You can have a dropshipping store on Shopify up and running in a day. The harder question is whether you'll have a functioning business at the end of month three. Pick the wrong platform or the wrong suppliers, and you spend your time troubleshooting integrations and chasing fulfilment problems instead of building an audience and driving sales.
Shopify's entry plan is currently available at £1/month for the first three months, so you can build and test a full store before committing at standard pricing.
We set up a test dropshipping store on Shopify to work through the full workflow: product sourcing via DSers and Spocket, order routing, pricing automation, and the customer experience through to checkout. This is what we found.
Below we cover what dropshipping actually is, why Shopify suits it better than the alternatives, and what you need to understand before committing to the model.
Dropshipping is a retail model where you sell products you never physically handle. When a customer places an order in your shop, that order is forwarded to a third-party supplier who picks, packs, and ships it directly to your customer. You never see the product, and you never hold stock.
Your margin is the difference between what you charge the customer and what the supplier charges you. If a supplier sells a product for £12 and you list it for £24.99, your gross margin on that sale is around £12.99 before platform fees, payment processing, and any advertising spend.
The model has existed in traditional retail for decades. Catalogue businesses and wholesalers have used supplier fulfilment for years. What e-commerce has done is make it viable at small scale, without a purchasing department, a warehouse lease, or a logistics team.
The practical trade-offs are real and worth understanding from the start. Because you're not controlling fulfilment, you're dependent on your supplier's stock levels, packaging quality, and shipping times. Your customer doesn't know or care that a third party is involved. If the order arrives late or damaged, it's your brand that takes the complaint.
For a business getting started online, testing products and learning what sells, dropshipping removes the capital risk that has historically been the biggest barrier to retail. That's a genuine advantage. Just not a free one.
Shopify wasn't built exclusively for dropshipping, but the platform has become closely associated with it, and the reason is practical. When we connected DSers to our test store, the full import-to-fulfilment workflow took under an hour to set up. No custom code, no complex configuration. The ecosystem exists specifically to support this model in a way that WooCommerce or Wix simply don't match at this stage of the market.
The app store is the core of the appeal. A large proportion of Shopify's third-party apps exist specifically to support dropshipping workflows. DSers, the official successor to Oberlo (which Shopify originally built itself), lets you import products from AliExpress, set pricing rules, and auto-fulfil orders with a single click. Spocket connects you to UK and EU-based suppliers, which matters for British customers who expect delivery within a week. Zendrop and AutoDS offer similar functionality with different supplier networks and more automation options.
Beyond the dropshipping-specific apps, Shopify's general e-commerce infrastructure is strong. Checkout conversion is high. The Shopify checkout is used by millions of customers and carries a level of trust that a custom-built storefront would take years to establish. Shopify Payments handles card processing without a separate merchant account. Abandoned cart recovery is built in from the Basic plan upwards.
The theme library means you can build a store that looks credible without hiring a designer. And because Shopify is a fully hosted platform, you're not managing servers, updates, or security patches. You focus on the business side.
Your choice of supplier app matters more than most setup decisions. It determines where your products come from, how long they take to arrive, and how much you pay for automation as you scale. Here's how the main options compare.
DSers (free tier available) is the most widely used tool for sourcing from AliExpress. You browse AliExpress, push products to your store with your own titles, descriptions, and pricing, and when an order comes in DSers places it with the supplier automatically. The main downside is delivery time. AliExpress is predominantly Chinese suppliers, so UK customers can wait two to four weeks unless you filter specifically for suppliers with UK or EU warehoused stock.
Spocket focuses on UK, EU, and US suppliers, which makes it a better fit if delivery speed is a priority. Pricing starts at around £24 per month after the free trial, but faster fulfilment and better product photography often justify it for stores targeting British customers.
AutoDS and Zendrop offer more automation: price monitoring so your margins hold if supplier costs change, order tracking updates sent directly to customers, and broader supplier networks. These make more sense once you're at volume and manual fulfilment management would eat too much time.
The basic setup sequence is straightforward. Create your Shopify store, install your chosen supplier app, import products, write your own product descriptions (don't copy the supplier's, as Google won't rank duplicate content), set your pricing, and connect a payment method. You can be operational in a day.
Dropshipping has been oversold in certain corners of the internet as passive income with minimal effort. That framing is misleading. Going in with that expectation is the fastest route to a store that generates nothing.
It's a low-barrier model, not a no-effort one. Margins from AliExpress can be thin once you account for Shopify's monthly fee, Shopify Payments' transaction cut, and whatever you spend on advertising. A store stocked with generic products in a saturated niche, run without a marketing strategy, will not generate meaningful revenue.
What does work is niche selection, careful product research, and consistent marketing. Stores that find an underserved product category, build a recognisable brand around it, and drive traffic through paid social, SEO, and email can generate real returns. The model lets you test products quickly without financial risk. If something doesn't sell, you haven't bought 500 units of it.
Customer service stays your responsibility regardless of the fulfilment model. Shopify gives you the tools to handle it, including order tracking, automated notifications, and returns management, but you need to be responsive when things go wrong. And things will go wrong.
If you understand those realities and are prepared to treat this as a real business rather than a passive income scheme, Shopify is the right platform. It gives you the infrastructure, the supplier integrations, a trusted checkout, and the analytics you need to know what's working, at a price point that makes sense from day one. For anyone starting a dropshipping store in the UK, it's the clear first choice.
