Have you ever thought of dropshipping hair extensions? Are you wondering is it profitable? What is the catch?
In this post, we’ll try to answer all the questions you might have in mind. We’ll also show you tips and resources to start selling hair extensions without inventory as successfully as possible.
Why Dropship Hair Extensions? Is The Hair Extension Niche Any Good?
According to research, the global market size for hair wigs and extensions was valued at $5.96 billion in 2017. By 2023, it is expected to reach $10 billion, growing at a CAGR of 9%. This rise is largely attributed to the increase in hair loss rates, the growing popularity of personal beauty products, and the escalating awareness of harmful hair chemicals. Hence, hair wigs and extensions make an ever-green and profitable dropshipping niche.
To be more specific, studies show that 40% of people are suffering from visible hair loss at the age of 35 to 40. By the age of 60, this percentage jumps to over 65%. What is more, 47% of hair loss sufferers are willing to spend their life savings to regain a full head of hair.
Regarding the personal beauty industry, hair products make up the second-largest category (behind skincare), accounting for 21% of the entire shared revenue.
In 2020, the online eCommerce & dropshipping sale of hair wigs and extensions accounted for 63% of the global market.
34% of women also admit that they regularly use hair extensions as a part of their beauty regime. Meanwhile, 76% say that wearing hair extensions adds value to their look.
Additionally, as COVID-19 makes it harder for people to go out to have their hair done, the interest in buying hair wigs and extensions increases.
One more noteworthy statistic is that the search volume for the keyword “hair extensions” is consistently at 165,000/month for the US alone, which further proves the high demand for this dropshipping niche.
How Much Money Can You Make Dropshipping Hair Extensions?
Now, it comes to the most important question you need to ask before jumping into dropshipping hair extensions: “How much money can I make?”
To answer this question, let’s first look at a case study from Luxy Hair – a wildly successful hair extension eCommerce & dropshipping business.
According to the owners, they make seven-figure annually with organic traffic from their YouTube channel alone, which was created in 2010 and now has over 3 million subscribers. Products are carefully sourced from Alibaba and other high-quality suppliers.
Second, let’s look at some concrete numbers.
The average retail hair extension order is around $195, and the general ROI (Return On Investment) is about 50% and 100%. It means that for every sale, you can make anywhere between $65 and $97.5 in net profit.
Suppose you get 100,000 visitors/month to your store and a conversion rate of 1%. Your monthly profit would be 100,000 * 1% * [$65 and $97.5] = [$65,000 and $97,500]. Thus, you could make $780,000-$1,170,000/year.
As you can see, it’s entirely possible to make millions dropshipping in the hair extension niche.
Advantages And Disadvantages Of Dropshipping Hair Extensions
Below are the benefits of selling hair extensions:
- Highly Profitable: As dissected in this post, the hair extension niche has a big market size and a great profit margin.
- Easy To Promote: From Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, to TikTok, all have huge and active audiences for the niche. Furthermore, there are many different ad interests related to hair extensions you can target for your ad campaigns.
- Upselling & Cross-selling Potential: When selling hair extensions, it’s effortless to upsell and cross-sell other types of hair products such as scrunchies, hair clips, hair brushes, etc.
And, here are drawbacks of this dropshipping niche:
- Super Competitive: Where there’s money, there’s competition.
- High Return Rates: Suppose customers buy synthetic hair extensions that don’t look good together with their hair colors. They’re very likely to return the products.
- Troubles With Payment Processors: Because of the high return rates and vulnerability to fraud, hair extensions are considered high-risk by many payment services.
- Troubles With Customer Service: If you don’t have much knowledge about this niche, you would have a tough time responding to your customer inquiries.
How To Start Dropshipping Hair Extensions & Wigs Successfully
Below are the 9 tips and resources to help you start dropshipping hair extensions profitably.
1. Best ECommerce Platform For Dropshipping Hair Extensions
We’ll recommend using Shopify for hair extension dropshipping. The reason is that the platform is easy to use, fast to set up, stable, and effortless to scale up. On top of that, Shopify provides you with 100+ themes to create a unique store and 4200+ apps that support dropshipping hair extensions and various other tasks.
