Our readers greatly enjoy this format of our blog articles.
So do we!
This is why it’s time for another Q&A session. This one is for absolute beginners who have no experience in drop shipping at all.
We’re really happy that our solutions are motivating and encouraging even for people who have no idea how it all works. This is why we will do our best to help you out!
When someone visits your webstore and places your order, you buy this item from the supplier, but ask him to deliver the product on your client’s address
You get the profit from EVERY purchase – your profit is the difference between the seller’s price and your own price
As you can see, it’s not difficult at all. This business model has tons of benefits:
You don’t need to have anything ‘physical’ – products, office, warehouse, etc. All the deals happen in virtual sphere
You don’t need to buy items in advance, this is why you don’t have the risk of not selling them
You don’t need to rent an actual office and warehouse, and you don’t need to hire people to manage these facilities
You can start the business with the minimal financial investments, only spending money on the webstore development
You can run the business from any point of the globe – all you need is PC or laptop, and a stable Internet connection
You can increase the sellers’ prices any way you like, and no one limits your profit
You’re your own boss – the business fully belongs to you
2. How does the buying and selling process work?
So, you have a ready webstore with product images and descriptions.
A store visitor likes some of your offers, and places an order.
You accept the payment and ask for the client’s name and address.
As soon as you receive the money from the buyer, you transmit the same order to the original AliExpress seller. AliDropship plugin does this automatically, so you won’t get confused with all the orders, sellers, items, countries, addresses, etc.
The seller gets money and customer details from you, makes the package, dispatches it to your buyer, and gives you the tracking code.
You, in turn, send this tracking code to the client, and keep an eye on this order to see how everything’s going.
Nothing extraordinary, in fact!
3. Can I do drop shipping without AliDropship plugin?
Well, yes.
The reason why people all over the globe use this plugin for WordPress-based online stores is that the plugin does the biggest part of the job automatically. Still, the plugin is quite young, even though this business model exists for a long time already. So, several years ago people were just doing drop shipping without any technical help.
And this is exactly the reason why we created the plugin!
You see, as your business grows bigger, you find it more and more difficult to manage all the processes. To save your time and nerves, and to deal with the most common drop shipping challenges, it is better to go for automatic solutions.
4. What is WordPress?
Speaking in VERY simple terms, it’s a piece of web publishing software.
It’s the most popular solution globally used for building websites and blogs – around 28% of ALL the existing websites are created and managed with the help of WordPress.
You download it from the official provider, install it on your site – and here it is! Now you can easily and conveniently manage your website.
WordPress is free, user-friendly, and super flexible. There exist thousands of plugins, extensions, and themes compatible with it. You can download (or buy) any of them to boost the functionality of your website and make it totally unique.
5. What is hosting?
Again, let’s talk in VERY simple terms.
Hosting is a service provided by experienced companies (you can try doing it yourself, but it will be really challenging to manage).
What do these providers do?
Basically, by giving you hosting, they help you upload all your website information to the Internet.
As soon as you get hosting, everything that you’ve added to your website (texts, pictures, videos, etc.) becomes accessible to Internet users. Therefore, people can find your website, browse it, and view it.
6. How can I make profit using AliDropship plugin?
Considering the constant demand for AliDropship custom stores, we decided to devote a whole separate Q&A session to it. Enjoy!
1. What’s a custom drop shipping store?
It’s a ready-made drop shipping store that is created for you exclusively. The store is developed by the team of highly skilled designers, programmers, and other technical specialists who make it all from scratch.
This is a wonderful solution for people who don’t know how to make their own store (or don’t want to waste their time on this). That’s why a huge part of AliDropship clients prefer buying a ready store.
2. What does the whole process look like?
First of all, you place an order and make a payment.
PLEASE NOTE: you only make ONE payment. There are no regular (monthly, yearly, etc.) fees!
After that, a dedicated member of our project management team gets in touch with you. We assign a personal project manager who will guide you through all the steps of the work.
He or she gives you an access to Basecamp – the special platform where you can monitor the progress and leave your feedback. We will also ask you to fill in our questionnaire – this way, we will learn your requests and preferences.
When the development process is over, you get a customized webstore adapted for your needs and wishes. The store fully belongs to you: you get 100% ownership, and you are free to do ANYTHING with the site.
