If you’re looking for a way to make money online, you’ve probably heard of dropshipping. Dropshipping is a modern online business model that hardly requires any start-up capital. But how long does it take until your new dropshipping online store is ready and you can accept your first orders?
Looking for a quick answer to the question?
It always depends on how much experience you have with the topic of store creation. If you have a lot of experience in creating and designing an online shop or outsource the work to an experienced external service provider or web designer, who should create the dropshipping store for you, the creation of a professional dropshipping store takes about 14 days. If you want to create the dropshipping store yourself and don’t have that much experience in online store creation, it can take 30 – 60 days to create the dropshipping store.
What is dropshipping exactly?
Dropshipping is a method of online commerce in which a store does not stock the products it sells.
Instead, when an order is received by a dropshipping retailer, they send their customer’s order details directly to the supplier who stores the goods. The supplier then ships the product directly to the customer and receives the purchase price for the item shipped from the retailer. This means that the dropshipping dealer does not have to buy his goods from a wholesaler in advance in order to be able to sell them in his shop.
So, the biggest difference between dropshipping and traditional online retailing is that the retailer doesn’t keep inventory in stock. Instead, the retailer sells a third party’s products, usually those from a wholesaler or manufacturer.
Dropshipping is suitable for budding entrepreneurs without a lot of seed capital as it does not require high investments like the traditional online retail model.
The dropshipping merchant is primarily responsible for customer acquisition and fulfillment of orders when it comes to dropshipping, which means that you are effectively a middleman.
You should keep this in mind when creating a dropshipping store
We would like to clarify the main time factors that must be taken into account when planning the development of an online shop with the following list:
Preparation
Good preparation is everything! The better and more detailed the preparatory cooperation with your service provider is, the more time you save for the actual development. A clear picture of the online shop to be created should be defined in advance. In this way, later time wasters such as misunderstandings and annoying corrections are already enormously reduced in the preparation phase if you want to outsource the creation of your online shop.
Product and shop design
Depending on the product range, the online shop must meet certain requirements. For example, should products be sold that the buyer can adapt individually in a design mode, or are mainly standard products offered? In this context, the design of the shop plays a decisive role. Especially if there is no corporate CI yet because such development takes a lot of time.
Target the right market
If the online shop is to serve the international market, criteria such as shop multilingualism or international payment methods are essential. However, if the products are only sold regionally or nationally, other aspects are of course important, which can have both positive and negative effects on the development time of the shop system.
Interface development
Measured against the requirements that a shop should meet, corresponding interfaces between the merchandise management system, logistics, the online shop, or additional marketplaces must be generated and ensured. Although interfaces of this type are quite time-consuming to develop, they save a great deal of time during operation, since duplicate administrative efforts for sales and warehousing are avoided. The same applies to interfaces to payment providers such as PayPal or Klarna, even if existing solutions can often be used here.
Marketing measures
In the best case, the customer already knows the products or brands of the online shop and visits them on their own. If this is not the case, more effort and time must be invested in marketing and appropriate marketing tools should be integrated into the shop. Either way, the time spent on the marketing tools is always worth it in order to permanently bind the customer to your shop.
Shop system solution
Shop systems such as WooCommerce or Shopify offer many ready-made tools that significantly reduce the time required to create an online shop. If, on the other hand, you rely on a complete individual development, the expenses increase and the implementation takes longer.
What takes the longest time to create a dropshipping store?
Here I would like to show you the different steps you need to start a successful dropshipping store and how long each step takes.
Also, note that these times are only a rough estimate. It can of course be that you need much longer for one step and another step is done much faster. Of course, this always depends on your experience or the special niche in which you want to start your shop.
Research
Which products should you sell or in which niche is it worth opening your own dropshipping store? You should take your time researching the right niche and the right products. You should also think about which shop software you want to use beforehand.
Probably the most popular CMS systems for creating a dropshipping store are Shopify and WooCommerce.
You should plan at least 7 days for the detailed research.
Building the shop
No matter which shop system you use. Creating the shop is probably what takes the longest. It always depends on the complexity of the shop and the design.
If you have experience in developing and designing eCommerce shops, you probably won’t need that long. Or even if you hire a professional to design your new dropshipping store, it won’t take that long either.
However, if you are new to web design and you need to try everything to find the right way, it may take a little longer.
I would estimate that it takes a professional web designer around 10-14 days to create a dropshipping online store.
Import the products
Importing the products may also take some time. It also always depends on how many products you want to import, how many categories your online shop has and whether you have to write the product descriptions yourself or whether you want or can use the product descriptions and product images from your dropshipping supplier.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to estimate the time for importing the products, as this depends on many different factors.
Marketing
The marketing of your new dropshipping store is probably the most important thing to make customers aware of your online shop and to generate traffic to your online shop.
You have to keep in mind that new websites or online shops have a low chance of being displayed in the organic search results. The shop must first build trust in Google and other search engines.
Therefore, it is very important that you come up with a good marketing strategy. For example, you can use social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, or Instagram to market your products.
But you can also place ads to get visitors to your new online shop.
Design adjustments
No matter how good the web designer is, there are always things you want to change or adjust afterwards. Therefore, plan additional time for adjustments or changes.
It can happen, for example, that you don’t like the button color, or that pictures have to be exchanged, or that entire page layouts have to be changed.
A professional web developer can of course help you with this. So always calculate a little more time and budget.
Conclusion
If you want to build a professional dropshipping online store, you should always keep in mind that it takes time to develop and design a shop.
Whether you create your new dropshipping store yourself or have it created by a professional. Good web design takes time!
Therefore, you should not put yourself or your web designer under pressure.
If you are planning an online shop, you should plan at least 14 days for the development of your online shop.