Hello entrepreneurs! Are you ready to make that dream come true? Follow this easy steps to setup your shopify store for dropshipping, this is really a life and pocket changer.
Welcome! Lucky you! It’s time to make that dream come true! Yes, you’ve really been dreaming of having your dream Shopify dropshipping store, you’ve yearned for it so hard and can’t actually wait to start making those cool cash you’ve always wanted, and now I tell you that it’s finally time to make this dream come true!
With these Easy Steps to Setup your Shopify Store for dropshipping! Your dreams are ready to be fulfilled! You will learn the very basics of setting up your Shopify Store for dropshipping using the best options and guide which have been well tested and recommended, this easy steps to set up your Shopify store for dropshipping will give you best results and conversions, all you have to do is to follow it up to the end line by line.
WHAT IS SHOPIFY?
Before diving deeply into the topic of the easy steps to setup your Shopify store, let’s briefly talk about Shopify and how it works with dropshipping. Shopify is a subscription eCommerce platform that allows you to set up your online eCommerce store by providing you with all the best, simplest to use, and navigate available features.
Shopify allows you to access the admin panel of your store, where you can add in items, check and track orders. Shopify has available different plans which you can choose from based on the scope of your business. The most interesting feature is that Shopify gives its customers an opportunity to test them free for 14days whereby you can create the store and even make sales before choosing a desired plan of yours. Check out Shopify plans here.
WHAT IS DROPSHIPPING?
For complete details on dropshipping, check out this post on HOW TO START DROPSHIPPING WITHOUT CASH!
If you already know, you can just skip to the main topic.
Dropshipping is an online eCommerce system whereby the dropshipper sells products to consumers but the dropshipper does not have an inventory or stocks of goods, instead, the merchandise or supplier is the one who actually dropships the products.
So all the functions of the dropshipper and dropshipping are summarized here:
- The dropshipper owns an online store, where he displays his products for sale but he doesn’t have this product or an inventory
- A customer places an order on the site and the dropshipper places the same order directly to the dropshipping supplier or merchant using some tools e.g oberlo, dropfied, alidropship, and so on.
- After the order is been placed by the dropshipper, the merchant or supplier is the one to handle the rest. So this literally means, you are the one who will just take order request and send it to your desired supplier who handles and process the actual order.
- Then the products get to your customer without you even seeing or placing your hands on it.
Cool, it is right? Yes! Very simple and profitable! You may be wondering if your customer won’t know that the goods were dropshipped or that it was from the supplier, well it’s very simple, all you need to do is to make sure that the supplier you’re working with allows dropshipping service.
Alright, Lets’ now get down to business!
The Easy steps to Setup Your Shopify Store for dropshipping
Now that you’ve decided on having your own online eCommerce store for dropshipping, we need to get some certain things right by reshaping our thinking and understanding. Truly, dropshipping is really profitable and can actually change one’s pocket and life, but it still requires your total effort, commitment, and willingness to put in all your best.
Many folks out there may cling to the notion that dropshipping can make you rich in few hours or few days, but I tell you, nothing good comes easy without putting in true efforts, mind and soul.
Before we would start with the easy steps to setup your shopify store, we would advise you take a look at these tips as they are like guidelines to setting up any eCommerce store:
1. Learn Tips and tricks by studying other successful dropshipping stores
Learning is not limited to anybody or any place and no man is an island of knowledge, we all need to keep learning in order to be informed and also to keep that uniqueness in us. A very good tip to start with is learning some business strategies from successful dropshipping stores out there. A quick study of some of these stores may inspire you with lots of tips and tricks you can implement to bring out that uniqueness in you.
2. Pick up a Unique Niche of your Own
What is a niche? In simplest terms, a niche may be referred to as an area of interest. When starting up a business generally, be it online or offline, it is advisable to pick up a niche, an area which you so much have an interest in and can really work with passion.
Many entrepreneurs and dropshippers are most times discouraged about their businesses because they get fed up in the journey of their business, why? the most reason is that they picked the wrong niche! Some are like generalists (those who want to sell or do everything) while some are like specialists (those who specialize on a particular product or service), having this in mind, they sometimes have drawbacks because they picked the wrong niche, the wrong area of interest.
