How to Start a Profitable Dropshipping Business In Nigeria

In this post, you’ll learn how to start a dropshipping business in Nigeria from the comfort of your home.

Quick one;

Did you know that the dropshipping industry is expected to reach a market valuation of $557.9 billion before 2025 according to statistics on dropshipping?

This is just to show you the profitability of this business model!

The idea of dropshipping in Nigeria is a great idea, only if you know how to run it successfully.

The reason I captioned this title as “How to start a dropshipping business in Nigeria” is because it’s a whole lot different scenario when it comes to Nigeria.

Starting a dropshipping business in Nigeria means you have to think of the payment gateway for your business. Also, you need to know how to deal with suppliers and have your products shipped faster.

What kinds of products should you dropship?

And if you’re thinking of dropshipping internationally, then you should be aware whether or not you have to pay tax or register your company.

Lastly, you need to understand if you are going to pay a customs tax on all the product you’re dropshipping in Nigeria especially if you’ll be importing them.

These and more, are the reason I made the title “how to dropship in Nigeria”, because of the economy uniqueness and some rules and regulations guiding e-commerce business in the country.

So sit tight and let’s do justice to this together. If you are not subscribed to this blog, please do, to get more of this and join our new community on Facebook.

Let’ s get started shall we?

What’s Dropshipping & How Does It Work In Nigeria?

In the simplest form dropshipping is selling products without buying or having them.

This is how it works; after you’ve created an online store and added your product to it.  When I mean product I mean pictures and descriptions of the product.

This is because you don’t have to have the product stock in physical.

And after this, once you made your sales, all you have to do is contact your third-party supplier (owner of the product) and send your customer address and pay the supplier from the initial money paid to you by your customer.

The supplier, in turn, makes the shipment to your customer. While you and your customer returned home happy.

However, if you are going to be using AliExpress to source for products, you don’t need to contact the seller.

All you simply need to do is go ahead and pay for the products and fill your customers’ details on AliExpress as the buyer.

Without questions asked the seller on AliExpress will have the product packaged, processed and shipped to your customer without them knowing it’s from AliExpress.

Pros and Cons of Dropshipping in Nigeria

Since we’ve been able to unravel how dropshipping works in Nigeria, now let’s talk about the good and bad side of the business.

This will help you to know what you’re getting into and how you can use them to your advantage to run a better dropshipping business.

Pro of Starting a Dropshipping Business In Nigeria

• Starting a dropshipping business requires a low start-up fee compared to other ways to make money online in Nigeria.
• You can test as many products online to find a winning product without incurring much cost
• You can work with multiple suppliers and sell different kinds of products in your store. All you need do is create a new category for the product and you’re good to go
• There’s no need to buy the product or stock inventory with dropshipping
• Your supplier handles shipping of products and all you have to do is receiving and forwarding orders to your supplier

Cons of Starting a Dropshipping Business in Nigeria

• You’re responsible for your customers
• Customer can be annoying when their product is delayed
• You are not in control of your product quality your supplier is
• The easiest way to get traffic is to run adverts
• Profit on each product can be small compared to buying them in bulk
• Selling directly to Nigerian might not be feasible
• Long shipping time from China to Nigeria

The key to success here is finding a good product and finding the right interest of buyers then scale your marketing to make the most of it.

But keep in mind, there could be one or two failures along the line but once you’re determined and consistent you’ll have a profitable result from your business.

Also, you might want to target international buyers instead to selling directly to Nigeria which is going to take longer shipping time.

Having said that, now let’s proceed to how we can start the business the right way.

How to Start a Dropshipping Business in Nigeria

Before we start let me quickly answer some of the frequent questions commonly asked about drop shipping in Nigeria.

