Drop Shipping Business

Drop Shipping for Beginners: Q&A Series #3

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!

1. What is drop shipping?

Drop shipping is an online business model.

It is really simple:

You find a supplier who sells items all over the globe (most typically, people find such suppliers on AliExpress)
You create or order a webstore
You fill your webstore with images and descriptions of products available from this seller, and set higher prices on them
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.

We were doing the same – as you know, we have a huge experience of running our own drop shipping stores.

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?

The plugin does the biggest part of your technical job.

This way, it gives you enough free time to experiment with marketing strategies and boost your store sales.

The more time and effort you devote to marketing, the more impressive is the result!

7. Does AliDropship plugin have a trial period?

There’s no demo or trial period, but we provide 30 days money back guarantee on the plugin.

8. Can I use your standard free theme without AliDropship plugin?

No, the themes will only work if you have installed the plugin.

9. Do I need to register my business?

AliExpress suppliers won’t ask you for any official registration – they will work with you even if you’re just an ordinary person.

Still, every country has its own legal rules. Check the relevant laws carefully!

10. Do I need to sign up drop shipping agreement to start business with you?

No, you don’t need to sign any papers.

So, as you can see, there is nothing scary about drop shipping. You can easily handle it even if you have no previous experience at all, and if you use the right automated solutions, you will enjoy some truly awesome results.

We will be happy to see you joining our drop shipping community!

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Dropshipping

How to Easily Manage Day-to-Day Operations in Drop Shipping Business: Q&A Series #5

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.

In other words, the cost of an item won’t be deducted from your PayPal account. Instead, while placing an order on AliExpress, you can use one of the payment methods supported by the platform.

5. Does the plugin import the shipping costs or do I have to add shipping options to my products?

AliDropship Plugin doesn’t import items’ shipping costs.

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.

If your client did not receive the order or is not satisfied with his purchase, you should follow AliExpress Buyers Protection Policy.

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.

10. How will I handle refunds?

One of the reasons why AliExpress is perfect for drop shipping is its good protection system with full money back guarantee.

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!

Dropshipping

Myth Busted: Is Dropshipping Dead?

Is dropshipping dead? Does dropshipping work? Is dropshipping worth it? The answers to these questions are obvious – still, for some reason, they continue to bug thousands of people all over the globe.

When you are standing at the doorstep of your first dropshipping journey ever, most likely, you don’t know much about this type of business and its prospects.

This is why you go online in hopes to see dropshipping explanation for beginners, or a checklist of must-have things at the beginning, or the advantages of the dropshipping business model, or the opportunities for your future growth, or something like this, encouraging and helpful.

Instead, on your search results page, you see some terrifying things:

Lol.

Sitting in one of the spacious downtown offices generously rented by our CEOs, and surfing the Web on my shiny Mac beside 50+ colleagues who develop, test and improve this business-related solutions, I personally giggle at all the hysteric Internet posts that pronounce dropshipping dead and claim it has no future.

And you know what? I strongly advise you to do the same and not to take any of these statements seriously.

Dropshipping will outlive us all, and here is why.

Why the answer to the ‘Is dropshipping dead?’ question is NO

Surely, there’s nothing funny about actual people’s worries and concerns: it’s natural to be anxious about the things you don’t fully understand or know yet.

People go online to learn more about the business they’re planning to launch, and obviously, they look for the advice of more experienced entrepreneurs.

This is why Quora and Reddit, the forums aimed on solving the most pressing everyday issues, are filled with questions like these:

There is absolutely nothing wrong about these questions: they simply show that dropshippers-to-be are genuinely interested in the financial prospects of this business, and (unfortunately) lack information on the topic.

The sad part, however, is that yellow press takes advantage of this public interest and speculates on it in the most misleading way possible.

So, let’s go through the most common arguments these ‘experts’ use while talking about the future of dropshipping.

‘Dropshipping is dead because its hype years are gone’

Oh, I beg your pardon.

Here’s a Google Trends graph showing the frequency of searching for the ‘dropshipping’ term in the last 5 years.

