How To Create a Dropshipping Website for FREE (2021)

have you always wanted to start your very own drop shipping business but you just haven't had the money to invest well now you don't need to worry because in today's tutorial i'm going to be showing you how you can set up your very own branded dropshipping store for an entire year without investing a single penny and this video isn't clickbait we're not going to be setting up some store in a 14 day free trial i'm going to be showing you how to set up a complete drop shipping store without investing one single penny and you might be thinking how can we actually do this well in this tutorial i'm going to be showing you how you can get free hosting how you can connect a free domain to that hosting how you can also go and install a free ssl certificate and then i'm going to be showing you how to go and install the free woocommerce plugin to add e-commerce functionality to your website how you then can go and import products from aliexpress using a free plug-in and then how you can also go and build all of the necessary pages for your dropshipping store using a free drag and drop page builder so if you always wanted to start your very own dropshipping store and just go and try it out and see if you can make money without actually investing any money this is the perfect tutorial for you so let's go and have a look at the website we will be creating in today's tutorial so here is the free drop shipping store that we will be building in today's tutorial as you can see it is a beautifully branded design we have some categories over here and we have some best selling products that have been imported from aliexpress down here and you can see we also have a branded domain name and an ssl certificate that gives us this little padlock to tell our customers that the website is secure and as i mentioned in the beginning of the video all of this will be completely free for one entire year i will be showing you how you can go and create beautiful product pages like this and how you can go and write your product listings and then your customers can just go and choose the options of the product and add these straight to the cart and they can also go and see additional information about the product down below and as they scroll they will be able to see related products from different categories i will be showing you how to go and categorize your products so you can go and display them to your customers in the best possible way and i'll also be showing you how you can go and create all of the other necessary pages such as a contact us page a privacy policy and a returns and refunds page i'll also be showing you how you can go and connect paypal and stripe payment gateways so that you can start accepting payments from customers right away so your customer simply needs to add their item to the cart and then they can go and view their cart over here they can go and make amendments to their cart so they can go and delete and add products they can go and apply coupon codes and then they can just go and proceed to the checkout and then they just need to go and pay either using paypal or a debit or credit card and then i will be showing you how you can go and fulfill orders using aliexpress so that you can just go and drop ship these products so if you have been looking at how to set up a dropshipping store without investing one single penny then this is the tutorial for you because i have loads of hidden gems that i want to share with you throughout this tutorial such as setting up a free professional email address and loads of other things so without keeping you waiting any longer let's begin the tutorial in order to start building your free drop shipping store we are firstly going to need to get some hosting and hosting basically allows you to have your website live on the internet so we will be using pro free host to get completely free hosting for life so you won't have to pay a penny to host your website live on the internet so just click the link in the description to pro free host and it will bring you over to this page over here so what we are going to do first is we're going to go and click on create account over here so let's just wait for this ad to finish and once the ad finishes we can go over here to where it says register so just go and enter in your email address and select a password and once you have entered in your email address and selected a password just go and click on this tick button over here then we can just go and confirm that we're not a robot and hit verify over here and now it's going to create our completely free hosting account so once you have done that you will be brought over to this page now if we scroll down it's going to go and say that we need to activate our account via our email so just go and head over to your email account over here and we should be able to go and find an email from from pro free host so just go and click on this i'm gonna go and click on activate account so now it's going to say that your account has been activated and it's redirecting us to our account and now over here we can go and click on create new account so just go and click on this over here now from here it's going to ask us to launch our new website now don't worry we are just going to go and start off with a free domain and then we're going to go and get a another domain a custom domain that we're going to go and connect to this hosting account so just go and pick any name that is familiar with you so i'm just going to go and pick digital agency approval and then once we have done that we can just go and click this tick button over here and once again we can just go and verify that we are not a robot and it's going to go and create our hosting account so just give it a few moments to finish registering your hosting account so from here now we can go and look at our hosting account so over here if you just go and click on manage and it's going to bring us over to our pro free host account so over here we can go and see we've got our username we've got our ftp host name and username which we'll be using later we have our dns name servers so don't worry about these things if you don't know what they are yet because we'll be using them throughout the tutorial and everything is really simple to use with this pro free host account so what we are going to do next is we are actually going to go and register a professional domain for completely free so we are going to go and head over to a website called names.co.uk and from here we can go and register a domain so i will leave a link in the description to names.co.uk and it should bring you over to the home page over here so from here we're just going to go and click on donate domains and basically you can get a dot co dot uk or a dot uk domain for completely free now i know some of you may be in the us or in australia or