How To Start Shopify Dropshipping With No Money In 10 Steps

Thus, this article will show how I tried Shopify Dropshipping With No Money entirely. 

Therefore, you’ll figure out how I effectively execute what I call “The Revenue Share Strategy,” which lets you use influencer marketing with absolutely no upfront cost! 

I created this article to provide you with a step-by-step instructional manual on how to start a profitable Shopify dropshipping business from scratch as a novice without money. 

Initially, I kept the thoughts to myself, but instead of just talking about them, I wanted to put my mouth where my money was.

I guess that doesn’t make sense because I’m essentially not using any of my money, so I think I meant to say that I’ll do this.

Rather than just talking, I’ll walk the walk. If you didn’t read the article where I discussed how you could start Shopify Dropshipping from the ground up with no money, I’ll walk you through it. 

The Strategy

The strategy is straightforward. It’s a revenue-share agreement, which means you split revenue with the influencer in exchange for their promotion of your website or product. 

Although this strategy and methodology are fundamental and straightforward, they aren’t easy to execute.

Finding an influencer who will be down for this strategy is the hardest part. 

Since many influencers nowadays need to be paid upfront, you’ll need to contact several to find a few, a couple, or even one who is down.

I will give you a step-by-step on how I do this time to effectively actualize this strategy. 

Thus, in terms of the complete strategy summary, number one is to find a product, create the store, discover the influencers, contact them, and negotiate with them.

Hopefully, you’ll get a few, a couple, or even one to promote, and afterward, hopefully get sales. 

I could spend the entire day discussing how to actualize the strategy; however, I need to show you that we should start immediately.

The first step to Shopify Dropshipping With no Money is picking a hot-selling product.

I chose the LED Beauty Mirror as the product because it’s in the beauty niche, and there are many influencers in that space. 

I typically pick the niches with the most influencers for the strategy because it’s a numbers game.

You’re presumably going to hear me say a great deal that it’s a numbers game, implying that you need to contact many influencers for a few to be down. 

You won’t be able to contact just ten influencers.

This is where you need to get in touch with 100 influencers and five, ten, or even fewer than that to be down, so I was hoping you could keep that in mind so you don’t anticipate that many influencers should be down for the strategy, since they are not. I need to make that very clear. 

The more influencers you contact, the more likely you are to find more to work with; you must find a niche with many influencers. 

Since I have the product, it’s time to create the Shopify store, and I recognize what some of you folks are thinking as you read this piece. How can you make a store?

How can you do all this with no money when Shopify costs 29 bucks monthly? 

Shopify has a free trial: 3 days, then $1 for the first month. So, I’ll have 30 days to make money with the store until I am charged the regular Shopify pricing plans.

The fast, quick, and simple hack to do this is to create the store, pick a plan, and enter my Credit card data. However, I will not be charged until after three days. 

I strongly suggest this basic, straightforward hack to maximize your potential profit from this free trial.

Finding the Influencers 

Alright, with the website created, it’s time to move on to the most important step by far: finding and contacting the influencers. So, right away, we should go.

As I mentioned in my previous article, it’s an overly free and straightforward approach to discovering Instagram influencers. 

You can utilize the suggestive feature. For instance, I had to find one Instagram page and then click the down button. This gave me many suggested Instagram accounts related to that account. 

You could continue scrolling to find influencers related to the page.

For this strategy, especially prominent Instagram accounts with countless followers, hundreds of thousands to millions most likely won’t agree to the revenue share agreement since they’re accustomed to getting a colossal sum of money from brands upfront. 

I suggest focusing on the smaller influencer accounts with 30,000 to a few hundred thousand followers since they’re likely to be down for this strategy.

Day #1

After finding the influencers, I organized them on a spreadsheet with their usernames and emails. Then I’d write the emails to send to them, and the first sequence would be the email to each influencer.

You can find the influencer by typing in your keywords in the search button. Then, you follow influencers plus the suggested followers.

In the second sequence, the email is sent to influencers who do not reply after a certain number of days.

I’d connect that spreadsheet to email software to mass-contact the influencers and automatically follow up if they don’t respond. 

Day #2

Now, all the emails have officially been sent to the influencers, so it’s been about a day since I contacted them. I just went through the replies, and unsurprisingly, a lot of the influencers declined the offer. 

The reason is that many of them said that they do not make affiliate-only sales and only do it when they’re getting paid. The right amount of influencers had managers, so the managers responded and said they only do paid collaborations.