Can anyone seriously insist that the ‘golden era’ of dropshipping has already ended?

Is it even logical and sensible to say that ‘dropshipping was hot in 2010s, but it’s all over now’?

This graph clearly demonstrates that the number of business persons interested in dropshipping model is growing steadily no matter what – no political turmoils, wars, economic crises, etc. can stop people from pursuing their dream.

Plus, a considerable surge in public interest towards dropshipping has started less than a couple of years ago – it lets us assume that this whole business scheme is currently on its early growth stage, and the best is yet to come.

These assumptions are proven statistically: just take a look at this graph, and you’ll see that in 2017, the whole e-commerce industry accounted for only 10.1% of all retail sales worldwide.

It’s only 10%! And for drop shipping business in particular, the number is even lower because clearly, not all of the e-commerce transactions can be classified as dropshipping-related actions (and we will talk about it further).

To sum up, drop shipping business has an incredible room for growth: on global scale, its operations now account for a small yet promising percentage of all the acts of purchase and sale.

This, in turn, leads to the following speculation…

‘Dropshipping is dead because of extreme competition’

This is quite a common business fear: if something gets insanely popular in a short time period, all the related spheres instantly get overly saturated with entrepreneurs making profit from it.

In other words, the more demanded something becomes, the more intense the competition gets – so, if you’re not already in, you won’t have a chance to succeed.

Sounds slightly reasonable, but let’s take a quick look at the industry statistics.

As Statista researchers report, only in the United States, there will be 230.5 million digital shoppers by 2021.

Can you imagine the number of enterprises that is necessary to satisfy the needs of all these shoppers?

And don’t forget: it’s only the data for the United States! Take a look at other geographic markets, and you’ll see that it’s early impossible to create an ‘excessive’ online store – with due marketing efforts, there will be enough buyers for everyone. Southeast Asia’s Internet economy for example, is predicted to reach the $50 billion mark in 2018, and for 2025, the number is estimated to be around $200 billion.

So, it’s possible for a dropshipping store owner to successfully target any geographic market and reap the rewards of the business flexibility: its specific mechanism makes it easy for everyone to dropship from any country on the globe.

Still, the availability and affordability of launching a self-owned dropshipping store leads to the mass creation of the following myth…

‘Dropshipping is dead because you can make no money of it’

This is my favourite part.

Dropshipping opponents dare to say that a business which is so quick to start and so easy to run can’t bring the owner any considerable returns.

To clear these doubts and get a full picture of what’s happening, again, let’s consider the global e-commerce trend.

Judging by the Statista data, the expected volume of retail e-commerce sales in 2018 is due to be around $2,774 billion.

At the same time Lehigh, one of the leading research universities in the USA, figures it out that dropshipping sales and purchases constitute 25-30% of all the e-commerce transactions.

It lets us roughly estimate that by 2021, the volume of global dropshipping sales in 2021 will exceed $1,500 billion.

Isn’t this number impressive enough?

Doesn’t it showcase a thrilling opportunity to get a fair share of this jaw-dropping amount of money?

Surely, you might say – ‘nah, it’s all about large-scale businesses, it has nothing to do with me, a mere mortal”.

But how, in your opinion, have all these multibillion-dollar empires started?

The incredibly inspiring example of Zappos shows that it only takes a first step to embark on this breathtaking journey.

Zappos, in the same manner as Amazon, has started from humble beginnings – but look what both of them managed to achieve in the course of time.

Each and every person proudly sharing their first dropshipping achievements, whether it be $600 revenue in the first two months or $3,000+ in sales daily, has the chance to build a mind-blowing e-commerce venture – and you can do the same, too.

On a $1,500 billion market, there’s a place for everyone!

Maybe, the next dropshipping success story will be written by you?…

Dropshipping

All Entrepreneurs Do It: 9 Ways to be Successful in Business

Have you ever found yourself looking up the internet in search of some cookie-cutter solutions how to be a successful entrepreneur? And does it really make any sense? Everybody knows that there’s no magic pill, and it’s not enough to read a pair of books on business to become Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg. Still, there are some things that most prosperous businessmen have in common. Let’s see what distinguishes a good entrepreneur from a second-rate one.

