How to Build a Successful Dropshipping Website in 5 Steps

Using the dropshipping business model to start an online business is one of the easiest and risk-free ways to break into the world of ecommerce, but building a dropshipping website can seem overwhelming when you’re just starting out.

A lot of thought needs to go into the process which requires time and effort. It’s not as simple as choosing a font and a colour scheme and listing your products, and customers will be able to tell if you haven’t put much effort into building your website for your dropshipping business.

While at first, it might seem like a lot of work, building a dropshipping website offers many benefits and helps to create lasting customer relationships and increase the growth of your dropshipping business.

Why is your website important for the dropshipping business model?

If you have spent the last few years with a variety of dropshipping business ideas floating around in your head, you’ll want to be sure that you are executing those ideas properly, and that starts with having a great website.

Your website acts as the front cover of your dropshipping business, it represents what your brand is about and offers a solid base for your customers to visit, learn more about your business, and shop your products. 94 per cent of first impressions are made with your website and its design, so your website is extremely important when it comes to the success and profitability of your dropshipping business. Nothing will lose you a sale faster than having an out-of-date website or no website at all.

A website that works well and has a great design can set you apart from the competition, it gives you that professional edge and allows you to solidify yourself as a serious company. You may even find that a professional-looking website attracts new dropshipping suppliers who want their products to be sold on your storefront, allowing you to build new business relationships that will lead to more profits.

Things like digital marketing strategies and advertisements won’t mean anything if customers don’t have a website to visit as the end result, and your website will serve as the home base of your dropshipping business.

Websites are great to show your customers a catalogue of all the items you sell, giving them an easy way to sort through categories and find what they need. You can create links to different trending products on your homepage and advertise promotions to help drive more sales for your dropshipping business. Overall, your website is a never-ending display of information about your products and your own brand, and customers will be more likely to trust that you are reputable and safe to buy from, as 26 per cent of people don’t trust companies without a website, and 45 per cent of small businesses don’t have a website.

Your website offers crucial information for your customers, like shipping times and returns policies. Having a frequently asked questions (FAQs) page helps reduce the number of customer queries you get in your emails or on social media pages, saving you time as you’re not having to reply to the same questions again and again. Providing details about your products and your policies will also help to increase customer satisfaction and improve your sales for your online business.

By creating a dropshipping website, you are not only reducing the risk of losing customers, but also getting a step ahead of a large amount of dropshipping businesses without a website, and there is no better way to create profitability for your online store than getting ahead of your competitors.

5 Steps to building a successful dropshipping website

1. Choose your dropshipping platform

To start a dropshipping business, the first step to get you underway will be building your website and choosing the ecommerce platform you are going to use. This will be the foundation of your website and will determine the subsequent choices you make, but it can be difficult to decide on which platform is right for you and your business goals.

You should look for an ecommerce platform that invests a lot of energy in its back-end technology so you can be assured that there will be minimal issues with the usability of your website.

Determine how much you are willing to spend on your ecommerce website builder, as different platforms have varying prices. You should also do a lot of research about what platform will work best for you. It’s no good simply choosing a platform on a whim, you need to evaluate each one and decide which one best fits your needs. This way, down the track, you won’t regret your decision or discover you should have gone with a different platform and have to start from scratch.

Consider your future business goals and understand your dropshipping business plan, do you want to leave room for expansion? Do you want to have the freedom to try a different dropshipping niche along the way or sell products on an online marketplace as well as on your website? You want to make sure the platform you choose has the capacity to handle a large volume of customers once you start to get more traffic on the website so you can rely on the fact that the website won’t crash, which will result in unhappy customers.

Choose your ecommerce platform based on the reliability of the payment processes they offer, as this will help your customers feel more comfortable shopping with you. Shopping cart abandonment rates sit at 72 per cent in 2023, so your website will need to have a convenient checkout process to bring this percentage down so customers don’t get frustrated with load times or badly designed website features.

List of the best dropshipping platforms

Here are some of the best dropshipping website builders in 2023, they each come with their own pros and cons so it’s important that you research each one to help you choose what will work best for your online store. You can find out more about the best dropshipping platforms and their pricing.

• Shopify

• WooCommerce  

• Wix

• BigCommerce

• Magento

What platform do we suggest using?

Dropshipzone suggests using Shopify as your chosen platform due to its wide range of ecommerce features and high performance rate. Shopify is extremely easy-to-use and has an extensive selection of designs. It also offers 24/7 customer service and allows you to easily integrate your dropshipping products on the website.

2. Choose your domain name for your online business

Now that you’ve chosen the platform to house your dropshipping store, it’s time to choose a domain name to represent your own dropshipping business.

Your domain name should be as close to your business name as possible to avoid confusion, and it’s a bonus if it gives your customers a good idea of what kinds of products you are selling. Think about what your domain name might look like to the customer, what kinds of feelings do you want it to evoke? Don’t worry if your domain name doesn’t immediately come to mind, this step of building a website takes time, and it’s a big decision to make.

