Dropshipping business happens to be one of the most profitable online businesses you can start and be generating extra income without quitting your present job. It is easy to setup, less time consuming and very easy to scale when you have access to the right tools and strategies. In my previous article, I mentioned the various ways you can design your drop shipping or e-commerce store and the use of Alidropship plugin happens to be one of them. When you use this plugin in building your dropshipping store, you will be amazed on how easy it is to get everything up and running in minutes!
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Alidropship plugin is a cloud based software that helps you automate the whole dropshipping process. It is an All in One Dropshipping Solution that helps you turn your wordpress site into a fully functional dropshipping store. It is design to work with wordpresss and is fully integrated with Aliexpress marketplace.
First of all, you will need to purchase the plugin. It is a one-time payment of $89 and trust me, the features and functionalities you get from using the plugin in your dropshipping website would definitely worth more than the price, couple with the fact that no monthly charges compared to when you use Shopify platform in running your dropshipping business.
Get 10% Off Alidropship Here
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Having purchased the plugin, let’s get started with the step by step instructions on how to use the Plugin in building our dropshipping website.
The Step by step instructions involved in building a dropshipping website with Alidropship plugin are;
- Get a Domain Name and Hosting
- Install WordPress
- Download the Alidropship Plugin
- Upload and Activate the Plugin
- Choose a Theme
- Store Customization
- Set the Currency
- Set the Payment Gateways
- Setup Pricing Rule/Fomular
- Import products from Aliexpress
- Import Product Reviews
- Setup Shipping Options
- Setup Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
1. Buy a domain and Hosting Plan
To setup our dropshipping website, we would need to get a domain name and an hosting plan. A domain name is the name of your business online and an hosting plan is the service that would help make your website live on the internet which is very crucial to the success of your business. You will need a reliable hosting service to be able to run your dropshipping business successfully.
The companies I would recommend for your domain names are Namecheap, Smartweb and whogohost. For your hosting, I would recommend Bluehost and Alidropship Hosting Services for much more reliable hosting services. The great thing about blue host is that with their hosting plan, you get a domain name for free, free ssl, 24/7 support and one click wordpress installed. Alidropship hosting service is specifically optimized for dropshipping business in mind and with their hosting plans, you get high technical performance and 24/7 customer service and support but you need to buy a domain name because they don’t offer domain name services.
2. Install WordPress
You will need to install WordPress on your hosting after your domain name and hosting purchased. WordPress is software that allows you build and manage your website without any knowledge about html.
It is important to note that if you want to use the best solution for AliExpress drop shipping business, you will need to install wordpress. Also, alidropship plugin works perfectly on wordpress.
You can either install wordpress automatically or manually from your website cpanel. For bluehost aand Alidropship hosting services, wordpress is automatically installed for you but there are some hosting providers that would allow you install wordpress manually from your cpanel. But installing wordpress automatically wouldn’t pose any technical problem.
To install wordpress manually;
Go to your cpanel at www.yourdomain.com/cpanel
Scroll down to the buttom of the page to locate wordpress icon under softaculous
Click on wordpress icon ->Click on Install
Wait for few seconds for the installation and visit your wordpress site from www.yourdomainname.com/wp-admin
- Download the Alidropship Plugin
On the checkout page of your purchase/Thank you page, you will be given the License key which will be needed in activating the plugin on your wordpress site.
This license key will be sent to your email as well as the link to download the plugin and theme. Keep the license key in a save place because, we are going to need it in the next step.
One of the great features of Alidropship is that if you purchase the plugin, you will be given the Woo version of the plugin for free but you can only use it on the same domain.
To download the plugin
- Choose the version of the plugin you which to download
- Choose the PHP version of your wordpress site. You can ask your host if you don’ know the your PHP version
- Insert your License key
- Click on Download
Note the location of your download on your computer
- Upload and Activate Alidropship Plugin
- On your wordpress dashboard
- Click on Plugin-> Add new
- Scroll up to locate “Upload Plugin
- Choose the plugin from your computer
- Click on Install
- Click on activate after installation of the plugin.
To activate the license key;
- Click on license under alidropship on your wordpress dashboard
- Insert your license key and click on activate
Please note that the license key is unique and valid for only one domain name and if you perhaps change your domain name in future, you will need to notify their support desk for the plugin to be reset.