For example, if you ate technology, then you won’t go for tech stuff as your niche, why? these would give you hard times in
- Interacting with your customers
- Writing out letters or replies for orders
- Problems in writing good and detailed descriptions/information about products
3. Craft out an eye-catchy name for your store and get a domain name
Your uniqueness is all that matters! Think deeply like a pro and craft out that beautiful, captivating, and unique name for your store. After this, proceed to register it as a domain name for your store, so this may require you to check the availability of this domain name. You can get tips and suggestions on available domain names using these tools:
After you’ve successfully chosen your desired domain name for your store, then you proceed to register this domain name. To register your domain name, I would recommend a very popular, cheap and secure service you can use to register your domain name.
NameCheap
Namecheap as its name implies is a widely known domain name registrar based in Arizona, United States. Namecheap. Namecheap is very secure and affordable for everyone. Their annual pricing for domain is actually $8.889 dollars per annum for .com domains.
4. Create a Business Email address for your store
Since we mean business, then all of our services need to be official, formal and business inclined. So you would need to have a business mail with mostly your domain name attached to it. There are some tools for create a business name that I can recommend for you. Try Zoho mail. This is a free business email service provider which gives you a free business mail for your store, for example: top-picks@your-store-name.com.
5. Start sourcing your products
Since in dropshipping you don’t have an inventory or a warehouse, instead, you transfer customers’ order to your preferred supplier, in respect to setting up your Shopify store, you would need to get your ready a source (a supplier) that supports dropshipping for supplying your products in which you can as well import and display them on your online store.
Below is a list of popular sources for dropshipping:
- AliExpress
- Spocket
- SaleHoo
6. Research Your product
For every product you intend on selling on your store, it is advisable to do some product research, this would harness you the opportunity to get enough information about the products such as: if the product is actually solving any problem, customer’s review on the product, number of engagements the product has had with customers.
Apart from the above options, doing product research would give you quick insight and analysis if the said product would move in the market, with metrics of how well will it convert?
There are two ways you can research a product before selling
- Research on google
- Use paid product research tools
You can check out these posts on:
Strategies to find the top winning products
7. Find and Engage with the best supplier
Your business is your integrity and your integrity is your business. Since you’re dropshipping you would need to find and engage with a trustworthy supplier, you wouldn’t want to sell fake or retarded quality products to your customers, also you wouldn’t want to delay the fulfillment of their orders. So you need to get a supplier who is diligent, trustworthy, and supportive. I’ve got a concise post available on this!
Check it out! How to find a trustworthy supplier for dropshipping
Alright! Having gotten the above tips, it’s time to follow the easy steps to setup your Shopify store for dropshipping!
We shall be following these outlines as a guide to the easy steps to setup your Shopify store for dropshipping
- Startup your store with a free Shopify trial
- Start to add in products, product’s picture and prices for selling
- Customize your store’s appearance by selecting your preferred theme
- Add in product’s collection
- Start to add in important pages to your store
- Setup the constraints for your shipping
- Connect and setup your payment gateways
- Get ready to launch and go live
- Go live with your store! (Launch)
1. Startup your store with a free Shopify trial
One of the interesting things about Shopify is that it allows you to try its service free for 14days especially when you don’t have enough cash for the store yet or perhaps you just want to set it up first for later use before choosing your preferred plan. Whichever the case may be, it is simply an advantage you can take hold of.
If you’re completely ready to have your Shopify store, you can check out their available plan and select your preferred choice all based on your budget and preferred features.
On the signup page for the free Shopify trial, you would be given a form to fill in some details and after when you’ve finished signing up, then your Shopify account with your store is ready!
Before proceeding to the next step, be sure to remember the business tip and guide stated earlier, since you’re planning on setting out your professional store.
2. Start to add in products for selling
The next step is to start adding products to your store. Your Shopify store is simply useless without products in it simply because it was because you wanted to sell to customers that was why you opened an eCommerce store.
To add products to your store, navigate to the side of the page and you will see products, click on it then click on add products.
Show your product’s title and description
The product’s page contains the project’s title and description where customers see the vital information about a product. This points to the customer all the necessary details of a product such as sizes, variations, quantities available, and so on. It is a good practice to add a concise product’s title and description.
