Make Money

What is a Dropshipping, Requirements and How to Start as a College Student

Dropshipping business is one of the easiest and simple ways to establish your homemade business as a student in Ghana. It’s among the best ways to make money online and live the life you wanted with no limitation.

People are making thousands of dollars every blessed day with this kind of business. If you are new to the dropshipping business or if this is the first time of coming across the word dropshipping then, let me use this opportunity to brief you on what’s dropshipping and what you need to start a successful dropshipping business that can make you money as a student or someone who want to start an online business.

Table of Contents

What is dropshipping?

Dropshipping is a supply chain method in which the vendor does not own the products or the stocks of goods, but instead depend on a wholesaler, manufacturer, and in some case another retailer for the stocks.

What this means is that the owner of the dropshipping store does not have the goods or products that he/she is selling in hand. What he does is to serve as a retailer to either a wholesaler or a manufacturer of the products. The dropshipping store owners will only take those products from the manufacturer’s store and place them in their store.

If a customer comes to their store and purchases those products, the dropshipper will then transfers the customer orders and shipment details to either the manufacturer, another retailer, or a wholesaler, who then ships the goods directly to the customer.

How Ddropshipping works?

The whole dropshipping business works like this:

  • A customer comes to your store and purchases an item from your store at the retail price
  • Then you the store owner will go to your supplier and purchase the products at a wholesale price using your customer’s details
  • Then your supplier ships the item directly to the customer under your store name.

Isn’t that simple? Yes, I guess it is. With drop shipping, you sell products you don’t own, so you don’t have to worry about inventories. All that you need to do is marketing the products, providing customer support, and fulfilling your customer’s order by transferring your customer’s orders to your product manufacturer or wholesaler.

5 Requirement for Starting a Dropshipping Business

To start a dropshipping business, you will need to do the following:

  • Select a dropshipping niche
  • Find the product to sell
  • Pick a supplier of that product
  • Find the platform for your store
  • Promote Your Store

Let’s look at these simple five steps in detailed

Select A Dropshipping Niche

A niche is a section of a market that you choose to operate. There are many dropshipping niches you can operate from. For instance, women bags, shirt, necklets is a niche under the women products market.

You can choose to operate with many niche products in your store, and it will work fine, but the more specific your niche is, the better the store performance.

Selecting the best niche is what will make your store do well in the dropshipping arena. Today many people are operating dropshipping store selling different kinds of products, and this made the dropshipping business more competitive.

As a new entrant, you need to select the right niche which will help you to make headway to the competitive market. Below are some of the things to consider when selecting a niche.

  1. Choose a niche that you have interests and passion
  2. Conduct a Google keyword planner search for that niche
  3. Research social media platforms
  4. Ensure the niche is profitable

Find the product to sell

Once you are able to select the niche you want to operate your dropshipping store on, the next thing is to find the product to sell. The products you sell in your store will also depend on your choosing niche.

There are millions of products you can sell regardless of the niche you chose to operate on. For example, if your chosen niche is about women’s clothing, then you can find products relating to women’s Products like women’s pants, tops, underwear, bags, etc.

Pick a Supplier of that Product

There are hundreds of suppliers for every chosen product you decide to sell in your store. These suppliers provide similar products at different prices. So you must pick the best and right supplier for your chosen products.

There are many places that you can find these suppliers for your product, and one of those places is AliExpress. AliExpress is the best and most widely used source of inventory for every dropshipper. There are millions of products you can choose to dropship from AliExpress.

AliExpress together with the help of some software has made the dropshipping business more easy and cheap. Even a newbie can easily succeed in the dropshipping business as far as he or she can choose the best platform to operate the business. This brings us to our next point. Thus find the platform for your store.

Find the platform for your store

There are many platforms you can use to build your dropshipping store. But the two best and most widely used platforms are woo-commerce and Shopify. Both Woocommerce and Shopify are great platforms you can use to build your dropshipping store but what I used and recommended for any newbie to this kind of business is woocommerce.

Why do I Prefer Woocommerce Over Shopify?

  1. Woocommerce is a free WordPress plugin, and as you know, WordPress is also a free CMS that you can easily install and do all the customization with ease.
  2. Setting a store with Woocommerce is much easier and cheaper and also does not require any technical know-how.
  3. Woocommerce is built on WordPress and WordPress has a lot of beautiful themes developed purposely for the e-commerce platform. This means you can have a professional-looking store with woo-commerce than Shopify.
  4. Woocommerce has the best plugins (AliDropship plugin) to run the dropshipping store with few clicks.
  5. The final reason is the fact that operating a woo-commerce store required fewer budgets as compared to Shopify.

Promote Your Store

For any business to succeed online, it must have customers. A dropshipping business needs to be promoted in other to get enough sales. There are many ways to promote a dropshipping website.

You can promote your store using paid ads. A store can also get more traffic through free organic traffic, but for a new store, the fastest way to promote is through paid advertisements.

In this post, we will not look at how to set up paid ads, which will be cover in the coming article. So make sure to sign up for our push notification so that you’ll not miss this new coming article.

Thanks for Reading. Please Share this article with all your friends and family on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platform.

2 Comments

Leave a Comment