• Do you need to pay tax dropshipping with AliExpress in Nigeria? The answer is NO! Paying of Tax is for residents in the US.
• Will you pay tax duty on products shipped to Nigeria? Still NO! Whatever amount you are to pay on a product will be clearly written on your supplier website. The shipping cost covers the tax duty.
• Do you need to register your company as an e-commerce business? The answer is NO and YES! When starting, you don’t necessarily need to register just to save the cost. But when your business starts booming and growing momentum then you should consider registering your business.

In addition to this, some payment gateway might require you to have your business register before you can start making use of their services. A good example is Paystack. and Stripe for receiving dollar payments.

That’s that about that.

So let’s look at the steps on how to start a dropshipping business in Nigeria.

1.  Choose a Product to Sell
2.  Find a Reliable Supplier
3.  Choose a Selling platform.
4.  Market your business.
5.  Start making money.

Step 1: Choose a Product to Sell

The first step to this is choosing the product you want to sell. Many people are often tempted to start selling anything they can think of. You should have this at the back of your mind that drop shipping is a business.

And like every other business, you need to do thorough research and have a business strategy on how to be profitable in your business.

One of the ways you can do this is by looking for winning products to sell.

Another thing you should have in mind while choosing your product is that you can’t just start selling any product you see. Try as much as possible to check the demand over time for such products through the use of Google Trend.

It has to be on the market trend. That is, demand for it must be relatively high or at least very stable and the competition for it should be minimal.

You don’t necessarily have to have tons of products on your website to be successful in this business model. Your emphasis should be on hot products around a particular niche.

There are two actual ways to find product to sell.

The first is via manual product research while the second option is using winning product research tools, some free and some paid.

#1: Manual Product Research method

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel, and I personally go with something that’s working already. The same thing goes for winning products.

Most people say it’s bad to sell what everybody else is selling but what they fail to realize is that, why is everybody selling it if they are not making profits?

There’s no need to be a product pioneer because most times you’ll be losing more money than you ought to make pushing a new product to the market.

But with already selling products, you can quickly plug in and get your own share of the market real quick.

So how do you find what’s selling already?

It’s very easy…

Just look for popular eCommerce store bestseller lists and you’ll be provided with goldmines worth of products.

Here are a few examples of popular e-commerce stores with a public bestseller list where you can use a winning product for your store.

Amazon Best Sellers

This should obviously be the number one on your list because Amazon happens to be the number eCommerce store out there.

Amazon has a huge list of best sellers literally for any category you could think of and the best part is that they are updated on an hourly basis.

This list includes branded and unbranded products you can explore as inspiration to find winning products to sell on your eCommerce website.

Wish Winning Products

Wish is another huge eCommerce platform you can use to explore winning products to dropship on your website.

One of the best ways to do this is to look for products with extremely high numbers of orders. Now, you shouldn’t need anyone to tell you that a product is doing well when they are having a huge amount of orders.

Let’s take a look at the product below. “Stainless Steel Grater” this product is over 300,000 orders already and counting.

This obviously is a great product to sell. So while browsing through the popular list on Wish be on the look for products with high numbers of orders and review.

AliExpress Dropshipping Center

The AliExpress Dropshipping Center is created for the main purpose of dropshipping. Inside the centre, you’ll have access to top-selling products on AliExpress.

From there, you can also find products you’ve found on other platforms like Amazon and Wish using the image of the product.

You can also analyze products by the seller and their logistic rating. This will provide you metric of how well a supplier on AliExpress is doing before you start selling with them.

#2: Winning Product Research Tools

This research method involves using winning product tools to find products that are hot in demand. What they do is they curate these products and provide it access to their users.

The most important thing here is they save time and most of them also provide ads insight on how to promote the products via social media.

Let’s talk about few of them;

AliDropship Premium Products

The AliDropship premium products are a list of hot-selling products tested by the AliDropship team on their own dropshipping stores.

They pick potential winning products and run test adverts to find winners amongst these products using different ad copies.

Once they find the winner they then add it to their premium products list on a weekly basis. So users subscribed to it will be provided access to the products and the winning ad copies to promote the product.