You can also check out this article on the complete guide to start dropshipping with Shopify for more information.
2. Best Themes For Hair Extension Dropshipping
As we have mentioned, Shopify has a lot of themes. However, we think these 3 themes are the greatest for showcasing your hair extension products.
Minimal
As the name suggests, the Minimal theme gears towards a simple and clean design that keeps the focus on products. This is perfect for stores in the beauty niche in general and hair extensions in particular.
You also won’t need to worry if you intend to sell many different items. Minimal supports large product catalogs and has built-in product filtering and product recommendations.
At the time of writing, the theme receives 82% positive reviews and is completely free to use.
Modular
Modular showcases your products delightfully in a grid-style layout. Additionally, it supports continuous product scroll, which helps improve the discoverability of all of your products by allowing customers to scroll infinitely between product pages.
As of now, Modular costs $180.00 and has 97% positive reviews.
Envy
Envy is another great theme for dropshipping hair extensions. With an elegant built-in marketing popup and promotional bar, you can easily share updates on the latest products with your customers.
Furthermore, this theme provides you with a unique feature called image hot-spot linking. It allows you to tag specific items on your store image for in-context product discovery.
Envy currently receives 92% positive reviews and costs $180.00.
3. Store Design Tips For Hair Extension Dropshipping
Design components like color, typography, and graphics can greatly impact customer emotion and sometimes even alter their perception of your store.
Color
Different colors mean different things and have different effects on the human brain. For example, you will often see food companies use green because it denotes growth and nature. Whereas brands like Netflix or Coca-Cola use red as it stands for passion and excitement.
In the case of a beauty store selling hair extensions, it’s best to use black and white to evoke cleanliness, sophistication, modernity, and luxuriousness. Pink is also a great choice if your audience is female only.
Typography
Typography is the next design element you should pay attention to. Similar to color, each type of font is suitable for a specific kind of business.
For the hair extension niche, you can use display fonts like Lobster or Playball for logo and heading text because of their decorative nature. With body text, sans-serif fonts such as Open Sans, Montserrat, or Raleway are great choices since they’re easy on the eyes but still keep a modern and luxurious looking.
Graphics
Unlike household items, whose functions and benefits are all that matter, beauty products get examined closely by customers. Therefore, your store images should look very sharp and clear.
It’s also important to use lots of photos featuring real people to help customers imagine how they would look using your products.
4. Facebook Ad Target Audience For Hair Extensions
Facebook is the biggest social media network on the internet. With more than 2.74 billion monthly active users, it becomes the destination for over 200 million active businesses of all sizes and shapes to connect with customers.
Dropshippers also choose Facebook Advertising as the number one platform to promote their products. The reason is that it’s simple to use, powerful, and tailored to various needs. On top of that, Facebook Advertising can automatically find all people with specified characteristics and scale with business goals on autopilot.
In fact, for the beauty niche, the average conversion rate for Facebook ads can be as high as 7.10%.
When setting up a Facebook ad campaign for your hair extension dropshipping store, audience targeting is one of the most important elements. Picking the wrong audience makes it hard for Facebook to find the right customers for your products. Choosing the same audience as competitors in your niche lowers your conversion rates as customers have alternative options.
Understanding the problems, we’ll present you with some tips for better hair extension audience targeting.
Locations
As you might have expected, countries in North America, including the US, Canada, and Mexico, dominate the hair extension market, accounting for 40% of the global share. Following is Asia-Pacific (Japan, Indian, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand) with around 30%. European countries like Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the UK take up the next 10%.
When you’re just getting started, you can create an ad campaign targeting all locations listed above. Then, run it for a few days to let Facebook figure out the best countries for your dropshipping product. After that, you can create an additional campaign targeting specifically those countries to compare the performance between the two.
