How To Create A Dropshipping Store With WooCommerce

In this tutorial, I’m going to teach you how to create a dropshipping store using WordPress. Plus, a free plugin called WooCommerce. Not only this, but I’m going to teach you how to use a free app called WooDropship. This app is not only going to save you a lot of time when you’re adding products to your store, but it’s also going to semi-automate the drop shipping fulfillment process. 

Now, there have been a lot of people who’ve read my article where I teach you how to create a semi-automated store using Shopify and Oberlo, and they want to be able to do the same thing but with WordPress. 

Well, thanks to WooDropship, we now can. It doesn’t completely automate the process, but it does greatly streamline it. This is going to be a 8-step process, but don’t worry, because I’m going to be showing you the exact instructions that you need so that you can follow along.

Here is a preview of the store that we are going to build today. As you can see, it has a custom logo, has a custom menu, and underneath products. It has a sub-menu for the different categories of products that we are selling in it. 

Scrolling down, you can see that we have a homepage that has a banner on it, some content, and we’ve even got a preview of the eight most recent products in our store catalog, making it look nice and professional. 

I’ll show you how to do all of this. So, I’m just going to open up a product listing for a travel lens coffee mug. So, here is an item listing, which I’ll show you how to add. You can see we’ve got an image gallery, and the customers can zoom in on images and click to view more. 

We’ve also got some content on the page, which I’ll show you how to add. We’ve got a “related products” section which upsells the customers on more items that they might like. 

This product page works by clicking the “Add to cart” button What customers have to do is fill out their details and then complete the payment with PayPal. And they don’t need a PayPal account to pay either, as PayPal lets them checkout as a guest. 

All right, that is the store I’m going to show you how to build. 

Let’s get started. 

Step 1. Setup A Web Hosting & Pick A Domain

Create an account with any Webhosting of your choice because I wouldn’t recommend any web hosting for you in this tutorial. Just google search and you’ll find good web hosting. But the one I’ll be using for this tutorial is iPage.

The process is the same with any web hosting when you’re about to install WordPress.

Step 2. Install WordPress For Free

Let me show you exactly how to do this. 

On the iPage control panel. Click “WordPress. To install WordPress, we need to use the MOJO Marketplace, so on this page, just click “Continue Installation.” 

Now we need to select which domain name we’re going to install WordPress on. Select the www.yourdomainname.com option, and do not click the one ending in iPage. Keep the directory section empty. Scrolling down, I recommend deselecting these plugins. I mean, you can install them later if you choose to use them, but we don’t need them for now. Click “Next.” 

It may take a while to load. Now, do not click away. This is perfectly normal that it takes some time. There isn’t anything wrong, just be patient. Once it’s finished loading, it’s going to warn you that the install directory is empty. Don’t worry about this, just click “I confirm that it’s safe to overwrite any content in this directory,” and click “Next.” 

On the next page, you’ll be asked to fill out the site title, create an admin email address, and an admin username and admin password. Fill out all of this information. This is going to be the login information for the dashboard of your new site. You don’t need to worry about the site title, because we’re to be deleting it later. 

So, click “Next” once you’re finished. It’s going to take a little while for WordPress to install. Again, don’t click away thinking that there is an error or a problem with your connection. Stay on the page and let it load and install WordPress on your new domain. 

It should take about a minute or so to install. It may take longer depending on your internet connection. So, again, don’t get discouraged and click away. 

Once this has been installed, I’m going to be showing you how to access your WordPress dashboard by typing in the URL into your browser. 

Now that WordPress has successfully installed, go to your browser. Type in the domain name of your new store. At the end of it, type “/wp-admin” and then click enter. For example, www.yoursitename.com/wp-admin. This will take you to the WordPress admin area of your site, which is how we can go and edit it and make modifications to it. 

On the page, you just need to fill in the login details that you created earlier, your username, and your password. And then, once you filled in that, just click “Log in.” 

When you’ve logged in, click the “I don’t need help” button

That’s it. Step 2 is finished. It’s now time to move on.

Step 3. Install WooCommerce, A Free Plugin For WordPress

You firstly need to open up woocommerce.com. Start by clicking “Get started.” On the other page, you’ll need to create a WordPress account. We’ll be using this WordPress account for step five when we install a theme. Now, make sure you use a real email address, as in step five, we’ll need to find a verification email to verify our WordPress account before we can download a theme. Click “Sign up.” 

On this page, select that you don’t have a WooCommerce account and then click “Continue.” After this, you’ll be taken to a series of questions. These questions are just a survey. If you want to help WooCommerce, you can fill out the survey. If you don’t want to, you can just skip any question by clicking “Continue” without selecting any answers. 

