A dropshipping business can be a good way to make money with an online store. You don’t need to worry about packing and shipping the products, and also, there is no need for storage space.
But how to build a dropshipping website with WordPress?
Why build a Dropshipping site with WordPress?
WordPress is an open-source platform that makes it easy for developers to create plugins for all types of tasks. It is often the first choice for people who want to build an e-commerce store.
With WordPress, you get full control over your site, and you can customize and automate your dropshipping business. There are also many cheap hosting providers compared to their extremely expensive counterparts.
The WordPress platform is relatively easy to use and can run a store or almost anything you can be implemented via plugins. For example, the Alidropship plugin that you can use to power your dropshipping store with all of the necessary features.
In combination with WooCommerce, your work is already half done because all the pages like My Account, Shop, Cart, and Checkout are automatically created with a single click. There are also multiple payment gateways supported to sell you products worldwide.
You don’t need to design everything from scratch there are many beautiful themes that support both Woocommce and dropshipping. If you want full customizing control, you can use different drag & drop builders like Elementor or Visual Composer.
WordPress has a large community of developers and people to make it better and refine the previous version. You can find a lot of support if you encounter any problem via the WordPress forum or with a simple Google search.
How to build a Dropshipping Website with WordPress?
To create a dropshipping store with WordPress, you need to keep some steps in mind.
1. Finding your niche
One of the most important things you need to think about is deciding what niche you want to pick. Research ideas you have and products you are interested in. Look for google trends or popular marketplaces like Amazon and Aliexpress, what products people are interested in, and the demand and competition.
Make a list of your research and identify your targeted audience. Then pick the niche you are most interested in and has a potential audience of customers who buy from your store.
2. Choose a Hosting provider and Domain Name
Decide your domain name mainly, the .com endings are used for domains, but you can also use other endings like .shop, or if you target a specific country, use it as a domain ending (.us .uk .de).
To find a name for your domain name, try to integrate keywords of what you sell into the domain so customers get an idea of what they can buy from your business by looking at your domain.
It is also possible to make up names that are easy to remember and not longer than 15 characters. Use the name generator Namemesh, where you see what names are available and have different options to choose from.
Now you need a domain hosting platform where you can buy your domain name and host your WordPress website. Some options would be Wealthy Affiliate, which gives very fast and secure hosting and 24/7 backup and service, marketing tools, courses, and a big community to help with your online business journey. Or select a hosting platform like Bluehost.
3. Install WordPress
The Installation of WordPress is pretty easy on most providers it is just a one-click installation. You need to set a username, password, and email for your administrator account and decide your site title.
Then you need just to wait until the installation is finished, and you can start building your site on WordPress.
4. Selecting the Themes and installing Plugins
Depending on if you want to use Woocommerce for dropshipping or not, you need to select a theme that supports Woocommerce. There are many free and premium themes you can choose to build your dropshipping store.
If you want to use the Alidropship plugin without Woocommerce, you should look at themesite and select one of the themes made specifically for the plugin.
With the alidropship plugin, you can integrate unlimited products from Aliexpress to automate almost all processes, and you only need to pay once.
This should be one of the first plugins you need to buy and install to build your dropshipping store.
You can integrate some other helpful plugins into your site, like the SEO plugin Rankmath to get free search traffic from Google and Bing and track keywords and rank organically. A good idea is also to install an image optimization plugin, so your site loads faster and images don’t use as much space.
Another plugin, for example, would be contact form 7, where users can send you emails you then answer.
If you want to create a newsletter, you can buy an email service like Sendfox to automate your newsletter.
5. Setting up Woocommerce and the alidropship plugin
If you install Woocommerce, you will get an on-screen setup wizard you need to follow step by step. Here is a tutorial video on how to set it up for the Woo alidropship plugin.
But the alidropship plugin can be the better option for beginners because almost all options are integrated into the plugin. To install and setup the plugin, you can watch this video:
6. Finding and importing Products
When you do drop shipping, you don’t have the stock, so you need to find suppliers and quality products to import. If you want to import Aliexpress products, search for offers that are high quality and have good reviews.
Also, think about what country you sell because there are different rules for taxes and products. These fees and shipping cost greatly impact your business and customers. So if you target a country and ship products from, e.g., China to a European country, your customers may encounter problems with customs and long shipping time.
To fix this problem, select products that are already in the country. Use the AliDropship Google Chrome Extension to import your products to your WordPress store. You can edit the product title, description, and shipping options before you click import.
7. Design your theme and customize your settings
For an online store, one of the most important things is that it is visually appealing to your potential customers. So design your menus, product & checkout pages, and categories to offer a good user experience.
Customize your settings so that visitors can easily access your product and have a fluent checkout process with different secure payment options.
8. Marketing
You need to acquire paying customers. So think about how you want to promote your dropshipping store. One of the first steps should be SEO with a plugin like Rankmath to rank your products on the Google and Bing search engines.
You can also put your products in the merchant center of Google and Bing, so they appear on the Shopping pages.
Think about if you want to do advertising with social media or search engine ads through Google and Bing. Of course, if you already have a following, you should share your store with your followers.
You can also build and grow a social media and blog following by posting relevant content to your niche. In such posts, you can share product links and your store pages.
9. Fulfilling orders
If you get your orders, you need to fulfill them on Alixepres. The AliDropship plugin makes the process easy. You can click “place order automatically,” and the plugin redirects you to AliEpresss all the shipping details for your customer will be placed automatically.
Check that the process works, and if there is a problem, you can place an order manually. You can check your order status either through the plugin or Woocommerce.
10. Building Trust
If your customer experience any problems, try to answer as soon as possible and come up with a solution. You need to connect with suppliers to find a solution. Professional customer support is important to building a long-term dropshipping business.
Also, make sure to get reviews from customers and social proof, so potential customers trust you and buy from your store. Building trust is key to earning long-term revenue and royalty.
11. Analyze and measure your results
No matter what you do, you should analyze the process to find out what works and whatnot. This way, you can improve your process and maximize your profit and get more happy and loyal customers.
This means you might need to change your targeted audience or modify your pricing strategy. Or you need to delete and add new products.
