At this point on day 4 of this 7-day crash course for drop shippers you have been taught how to discover a winning niche, set up your basic drop ship site system and how to find quality drop ship suppliers to work with. You're doing great! You're now ready to learn how to customize the basics of your drop ship site so you can get the best results when you start to share your drop ship site with your target audience. I'm going to give you fair warning right now that customizing your site will take some work and requires some technical skill. You don't have to be a tech ninja though. You may need to get some help on this step from a friend or even reach out to my team here and we can help you out with one of our "Done For You" website services. I'll outline below what you need to do though if you want to do it yourself.
When customizing your drop ship site it's important to keep things simple but yet effective. I say this because it's very easy to get caught in the trap of customizing your website for months and months spending lots of time and money without even launching and making a dime! I suggest avoiding that trap and instead focusing on customizing your site to create what we call a M.V.P. ( a minimum viable product) drop ship site.
An M.V.P. drop ship site is simply going to focus on the bare minimum items necessary to set up and customize in order to launch your website to get it in front of people so you can prove your business and see if you have what it takes to make your grow a profitable drop ship business! Trust me, it's better to find that out sooner than later. More about this in day 5 training coming next!
And that's it. The goal is to customize the site with the minimum features, launch it so you can start sharing value with your audience in the form of your business message, products and marketing style. As you observe and learn how and where your audience is engaging with you most then you can spend more time and money where necessary to customize and optimize your site even more.
To customize your M.V.P. drop ship site follow this checklist:
- Login to your WordPress site and install and activate these two basic plugins: WooCommerce and Contact Form 7 Once you do this your "Store" page will automatically be created by WooCommerce.
- Customized the WooCommerce settings to update the taxes, shipping, and add your payment processor information such as PayPal for example. It's easier and free to start with PayPal. Simply set up a Business account with Paypal by clicking here.
- Order a professionally designed logo for your drop ship site for only $5 over at fiverr - click here to order your logo
- Add the legal pages to your website footer: copyright, privacy policy, TOS, shipping/refund/return policy, disclaimer (click here to download these legal text templates for free and then customize them and place them on your site)
- Create and customize the home page of your website to clearly present your value proposition statement and other elements to show case your products. To learn how to create your own value statement read this article to learn how to do this effectively.
- Create and customize the other basic pages of your website such as: Home, About, FAQ's, Shop, Contact
- Customize your navigation menu to present your major pages.
- Customize your store settings to include tax & shipping settings where necessary along with PayPal payment settings, etc.
- Add and customize the product descriptions of up to 10 beginning drop ship products on your website store using high quality images. Make sure your products are presented professionally with all the details necessary on them.
Besides the steps above all other customizations can be done later after you launch your drop ship site and make some money.
As I mentioned above, customizing your drop ship site is usually one of the most challenging steps because it involves some technical skills. If you are not the "technical" type of person we do offer a "Done For You" website customization package for a very reasonable price. Get more details here.
Once you have customized your drop ship M.V.P. site you are ready for day 5 training where I will teach you how you can quickly prove to yourself and your audience you have what it takes to grow a successful drop ship business. This is where things start to get real exciting because once you prove that people like what you have to offer you can learn how to measure and grow your drop ship business to amazing profits each month!
