Jordan Welch is a successful Shopify drop shipper. If he was a complete beginner and had to start all over today, from scratch, here’s what he’d do. It’s the exact process he used to launch a new store, just a few short months ago, that’s already profiting about fifteen hundred bucks a day. There are four main pillars. Your product, your store, your marketing, and then how you run your business and ship out your orders. Read on for Jordan’s full dropshipping for beginners guide.
Without a winning product, it’s impossible to succeed with drop shipping. Thankfully, there’s new winning products popping up every week. Jordan looks for three things when deciding what to sell. First, is it trending on Facebook or Instagram? Is someone else running an ad for it, that’s getting tons of engagement? This proves demand. Second is mass appeal. Or else, how you gonna scale? Third is good profit margins. Ideally, you can sell it for three times what it costs to ship it out to the customer.
So how do you find products that meet all three criteria? Don’t overthink it. Scroll through your social media feeds, watch for ads with a crap-ton of likes and comments, and see which products they’re promoting. Make sure you engage with the ads so the algorithms know you’re interested in similar ads. Now you’ll see a bunch of ’em every single day. Find one that interests you, where the numbers make sense, that you can market even better than the ad you saw.
Now you’ve gotta build a store, right? There’s a few different ways to go about it. You could do a general store, with lots of random products for sale. Or you could do a one-product store that’s designed to maximize sales for a single product. Or, what Jordan does, is he builds hybrid stores. Basically, a branded store that looks a lot like a one-product store, but with the ability to test different products. It’s the best of both worlds. Max conversions, minimal risk.
Here again, you wanna model the look and feel and flow of your store off of other stores that are already working. Jordan used to have a Flora Flow Shopify store that was inspired by some of his top competitors. From logo to colors to layout, he just modeled what was already proven. “You don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” he explains, “you just have to take what’s already out there working well and put some of your own sauce on it.”
So find your main product, build a branded store for it. Sprinkle in complimentary products. Articture.com is a great example of this. But Jordan thinks this is by far the best approach for beginners. Now you just need to get some traffic over to your website, right? Jordan’s go-to source is Facebook ads. You’ll need at least a few hundred bucks to test with. The major benefit is you can kickstart your dropshipping biz in a snap. And when you find a winning ad, you can scale instantly.
Speaking of which, Jordan’s big on video ads. Show, don’t tell. Either learn how to make and edit good video ads yourself or hire an expert to do it for you. Once you’ve got one done, create a Facebook page and Instagram account for your brand. You’ll need these to run ads. Now create a new ad campaign with five ad sets (aka different groups of audiences). Spend a few bucks a day on each ad set. See which ones convert and which don’t. Cut losers, scale winners. Follow Jordan for more.
