Pre built dropshipping stores are now more readily available and cheaper than it has ever been. Back in 2016, getting a Shopify dropshipping store built on Upwork would set you back well over $1000.
Today, there are a number of online marketplaces where you can buy a pore built dropshipping store for under $150. This often includes everything you need to have your very own professional and fully functional business.
There’s a lot of good and bad in these turnkey dropshipping websites. There’s even some ugly with scammers always lurking and ready to pounce.
On the surface, dropshipping sounds like the perfect business model. You can start with almost no capital, only buy inventory when you make sales and you do not have to handle any products.
Websites and developers who sell pre built stores often harp on about all these benefits and like all good sales pages they make it look and sound very easy to simply ‘turn the key’ and start making money.
Dropshipping has become very competitive. Dropshipping from China has become riddled with pitfalls. It is not an easy business by any stretch of the imagination.
Buying a ready made dropshipping website could be a great option as it can help you overcome a lot of the hurdles that hold many people back.
Get Rich Quick: Turnkey Dropship Websites For Sale
The dropshipping space is jam packed with gurus and 16 year old idiots posing in rented Lambo’s on Youtube. None of them ever portray the true nature of running a successful dropshipping store.
It is not easy. It often takes a lot of failure before you see success and those who do get lucky early on tend to fall very hard if they do not learn quickly.
The idea of buying a ‘successful’ dropshipping store as a ‘turnkey business’ is a copywriter’s dream. You can sell this idea any day of the week because people who are desperate for success will love every single bullet point.
Your store is just one small part of your ecommerce business.
It is a very important part but by no means will a store in and of itself ‘make you’ successful.
One thing I’ve seen over and over again in dropshipping is how a dozen people can fail with a particular product and then one person comes along and makes 7 figures with the exact same product.
What makes the difference?
They are all selling the exact same product, sourcing it from China for almost the exact same price. They all use Shopify and most have a more or less professional looking store.
The difference comes in with the one person who got her marketing right. The right angle, the right branding and the right message.
This holds true for business in general.
It is not WHAT you do but HOW you do it. Ultimately your store is a means to an end. So many people spend weeks and weeks creating their store and making the most minute adjustments and tweaks to ‘get it perfect’.
Expending so much energy on building your store is very dangerous. When your store does fail, it can really leave you feeling deflated and even depressed.
There are 3 important mindsets that you need to have to be successful with dropshipping and eCommerce in general.
- How can I best serve my customers to help them fix their problem or satisfy their desire
- Everything is a test – don’t get attached to your products and don’t fall in love with your own ideas
- Don’t get it right, just get it started – don’t spend too much time, money or energy to test an idea.
If you keep these 3 ideas in mind when you buy a turnkey dropshipping store then you could make it work.
If you are looking to buy a pre made dropshipping store because you want to ‘buy success’ then you will be bitterly disappointed.
Never think that buying a pre made store will bring you instant success. While it could, it most likely will not.
The very mindset of looking for a shortcut to success is the real problem.
The Pro’s of Buying a Pre-Built Dropshipping Store
Can you really start any business and have it completely up and running in 24 hours or less? I do not know of many business models that would allow you to do that other than buying a pre built dropshipping store.
Apart from being able to get started quickly, it also removes a lot of the technical aspects that keeps many people from even attempting eCommerce.
Getting a Shopify store set up, having products added and making it look polished and professional is not easy.
Buying a pre built store however can give you just that. Lets briefly look at the main advantages of pre built stores.
1. Speed
Time is money. We’ve all heard this so many times that we have become tone deaf to its importance.
I’ve been guilty of this as much as anyone else.
Getting caught up in non-productive tasks that suck up half a day – tasks that will never warrant the time spent on it. These are often tasks you could have paid someone on Upwork $50 to complete.
In dropshipping as in much of eCommerce it is not so much about finding winning products as it is about finding which products are not working.
Speed is essential. There is a saying in business that you need to ‘fail faster’ and this is certainly true in dropshipping.
You do not want to spend months building a store only to see it not working after the first week of launching it.
If you do everything ‘sort of’ right then a winning product will usually sell right off the bat even if you do not have everything perfect yet.
Buying a pre built store will allow you to quickly start testing products. The fact that the pre built stores look very professional and are filled with products that are proven to sell gives you a head start.
You can start testing products in 24 hours or less. Compare that to the person who spends 6 weeks picking products, adding them to Shopify, making their own (crappy) logo and trying to write good product descriptions etc.