Finally, these products are made available inside your WordPress dashboard, so you can easily publish them with a push of a button.

Ecomhunt

Another popular dropshipping product research tool is Ecomhunt. Unlike AliDropship, Ecomhunt allows auto import of these winning products to Shopify stores while the former works with WordPress.

Ecomhunt also provides a list of hot-selling products for their users on a daily basis. They provide at least 2 winning products on a daily basis.

And these include ad video and ad insight like interest, and demography on how to promote the products on Facebook.

Dropship Spy

This is another winning product tool that provides products to users on a daily basis.

It also provides a tool that lets you download real users reviews of products on Amazon that you can upload as product reviews on your website.

Dropship spy pretty much works the same way with Ecomhunt, so they are both similar tools that can be used to hunt products to sell.

Step 2: Find a Reliable Supplier

The place of suppliers cannot be over-emphasized in the dropshipping business. This is because they are the owners of the products you’re selling.

So, it’s safe to say the quality of your supplier determines the success of your business.

Trust me without a reliable supplier there won’t be a product for you to dropship. So you might as well take them seriously.

One of the ways to spot good supplier on AliExpress is by checking their seller rate. You wouldn’t want to go for a seller below a 90% score.

Most likely, AliExpress is this the best options for anyone interested in dropshipping from Nigeria. Except you have a reliable manufacturer or seller in Nigeria that’s willing to work with you.

In this case, all you’ll have to do is promote their products send orders to them, and they will be the one to handle the logistic within Nigeria.

Other than that, AliExpress is your best guess!

Products on AliExpress are relatively cheap giving you profit scalability on your business.

The good thing is over 80% of drop shipper use AliExpress so this might be your best choice in Nigeria.

However, using AliExpress also comes with its own challenges! Which of course is the issue of AliExpress long shipping time.

This is when questions like;

will your customer be able to pay before they receive their products in Nigeria? Or will they be able to wait over 30 days before they receive their package, will begin to pop up in your mind.

Then you’ll begin to wonder, is all hope gone for dropshipping in Nigeria?

Nah! You can always sell to international markets or delve into the Mini importation business.

Step 3: Choose a selling platform

Now, this part is very important, because it determines how your website is going to look to your customers. And you know professionalism breeds reputation.

For this I’m going to list two platforms for building your store. They include:

• WordPress and
• Shopify

WordPress –

The good thing here is I already created an article on how to set up a dropshipping website with WordPress from scratch.

Click and open the link on another tab and read once you’re done and ready to create your dropshipping website.

There are several ways at which you can start your online store since there are several WordPress dropshipping tool.

This, however, makes the whole installation process very easy to do and straightforward. But before we start, there are other easy ways at which you can get started.

This includes getting a “DFY (done-for-you) dropshipping website” built on WordPress or get a duplicate of an already successful WordPress dropshipping store.

Which includes the same winning products on the website, product ads copies and also an installation package to install the site for you.

This is super great if you want to save time and stress of customizing and installing the new website yourself. Even great when you’re having little or no experience with WordPress customization.

Interested in getting a duplicate of the successful dropshipping website? You can learn more about that here!

Other than that, let’s begin with how you can start your dropshipping business with WordPress.

WordPress Dropshipping Set-up Requirements

For starters, you’ll need a self-hosted website on WordPress.org which entails a branded domain name and a web hosting account.

For this, you’ll need the following:

• Domain Name (The name of your website)
• Web hosting account (This is where your website data is housed online)
• SSL certificate ( To secure your website and makes it easy to accept payment online)
• WordPress Dropshipping Plugin (This is what makes your website a dropshipping website. More on this later)
• A Website Theme (This is what makes your website beautiful)
• Winning Products (This includes the products to sell on your store)
• Reliable Supplier (This is the supplier that owns the products you’ll be selling and they’ll be responsible for shipping of products to your customer)

Everything listed above can be categorized into TWO things which is the WordPress Platform and the Dropshipping Plugin you’ll be using.