Another thing I want to mention is that if the influencer is using that manager 100% of the time, the manager will always decline this offer.

The influencers’ managers only get paid if they’re paid an upfront fee for a promotion.

You appreciate it if it’s an affiliate or any partnership; it’s hard for them to get their piece of the pie, and so they’re going almost always to decline that offer. So, keep that in mind when dealing with influencer managers. 

But for the most part, the influencers that do respond, and if you could contact the influencers themselves one-on-one, you have a higher chance than if you were talking to their manager. 

But the good news is that I got four influencers interested in the offer, and it’s only been about a day.

Influencers sometimes take a few days, or even longer, to respond, but I will focus on these four influencers for now because I’m trying to complete this post as quickly as possible. 

The next step is super important. For those who read my articles, I previously discussed this strategy in How To Start Shopify Dropshipping On A Budget (Zero Budget).

This strategy is slightly different from that piece. In that article, I talked about the revenue share agreement, which means a mutual agreement between you and the influencers, just like you’re getting the influencer to be your affiliate.

This strategy will be a little bit different for this write-up because multiple influencers are involved. It will be complex to implement that strategy because it will be super hard to identify and track precisely which sales are coming from each influencer.

But that strategy, which I discussed in the previous write-up, is helpful if you have one influencer because you’ll split the revenue with that one influencer.

It’s not complicated, but it’s pretty hard to track where everything is coming from if there are multiple influencers.

This strategy will be more like an exclusive affiliate program for influencers, so they will receive their affiliate link before promoting.

Then, when they promote, I can see exactly how much sales and revenue they generated and pay them accordingly.

If you don’t want to use the keyword search to find influencers, you can also use Shoutcart, which is a fantastic tool.

It will give you the top influencers in your niche, based on the number of followers you want, and it will also verify their engagement.

Try Shoutcart

Affiliate Program 

What I needed to do was first create a free Shopify affiliate program, since I’m not using any money, then respond to the influencers who said they’re interested, get them to sign up for the affiliate program, give them the affiliate links, and they’d promote. Hopefully, we will get some sales. Without further ado, let’s go straight into it. 

Affiliate Apps

There are tons of great apps on Shopify that you can implement in your store, but I had to find a perfect one for free. The first one I found was Goaffpro, but I wouldn’t say I liked the design.

The next free affiliate that I found was Secomapp, and it checked out a lot better. It has tons of good reviews, and the best thing is that it offers a free plan with all the features I needed, so I used the free affiliate app.

Setting up the affiliate is extremely easy; to sum it all up, all you need to do is sign up and edit the affiliate percentage you want to offer to your affiliates, or, in this case, the influencers. 

By default, their affiliate percentage is 10%. Literally, all I did was change the name to reflect the affiliate program’s influence and set the affiliate percentage to 50%.

After the affiliate accounts are officially created, I’d email the influencer, basically instructing them to sign up for their affiliate link and then enter their PayPal email to get paid.

Let’s tackle step 3 of Shopify Dropshipping with no Money for one week.

Day #3

In just over 24 hours, I set up the affiliate programs for the four influencers, and only two of them signed up and were ready to go. The other two have yet to respond, and that’s what I want you to know.

Dealing with influencers takes some time. Because you’re communicating back and forth with them, you have to wait for their response before moving on.

Given their busy schedules, some influencers take days or even weeks to respond, so keep that in mind when dealing with them. 

I’m only going to concentrate on these two influencers since they were the only ones who signed up and were ready to go; they had their affiliate links.

I sent them images of the products I post on a store with their affiliate links, 

I also told them that they could include affiliate links in their profiles if they wanted to, but they didn’t have to, and then hopefully, with all that, we would get some sales.

I want to mention that I also made it clear to them that they could cease marketing the product at any time. 

The objective was to have no terms or binding agreements for a specific number of days or anything. They could begin marketing it today and then stop tomorrow, one week from now, or one month from now; it was absolutely up to them.

You must reassure and ensure the influencers because a great many of them won’t agree to this strategy if it’s a term or in a contract, that is, if it implies that they need to do this for a specific number of days or whatnot. 

Make that crystal clear to the influencer, and many of these influencers will continually promote on the off chance that they regularly make money; the same goes for anything like, say, a few of yourselves joining an affiliate program and consistently making money with it; you’re most likely going to continue promoting it. 

