You’re on the right track. You don’t need to keep inventory. You will work with a supplier (like Alibaba or Oberlo mentioned above) and you’ll get those suppliers to ship the product directly to the consumer from your storefront. (You’ll need to create a digital store to sell your products — you can use an all-in-one solution like Oberlo, or you could set up a Shopify store — or something similar — and then use Alibaba to fulfill the orders.

There are all sorts of tutorials out there that show you further how dropshipping works, what products are good products to sell, and how to advertise your shop. 🙂

You can check out some of Shopify’s webinars here: https://www.shopify.com/courses

I’m really confused about where I would get the merchandise from to sell. It doesn’t sound like I’m going out purchasing items and when purchased by a customer I ship it directly to them. Please explain to me because I’m interested in starting a Dropshipping business.

Hey Marion,

While it’s possible to start with no inventory, it would still be difficult to start with absolutely $0 down. That said, there are several pretty affordable options for getting started. You could:

• Buy web hosting, install WordPress, and install a free e-commerce theme. Total cost: $3-$5/month
• Buy a subscription to e-commerce web apps (such as Shopify or BigCommerece). Total cost: ~$30/month

That above cost allows you to create a storefront and start adding products and descriptions to your store. The hard part, though, is getting targeted buyers to your storefront. You can do that through content creation (a blog), social media, organic search, or the favorite of most dropshippers, paid acquisition (Facebook Ads for the most part). From there, you can source products from wholesalers and mark them up to increase profit margins to account for the paid Facebook Ads you had to leverage in order to get buyers into your shop.

Hope that helps,

Ben