#1: WordPress Platform

For this, you’ll need the first three requirements which are;

• A domain name
• Web hosting account
• And SSL certificate to set up your website on WordPress.

Luckily for you, you can get both domain name and SSL certificate for free when you buy web hosting with Bluehost.

The Domain name usually costs around $12 upward and SSL certificate around $20 upward. But both are free when you buy your web hosting account with Bluehost which is usually less than $3 per month.

Why Bluehost?

Well, Bluehost is a large reputable hosting company that has been in business since 2003 and they are currently hosting over 4 million websites across the world.

They also have a special package with WordPress.org and WooCommerce which makes their one-click installation very seamless.

Bluehost has a 99.9% uptime guarantee, which means you can forget about your website slowing down.

Using Bluehost is going to save you time, money and a whole lot of stress. Below is the list of other reasons you should consider Bluehost as your hosting company:

• Great customer support 24/7
• Established hosting company
• Officially recommended by WordPress.org
• Free Domain name
• Pre-installed WordPress
• Free SSL certificate
• 30 days money-back guarantee

Now that we have that out of the way, the next step is to set up your domain name and web hosting account with Bluehost and use the one-click installation button to install WordPress on your site before we process to the next step.

#2: Dropshipping Plugin

The remaining requirements like;

• Your website theme
• Winning product to sell
• And reliable suppliers…

Can all be categorized under the dropshipping plugin I will be introducing, which is no other plugin than the AliDropship Plugin For WordPress.

With AliDropship, you can create a full-fledged WordPress dropshipping website that is automatically integrated with AliExpress.

The AliDropship plugin helps you automate your dropshipping business by giving you access to winning and tested products that are killing it already in the market.

Not just that, they equally provide ads copies and interest targeting to promote the products on Facebook.

I mean… what could be more easier than that?

And once you start making sales the products are already linked to few of the top reliable suppliers on AliExpress.

Finally, the plugin also comes with free & paid themes that can be easily used to customize your dropshipping  website.

Shopify –

Shopify is a self-hosted platform and a website builder that allows you to easily build a website under a few minutes. You can create a store under 30 minutes and start selling any kinds of products you want to.

This is one of the best platforms for dropshipping if you are a newbie or even a professional. It allows you to focus on your business by branding and marketing your products while they manage your store for you.

The good thing is they offer a 14days trial. You can set-up your store in a day and start marketing immediately for the first week.

With this, it’s possible to make profits within the 14days and pay your subscription even before the trial expires.

But then, just because I said so, doesn’t mean you can!

I will recommend Shopify for those with no experience with WordPress as Shopify is relatively easy compared to WordPress but more expensive.

That been said, let’s create your Shopify store.

#1. Create a Shopify Account

The first step in creating a dropshipping store is setting up an account with Shopify. It starts by visiting the Shopify website.

When creating an account with them, you’ll be asked to enter a store name. So before setting up your account, you should brainstorm and find a good store name.

And while doing so, also check if the domain name is available (go for .com TLD). Most simple domain names are already taken.

If you’re thinking dogtoys.com, it’s already taken. To find a good domain name that goes with your product niche, you can use the help of free domain-hunters like instantdomainsearch.

If you’re just playing around with it, you should get a generic domain name that you can use to test different product niche ideas.

But if you can’t still come up with an idea, you can add a name to it which you can change later on. However, you can’t change the Myshopify URL you get.

Your myshopify URL follows this pattern: https://yourstorename.myshopify.com. And it’s via this URL that you’ll be able to access the backend/admin dashboard of your store.

So once you’re done creating an account, you’ll receive an email to verify your account.

#2. Install Dropshipping Apps

Shopify in itself isn’t fun yet except you add a dropshipping app to assist you and automate the dropshipping process for you.

And here’s where it gets more interesting. There are a couple of dropshipping apps to choose from with the most popular being Oberlo or Spocket. (Oberlo has stopped working)

Spocket works perfectly well with Shopify. It allows you to find trending products and also import these products into your Shopify store.

