How to Dropship Best Products Successfully: Step-by-Step

7 min readMar 8, 2021

Dropshipping for eCommerce: Getting started and how to dropship

No we’re fully aware of the pros and cons of setting up a dropshipping business, it’s decision time!

If you have existing WordPress skills and are after a business where you primarily add value through branding and marketing, then go ahead. If you want to spend time making your product, this probably isn’t for you. You could always start a blog if the WordPress product space really doesn’t appeal.
If you’re okay with the caveats and excited about building a great store, brand, and customer experience, then let’s go!

On the assumption you’re still reading because you’re at the very least curious, let’s move on to the best approach to how to dropship and setting up your dropshipping business: from honing in on your winning business idea to sourcing your supplier and finding your first customers.

1. Market research: Find a niche & choose your product

This is the bare-bones foundation of your business, so you’d best make it solid!

You need a niche: something your store will focus on. Think “bespoke coffee store” rather than “Amazon competitor”. Ideally, your niche is where you already have expert knowledge. Or perhaps it’s a topic/product which is relatively undiscovered and under-utilized: ideally, a combination of both!

You’ll have a much higher chance of success if you have a comparative advantage over the competition — even if it’s just your expert knowledge. “Expert knowledge” in a topic or type of product that you’re really passionate about. An existing hobby, for example.

Perhaps you love sourcing highly unusual, attractive artwork and you also enjoy photographing birds. Or you’re a new mother, but don’t want to give up your passion for golf. These are both great niches because they sit at the intersection of two categories. If you’re an expert in both, you’ve got an immediate competitive advantage. This sort of an approach is a great way to learn how to dropship.

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Explore lots of possible ideas, choose the best.

Try and find a couple of ideas to explore. The next step is to do some keyword research and look for existing products (high-quality bird prints? Baby golf buggy?). These are the same SEO techniques you’d use for deciding what to blog about and promoting your WordPress product business; we weren’t making it up when we said this requires similar skills

Happily, we have plenty of help: read our practical SEO guide and check the start a blog guide for general info. You’re looking for a reasonable volume of searches per month across a range of keywords. Ideally you want a niche without too much keyword competition so that you can reach potential customers on the first page of Google.

You must do your keyword research. “Buy coffee beans” won’t be a great basis for your business, but niche down from there and you could be on to a winner.

You might need to go through four or five ideas before you find a really good one, so get a pen and paper, and spend some serious time on this. With dropshipping, the costs of starting the wrong business aren’t absurd — it’s mostly your time involved — but you can certainly save yourself a lot of hassle by doing your research properly.

create acount deliverr

2. Sourcing the right eCommerce provider and dropshipping supplier

Whether you already have an eCommerce store or learning how to start a dropshipping business from scratch; it’s absolutely essential to find a good match between your eCommerce provider and dropshipping supplier.

These services will be sharing information day in, day out and compatibility issues can cause untold problems. Shopify, for example, has its own dedicated dropshipping app, Oberlo. It’s pretty impressive, but you’re stuck inside the Shopify ecosystem. With your existing WordPress knowledge, you’ve got space to carve out a competitive advantage by using the more customizable WooCommerce.

WooCommerce has its own dropshipping integrations: we’ve had success integrating WooCommerce and AliExpress with WordPress. AliExpress is a sister site from Alibaba, the Chinese eCommerce giant. The site has hundreds of thousands of products at wholesale prices, so it’s perfect when first figuring out how to dropship. The post linked above shows how to do the full setup; we’ll thus skip this step here.

AliExpress can be a key part of your journey with how to start a dropshipping business.

You should do your due diligence when choosing a marketplace, and remember you’re choosing a marketplace and need a supplier within that marketplace. You’ll want to know about customer support, shipping fees, and which channels you can sell through. Other popular options are Doba and Spocket. We’ll proceed with AliExpress here for the range of products and WooCommerce integration, but go for the marketplace with the best options for your niche.

3. Finding your first customers: Getting eyes on the prize

Much like any WordPress product or blog, your dropshipping store needs visitors and customers to thrive — you won’t learn how to dropship without customers! To start with, keep things simple and focus in on marketing channels most likely to attract sales to your website.

You should think about possible marketing channels, and if you have access or skills for an unusual or unorthodox channel, then do that! That’s a great way of getting your first customers. Here, however, we’ll recommend content marketing because it’s scalable and fits closely with WordPress’ roots, so you’re likely able to do a decent job.

The guides above will be a great help. The key things to remember here are:

Create really good content that answers unanswered questions related to your products, or answers already-answered questions better than is being done currently.
Have a target keyword in mind for each post.
Commit to a couple of months of content marketing. It takes time to work.

You can add things like tracking your search rankings, using UTM codes to track the sales results from each post and

building an email list, but those are things to look at once this is working (which you’ll know as you’ll have sales!). The key is to provide real value and useful information, which will keep customers returning to your site.

Try this out, and make sure to strike the right balance between committing for the right amount of time and tweaking strategy when required. This is a fantastic way to build out customers for your store and ultimately learn how to dropship.

4. Success stories: learn how to start a dropshipping business from the pros

Let’s check out some dropshipping for eCommerce success stories! This is a really exciting field, so we’ll see what we can learn from those already running successful dropshipping companies.

One of the best examples in this space is Anker, the seller of

phone battery packs and cables. You’ve probably got one — I do! Anker was started in 2011 by a Google engineer who saw space for “a line of reasonably priced accessories that would be better than the ones you could buy from Apple and other big-name brands”. It’s now the most popular brand for battery packs on Amazon.

Anker isn’t your classic dropshipping business, but that’s exactly why it’s a great example: it’s taken a commodified good — battery packs and accessories — and worked out how to add a huge amount of extra value through customer service, branding, and quality. Along the way, they’ve nailed basically everything we’ve discussed here. Here are some great insights from an interview with The Verge, linked above:

The initial setup took a year as Anker wanted to find reliable manufacturing partners. Founder Steven Yang went to China to ensure their supply chain was rock-solid.
Anker started with laptop batteries — not phone batteries — but found its nirvana of phones by testing lots of products.
The focus was on building a great product! Their batteries were better than what you got in your phone from the manufacturer. This helped build out their reputation as a reliable brand.
By selling on Amazon,
Anker was able to shortcut some of the marketing requirements you’d have from self-hosting.
After finding a product that was good enough, they focused on what was working. Anker went from selling 100 to 1,000 products every day in 2012. The rest, it turns out, has been a very good history.

From passion to profit in three weeks.

Cup & Leaf was born from a niche passion and is already making some money, after launching this year.

Nat Eliason saw a gap in the online market for high-quality, US-based tea sellers that ship online. So, it made sense to transform his personal love of tea into a company and learn how to dropship.

And — impressively — setting up, registering and launching the entire company with MVP took less than three weeks.

Cup & Leaf teas

Just a few insights on how Nat figured out how to start a dropshipping business at Cup & Leaf in under three weeks:

He registered the business on incorporate.com, which took 10-minutes. Within two days he had a fully-licensed LLC.
To keep costs down, Nat used his own digital SLR and a collapsible light-box (which he bought on Amazon) to do the product photography. He also chose to package his own product which added a bespoke flair to the brand.
Nat also made sure to implement marketing best practices, such as strategically-placed Calls-To-Action (CTAs) across the website, and interesting, SEO-optimized content on the blog. Integrating a few apps, such as Privy (for pop-ups), FOMO and Shopify’s built-in reviews app (to add social proof). You can replicate all of these with WooCommerce, too.