How To Start A Dropshipping Business In 8 Easy Steps (2025)

If researching how to start a dropshipping business is not on your mind, you’re missing a fantastic opportunity:

The dropshipping business model is an excellent way to build a sustainable source of online income.

It will allow you to sell products to customers without holding an inventory. You won’t even have to pay for these products upfront.

More importantly, the dropshipping industry is one of the most lucrative fields nowadays.

According to statistics, the global dropshipping market will grow by nearly 30% in the next couple of years.

But can you start a dropshipping business with little to no investment? Yes, you can launch an online dropshipping business without investment at all.

If you want to learn how to do that, follow the steps in the tutorial below.

This post may contain affiliate links – take a second to read my affiliate disclosure.

Dropshipping For Dummies: What Is Dropshipping?

Dropshipping is a business model anyone can use to sell products without holding an inventory.

It’s an online business where you won’t have to do a lot of heavy lifting to run an eCommerce store.

For instance, you don’t have to store, package, or ship products to clients.

In other words, dropshipping is one of the easiest online businesses you can start as a beginner.

How Does The Dropshipping Business Model Work?

As you already know, dropshipping is an order-fulfillment business method to sell products without keeping them in stock.

By all means, the dropshipping business model works in the following way:

Once a customer buys a product from your dropshipping store, a third-party supplier will ship it on your behalf. The customer pays the dropshipper (you), and you pay the supplier.

Three parties work together each time a dropshipping activity takes place:

• Manufacturer: Assuming you’re familiar with terms such as AliExpress United States or AliExpress Dropshipping, you already know what a manufacturer is. Still, let me explain that the manufacturer deals with the inventory, creates, and ships products to the customers on your behalf. Other responsibilities of a manufacturer are restocking products and replacing defective ones.
• Retailer: To clarify, you are the retailer in such a business model. You’ll research, choose, and sell a manufacturer’s products in your online store. Your responsibilities are marketing the products, paying shipping costs, and calculating prices to earn a profit.
• Customer: Once the customers discover your e-Commerce store, they can purchase the products. After they place an order, the manufacturer will ship the product to them.

Here is the place to mention that a manufacturer won’t charge you any fees for displaying their products in your store.

Why Should You Start A Dropshipping Business?

Quite frankly, there are many reasons to learn how to start a dropshipping business and make money dropshipping online.

Firstly, dropshipping is one of the most profitable online businesses you can build nowadays.

Secondly, the dropshipping model suits beginner business owners – anyone can master it without experience.

Lastly, you can launch a dropshipping business with barely any upfront investment – an internet connection and a desire to learn are enough to get you started.

How Profitable Is Dropshipping?

By all means, dropshipping is a profitable business model for merchants since they won’t have to deal with shipping or inventory.

Again, you can start dropshipping with zero money, which makes your new business a low-risk venture.

Also, owning an eCommerce business will not expose you to the massive costs that wholesalers must manage.

How Much Money Can You Make Dropshipping?

According to statistics, many dropshipping business owners earn over $100,000 a year.

However, these business owners have worked hard to build profitable online stores.

So, don’t expect to reach the same level of success overnight.

Besides, working with the best dropshipping supplier and marketing your brand will also impact your success rate.

Is Dropshipping Worth It?

Before I show you how to start a dropshipping business, let’s see how worthwhile the eCommerce businesses are.

In short, dropshipping is more than worth it – but only if you jump into the field with the clear understanding that you’ll be building a business.

What does this even mean?

Unless you’re willing to work hard for months and put all your time and energy into developing your dropshipping brand, you shouldn’t get into the field.

Launching an online store is easy – turning that store into a sustainable source of income is not.

Building a dropshipping business on solid ground will give you the best chance for success. Let me show you how to do that:

How To Start Dropshipping Business – Dropshipping Business Plan For Winners

1) Choose A Dropshipping Niche And Business Concept

Any successful dropshipping business centers around a concept and a niche. The quality of that concept will determine whether your business will become profitable.

More often than not, first-time business owners tend to over-complicate the meaning of the business concept. In reality, a business concept is something simple:

Generally speaking, a business concept and niche selection require knowing your target customers and what products they want to purchase.

