How Much Does It Cost To Start A Dropshipping Business In 2023? [6 Options]

Well, here is the #1 dropshipping FAQ: how much does it cost to start a dropshipping business in 2023? So let’s figure that out!

Time goes by, but starting your own business is still the most attractive and reliable option to get a stable source of high income.

Are there any ways to start a business easily and with a small investment? In fact, there are a number of options that look really tempting. Due to the fact that ecommerce is growing rapidly, dropshipping is undoubtedly one of the surest and most promising ways to start your own venture.

So how much does it cost to start dropshipping in 2023? Do you really need thousands of dollars to get into dropshipping? In practice, how much funds should you have to start thinking of your own venture? And with whom is it better to build your business if you want to start dropshipping easily with a minimum budget?

AliDropship answers!

Is dropshipping still profitable in 2023?

You might be thinking that dropshipping has hit its peak, that it’s not reasonable to start a dropshipping business in 2023. However, let us convince you otherwise!

Dropshipping businesses are still thriving in 2023 simply because they offer a lot of advantages that other businesses do not.

First off, it doesn’t get easier than setting up a dropshipping business. All you need is an online store and a reliable supplier. Secondly, you can easily scale a dropshipping business. How is that? Well, since you don’t have to buy products in advance and store them, you can seamlessly add products to your store without having to worry about inventory or fulfillment.

For that same reason, since you’ll save money on not having to purchase anything in advance, you can put that money to good use and invest in your marketing and advertising.

With dropshipping, you can avoid the initial startup costs required to start a traditional business.

Still not enough? Well, if you don’t trust the word, maybe you’ll trust the numbers? If we look at the numbers, it’s safe to say that dropshipping in ecommerce, in general, is thriving! Transaction value in the Digital Commerce market is projected to reach US$6.03tn in 2023, which is a 7% increase every year for the last 10 years.

Furthermore, small businesses are witnessing a 30% increase in conversion rates through smartphone devices. On top of that, according to Statista, by 2025, more than ten percent of all retail sales in the United States is expected to be generated via mobile commerce. These statistics show the importance of adopting your online store to be mobile-friendly to attract more potential customers.

What makes dropshipping especially great is that you’re not limited to your geographical location. You can target any market you like and sell to it. This means that with more Internet users you get more potential customers. Once your business starts growing, you should consider expanding it to broader markets.

How much does it cost to start a dropshipping business: a minimum budget

How much does it cost to start a dropshipping business? Okay, let’s review a couple of options to get your dropshipping business started. What are the alternative ways to create an ecommerce business in this case? And how much will it cost you?

Let’s go step by step and work out the minimal budget you need to start dropshipping in 2023!

First, we should figure out what things are necessary to launch an online store.

Since dropshipping allows you to avoid the difficulties of any brick and mortar business, there essentially are only five steps to launching a store:

• Choose a niche
• Create a website
• Find suppliers
• Add products to your site
• Come up with a marketing strategy

How much does it cost to start a dropshipping business? Well, let’s move on to the figures!

Niche research

Expenses – $0.

There is no need to pay money. Besides, if you don’t want to spend any time on carrying out research by yourself, there’s an easy solution. Our team offers you a free niche research tool that estimates the niche potential and even gives some recommendations on how to use it in your business most efficiently.

However, you should understand that choosing a niche for your business plays a crucial role in your future success. So if you have an opportunity to pay particular attention to this stage of your business launch, we recommend that you learn more about the service our marketing experts offer – it’s Deep Dropshipping Niche Research.

Website creation

Expenses – $134.

Now let’s take a closer look at creating your site. What do you need to get it? Here is the list of the must-haves:

• Domain

 Expenses – $10.

To launch your dropshipping business, you need to buy a domain name. Simply speaking, your domain name is the address of your website. It’s unique and it lets customers find your site on the Internet. On GoDaddy.com, you can buy a decent domain name for about $10 for the first year.

• Hosting

Expenses – $48.

The next step is hosting. In other words, you need a server for your website. You can search for one on your own or use our service. Please pay attention to hosting from AliDropship. It suits dropshipping perfectly and costs only $69 per year.

• WordPress content management system (CMS)

Expenses – $0.

Now, you’ve got a domain name and a hosting provider. What’s next? It’s time to build your website now!

Go to WordPress.org and download its software to your server.

The beauty of this software is that it’s absolutely free. You spend $0 again.

• AliDropship plugin

Expenses – $89.

The next thing you need is the AliDropship plugin. It’s going to wrap up the process of creating and running your online store.

By the way, the AliDropship Plugin price hasn’t changed for many years!

But, we’ve got a surprise for you. A little lifehack: just use the ‘STARTER15’ coupon code as it’s shown in the picture below. This way, you save $13, and pay less than $76!

