Wow. Today has been a real grind. And I haven’t even started selling product yet. Getting to that point is still ways away…So what have I done so far? What are my achievements for today?
Well, I’ve picked one of the 15 products I’ve researched to sell for my first dropshipping attempt. I won’t specify what exactly it is for now but I’ll share the fact that it belongs to the electronics category. I think it satisfies the key characteristics for a good dropshipping product in that it has sufficient “Wow Factor”, good quality, and can be found on Alibaba.
That simple bit right there was the easiest part of today. The rest was a struggle…I spent at least 6 hours following a tutorial on how to make a Shopify store from scratch on Youtube by Dan Vas. And I’m still not doing going through it. By following the first few steps I was able to select the first product to try dropshipping, find potential suppliers on Alibaba, see how to contact suppliers, create a Shopify store website, and create a logo for my website. I could’ve done this quicker but I got slowed down by my own ignorance and some technical difficulties. Note to self: never try to do any of this using wi-fi at a local cafe…
So my haste to start dropshipping I realized I’ve done some things out of order. To elaborate, today I’ve reserved a domain name and created a Shopify store website for a product…before reaching out to any suppliers…and before getting a sales tax ID. By the time I get that sorted out, I’ll probably have used up all 14 days of the free trial for my Shopify website before I can make any sales. Luckily, I already made an LLC a week or so and that was helpful when I applied for a Sales Tas Permit today. But it’s still going to take a few weeks for that to come back…I’ve made quite a few new accounts across several websites such as Alibaba/Aliexpress (Product and Supplier directory), Shopify (for the electronics product), Zoho (business email for shopify site), Canva (logo creation site), “State” Comptroller of public accounts (Sales Tax permit application). I hope I can remember all the login info for those a few weeks from now. Also making the last one actually made me a bit nervous. To this point, I hadn’t put much thought to how manage my ventures in terms of taxes. This is something I definitely need to dig deeper into because I don’t want screw myself over with the IRS…
Getting this first Shopify store up and running properly before the end of the month may be more difficult than I initially hoped. I thought I’d spent too much time researching but am now thinking I didn’t spend enough. But I’m making progress a little bit at a time and I intend to keep moving forward even if I stumble. A lot… Some next steps I’ll aim to complete before the end of the week is to open a bank account for my LLC, contact a supplier for my product, and then order a sample with my company logo.