Keep your domain short and sweet while ensuring it makes sense to your brand and is easy to remember. You want customers to be able to find your ecommerce store with the least amount of confusion. You should avoid using confusing spelling or slang words, and try to keep the name to 6-14 characters in length so customers can read it quickly and easily. Check how your business name looks with no spaces and check if the name makes sense when you read it with the words side by side. If it doesn’t make sense, think about using an acronym instead.

You should avoid including things like hyphens and numbers, as well as putting two of the same letters next to each other, as these are all things that might make your online store look unprofessional and untrustworthy. 78 per cent of business owners use .com for their online store, and it is the default for customers to automatically type this when looking for a website.

Another tip for choosing your domain name is to include search engine optimisation (SEO) keywords to make it more likely to come up as one of the top hits on search engines like Google. For example, using a keyword like tea if you are a tea company and combining it with your brand name may prove beneficial.

Once you’ve chosen your domain name, you need to check to see if it has already been used by another business or not. Google Domains is a great tool to see if the domain you have chosen is available. Make sure you also look around the internet in other places to see if the domain name you have chosen has been used anywhere else, like on social media or Google.

3. Create a page layout for your dropshipping website

Your page layout is where you get to express yourself creatively and represent your online store in a fun way so that potential customers are drawn in to buy your products. You can research your competitor’s websites to get a feel for what the market looks like and figure out what works and what doesn’t in terms of accessibility and design.

Dropshipping businesses can gain a great reputation simply from having an appealing website page layout as 75 per cent of website credibility comes from design. Customers are more likely to immediately trust that you are a credible dropshipping store with a creative and clean page layout.

The most important thing to remember is to keep your design simple, you don’t want your page layout to feel overwhelming to the customer. Instead, you want to focus on your products and keep the excessive words and images to a minimum. To figure out what works best, view your website from the eyes of your consumers, and not from someone who has a great understanding of what your brand represents. Is your page layout easy to understand and navigate? Can it be used across not only laptops and computers but also mobile devices? 45 per cent of users expect content to be able to be displayed correctly over different devices, so this step is important.

Your homepage will be what your customers first see when they visit your online store, and it will be what eventually entices them into buying your products. Think about what you want to be the main feature of each page layout, or what you want the customer to notice first. It takes 2.6 seconds for a customer to settle on a key area of your website, and if they can’t find something enticing to focus on in that amount of time they are likely to leave your website. You can feature things like a banner of changing images and promotions on the home page to encourage clicks that take customers to different product pages.

4. Import product information to your website

Once you’ve decided on your page layouts for your website, it’s time to import the products you want to sell into your dropshipping store. You’ll hopefully have already chosen a product niche and chosen a dropshipping supplier you want to work with, so you just have to decide on the specific dropshipping products you want to list on your own online store and make sure everything is in working order.

You should ensure that you have done extensive product research and that each item you have chosen has been proven to do well in the market and start looking for dropshipping apps and plug-ins that can integrate with your chosen ecommerce platform. Sofortig is an app exclusively developed by Dropshipzone to allow you to easily import items from the Dropshipzone catalogue of Australian dropshipping suppliers to start selling products on your online store. You can make use of detailed product descriptions and high-quality images and search products using your chosen keywords to save you valuable time.

Conducting market research on trending products and relevant keywords will make your products and your dropshipping store more likely to come up in Google searches. You should ensure that you’re using the right keywords for your products so customers can easily search for them within your website, otherwise your products are likely to stay hidden.

Your products should each include descriptions of what the product does but be kept to 250-300 words. Make sure you include the key features to showcase the product quality of your items and that the descriptions are easy to read. Including high-quality images for each item is a must, as 75 per cent of shoppers rely on product photos when deciding on a purchase.

5. Market your dropshipping store online

Now that your dropshipping business has a working website, you can begin to use marketing strategies to increase brand awareness and increase your sales. To make sure your marketing campaigns are effective, you need to understand what your target audience wants to see and what they respond to.

Email marketing

Digital marketing is becoming the preferred way for online businesses to market their brand and products as it is inexpensive and has the potential to reach more audiences. Email marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies as 58 per centof people check their emails before doing anything else online. You can use email marketing to let people know about promotions, provide links to blogs or social media posts, and even remind shoppers when they have left something in their cart to reduce the rate of abandoned carts.

Social media marketing

78 per cent of retailers that use social media marketing perform better than their competitors, and this marketing strategy can connect you to more customers with minimal costs. Posting regularly on your social media platforms is a great way to build customer relationships and allow consumers to stay up to date with your latest products and promotions.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO strategies should be one of the main focuses for your dropshipping business, as this will be vital to your brand visibility online. Creating content like blogs and videos are great ways to include SEO tactics, and the higher ranked your content is on Google the more likely shoppers are to click on your website as the top result in Google is shown to get 34 per cent organic traffic.

Summary

Now that you have built your website and customers are aware of your products and brand, your dropshipping supplier can ship those items directly to the end consumer and you can watch your online business grow. If you’re making the right marketing decisions, dropshipping can become an extremely profitable business model for you.

To make the dropshipping business model work for your online store, you need a visually pleasing website that works well, reliable dropshipping suppliers to offer great shipping times and quality products, and effective marketing campaigns.

If you want to create lasting success as a dropshipping business, sign up with Dropshipzone today to join Australia’s leading B2B2C marketplace.