How To Start a Dropshipping Business in India

Dropshipping is one of the best ways to start a business online. It is profitable, easy and passive. But, it involves a lot of risks if you don’t know what you are doing.

A question a lot of people ask is “Is dropshipping profitable in India?”. Yes, of course, it is profitable like in every other country.

If you are a person who wants to start a dropshipping business in India, then you are in the right place. So, Let’s begin.

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What is Dropshipping?

Dropshipping is a supply chain management method in which the retailer, (that is You!) does not keep goods in stock but instead transfers the customer orders and shipment details to either the manufacturer, another retailer, or a wholesaler, who then ships the goods directly to the customer.

Which primarily means that you just act as a middle man.

Best Dropshipping Platform – Shopify

There are primarily 2 things that you need in order to start this business. One, An eCommerce platform and two, a product supplier.

An eCommerce platform helps your customers choose their products and order them. A supplier is the one who ships the products directly to the customers. We will discuss different product suppliers later.

Shopify is right now the best eCommerce platform to start a dropshipping business. There are other alternatives like WooCommerce, Ecwid, BigCommerce, etc. But none of these are eligible to be compared with Shopify.

Shopify even offers a 14-day free trial which helps you launch your business without any upfront cash. During this period, you can easily make some money that can pay the monthly subscription fee of Shopify.

Avail The Shopify 14-day Free Trial From Here

General Store or Niche-Specific Store

After you sign up on Shopify, you need to decide whether you should start a general store or a niche-specific store.

A general store can contain different products while a niche-specific store may contain products in the same category.

When starting, it’s better if you start with a general store. Niche-specific stores are for advanced people who test different types of products. Moreover, General stores are a bit risk-free than the other.

Naming Your Store and Buying the Domain Name.

Naming is a crucial step when building a business. People should be able to remember and read it properly.

Names like Amazon, Flipkart, eBay, etc are all famous eCommerce stores. Just look at their names. They are just about 4-8 letters and are easy to read.

If you can’t think of any brandable names. You could just go to namelix.com. They can help you.

After you select your store name, you can go and buy a matching domain name from Namecheap.

Buy a Domain name from Namecheap

Finding The Best Supplier for Your Business

Since you do not keep any products on your warehouse or anywhere. You need a supplier to help you ship the products to your customers.

Aliexpress is one of the best, reliable supplier. Most dropshippers use Aliexpress along with Oberlo.

Oberlo is an application, which allows you to easily import dropshipped products into your Shopify store and ship them directly to your customers

Oberlo also has a marketplace which contains Aliexpress products. This helps you import products into your Shopify store easily.

When you click the Add to Import List button, It goes into a list, which contains different products that you wish to sell.

From this list, you can wish to edit the product’s name, description, delete or modify different variants of the same product, change the selling price so that you get a reasonable profit.

Once the product has been updated from the import list, You can now click on the Import to Store button.

After you click that, The product will start appearing on your store.

But, Your customers won’t be able to purchase them as of now since you haven’t set up your payment gateway.

Configuring Shopify

There are certain settings that you need to change so that you can accept orders from your customers.

Payment Gateway

A payment gateway helps customers pay for the products that they purchase from you. Normally, People use Stripe as the default payment gateway on Shopify.

But for Indian users, Stripe is not available as of now. Instead, you can use Paypal Express Checkout. There are other alternatives, but I recommend Paypal.

Once you activate your Paypal Payment Gateway. You can start receiving orders

Shipping Settings

Here, you can change the rates of shipping. The rates are usually applied when a customer reaches the checkout page.

I recommend not to charge anything for shipping rather increase the price of the product.

Legal Settings

This is where you create different legal documents like refund policy, shipping policy, terms of service and privacy policy.

You can create all of them with just one click. Make sure you edit the template as per your needs.

That’s all you need to do for setting up a basic dropshipping store. You can play around a little bit more on the settings if you want.

Your First Order

Once you have done all the above steps, you are ready to receive your first order.

Now, let me explain what happens when a customer orders from your store.

A customer places an order from your Shopify store and pays the price you have set.
You receive confirmation of payment from your payment provider.
You purchase the product at the wholesale price.
Your supplier ships the order directly to your customer.
Your customer receives their order.

Marketing your Store

In order to receive orders from your store, you need to start marketing it. You can market it on Social media, pay for ads or any other kind of marketing.

The best way I would recommend is to market it on Social Media and I suggest Instagram for this.

Instagram now has a lot of users and is increasing day by day. Here’s how you can market your store.

Suggest your friends to share your online store.

This is a great method. Ask your friends to share your store on their story. This is absolutely free and you don’t need to spend any money. But, it’s the least effective

Finding Instagram Influencers and big pages

Depending upon the type of products that you sell, find different pages on Instagram which has a good amount of followers as well as a good engagement rate.

When you find such accounts, list them down and contact each one of them. Ask them how much should you pay if they post it on their story or on their page.

For example, Suppose I am selling dog food or something related to dogs. I would select this Instagram page below and would shoot them a message. Don’t message pages that have a huge number of followers. It’s likely that they won’t reply.

If you want, you can use this template:-

Hey,
I recently launched an online store about {Your category/topic/niche}. I am having trouble getting my first order. Could you please help me out?

Once you send this message, they probably would ask for some money which ranges between $2-$20 depending upon the number of followers they have and the engagement that they get.

They may have different rates for a story, post and website link on their bio. Ask them to do all of them for a nominal rate. bargain with them. they may accept.

Once they do it, you will start to get traffic to your website and sometimes this traffic converts into your customers.

I do not recommend paid ads through Google. It’s because they do not convert well.

Conclusion

If you continue marketing your store, you will start getting more and more orders. As you scale up, try different marketing techniques.

Also, start treating your business as a brand. Start a FaceBook page, Instagram account, Twitter account, and others. Let your customers come from different places.

So, I believe I have helped you to start a dropshipping business in India. If you found this useful, feel free to share it with your friends and family

Peace.