Product title: The Title of your product should be clear and precise. This is very vital as it is what customers will see and what they would hold on to. Ensure your product’s title is short and then you can more details on the product’s descriptions.
Product descriptions: Without the product’s descriptions, a product detail is not complete, it is in the product’s description one can give the customer a clear picture of what they are buying or intended to buy.
- Be clear and honest
- Make your description simple and easy to understand
- Avoid the use of unnecessary words
- In your description, ensure the descriptions are able to answer some anticipated questions from the customers
Product’s Images
On the product’s page, there you will find the media section where you can upload the pictures of your products. Without a doubt, most customers would not want to purchase a product without seeing what they want to buy.
Product’s image and presentation helps you make the customer have a feeling of confidence in what they want they want to purchase.
- Use high-quality photos that put your products in the best light. Avoid blurry or low-resolution images.
- Try to maintain the same aspect ratio (i.e. the ratio between the width and height) across your product photos so that all your photos appear the same size. This consistency creates a cleaner, more professional appearance for your store.
- On every product you upload, there is an option where you can adjust the format of the pictures you upload, you can resize, you can add captions
Set prices for your products
The price section is where you put in the prices of the products you add, here the customer would be able to see the prices and as well proceed to make purchases according to the prices on the goods.
3. Customize the appearance your online store
The next step is to customize the appearance of your store. Your store needs a unique design for the customer’s experience and feel. The simpler and user-friendly the theme for your store is would determine the easy navigation of your theme.
Choosing a theme
On the admin panel or dashboard, you can choose a theme template or design you wish for your store. Shopify has both free and paid themes which you can implement for your store, you can choose based on the features you’re looking for.
Based on the size of your store, on the Shopify store where you can select your preferred theme, some theme designs were made for the larger sized stores where you can have large product listings, why others are for small stores with single products.
Here are some key points to consider when choosing the perfect theme:
- Each theme comes with multiple styles, so be sure to shop around for a theme and style based on how large your product catalog will be and the kind of aesthetic you want for your store.
- Consider whether the theme you’re looking at has any built-in features you need, like a search bar that auto-completes queries or a section that displays press mentions. Keep in mind that you can also find free and paid Shopify apps that add additional functionality to your store.
- Don’t pick a theme based on colors or fonts. These are all things you can customize later. You can even make your theme truly unique by hiring a Shopify Expert to customize it for you.
- You can try out and a paid theme before you purchase it for a one-time fee.
- Above all, keep in mind that you are not stuck with the theme you pick. If you change your mind later, you can preview other themes, install them in your current store, and customize them without having to recreate your products or pages.
4. Add in product collections
The products’ collection section is very vital to group items with similar features e.g. products for children, products for infants, products for females, fashion products etc. You can access and add-in products under Product > Collections in Shopify.
5. Start to add in important pages to your store
Your online store also needs to have important pages so as to help your customers understand your business, build trust and integrity. You can create pages for your pages here under the Online Store > Pages.
Some of the important pages you may need to get ready are:
- Contact page. The contact page is essential to provide the customers a way to reach you in case of questions or further information on a product or your store generally.
- About page. The about page is majorly used to present to the customers, the main aim, goal, and objectives of your business, it provides a clear picture of the business.
- FAQ page. The FAQ page is the frequently asked page, this page is used to predict some of the questions the customers might ask or want to ask.
- Policy pages. There are certain legal pages customers expect and that can help protect you in case of disputes, such as your return policy and privacy policy, that you can set up under Settings > Legal.
For our store, and for the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll go over how to create an About page (called “Our Story”) a Contact page, and essential policy pages (Privacy Policy, Shipping Policy, and Terms of Service), but you can create whatever pages you think will help you earn your customer’s trust.
About page
The About pages is a perfect way in small businesses to plant in trust in the lives of your customers.
There are different ways you may want to tell them about yourselves, the about page is perfect for this job. You could choose to present to them using short and concise video clips, or you could write for them a blog post mentioning all of your achievements, sometimes your mission, vision, goals, and objectives.
The About page is literally like an avenue to tell the world the essence why your business was established, the drive behind it, the ups and downs, and how you’ve been able to accomplish it.
