Start your Dropshipping Business with less than 350$

This post is not for those who think it’s easy money without any effort. It is for someone who is willing to put in the work. If you put in that effort it can change your life within a month! There are no tricks there. There are no shortcuts here!

How dropshipping has changed my life!

Find a Niche!

Always look for a niche that you can sell to many people and in a good niche with lots of influencers. If you choose a small niche it will be hard for you to find influencers. Some of the niches in which I have seen a lot of success are:

• Fashion (Huge!)
• Fitness
• Beauty
• Pets
• Baby

Build or buy your website

Now that you have decided on your niche, it is important to build or buy your website. If you are being daunted by this question – You are not alone. A lot of companies suffer from the same issue when it comes to building their technology stack — the software development conundrum of whether to build versus buy is more common than you may think.

I don’t want to get into the details of Build vs Buy – I will important part of it here:

• The Budget: When you are building an eCommerce stack by yourself, the budget will be much higher. it will be north of 1K USD.
• The Timeline: If you are reading this blog, this means you want to get started with your business immediately – without wasting time. When you are building your own website, that will take anywhere between 2 weeks to 3 months!
• Opportunity Cost: When you spend time and resources on building a website, it would rather be useful to get a marketing VA or invest in Ads. But if you are spending your own time – your time could have been invested into building your business so your revenues start faster.
• The Risks of Building: There is always the risk of building, whether you have taken care of security or design or chosen the right technology stack!
• Quality Compromise: If you decide to take on building your own eCommerce site, will there be sufficient resources to see it through to completion? Building an eCommerce site takes time and money, and often, more time and money than expected. If additional resources will not be available beyond the scope of the project, there is a chance it may not be fully functional (or functional at all) and may ultimately be a complete waste of time and money.

Get a Turnkey Website

Based on the discussion above. I will rather go for a readymade website – a website with LIVE products. So all I need to do is to add my PayPal address and start my business. Here at Gnosys Digital, we do offer such websites.

Cost to Start your Business with a Turnkey website:

• Fully operation Turnkey website: 299$ (Hosting, Domain, products have been included)
• Affiliate Plugin: 35$

Technology Stack (If you Build your site)

•  CMS: WordPress + WooCommerce
• Theme: OceanWP or WP Astra
• Hosting: TD Web Services
• Technical SEO: RankMath
• Security: Wordfence
• Plugins:
  • Elementor (Page Builder)
  • Conversios (Google Analytics, FB Pixel)
  • MailChimp
  • WP-Optimize, to optimize your website
  • TI Wishlist
  • YITH Affiliate (MUST HAVE For the strategy mentioned below)
  • YITH Gift Cards

Tip: Shopify vs WooCommerce – Which one is a better Platform?

Cost to Build:

• Customer WooComemrce Based Website: 500$
• Finding Products & Uploading 30 Days: 1000$ (cost of VA or Free if you are doing it yourself)
• Hosting: 75$ per year
• Domain Name: 15$ per year

Find Influencers Under 100k Followers

The reason I am suggesting finding influencers under 100K is that they are flexible with terms and will be happy to promote your website with Affiliate Links!

Steps to Find Influencers

One of the easiest and effortless ways to find influencers on Instagram/Twitter is to use the power of hashtags. Hashtags collect together posts and stories so you can easily find inspiration and content. What I did here was to search for #FallLook and within the 1st three rows, I found this influencer.

There are other methods of doing the same, it depends on what you are most comfortable with. I particularly like #Hastag, because it also gives me a feel of the niche and also what is trending. So, I am able to do research and also find influencers at the same time.

Some of the other methods include:

• Look at Your Brand’s Followers
• Monitor Brand Mentions to Find Top Fans
• Search Instagram Influencers on the Explore Page

Once you have found your influencers, they will have their website. Go to the website and search for their email address or contact us form. Create a list of 100+ email addresses/contact us forms in an excel sheet.

Reach Out

When you have to reach out, always use your website email address. NEVER use a free email address like Gmail, yahoo, outlook, etc. This is one important factor why I am with TD Web Services – in a single package I am able to have my Hosting email everything, unlike Shopify where I need to then get email services from Google Workspace or MS365.

Prerequisites:

• Affiliate Program Information Page (why they need to join your program).
• Affiliate Dashboard

Both these can be done with a single FREE plugin called YITH Affiliate. Your affiliate dashboard will be created by the plugin you will need to do anything here. But you will need to design a page. If you are using Elementor, it’s pretty simple to do it.

Reach out Toolkit

You will need to send out an email via the contact form or your email address. I don’t usually do bulk emails. Below is the format of the email that you can use:

Once you have sent them the email as above, next you will need to see how many affiliates have signed up. Keep a tracker column in your excel sheet. For those who have not signed up within 3 days, send them another email as below:

Do not email any more than 3 times to any influencer.

Your journey of Affiliate onboarding doesn’t end here. You need to be in constant touch with them. How to make your affiliate perform:

• Exclusive Coupons
• Newsletter with your latest collection
• Marketing Collateral (Banners, Tweets, IG Images, Videos., etc)
• Success stories about payout to the affiliate
• Free Products to select affiliates

Tip: create a tweets/IG Post talking about your affiliate program. There are a lot of hashtags on both platforms, inviting people to join your affiliate program.

To Conclude

If you are able to develop a good affiliate ecosystem the shoutouts from affiliates can generate revenues north of a few thousand per month! A preferred route will be to buy a turnkey website and start your business. It will cost you less than 300$ and you can start within 24Hrs. Other important points to remember:

• Find 100+ Influencers
• Email them
• Get them to say yes
• Engage with them on a regular basis
• Repeat

When your business starts to make money always invest in other marketing avenues like:

• Social Media Marketing
• SEO
• Ads (Google / FB)

Resources

• How to start your eCommerce Business
• Business Hosting
• Affiliate Program Landing Page Template