Dropshipping is a lucrative business model where you sell products from a third-party marketplace and mark up the price to make a profit. You don’t have to worry about shipping and storing the products — you only have to promote your store and drive traffic to it.
In this tutorial, I’ll walk you step-by-step through the entire process of setting up a drop shipping website with AliExpress and WooCommerce. Let’s begin!
Getting Started With Your WordPress Website
Before we start building the website, there are a few things we need to get. More specifically, you’ll need to get a domain name as well as a hosting plan. Then, you’ll also need to install WordPress, a WordPress theme and all the necessary plugins.
Let’s go through these steps one by one.
Step 1: Get Domain and Hosting
The first thing you need to do is buy a domain name and a hosting plan. While there are hundreds of hosting companies out there, I personally recommend Siteground.
I compared Siteground with 15 other hosting companies and Siteground came out as the most reliable company with the fastest loading times. It also has stellar support which is another reason why I recommend it.
Start by going to Siteground’s website and you’ll notice they offer three different plans. I suggest you choose the Grow Big plan as this will allow you to host an unlimited number of websites. However, you can choose whichever plan you want.
Once you’ve selected your plan, you’ll have the option to buy a domain name from Siteground. You can choose a general name for your store or you can be more specific and choose a name that’s related to the types of products you’ll be selling. Once you have a domain name you’re happy with, complete the checkout process by entering your payment information on the next page.
Siteground will then create your account and you’ll be taken to your customer area.
Step 2: Install WordPress
In the customer area, you can see all the details related to your hosting plan. The next step here is to install WordPress. Click on the orange button that says Start Your Website and then select Start New Website > WordPress.
On the next page, you’ll need to enter a username and password for your site. You’ll use those to log in to your WordPress website so be sure to write them down somewhere. Click the Continue button and Siteground complete the WordPress installation on your site.
When the installation is finished, you’ll see a blue button prompting you to manage your site. Click it and you’ll be taken to the page where you can see all the WordPress installations you have. Next to each site will be a login icon which you need to click to go directly to your WordPress dashboard.
Once you’re in your WordPress dashboard, there are a few things you need to do before going any further with the site setup. For starters, disable the plugin installed by Siteground as you don’t need it. Go to Plugins > Installed plugins. Here, be sure to deactivate and delete the WordPress Starter plugin.
Then, go to Settings > Permalinks and select the Post Name option. Setting your permalinks to Post name is better for your users as well as search engines. Save your changes.
The last step is to fix the SSL error which is telling us the website is not secure. You can fix this by installing and activating the Really Simple SSL plugin.
Once all those steps are taken care of, it’s time to install our theme and a few other helpful plugins for drop shipping websites.
Step 3: Installing and Setting Up The Theme
For this tutorial, we’ll be using the Flatsome theme. You’ll need to purchase the theme from ThemeForest and download the installable WordPress files. After you have purchased the theme, go to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to Appearance > Themes > Add new. Then, upload the zip folder with the Flatsome theme.
Once the theme has been installed, activate it and then follow the Wizard setup to complete the process.
When the theme has been set up, you’ll have the option to run the setup wizard for WooCommerce so go ahead and do so.
Then, click the Visit dashboard and go to Pages > Add new. You’ll want to create the Home, About, and Contact pages.
You can then use the Flatsome theme and its UX builder to design your own page layouts. As you can see, the Flatsome theme comes with hundreds of professional, pre-made layouts that you can use to speed up the website creation. All you have to do is pick a layout and import it and your page is done. You ca create your entire wordpress website with the flatsome studio library.
After you’re done creating and designing your pages, you can set up a menu by going to Appearance > Menus. First, create a menu and give it a name. Then, add all the pages you’ve just created to it, assign the menu as the primary menu, and save your changes.
Step 4: Installing and Setting Up The Dropshipping Plugin
The last step is to install and set up the AliDropship plugin. This plugin will allow you to automatically import products from AliExpress into your WooCommerce store. This is a premium plugin and on top of making it easy to import products from AliExpress, it allows you to set your own profit margins.
You can also set up automatic orders so you don’t have to input orders manually. The plugin also comes with a free package of 50 AliExpress best-sellers so you can start selling them in your store. The cost for the plugin is a one-time fee of $89.
Start by purchasing the plugin and then going over to your WordPress dashboard. Go to Plugins > Add new and install the plugin. Once the plugin has been installed activate it.
You’ll need to enter your license key and you can then access the plugin settings. The settings will allow you to control how the products are imported from AliExpress as well as how the price will be marked up.
After you have configured the plugin, don’t forget to install the AliExpress Chrome extension. The plugin will not work without it so don’t miss this step. The dropship extension will appear every time you’re browsing AliExpress’ website. To add a product to your store all you have to do is click the extension, hover over the desired product, and click the button to send it to your store.
Once everything is in place, you can visit AliExpress, search for a particular product type, and use the extension to add those products to your dropshipping website.
Step 5 : Importing AliExpress Products
When using the chrome extension, the processs is quite simple. To demonstrate, you simply search for a desired niche.
Then scroll to the product you want to import.
Then, you just click the orange import button and it sends the product right into your eCommerce /dropshipping store.
It’s important to note that you do want to select “ePacket” as your shipping method of choice.
You can do this by clicking on the gear icon in the upper right hand corner of your browser, and then select your target country and ePacket shipping:
This is typically the fastest shipping option for many products when dropshipping from AliExpress. You can expect them to arrive to your customers in around 10-15 days.
Fulfilling Orders
In any event, one of the most satisfying aspects of a dropshipping store is fulfilling orders. With AliDropship, you can do this quite easily.
This task does prove to be a bit tedious with many orders, yet with their data entry automation makes it much less painful, and quite quick to process your orders.
Final Thoughts
As you can see from the tutorial above, setting up a dropshipping website is not that difficult when you have the right tools and follow a step-by-step process.
Drop shipping is considered a low-risk business model making it great for new entrepreneurs.Are you ready to start drop shipping business?
Order your own webstore today!
As soon as it’s done, you can start marketing to get your sales.Now all you have to do is import your products and start driving traffic to your site. Happy drop shipping!