This store has a number of unique features you won’t find anywhere else:
Professionally designed theme optimized for high conversions
Unique design elements (logo, header, icons, favicon, etc.)
Integrated promotional tools: discount coupons, emails for abandoned carts recovery, and subscribers lists for further interactions
All-in-one dashboard to monitor your sales, orders, stats and activities
Integrated Google Analytics
Integrated payment gateways (2Checkout, Stripe, PayU, etc). to accept payments with both PayPal and credit cards
On-site SEO and social networks accounts
Up to 12% AliExpress cashback
For the Ultimate package, you will also be provided with our special social media promo tool. We install and set up the Social Rabbit plugin that will automatically promote your business on 4 top social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.
4. In the custom stores options, you mention that there is a niche research which is brilliant. However, can I choose my own niche?
Basically, you can choose ANY niche you like. It’s recommended to work in a niche you’re passionate about (or at least know quite well).
You will then need to evaluate the niche from the point of view of:
You can take a look at our exclusive ‘Niches and products’ blog section. There, we systematically post the results of our regular market research, and give you ideas of the most promising product types and categories that you can try in the upcoming season.
5. If I want to create a webstore with branded/copyrighted products, will I have any legal issues?
Yes, it is likely.
Every country has its own laws and legal requirements in terms of selling branded products, and every holder of intellectual property right has their own policy of dealing with such cases. You need to be really careful about your niche and products choice!
6. How do you choose and edit products for the website?
In short, we evaluate the items from the point of view of:
Product rating
Number of orders
Sellers rating
The option of e-Packet shipping or free delivery
If you want us to import products of a particular type or style, please, let us know before we start uploading products. You can attach some examples of products for each category.
8. Can you integrate a special payment gateway for my country?
Generally, we integrate PayPal and credit cards payment options into our drop shipping stores. Here you can find the list of all the options available.
Sometimes, clients ask us to include some other additional systems. We always notify our developers team about these requests, but the development process is not easy. The developers might agree to try a certain additional system if it is requested often, but it will be considered to be a ‘non-typical amendment to a website’, and it will cost you extra money.
9. If I only have enough money to buy the Basic Package, can I upgrade it later?
Of course! If you can’t afford the desired package right now, just start with getting the Basic one. Later on, as soon as your finances are fine, you can upgrade your store to the Advanced or the Ultimate level.
For all these packages, we do the same work, but on a different scale. For example, the number of the items we add to a store is 50 for the Basic package, 100 for the Advanced package, and 200 for the Ultimate package. But it’s not the limit! The numbers can be increased if necessary.
The same goes for all the extra services that only are available on the higher levels. Even if they are not included in the package you’re buying, you surely can ask us to add the necessary ones for an extra cost (or you can do it yourself if you wish).
Please note that the store theme choice doesn’t depend on the package you’re ordering! It doesn’t matter if you’re buying a Basic or an Ultimate store – you can anyway choose one theme out of the four options we offer.
10. If I buy your Ultimate Package, when I can start making money? The description says “This package is perfect for those who want a 100% hassle-free start and immediate profits”, so what do you mean by immediate profits?
What do we mean by immediate profits?
The day you receive your store is the day you can make your first sale.
Everything is set up already, so you can accept payments and process orders IMMEDIATELY after getting the site from us. From the technical point of view, your webstore is fully ready for operation when we hand it over to you.
We gladly share our marketing experience and knowledge with you – we provide tons of educational materials(check out the question #7). Still, we can’t predict how soon you will start getting income – it all depends on your own promotional efforts.
Did we cover everything you wanted to know about buying a custom store? Feel free to leave your questions in the comments section below!
Every day we get hundreds of questions from absolutely different categories of people.
Can you guess who are the most common askers?
Happy new owners of drop shipping stores have more questions than anyone else!
It’s an absolutely normal situation if you don’t know how to run your brand new business. Don’t worry, you will learn it all in due time. And as for now, we’re always here to guide you.
1. What should I do day to day to manage my webstore?
It may sound obvious, but you need to actually run your drop shipping business every day if you want it to be successful.
It’s not enough to simply own a store without doing anything to it. Take a look at the success story of Alex – during the first month of his newly opened store operation, Alex did nothing to manage the operations. As you can guess, the results weren’t satisfying at all. Everything changed as soon as Alex started paying attention to the business, and now things are going more than well.
