Easiest Way To Start Dropshipping (From Scratch)

If you’re a beginner and you’ve been struggling to get started, get those first few sales, and you don’t have a lot of money to invest, this is the perfect article for you. This is how I got started with dropshipping and this is what I would do if I had to start over from scratch

Hopefully, this helps you out.

Starting From Scratch

I just want to clarify what I mean by starting from scratch so that we’re all on the same page. By starting from scratch, I mean that you’re starting with about $200 in the bank and that’s all you have to your name and you also have a credit card.

$200 I think is the bare minimum that you can have in order to start drop-shipping, and it’s still not a lot, if you have more, it’s obviously better. But for this article, I’m going to be talking about starting from scratch with about $200 and a credit card

A credit card is also necessary because if you start getting some sales and you spent all your money on promotions, there’s a delay between the time that you get the sale and when you get the money in your bank account and you’re not going to have money to fulfill those orders so having a credit card is a must and just for ease of use to. I mean, there are so many things that you can just plug your credit card in, and then it makes everything easier so you definitely want to have a credit card when you’re starting out with drop shipping.

Your first expenses are going to be $29 for your Shopify plan, plus about $15 for a.com domain name which leaves you with about $150 left for promos. 

Read this article: How to create a dropshipping store using Shopify and oberlo

As for apps for your Shopify store, you can use free trials, every app has a free trial so that shouldn’t cost you any money. And for themes, I always recommend just using a free theme and customize it well. You don’t need to invest in a paid theme.

1. Finding A Product To Sell

When you’re just starting from scratch and you don’t have a lot of budgets, there’s no room to test a bunch of different products and find the next big winning product. What you want to do is you want to find a product that’s proven to work and then model your competitors. And the best way that I like to do this is by searching on Instagram rather than Facebook.

Searching on Facebook works great if you’re trying to find the next big winning product but the problem is that, let’s say you get targeted by an ad and it has like two million views and a lot of comments and you’re like, wow, this must be a winning product. The issue is that you don’t know if they spent thousands of dollars in testing to find the right audience for that product, you don’t know if they had previous warm audiences for that product to sell to, you don’t know what the barrier to entry is for that product. It might work really well for them but if you try to do the same it wouldn’t work because you don’t have the same data as them, you don’t have the audiences, and you don’t have the budget to do a lot of testing as they did.

What I recommend doing, if you have a very limited budget is searching on Instagram for proven products there. Because for Instagram influencers there’s no barrier to entry. People just message a page. They’re like, hey, can I buy a shout-out on your page? and then they post it, and you can do the exact same thing. There’s nothing stopping you from doing the exact same thing so if you see a product that’s constantly being advertised on Instagram, that tells you that the product must be selling and you can do the exact same thing.

That’s what I like to do to find these products. I like to browse through the Instagram explorer page and see if there’s any product that keeps popping up. You can do this over a few days and just try to pay attention to see if there’s a certain product that keeps popping up on your feed and if you do see a product that keeps popping up like that, it means that that product is selling well because no one’s going to keep buying promotions if they’re not making money with them. So that’s a great great way to find these proven products and not waste money testing a bunch of products

To show you an example of what I mean, I scroll through my explore feed before this article and I found a bunch of ads for the same teeth whitening product. So I took a few screenshots here but I saw the ads like 10 times at least just one-time scrolling through my feed

That tells you that this product is obviously selling really well on Instagram and you can model what these guys are doing and do the same thing. This is the teeth whitening pen product and as you can see, four different pages and they’re all promoting the exact same thing and it’s getting a lot of engagement and this is all on the explore page. If something is on the explore page it obviously means that it’s getting a lot of reaches. The explore page is when a post goes viral. These guys are making a lot of money with this product.

Once you find a product you can look it up on Aliexpress and get more information about it so that’s what I did here, I just searched for a teeth whitening pen on Aliexpress sorted by the number of orders, and I found this right here

As you can see it has 26,000 orders which is a lot of orders so this was obviously a winning product. However, just because it has a lot of orders doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s still selling well. So you can do a little bit more research and get more info. Let me show you how I would do this.

