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Startup Costs: How Much Money Do I Need For a Dropshipping Budget?

Video transcript: Hey everyone, my name is David and it’s time for questions. This is our weekly series where we take a closer look at a question that one of our viewers left in the comments section of a recent video. If you’ve got a question of your own, don’t […]

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Video transcript: Hey everyone, my name is David and it’s time for questions. This is our weekly series where we take a closer look at a question that one of our viewers left in the comments section of a recent video. If you’ve got a question of your own, don’t be shy, just leave it in the comments and we’ll be sure to take a look. Okay, so here’s the question we’ll be looking at today. So this one is from Tadiwa, who is asking, how much  they would need in terms of startup costs before they start their own store. Thanks for that question, Tadiwa.

When you’re getting started with your Oberlo dropshipping store, there are certain startup costs that you’ll just have to pay, like your monthly Shopify subscription, which will cost about $30 a month. When you’re designing your store, you can use a free theme but you may want to spend some of your startup costs budget for custom designs, like a one of a kind logo. I’d say, budget $20 to $50 for this, but honestly, you don’t need any custom designs to make a sale. You might also want to place some test orders before you launch your store, just so you can review the quality of the items that you’ll be selling, and put yourself in the shoes of your future customers. I’d budget another $30 to $50 for this. But again, it’s not totally essential.

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Startup Costs: Paying For Visitors

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Now, when you’re getting started with your store, there’s no guarantee that you’ll draw visitors right away, and if you have no visitors, you won’t be able to make any sales. That’s why it’s important that your startup costs budget includes some money for paid marketing campaigns when you’re getting started. The question of how much money you’ll need for those marketing campaigns is a really tough one. It all depends on what you’re selling and who you’re selling to. So if you set up Facebook ads, you’ll be paying for visits to your online store. Factor in the fact that the average global conversion rate is 2 percent, which means that you’ll need to draw an average of 50 visitors to your store, before you can make a sale.

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Startup Costs: What’s a Good Dropshipping Budget?

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So, it’s tough to give a definitive figure on how much money you’ll need for marketing startup costs. I’d say a baseline that you need to get started would be about $150, just so you can test out some campaigns, find the correct audience, and hopefully start to make some sales. Oberlo users have had a lot of success with Facebook Ads, so we do recommend that you get started there. If you’re interested in learning more about Facebook ads, we have a few videos up here, as well as a few links down here, that you can check out to get started. So if we do some quick math, it looks like you’ll need a couple hundred bucks in your dropshipping startup costs budget to get your store up and running, and to draw some traffic to your site. But hey, you gotta spend money to make money. Thanks again for the question, Tadiwa. And we wish you the best of luck getting your store up and running.

Is there anything else we can help with, when it comes to dropshipping startup costs? Let us know below. We check through the comments sections every day, and we’d love to use your question in our next video. And if you like what we’re talking about here, consider subscribing so you can get new dropshipping videos every week. Until next time, happy dropshipping.

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