Your About page also should have a short Meta Description for search engines to be able to optimize.
Contact page
The Contact page is the page whereby you most times get engaged with your customers. On this page is where you have available various means your customers can get in contact to you, e.g. via email, phone, social media networks.
The contact page most times enables the customers to be more confident in purchasing items. In most businesses, customers’ support and concern is the utmost priority. This is a means of promoting integrity of your business and embracing transparency.
On Shopify, you can create a Contact page by selecting some of the templates on the right-hand side of the pages panel. Click on Page > then navigate to Template
You can also add-in live chat apps to make contact with customers who are shopping easier.
Policy pages
Another very vital page you also need to create or the one which is required of every business is the Policy pages.
The Policy pages serve as a means of making the customers understand the system of your business, how your business operates. These policies serve as a means of clearing out yourself in case of misunderstanding or misconception from customers.
You can get templates for your policy pages on Shopify under Settings > Legal in Shopify, there you will see templates which you can work in and customize to your own taste.
So you should available:
- The Return policy: this place you can state clearly on what conditions are attached to returning of goods from customers
- Privacy Policy: this ones tell the customers how you collect their information
- Terms of Service: This one elaborates on the way you operate your system and a kind of agreement between you and your customers.
- Shipping Policy: Here you state clearly to your customer how you run your shipments for goods and how you charge based on costs and expenses.
(Note that the templates you might come across are just templates and are not for legal use.)
6. Set the Constraints for your shippings
Another core factor to be considered when setting up and eCommerce business is setting up the constraints for your shipping. There are lots of constraints which are needed to be considered, is it the cost per weight of products? costs of packaging your products, taxes, and rates to be paid, not to talk of your own profits.
Based on your online store philosophy, we can summarize the shipping factors into:
- Free Shipping: Implementing free shipping for your store in some cases may be like an a bonus for your clients, also a strategy to keep your customers by putting smiles on their face. Most times free shippings are based on certain criteria laid down. Perhaps you might say that free shipping applies for purchases higher than $100 or less based on your decision. You should be mindful that whatever offer you plan on giving is well calculated in line with your own profit and expenses.
- Charge real-time carrier rates. Shopify integrates in real-time with various carriers like USPS and Canada Post to generate shipping options and live pricing. This allows your customers to choose the exact service and price they want. You can take advantage of discounted rates through Shopify Shipping.
- Charge a flat rate. Flat rate shipping works best when your products have similar sizes and weights, making actual shipping expenses easier to predict.
- Offer local pickup/delivery. You can also give local customers the option to pick up their online order at one of your locations, setting specific notification settings, pickup instructions, and other details for each location.
About Shopify Shipping: With Shopify Shipping, you can get discounted rates, print shipping labels in Shopify, and manage order fulfillment all in one place.
Setting up our shipping zones
You can implement your shipping strategy under Settings > Shipping in Shopify. Here, you’ll be able to create shipping zones where you can set your rates for shipping to customers in certain countries.
Setting conditional shipping rates
Within the shipping zone we just created, we can use the Add rate button to create specific rates based on certain conditions. For example, we can offer free shipping based on the condition that order reaches a certain value threshold. Or we can increase the shipping rate if the order exceeds a certain weight.
Generally, you can save time and money on shipping while making more per sale by encouraging customers to add more items to their order. So we’ll use free shipping on orders over $30 (two bottles of hot sauce or the three-pack bundle) as an incentive for customers to spend more.
Setting up real-time calculated shipping rates
Real-time shipping rates are based on the shipping details you entered when adding your products and package dimensions on the Settings > Shipping page. Customers can then choose their preferred service and rate at checkout.
You can also adjust these rates to include a handling fee to account for extra costs, like packaging or your time, on top of the courier service’s rates.
7. Connect and setup your payment gateways
What’s a store having all its’ goods displayed but not means for customers to engage with payment options? Such store would run at loss.
The next step is to setup your payment gateways for your store. The payment gateways are methods that you make available for customers to be able to make payments. There are lots of popular payment gateways, these payment gateways are sometimes more dominant than each other in different countries. For total info about payment gateways read: TOP PAYMENT GATEWAYS for Shopify
Go to Settings > Payments to set up your payment provider. Shopify has made it easy to start accepting all major forms of payment with Shopify Payments. As long as you operate your business in one of the supported countries and aren’t considered a prohibited business, you can activate Shopify Payments in just one click and pay 0% in extra transaction fees. You can also choose from over 100 third-party payment providers here or offer your customers additional payment options, such as PayPal.