Now, I personally don’t really mind answering questions though because of the fact that WooCommerce is a free open-source plugin, and I don’t mind supporting it.  

When it comes to this page, select “Auto-Install.” On the other page, type in the full URL address of your new store and then click “Confirm.” When that’s loaded, “Continue.” 

On the next page, click “Install Now.” This will complete the installation of WooCommerce, but we still need to activate it and personalize it with our settings. 

On this page, click “Activate the plugin.” Now, it may take a while for this to load, but, again, do not click away. This is perfectly normal, as this is a very large plugin to install. 

All right, now we need to set up WooCommerce. Select “Let’s go.” 

Click “Continue.” You’re going to select what country your store is based in. I personally recommend just selecting your country of residence. I recommend that you use United States dollars as your currency of choice since most of your customers will be based in the USA unless, of course, you plan to set up a store to target a specific country like Britain, in which case you’d obviously select pounds. But most people are going to be targeting United States residents.

I recommend that you use pounds as your unit for measuring product weight, as, again, most of your customers will be based in the USA. And because of that, I recommend that you use inches as the unit that you use to measure product dimensions. After this, click continue. 

Don’t worry about taxes right now, just click “Continue.” Select the payments that you will accept. Everybody reading this article should select “PayPal.” You should make sure to put in your actual PayPal address. If you do not have a PayPal account, I recommend that you set one up immediately. 

I strongly recommend using Stripe to select payment if you purchased an SSL certificate, but only if you did purchase one because you cannot use Stripe without it. 

After you have selected your payments, click “Continue.” And that’s it, WooCommerce has been set up. Click “Return to WordPress dashboard.” Keep it open for step 4. 

Step 4. Add A Free Shipping Option

To improve sales and conversions, I strongly recommend having one shipping option, free shipping. You can easily offer this because AliExpress shipping is usually free anyway. Sometimes you need to pay a little bit extra if you want to use a premium shipping service like ePacket, but luckily this is usually just a couple of dollars or less. So, it’s very easy to absorb into your product price. 

Let me show you exactly how to do this. 

Go to the menu and go to “WooCommerce” and then “Settings.” Once in the settings, select the shipping tab. Click “Add shipping zone.” 

For the zone name, the easiest thing to call it is “Free Shipping,” so type it in. Next, you can choose to select regions to limit your shipping zone too. This is entirely optional. Let’s say, you selected the United States. You will only be offering free shipping to the United States. But since the Chinese suppliers from AliExpress usually offer to ship free worldwide, I suggest leaving this blank and offering free shipping worldwide. 

After you’ve done that, scroll down and click “Add shipping method.” From the dropdown menu, select “Free shipping” and then click “Add shipping method,” and that’s it. We’re done.

I’ve shown you how to set up free shipping since AliExpress offers free shipping. But if you’d like, you can create your own paid shipping options as well. It’s entirely your choice. 

Step 5. Install A Free Theme

We need to verify the WordPress account that we created in step 3. Go to the email account that you’ve created it with and click on the email sent from WordPress titled “Activate” followed by your site name. In the email, click the confirmation button, and that’s it. You’ve confirmed your account. 

Now, it’s time to open up the website. Got to https://woocommerce.com/product-category/themes .

Scroll down and click “Add to cart.” I know that makes it sound like you’ll be purchasing something, but don’t worry. It’s completely free. Click “Sign In with wordpress.com.” Log in with your WordPress account that we verified earlier at the beginning of this step. When you’re done, select “Login.” 

You will need to fill out your information. Don’t worry about being charged money, it’s entirely free. Click “Purchase.” 

On this page, we’re just going to download a theme. 

It’s a small file, so it should be very fast to download. Once it’s downloaded, go back to the dashboard for your new website. Go to “Appearance” and click “Themes.” Click “Upload.” And then click “Upload Theme”

Click “Choose File.” Find where you saved the Mystile theme file on your computer and click “Open.” Once you’ve done that, click “Install Now.” It may take a while for it to install on your site. Again, don’t click away and assume that anything is wrong. This process should take less than a minute. It may take a little more depending on your internet connection. On this page, click activate. And once you’ve done that, you have successfully installed the theme. It is now time to move on to the next step.

Step 6. Sign Up For A Free WooDropship Account And Install The WooDropship Chrome extension

WooDropship is not only the app that we’re going to use to greatly streamline the process of adding products to our store, but it’s also going to help us semi-automate the drop shipping fulfillment process. 

Go to www.woodropship.com. Click “Get started for free.” You’ll need to create an account. 

Go to the “Connect WooCommerce Store box and type in the URL to your new store, and then click “Connect store.” Just scroll down and click “Approve,” and that’s it. You’ve connected WooDropship to your site. 