Instead of having to write your product descriptions from scratch, Spocket imports the suppliers’ product descriptions into your store. All you have to do is to edit it to your taste.

The product images of the suppliers are also imported into your Shopify store so you have nothing to worry about.

It also suggests the price and average profit that can be made from the product. What’s more, it has a free plan to start with.

Here’s how to install Spocket in your Shopify Dashboard

1. Log in to your myshopify dashboard
2. Click on “Apps” and you’ll find Spocket in the app store
3. Click “Add App”
4. Spocket would request permission to import products into Shopify, accept, and Install the app.

#3. Design your Store

Your store’s design can make or mar the success of your dropshipping business. By making a simple tweak in a store’s design, you can increase your revenue.

Little design details that you don’t pay attention to can cause you lots of sales. And that’s why there are Shopify design experts who focus solely on helping eCommerce businesses build a highly converting website.

However, it’s something you can do yourself. What’s more important is providing a good eCommerce experience to your visitors.

It all starts with your chosen store theme. Shopify offers some free themes to start with and you can also get a premium theme in the marketplace.

From the library of themes, choose a theme that would be a good fit with your dropshipping niche.

For instance, if you’re in the gaming niche, you need a graphics-oriented (and attractive) theme to match your audience’s taste.

#4. Customize your Theme

After selecting your chosen theme, the next thing is to customize the theme to your taste.

You have to customize the content, logo, and every other thing attached to the theme by default.

• Edit your Header

One of the first elements you will come across is the header. Once you’re in the customization interface, click on “Header”.

At this point, you should already have a logo designed. Add your logo to your Shopify header. You can choose to add an announcement bar at the Header of your store.

The announcement bar is what you find at the top of most Shopify stores via which they promote their black Friday offers or discount promos. You can achieve that on Shopify with no code.

• Edit Sidebar and Footer

Two essential sections you shouldn’t omit are the sidebar and footer. Depending on the theme you go for, there might be different elements under each section. Go over each of them and edit the content to fit your brand.

• Add Social Media Accounts

Under the theme setting, there are a lot of other things you can tweak and edit like your social media accounts.

Shopify allows you to add your social media accounts to your store which makes it easier for your customers to find you on several social media channels.

If you don’t have a social presence for your dropshipping store, then you should add it to your to-do list and can always come back to include it in your store.

#5. Add Essential Pages

For every store or legit online business, there are some essential pages you can’t but create. Likes of your “About page”, “Contact Page”, etc.

However, for eCommerce stores, the list of essential pages also include “Shipping policy”, “refunds”, etc.

After customizing your store to your taste, before going any further, you need to come up with these pages.

An easy way to do this if you are stuck finding ideas is to look at your competitors or any dropshipping store in your niche. There’s no harm in seeing how their pages are wired.

Check out their shipping policy and modify it to suit your business. You can also do the same for the rest of the pages.

#6. Add a Domain Name

With all set, the next thing on the line is to add a domain name to your store. By default, your store’s address will look like this: storename.myshopify.com. It’s quite unprofessional.

For better SEO and branding purposes, you need to get a custom domain name to link your store to. For instance, torchbankz.com. Your domain name must be easy to remember and brandable.

Another benefit attached to adding a custom domain name is that it hides your MyShopify address which is linked to your admin login.

It reduces the chances of hackers hacking into your dashboard.

So to do this, navigate to “Domains” under the “Online Store” menu as seen in the image above.

Once there, you can connect an existing domain (if you have one), transfer the domain name to Shopify, or buy a new domain from Shopify.

#7. Choose Payment Method

To set up your payment, click on Settings > Payments and find a suitable option for you. By default, Shopify pre-selects and displays PayPal as its first payment option.

But if this doesn’t work for you, there is a library of other options.

