Is Shopify Good for Dropshipping? (10 Points to Judge)

Is Shopify Good for Dropshipping?

How is it different from other e-commerce platforms?

Is it good to start and grow your dropshipping business with, or should you use another platform?

What are the pros and cons of using Shopify for dropshipping?

These questions and more I will be answering here in details in order to help you know if it was safe to use this platform for your dropshipping business or not.

Is Shopify Good for Dropshipping?

Shopify is good for dropshipping, and maybe the best and most reliable e-commerce platform to start with dropshipping and even upscale your business.

Here are ten reasons why Shopify is good for doing dropshipping online:

1 – Easy & Fast to Start a Dropshipping Store

Shopify makes it so easy and seamless to start a dropshipping store because the platform was mainly designed to build online stores, and because of the ability to connect the store with different sources of dropshipping products from different suppliers all over the world, and in almost any industry.

You can literally start your first dropshipping store in less than five minutes, and without any technical knowledge or experience, thanks to the very user-friendly platform and interface that was designed to help almost anyone start an online store, which is great if you want to start a dropshipping store.

2 – Many Options to Find Dropshipping Products

Because third party developers are allowed to create apps that can be integrated with Shopify stores, many apps have been developed and published for dropshippers in particular in order to help them find products in different industries, either from big marketplaces like AliExpress, or from standalone companies like print-on-demand companies such as Printful and Printify.

This makes the dropshippers’ lives much easier because they don’t have to take lots of steps in order to start adding products to their store in order to sell them with the dropshipping model.

Especially that with dropshipping, you might need to test lots of products before finding one winning product that people want to buy, which means that you need to find and add products to your store easily and quickly.

With apps like Oberlo, you can add products to your dropshipping store with only few clicks, and start editing the title, description, images, and price.

And the same goes with print on demand apps like Printful that allows you to add certain white-label products such as t-shirts, hoodies, hats, …etc., and add your design to them so that you sell them as unique items that are only found on your store.

3 – Easy to Manage Inventory & Fulfill Orders

Like it is when it comes to adding dropshipping products, Shopify makes it very easy for dropshippers to fulfill orders after they receive them through the same dropshipping and POD apps.

For example, if you are using Oberlo to import products to your store, you can also use it to fulfill and order when you receive it, as you can fulfill the order through the app to the supplier and the app will automatically forward the item and shipping details to the supplier, and you can also use it to sync the order on AliExpress with your store so that it fetches the shipment tracking number after the supplier sends out the product.

And the same goes with POD apps.

Add to that, it is easy to manage the inventory with Oberlo as you can set it up to delist some product or variant when it is no longer available at the source.

This makes Shopify great for dropshipping as it can save you lots of time when managing many products in your store, and when fulfilling many orders on daily basis.

4 – Low Start-up Cost

Dropshipping is a nice model because you can start selling products that you don’t own, and you only pay the supplier after you receive the price of the item listed on your store.

And Shopify makes it even better for dropshippers because they can start their store with the Basic Shopify plan that costs only $29/month for all the necessary features and functionalities that allow them to start testing and even grow their business.

If you want to start a dropshipping store on WordPress, then you would need a relatively expensive hosting plan as the shared hosting plans are not designed to handle e-commerce sites, especially the ones that operate in the dropshipping model that require having many images and receive a lot of traffic continuously.

Also, with WP sites, you need to add many plugins in order to transform the site into an online store and start adding dropshipping products and receive orders, and many of these plugins cost money.

This means that starting a dropshipping business with Shopify is better as you get all what you need for only $29/month.

And on top of that, you get a 14-day free trial, where you can test the platform and your store before paying a dime, and you can cancel your subscription anytime you want.

While with WordPress, you usually need to pay for a complete year of the service, and rarely that a WP hosting provider offers a money back guarantee like A2 Hosting does.

5 – Good Themes for Dropshipping in Many Niches

Another good thing about using Shopify for dropshipping is that there are already many themes (free and paid) that you can use in order to customize your storefront to your brand and to make it appeal to your audience and niche.

You can easily switch from one theme to another and you only need to do little actions in order to modify the new theme to match your branding and niche.

This helps you in testing different layouts for your dropshipping store, and if you are using a general domain name for your store, then you may need to test few products of every niche until you find a good niche, and to do so, you would be benefiting from the ability to easily switch from one theme to another based on the products you want to promote.

6 – Ability to Receive Payments from Dropshipping Clients Everywhere

Because dropshipping suppliers can ship worldwide, dropshippers usually upscale their business by advertising to many countries at the same time.

And this means that they need to have more than one payment gateway on their stores as people in one country might prefer to pay with PayPal, while in another country might not even be able to create a PayPal account and have to pay with credit cards.

And Shopify is good in this matter as it allows dropshippers to add more than one payment gateway at the same time with the available integrations with tens of payment processors and gateways worldwide, with only few steps and without having to hire a developer or a techie person.

7 – Flexibility in Scaling & Managing a Dropshipping Business

Since the fulfillment and shipping are handled by the supplier, dropshippers can have more time to focus on marketing and scaling their business, and this means that sometimes they need to hire virtual assistants that would help them add products, fulfill orders, deal with returns, ….etc.

