We translated the material and supplemented it with a couple of our comments on how Weblium helps you save money when starting an e-commerce business.
Content
Startup Costs for a Dropshipping Business
1. Launching the site
The most affordable way to create a website is to use a website builder . In this case, you will reduce your costs by at least 2-3 times.
Most platforms offer free subscriptions . Thanks to them , you can test key features and understand whether they suit you or not. Since you are creating a dropshipping website , you first need to pay attention to e - commerce functionality, including sales management and product accounting functions , the ability to track product status , connecting payment services , etc.
Weblium's tip : Our hosting plan costs $99 per year . This rate is one of the lowest on the market. It is especially beneficial for newbies in online commerce, as it helps to reduce the costs of starting a business to a minimum.
In addition to the price , start from your goals when choosing a website builder . If you do not plan to sell a lot of goods at the start , the basic e-commerce functionality will be enough for you. These are, first of all, custom product cards and a shopping cart, product status settings (“in stock”, “out of stock”, etc.), the ability to connect a CRM for order processing, payment services and delivery services.
Some platforms offer many additional features, such latvia phone number resource as built-in tools for creating newsletters, promo videos, etc. The presence of these features also increases the cost of using the constructor. But this can be avoided. For example, our platform for creating online stores offers only basic e-commerce functionality. Weblium has everything you need to create a convenient and modern online store for a dropshipping business . The functions you lack can be obtained by connecting additional services. Some of them (for example, Hotjar, MailChimp, Bitrix 24) are already integrated into our platform, others can be connected independently in literally a few minutes.
2. Connecting a domain
A unique domain is a kind of identification mark for a website. Firstly, it will show that your online store is trustworthy. Imagine, for example, that you want to create an online store of dog products. In this case, a domain name like “dogs.com” will be more appropriate and attractive from the buyer’s point of view than something like “mystore.io”.
Secondly, users will remember a laconic and bright domain name faster. And they will find it faster in a search engine if they suddenly lose the link to your online store.
The cost for connecting and maintaining a domain varies from $9 to $15 per year.
Weblium Tip : When you purchase an annual Pro subscription to our website builder, you can connect any domain and use it for free for a year. Weblium users also get free hosting and an SSL certificate. This way, you can reduce your costs when starting a dropshipping business by at least 15-20%.
3. Logo creation
An online store operating on the dropshipping model needs a unique logo just like a unique domain. But its development requires costs, and in some cases, large ones. The final cost depends on many factors, such as the performer's experience, the deadline, the number of edits, uniqueness (whether everything will be created from scratch or whether the logo of an existing brand will be taken as a basis and redesigned to suit the customer's needs).
To minimize your costs for starting a dropshipping business, you can use special services for logo development. Some of them are available for free.
Advice from Weblium : in Russia, the cost of developing a logo varies from a couple of thousand to tens of thousands of rubles. As a rule, beginning designers offer a small fee for their services, but the risk of getting plagiarism in this case is higher.
If you don’t want to take risks and are ready to spend some time, logo design services can really help you. Of the free ones, you can try Free Logo Design or LogoAster. But with their help, you can only create something simple and standard. More professional options are offered by paid platforms, for example, Ucraft and Canva.