Shopify provides payment flexibility in case you are not comfortable with PayPal. There are several third-party payment providers like PayStack, CashEnvoy, 2Checkout Adyen, Bogus Gateway, Authorize.net, Airpay, etc.

While most of these payment providers have location limits based on the country they operate in, Shopify does well by recommending payment providers based on which would suit you best.

Besides these third-party payment providers, Shopify offers alternatives like BitPay, Coinbase Commerce, PayGate, and PaySera.

#8. Choose a Premium Plan

Finally, at this point, if you’re using the 14-day free trial, you should be close to the end of it. And there’s a need to choose a premium plan for your dropshipping business.

Shopify offers you three paid plans to choose from; Basic Shopify, Shopify, and Advanced Shopify plan.

The Basic Shopify plan costs $29 per month and is best for beginners just starting with their eCommerce business. It offers you the basic features to start and grow your store.

The Shopify plan costs $79 per month and offers few features over the Basic plan. It’s best for fast-growing businesses that want more automation. This plan offers professional reports.

Finally, the Advanced Shopify plan offers all the features alongside giving you the least transactional fees. It’s best for businesses with a large team and big eCommerce brands. It comes at $299 per month.

Thinking of which plan to start with? You can choose between the Basic Shopify and Shopify plan.

To learn more, you can check my Shopify Dropshipping Guide

Step 4: Market your business

Obviously, without marketing, nobody is going to visit your store. You can’t just sit down and expect customers to come and buy from your store.

You have to take it to them. The best place to market your product is through Facebook and Google Merchant.

You can do this by creating a Facebook fan page after your domain name and creating a Facebook business account to run your Facebook advert.

When running your Facebook ad, choose one of your cheapest products to drive traffic to store. Or use this method called Free Plus Shipping Model.

Once they make their first purchase they will naturally come back.

Another means is by collecting their emails upon sign-ups and sending marketing emails on new products or discount offers on existing products.

Instagram ads and Instagram influencers do a good job in marketing dropshipping products too, you can as well check them out.

Step 5: Start Making Money

Like I mention earlier, to make the work easier, there is a dropshipping plugin called “The AliDropship plugin”. This plugin is specifically designed for dropshipping.

What it does is that it helps you to import product descriptions, photos, etc from your supplier website to your store.

This can be done with just a click and when a product is sold on your store, it automatically sends the customer details to your supplier. The only thing left for you to do is to pay the supplier.

After that, the supplier then ships the product to your customer address without questions asked and your customer won’t know the product is from a third party.

Dropshipping has proven to be a good residual stream of income when done the right way and following the proper channel.

So learning how to start a dropshipping business in Nigeria is not enough, you need to implement what you’ve acquired.

FAQs About Dropshipping In Nigeria

The Issue of Payment Gateway In Nigeria

The payment gateway is still the greatest hindrance to several online businesses in Nigeria. However, in the case of dropshipping, there are few ways around that. They include:

• Stripe
• PayPal and
• Paystack

Stripe – This is the most widely used payment gateway in the world even better than PayPal. Their seamless integration makes it easy to receive payment on your website in any part of the world.

By default, it doesn’t work in Nigeria. And to legally use it, you’ll need to register your business in the US. I’ve written a complete guide on how to register your business to use Stripe.  You can as well check it out!

PayPal – this platform is one of the most widely accepted payment gateways but unfortunately it’s not visible in Nigeria. However, there has been a way around that. Which I’m sure few people are currently aware of.

If you’re not, I have a PayPal report on how to set up your PayPal account that receives payment in Nigeria.

Alternatively, you can use…

Paystack – this platform accepts payment by default only in Nigeria.

But if you want to receive payment internationally, you need to create an account with them and have your business registered with CAC and also have a corporate bank account in your business name.

After this, you can then send them a request for receiving international payment. If everything goes well, you can start receiving payments within 24 hours.

If you enjoy this post, let me know what you think in the comment section and do well to share with this with your friends and family.

That’s it on how to start a dropshipping business in Nigeria.