FAQ

Dropshipping does not require much initial funding, but it's good to have a realistic idea of how much money you'll have to invest before you get results.
Keep in mind, none of this money needs to be invested upfront, in general, you'll spend your initial investment over the first month. Marketing expenses, your biggest cost, will be spent last - once you've perfected your store and products. It could cost much less than $200 to get your first sale, but realistically you may test several products that do not sell until you find the winning product that gets you your first sale.

For those of you who don't know - a general store is a store that can stock almost any product category, from fashion to children educational toys. These stores generally revolve around selling gadgets, trinkets and gift style items. A niche store is a branded store revolving around a central theme, for example mens watches.
We would recommend you start with a hybrid store - a mix of general and niche. This means your store will be branded but will also contain products from a large interest / niche, for example fashion or fitness. This allows you to brand your store more effectively, come across with more authority and focus on one category of products at a time while still being able to test & scale many products at a time.

There are two factors to consider here. The quality of the products you're importing and the type of niche your store occupies. For example, with womens general fashion, having only one or two products is not the norm and certainly won't cut it.
It is advised to import at least 25-100 products - you won't necessarily sell every product, but it will make your store look more authoritative and legitimate if you have many items for your customers to browse, which helps increase the time your customers spend on your site. However, make sure you keep a high standard of quality across all the items you are selling & view each product as a potential winner.
However, more products seems to be better - the top 10 Shopify Dropshipping stores have listed an average of 1095 products on their websites.

As a general rule of thumb, yes. Most suppliers want you to buy more of their product, and will provide high quality images to help you sell it. We would recommend you remove any supplier names, logos or watermarks left on the images before you use them on your store. If you are unsure, you can always message the supplier and ask if you can use their images.
Taking your own product photography can also be a great way to put your store head and shoulders above other stores selling the same products, however this can be a time consuming process, especially if you have a large amount of items listed on your store.

Before you think about making your first sale, make sure your store and products have been perfected and are ready to sell. Getting your first sale requires driving a large amount of targeted traffic to your store, which is not easy - it can take a long time and requires you to adjust and improve your website as you work out what drives sales and what does not.
A few common ways entrepreneurs go about making their first sale include:
Using their stores branded Instagram to DM potential customers, offering them a discount code
Purchasing Instagram shoutouts on a page related to your website niche
Facebook Ads, Google Ads
Whichever way you go about making your first sale, the key is to drive targeted traffic (traffic that might be interested in buying what you have to sell) to your website, you can do this in any way you can imagine, so get creative.

It varies from person to person. Some entrepreneurs will make a sale the first day they launch their store. Others will take months to make their first sale. We would say the average time is between 30-45 days.
The more time & effort you put into your store and products, the more likely it is that you will get your first sale quickly. In making your first sale, it will take some time to figure out which marketing channels, for example Facebook Ads vs Instagram influencers, will work for your business.
Once you find out which marketing channel works, you can focus your efforts and increase your sales.

While in general customers do prefer quicker delivery times, it depends on the customer's expectations versus reality. For example, Amazon Prime may offer 2 day free shipping, but if the item took 5 days to come the customer would be upset, and if the item arrived in 1 day the customer would be happy. The best shipping method for dropshipping is ePacket shipping , allowing your customers to get their products from China in 7-20 days.
Similarly, dealing with shipping times in dropshipping is all about expectation management, you want to make it very clear to the customer that their product is going to take 7-20 days to get to them. We recommend you make the shipping fee completely free in order to give more value to your customer and make up for the long shipping times.
In addition to this, you can use SaleSource to find faster shipping methods for almost any product, by comparing all possible suppliers against each other. This includes finding USA shipping for products that previously only shipped from China.

Unless these products are fulfilled by the same supplier, from the same warehouse, it's likely that your customers will indeed receive your goods in separate packages at different times.
From a wide body of experience, customers generally expect this to be the case. If a customer does raise the issue, we recommend telling them different products are stocked at different warehouses worldwide.

As a brand, your store represents much more than just a product. It represents great customer service, brand identity, values, community, status and more. Your brand is much more than the products you sell, and in dropshipping, that is what you have to convey.
A good dropshipping store gathers the best reviews, images, videos and marketing materials for a given product and displays them to the customer in a way that directly conveys the value of the item.
In addition, you allow the customer to effortlessly purchase the item and others like it in your store, all in one place. Your store makes it easy to find exactly what the customers are looking for, and presents the product in an expert manner, answering all customer questions and building trust.