Is Shopify Good & Profitable For Dropshipping?

There’re many good online store builders to help you create a dropshipping store. But, from our own experiences using all of them, Shopify is still the best option to make money dropshipping in a profitable and successful way.

Why is that?

All will be answered in this post.

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Is Shopify Dropshipping Legit?

Shopify dropshipping is 100% legit. It’s currently being employed by established brands, such as GymShark or FashionNova. Global eCommerce & dropshipping marketplaces like Alibaba, DHgate, or Banggood also support integration with Shopify out of the box.

How Profitable Is Shopify Dropshipping?

Shopify dropshipping is definitely not dead and still very profitable. For instance, Alexader and Andreas – owners of an online pet store – make $11M in less than 3 years of dropshipping on Shopify, as stated in their interview with CJDropshipping.

Another example is from Adam Greenspan – the owner of Wallplate Warehouse. This Shopify dropshipping store has been around for more than 16 years and generates $102,000 in sales every month.

For further proof as well as inspiration, you can have a look at 8 dropshipping millionaire success stories.

Shopify dropshipping Facts & Statistics

If you’re still not convinced Shopify is a good platform for dropshipping, here’re some eye-opening facts & statistics.

In 2017, Shopify bought the dropshipping service Oberlo for $15M. At the time, Oberlo had helped merchants sell over 85 million products. This acquisition allowed Shopify to hold a competitive position against its competitors, like Wix, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, or Ecwid.

Currently, Shopify is the fastest-growing eCommerce platform in the world. In the US, it’s the 3rd largest online retailer behind Amazon and eBay.

According to ShopGram, 12.82% of Shopify stores sell at least one dropshipping product, while 7.10% of goods sold through the platform are fulfilled from a dropshipping service.

Pros Of Shopify That Make It Good For Dropshipping

Here’re the strengths of Shopify that make it good for dropshipping.

Fast To Set Up: Shopify has done all the heavy lifting behind the scene. Thus, you can literally get a dropshipping store up and start selling within a couple of hours or days max.
Plentiful Themes: The platform has more than 100 customizable themes in various dropshipping niches to help you create an elegant and unique store quickly. It’s also possible to swap between themes without losing your content.
Abundant Apps: There’re 4200+ third-party apps in the Shopify App Store to help extend your store functionality effortlessly. Among them, there’re at least 400 apps that specifically support dropshipping, from product importing, automated fulfillment, sourcing, print-on-demand to marketing and branding.
Easy To Use: From adding products, managing orders, set up shipping rates, creating discount codes, editing themes, generating legal pages, customizing checkout pages to installing apps, all can be done with just a few clicks.
Good Performance: Shopify dropshipping stores load fast even under high-traffic days with thousands of concurrent visitors like Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
Available all the time: Shopify maintains a 99.99% uptime for all stores even during peak seasons.
Good Security: SSL certificates are created automatically for all Shopify sites, encrypting all customers’ information and publishing it securely using HTTPS instead of HTTP. This makes shoppers feel more confident when purchasing from your dropshipping store, which in turn increases conversion rates.
Scale Effortlessly: All Shopify plans include unlimited bandwidth and an infinite number of orders.
Multiple Currencies & Languages: You can display your Shopify dropshipping store in many currencies and languages, either by using built-in tools or third-party apps.
Numerous Payment Gateways: No matter which payment methods your customers use, from Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Paypal, to direct bank transfers, you can cover them all with Shopify Payments and 100+ other payment providers.
Automatic Tax Rates: Shopify has a robust tax system that can handle most of the common sales tax calculations.
Powerful Reports, Tracking, & Analytics: Shopify has powerful built-in reports and analytics for traffic, revenue, conversion rates, etc. It also supports setting up tracking with Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel.
Advanced Marketing & Advertising Features: These include automated notifications, email marketing, SMS marketing, sales channels (Buy Button, Google Shopping, Facebook Shop, Facebook Messenger, Instagram Shopping, Amazon, Handshake, and wholesale channel), and POS.
Good SEO Features: Shopify covers all of your basic SEO needs, such as meta titles, meta descriptions, custom URLs, image alt text, mobile-friendly pages, 301 redirections, sitemaps, etc.
Team Management: If you have multiple members working on your dropshipping store, you can assign them to specific roles and limit their access to certain areas.
Integrate With Most Popular Dropshipping Suppliers: Third-party apps can help you quickly connect with trustworthy and well-known suppliers like AliExpress, Alibaba, DHgate, Banggood, Spocket, and Modalyst.
Ample Guiding Resources: Shopify Learning and Oberlo Learning provide completely free Shopify dropshipping courses, lessons, and advice from the best minds in the business. There’s also a lot of YouTube tutorials and blogs like us proving comprehensive guidelines on starting a profitable Shopify dropshipping business.
Big Communities: It’s easy to find Facebook groups, Reddit communities, and online forums about Shopify dropshipping to ask any question if you get stuck.
Able To Sell Your Store: Even if you fail, you can flip your dropshipping store on Exchange Marketplace (owned by Shopify) to get some money back.
Not Only For Dropshipping: You can use Shopify without dropshipping. It has all the tools and apps to help build a versatile blog, create a portfolio, sell digital products, or even manage a complex restaurant.