We just need to go and install the WooDropship Chrome extension ( Woodropship – Aliexpress WooCommerce importer). Once you arrive on the page, just click the “Add to Chrome button and then click “Extension.” When you do this successfully, you’ll see the WooDropship icon in the top right-hand corner of your Chrome browser. 

Now we need to verify it. Go back to WooDropship and click on the little setting wheel icon. Scroll down to the WooCommerce user key. If you’re using a PC, highlight this, right-click it, and click “Copy.” Then go back to the WooDropship Chrome extension and come down to the user key bit. Paste in your key, and then you just need to click ‘Update,” and then that’s it. We’ve successfully created a WooDropship account. 

We’ve added the Chrome extension, and we verified it. It’s now time to move on to the next step which will also be the biggest and the longest.

Step 7. Add Aliexpress Products Into Your Store Using WooDropship

Let me show you exactly how to do this. What I’m going to do is I’m going to search for products to add to my store. Now, if you aren’t sure what to sell, you can browse around for ideas. But for me, I know what I’m looking for, so I’m going to type it in. “Self-stir mug,” and then click “Enter.” AliExpress has given me all of the results for a self-stir mug. There are lots. I want to figure out which of these sellers is the most trusted. So, I’m going to sort the results by order. 

Now AliExpress is showing me, sellers, selling this item in order of how many sales they make. This is a good way to order it, because if a seller is making hundreds of sales a week, then you know they must be good at fulfilling orders.

This little ePacket tick symbol is showing up as a feature of WooDropship’s Chrome extension. 

It’s letting us know that this item has ePacket shipping available. And on the flip side, it’s showing us that ePacket is not available for this item. So, if you wanted to use ePacket shipping, you’d know not to sell this one. 

All right, let’s add this item to our store. To do so, click the button. This button is there because we have the WooDropship Chrome extension installed. As you can see, it’s telling us that this item was successfully added to our WooDropship import list. 

All right, let’s switch back to our WooDropship dashboard. Go to the menu, click “Products,” and then click “Import list.” 

And as you can see, the self-stir mug has been added to our list which is great. 

WooDropship is a bit different from Oberlo. The WooDropship team is adding in new features constantly, as it’s quite a new app. But at the time of this article tutorial, I personally found it easier to make deeper edits to each product listing manually, and I’ll be showing you how to do so. 

I’m going to edit the title and description for each of these products. I’ve pasted in my new product title and description that I’ve created for the self-stir mug. When you finish that, click “Push to store.” This may take a little while to load, so don’t click away if it does. Wait for it to load. When it successfully worked, you’ll get a little message saying “Pushed.”

Switch back to your WordPress dashboard.

As you can see, the products have been successfully added. 

Step 8. launch Your Store

This is super-duper easy to do. We are almost finished. Congratulations on staying with me this far. Now we just need to remove this “Website Coming Soon” page. When you do, people will be able to come to your storefront, see it, and buy items. 

Go to the admin dashboard. Then just click that button. And when you do that, it’s done. Now when people come to your store, they will see the store and not the “Coming Soon” page. 

Congratulations on completing all 8 steps. You now have a semi-automated dropshipping store, and that is it. We’re done. Well done in staying right to the end of this tutorial. 

I’m now going to go purchase an item from my store and then fulfill it using WooDropship so that you can see how it semi-automates the drop shipping fulfillment process. I’ve purchased this guitar mug. Now I’m going to fulfill the order with WooDropship. To do this, I’ve gone to “Pending Orders.” I’m going to click “Fulfill order.” 

What WooDropship is doing is adding this item into my cart and typing in the customer address semi-automatically. This is a huge part of what makes WooDropship an amazing app for creating a semi-automated store, it is semi-automating the fulfillment process for me. And it is a huge time-saver. 

Now that it’s finished, I can scroll down and select the shipping I want to use. ePacket isn’t available for this item, but if it was, I would have probably selected that. 

I’m going to leave a message as though I was blindly dropshipping this item. I requested the merchant not to include any advertising or invoices with the order. I recommend adding a message like this as well if you are also using this as a store-to-dropship. You can then select how you want to pay. 

Then you just click “Confirm & Pay.” When you do that, you’ll be taken back to WooDropship. I recommend switching back to AliExpress and confirming that the order went through. For me, I had to confirm my credit card. Sometimes you’ll need to do this. Sometimes you won’t. 

It’s not WooDropship’s fault. It’s just a quirk of AliExpress. And that’s it. We’re done. We’ve successfully fulfilled the order with WooDropship. 

That is it. With a little bit of work, we had created our own semi-automated dropshipping store using WooCommerce and WooDropship.