The first step to develop a dropshipping e-commerce store is to select the niche. What kind of products do you want to sell on your e-commerce store? Do you want to sell fashion products, gadgets, luxury products, household products, or something else?
How you should select a niche?
Here are a few tips for you to consider while selecting a niche for your dropshipping business:
Think about the profit margin of your chosen products.
Think about your own interest. It will be fun for you to sell those products that you really like and have an interest in.
Try to choose standard products instead of customized ones.
Choose those products that are in demand.
This is perhaps the most important step toward building a successful dropshipping store. Therefore you must put sufficient time and consideration to choose a niche.
Before you step into the development of your eCommerce website, do thorough research on the competition who are selling products similar to your product niche.
If there are already a lot of competitors, it simply means that your chosen products are really in demand and you shouldn’t either face any challenges to grab your market share.
However, if you see that there are not many competitors, you may have to create a demand for your products before you could ask your potential customers to buy.
What other things you can check on your competitors’ websites?
Which product(s) they focus more on?
What are their primary marketing techniques? In other words, how they are promoting their business.
Are they offering any combo packages or bundle discounts?
What kind of offers & discounts do they provide to their customers?
Perhaps, it would be a great idea to share your competitors’ website details with your website developer so that he can understand your expectations in a better way.
#3 Select a web development platform
Once you have decided upon the product niche and have done enough research on the competition, the next step then is to select a web development platform.
Although there are several options for you to choose to create a website, you must prefer WordPress for a few reasons such as below:
WordPress is free to use, being open-source.
The cost to build a WordPress website is lower as compared to other CMS platforms.
WordPress is user-friendly and easy-to-use for novice webmasters too.
WordPress website development process is convenient & faster as compared to other CMS platforms.
WordPress plugins are available either free of cost or at a nominal cost.
WordPress themes will cost you less than $100 only.
There is no shortage of WordPress developers. In other words, you can easily hire an affordable WordPress developer to build your website.
WordPress websites are loved by search engines due to their optimized development architecture. You can also leverage a WordPress blog to boost the presence of your website on search engines.
There are a few useful dropshipping plugins available for WordPress websites that you can use and import hundreds of products in just a few hours.
Now you have several reasons to choose WordPress for your dropshipping website development.
The next step is to arrange for a web hosting package to host your dropshipping store. You may also seek your web developer’s assistance to choose a reliable yet affordable web hosting company.
Below are a few essential qualities that your web hosting server must have:
24/7 Support
High configuration servers to ensure that your website always performs better.
High-security tools/modules enabled.
Affordable plans
Provision of scalability
1-Click WordPress installation
Control panel access
You may end up paying between $50 to $200 per annum for hosting your e-commerce store.