Here, on the same page, you can also put a tick and add hosting for 1 year, which we’ve already mentioned.

Now when you’ve done it, there is one last thing left. Customize your website as you’d like to. Naturally, you don’t need to pay yourself for your own efforts 🙂

Let’s sum it up! Your domain name is going to cost you about $10. Plus, you’ll spend $145 on hosting and the  AliDropship plugin combined. The rest is available for free.

So the total price for your website is $155.

Suppliers and products

Expenses – $0.

The next step is to find a reliable supplier you are going to deal with.

But the question is, how to do that? How can you find such a partner that will provide your clients with high-quality products?

All you need to do is go to AliExpress and make your choice. Please pay attention to our guide on how to find a dropshipping supplier. What we’re interested in is the price. And you don’t need to pay any fees to anyone.

When you’ve chosen your business partners, you can add products to your online store.

You’ve already got the AliDropship plugin. This means you can import as many dropshipping products from AliExpress as you want. You pay nothing for this.

However, if you’re eager to make the most of your business, you should consider your product strategy completely. The fact is that you need to have several extremely popular products in your online store that you’ll advertise. These products are supposed to bring you most of the profits.

So if you want to find a really promising product for your business and not make a mistake at this essential step, let our dropshipping experts find a winning product and consider an ad strategy for you!

Marketing

Expenses – $0.

In fact, you can reduce your marketing costs to a minimum and promote your online store yourself with $0. In this case, it’s a great idea to learn about SEO as much as you can. Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most powerful free marketing tools you could have under your belt. If you properly optimize your website in general and product pages in particular, people will naturally come across your online store.

Websites such as Quora.com could be great sources of free traffic to your store.

People post all sorts of questions there. Reply to those that your target audience might be interested in. Don’t forget to include links leading to your site in to your answers.

Another must-do thing is your activity on social networks. Depending on the niche you’re dealing with, you can successfully promote your store on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.

You need to create accounts on these platforms, find communities related to your niche, post comments, and so on. In other words, you should manually promote your store there.

Yes, it takes quite a lot of time. If you want to save it, we recommend you pay attention to the Social Rabbit add-on and pass the torch to it.

The best news here? You can start with the Rabbit’s FREE 7-day trial before making your final decision! And of course, you are more than welcome to rely on useful marketing tips in the special section in the AliDropship blog.

Well, we’ve found out that at least for the first time, there is an opportunity to get along without any marketing expenses.

It means you can spend only $155 to start your dropshipping business in 2023! Sounds tempting, doesn’t it?

Dropshipping startup costs: a medium budget

It may seem to you that despite the fact that it’s extremely cheap to start a dropshipping business, there are a number of tasks that require you to have special skills and a lot of time. This is exactly why AliDropship is happy to provide you with different options to launch your dropshipping venture.

Would you like our highly qualified personnel to take over technically complex and time-consuming tasks?

It means if you are ready to expand your budget a little bit, you can avoid some difficulties. And in dropshipping, you don’t really need much to get around many obstacles.

Let’s be honest. Getting a complete ready-to-go business for $500 is a good deal.

Yet, it could be cheaper if it’s the dropshipping business.

Here are two main options to get a ready-made online business AliDropship is happy to offer.

Custom dropshipping store

You can order a custom store from AliDropship. And within 12-25 business days, you’re going to be an owner of an online store built for you by a team of professionals according to your preferences only. Let’s look closer at what you actually get when you buy a custom store.

• A niche research
• A domain name
• Google Analytics integration
• Website customization
• AliDropship plugin
• At least 50 products that have already been added to your store (you can add more later)
• On-site SEO
• Social page on Facebook

Not bad, right?

But the best part is that you can start your dropshipping business for $299. And pay your particular attention to the fact it’s a ONE-TIME payment.

But there’s more good news. It would be unfair not to tell you how you could save a bit more money. Use the coupon code ‘CUSTOM10’ to get $30 off your store cost!

Along with hosting for 1 year, it’s going to cost you $317.

The rest of your money can be invested in your PPC (pay per click) campaign, Instagram shoutouts, paid Facebook ads, Google ads, etc. This is going to drive more traffic to your site. These are the people which are highly likely to make a purchase in your online store.

So, you spend $317 on the custom store and hosting and, let’s say, $180 on paid ads. And if you have a medium budget, starting your dropshipping business in 2023 is going to cost you less than $500. That’s a bargain!

Premium dropshipping store

Besides custom dropshipping stores, AliDropship has developed one more option for you to get a quick and easy start in dropshipping. It’s all about our well-loved Premium Dropshipping Stores.