So, as an owner of a drop shipping business, you need to:
Manage orders and payments, inventory, and track delivery
Well, this is the essence of drop shipping business, right? You don’t have to handle storage and shipping issues (and it saves you tons of money!), but still, there are business operations that must be managed.
You have nothing to worry about, though, if you have AliDropship plugin already installed. In terms of business operations, it does the majority of necessary tasks, so the only thing you actually need to deal with is human factor.
Communicate with your customers via email and other means
Communication and interaction is probably the only thing that can’t be automated in this business field.
People value personal attitude, and it becomes exceptionally important when it comes to e-commerce.
Just think about it: someone decides to buy a product from you without seeing this item first; basically, this person trusts you with their money, and, to be honest, takes a risk.
Don’t leave them confused and uncertain! Help them, guide them through the store and the shopping process, encourage them to make a purchase, and thank them for their decision.
This is how you will turn their random purchase into a very personal and pleasant experience. This is how you will create additional value of your store, and this is how you will carefully build an audience of loyal and engaged customers.
Drive traffic to your webstore
People won’t locate your store easily, you know?
The competition is astonishing, and Internet is huge.
This is the challenge that can and must be taken. All you need to do is pay attention to your promotional efforts. If you don’t know where to begin, take a look at our Marketing Tips blog section.
Search and import new products for your webstore
It is important to do it regularly – this is how you will keep your existing customers enthusiastic about new offers they didn’t see before. Also, don’t forget about trends and fashion – technologies and interests change quickly, and it is vital to go with the flow. Nobody likes outdated and boring items!
Edit the pages content to make the store look neat and professional
Mostly, it refers to single product pages – when you import new products from AliExpress, the titles and descriptions you get are not perfect at all. This is why it is necessary to take some time and edit everything that doesn’t look good.
Also, don’t forget about search engine optimization – keep it in mind when you’re editing the pages’ content. You won’t see immediate results, but in the long run, these efforts will give your more benefits than you can imagine.
2. What are the costs of running and managing a drop shipping webstore?
Oh, no one can tell you that, actually.
Let’s think of all the possible costs you might have in this business:
Hosting payment – sorry, you just can’t go without it.
First orders payment – you need to order an item on AliExpress to get it delivered to your customer. So, at the beginning of your drop shipping journey you will spend your money first to get later paid by your customer.
Marketing activities – everything is up to you here. Maybe you will launch a full-scale campaign that will cost you hundreds of dollars, and maybe you will simply install some promotional plugin like Social Rabbit.
As you can see, it’s impossible to predict the amount of your expenses. No one defines it but you!
3. What should I do when I receive an order?
Step one: get excited.
Step two: go to the Orders section and click the “Place order automatically” button.
AliDropship plugin will visit AliExpress and create an order for you automatically. It will select necessary product variations, add items to your shopping cart and fill your customer’s shipping details on the checkout page. You will just need to click confirm button to complete a purchase.
Alternatively, you can place the order manually by clicking “Place order manually” button.
Step three: celebrate!
4. Will the cost of an item on AliExpress be deducted from my PayPal account?
AliExpress doesn’t support PayPal as a payment method which is why you can’t use your PayPal account to pay for purchases on AliExpress.com.
We highly recommend offering your customers a free shipping service by taking advantage of the free/low cost shipping offered by many AliExpress sellers. However, the Plugin has a special section where you can enable or disable different shipping options.
You can add up to four different shipping options (including free shipping) to any or all products.
6. Are the customers able to create an account on my website?
Yes, your clients can get the option to create a personal account on your website.
This account gives your customers the opportunity to store their contact and shipping details, check the list of products they purchased, and track the status of any order.
7. Will the customer receive a tracking number? How can our customers track their orders?
Once you placed an order on AliExpress and your supplier shipped an item, you get your tracking ID.
The plugin will automatically collect this tracking data and add it to your order details.
Please note: you need to be logged in your AliExpress account and your AliDropship orders section to activate this tracking auto-filling option.
8. How can I know if the package was delivered to the customer?
If there’s a tracking number available, you can easily track the package delivery.
With this tracking ID provided by the AliExpress supplier, you can check if the customer received an item.
9. My customer didn’t receive the order. What should I do?
First of all, stay calm and don’t panic.