Age, Gender, and Languages
As we have mentioned earlier, people over 35 suffer from hair loss. Hence, it’s understandable that they make up the largest market share. Statistically, consumers between 35 and 45 are the most significant contributors. Next comes 45-54 and 54+, which are nearly equal with each other at around 22%-23%. Teenagers under the age of 25 use hair extensions mainly for functional purposes, such as coloring, styling, or lengthening.
Overall, regardless of age groups, there’s a demand for hair wigs and extensions. Therefore, we recommend selecting 18 and 65+ for the age section of your Facebook ad campaign and let the algorithm do its job.
Regarding genders, it depends on your products to decide which half to target. But, a valuable insight is that women still hold the majority share despite the market segmentation into females and males.
For languages, choose one depending on your store language. For instance, if your store is in English only, choose English (All).
Interests
The first target interest that comes to anyone’s mind is obviously Hair Extensions, which has a fairly broad audience size of around 5,516,593. However, it’s the most competitive, as nearly every advertiser in your niche will target it. We recommend that you go for a more specific one, such as Human Hair Extensions and Halo Hair Extensions, which have audience sizes of 3,273,379 and 154,640, respectively.
Other recommended interests are Hair & Beauty (2,981,720), Hair Tutorials (2,658,746), Hair & Make Up (959,300), Fashion Hair (166,810).
Options like Top Hair (393,320), Short Hair (122,630), and Blue Hair (80,940) are great for products with similar characteristics. For example, Top Hair is only a good interest when promoting toupees.
If you want to try your luck with broader interest targeting, we recommend Long Hair (37,054,626), Natural Hair (7,860,085), or Management Of Hair Loss (7,175,010).
Remember to exclude Dropshipping from your ad campaigns to reduce the possibility of being spied on by other dropshippers.
You can also check out The Facebook Hidden Interest Finder tool for more hair extension targeting options.
5. Leveraging Instagram Influencers For Hair Extensions
Another way to promote your products is through Instagram influencers.
According to Statista, Instagram is the fifth-most visited social media site, serving over 500 million daily active users and 1 billion monthly active users. 70% of shopping enthusiasts turn to Instagram for product discovery.
In terms of Instagram influencers, there are 500,000 active influencers on the platform, accounting for a marketing spending of $8.08 billion. Researchers also show that user-generated content from influencers results in a 4.5% higher conversion rate than paid advertisements.
Nowadays, more than 96% of beauty brands are on Instagram, and at least 10 million posts are about hair extensions specifically. 65% of teens discover and buy beauty products through social media and influencers.
To start finding Instagram influencers for your hair extensions dropshipping business, just go to Influence.co and type in “Hair Extension” or “Hair And Make Up” in the category field. You can also choose a specific location, total reach, number of followers, or engagement rate if you want to. Note that you might have to create a free account first before being able to see the search results.
Then, depending on your budget, you can contact each of them for a promotional post for your hair extension products.
For instance, BeautyByTtee has 78.3k followers with a good engagement rate of 2.2%. She charges $300 for a post. Suppose 1% of the engaging audience buys your products, and you make a profit of $50/sale. Your total gross profit would be 78,300 * 2.2% * 1% * $50 = $858. Subtract the influencer fee, and you make a net profit of $558.
The second method is to go directly to Instagram and use hashtags like “#hairextensions” or “#hairtutorial.” It would take more work this way, but you have more options to choose from.
6. Building A Pinterest Profile For Your Hair Extension Store
Besides Facebook and Instagram, Pinterest is the next big social networking site to grow your hair extension dropshipping business.
Currently, the platform has over 459 million monthly active users. Among them, 77.1% are females, and 34% earn between $50,000 to $74,999 per year, making it perfect for promoting hair extensions.
If you’re still not convinced, here are some more stats. Hair & Beauty is the 6th-largest category on Pinterest, accounting for 48% of all users. Additionally, 90% of weekly Pinners make purchase decisions on Pinterest.
To start growing your Pinterest profile, you first need to switch your Pinterest account to a business one. This will allow you to access all of the advanced tools Pinterest offers.