However, if you stop making money with it or don’t make any money with it, you’re likely not going to promote it anymore and apply to these influencers. 

I had allotted the influencers to promote for at least 24 hours this way, and I’d judge the performance based on 24 hours. I was overly upbeat about seeing what the outcomes would be.

Are you still reading this Shopify Dropshipping With No Money case study? Carry on.

Day #4 

The two influencers posted on their Stories in well over 24 hours on the morning of Day #4, and from those two posts, I made a little over a thousand dollars in sales. 

I made a little over a thousand sales in under a day, and that is only the total revenue; thus, if we consider all the costs, we can get the absolute profit.

The total sales were $350, the full influencer or payouts were $120, and the product and total cost was $50, which leaves an all-out profit of $180

Hacks to Improve Overall Revenue 

For this example, the profit margin is only slightly over 16%. I want to discuss specific tips you can use to increase your profits whenever you execute this strategy in the future. 

Tip #1 Lower Cost of Goods: Lower the cost of goods. For this example, the product I used for this store was priced between $15 and $70, including delivery costs on AliExpress.

That isn’t acceptable in any way. When your product is costly, it’s hard to make a profit because you need to price it at $30 to $50, and if it’s that high, it eats into your profits.

In a perfect world, you need a product priced lower than that, preferably below $10; that way, you have much more room to increase revenue. 

Tip #2 Increase Selling Price: Increase your selling price as much as expected. For this example, after I received 10 orders, I increased the product price by $10, from $39.99 to $49.99, which isn’t a significant difference. However, on the off chance that you get a ton of orders, it adds up fast, and it adds up to more profit in your bank account. 

Tip #3 Decrease Influencer Revenue%: Decrease influencer revenue share as much as possible.

For this example, the influencers’ revenue share was 50%, which is relatively high. However, I know that if it stays at the 50% range, more influencers will be persuaded to accept the offer. In a perfect world, if you could bring the revenue share down to even 30%, that would save you lots of money and increase your net revenue drastically. 

Pay To Influencers 

Paying influencers is straightforward, as I said before. It is essentially similar to an affiliate program.

You should go to the affiliate, like the one I created on my Shopify account, and pay the influencers via PayPal. 

Ordinarily, I’d tell the influencers I’d pay them once a month, since that gives me enough time to manage refunds or any issues with the orders. You sure don’t have to pay them every day.

Suppose you need to deal with a refund or any matter related to the order that comes out of pocket. You sure need enough time to manage any issues with the orders, and once a month gives me plenty of time for that. 

Finally, to pay for and fulfill orders on AliExpress, you have to wait for your Shopify payout to arrive.

Your first payout usually takes seven days. Anything after that takes every two days to get paid, worst-case scenario. So, hang tight for seven days for the first payout, and then use that money to pay for the order.

But ideally, I suggest that if you have a credit card, use it now so your customers aren’t waiting any longer for their orders. Worst-case scenario: as I said, if you have no money or don’t want to use any of it, wait for Shopify to pay you out, then use that money to pay for the orders.

Domain 

I would also like to state that when you get your first few sales, go out and purchase your Domain name; you sure don’t want to have that https://your-store-name.myhopify.com domain name for eternity. 

You’ll get away with it at first because the influencer is solely promoting themselves, but ideally, you want your domain name because it looks more legit and looks much better than dot myshopify.com.

Conclusion

It’s a wrap, folks, and I hope you got immense value from this piece. I honestly feel like I went over everything in detail, step-by-step, so I hope you learned the strategies and gained more ideas from reading this article. 

This exercise was a success. By using two influencers in under a day, I was able to rake in almost $200. 

The best part is that I didn’t use any of my money. The crazy thing is that it was just from two influencers, and in the last three days, over 10 influencers responded, saying they were interested.

I’m going to try to scale up this business. 

Let me know if you liked the Shopify Dropshipping With No Money post and if you want me to do a sequel.

I recommend experimenting with this strategy if you don’t have much capital to start dropshipping, because it costs you nothing.

All right, that’s all we have for now. If you have any questions or want to share your own experiences with dropshipping, please do so in the comments below, and I’ll be sure to get back to you. 

And if you like this post, consider liking & sharing. Till next time, thanks so much for reading and your support.

For those of you new to this platform, I typically urge you to learn often, market better, and sell more before I sign off on each article.

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