Almost every single winning product I have ever had, started converting from day one. You immediately know if you were able to match the right product to the right audience.
Once you have that match, then you can start refining your sales process because then it is time and money well spent.
Spending time and money refining your sales process before you have a product that is proven to sell is just wasted time and money that could have been spent testing new products.
2. Quality
Unless you have some experience with building websites and/or graphic design skills you could really struggle to build a quality Shopify store. Woocommerce is even harder if you are not technically or graphically inclined.
Building a quality store requires both graphic and technical ability. The days of slapping together an ugly store with a free theme is well and truly over.
Your store needs to look polished and profession just for you to stand a chance in the competitive dropshipping world.
You could buy a great looking theme but there are always adjustments to be make, logo’s and graphics to be added and optimizations to be done.
It trikes me just how blatantly obvious amateur stores always look and I always know that behind the scenes someone probably struggled for weeks just to make it look that average.
Buying a pre built dropshipping store firstly allows you to see exactly what you are buying. Most of the pre built stores for sale look great.
They are almost always very well formatted and optimized with the right image sizes and appropriate mobile optimization.
Often times you can also get a professional logo already set up with your pre built store which is a must.
If you can not at least make a store that is close to being on par with a pre built store then buying a store will not only be cost effective but give you a quality store to have a fighting chance of making it.
3. Learning Curve
Whether you choose to use Woocommerce or Shopify, there will be a learning curve involved. If you have a basic understanding of websites and CSS then the learning curve won’t be much.
If you don’t then it can really suck up valuable time. While Shopify is much easier to use, you will still need to learn how to make basic edits and how to control certain aspects of your store in Shopify’s backend.
Much of this learning curve can be skipped if you buy a pre built dropshipping store. This is especially true if you decide to go with Woocommerce.
A pre built store will come ready to rock and you will only need to learn the very basics of how to actually operate the store.
Ass far as editing is concerned you will be able to skip that altogether. This is a great option if you have no real technical skills.
4. Product Selection
One of the biggest challenges with dropshipping is product selection. With millions of products available for dropshipping you are spoiled for choice.
Selling the right products to the right audience at the right time is the golden recipe for success. It takes a lot of testing and experience to develop a sense of what works and what doesn’t.
There are many spy tools available now that aim to make product selection easier. Tools like EcomHunt, SellTheTrend and BigSpy scrape a lot of Facebook Ads to find dropshipping products that are consistently being advertised.
The theory is that if someone is consistently spending money advertising a product then they must be making a positive ROI.
Selling products that are already proven to sell could be a good strategy – especially if you are starting.
Trying to find outlier products that could become best sellers is an expensive game to play.
When you buy a pore built dropshipping store you will most likely get the store with anything from 10 to 50 pre-populated products already added.
Most pre built stores are built around massively popular products which could make your life a whole lot easier.
The idea of a ‘plug and play’ store with proven products is very appealing. While it does not guarantee success in any way, shape or form it does make this incredibly tricky task of product selection much easier.
5. Analysis Paralysis
Overthinking everything is a very real problem – especially for inexperienced dropshippers. Over time you learn (mostly through trial and error) what works and what doesn’t.
This makes the decision making process much easier but if you lack the experience it can be tough.
Far too many dropshippers spend weeks and even months on niche selection. Some spent weeks on picking a theme or a name or a domain.
This is commonly referred to as analysis paralysis and the idea is that all the options in front of you are not helping you but rather paralyzing you.
This is perhaps most evident when it comes to product selections. If you log into Aliexpress you will be confronted with millions of products. How do you choose? Where do you even start?
From this point of view, a turnkey store is great. It really helps you to overcome analysis paralysis as most of the decisions have already been made by people who have (hopefully) been there and done that.
If you are prone to analysis paralysis then buying a dropship can certainly help you and it could save you weeks of thinking about things without actually getting much done.
5. Cost
Just so you know that I know, I’ve included cost as both a pro and a con of buying a dropshipping store.
The reason is that spending money on buying a dropshipping store can have both advantages and disadvantages – depending on your financial situation.
If you spend $50 for a Spy Tool to find good products, $100 for a good Shopify theme and maybe even another $100 to $500 to get your theme customized and get a professional logo done then the costs can quickly add up.
From this point of view, spending $150 to $200 on a pre built store where you get a theme that is perfectly adjusted and a store filled with proven products makes total sense.
The Con’s of Buying a Pre-Built Dropshipping Store
Buying a beautifully designed store that looks professional and completely ready to go does sound very appealing – especially if the price tag reads $149.95.