But how do you create such a concept and pick a niche?

Well, the first step is brainstorming dropshipping business ideas and focusing on the ones you’re passionate about.

Once you do that, you’ll need to do some work:

Find A Niche Through Product And Market Research

Assuming you have a dropshipping business idea, the next thing to do is evaluate its profitability.

In other words, devote enough time to researching whether your dropshipping idea is worth developing.

How can you make sure your business idea is good enough? I suggest doing product and keyword research.

By all means, focusing on niche products to sell to a worldwide audience is the best way to go when launching a dropshipping business. Marketing such products will introduce your store to customers with strong buyer intent.

There are a couple of key metrics to consider while conducting product research. These metrics are product sales volume, keyword search volume, and trends data.

An effective product research will result in finding trending products that can bring customer satisfaction. Meanwhile, keyword research will help you find the right niche by discovering unique products that are popular among your target market.

Tips And Tricks To Successfully Evaluate The Best Dropshipping Business Ideas

• Use A Keyword Research Tool: Run your main keyword through a research tool like Jaaxy. Then, examine the search results for ranking difficulty, number of competitors, etc.
• Research Successful Online Stores In Your Niche: Find the biggest brands in your dropshipping market and learn as much as possible about them. For example, what do these stores have in common? What are their best-selling products?
• Visit Google Trends: Google Trends will show you whether a specific product trends upwards or downwards.

2) Research Your Main Competitors

Since you already know what products you’ll sell in your online store, what you should do next is find out who your competitors are. No matter what dropshipping niche you choose, other business owners are already in this market.

Here is the thing about competition in the dropshipping industry:

Having plenty of competitors is not a bad thing. On the contrary, the more people trying to sell the same products you offer, the better.

Why is that?

Facing tons of competition means a large customer pool looking to buy specific products. Now, how do you research and analyze your competitors?

Implement the following marketing strategies to learn as much as you can about your dropshipping competition:

Conduct A Google Search

Type in a few relevant key terms and look at the top ten results. These search results will show you who your main competitors are, how they market their products, and what long-tail keywords they target to rank in the search engines.

Use Social Media

These days, most companies utilize the power of Social Media Platforms to increase their brand awareness and customer reach. Look at your competitors on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok. Take notes about crucial metrics, such as audience engagement, number of followers, etc.

Find Out What Content Performs The Best For Your Competitors

Tools like BuzzSumo will show you the type of blog posts that get the most shares on Social Media.

Subscribe To Your Competitor’s Email List

Access to inside information will reveal their marketing and promotional strategies.

3) Choose A Dropshipping Supplier

Choosing the right supplier for your dropshipping business will increase your chances of success. Consider the following factors when choosing your dropshipping supplier:

• Reliability: Never work with a supplier with a reputation for shipping delays and other missteps that lead to customer dissatisfaction. Your supplier must keep products in stock to minimize possible delays. Order a few products from reliable suppliers to check whether their working process aligns with your brand identity and business needs.
• Profitability: The whole point of learning how to start a dropshipping business is to make profits. So, look for a supplier that will allow you to earn around a 20% profit margin after paying their shipping and transaction costs.
• Return Policy: Unfortunately, some suppliers don’t have a return policy – you don’t want to work with them. Instead, find a supplier that offers the opportunity to return products.

4) Source Products From Suppliers And Set Prices

By all means, sourcing products from reliable sources is the most time-consuming stage in learning how to start a dropshipping business.

You’ll have to consider many factors when sourcing products to sell, such as the product’s popularity, quality, profitability, and location.

Of course, ensuring the dropshipping supplier you want to work with is reliable is crucial, so don’t go through this step lightly.

I suggest sourcing products from an online marketplace when starting your dropshipping business.

Feel free to work with popular and reliable marketplaces like AliExpress, Worldwide Brands, Doba, Modalist, Megagoods, and Salehoo.

How To Price Your Dropshipping Products

As you can guess, your pricing strategy will have a massive impact on your business’s sustainability in the long term. A careful product selection and countless marketing efforts mean nothing unless you profit from each sale.

