Digital Dropshipping Starter Guide

Introduction: As many of you probably already know, regular dropshipping on shopify consists of finding suppliers to sell products from china, running paid ads on platforms like Tiktok and Facebook to your store selling this product, and hoping that the existing customer demand is enough to get them to buy the product. In the long term this is very unsustainable and there are lots of problems like payment holds, massive shipping delays, customer refunds, etc. The margins with Shopify dropshipping are also terrible as often people might scale a product to $100k months but be spending 50% on ads and testing to keep scaling, and another 30-40% on product costs and fees meaning they are left with around 10% profit which is then re-invested into testing new products once the winner inevitably dies out.

The advantage with this fairly new digital dropshipping model is much more broad than shopify dropshipping with higher margins due to no product costs and its much more sustainable as it focuses on a mix of cold traffic, retargeting campaigns, and organic traffic through branded social media pages. This means that you are in complete control of every single aspect of the business and you don’t have to rely on long shipping times from china selling someone else’s product, or facebook/tiktok banning your ad creatives that you’ve copied from other sellers. This model also allows for big exits in the future (i.e. selling your company for 6 or 7 figures), especially if you are able to build a big page on one of these social medias (a strategy that we will go into) since these produce lots of organic traffic in your niche and allow for consistent sales.

So let's get straight into it:

Product and Niche selection

Essentially this model is not 100% dropshipping, it depends on the product you select. The whole advantage with digital dropshipping or digital ecommerce is that you market an ‘idea’ that is in demand, in order to trigger the pain points of a buyer and you then sell a product to them based on this.

So that means that you don’t necessarily have to be dropshipping a product, the product can be made by yourself even if you have knowledge or expertise in the field that you are in. Examples of digital products can be:

– Guides / Templates

– Video Courses

– Ebooks

– PLR products (will go into this later)

– Services

– Niche specific resources (e.g. weight loss plans for overweight people)

Basically ANYTHING that is digital and does not require fulfillment is considered a digital product and can be sold in digital dropshipping / digital ecommerce. The whole point of selling these products is to help people in the niche that you are selling to. There is such a wide range of products that people sell I’ve even seen an ecommerce store that dropships digital shoutouts from famous people who do shoutouts on Cameo. The product range is INFINITE and the more creative you get the better results you will have.

The common 3 niches to sell in (as we all probably know) are:

– Health

– Wealth

– Dating / Relationships

The first step is to select a niche. Like I said before if you have a specific area of expertise and there are people doing well selling digital products in these niches then I recommend doing this niche. If not, you can select one of the three main areas above. Once you have selected one of these, you want to search phrases related to these niches into tiktok/instagram and find content creators making videos on these topics. Why is that? Because 99% of the time these guys are actually selling digital products. You will find a mix of people running faceless accounts and personal brands all talking about their niche specific topic and selling some sort of digital product associated with it. For example if you search “How to make money from home” on tiktok for ideas of what people are doing and their sub-niches.

You should gather 10-20 of these sub niche ideas within your niche and choose one out of them. As for which one you should choose, select the one that has the largest pain and is getting the most attention.