I've been researching and working on dropshipping, acquiring knowledge and a detailed understanding of how things work and what I need to do once I'm in the middle of it, but I still struggle to understand what to start with. My budget is tight. 100$ max. I can reinvest everything I make for a month or so but that's all I have to start with. Where do I get started practically and how do I spend my money in the right place to get into it? Think of a Venn diagram of three intersecting circles. First circle is "Cheap". Second circle is "Fast". Third circle is "Viable". You can only choose two. Your options are: Cheap & Fast = Not Viable Fast & Viable = Not Cheap Cheap & Viable = Not Fast Your situation would be the third in the list. If you don't have much money to work with, and you obviously need for your store to actually be viable, you'll therefore need time to make it work. Lots and lots of time. Time to figure out your audience & competitors (you need to understand them to be able to sell properly). Time to create a beautiful & viable image presentation (you need a proper & appropriate presentation for your audience). Time to grow your followers organically on social media (as you lack funds to spend on ads). Time needed to learn essential skills (photo manipulation, copywriting, HTML/CSS scripting, maybe a bit of programming, some amount of IT, etc..). Time enough to plan everything out, sometimes months ahead. And so on. If you don't have the money to spend on ads, to hire designers, or to hire programmers, then you'll have to handle things yourself. It's not all bad tho. If you put in the same amount of effort and determination into learning and handling those aspects yourself, as you currently are with your workouts, you'll probably be able to craft an image that beats everyone else's store here out of the water. But that's for later. Your initial steps is to first understand your target audience. And that means doing research. Not "product research" like folks thinks is useful, but actual research with audience & competitors. You need to do it right. So for a given niche or product you're planning on offering, you need to find out your target audience's core data. Including who they are, what they do, their ages, where they're from, their income, what they want, what they hate, what brands they're loyal to, what brands they hate, and so on. Each of those pieces of information is critically important for your venture. Eg. If their income is high, you can maybe get away with charging a higher price, or offering high-ticket products. If you know what they hate, you can tailor your offers to avoid or even counter that. If you know what they do, you'll have options & possibilities on what you can potentially offer. And so on. Essentially you have to put yourself in their shoes, and put their mindset into yours. You need to completely immerse yourself in their situations and lives, and figure out what makes them tick. That's when you'll know whether your products are actually viable or not, what sorts of impression (brand image) responds to them, where they frequent, and so on. After that, you do the same for your competitors. This means who they are, what they do, what they sell, how they present themselves, who they target, their branding strategy, their marketing strategy, their communication strategy, and so on. You get excellent knowledge from seeing what lessons they learnt, and what you can avoid, saving you time and money. Your research findings is precious. It contains valuable information that'll allow anyone to make real money from it. So suggest keeping it to yourself, and not sharing with anyone. Once you find out everything you can about both your audience and competitors, you can then start building your brand image. Not just a fancy looking store theme and a new logo, but an actual image that your specific audience wants. This means name, logo, color-scheme, store style, store presentation, store feel, product selections, product presentation, product descriptions, prices, blogs, articles, maybe videos, who you are, what you do, your raison d'etre, how you communicate with your audience, what social media platforms you're on, how you conduct and implement your marketing & promotion strategies, and so on. Each and every single one of these will need to be based on your research findings. Your $100 will last you a couple months on Shopify ($25 monthly), assuming you don't use ads. If you decide to play with ads, it won't last you very long until it's gone. Suggest increasing that while you conduct your audience-competitor research. If you simply can't, then you need to play your cards right, and stretch it as long as possible. One way might be to host your store on Woocommerce instead. Easy to use hosts like Greengeeks works out to around $15 per month or something. If you have IT skills and are familiar with servers, you can host at DigitalOcean for like $4-$6 per month. More on reddit.com

Alibaba = buy and hold inventory in bulk. Best option if you plan of fulfilling orders in house or in a local fulfillment warehouse. Minimum order Quantity required (MOQ). Aliexpress= Only viable option for dropshipping between the two options. Buy products "on demand" instead of having to buy, hold and distribute yourself. No MOQ required. The manufacturers are identical and therefore, so is the quality. Alibaba is wholesale whereas Aliexpress is direct to consumer. More on reddit.com

Lmao the comments here are priceless 😂😂 Soo much bad advice. tbh I wouldn’t bother, i’ve tried creating multiple stores and dropshipping and it’s just not worth it. You hear that everyone?!? u/Eggsly7 has not had success with dropshipping!!! Everybody pack up your bags and go home. E-commerce on the internet is dead More on reddit.com

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