Unfortunately, this happens.
Maybe something went wrong within the postal service, or the customer provided a wrong address, or a seller is shady (did you choose the seller carefully?). You’ll figure it out later, but right now it’s not the first priority.
Secondly, apologize.
Whatever happened, it can all be fixed. Your behavior and personal attitude will help a lot to solve this issue.
We recommend you to talk to the seller first. Go on AliExpress, open “My Orders” page, select the faulty order and write a private message to the seller. The seller should respond quickly and offer different solutions to fix it. The reputation of the sellers is rather exposed and they are willing to do anything to maintain their feedback rating.
So, if your customer is not satisfied with a product and asks you for a refund, you should dispute the purchase with AliExpress seller.
If you are selling inexpensive products, your AliExpress suppliers usually refund you quickly and don’t ask you to return the items. They don’t want to waste their energy on managing disputes and receiving returns for relatively low value items. You can read about it more in our interview with an actual AliExpress seller.
As the result, you can give a full or partial refund to your customer through PayPal without asking them to return the product. This is why we recommend you not to spend all your earned money at once – keep a small fund just to be safe.
Are there any questions we didn’t cover? Feel free to leave them in the comments section below!
Are you wondering how to choose a domain name for your drop shipping website? Here are the expert answers to the most common questions that typically come from the online business newcomers.
Every business starts with an idea.
A drop shipping store starts with a niche.
Your website starts with a domain.
Our today’s article is all about a highly important topic. Here, we will explain how to select, evaluate and purchase the perfect domain for your drop shipping website.
Let’s start with the basics, as usual!
What is a domain name, exactly?
To put it simply, a domain is the main part of your website’s URL address.
For example, take a look at our website’s address:
Here, ‘alidropship.com’ is the domain. It consists of 2 elements:
‘alidropship’ part is a so-called Second Level Domain
This is a word or a combination of words that you choose to represent your drop shipping website.
Theoretically, you can select any combination of letters and digits to be your second level domain. Still, this combination should make sense – something like higur465wy24.com doesn’t inspire much trust, right?
Usually, the word or phrase in the second level domain is identical to the store name. It makes lot of sense since it helps you with branding.
But, alternatively, to get better Google rankings, you can take the main store keyword and play with it a little. The idea here is to to create a short, memorable and catchy phrase – and we will elaborate on this further.
‘.com’ part is a so-called Top Level Domain
There exist a limited number of top level domains, so here you don’t need to invent anything. Simply follow the basic rules and choose among one of the options available.
Wait, what? There really are rules that regulate how to choose top level domains?
Traditionally, top level domains demonstrate what is the type of an organization that uses them. Let’s go through the most common ones:
.com domain is generally used by companies and organizations who run some kind of business or who hold this website because of some financial purpose. It has the reputation of the most popular, prestigious and trust-inspiring domain. Naturally, it makes it highly popular among businesses and enterprises worldwide.
We personally recommend to go for the .com domain. In our experience, short and keyword-rich names with .com top level domains show better results. Moreover, they prove to be more efficient for drop shipping websites.
.co domain is a relatively new alternative to the .com one (the majority of appealing names on the .com domain is already taken, which is why entrepreneurs go for a different option).
.biz domain (‘biz’ is short for ‘business’) is basically used in the same cases, but for some reason, it is much less common and not as widespread as the .com one.
.net domain is normally associated with hi-tech businesses, information technologies, startups, and other tech-related entities of this kind.
.org domain (‘org’ is short for ‘organization’) is usually chosen by charities and other non-profit establishments that don’t put finances in the core of their activity.
.info domain traditionally belongs to websites and blogs that have an enlightening or informational purpose and exist to raise awareness about something.
.edu domain is regularly taken by educational institutions of various types.
.gov domain belongs to governmental entities across the United States.
Plus, there exists a number of country-specific top level domains, for example:
Are there any similar rules for the selection of a second level website domain?
Oh, this is the most exciting part.
When you’re choosing a top level domain, you don’t have much room for imagination and inventiveness. All you need to do is simply pick one of 20-30 available options.
But when it comes to the second level domain name, it’s a whole different story.
When you’re creating your store domain, there are 3 vital things to consider.