How do they differ from our custom stores? Actually, we answered this question in our detailed guide on how to choose a dropshipping store, feel free to read it. But the point is that Premium Dropshipping Stores are the exact copies of the most successful dropshipping store AliDropship has ever run.

So what do you get in case of purchasing premium dropshipping store? You get a ready-to-go dropshipping store that you need only to upload to your hosting.

How much do such dropshipping stores cost?

Here is great news again: prices of Premium Dropshipping stores start from the same $300.

What to buy: custom or premium stores?

Custom Dropshipping Stores suit those entrepreneurs best who are eager to get a store made according to their preferences only: they will have an opportunity to choose a niche, influence the selection of products to sell, the website design, etc. However, you will have to wait for such an online store for 12 business days or more.

Premium Dropshipping stores suit those entrepreneurs best who want to get their store right here and right now. After completing a purchase of a premium store, you will get the materials you need to upload to your hosting almost on the same day, almost instantly. Meantime, you have to choose one of the stores that already deal with a niche and number of products. If you want to change the niche or something else after purchasing a store, you will have to do this yourself.

How much to invest in a dropshipping business: the maximum budget

How long may it take you to become a CEO of a prosperous company?

Usually, it doesn’t happen fast.

But dropshipping is an exception! Here, you can run your business and only be concerned about scaling it: the rest of the tasks won’t be your headache anymore.

Actually, AliDropship is happy to offer you two options. In fact, there’s something bigger. Stay tuned!

Ultimate custom store

Under the Ultimate package, you can get a custom store specifically created for you by the AliDropship team. It will have extra advantages apart from the ones mentioned above – and only require a ONE-TIME payment of $899.

What’s the point?

Along with the benefits listed in the Medium budget section, you get:

• 150 more products added to your store
• More detailed SEO elements
• Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube pages created along with the Facebook account
• Promo video that shows your customers all the advantages of your online store

And the cherry on top – the Social Rabbit add-on which takes over all your social media activity

In fact, whatever your financial situation is, saving money is always a wise move. If you choose the most advanced package, don’t forget to use the same coupon code ‘CUSTOM10’ – and $90 will stay with you.

As you can see, for only $857 you can buy a store and hosting for 1 year. At the same time, you get enough time to devote to your online store development. So you can consider your marketing strategy properly and invest as much money in it as you can afford.

Premium dropshipping store + Marketing & Installation packages

Besides ultimate custom stores, it’s also premium stores with additional packages that suit you best in case you’re ready to invest more money in your startup. So what will you get if ordering a Premium Dropshipping Store with Marketing and Installation packages?

• An exact copy of an online store that is ready to be uploaded to your website.
• A wide range of marketing materials our specialists used to promote the original store and benefited from.
• Prepaid 1 year hosting, 3 domain names to choose from, store logo editing, assistance in setting up a payment gateway, uploading the online store to your website

As you can see, if you buy such an online store, you won’t have to do anything – you get a ready-to-go online store from scratch that also provides you with ad materials to promote it. It will only cost you $700! Doesn’t it look like a bargain?

However, you can save EVEN MORE! If you use the ‘PREMIUM15’ coupon at the checkout, you will get 15% off your copy of a profitable dropshipping store and enjoy a ready-to-earn business for $595 only!

Can I start dropshipping with 0$? [Solved]

Worried about technical support? Don’t be! We provide free technical support to make sure you’re not left in the lurch if any issues arise.

And to top it all off, we’re giving you a store promotion video course as a bonus. Learn the ins and outs of effectively promoting your store to attract more customers and increase sales.

So, are you ready to embrace this exciting opportunity? Remember, this isn’t just a business venture; it’s a chance to grow, learn, and potentially transform your financial future. Let’s take this journey together — get your prebuilt dropshipping store now!

Summing it up: how much does it cost to start a dropshipping business in 2023?

So let’s make a conclusion. How much does it cost to start a dropshipping business? Now you know the answer. The cost of a ready-made custom store together with hosting is $857, and the cost of your promotional activities is up to you. The cost of a premium dropshipping store with all the additional packages is $595, and the cost of a dropshipping store you’re making completely on your own is up to $150.

So how much does it cost to start a dropshipping business? In fact, the maximum price you pay for your dropshipping business is $600-900 or more in case you’re ready to invest in your online store promotion. Actually, these dropshipping costs are not much for your own fully-functioning ecommerce business that has all chances to become your stable source of high income, is it? Fortunately, there is an option to get a prebuilt dropshipping store absolutely for free!

So how much does it cost to start a dropshipping business in 2023? Now you know this for sure. Are you eager to try your hand at dropshipping and grow a venture you’ll always be proud of? No big deal, actually — get a done for you dropshipping business now and build your own profitable ecommerce platform you’ve always dreamed of as soon as possible. So wait no more!