Most store owners might find higher profit margins too tempting to resist. However, thinking twice before going in that direction is a good idea:

Choose a profit margin after calculating the supplier cost and other expenses. Also, compare your prices to similar products to attract as many potential customers as possible and be competitive with your product offering on your chosen selling channel.

5) Build an eCommerce Store

This tutorial about how to start a dropshipping business is coming to its most essential stage – building your eCommerce store.

An eCommerce store is a site where you’ll list products for sale and set up payment processing so clients can purchase them by placing customer orders.

Here is what you need to build your eCommerce shop: a content management system, a domain name, web hosting, and a built-in payment gateway. You’ll have to pick an eCommerce platform, too.

I suggest Shopify since it’s the industry leader and the best platform you can use to build a successful dropshipping store. Why should you choose Shopify?

By all means, Shopify is the most obvious answer to the question of how to start dropshipping without money:

Shopify offers a free trial, which means you can launch a free dropshipping store without paying anything.

Many business owners prefer to do Amazon Dropshipping, which entails buying products from a supplier and selling them through Amazon FBA. While this business model has advantages, it also requires a start-up investment.

See Also: Top Ways To Make Money With Shopify

6) Choose A Business Structure & Register Your Business

Do you have a business plan? Hopefully, you do, since such a plan allows you to separate your business from your personal finances and assets.

Before that, speak to a lawyer who can offer legal advice and help you choose a suitable structure for your dropshipping business.

Generally speaking, you can register your eCommerce business as a Sole Proprietorship, Limited Liability Company (LLC), or C Corporation.

Also, you’ll have to get a Tax Identification Number (TIN) from the IRS. Use your TIN to create a separate bank account and link it to your payment gateway.

What else should you know about registering your new business? Nowadays, most US businesses must have an EIN (an Employer Identification Number) – obtaining one is the next step you should take before making any online sales.

7) Set Up Finances

Is setting up the finances of your eCommerce business hard work? It doesn’t have to be if you take the following steps once you pick a business name and launch your online store:

• Open A Business Checking Account
• Apply For A Business Credit Card
• Collect Sales Tax (when necessary)

8) Market Your Dropshipping Business

First and foremost, you can’t expect tons of traffic as soon as you launch an online store:

No one will find your online shop unless you use your marketing skills to reach the target audience in different customer places.

These days, you can rely on marketing materials to promote a dropshipping business in many ways, such as:

• Email Marketing: Start an email list when you launch your eCommerce store. Once you build an email list, begin email campaigns to market the new products you sell to your subscribers.
• Influencer Marketing: Most consumers trust the influencers they follow, so use that to your advantage. Influencer marketing won’t cost much money and will work better than traditional advertising when betting on a great customer experience and product quality.
• Content Marketing: Content Marketing entails publishing blog posts, podcasting, developing a YouTube channel, etc. Digital marketing is the easiest way to grow your eCommerce business faster once you learn Search Engine Optimization.
• Paid Advertising: Running Google Ads or Facebook Ads is another way to market the products you sell to your target audience.
• Social Media Marketing: Create a business account on the most popular Social Media Networks, such as Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest, and even Facebook. Investing in Social Media Ads is a great way to benefit further from these sales channels and boost your conversion rate.

How To Start A Dropshipping Business With No Money FAQs

How To Dropship As A Beginner?

• Choose products to sell
• Pick an eCommerce platform
• Find a dropshipping supplier and launch your dropshipping business
• Drive traffic to your online store
• Make sales

How Do I Find A Product For Dropshipping?

• Check Google Trends
• Do competitor product research
• Research product hashtags on Social Media
• Join online communities and receive advice about the best products to dropship

Is Dropshipping Good For Beginners?

In short, dropshipping is an excellent business model for first-time entrepreneurs.

Dropshipping is less time-consuming since you don’t have to keep an inventory or do the shipping. Besides, dropshipping is a cost-effective way to do business, considering you can build and launch an eCommerce store for free.

My Closing

Do you know how to start a dropshipping business at this point?

Hopefully, you do, and every question you may have on this subject has an answer already.

Selling high-quality products at reasonable prices and providing excellent customer service is a great place to start your dropshipping business.

Working with the best suppliers and using valuable online tools will take you further.

You can always leave me a question in the comments section, and I’ll answer it soon.

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