This is why many drop shipping business owners build their webstore domain around their main keyword. For this purpose, they can also use any of the supporting keywords. This way, they solve 2 issues at once. They improve their rank in search results, and make it easier for Internet users to stumble upon this particular webstore.
Of course, it’s necessary to treat this optimisation thoughtfully. A website that has an address like buyofficechairsonlineusa.com looks quite suspicious. It even creates the impression of something potentially harmful, like it poses a threat to the visitor.
A domain name that solely consists of a long-tail keyword looks spammy and doesn’t inspire much trust. Plus, it doesn’t help you create a memorable shopping destination that stands out from the competition.
This aspect brings us to the next crucial consideration point which is…
It’s all because you can create a recognizable and buyer-oriented shopping destination with a totally unique atmosphere and friendly environment.
Your range of activity is rather small in comparison to huge shopping platforms, and this gives you an enormous advantage. When you concentrate on a tiny amount of products to sell, you are able to provide top-class customer service. This is the perfect strategy to win the hearts of your buyers.
This challenging yet rewarding job of creating your own in-store universe starts with… your website address and, more specifically, your domain name. Basically, when people visit your store, the first thing they notice is the website address and the domain name. At this moment of the first encounter, your website name provokes some specific expectations. Obviously, it’s your responsibility to meet them.
This is why, ideally, a good domain name should clearly indicate what this store is about – this way, you gain recognition and support the creation of your own, unique brand that is strikingly different from the competitors’ offers.
Credibility
As we have already mentioned it, your drop shipping website URL is the thing that makes the first impression. The domain name, naturally, plays its role, too.
Will an Internet user actually visit your store after noticing it in the search results, or not?
It heavily depends on the quality and contents of your domain name. Imagine that it consists of an odd word combination, or a random mix of letters and numbers making no sense. Even if its brilliant in terms of SEO, the majority of Internet surfers won’t even click on it.
The same goes for a website that obviously speculates on a well-known brand or trademark. Typically, scammers do it by using either the wrong spelling (abibas.com). Alternatively, they can pick a top-level domain that is slightly different from the official one (adidas.net). No one likes scammers, so misleading people with an illegal use of someone else’s brand shouldn’t be you strategy.
Plus, people will avoid your website if its domain name looks silly or scary because of unintentional inappropriate word combinations. Think of domains like therapistbay.com or bestkidnaps.com, for example.
You should also avoid accidental negative meanings in foreign languages. Surely, it is impossible to consider all the languages that exist across the globe. Still, check the meaning of the chosen name in the language of your target audience. Additionally, consider its meaning in the most common languages in the world (Chinese, English, Hindustani, Spanish and Arabic, at least).
So…how can I generate a drop shipping website domain, actually? What should I do technically? And how can I buy the domain?
Oh, it’s a really simple and totally entertaining procedure.
First, you need to go on a domain generator website. Tons of them provide their service for free, so you won’t pay anything extra.
We strongly recommend the Namemesh generator: it is awesome because it lets you evaluate the appeal of any domain name by several parameters at once.
It works the following way: you enter 2-3 words into the search bar, and press the ‘Generate’ button.
The system shows all the possible combinations of these words, and divides the domain name suggestions into several categories:
Common – these are the most ‘traditionally-looking’ names with typically used top level domains (also called extensions) like .com, .net., org, etc.
New – these are the names containing the most recent extensions that become available for websites (.tech, .chop, .center, etc). Since these extensions are really ‘young’, there’s a good chance to grab a vacant name earlier than anybody else.
Short – this section contains the shortest domain names available. In general opinion, the shorter is the domain, the better it is for your recognition. Still, don’t forget that it should make some sense!
Extra – these are the domain names with ‘unusual’ extensions like .name, .me, .ly, etc. In a way, they are similar to the ‘New’ category, but these ones are not uncommon for the worldwide practice.
Similar – these domains don’t contain the exact keyword you’ve provided. Instead, they are based on synonyms, antonyms, related words, etc. Here, you get unconventional names that describe your business concept in a more ‘smart’ way. In terms of branding, they might be the perfect option for you.
SEO – this section includes the names that are perfect in terms of potential Google rankings. The system slightly modifies the main keyword through the use of prefixes or suffixes. This is why you get a list of SEO-friendly yet sensible domain names.
Fun – the website domains listed in this category are the result of smart word modification: blending and meshing words, misspelling, phonetic variations and other tricks are used. As the result, you get some unique yet meaningful words that can make a perfect brand names.