There are a lot of issues with pre built stores though and by far the biggest issue is the fact that you may be one of many who buys exactly the same store – or at least a store that is very similar to hundreds of others out there.
This gives you very little room for being creative and adding your own personality and USP to really set you apart from the competition.
On top of that, you have to treat carefully as there are many scammers out there trying to take advantage of would-be dropshipping entrepreneurs.
1. Saturation
One of my biggest gripes with pre built dropshipping stores is the fact that the same store could be sold to number of buyers.
This means that you could be one of many store owners who all have the exact same store and sell the exact same products.
On top of this, the products in your store was most likely uncovered by using a spy tool to find these products that are (or where!) top selling products some time ago.
Saturation can be a real problem. If too many people sell the same products and all have the same marketing materials it can become very spammy.
2. USP
Pre built dropshipping stores tend to be very generic. It has no real USP and nothing that really makes it unique.
A unique selling position (USP) or what is commonly referred to as ‘an angle’ or a ‘a hook’ is how you position your product.
With a USP it allows you to focus more on HOW you are selling the product than WHAT product you are selling. An angle gives you a unique approach in presenting something about the product that could appeal directly to a segment of your audience.
This allows you to stand out from the crowd and indirectly gives your product a higher perceived value.
Suppose you sell a diaper bag. Most stores will simply sell the diaper bag based on its features and functions.
What if your angle was to sell a diaper bag for moms with twins? Or how about you push the fact that the bag is 100% organic or target parents who travel a lot?
This becomes very hard to do with a pre built store as your USP will require a significant overhaul of your name, logo and much of your text.
A USP often makes the difference between a product failing or succeeding.
3. Growing and Editing
If you buy a dropshipping store that is perfectly packaged up and ready to go it can be a great start – especially if you don’t know much about Shopify, apps and importing/editing products.
If you do start seeing some sales and you need to start growing and editing your store you could run into a lot of issues.
At this stage you will either have to learn very quickly or spend the money to pay someone to do it for you.
Personally, I dislike the fact that I have to pick up on someone else’s work – someone who may have done things very differently to the way I like doing it.
You may have to spend significant amounts of time trying to figure out what they original developers of the store did so you can pick it up and run with it.
4. Cost
Buying a turnkey dropshipping store is not expensive. At the high end you could pay around $500 and at the low end you could get away with spending only $100.
If you are starting with a tight budget then spending your limited budget on buying a store is probably not a wise decision.
I consider a low budget to be anything under $500. In this case you are far better off spending the time to do it yourself and spend the $100 or do to get the absolute basics. Use the other $400 for ads.
This will get you much further than blowing half your budget on buying a ready made store.
Remember that buying a store that is pre-filled with ‘winning products’ does not guarantee your success.
5. Trust
I am a firm believer that you have to trust people if you want to do business. I can still hear my grandmother’s advice not to trust anyone ringing in my ears.
Being cautious is important though – especially in the wild west that is the internet and dropshipping.
There are a lot of scams and there are a lot of people who have no shame in scamming you.
The problem is if you don’t know what you don’t know. Someone could steal from your store by placing code that you may never be aware of.
Someone could re-sell the store you buy even if they promise not to. Someone could sell you a store with products that have well known issues to get your accounts banned.
Where To Buy Pre Built Dropshipping Stores
There are a number of places online that offer turnkey dropship websites for sale. Some are more credible than others.
One mindset you need to have when you do decide on buying a turnkey dropshipping store is to understand that the store itself will not guarantee your success.
I’ve listed 6 reliable places to buy a pre built store from. There are probably many more but trust is always an issue.
One place I would strongly discourage you from buying a store is on Facebook Groups and private forums.
There is no accountability from sellers on these platforms and you are far better off buying through an established marketplace where there is accountability.
Here are the 6 best places to buy a pre built dropshipping store from.
1. ECOMMERCEiFY
ECOMMERCEiFY has some of the best looking pre built dropshipping stores for sale. What I like in particular is that all their stores are built around very specific niches.
Starting with a niche store is infinitely better than a spammy general store. Their pre built stores sell for around $150 and include everything may need to get started.
This includes a logo (which is okay), a collection of proven products and a professional quality theme.
Everything is also set up and all you need to do is to provide your payment gateway details for either Paypal or Stripe.
ECOMMERCEiFY offer two packages with an upgrade available for $299 which offers SEO and Social media posts which in my opinion is not worth it. The $149 package is very well priced for what you get.