Of course, no one can learn to swim just sitting on the shore and reading the articles like “10 Influential Books You Need to Read to Become a Great Swimmer”. There is no other way to learn to swim than to jump into the water; to become a good entrepreneur, you should first of all run your own business. Anyway, there are some points that you should bear in mind and some guidelines to follow. Study our tips and think over the points that you should master.

How to be a successful entrepreneur

Don’t be afraid of mistakes

Maybe you are a unique prototype of a leading-edge robot created by a brilliant scientist. You are programmed to make perfect decisions and always choose the best option of all the possible. And you never make mistakes. So, you can miss this point and pass to the next one.

All the other people make wrong decisions from time to time, and there is nothing terrible about that. This is business, not mathematics or physics – there are no ironclad guarantees. If you have chosen wrong products for your store, oversaturated your landing page with pop-ups, met disreputable supplier or was cheated by a credit card fraudster – it’s not the end of the world. You’ll know better next time. Keep calm, fix it and move along.

Seek ways to work smarter

Try to minimize manual routine actions that are your main time robbers. You’ll be surprised how many of them can be automated.

For example, if you run your dropshipping business with AliDropship plugin, you’ll be relieved from the problems with pricing, placing and tracking orders, updating products, etc. The plugin does all these and many other things for you.

Promotion also can be automated with the help of special tools. Such great SMM solutions as Social Rabbit plugin can save you up to 40 hours a week!

Don’t try to keep every tiny detail in your head – use planners, calendars, sticky notes and other things that were invented to make our life easier.

Learn from the others’ experience

A smart entrepreneur knows how to combine business with pleasure. Reading success stories is a good way to spend your free time profitably.

There is always someone who is smarter, richer, more experienced and prosperous. Such guys have a lot to learn from. Luckily, many successful ecommerce entrepreneurs are glad to share their practice and knowledge with newcomers. So, reading their pieces of advice in blogs or on thematic forums is really helpful and inspiring.

Their valuable experience – both positive and negative – can give you the cue to some problem or save you from making a mistake.

How to run a winning business

Evaluate and manage risks

Taking risks is an integral part of any eCommerce venture since a calculated risk means a good opportunity.

“The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” – Mark Zuckerberg

Anyway, pay attention that taking risks doesn’t mean going nap blindly. Any risky step requires a thorough analysis. Weigh all pros and cons, and if the risk is justified, get moving. This is the only way to develop your business and leave the competitors far behind.

Use complaints for further development

What is the main task of any business, including eCommerce? It must satisfy consumers’ needs. Retail enterprises must be client-oriented, and online trade is not an exception.

Your customer’s complaints help to find out the weaknesses of your business. Each time you have an unsatisfied customer, you face a wonderful opportunity to master your skills of customer service, to identify the weak point in the process and to fix it.

How do entrepreneurs become successful

Create long-term strategy

Actions without a plan and control are chaotic and unorganized. Even if they lead to the result, it will be difficult to track what algorithm worked there. Therefore, planning is your first priority.

You should have a clear view where you want to find yourself in a month, in a year and five years later. Formulating your main goal is the first step of planning process. Your long-term strategy will determine your everyday tactics. The more effective and accurate it is, the faster the goal will be achieved.

Establish clear goals

The previous point is impossible without this one. There is a great purpose you set your sights on. To achieve it, you should clearly understand where to and how to move. Split your long way into small steps.

Needless to say that your goals must be real, attainable and tangible. Unfortunately, quite often companies either do not formulate goals at all, or operate with such non-specific things as “increase profits” or “work faster “. This will lead you to nothing. A detailed step by step plan with specific numbers is much more realizable than a vague idea “I want to be a millionaire”, isn’t it?

