Commerce is rapidly shifting to the Internet nowadays, because it is a vast territory that
allows you to find sellers and buyers worldwide and make orders at any time. Maybe
you even have already created your own e-commerce site on Drupal.
Dropshipping is a popular way to sell online, which requires no initial investment in materials, tools and labor needed for manufacturing, or even in buying from manufacturer or wholesaler. Dropshippers don’t even see the products and don’t need a place to keep them in stock. The drop shipping online store owners only collect customers’ orders and payments and then transfer them to the supplier, who then ships ordered goods directly to the customer. It looks easy and not risky, right? So, if you have decided to start dropshipping and decided on your niche market and supplier, then you are ready to start creating your dropshipping online store.
Steps for creating your dropshipping website
Choose a dropshipping platform
At first you have to choose a platform to build your site on it. Since Drupal is open source, Drupal-based platforms are free, and thus economically advantageous for you. Ubercart and Drupal Commerce are the most popular of these, and have pre-releases for the latest 8th version of Drupal.
Ubercart has everything you need to start dropshipping online. For example, it allows you to easily create lots of similar items through special settings for each product class. Customer accounts are automatically generated based on the e-mail address. Activity logging allows you to monitor all the changes made to an order. Designed to be continually enhanced, Ubercart is very flexible and open to new progressive solutions.
Drupal Commerce is a great platform, allowing you to build not only a site of any scale, but an application too. It is flexible and extensible. Consisting of modules, it can be easily configured to meet your growing needs. It can also be integrated with third-party systems including payment systems. Drupal Commerce 2.x is now available, which can only be installed via Composer and you need Drupal 8.3.0 or newer. This means it is actively maintained and its updates are aimed to modernize your web resource, improve user experience and increase sales.
Choose a theme
A theme is the first thing visitors notice. Try to make it both pleasant to look at and convenient to navigate, in order to attract users and make them stay longer on your online store.
Drupal offers a variety of contributed themes that are free to install, easy to customize, responsive and mobile-friendly. Check our collection of great Drupal themes 2016. You can also create a subtheme or totally new custom theme if you wish, but there are plenty of free, ready-made Drupal themes to select from.
Create must-have pages
Product pages are the main constituent part of any online sales website and your drop shipping site isn’t an exception, because products are the main reason why the visitors will come to your site. If you want users to make orders and complete purchases, try to make your product pages catchy, interesting, memorable, beautiful and informative. These pages must include prices, characteristics and image representations of goods.
Use relevant photos of high quality. By the way, you can also use Field image tooltips Drupal module. It allows you to add big images of several products with tooltips on them. Clicking on a tooltip will open a modal window with detailed information about a selected item.
The description of items may be given to you from your supplier. Use them while copywriting, but don’t copy and paste them. If you want to stand out from your competitors and be highly ranked by search engines, then don’t forget about the value of unique content.
The other types of content to fill your dropshipping store could include: product reviews, showcases, tutorials, how-tos, forums, polls etc. Select them according to your content marketing strategy.
Create must-have features
Build a shopping cart to allow users choose and review goods while making their buying decision. You, as a dropshipper, will have to collect not only orders, but also payments from your customers to then send them all to your supplier. Thus, your dropshipping site should give users the opportunity to pay online and, usually, the opportunity to choose how to pay. Since Drupal is a very flexible CMF, it can be easily integrated with many payment systems. Since Drupal is mobile-friendly, it can be integrated with mobile payment systems to let your customers pay from their mobile devices. One more mobile first solution is responsive design, which can help your site be highly ranked on mobile search in order to be SEO-friendly. Going mobile with Drupal is easy.