Mix – other words, prefixes and suffixes get mixed into the keyword you’ve provided.
So, you get a full page of the results with the the possible domains:
As you can see, you can make some amendments to the generated results and play with them further!
For example, you can check out every single one of the Search Suggestions to get more relevant domain options. It’s quite handy if you’ve already tried everything and can’t think of other good names.
Also, you can hide the already registered domains – it definitely saves your time. Besides, you can explore the WhoIs database. There, you will learn who has purchased the most appealing domain. In some cases, it might be useful to contact the current owner and try buying out this particular domain.
You can also set the preferred domain length and tick the top level domains you’d like.
And finally, we’re coming to the most important part. Here, you can also choose the registrar service that will sell you the best domain name!
In order to actually purchase the domain you’ve picked, you need to visit a different place – a registrar site. There, you make your user account, provide the necessary documents (IDs, etc.) and pay for the purchase. This is how you become a legal owner of a domain at your choice.
Namemesh site doesn’t sell the domain names. Instead, it lets you check the most credible and trustworthy registrars that are really popular across the globe:
It doesn’t matter what registrar service you use. All of them have the same range of domains available. Actually, it’s impossible for a registrar to have ‘exclusive’ domains that you can’t be buy anywhere else. Plus, all of the registrars listed on Namemesh have the legal right to sell website domains.
Still, it’s a good idea to check the appealing name within each registrar anyway. The reason is simple: even the identically same names can have totally different prices across various services.
So, to be a smart shopper, you need to:
Go on Namemesh
Select one registrar
Enter the keyword
Hit the ‘Generate’ button
Read through the generated list of domain names
Click on the name you like more
The system will automatically redirect you to the registrar site. Here, you will see the domain name price, and the instructions on the buying procedure. If you’re happy with the name and its price, follow the registrar recommendations and complete the purchase!
There are so many name options, it’s confusing! Is there any checklist on how to choose a domain name for my drop shipping business?
Of course! Go through this list and tick the statements you agree with:
I like this domain name
Your personal opinion matters! You should be happy with the sound and the meaning of the name, no matter what marketing gurus say.
It is short
Roughly speaking, a length up to 10-12 characters is okay. You want people to remember your name easily, right?
It is easy to type
Again, it’s all about your brand recognition. Let’s suppose you’ve chosen a well-known word but opted for an untypical letters order in it. Chances are, people will simply misspell it while typing in the address, or writing hashtags in social networks.
It gives me some room for growth
In the world of drop shipping, it is super easy to expand your product offer when necessary. You can even switch to a slightly different business niche if you want to. Will the domain still be relevant for your store if you ever decide to add new product categories?
It is available on social media
To promote your store online, you need relevant accounts on social media. Imagine that somebody has created a Facebook account with the name that you have just picked. It would be quite a sad situation because it would make your buyers really confused. Plus, they will constantly mix you up with this random account.
Luckily, Namemesh has this adorable function of scanning social networks as well! Look at the picture below:
When you click on a suggested domain, the system checks the so-called ‘Social Availability’. It means that it analyses the existing Twitter and Facebook account names. You, in turn, can perform the same check on Instagram manually. This way, you can choose the identical names for all your social media channels. Surely, it helps you create a strong brand and boost your recognition.
It has a good history
Did you know that you need to check every domain name before purchase? Even if you’re not buying it from an actual previous owner, look into its history anyway. It is possible that this domain has some history anyway. Maybe, the owner has simply abandoned it several years ago after the domain expiry. To make sure nothing suspicious was happening there, try using the Wayback Machine service. It shows whether someone has used the domain, and for what purpose.
If you’re buying a ’second hand’ domain, check the Expired Domains portal. Here, you will see domains with reliable history that are no longer in use for some reason. These domains can rank better on Google if the previous owner had no suspicious actions on them. So, you can even buy several domains and simply wait till one of them start ranking higher than others.
Have you ticked at least 4 items in this checklist? Go for this name!
That’s it for our today’s Q&A session. Now, you know how to choose a good domain name that will fit your drop shipping website perfectly – feel free to use the knowledge for your personal benefit!
These Facebook promotion guidelines are highly valuable for drop shipping store owners: with these tips, you can launch a affordable and efficient promotional campaign for your business!