Ways to be a successful entrepreneur

Delegate tasks

Even if your business is young and small, and you think that can manage all by yourself, there may be some things that are better to be passed to someone else. You cannot be equally good at everything – graphic design, web development, copywriting, SEO, multimedia production, and what not. This is why you’d better hire specialists to solve some tasks.

If you are not an expert in some field, it’s logical to delegate it. For example, a professionally designed website is more attractive and user-friendly, and you will have a chance to concentrate on other things which you are good enough at.

Never rest on laurels

Keep on challenging yourself. Running a successful business is impossible without ambitions. A good entrepreneur always wants to keep growing, to provide a better service, to run more effective promotion campaigns. You shouldn’t simply want to be better than your competitors – you should aim to be better than you were yesterday. Look for new growing points, soar for new heights, and one day we’ll be glad to read your success story!

Factors of success are many and various, and one can hardly explain how to be a successful entrepreneur in several simple words. But if you start your own dropshipping business with a ready-to-go custom store, you’ve got excellent chances to go far in the world of eCommerce!

Dropshipping

‘It’s The Same Old Importing From China’: 7 Dropshipping Stereotypes

Dropshipping is a relatively young business model, which is why not everyone is well-informed about its benefits yet. Quite remarkably, some of the newcomers even think that this venture is identical to traditional importing from China! So, in order to fulfill our educational mission, we will investigate the most common dropshipping stereotypes – and help YOU change your life to the better thanks to this incredible venture.

Okay, here’s the axiom: if you have a low opinion of dropshipping, you don’t know much about dropshipping.

Yes, this is one hundred percent true.

The better you understand the mechanics and the distinctive features of this business, the more excited you get about the benefits of this awesome type of ecommerce enterprise.

Shall we begin uncovering the truth about this business model?

Myth #1 Dropshipping is an ordinary importing from China, but with a fancy name

Some people think that the whole existence of dropshipping is just a ‘marketing’ trick. In their opinion, it’s like using a ‘cleaning service manager’ job title instead of a simple ‘janitor’ word: the smarter the term, the easier it is to deceive the unsuspecting public, right?…

In reality, dropshipping is strikingly different from the traditional scheme of buying Chinese items upfront and reselling them for a higher price. Watch this video to see the differences:

Summing it up, if you are dropshipping, you:

Buy no items

You don’t spend a single cent on buying any products from your suppliers, and you don’t deal with things like customs clearance, customs tax payment, etc. So, you can basically start this business at any point of your life: your start-up expenses are really low, and you don’t need extra savings. Besides, you don’t have any risks of going bankrupt even if you accidentally choose wrong items to show in your dropshipping store. As you haven’t really bought these undemanded items, you have no headache over getting your money back – and you can easily change the product offer in your store with no financial or reputational losses.

Keep no physical stock

Since you’re not buying any items, you’re not having any troubles with keeping them safe and secure. This means, there is no need for you to rent a warehouse, or to hire staff to keep an eye on the stock. So, your product-related costs amount to zero!

Arrange no shippings

If your client buys an item that you physically possess, you have to deliver it to the buyer. But, if your customer purchases a product through your dropshipping store, you have absolutely nothing to worry about: the product is located at the original supplier’s place. So, all you need to do is transfer the order details and the buyer’s address to the supplier: all the rest is beyond your responsibility.

As you can see, even though this business model means that (roughly speaking) you’re selling Chinese-made items to your buyers, it is quite far from the traditional direct import from the original supplier. You’ve noticed how huge your financial savings are, right?

Myth #2 Even if you’re dropshipping instead of importing from China directly, you still deal with locally manufactured low quality products

Not necessarily.

I mean, yes, the most convenient place to source your dropshipping products is AliExpress, so technically, you’ll be selling Chinese items in your store. But, who says they will definitely have a poor quality?…

Thanks to our own broad experience in dropshipping, we have learned the most efficient ways to modify AliExpress search bar settings while sorting out the goods on offer. Besides, we have mastered the skill of analysing the product prospects, and shared the gained knowledge in a super extensive manual on choosing the best AliExpress items for your business. Following these simple recommendations, you will stay away from shady sellers and shabby products, and will only offer carefully handpicked items to your potential customers.