First off, you want to copy the URL of the product page and then head to your dropshipping Center. Go to my Aliexpress, and then dropshipping center, and then product analysis

Once you’re there, you just paste the URL. Hit searched, and then you can get some information. 

This product has been getting like 200 orders a day consistently, if it has 26,000 orders and it’s getting 200 orders a day that means that it’s been going for like 3 to 4 months. You’re not at the start of the trend with this product but it’s obviously still selling well because we’re seeing all these ads for it on Instagram so what this tells me is that maybe not be the best time to get into this product for a long term because it’s getting exhausted, however, it’s still selling really well so you could probably just model what the guys are doing on Instagram and make a quick buck with it

Another thing you can do to find out more about the product is going to Google Trends. Type in the product, teeth whitening pen, and this will show us where the product is at in its cycle. Each product can have a cycle it goes up and then it goes down and we can check out where the teeth whitening pen is at 

This is the United States in the past twelve months, and it started trending around in July, and then it peaked in October, and then it crashed pretty hard, and now it’s going back up again. So now we’re at 72% relative search interest 

This tells me that this product is probably in a downtrend now, it’s already reached its peak but it’s still working well apparently because I keep seeing ads for it on Instagram so I wouldn’t get into this product for the long term. However, if you wanted to make quick money and if you’re just starting out with dropshipping and you’re trying to learn how it works, you could try to do the exact same thing that these guys are doing on Instagram and it would probably work because it seems like it’s working for them.

2. Building A One Product Store

Once you find a good product to sell, the next step is setting up a store for that product and the way that I like to do it is setting up a one-product type store kind of a niche store around that product. I find that that helps you get an edge over the competitors who are just selling the product in a general store.

You could make it more branded and build your whole store around that one product. I’ve already talked about that in this article how to create one product dropshipping store for beginners

Another thing is you definitely want to model your competitors and don’t reinvent the wheel. For example, in the product descriptions, you can see if the product description is working well for them. You can base your product description out there so you copy theirs, copy it in a word document, and then start editing, make it more personalized to your website, try to make it better, and then use that. You want to save time and you want to move fast and you don’t want to reinvent the wheel because you’re starting out with $200 and you don’t have time to just test around a bunch of different things. You want to find something that’s working, model it, build up some capital.

3. Promoting Your Store/ IG Influencers

When you’re starting from scratch, I definitely recommend staying away from Facebook Ads because Facebook Ads requires a lot of budget for testing, and if you only have $200 in your beginner, it’s the quickest way to just blow away $200, and then you’re done with drop shipping. Stay away from Facebook Ads especially if you have a limited budget and you don’t have any prior data to work with. Instead, what I like doing is using Instagram page influencers like meme pages, these pages. And I find that that’s a lot easier and you can just model what the competitors are doing that we found earlier. 

One thing that you want to do is install your pixel right away even before you start running Facebook Ads so that you start collecting all the data about the people who visit your store, people who buy, you want to install your Facebook pixel right away so that you can eventually switch to Facebook ads. But when you’re just starting out from scratch I definitely recommend starting with Instagram influencers.

You’re also going to need to make an ad for the product. When you’re just starting out, and you don’t want to invest money into getting your own ad made, what you can do is just take some clips from YouTube and make your own little montage and make it out that way, or you can just steal your competitor’s ads that’s what a lot of people do, however, it’s unethical, and you could definitely get into some copyright issues so I definitely don’t recommend it, but if you’re desperate, you got to do what you got to do.

Make sure to model your competitor’s ads. You don’t want to reinvent the wheel so don’t try to go crazy with it, just see what’s working and then do a similar thing.

Find small but engaged pages within your niche, and by small, I mean, from 50,000 to 200,000 followers and that’s the range that I found works best to get the highest ROI. You’re not going to get crazy volume with that size of the page but you can get cheap posts and they can go viral and they get a lot of engagement. Usually, you’ll get a great ROI on these pages.