Drop shipping is awesome.
You can run this business in any point on the globe, you don’t need much money to start, and it’s not necessary to have any previous experience in the field. Anyone has a chance to win.
That’s why people readily buy customized drop shipping stores or build nice websites themselves. Being inspired by incredible drop shipping success stories, they wait for tons of sales, and to achieve that, they start trying to promote their webstores.
Quite commonly, our support team gets questions about such type of social media marketing as Facebook promotions – people are wondering what should they do if they want to advertise their drop shipping stores on Facebook platform.
Let’s answer all these questions at once!
That’s why we have prepared these Facebook promotion guidelines!
If your potential clients use Facebook a lot, then yes, you should definitely go for it.
In our own experience, Facebook is a wonderful promotional channel in the majority of cases. The reason is, it is the most popular social network globally: according to the data of June 2017, Facebook has 2.01 billion monthly active users. This is much much more than Instagram (600 million), WhatsApp (500 million) and Twitter (284 million).
Wherever your potential customers live, you can easily reach them with the help of Facebook. The newest stats shows the following data about the geographic location of Facebook users:
Asia – 37,2%
Latin America and the Caribbean – 18,8%
Europe – 17,4%
North America – 13,3%
Africa – 8,0%
Middle East – 4,4%
Oceania/Australia – 1,0%
As you can see, this social network basically covers all the global regions. So, if you are not targeting some specific and narrow customer segment living in a very remote part of the globe, it won’t be difficult for you to connect with your audience through Facebook.
2. How can I promote on Facebook?
Well, first of all, you need to be present on Facebook, so you will have to create and run a page dedicated to your drop shipping store.
When the page is created, you have 2 ways of running a promotion on Facebook.
The first way is share your posts in Facebook groups that are somehow related to your store idea.
It’s not difficult at all – read this step-by-step guide to learn how we used this strategy for one of our own stores.
The second way is to create and run Facebook advertising campaigns. Speaking in simple terms, you create a promotional message and pay some money to show the ad to a selected group of Facebook users.
At the moment, we are preparing detailed Facebook promotion guidelines. As for now, you can read official Facebook instructions to get a general idea about launching and managing Facebook Ads.
3. Should I register a business account on Facebook?
If you’re only going to place promotional posts in other Facebook groups, you don’t need to get a business account.
If you want to create and manage Facebook ads, you need to get a Business Manager account. To do this, go to https://www.facebook.com/ads/manager – this is how you will get an access to your Facebook Ads dashboard. Here you will administer promotions of your business.
To create an account, you need to submit some additional details – your account information, and also the payment method you are going to use.
The account information will include your account name, business name, business address, time zone, currency, etc.
Providing your payment details, you can choose one or several preferred payment methods – Facebook accepts multiple payment options, including credit cards and PayPal payments.
As soon as all the necessary details are submitted, you can plan your Facebook advertising campaigns and enter a promotion.
You will be able to add and manage up to 5 Facebook pages through this Business Manager account.
4. When I do Facebook Ads, how can I target the audience correctly?
You surely know something about your potential customers, right?
Even if you only have a general idea of a portrait of your average client, it’s a good starting point.
When you are creating an advertisement campaign on Facebook, the system asks you to set some parameters of the audience who is going to see your ad:
Connections to your Facebook page (followers, commenters, etc.)
When you set these parameters, you create a new audience – you can save it and use it later for your further campaigns.
If you feel that you need to target your audience even more precisely, you can use:
Custom audiences
Lookalike audiences
Custom audiences consist of people who are already interacting with you somehow. There exist various types of custom audiences, for example:
People who gave you their email addresses, phone numbers, or Facebook IDs;
People who have recently visited a specific page on your webstore;
People who took specific actions in your desktop or mobile app (if you have one);
People who engaged with certain ad types on your page.
As you can see, it’s great to work with custom audience because these people are already interested in your store offers. Don’t miss out the opportunity to get in touch with them! To learn more about this type of audience, you can read the official Facebook guide.
Lookalike audiences consist of people who never interacted with your store or brand before. Still, they are really important: these audiences are created by the Facebook’s own special algorithm.
Facebook takes a custom audience you already have in order to generate an absolutely new audience.