Then, fill in all of the information fields in your Pinterest profile, especially your username, display name, and description. Remember to include some keywords, such as “Clip-in extensions,” “Halo Extensions,” “Ponytails,” or “Hair Tools.” Pinterest will look at them as an SEO factor to show your Pins to relevant audiences.
The next step is to claim your website so that Pinterest can give credit to your content properly.
Next is to create Pinterest boards. They are where you save and organize your Pins. Many successful Pinterest brands suggest that your account should have at least 15-20 boards.
Another important thing you should do is to install Rich Pins. This feature will allow you to show additional information about your dropshipping store right on your Pins, giving Pinners a richer experience and increasing engagement.
Finally, create great Pinterest Pins and use a tool like Tailwind to help schedule and publish them automatically at the optimal time frames. There’s no defined number as to how many Pins to post a day. However, we recommend you aim for 15 to 25.
7. Using YouTube To Promote Hair Extension Products
Similar to Luxy Hair, you can take advantage of YouTube to drive traffic to your dropshipping store.
As shown by Statista, YouTube is the second-most popular social networks worldwide, reaching over 2 billion logged-in users. Concerning purchasing behaviors, 70% of viewers bought from a brand after seeing it on YouTube.
In terms of hair extensions, this dropshipping niche gets searched at least 200,000 times/month on the platform. This number is very high given the fact that more than 70% of what people watch on YouTube is determined by its recommendation algorithm, not by manual search.
Besides producing in-house content, you can curate TikTok clips into a long video and publish it to YouTube. Channels such as Giftie Muenda and BeautySlay achieve huge success this way.
You can also check out 13 ways to make money on YouTube without making videos for additional quick and creative content creation methods.
8. SEO Keyword Ideas To Rank Your Hair Extension Store
SEO is a crucial element for the success of eCommerce. According to SearchEngineLand, organic search drives 51% of website traffic. Researchers also show that it captures more than 40% of companies’ revenue.
What is more, 81% of customers do online research before making a large purchase. Plus, 69% of mobile device users state that they are more likely to buy from a website that addresses their queries.
In the beginning, you shouldn’t aim to rank your dropshipping store for the keyword “Hair extensions” as it’s very competitive with an SEO difficulty of 66, as calculated by Ubersuggest.
Instead, try writing blog posts to rank for more specific topics with an SEO difficulty of less than or equal to 30. We recommend Hair Extension For Thin Hair (2900 searches/month in the US – 24 SEO difficulty), Hair Extensions USA (140 – 29), or Hair Extensions Training (110 – 29).
You can also go for question keywords like How Long Does Hair Extension Last (2400 – 29), How To Style Hair Extensions (1600 – 20), How To Put Clips In Hair Extensions (1300 – 25), How Long Does Tape Hair Extensions Last (590 – 28) or Does Hair Extensions Damage Hair (320 – 16).
9. Tips To Expand Your Hair Extension Dropshipping Business
Apart from hair extensions, you can easily expand your dropshipping business by selling other related items and accessories, including hair extension carriers, hair clips, hair ties, scrunchies, hair brushes, headbands, hair rollers, and hair curling tools. They also work amazingly as gifts to boost conversion rates or cross-selling offers to increase customers’ order value.
8 Best Hair Extension Dropshipping & Wholesale Suppliers
Below are the 8 best hair extension & wig suppliers for dropshipping and wholesaling.
1. AliExpress – Best For Beginner Dropshippers
Founded in 2010, AliExpress is an online eCommerce giant owned by Alibaba Group. The platform provides 100+ million products from 200,000+ sellers in pretty much any category at low prices. Additionally, it accepts 20+ payment methods and delivers products to 200+ countries.
Because of those reasons, many dropshippers use AliExpress as a starting point to find winning dropshipping products for their business. Once having great results with a specific product, they would find an agent or private suppliers to source products at a large scale.
On this platform, you will find hundreds of good hair extension products at a price of only $8-$10.
Oberlo, DSers, and Topdser are the best Shopify apps to import AliExpress products to your store and start selling.
