Two Weeks In…
This is a recap of my second week “Creating a Dropshipping Company in a Month”. Stay tuned for more weekly updates!
Once I found the product I wanted to sell in my store (A Luxe Hydration Reusable Water Bottle) I then looked up their other products and found a plethora of accessories made by the same company sold on SPocket. I created a video explaining how to push products from the application to a Shopify store. Now all I had to do was create a logo, purchase a domain name and an online store plan from Shopify to get my company up and running.
The Domain
I started off by purchasing a domain from Shopify. Obviously Shopify attaches their name on free domains and doesn’t look very professional. For example a free domain would look like this “yourstorename.myshopify.com” and that screams dropshipping store. I wanted to purchase the domain name first before I created a logo and built a website themed around that logo and product. I decided to go in this order:
- Acquire the domain
- Create the logo
- Build a website themed around the logo
I decided to choose Poseidon Shop as my company name. It made perfect sense being in the Eco-Friendly niche-market. A portion of my product sales eventually ended up funding ocean cleanup so what better brand could sell these products than Protector of the Sea? So I went to my Shopify admin page, clicked on “Online Store” and then clicked on “Domains”. This brought me to Shopify’s domain finder.
From here I simply typed in poseidon and a list of domains came up that were available for purchase. You can play around and add words to increase your chances of getting close to the domain you want. For example poseidon.com was unavailable and poseidon.shop was $33.00 so I typed in “poseidonshop” and found a cheaper domain that made sense.
I chose to purchase the domain poseidonshop.store for $20.
The Logo
Now that I had the domain I wanted I went ahead and created the logo. There are many different logo creation tools available and each software has different pricing to create your logo. The one I found the most user-friendly and least expensive was Canva. They charge only $1.00 to remove watermarks and allow you to download your logo in various forms. I created a simple logo and downloaded it into a PNG form to upload to my website.
My Final Product
Website Creation
The last and most important step I needed to take this week was to customize a theme and publish my store. To do this you have to purchase a store plan on Shopify so I picked the Basic Shopify model and my goal is to be selling enough products not only to cover this monthly expense but to upgrade to their premium plans with better shipping rates for my customers.
To customize my store I picked from one of Shopify’s free themes.
When customizing the website, you can change the typography, the background colors, the text colors and call to action buttons all to maximize the appeal of your online store. I then researched what colors work best to push sales.
Neither red nor green matches my brand identity but blue was perfect for my website because I am selling a solution to a contributing ocean polluter. I looked up color codes for blue and found the specific ones to implement on my site. I did this by trial and error until I found the specific color codes that blended well with my logo and featured products. The colors I thought best fit on the site were Cerulean #0492C2 for the header and Royal Blue #4169e1 for CTA buttons.
Do It Again?
Hindsight is 20/20 and if I were to do this process again I would have created a logo, customized my site and then worried about a domain name. The domain name doesn’t have to mirror your logo or your website exactly. Like I said before, you can play around with the keywords to get close to your exact brand name.
What I still have to do…
I have to publish the website and test the ordering process in real time. This means I need to have a third party (a friend) purchase a product from my site and then I need to fulfill the order on my Shopify account and see how fast the product ships and acquire a review of the product. I also need to set up a marketing campaign on social media (Tik Tok and Facebook) to promote my store. Stay tuned!