WooCommerce dropshipping store is becoming very popular day by day because of the ability to sell without carrying inventory. If you’re not familiar with this, we’ll explain how WooCommerce works and how to link it to some of the most popular dropshipping plugins on the market.

The tutorial covers everything from scratch right through to fulfill your first order.

What Is Dropshipping?

Dropshipping is a business model where you don’t need to keep products in stock as well as the inventory. Whenever a customer place an order of a product, you pass the order to a supplier who then ships the product to the customer. Finally you will receive your share.

The beauty of building a drop shipping business is it removes the back end inventory management.

Advantage of Dropshipping

The main advantage of the drop shipping model is that you don’t need to own any stock. Instead of, you sell virtual inventory that being stored and shipped directly from suppliers to customers.

• Zero Capital Need to Get Star: You don’t need to buy any product inventory, you only pay for the stock you sell. So, the risk of spending a lot of money on unsold stock item is zero.
• A wide range of Products: With Drop Shipping business you can offer a very wide variety of products. This is a plus point because wide range product selection is one of the key factors that influences customers’ purchasing decision.
• Time Saving: Having suppliers dropship for you, basically means that they are taking care of of the practical operations for you. The only things you have to focus on listing products, marketing, optimizing, supporting customers etc.
• Scalability: When you’re Drop Shipping a product with single quantity or multiple products with huge quantities, the amount of work is same for you. You just need to transfer the order information to your supplier. That means a Drop Shipping business is highly scalable and is virtually limited by the processing capacity of your suppliers. If your suppliers have limited stock or can’t handle the huge volume of your orders, you can source another dropship supplier.

Disadvantage of Dropshipping

• High Risk: All business has some risk. Physical aspects of the business like high packaging quality, quick handling and shipping times and stock availability are out of your hands. Sometimes you need to rely on your dropship suppliers, who are often times from the other side of the world and have a different business culture than yours. There are also a lot of moving parts which are out of your hands.
• Low Profit Margins: The most challenging part is that dropshipping world is a very crowded space. The crowd increased during the last few years. Sellers must find a unique competitive product rate in order to stand above the competition.
• Shipping Time: Shipping time is a vital factor in an online shoppers buying decision. Drop shipping your orders from suppliers instead of managing your own logistics to minimize the slower shipping time.
• Customer support: The main disadvantage of dropshipping is that as the store owner, you’re responsible to give the customer support. You can also outsource this process by hiring a virtual assistant on freelancing websites.

Why You Should Use WooCommerce For Dropshipping

WooCommerce, is free open-source platform. It is easy to use and this is why the largest slice of the eCommerce pie is WooCommerce.

With WooCommerce you can launch your store in less than 15 minutes if you choose managed eCommerce hosting.

WooCommerce offers lots of themes which you can use for your eCommerce store. And the best part is most of the themes are free and fully customizable to complete your dropshipping store requirement.

It has around 75,000 extensions to choose from. Most of the extensions/plugins are free which is actually very positive. The best part of WooCommerce is, if you need any feature, you can find out an extension.

We all know that WooCommerce is an open-source and free WordPress plugin, so there are lots of WordPress forums available on the Internet where we can ask any related question for WooCommerce or WordPress. And, this is the big advantage for WooCommerce.

What You Need To Create A WooCommerce Dropshipping Store

Hope you are now convinced that WooCommerce makes a good option for dropshipping. Now, let’s check what you require to create a WooCommerce dropshipping store.

1. Domain Name and Web Hosting

The first step to create a WooCommerce Dropshipping store is to choose a domain name for your business.

You can check the availability of your domain name on several websites. Like Name.com. To buy a new domain you can get that service from bellow sites,

• GoDaddy
• Bluehost
• Namecheap
• Dreamhost

Now, let’s move forward about web hosting.

Websites are made of with files such as html files, CSS files, image files, etc. When you visit a website, your browser makes a request to a server which returns these files.

This doesn’t mean that you need to buy your own server and manage the hardware. Instead of this you pay someone else to use their server. When you pay someone for space on their server we say they are “hosting” your website.

It’s very much important to get a secured web hosting service. Otherwise, your site will take time to load, or become vulnerable. You can get secure web hosting service from HostGator. Or you can go to the above-mentioned service providers. They also provide secure web hosting.

2. Install WordPress

Here are some methods on how to install WordPress.

Method #1: Choose a host that comes with WordPress pre-installed

The easiest way to install WordPress is to just pick a host that does it free or automatically for you. Nowadays, many WordPress-specific hosts will let you choose to have pre-installed WordPress.

Here are a few recommended hosts that offer pre-install WordPress for you:

• Bluehost – affordable and comes with pre-installed WordPress.
• SiteGround – has tons of WordPress service marketplace-specific features that make your life easier.

Method #2: How to install WordPress via cPanel and auto-installers

cPanel is the dashboard that most web hosts providers give their customers. When you sign up for hosting, your host should give you with login details for cPanel.

In your cPanel interface, your host should give you an auto-installer. Auto-installers basically automate the full WordPress install process. So instead of doing everything manually, you just input some basic information, click a button, and the auto-installer installs WordPress for you.