2. CJDropshipping – Best For Sourcing Hair Extension Products
Established in 2014, CJDropshipping is the best dropshipping service to help you source any AliExpress products. Providing a team of 1,114 professionals and 200+ warehouses worldwide from China, the USA, Germany to Britain, Australia, and France, CJDropshipping makes it easy for you to scale your dropshipping business without worrying about running out of stocks or long shipping times.
The platform also offers hair extension products at wholesale prices, helping you make even bigger profits. Additionally, it allows you to brand your dropshipping store by shipping your products with custom packaging.
To import CJDropshipping products to your store, you can use the official CJDropshipping app.
3. Modalyst – Largest Dropshipping Platform On The Internet
Modalyst is an inventory of 1000+ dropshipping suppliers, featuring 10+ million products in 3,000+ categories. Currently, the platform caters to 350,000+ online businesses and has reached 50+ million shoppers around the world.
On Modalyst, you can find hair extensions at a wide variety of prices, from $1-$2 to even $400.
Similarly, you can start selling Modalyst products using the official Modalyst app.
4. Spocket – Best To Find Top US/UK Dropshipping Suppliers
With Spocket, you’re able to discover high-quality dropshipping products from quick and reliable US/UK dropshipping suppliers.
Hair extensions on this platform are also priced reasonably, ranging from $8 to $122.
Regarding how to dropship from Spocket, you can use the Spocket app.
5. Syncee – Best To Find Hair Extensions At B2B Wholesale Prices
Syncee is a technology partner of Alibaba, offering dropshipping products at B2B wholesale prices in 40+ different categories. The best part is there’s no minimum order requirement, meaning that you can safely start real Alibaba dropshipping with no risk and no upfront investment.
Apart from Alibaba, Syncee also helps you connect with suppliers from the US, EU, AU, and other local retailers for fast shipping.
In order to start dropshipping from this platform, you need to use the official Syncee app.
6. Automizely Dropshipping – Fast And Free Shipping Suppliers To The US
Next, we have Automizely. The platform provides winning products with 3-10 day trackable free shipping to the US. Here, you can find numerous types of hair extensions anywhere between $6.99 and $13.74.
The platform also has its own Automizely Dropshipping app on Shopify.
7. Wiio – Best For Product Warehousing In China
Wiio is another great place to search for quality hair extensions, pricing from $1.55 to $40.45.
Founded in 2015, the company now has over 150 members ready to cater to you in every phase of your business.
The strength of Wiio lies in the ability to help you easily find the right suppliers that best fit your budget. Then, it sources and warehouses your products in China and another 25,000 m^2 US repository.
Speaking of importing Wiio products to your store, you can use the official Wiio app.
8. Private Label Extensions – Number One Quality Hair Extension Supplier
The final supplier we would like to introduce is Private Label Extensions. This is also the only platform on the list made explicitly for dropshipping hair products.
Although the cost of goods from this supplier is a little bit expensive (from $22.00 to $395.00), it has very high product quality.
Besides hair products, you also have access to other beauty items such as eyelashes, lipsticks, and edge control.
To start importing products from Private Label Extensions, you need to install the Dropship Beauty app.
10 Best Hair Extension Dropshipping Product Ideas
Before going into different types of hair extensions as well as their benefits and drawbacks, let’s talk about 2 main hair extension materials: real and synthetic.
Real hair extensions, as the name suggested, are products made from real human hair. They look natural and last for more than one year. On the other hand, synthetic hair extensions are made from synthetic fibers, which are cheaper but last for only a few months.
It totally depends on you to choose which one to start dropshipping. However, we recommend testing both to compare their performance.
Now, let’s go through 10 hair extension dropshipping product ideas.
1. Halo Hair Extensions
We put halo hair extensions in the first spot as they’re among the easiest types of hair extensions people can put on. They also cause little to no damage to human hair. That’s why people love them.
One downside of halo hair extensions is that since they attach to the head with a thin invisible wire, they aren’t suitable for strong activities. Furthermore, there’re not many styles people can do with halo hair extensions.
