How can you make money with Shopify? Let’s take a look at how Shopify works, how much it costs, and how to do dropshipping.
What is it and how to make money with Shopify?
Shopify is one of the best platforms that the market currently offers to create e-commerce sites. Whether you have a product from your own company or want to sell others’ products via dropshipping, Shopify allows you to create an online store, sell and receive payments while giving you a guarantee of stability, performance, and security.
In this article, you will find out what Shopify is, how the e-commerce platform works, how to do dropshipping, and the monthly costs to incur.
Why choose Shopify for your e-commerce? What are the main differences with other software, such as WooCommerce for example?
Shopify: why is it considered the best platform for doing online e-commerce?
One of the easiest ways to open an online store is to use the Shopify SaaS platform. Launched in 2004 and started as an online store that sold sporting goods, it is now the provider of the most used platform in the world for doing e-commerce. In addition to being the best known, it is certainly the most user-friendly, and the best in technical terms, for anyone who wants to open their own e-commerce business and sell products online.
Whether you are a beginner, intermediate, or expert, the best choice is undoubtedly to choose Shopify as the software to have a successful online store and a scalable and performing business. At the bottom of the article, I will give you some tips to sell dropshipping products through this platform.
Make money with Shopify – The boom of online eCommerce
The major boom in the e-commerce business through Shopify started happening in 2019. More and more people are abandoning old open source solutions and choosing this platform to make money online and develop their businesses. Given the simplicity of this e-commerce platform and the possibility of dropshipping, more and more people without any programming knowledge can open their own online stores and sell products.
With Shopify, you can open your e-commerce today, insert product images and prices and promote them on Facebook and Instagram to see the first orders and money arrive directly in your PayPal or Stripe account (credit cards).
Shopify offers a 14-day free trial for each store.
During these 14 days, you will be able to use the platform completely free and you will be able to test and sell physical or digital products right away. You will be able to experiment with the various themes, try the apps from the store, try the payment methods and analyze the other aspects of Shopify. Later, you can decide if this business model is for you or if you want to abandon the idea of selling products online.
Not everyone chooses Shopify as their platform to sell online. The primary reason? They are scared of the cost of $ 29 a month. These people prefer to choose free tools such as WordPress combined with the one-time paid WooCommerce plugin. In my opinion, the wrong choice.
Shopify costs/prices
As you can see on their official website, Shopify allows you to have a real online store without you needing any programming or web design knowledge. All you have to do is connect the domain to the platform, choose the theme of your store and start inserting the images of your products, choose the price and start selling to receive money on your PayPal or Stripe account.
The monthly costs and prices are divided into three bands:
Basic Shopify for $ 29 per month
Standard Shopify for $ 79 per month
Advanced Shopify for $ 299 per month
All the features you will find in the Basic plan will be enough to have a 100% functioning store. You will have everything you need to sell, promote, create offers, install apps and make money with Shopify.
When you are ready and you need to improve the store by adding new features (such as advanced reporting or gift vouchers) you can easily scale to a higher floor. Of course, the higher the plan, the fewer commissions you pay Shopify. For example, if you choose the “Shopify” plan at $ 79 per month you will have a commission of 1%, instead of 2% on each sale.
How To Create An Ecommerce With Shopify?
Creating successful e-commerce can be a challenge if you don’t have web marketing knowledge behind you.
first of all, you should have complementary products in order to form an offer, have a structure capable of managing shipments quickly and above all, active customer service.
These are the steps you could do in 1 day to get started making money with Shopify:
- Choose the name of the brand and create a logo.
- Purchase a domain on GoDaddy for $ 0.99.
- Activate your Shopify subscription.
- Connect domain to the platform.
- Purchase a premium theme. A premium theme will give your e-commerce an instant professional look, and most important of all, you’ll have conversion-optimized e-commerce.
- Connect the platform with the Oberlo plugin.
- Choose products from AliExpress.
- Add products to the shop through Oberlo.
- Create a campaign with Facebook Ads (paid traffic) to promote the products.
That’s it! That’s all.
Make Money with Shopify Dropshipping as an Influencer
Dropshipping done with Shopify is one of the businesses of the moment. I know dozens of content producers or young influencers who are breaking the bank by selling products mainly from China.
First, search for the product on AliExpress, copy and insert the images in your store, choose the selling price and promote it online via Facebook or Instagram Ads. Thanks to plugins like Oberlo, the order will arrive directly inside your Shopify dashboard.
Your potential customer will see the promotional video of the product you just entered on your store, click on the link from Instagram or Facebook, and will be redirected to your e-commerce, put the product in the cart, enter the shipping details, pay via PayPal or credit card and you can use the money you just received to go and buy the product on AliExpress and have it sent directly to the recipient.
If you want you can also integrate re-marketing with plugins like Recart or Active Campaign to increase sales even more, but starting from such a simple sales base, you can immediately generate sales that can make this business very profitable.
How To Make Money Selling Dropshipping Products With Shopify
For example, if you find a product that costs $ 3 on AliExpress, you can sell it in your shop for $ 14.99. You will then have a $ 12 profit margin for the sale of a product. Therefore, you will have a positive return on investment only if you can sell that product at a cost of less than $ 12 spent on advertising.
