How to start making money with Drop shipping Business in Nigeria

Dropshipping business is one of the easiest businesses one can start in Nigeria today and be making a lot of money without stress.

Do you know why?

Beacause you don’t need to keep stock of the products
You do not need to handle shipping
It is easy to scale a dropshipping business

However, this is possible only if you use the right strategy.

This tutorial is to guide you on how you can start dropshipping business in Nigeria even in your Pijamas following a few steps;

Disclosure: This post contains affiliates links and I will earn a commission if purchased through my link. Thanks for your support.

Step 1: Find your niche

This step involves choosing the right niche for your dropshipping business. This ranges from choosing the best selling product, choosing reliable suppliers to pricing.

In choosing the best selling product or products for your dropshipping business, you would need to do a market trend analysis using the Google trend.

Google Trends provides keyword-related data including search volume index and geographical information about search engine users. Google trend helps you in choosing the right product to dropship base on the market trends of the product interms of the search volume per month, Country, location etc.

So, go over to www.trends.google.com. The first thing you need to do is to carry out an initial product research of the product you want to start dropshipping. If the product has higher competition or can be found down the street of your house then don’t go there! Find another product to dropship.

Using the google trend to find the best selling product to dropship, below is an example;

From the above image, it reveals that the market trend for men shoes is falling from the arrow that is going down.

Therefore, droshipping men shoes may not be a good idea.

Also from the search conducted on Sunglasses on google trend, it shows that droshipping sunglasses is great because of an increase in the pattern of movement based on the arrow as indicated in the graph.

It is always a good idea to narrow down your niche to fewer products says one or two to dropship beause of the following reasons;

In order to be able to understand the product more
To be an expert in that niche
Easier to rank higher in google search
It is easier to focus on a particular market audience.

Also, find reliable suppliers for your dropshipping products and also check the product price from other stores selling the same product and among suppliers selling the same product and do price comparism.

Step 2: Build your website for your dropshipping Business

There are many ways to build your dropshipping store after you have concluded on the product to start dropshipping. These ways are analysed below;

WordPress + Woocommerce

I have try to explain the steps involves in using woocommece plugin and wordpress in building your store and some of the benefits of using the platform over other platforms as well.

To use the wordpress and woocommerce platform, you will need a domain name and an hosting plan. In choosing a domain name and hosting plan, I will recommend bluehost because of their 24/7 support, 99.9% uptime guaranteed, free domain name, ability of your store to load very fast and they are officially recommended by wordpress.org.

Another awesome site to get cheap domain names from is www.namecheap.com.

Also, some of our naija hosting providers too are great but I can only recommend those services I have used, I would like to recommend Smartweb and Whogohost. Both hosting providers give you one year free domain name along with your hosting plan with the .com.ng extension and their support is superb too.

After you must have gotten your domain name and hosting, install wordress, woocommerce plugin, install a theme, add your payment gateways and start adding products to your store. You can do this following my previous post on how to setup an online store with wordpress and woocommerce.

However, most of the tasks can be automated with the help of some plugings namely alidropship/alidropship Woo, Woodropship, Shopmaster etc. You can actually automate most of the processes involved in adding products to your store to order fulfillment. These softwares are great in automating your dropshipping business.

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Custom Store

Two of the plugins recommended above also offer custom stores ( Alidropship and Woodropship)

With Alidropship custom store, your store can be up and running in less than 72hours. The custom store idea will save you alot of time and its comes with a one time payment of $299. You can also go with their yearly plan of $89.

Get 10% Off Alidropship Here
(Use Code smart10 at checkout)

Woodropship on the other hand, is a plugin that makes your Dropshipping business Easier. It helps in automating virtually all the processes involves in your droshipping business. It can easily import the products to your store from Aliexpress and automate order fulfillment process. It also not free just like Alidropship plugin. With Woodropship, you can also get a custom store setup and saves some time in running your dropshipping business. It cost $89/year including a domain name and one year hosting plan.

Shopify

With Shopify you can also build a professional looking store for your droshipping business. It saves you time and cash involves in hiring a webdesigner. If you are not a techy person, you can easily used the platform in building your store because no coding whatsoever is involved.

With the shopify platform, you get to pay a monthly charges for your store to continue to run. Though, you are entitled to 14days free Trial. The platform makes it easier for you to concentrate on marketing and customer acquisitions.

Just like Alidropship and woodropship plugins that help to automate your droshipping business under the platform of wordpress + woocommerce, Oberlo plugin helps in automating your dropshipping business under the shopify platform.

Oberlo is a Shopify plugin that helps in adding products to your shopify store conveniently. With the plugin, you can easily import products to your shopify store in a single click. Price : $29/month with free Trial for 30days.

Step 3: Import products into Your Store

If you have purchased any of the plugins recommended above, download whichever one you have purchased and use it in importing your products to either your woocommerce or shopify store. If not, add products to your store manually. You can refer to my previous post on how to build an ecommerce store for the step by step guide.

It is advisable to import or add products with free shipping and epacket products. With epackets, products are shipped faster than the normal duration of 3-4weeks and with free shipping, you can easily shift the little shipping fee on some products to your customers.

Step 4: Market Your business and Start Making Money

It is time to make your business go live through marketing of your products, after all the needed setups.

To run a successful dropshipping business in Nigeria, you need to put in place strong internet marketing strategies that would help your business grow faster. Marketing your products can be carried out via the following channels as listed below;

Search Engine Optimization

SEO activies helps your store to be visible and found on most search engines if properly done. This is a series of activities carried out in aiding the visibility of a website in organic Search results. The more your store address pops up in search engines, the more sales you make when prospects search certain keywords that are related to the ones your store is ranking for.

Email Marketing-

Email marketing has proven to be one of the most effective means of selling online. Don’t expect every prospect that visits your online store to buy from you immediately, so having a strong email marketing strategy in place would help you in marketing to those visiting prospects in future which can eventually leads to sales.

Social Media Advertising-

Social media marketing for your online store helps you in generating a lot of sales through proper targeting of your prospects through Facebook Ads/Instagram Ads campaign.

Yes! I know the questions most Nigerians like to ask is on payment gateways and how to fulfill orders?

On the issue of payment gateways, the best payments gateways for Nigerians are Paypal and Rave or Paystack. if you are going to be dropshipping both internationally and into the Nigerian market.

Once orders start rolling in, log into your backend to fulfill the orders by visiting aliexpress and fulfilling the orders using the addresses given to you by your customers and your suppliers would then ship the products to your customers on your behalf

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Thank you.