9+)
- It addresses a real customer need or hype
- Its appeal is broad enough to target a large market
- It is small enough to easily make videos with
Here's an example of a great product:
- You can realistically sell this product for $60+. As the total dropshipping price is $19.60, it meets the 3x markup criteria.
- Women spend a lot of time and energy curling their hair. This product makes it easy for a cheap price - so it addresses a real customer need.
- A large number of women curl their hair, so this appeals to a mass market (~50% of the population).
- It is no bigger than a bottle, making it very easy to film with.
How to find a great product to sell
Method 1:
- Minea is a great tool which analyses other peoples existing ads, shows you which are performing best, and even gives you what it thinks to be the best products currently out there.
- A great way to find products is just to look through their analysis. You can even reverse search their online stores to find the product supplier for yourself.
Method 2:
- TikTok creative centre is a great free tool. All you need to do is signup to TikTok business with your email and you are shown the page below.
How to find a product supplier
Starting out:
- CJ dropshipping is the best place to start finding suppliers.
- Just search for the product you are trying to find and check the dropshipping price (total price, incl shipping, to send the product to the specified area)
- If this price meets the 3x min markup criteria, congrats you’ve found your supplier.
- The best thing about CJ dropshipping is it integrates with shopify so you can import the product listing into your store and start selling straight away.
- Zendrop is another great alternative to CJ dropshipping
The walkthrough videos below will show you exactly what to do.
Store setup
Earlier you signed up for a Shopify free trial - this actually creates a website for you.
Once you found your product, the videos above should have also shown you how to import them to your website.
All of your websites infrastructure is now in place to start selling, the only thing left to do is to make it look good:
Store Optimisation
There are likely tens, if not hundreds of online stores selling exactly the same product as you. This is great as it builds awareness of the product, but it also means there is a lot of competition. As such, you need to do everything you can to make your store feel as trustworthy as possible and ultimately convince the customer that you are the MAIN/Original seller of the product. There are a number of ways to do this:
- Improve your store design
- Improve your stores copy
- Import reviews
- Upload better product photos/videos
- Put in place a great returns policy
Go-to-market with TikTok Ads
This stage is also known as product testing. Essentially you create/source loads of content around your product and then use it to run ads to your store.
Using specific criteria, you can assess the likelihood of your product/store being a success and then decide whether to scale up, retest or scrap the product before moving onto the next.
The video below outlines all of the required steps to start promoting your store and scaling for success with TikTok Ads.
Closing thoughts
Dropshipping is all about finding products that people want to buy and then scaling up. People’s tastes, trends, likes and dislikes change more frequently now than ever and the dropshipping landscape reflects this; products move in and out of success, giving short windows of opportunity for you to capitalise.
This guide has given you the framework to test products. All that’s left to do is to get testing. The more you test, the more likely you are to tap into one of these windows of opportunity and see phenomenal results like Sebastian Esqueda as mentioned at the start.
It is not uncommon for someone to test 20-30 products before seeing serious results. Don’t give up when the first few products don’t succeed. Dropshipping is a skill like any other and one that can yield some great returns.