2. Clip-in Wefts
Clip-in wefts attach to human hair using small hair clips. They’re relatively beginner-friendly. However, it can take about 10-20 minutes to put them on. They also can cause hair loss and hair thinning due to the force from clips.
One advantage of clip-in wefts over halo hair extensions is that people can do almost any hairstyle with them.
3. Clip-in Bangs
The next ones you should consider dropshipping are clip-in bangs. They’re a type of clip-in wefts, but we want to separate them out due to the very high demand for these products.
4. Wrap-Around Ponytails
Wrap-around ponytails are also a type of clip-ins which many people want to buy.
5. Hair Wigs
Hair wigs act as a complete replacement for a person’s hair, covering his/her entire head. They are often used for hair loss, balding, changing hair look, or cosplaying.
6. Toupees
Toupees are hair wigs for men. Although the market is not as big as women’s, they are worth having a try.
7. Tape-In Hair Extensions
Next, let’s go through more technical types of hair extensions that might only be suitable to dropship for audiences like hairdressers or hairstylists. However, you should also try promoting them to regular audiences to see how things turn out.
First are tape-in hair extensions. They are attached to people’s hair using tapes, which usually take about 40 minutes to apply. The glue from tapes can dry hair fibers, causing hair breakage and hair thinning over time.
The benefit of tape-ins over the aforementioned hair extensions is that people can wear them for strong activities.
8. Hair Weaves
Weaves take several hours to apply, using a needle and thread to sew them into the braid or cornrow. Compared to tape-in hair extensions, weaves last much longer (up to 4 months before having to remove them to avoid affecting natural hair growth).
9. Fusion Hair Extensions
Fusion hair extensions are fused to people’s hair using glue. They’re less clunky than hair weaves but can cause serious damage to natural hair.
10. Microlink Hair Extensions
Finally, we have microlink hair extensions, which are applied using small silicone-lined beads. They take around 2-4 hours to put on.
3 Best Hair Extension & Wig Stores To Spy On And Get Inspiration
If you get stuck designing your dropshipping store, below are the best hair extension brands to spy on and get inspiration.
1. Luxy Hair
As we have mentioned a lot in this post, Luxy Hair is one of the best dropshipping stores in the hair extension niche. With a wide variety of great hair collections, clear images, high-quality blog posts, and clean store design, this is a brand that you must follow closely and learn its strategies if you want to become as successful.
On the checkout page, you will see Luxy Hair allows customers to choose a free gift for their purchase. And, below that, the store displays a cross-selling product. This is a brilliant sales-boosting technique as customers are in the state of being surprised by the generous present, making them more likely to accept the additional offer.
Besides YouTube, Luxy Hair currently receives 329,035 likes on Facebook, 10+ million monthly Pinterest views, and 612k Instagram followers.
2. BELLAMI
Next, we have BELLAMI. The store focuses on using Instagram influencers to boost its exposure and brand awareness. It now has 1.7 million followers on Instagram, 171,141 likes on Facebook, 10+ million monthly views on Pinterest, and 13,9K followers on TikTok.
3. Zala Hair
The final one is Zala Hair. The brand has quite a wide variety of hair extension dropshipping products to get inspiration from. However, we don’t recommend following its store design as it looks very confusing and clustering.
Regarding social media presence, Zala Hair has 117,796 Facebook likes, 213K Instagram followers, and 5.9 million monthly Pinterest views.
Conclusion
With an enormous global market size and huge audiences across social media networking sites, hair extensions & wigs definitely make one of the most profitable dropshipping niches to start dropshipping.
Speaking of suppliers, AliExpress, CJDropshipping, Modalyst, Spocket, Syncee, Automizely, Wiio, and Private Label Extensions are great places to find high-quality and cheap hair extension products.
And finally, running Facebook ads, using Instagram influencers, building a Pinterest profile, and creating a YouTube channel are great methods to promote your dropshipping store successfully.
The rightful owner of The Clever Business. I review & curate the leading suppliers so you don't waste time scouring the internet.