In my case, I’ll Complete Account Setup for Shopify Payments by entering my business and banking information. I can also Manage my settings for Shopify Payments and do things like:
- Choose the payment options I want to offer, like different credit cards (e.g., Visa), and accelerated one-click payment options like Apple Pay and Shop Pay. Shop Pay is Shopify’s one-click payment option that lets any customer of any store with Shop Pay enabled save their payment information for future purchases.
- Sell in multiple currencies, which will automatically convert your prices into the customer’s currency if you enable it. Since we’re selling mostly in Canada and the US, we’ll add the US dollar and the Canadian dollar to our enabled currencies.
- Set your payout schedule. You can receive your payout daily, weekly, or monthly—it all depends on your preferences when it comes to your cash flow.
- Toggle extra fraud prevention measures such as CVV and postal code verification to add an extra layer of security.
- Customize how you appear on your customer’s bank statements. We’ll use KINDAHOTSAUCE to make our brand recognizable to customers on their credit card statements.
The currency you sell your products in can be set under Settings > General. I’m going to be selling in US dollars since it will be familiar for both US and Canadian customers.
8. Get ready to launch and go live
With all the work we’ve done so far, we could actually launch our store now if we wanted to. We would just disable the password protection under Online Store > Preferences, which is the final step to flip the open sign and let people in to start buying our products.
In fact, if you’re in a rush to go live, you could skip some or all the following steps and revisit them later when you have time.
But in this tutorial, I’m going to ensure that my store not only makes a strong first impression and offers a smooth customer experience at launch, but is also in a good place for me to start marketing.
That said, here are the final steps we’ll be going over:
- Adding a custom domain
- Installing relevant sales channels
- (Optional) Customizing your email/SMS notifications
- Setting up your store for marketing (tracking and analytics)
Adding a custom domain
Buying a domain is like claiming land on the internet. That’s why it’s called a “web address.”
A custom domain is a fully branded URL that replaces the default URL that was created based on the store name you chose at setup (e.g., you could buy yourstore.com to replace yourstore.myshopify.com as your public URL).
Under Online Store > Domains, you can buy your domain directly through Shopify in a matter of seconds, or you can transfer your domain from another registrar and connect it to your store.
Since the .com is taken, I’ll be buying the .shop extension for KindaHotSauce through Shopify. KindaHotSauce.shop is now my store’s URL.
Installing relevant sales channels
One of the advantages of using Shopify to power your business is that your online store is just one of many sales channels you can use to sell your products. You can connect your products to additional sales channels to meet your customers where they are, while keeping track of your products, inventory, and reporting in the same Shopify account so you always know what’s going on in your business.
While you don’t need to connect all of them right away, it’s good to have them in mind when you’re ready to explore new ways to get your products in front of the right shoppers.
Not every sales channel will be relevant for your unique business, but here are some that are worth highlighting:
- Shopify POS. Our point-of-sale solution for accepting in-person payments and easily syncing physical retail sales with your online Shopify store and inventory.
- Social networks. You can sell your products through a Facebook Shop on your Facebook page, product tags in your Instagram posts, Pinterest, and more.
- Marketplaces. Many shoppers start their purchasing journey on marketplaces like Amazon or eBay.
- Google channel. Google is the most popular search engine in the world. With the Google channel, you can run Google Shopping campaigns and list your products for free in the Shopping tab in Google search results.
- Buy button. If you have an existing website or blog where you want to sell your products, you can install the Buy button sales channel to embed your products onto another webpage, allowing customers to purchase them and check out there. You can even create checkout links to send directly to a customer and have them jump straight to checkout.
You can quickly add sales channels by clicking the + button next to Sales channels or view our full list of sales channels in the Shopify App Store. Then, on your Product pages under Product Availability, you can choose which products are available on which sales channels.
I’ll be considering the Facebook and Instagram channels for sure since a brand like Kinda Hot Sauce will rely heavily on social media marketing.