The downsides are of course that they do not offer exclusivity and all their stores could be sold to many multiple users all with only slight tweaks.
2. BeBiggy
BeBiggy is one of the more established Shopify developers who sell pre built dropshipping stores. Being in business for longer, they have sold the same stores for more than one year which potentially means that there are dozens of similar store around.
One big advantage with BeBiggy is that they also have their own spy tool for finding winning products. As a stand alone tool the cost is 19.99/month and this is also the tool they use to find products for the stores they sell.
Buying a dropshipping store from BeBiggy will cost you $299 for a ‘regular Shopify store’ and $599 for a ‘premium Shopify store’. The difference between the two is not obvious but the more expensive stores are newer stores with more fresh and up to date products.
These newer stores are also not as saturated and over sold as some of the older ones.
BeBiggy is a solid place to buy a store from and their stores look great and will give you a solid foundation. They are also pretty good with post sales and helping you out if you were to get stuck.
3. AliDropship
AliDropship is one of the most popular dropshipping apps for WordPress and Woocommerce. It essentially does exactly what Oberlo does for Shopify.
AliDropshiphave expanded their business in many directions and one of them is to offer pre built Woocommerce sites.
If you do not want to go down the Shopify paid subscription route then this is where you should be looking.
The guys behind AliDropship are veteran dropshippers and their product selections and themes are on the money.
A pre built dropshipping store from AliDropship will cost you $299 and that includes a copy of the AliDropship plugin which is a $89 value and one of their AliDropship themes which is a $67 value. It does not include hosting though.
I love what AliDropship has to offer as they do not simply sell cookie cutter stores. All their stores are somewhat custom and when you order a store from them you have quite a bit of control over what you get.
An account manager will help you find the right niche match for you and your $299 store will come with everything – including 50 products with professional product images and descriptions.
They also offer a more expensive $899 package that comes with 200 products but that might be overkill if you are just starting out.
I think that AliDropship hands-down offer the best value if you want to buy a pre built dropshipping store.
4. Premade Stores
Premade Stores is slightly different than some of the other store sellers in that there is a level of customization to every store they sell. I really like this because you are not just buying some cookie cutter store.
They allow you to choose your own niche and give them a business name for your business. Their base cost is $180 with a few add-ons like a logo ($25) and product descriptions ($35) that are well worth the money.
Their turnaround time is 24 hours which is great. They do also offer pre built stores around some popular niches.
These will be very similar to what you can buy on the previous platforms.
What I do not like with their pre built stores is that they simply import Aliexpress product descriptions which is a big no-no in my books.
All and all, these are great starter stores that look ultra professional and I would highly recommend using their custom option – especially at that price.
5. Flippa and Marketplace Exchange
Flippa is one of the most established marketplaces for buy and selling digital assets. They sell a lot of domains and websites – mostly established ones with a proven earnings history or a proven value (as with domain names).
On Flippa’s eCommerce section you will mostly find dropshipping stores that already have proven earnings. These tend to sell for much higher prices.
To find ‘starter stores’ you can simply browse for stores with no claimed earnings and that are less than 1 year old.
These stores sell for anything from$50 to $500. While Flippa is a very safe and secure place to buy websites from the stores that are for sale tends to be a mixed bag. There are some gems to be found but you will need patience.
Shopify’s Exchange Marketplace is yet another great marketplace where you can buy a starter store. Similar to Flippa they also have many established stores but they tend to have a bigger inventory of starter stores.
Given that it is owned and operated by Shopify gives you some reassurance but does not give you many guarantees. There are a lot of crappy stores for sale with the occasional gem.
6. Fiverr
Fiverr offers some truly amazing gigs and when it comes to Shopify you are spoiled for choice. While there are a number of sellers that sell pre-built stores, on Fiverr I would recommend you go for a more custom option.
On Fiverr you can get a ‘custom’ Shopify store for around $350 and a more generic one for around $200.
The best part about Fiverr is that their reviews are very reliable. If you can find a gig with more than 100 5 star reviews then you can proceed with a lot of trust.
While many of these Fiverr gigs will promise you a unique store that does not mean it is a one-of-a-kind store.
If you want something a bit more custom while still staying on a tight budget then I would recommend you go the Fiverr route.
Make sure you know exactly what you will get and make sure you communicate with the seller before you buy to make sure you can get something as custom as you think you will get.
Make sure you ask them about the logo/name and make sure they don’t just use the Wix Logo Maker. Ask them about the theme they use (is it a premium theme of just a free one) and most importantly, ask them how they pick products.
