One of my regrets early this year is that i had little or no knowledge about drop shipping. well the main issue is not about me not having the knowledge but thinking drop shipping is a get rich quick scheme and that was the core of my problem also was the beginning of my failure.
Drop shipping is a big man job not only drop shipping but E-commerce is not an easy business to venture in without researching and having a sufficient amount of information to make you know the cons and pros in drop shipping cos lack of knowledge is simply the beginning of failure. Am not here to teach you about drop shipping even i don’t have adequate knowledge to make a living on drop shipping i just want to dish out an advice and some financial management on drop shipping with my little experience.
I will be talking about woo-commerce and shopify here since both are the most commonly used plugin for starting an E-commerce store, i will be talking about their pros and cons in terms of monetary management and features and on what to choose for starters who want to rush into drop shipping.

SHOPIFY.
What is shopify?
is an all in one eCommerce solution, which allows you to set up an online store to sell your goods, and provides customers with a great user experience. It features customizable templates, organized storefront, ‘Buy Button’ functionality, which allows you to use Shopify as a Point of Sale (POS) option and let customers buy your goods anywhere online.
You can visit https://www.shopify.com/ for more info
They have 7 days free trial though.

Pros:
* Speed and security – Shopify is integrated with payment providers, and its built-in speed checkout allows customers to pay with minimal load time.
* Marketing – Shopify allows custom Title tags, meta descriptions on every category page for SEO purpose and also allows you to build customized landing pages for marketing purpose.
* Design – Shopify offers multiples free themes and numerous custom-built premium themes along with the option to customize and add features for Developers.
* App Store – Shopify App store has all the features that you need to run an online business. It provides various free and paid Apps and adds flexibility for the brands having an online presence all around the web.
Cons:
* Pricing – Shopify’s basic plan starts from $29 a month; the average plan is for $79 a month, and advanced Shopify is for $299 a month.
* Customization Hacking – Shopify uses a different set up to customize their themes rather than using PHP for their templates. It might be a problem for first timers on Shopify.
* Content Marketing – Shopify’s blogging platform is not as great as WordPress as it provides a basic layout for blogging.
* Lock-In feature – Lock-in features to delete your online store permanently. Shifting from Shopify to another online store may not be a very smooth journey.

WOO-COMMERCE
What is Woo- commerce?
WooCommerce is one of the popular e-commerce plugin for WordPress. It is used by most of the online store in the world. WooCommerce plugin is free of cost. So you can sell your product anywhere and make WordPress more affordable and accessible.

WooCommerce Pros
1. WooCommerce is free –
WooCommerce is open source free software. This is very effective to scale online business. You do not have to pay for it. You can also update for free.
2. Professional and customizable –
Many free plugins are available to customize the WooCommerce plugin. It professional and standard that can be customizable with many themes so it can be modified for color variety.
Customers and visitors are impressed by the professional outlook of your website. It is user-friendly and provides lots of features that could customize your website.
You can download extra plugins to further customize your website. Many apps are available in free on WordPress store.
3. Analytics –WooCommerce provides lots of analytic tools to make top choice of developers. With these tools, you can easily measure the sales and analysis according to date brand, statics of customer, calculate your daily and monthly sales, measure no. Of orders and many more tools are inbuilt in WooCommerce.
4. Security - Security is one of the most important factors in e-commerce. Customer needs to make sure that transactions are secure. Merchant of e-commerce site makes sure that they are providing security to their customers. WooCommerce is very secure because it's regular updates undergoes for security purpose.
5. Flexibility – WooCommerce provides lots of functionality. You can change all the content easily. As like price, image, category and all. You can sell any type of product as like Simple, variable, downloadable etc.

WooCommerce Cons
1. Frequently WooCommerce updates – Most of the customers are dissatisfied about the update of WooCommerce. Sometimes your WordPress plugin is up to date but WooCommerce doesn't meet with updates.
2. Can be costly- WordPress and WooCommerce are free of cost and also there are various themes and plugins are available but sometimes it does not meet your requirement. If you want to customize site according to your requirement then it takes the time to do that or by expanding money you can customize your website.
3. Effective knowledge to use- This plugin requires effective knowledge to use. Sometimes when you want to make changes in your website but it is difficult to do by yourself. So you have to know about the both WordPress and WooCommerce.

As you ve seen from the above articles about the pros and cos of both woo-commerce and shopify so which do you think is beginner friendly?Well in my opinion i will go for woo-commerce.
I will be talking about woo-commerce here since its less costly than shopify and both offer the platform which is to create your online store.

If you decide on going with shopify you can go to their site https://www.shopify.com/ and purchase their basic plan which costs 29$/mo thats about 340$/year (N110/Year) although u get 7days free trial.

If you decided on going with WOO-commerce you should purchase your woo-hosting plan from
https://balehosts.com/woo-hosting, since woo-commerce is a plugin that is installed on wordpress. You can purchase your plan form https://balehosts.com/woo-hosting ,their basic plan starts from 18k/Year (50$/yr) and they provide .
1. Free domain name(You will be saving 4k buying a domain name)
2. Unmetered SSD storage and bandwidth
3. Free ali2Woo plugin for importing your products from ali-express(You will be saving 40$ buying the plugin.
4. Free necessary plugin for a standard store.
5. They also provide free store setup.
SO when you purchase their basic plan or any plan they help you to install a professional woo-commerce theme,plugin and setup your store with necessary plugin installed so all you have to do is to search for your niche and import your products to your store.so i recommend https://balehosts.com/woo-hosting if you decided to go for woo-commerce.

Thanks for reading.you can drop your suggestions below ,nobody knows it all

Nice. How abt payment gateway for woocommerce for Nigerians ?

africanman85:
Nice. How abt payment gateway for woocommerce for Nigerians ?

There are several payment gateway for Nigerians to use on their woo-commerce site but the main issue is trust. USA citizens trusts PayPal and stripe more than any payment gateway and when they go to your store and see you don't have PayPal or stripe as a mode of payment they simply lose interest thinking its scam. You can use PayPal Lesotho business account, gtpay, quickteller and so much more as a mode of payment. PayPal holds your cash for 21days or less until your customer receives his/her products, u can use skrill business account also but my advice is to register your store business name in Nigeria or UK for more trusts with PayPal or any payment gateway