- Choose a Theme
A theme determines your store/website appearance. It is the design of your website. Most alidropship themes are free while some are premium themes and they all work pretty well with the plugin. You can easily download one from their website, under Products ->themes,
Go back to your wordpress dashboard to upload and activate the theme
To upload the theme;
Click on Appearance->theme->add new-> upload theme->install-> activate theme
- Store Customization
To start customizing your store, you will need to get your store logo, favicon, main page images and banners ready. You can easily design them using the Canva app or get a freelancer on fiverr or upwork to design them for you.
Once you have them, start customizing your dropshipping store.
To customize your store,
Click on Customization
Do your General customization- create your store pages and menus, choose your store color template, store layout etc and remember to save changes
Create product categories and generally customize to your taste, just the way you want it.
- Set the Currency
The currency you choose depends on your store location but the default currency is US dollar and you can always add more currency settings later.
- Set the Payment Gateways
Yes! This is where the challenge is, for most countries especially Nigerians. A functional paypal will definitely do the trick here. If you have a paypal account from a Non- restricted country, then choose paypal as payment gateway and for credit card payment, you can either choose Paystack and Rave. But double check with what payment gateways are available in your country. AliDropship plugin supports so many payment gateways.
If you need a functional Paypay account, that can send and also receive money from any country in the world without hiding your IP address or VPN, you can give me a call on +2348163247809 or send
me a message on whatapp with the same number. Let’s get your Paypal ready in less than 24hours for a token
- Setup Pricing Rule/Formula
Pricing rule is where you fix the prices of your products for your markup profit. You can create as many formulas as you need and set any kind of price you want with the plugin.
With the alidropship plugin, you can set your pricing rule with their recommended pricing formula or create a new rule and save changes and it will be updated automatically. Also, In terms of buyers’ psychology and to increase the level of trust in your store, it is a good to make use of the rounding up option in the pricing feature. For example, if the price of your product is $7.87, you can use the rounding option feature to round the figure up to $8.
- Import products from Aliexpress
Alidropship plugin is fully integrated with Aliexpress marketplace so it is easy to import products from Aliexpress directly from your wordpress dashboard. In addition to this, you can import already edited and optimized products from the import list right on your wordpress dashboard.
- To start importing products into your store from Aliexpress, you will need to install the Alidropship chrome extension.
Click here to install the Chrome extension.
- After installing the chrome extension
- Click on the extension
- Add your Domain name and click on Add
- Another page would prompt you to Authorize your website
- Click on Authorize for the extension to start working.
- Go back to your wordpress dashboard and click import from Aliexpress. Then you will be redirected to Aliexpress website.
- You can import a single product or bulk import product from Aliexpress.
To import a single product from Aliexpress, simply click the Alidropship icon that appears beside the product and your chosen product would be imported in one click
To import products in bulk, you would need to create product categories on your webstore first before going to use the bulk import feature of the plugin on Aliexpress website.
Type in your product category
- Scroll up to the Alidropship plugin feature to pick a product category already created in your store.
- Click on import items.
Edit your product titles descriptions and permalink to make them more readable and compact. Delete all the images from your product descriptions in order not to look like a copy of AliExpress. use the built-in Image Editor to edit the product image.
- Import Product Reviews
Reviews from previous customers are motivating factors that help other people make decisions faster about products purchase. It is possible to import reviews to your store directly from AliExpress. You can choose the number of reviews per product, add reviews only in your language, import reviews with images only etc.
- Setup Shipping Options
The plugin has a special section where you can enable or disable different shipping options and select the countries that you want to deliver to. There are about four different shipping options you can choose from – free shipping, super savings shipping, standard shipping and expedited shipping but it is always advisable you use the free shipping option because it encourages customers to buy more.
- Setup Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is the last step and is probably the most important step because without traffic to your store, there would be no sales. Alidropship plugin has an inbuilt SEO feature that is capable of bringing in free visitors to your store on a daily basis. SEO is very important to your dropshipping business, it allows you gain free traffic from search engines and also improves your website performance.
These are the basis in designing your dropshipping website from scratch using Alidropship plugin. If you have any question, please leave it in the comment section below, I will attend to them as soon as possible.
Below, is the video version of this tutorial, Enjoy!
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