Myth #3 Dropshipping profits are so small and irregular that they aren’t even worth all the effort

That’s probably one of the most popular ‘urban legends’ about dropshipping business. This misconception is based on the following thought: in order to get a sufficient profit from every sale, you need to put a considerable markup on each product price – and it will scare off the potential buyers.

But, this is exactly one of the reasons why we recommend using AliExpress as your product source! As the majority of the items are low-priced, you can safely make them cost more – but even with a good markup, the final price will still be acceptable for your customers.

And speaking of the ‘small’ profit… well, look at Mousslim from France who made $3,500 in his first 45 days of doing dropshipping. Or, make yourself familiar with the experience of Martin from the Netherlands who made over €4,100 in 30 days of running his dropshipping store. Or, get inspired with the feedback of Rahul from Indiawho went from 0 to $12,000 in 5 months of managing this business. Both our success stories blog section and dedicated forum thread are filled with real-life stories of actual people who did their best and succeeded with their dropshipping ventures; what makes you think you can’t do the same?

Myth #4 On the package label, your buyer will see you’re importing from China – and it will ruin your reputation

To me, this is one of the funniest arguments against starting a dropshipping business.

Indeed, let’s assume that your buyer receives the package, examines the wrapping paper carefully, and notices Chinese characters, or a Chinese shipper’s name/address.

Now what?

There’s nothing suspicious about it, given that an impressive number of warehouses and manufacturing facilities of the largest global corporations are physically located in China. Plus, the majority of AliExpress sellers are extremely kind to dropshippers (for both sides, it’s a mutually beneficial partnership), so it’s more than acceptable to contact your seller and ask to remove all the promotional leaflets and other irrelevant materials from the package.

If you want to play safe, you can even write it plain and clear on every product page: “The item is kept in our warehouse in China, which is why its average delivery time is 28-35 days depending on the buyer’s location”. With a phrase like this one, you will basically kill two birds with one stone: read what I’m talking about below.

Myth #5 Long delivery time will make the store visitors abandon their shopping carts

If this particular idea bothers you, think of the following: 95% of actions taken in a dropshipping store are driven by emotions. In fact, the whole success of your venture mostly depends on your ability to create a sense of urgency: an in-store atmosphere that promotes impulse purchases.

This is the main reason why a long delivery time won’t be a major negative factor for your clients: they don’t buy your products because it’s a life-critical necessity. They don’t need these items to be delivered immediately; they just want to own them because these products are cute and lovely! Plus, with a smart tech solution at hand, you can always get in touch with the abandoned cart owners, and persuade them to complete the purchase.

Myth #6 Contrary to usual importing from China, dropshipping requires you to be an IT person

When it comes to automated solutions that make a dropshipper’s life 10 times easier, some people get confused, and start worrying a bit. They assume that it’s strictly necessary to deal with coding, to possess advanced tech skills, and to have a website development background.

In reality, the only obligatory piece of knowledge here is the understanding of dropshipping process itself. To help you out with this, we put all our experience and recommendations in this single monumental guide. Read it carefully, and it will be much easier for you to manage your dropshipping business with a healthy profit.

And, with regard to the tech part, we also have something to offer you: here is the easiest way to get your own independent dropshipping business with no technical efforts whatsoever! The lack of IT skills can never stop you from launching and keeping your own fruitful venture because you can simply order a customised store that is fully ready for operation and is assembled by a professional team of developers and designers. That’s a too hot opportunity to miss!

Myth #7 If you keep promoting dropshipping so hard, everyone will start doing it, the bubble will burst, and the industry will collapse

And why on Earth would that happen, I wonder?

As long as you promote your dropshipping store carefully and update its product range on a regular basis, you will always have enough buyers. For many reasons, your store will seem even more appealing to the clients than AliExpress or Amazon!

Plus, the future of dropshipping industry looks brighter than ever: we have collected and analysed some market-related stats in this article, and I strongly recommend you to read it if you have any doubts over the long-term prospects of dropshipping business.