Most likely, these new people have never heard anything about your business; still, they share significant features (hobbies, interests, behavior patterns, etc.) with the people who already cooperate with your brand.
Chances are, they will like the ad you’re targeting at them, and you, as the result, will get a bunch of new loyal customers. To learn more about creating a lookalike audience, you can read the official Facebook guide.
5. How much money should I spend on the Facebook promotion?
The real question here is ‘How much money CAN I spend on Facebook ads?’
If you can’t afford spending on advertising right now, wait a bit until you have some savings.
The thing is, if you only have money for 1-2 ads, you won’t be able to track their performance and understand whether it’s actually efficient. You simply won’t gather enough data to watch and analyze.
We recommend you to try 3-4 different ad types during one month. This will help you get enough data on your ads performance and understand what can be improved. So, do the math and calculate how much you will have to spend for your very first Facebook advertising campaign.
When it’s over, you’ll be able to analyze the results and rethink your costs if necessary. The more you experiment, the higher are your chances to find a winning combination of Facebook ad types.
6. What content should I post and how often?
When you run the Facebook page dedicated to your drop shipping store, it’s important not to:
Get forgotten (and it can happen if you don’t post anything for months)
Become too noisy and spammy (and it can happen if you post every hour)
In other words, you need to keep a healthy balance.
The barely minimum is to post at least once a week. If you’d like to stick to this strategy, it’s the best idea to make posts showing and describing your products, announcing sales and introducing special offers.
If you have the energy to post more often, you can make posts once a day. In this case, you should think of mixed content. Apart from the post ideas mentioned above, you can also tell your subscribers your store news, share your buyers’ feedback, make little polls and surveys, announce your blog posts, ask for your subscribers’ opinion on your product range and service quality, and in general, keep your readers interested and entertained. The more they are engaged in conversations, the better!
Another popular way to increase engagement is running a contest or a giveaway. Facebook contest is a cost effective solution to attract attention, collect emails, and increase brand awareness in a short time. You can use third-party apps and services for FB promotion, so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. But remember that you need to follow all official rules set in FB Page terms. For example, in your contest, as well as in any other FB promotion, you must inform that it isn’t sponsored, endorsed or administered by Facebook; you cannot use Personal Timelines or friend connections to administer promotions; and there are other regulations you should observe. The greatest thing in contests and giveaways is that you can vary your contest rules according to your goals and give different tasks to your audience. And as a result – you rise product awareness, collect the data you need and boost your sales!
7. How should the FB promotional post look like and what should be included in it?
When you think of an idea for a post on the Facebook page of your store, make sure that it contains:
Visual part
A bright high-quality picture or a short interesting video grabs attention of your page visitors and makes them interested in reading further.
Caption
Write a short text to comment or explain the visual material. Don’t make it too long – 150-200 characters will be more than enough.
Call to action
The reason why you make these posts is to motivate people on making a purchase, right? Encourage your readers to take a look at the newest offers, or to visit your website, or to share their feedback, or to ask you something about the items, etc.
Hashtags
Hashtags help people surf Facebook and find the type of content they’re interested in. Think of a catchy and memorable hashtag describing your business, and use it consistently for every post you make. Also, put 2-3 popular hashtags related to the content of each separate post. Don’t be afraid to experiment with these additional hashtags!
8. Are there any automated services for Facebook promotion?
We understand that it’s not always easy to find the time to manage your Facebook page.
An automated promotion tool we can recommend is Social Rabbit Plugin. Basically, the plugin uses the settings you’ve specified to create human-like posts in 4 social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.
The plugin can automatically share the content of your drop shipping store in social networks, attract mass attention to your Facebook posts, and also repost popular content from related social media accounts.
AliDropship company doesn’t provide the service of launching and managing advertising campaigns on Facebook for you.
Instead, we can offer you the service of Social Media Creation. In other words, our dedicated specialists can create a professionally designed Facebook page for you. This account will be integrated with your website, so your store visitors won’t have any troubles finding it.
When your Facebook page is ready, we won’t be running it manually. However, we can help you install and set up Social Rabbit Plugin. Making automated posts and attracting the public interest towards this page, the plugin will make it much easier for you to find new customers on Facebook and boost your drop shipping store performance.
Did we cover everything you wanted to know about Facebook promotion in this guideline? Feel free to leave your questions in the comments’ section below!
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