 Method #3: How to install WordPress manually

Download the latest version of WordPress from wordpress.org.

Then unzip the zip file and upload it to the public_html (or similar) directory of your website. If you’re not sure how to log in to FTP, ask your hosting provider for your FTP account information.

The rest will be done by your web hosting provider.

For further installation details Read.

Install WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin that adds all the essential eCommerce features instantly to your site: shopping carts, checkout, payment processing, etc. There are a lot of paid extensions available to add more eCommerce features to your site.

If you’ve never used WordPress, it’s not so difficult to install the plugin. You can search for plugins and install them straight from your WordPress admin dashboard.

After a successful installation, you will get a setup wizard that lets you configure your store easily. Just follow the steps and change what you need to.

3. WooCommerce Dropshipping Plugin

Here are the list of popular WooCommerce dropshipping plugin.

• Dropship.me or WooDropship – Each of these plugins connects you to the AliExpress marketplace for locating suppliers and instantly syncing your favorite products to your online store. Both of them work well with WooCommerce, and the Dropship.me plugin even gives you pre-edited product names and descriptions.
• AliDropship – A premium plugin that links your online store to AliExpress. The most interesting about AliDropship is that you can either build a store by yourself and extend it with AliDropship or pay for the AliDropship company to make the website for you. The plugin starts at only $89. Custom sites begin at $299 only.
• WooDropship – Another viable premium plugin for making your next dropshipping store on WooCommerce. There’s a free version, which is nice to get started. The next plan is $14.99 per month for the ability to import 3,000 product variants. AliExpress is the product source for the plugin, with nice features like inventory syncing and customizable pricing rules.
• Dropified – This plugin integrates with several platform such as WooCommerce and Shopify. The pricing plan starts at $47 per month to support 15,000 products.
• Printful or Printify – These two plugins have similar names and functions. Both provide dropshipping store for custom designed products.
• WooCommerce Dropshipping – This plugin is a handy little extension, but you should only consider it if you plan on manually partnering with suppliers and automatically sending them orders. It doesn’t give you the flexibility of browsing for suppliers and products online.
• Spocket – This is your best plugin for finding high-end products that ship from the EU and the US. You should consider Spocket if you’d like faster shipping times to your customers in these areas. The monthly pricing gets a bit expensive as you grow, but Spocket is known for helping your business make more and more money with the right resources and tips. 

How to Create A WooCommerce Dropshipping Store

So, you got a list of some amazing plugins. Now let’s see how to create a WooCommerce Dropshipping store.

WooCommerce Dropshipping store with Dropship.me

Most of the WooCommerce dropshipping plugins connect you with the large AliExpress marketplace. But for the tutorial purposes we’ll use Dropship.me. Just because it offers an excellent interface, a free plan for up to 50 products, and pre-edited product information.

Assumed that you already have completed the above step that means, registered a domain and manage web hosting, Installed WordPress and WooCommerce. Now let’s start…

Go to Dropship.me and click on the Get Free Plugin button. Type in your email address and reveal the page to download the plugin. Don’t forget to copy the API key as well.

After the completion of download the plugin, navigate to your WordPress site. Now, go to Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin. Select the Dropship.me plugin file that you downloaded and upload it to your dashboard. And activate the plugin.

After activating the plugin you have to activate your Dropship.me account and connect it to your online store. Go to the Dropship Me tab in WordPress and click on Activation button.

You will be asked for an API Key. This key will be found in your mail that you entered to register.

After full activation, you will get the option to start importing products. Now go to Dropship Me > Import Products. You have the freedom to Get More Product and upgrade your account if you want.

All of the suppliers and products will be found in the WordPress dashboard. Use the filters and search bar to check out some of the categories and specific products you might want to sell. Once you find something, click on the Import button to post it to your online store.

You may have to set the product under a specific category to have it show up on your homepage or in a different gallery. Regardless, the products should appear in your Products list.

Don’t forget to view all of the product information before importing! The plugin lets you look at more information such as pricing, supplier ratings, and also the images.

WooCommerce Dropshipping store with Spocket

As mentioned earlier, Spocket finds suppliers in the EU and US so that shipping to those places is much faster. The pricing is also good and the product selection is very impressive. Visit Spocket.co to sign up for an account.

Go to WordPress dashboard and Search for the plugin just like the other plugin.

Once found, click on Install Now.

Now, go back to your Spocket account you just created to find the My Shop button in the menu.

When you will click on My site, you will see the WooCommerce option. Click on that, then copy the site ID to your clipboard.

Now go to Settings > Spocket, then paste the ID you just copied to link your store to Spocket. You may require to install an SSL certificate.

Now go back to Spocket and begin searching for keywords or filtering product categories.

View more product information, then click the Add to Import List button when you find a product!

Click on the Import List tab in Spocket and click on the Push to Store button for the product you like.

After that quick process, you’ll find that the product is showing in your WooCommerce Products list.

Create Your WooCommerce Dropshipping Store

And that wraps up our guide to using WooCommerce to create a dropshipping store! Hope you found the guide useful. And if you have any questions or suggestions for improvement, please don’t hesitate to put a comment!

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