How to Make Money by Dropshipping on Shopify (The Right Way) in 2021

We’re currently at an intersection of global economic uncertainty. Despite the recent turbulence, the e-commerce industry continues to grow at a rapid rate.

There are thousands of new web stores a day fighting for a slice of the big pie ‒ over 2 billion digital buyers in the world.

In fact, why don’t we have a look at some numbers?

For example, e-commerce sales are expected to account for 18.1 percent of retail sales worldwide in 2021.

In other words, It’s estimated that there will be 2.14 billion global digital buyers in 2021.

Just take a quick look at the growth from 2014.

Now that’s mind-blowing! Why? you (might) ask.

Well because obviously, the numbers are in your favor. Especially, if opening an eCommerce store is in your plans to make money in the near future.So, in case you’re interested in launching your first web store, it’s the perfect timing to do so. Consumers love to browse and order products from the comfort of their homes, plus the recent pandemic makes it more convenient to do so.

But before you start, you’d need the perfect platform to set up your store. But, which one is it? You might ask.

Well, why not start with the crowd’s favorite? Yes, you’ve guessed it. I’m thinking about Shopify.

How Can You Make Money on Shopify?

In recent years, Shopify practically became a synonym for e-commerce. Whenever we indulge in a conversation with someone about online shopping, somehow Shopify always finds a way to squeeze in the discussion.

But, what is Shopify?

Shopify is a subscription-based software that allows anyone to set up a web store without any prior coding or web design experience. You can set up a webshop and make a sale within your first day.

To give you a better perspective, over 1,000,000 merchants sell their products in over 175 different countries on Shopify at the moment.

In simple terms, Shopify is best known for its simplicity, customization, and flexibility to synchronize it with your favorite apps.

Aside from its easiness to launch a store, let’s delve deeper into how you can actually monetize your web store.

How Can You Make Money on Shopify?

Most often, when people think about e-commerce, the first thing that comes to their mind is renting a huge warehouse, spending loads of money on product inventory, and managing dozens of employees.

Well, that’s the classic business model that becomes inevitable if you’d like to scale up and control the quality of the whole e-commerce experience.

On the other hand, with the fast growth of social media and digital marketplaces, a few other ways of making money were well established.

Let’s take a look at the most popular ways of making money on Shopify

E-commerce with Shopify

This is the most common e-commerce model. 

First of all, you need to find a product to sell. Shopify lets you sell both physical and digital products. Hair shampoos, pet treats, bath bombs, online courses, or maybe your HD photos from your recent travels if you believe you have a talent for it.

Shopify provides an easy-to-use dashboard for you to add products, descriptions, prices, discounts, or set up a blog to educate your customers. In addition, you can integrate all of your favorite apps to provide a flawless customer experience. 

For an individual, we would recommend the basic Shopify plan that starts from $29 a month.

In case you lack inspiration, take a look at these unique examples of landing pages.

Monetize your social media

This is the most common e-commerce model. 

First of all, you need to find a product to sell. Shopify lets you sell both physical and digital products. Hair shampoos, pet treats, bath bombs, online courses, or maybe your HD photos from your recent travels if you believe you have a talent for it.

Shopify provides an easy-to-use dashboard for you to add products, descriptions, prices, discounts, or set up a blog to educate your customers. In addition, you can integrate all of your favorite apps to provide a flawless customer experience. 

For an individual, we would recommend the basic Shopify plan that starts from $29 a month.

In case you lack inspiration, take a look at these unique examples of landing pages.

Since dropshipping is one of the most affordable ways of earning money on Shopify, we’d like to focus more on explaining how to do it ’The right way’.

Dropshipping And Shopify – How To Do It The Right Way?

While researching the topic of e-commerce, you’ve most likely stumbled upon YouTube videos that promise you to get rich overnight by doing dropshipping on Shopify.

The ones that tell you to choose a default Shopify template, find a random product, and simply spend $25 on Facebook ads. Then, you go to bed, and your profits will be maximized the next morning.

Well, can you recognize the fallacy here?

Just like any other successful business, you need to spend quality time on research, come up with a detailed business plan and decide where to focus your marketing efforts.

For example, there are thousands of suppliers on Oberlo. You need to conduct solid research in order to find the right partner that will support your business in the long term. 

To better assist you, Oberlo can filter the best supplier by certain metrics such as page views, products sold, and ratings.

So, as you can tell, setting up a successful dropshipping webshop requires a solid effort and it’s difficult to wake up rich overnight.

In order to avoid the mistakes that many dropshipping beginners made, refrain from using quick plug-and-play tactics that promise you to get rich overnight.

At the end of the day, if those tactics were true, everyone doing e-commerce would’ve been rich by now.

Instead, invest your efforts into marketing strategies that will help you differentiate yourself from the competition. 

Let’s take a look at a few of them.

Find the right niche

This one is crucial. 

Why? You might ask.

Well, because selecting a niche can make or break your dropshipping business. It’s a crucial step of the dropshipping process that you don’t want to rush.

You will spend the first few days of starting a dropshipping business on finding the right niche and researching products. The best way to start is by creating a Google spreadsheet on your favorite devices and write down suggestions without any bias. Inspiration can be found anywhere, starting from your local convenience store, to your favorite sports outlets.

And remember, Google is your best friend. Use Google to research the supply and your potential competitors.