Customizing your email notifications (optional)
Shopify comes with a series of ready-to-use automated email and SMS notifications to let customers know about order confirmations, status updates, and more.
I’ll be leaving them alone for now, but if you need to customize these for any reason—to communicate specific information or simply reflect your brand better—you can edit these notifications under Settings > Notifications.
Setting up your store for marketing
Marketing is different for every business, but regardless of your strategy, it’s important to set up the right foundation as soon as you can so you can get the most out of your efforts as you drive traffic to your store.
In particular, I want to cover the fundamentals of nearly every ecommerce marketing strategy that are important to know for new store owners.
Analytics
Shopify Reports (under Analytics > Reports) not only helps you monitor traffic and sales generated by your store across all your sales channels but also serves as a treasure trove of great insight for improving your business over time.
You can learn where your traffic and sales are coming from, your overall online store conversion rate, traffic and sales over time, and more.
For more granular analytics and flexible reporting, you can set up Google Analytics for free.
Facebook pixel
Have you ever visited an online store, considered a product, but left without buying it, only to see an ad for it a few days later? Or have you ever seen an ad for a product from a business you’d never heard of that seemed like it was made for you?
That’s made possible through something called the Facebook pixel, an intelligent code that learns from how people interact with your brand and your website—from liking your social media posts to making a purchase—and makes it possible to personalize how you advertise to them over time.
The Facebook pixel learns from all the traffic you send to your online store, so if you plan on advertising on Facebook or Instagram at any point in the future, it’s important to have your Facebook pixel set up.
You can get clear instructions on how to set it up for your Shopify store by using our free Facebook Marketing app (note that this process will require you to also set up a Facebook page and ad account for your business).
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Many shoppers turn to Google and other search engines as part of their purchasing journey, whether it’s to find a product they saw or heard about through a friend or they’re conducting some comparison shopping for a purchase.
Helping your online store’s pages and your products appear in these search results can create passive streams of relevant traffic for free. However, it takes time to grow this source of traffic.
You can lay the right foundation through a practice called search engine optimization (SEO), which we were first introduced to when we set up our Products and Pages in our store.
Another area of your store where you’ll want to keep SEO in mind is the Title and meta description fields, which can be found under Settings > Preferences. For Kinda Hot Sauce, I want to make sure I include my brand name and a description of what my business is about, based on the keywords people might search for to find my business.
You can use a free keyword research tool like Ubersuggest or Keyword Surfer (Chrome extension) to estimate how many times people search a specific query in a month and what types of searches happen around that keyword. Estimated monthly search volumes aren’t always 100% accurate and the more popular a search is, the more competitive it usually is.
Always remember that the job of a search engine is to show the most relevant results to the user, so you should try to prioritize keywords that are directly relevant to your business.
Let’s take Kinda Hot Sauce as an example to illustrate some of the key findings that can come out of even the simplest keyword research:
- “Medium hot sauce“ and “mild hot sauce” come up with 480 and 40 estimated monthly searches, respectively. Since they relate closely to what my business is about, I can prioritize them in my homepage title and description.
- Many people also search for a variety of recipes for spicy foods (e.g., “how to make crispy hot wings”), meaning I could introduce a blog later on to create content around searches related to recipes that involve hot sauce.
While I’m here, I’m also going to add a Social sharing image to make sure that I create a strong first impression whenever a link to my store is shared on social media or in direct messages.
9. Go live with your store! (Launch)
I’m finally ready to launch! Is my store perfect? No. But I feel good enough about it to bet time and money marketing it and learning from the feedback I get to make it even better over time.
I can remove my password page (under Settings > Preferences) and start telling the world I’m open for business.
The journey ends here for this demo store. But it’s just beginning for you. Here are some next steps and resources to help you ramp up your business after launching:
HOW WE CAN BE OF HELP!
Obviously the majority of us who are the busy type may not have the time to read through this post from top to bottom, even some may read and may not have time to take action by following the above easy steps to setup your shopify store.
However, we can help you get your Profitable Shopify all set with just an affordable fee. You get your store beautiful ready within 6-8 hours at most 24 hours! Nicely done with all the required features for your store!
Contact: SHOPIFY WEBSITE BUILDER!
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