How Expensive Is Shopify Dropshipping?

Another reason why Shopify is good and profitable for dropshipping is its low subscription cost.

Shopify has 3 subscription plans: $29/month Basic, $79/month Standard, and $299/month Advanced. The higher the plan, the more staff accounts and discounts on transaction fees or credit card rates you have.

However, for most dropshippers, the $29/month plan is enough to start a full-fledged dropshipping store that can scale up with any business needs in the future.

In addition, you can try Shopify out for 14 days completely free with no credit card required. This further helps you save money when you’re just getting started with dropshipping.

The next costs are for buying a domain name and a custom business email, which is about $20/year in total.

You might also want to extend your store functionality with some third-party apps. But, you can find free alternatives for most of them. So, we wouldn’t count them here.

Altogether, it costs less than $50 to start dropshipping on Shopify. This includes expenses for the Basic Shopify plan, a domain name, and a custom business email. Note that this doesn’t take variable costs (e.g, promoting dropshipping products and fulfilling orders) into account since you can always reinvest profits into them.

How Hard Is Shopify Dropshipping?

Shopify dropshipping is not hard, but not a get-rich-quick scheme either. Although you don’t need any special skills to get started, you have to put in the work and time to learn how to build a high-converting Shopify store, research profitable dropshipping products, marketing, advertising, and branding to compete in the market.

From most of the success stories we have encountered, it takes on average 3 months to make profits and at least 2-3 years to generate significant numbers dropshipping on Shopify (e.g., making six figures/year).

For example, Harry Coleman – a wildly successful Shopify dropshippers – made his first sale after spending $500-$800 on ads. After a year of working hard on his store, he finally got to the $1,000/day mark.

The young entrepreneur Shri Kanase has a similar story. His first sale came 17 days after opening his third Shopify dropshipping store.

Are Shopify Alternatives Better For Dropshipping?

Let’s go through other most popular dropshipping platforms and compare them with Shopify.

WooCommerce: The widespread of WordPress is the main reason for the popularity of WooCommerce. This platform offers more customization options and design freedom than Shopify. However, it’s harder to work with and doesn’t offer as many out-of-the-box sales features as Shopify.
Squarespace: In terms of built-in tools, Squarespace comes out on top. But, when it comes to third-party integration, Shopify gets the upper hand and is more suitable for large dropshipping businesses.
Wix: Similar to Squarespace, Wix has plenty of built-in features and great SEO functionality. But, the Wix App Market doesn’t offer nearly as a wide variety of apps that support dropshipping as its competitor.
BigCommerce: BigCommerce has powerful sales features and analytics. Some are even more advanced than Shopify’s. Still, there’s a lack of themes and apps that make the platform not as good as Shopify for dropshipping.
Magento: This platform is specifically made for enterprise-level dropshipping businesses who obsess about performance and security. In exchange, Magento is really expensive, costing around $1988.00/month.
Ecwid: You can start a totally free dropshipping business with Ecwid. Its strength lies in its ability to be embedded inside any other website. But, it still lacks many dropshipping features in comparison with Shopify.

In Conclusion, Is Shopify Good And Profitable For Dropshipping?

Considering all information above, Shopify is definitely good and profitable for dropshipping. It’s affordable, easy to use, offers robust sales & marketing features, and has great performance & security out of the box. Furthermore, Shopify provides abundant third-party apps to accommodate any of your dropshipping needs.

All that’s left for you is to spend time and effort learning the ins and outs of dropshipping and the right ways to building a successful and sustainable business.

For a complete dropshipping roadmap, have a look at our dropshipping checklist.