If you manage to sell that product for every $ 6 spent on Facebook Ads, then you will have a profit of $ 6 per sale. This means that you will have achieved a 100% ROI. If you spend $ 6 on advertising, you will get a net profit of $ 6. A good result.
Once you have found a winning product (which gives you a positive ROI) you can begin to scale the ad campaign and get more revenue.
How to make $ 1,000 a day? You should multiply your daily advertising investment until you get a net income of $ 1,000 per day.
Having a 100% ROI, you should spend $ 1,000 a day to get $ 1,000 in net income.
These figures might seem high, you could, for example, say “Who has $ 1,000 to spend per day?”, But the beauty of dropshipping e-commerce is this.
It is possible to start with a limited budget, with a 3 -10 $ daily budget, but once your budget is over, what will you do? Will you stop the cash flow?
Not with Shopify. Because whatever product you sell you will instantly get the money from the person who made the purchase. You will find the money directly in your PayPal or Stripe account. Money that you can reuse for advertising and be able to quickly scale the campaign up to three-zero figures.
It should be noted that Stripe and Paypal (which accept payments by credit card) will have a delay of a few days before sending you the money.
Certainly, there will be obstacles while growing. Cash flow (especially at the beginning) will not be 100% fluid, but dropshipping e-commerce is one of the easiest businesses to scale even with small budgets.
There are many case studies of people who have managed to make even more than $ 100,000 a month thanks to Shopify and dropshipping.
Will it be challenging? Obviously. The more you grow, the more orders you will receive, and the more your support emails will increase. Some packages will not arrive or arrive late, some will not like the product, and you will have to refund service and many other things. The choice of how far to push and how far to expand this business model is up to you.
What to Sell on Shopify? Where to find ideas for a winning product?
There are many products you can sell on your store. In this article, we mainly focus on dropshipping with products from AliExpress.
If you already have a product of your own that you want to sell through Shopify, you won’t have to worry about finding the winning idea, finding product images, and testing. What if you have no idea what to sell?
You can see some of the attractive ideas and products by just browsing on Facebook. You’ve probably seen some ADS with products that say “Wow, this is a cool gadget. I want it”.
If you see that that video has received a lot of likes, comments, and shares, it means that the product is selling. Click on the link you see in that video and check if you will be redirected to a Shopify e-commerce site (you can find out by right-clicking and viewing “Page Source” and looking for “Shopify” in the code). If you find that that product is being sold through a Shopify eCommerce store then you have an idea of what to sell.
Clicking on that Facebook ad activates the Facebook pixel. Now that Facebook has seen that you like those kinds of products, it will show you similar products in your timeline from now on. All ideas that you could copy or take inspiration from.
The products will almost always be found in AliExpress. If not, it will take very little to find out where to find the supplier. A simple “Search for Images” on Google will almost certainly give you the solution.
In addition to this method, there are many others for finding products. Like going to AliExpress and seeing the best-selling products in the last 30 days.
How to create a professional-looking online store – the best themes
One of the most common mistakes is to start with a shop that has an “amateur” look. The average user doesn’t trust buying on sites he doesn’t know or seems disreputable. You need to create the most professional and clean-looking e-commerce possible.
The theme must be optimized for sale. You need to make it super easy to switch between the product page and the checkout page.
There are many graphically optimized themes that you can install in your store. I absolutely recommend that you DO NOT buy UNofficial themes from Themeforest.
The best thing you can do is purchase one of the Premium templates from the Shopify store. They are rigorously checked and written in a clean and 100% optimized manner. They cost a little more, but you won’t have to go through anxiety and delirium every time you try to change the thickness of a font.
Shopify Vs WooCommerce
The difference between Shopify and WooCommerce is that Shopify has a monthly cost, while WooCommerce has a one-time cost. WooCommerce takes no commission per sale. According to some clearly insane people, it turns out to be more convenient to use WooCommerce instead of Shopify in the end.
Nope.
The real price to pay is that by choosing Shopify you will have a better experience in order management, the speed of hosting, the platform itself and all its features, the availability of plugins that WooCommerce does not have (or are buggy), and in many other elements that will greatly impact the success of your e-commerce.
Shopify has essential remarketing plugins. The ones that exist for WooCommerce slow down the site so much that my grandmother would overtake it with the tricycle and clog the database worse than my sister’s hair in the shower. Shopify allows for a much higher conversion rate than what you can get with WooCommerce.
For Shopify, you pay for an optimized and high-performance hosting service hosted on Amazon servers, while with WordPress + WooCommerce you will have to pay for it yourself.
In short, Shopify wins. So, if you want to create successful e-commerce go calm and start with Shopify.
Make Money with Shopify – FAQ
** Is Shopify hosting included with the monthly cost?
Yes. Their hosting service is included in the price and is 100% optimized with CDN content on Amazon servers, with 99% uptime. On top of that, the store’s APIs are open and ready to integrate with other systems.
** Is the custom domain for Shopify included in the price?
No. You can also buy it through Shopify, but I recommend that you buy it from any external service (Register, Aruba, Godaddy, whatever you prefer) and then connect it by changing the DNS.
** Does Shopify include the SSL certificate?
Yes. The SSL certificate is free. If you were to buy it for Woocommerce or Prestashop it would be an extra cost.
** Is a custom email address included when purchasing a domain with Shopify?
No, but usually any provider (Register, Aruba, Godaddy, etc.) provides 3 free domain emails.