The ideal dropshipping niche would:

• Be aligned with your interests and hobbies
• Not be overly saturated with the same products
• Offer products with a lot of styles and variations
• Provide products that customers would wait for due to their uniqueness
• Not depend on brand loyalty

Ways to bring and convert visitors to your web store

Every dropshipping beginner struggles with finding and converting the right audience. You have to be creative and think of places where your audience would most likely hang out.

For example, if you’re selling organic pet shampoo, there are hundreds of Facebook groups that you can engage with their audience.

Finding the right audience is always a big challenge, so let’s explore some strategies on how to land your first sales.

Run Social Media Ads

Running social media ads is primarily the go-to strategy for most e-commerce owners. 

It doesn’t require a lot of effort, you can run it on autopilot and it can be highly customized to deliver it to an audience with certain interests.

However, a lot of dropshipping beginners get discouraged. The primary reason for this is because they solely focus on one approach.

Practically, running social media ads should be approached like science. Brainstorm, test, and optimize until you hit the sweet spot.

Create a Google spreadsheet and come up with dozen sets of audiences with complementary interests. Divide your ads budget equally and keep an eye on the reports.

In addition, you have to keep experimenting with the titles of your ads, the content, and your ways of delivering them to the audience ‒ text, image, or video.

For example, including a video on your landing page can skyrocket your conversion rate by up to 80%, according to Unbounce.

Influencer Marketing

This is arguably the fastest way to build brand awareness for your product or service.

The audience is highly targeted and the influencer already built enough trust to engage them effectively with promotional content.

All you need to do is create a win-win partnership with the influencer where both parties are offering amazing value to the audience. 

For example, create a bundle of products to give away or provide a once-in-a-lifetime limited offer by creating special coupons.

Here’s one email template that you can use to land collaborations with your favorite influencers.

”Hi [Insert Influencer Name],

My name is Anna, head of partnerships at [Insert Company’s Name].
I have been following your profile for a while and I’ve been enjoying your latest content on [Insert a compliment about their latest content].

I work for [Insert Company’s Name], a brand that specializes in [Insert What Value Your Company Offers]. Since your content aligns with our values, I thought I would reach out to see if you would be open to testing our product and doing a collaboration together.

Let me know if you are interested and I will send more details!

Best regards,

[Insert Your Name]”

Build your website to look like a powerful brand 

The most common mistake dropshipping beginners make is not spending enough effort on branding their website.

Instead, they just choose a default Shopify theme, display their products with generic information and launch Facebook ads on autopilot.

Guess what happens next?

Most of them quit after a while and start preaching that dropshipping is officially DEAD.

Let’s have a real talk here.

You and I both know that if you care about your customer experience, you’ll always strive to create a flawless marketing system that will capture and convert your visitors into brand advocates.

Just take a look at these amazing Shopify stores and the level of details and service they provide.

They all focus on creating a unique character for their business, and that is called branding.

This is always the most challenging part when building an e-commerce business and it requires a lot of effort, patience, and optimization. 

There are many ways to build a powerful brand, but let’s start with the basic one ‒ Web design.

How To Build A Dropshipping Website That Will Stand Out From The Crowd?

Learning how to brand a dropshipping store is the key to beating your competition.

Let’s start with the basic step ‒ Choosing a Shopify template.

The Shopify Theme Store hosts an assortment of over 70 website templates. You certainly don’t need any web design skills to apply one and modify the content.

But here’s a curveball.

What do most of the dropshipping competitors have in common? 

You’ve probably guessed it. It’s a default Shopify template that any consumer can recognize from a mile away.

A default Shopify template breaks your authenticity so customers don’t feel like you’ve invested much effort in making your store genuine. Therefore, they often abandon the carts so webshop owners have headaches when dealing with high bounce rates.

How to take your Shopify dropshipping store to the next level?

Drag-and-drop page builders. 

When you choose a Shopify template, the levels of customization are somewhat limited. You can apply a logo, change the cover photo and product descriptions.

But when you opt to use a page builder, you can change almost anything. One of the most flexible Shopify page builders out there is DragDropr.

DragDropr lets you create, edit and design the content for your website, webshop, or any other web content by simply dragging and dropping. No prior coding or web design experience is needed.

With DragDropr, you can turn your default Shopify template into a powerful brand by customizing each layer of elements on your website to be perfectly aligned with your audience’s core values and interests.

DragDropr’s new feature particularly focuses on helping dropshipping beginners turn their web stores into brand machines that can’t be compared to the rest of the default dropshipping competitors.

We have several widgets to let you show your products:

• Single product widget
• Product collection – show your widgets in a grid
• Product slider – show your widgets in a slider

Let’s have a detailed look at these new improvements.

All of these widgets support our predefined styles, so you can adjust the display of your products.

In addition, you can fully customize how your product is displayed by using the product card editor.

This way, you don’t have to use the default and uninspiring headlines given by your suppliers that all competitors use. The layout of your products will now look original and stylish. 

The primary goal of the new product card editor is to improve your conversions by turning your default product offerings into elegant, classy, and unique offerings.

Branding your business is crucial, especially if you’re dropshipping with Oberlo and Shopify.

The reason behind this is that there’s usually more than one dropshipper selling a given product. The only dropshippers who set themselves apart from the rest of the competition are the ones who work hard on the branding.

But being a successful dropshipper requires constant learning.

Your webshop will make unique impressions through a combination of web design, copywriting, color patterns, and creative imagery.

In simple terms, imagine your store was a person you randomly stumble across the street. What would the person look like? How would the person talk and what would the person say?

It’s actually quite simple. Your store should walk, look and talk like your customers.