Preferably you want to find pages that don’t do promotions yet, those will definitely give you the best return because people trust the owner more, and since they don’t do much a bunch of promotions. If a page does a bunch of promotions, people start being immune to those ads and they just stop responding to them. Versus, a page that’s never done a promotion before, it’s much more likely that people are going to pay attention to it. What I like doing is negotiating for a good rate, usually, I go for 12-hour posts because I found that those give me the best bang for my buck. And I recommend negotiating for $25 or less for those 12-hour posts. It obviously depends on the page so this is just like a benchmark that I put. But you don’t want to be spending too much per post especially because you have a low budget

Related article: Facebook ads for e-commerce and dropshipping

A good way to get low prices is to say, hey, can I do this much for my first post? and if it does well I’m going to be buying a bulk deal of five posts or something. And if you do that, they’re going to let you test the page for cheaper and you can get a great ROI that way. To get the best results with this method you do need to put a lot of work into finding the best Instagram influencer pages and that takes some time. But there is one method that I like doing that saves time and you can start building a big list of influencers to promote on. I’m actually going to show you that method right now

I pulled up my Instagram and I’ve just been scrolling through the explore page until I found another one of those teeth whitening pen ads. I just found one right here as you can see it’s pretty easy to spot them

You click on it, and then what I like doing is I’ll go to the page that they actually promote it on. That tells you this page is probably doing well for these guys

You could try to advertise on the same page like them but this one got 9278 followers so it’s going to be more expensive. Plus, they’re already doing business with these guys so they’re not going to promote the same product.

But what you can do is you just click this little tab here, and it’s going to give you some suggestions of similar pages. 

For example, beauty TV posts. We can go to this page and then this could be a potential page to promote on. I will just do this on, and on until you find good pages to promote

Another thing I want to point out about these Instagram influencer promotions is that, if you notice this thumbnail right here, this cover for the video that they posted is eye-catching. This is obviously Photoshop. It’s fake

But you can select the cover when you post something on Instagram. When you post a video there’s a little tab it says, cover, and you can select a frame in the video to select the cover. Selecting a good cover, something that is like clickbait. That’s going to make all the difference for your Instagram influencer promotions so that’s a really important tip. You want to make sure that you’re selecting a good cover for your post.

That’s one of the easiest ways to find Instagram influencer pages to promote on. Find your competitor’s ads and then find suggested pages and keep searching and you can keep looping through until you find something that meets your requirements which is a smaller page that’s engaged and that doesn’t do a lot of promotions.

4. Fulfilling Orders

When you start getting some orders that’s where using your credit card comes in, and then you can use your credit card to fulfill those orders with oberlo. I’m not going in-depth into how do you fulfill orders and how to set up oberlo because I have already talked about that in this article how to dropship products using a us supplier

5. Rinse & Repeat

If your first few ads are profitable, you want to keep scaling. Find more influencer pages and just buy more posts and keep doing this until you start building up some capital. This is a great way to start getting a feeling for how dropshipping works. Get a first few sales, started learning how to customer service, all that type of thing. Getting the vibe with dropshipping and then building up some capital. 

When you have about $2,000 in the capital, that’s when you can start considering focusing on Facebook Ads. This is exactly what I did. And Facebook Ads is going to be a lot easier right off the bat because you’re going to have money to test with, and you’re going to have data from your pixel that you installed from the start

All the sales that you made on Instagram, all the people who visited your website, you’re going to have all that data to work with when you’re working with Facebook. And that’s going to make things a lot easier.

Conclusion

That’s the basic blueprint for how I would get started from scratch, and how I recommend beginners to get started from complete scratch because this method saves you a lot of guessing, and I see a lot of people just complete beginners jumping into Facebook ads and then they waste a ton of money. They’re down a few thousand dollars just made a few sales and it’s because Facebook Ads is tough especially if you don’t have data and you don’t have a lot of budgets to test with. So, this is definitely what I would recommend.