And Shopify offers different plans that allow you to add people to help you manage your dropshipping store with more ease so that you free up more of your time in order to focus on tasks that cannot be delegated like running ad campaigns.

Shopify also makes it easy, with the help of apps, to increase the AOV and the customer LTV with functionalities such as the related products feature, cross-sells and upsells, email marketing automation, abandoned cart recovery, …etc.

And these all are important if you want to grow a dropshipping business and take advantage of everyone that visits your store or buys from you.

8 – Reliable Platform for Receiving Lots of Web Traffic

Shopify was founded in 2006 and it keeps getting better and more robust everyday in terms of quality and support, unlike many of the WordPress hosting companies that start focusing on getting money from their customers and start providing low quality services and support.

And their servers are built to handle the high traffic and to load stores fast, which is good for dropshipping stores.

The uptime of Shopify store is really high and the platform is very reliable.

And on top of that, they offer a 24/7 support through phone, email, and live chat, in addition to the community forum and the many well-documented support content.

This means that if you use Shopify for dropshipping you can focus on the business side of things instead of worrying about technical bugs and issues.

9 – Ability to Add Mutliple Marketing & Sales Channels

Dropshipping is all about testing, optimizing, and scaling.

And scaling requires bringing more targeted traffic to your store.

And Shopify helps with this with the easy integrations with the different analytics tools and advertising tools like Facebook ads and pixel, Google Analytics, SEO, …etc.

And it also allows you to embed “Buy Now” buttons for products or collections on any website that you have, and to set up stores on Facebook and Instagram to list the products you have on your store there.

These all come with easy integrations through apps and sales channels that don’t require a techie person to do them, which is great for dropshipping store owners.

10 – Many Training Courses on Dropshipping with Shopify

There are many training courses on dropshipping with Shopify in particular that can help you learn faster and skip many of the mistakes that beginners do when they do dropshipping.

Some courses are outdated, and some are expensive and are not worth the price, so, you have to be careful where to learn from.

If you want a good paid course, then Ecom Elites by Franklin Hatchett is the best one, and it costs much less than what other courses cost.

But if you want a free course, then you may check the Shopify Academy (Shopify Compass) that offers many free detailed courses on dropshipping, print on demand, and other ecom business models from people who are actually successful in these business models.

So, for these ten reasons, Shopify is a really good platform for starting a dropshipping business, if it was not the best out there.

 

Problems Dropshippers Face with Shopify

Despite being the best platform for dropshipping businesses, there might be some issues that dropshippers might face with Shopify, such as:

1 – Merchant Selection

This is not related to Shopify itself but to dropshipping in general.

Because you don’t have much control on the supplier, you might face some problems with quality of the products, shipping times, stock availability, …etc.

The solution to this is to follow the best practices when selecting products to sell and suppliers to work with, as you might learn in the training courses I mentioned in the previous section above.

2 – Fake Gurus Everywhere

The rise of Shopify as an easy to use platform has been accompanied by the rise of many fake gurus who show you fake screenshots of huge income and tell you that you can make these numbers overnight working few minutes a day.

And while dropshipping is a beginner-friendly model, and Shopify is very good for beginners, but still, this is a business, and you should not expect to make any money if you don’t put in the consistent effort, especially at the beginning during the learning phase.

That’s why I highly recommend learning to the teachers in the courses I mentioned in the previous section above.

3 – Multi-Language Dropshipping Stores

Like it is with other platforms, Shopify allows you to create your store in one primary language.

But because dropshippers usually sell to many countries, it is better to show a translated version of the store to every visitor based on their own language.

And you can do this with your Shopify dropshipping store with the help of different free and paid apps.

4 – Transaction Fees

In addition to the transaction and processing fees charged on every order by the payment gateways, you need to pay Shopify a small fee on every order you receive, which is a small percentage on the total order value.

These fees are (2%, 1%, 0.5%) of each order value depending on the plan you have (Basic, Shopify, Advanced).

But as you scale your business, using the Shopify or the Advanced plan becomes a necessity, and the fee gets smaller, and it is still better than using a dropshipping store that is built on WordPress.

5 – Migration Requires Some Work

Because Shopify is a closed source software, you can’t just take your store and host it anywhere you want.

If you decide to stop paying for Shopify and you want to host your store elsewhere, then you need to take certain steps in order to export your store’s data and upload it on a Magento or a WordPress store.

And this requires some work that might require you to hire someone to do.

But in general, dropshipping stores are a bit different from other e-com stores because usually you focus on few items that you sell in big quantities at certain periods, which means that you usually won’t need to transfer everything to the new store.

 

Conclusion – Should Dropshippers Use Shopify?

Yes, dropshippers should start their businesses with Shopify thanks to the easiness and the flexibility it gives to its users to start, grow, and scale a dropshipping business at low cost and without technical knowledge or experience.

Remember that Shopify offers dropshippers a 14-day trial that allows them to test the platform and start a store before paying anything, unlike other platforms that usually require a full year commitment.

If you still have any questions or concerns, or you have any other reason why Shopify is good for dropshipping businesses that you want me to add to the list above, please, feel free to tell me in the comments’ section below and I will do my best to respond to you asap 🙂

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