in many different countries around the world but you can still go and run your store using a dot co dot uk domain that's perfectly fine it's a very trusted domain and it doesn't matter if you're outside of the uk you can still go and run your store using a dot co dot uk domain so if you just want to go and search up a domain that you want to go and use for your store so i'm going to be registering the chillcutridge.co.uk domain but if you're unsure of what domain name to pick for your store you can just use a website called lean domain search and basically this website allows you to type in words and then you can go and get suggestions for a domain name so if we just go and type in let's just say baby for example we can go and search all of the domain names that are available that have a baby in so you can go to length over here and you can go to starts with or ends with so you could go for let's go for ends with we could go for valid baby or guild baby or whichever one you think is suitable for your drop shipping store so once you have gone and thought about a domain you want to pick just go and type it in here i'm going to go and hit search domains so now it's just going to go and load the results of the available domains and once the domains have finished loading you will see over here that you can go and register either a dot co dot uk or a dot uk domain for one year for completely free so just go and click add so you can see over here i've already added this one over here then what we are going to do is click on proceed to basket then over here we're just going to go and ignore this so we can just click on proceed to basket once again once again we can go and ignore this because we don't need any web hosting so we can go and click on proceed to basket now once the basket loads we will see that we've got some of these things in here so we can just go and get rid of these so let's just go and delete all of this and now that we can go and see we've got this domain one year registration and it's going to cost us not one single penny so once we do that we're just going to go and click on create an account over here now from here you're just going to go and enter in your details and once you have entered in all the details you can just go and click on proceed so once you have created your account it will bring you back to your cart so you can just go and confirm that you've read the terms and conditions and just click on proceed again now once you do this you do just need to go and enter in some payment details now don't worry you won't be charged anything you can see here that the amount due is still zero this is just part of the domain ownership of validation so just go and enter in your billing details over here and click on confirm and then finally you just need to go and enter in your card payment details and as i mentioned you will see that the amount you'll be charged is still zero so once you have entered that in just click on continue so once you have done that it will say thank you for your order and now we can actually start using our domain so the first thing we are going to do is click on control panel over here so just go and click on this control panel and we will go and see that we have all of our domain registration in information over here now the first thing that we're going to do is change the name servers so go and click on change name servers over here and we are going to go and enter in the name servers of our free hosting account so go and head back to your pro free host client area so if you have been logged out just go and log back in and now from here what we are going to do is we are going to go and click on dns and we're going to go and find these name servers over here so we're going to go and copy these name servers so copy this first one over here and i'm going to head back over to the name stop code uk control panel and we're going to go and paste that in there and now we're going to go and copy the second one over here and once again we're going to come back over here and paste that in there so now just go and click on update you will then see over here that it says your name servers may take up to 12 between 12 to 48 hours to take effect now that's totally fine it hopefully should be a lot quicker than that so what we're going to do next is we are going to go and add our domain to our hosting account so go back over to your pro free host account over here i'm going to go and click on where it says control panel so go and click on control panel over here and it's just gonna redirect us to the control panel so just give it a few moments now if when redirecting to your control panel you get this message over here don't worry just go and click on advanced and click on proceed to control panel and click on continue now it's going to bring us over to our control panel so it's just going to go and ask for your approval so just go and click on i approve and now it's going to go and bring us to the control panel for our hosting now from here we can go and add our domain to our hosting account so if we scroll down and click on add-on domains over here just go and click on this and now we can go and type our domain in here so i'm just going to go and add my domain so just go and type in your domain name and click on add domain so then you should get congratulations you have now added a new domain to your control panel so just go and click on go back over here so now we can see we've got our domain over here so that's perfect so now that we have got our hosting and we have got our domain and we have connected our domain to our hosting account the next thing that we are going to do is sign up for a free professional email address so we are firstly going to get a free professional email address and then we will go and install an ssl certificate so like i said don't worry if you don't know what these things are that's totally fine because i'm going to take you through every step of the process so next thing we are going to do is head over to a site called zoho.com mail once again i will leave a link in the description and we are going to use this to go and create our free professional email address so just click over here where it says sign up for free and then from here we're going to scroll down and we are going to go for the forever free plan so just go and click on sign up now now from here we are going to go and enter in our domain name again and then we can just go and click on add now once again just go and enter in all of your details now once you have entered in your details over here where it says administrator account make sure you put in admin don't put anything else like contact or help make sure that you go and put in admin because we are going to need this email address later on when we get a free ssl certificate so this is very important make sure you enter an admin over here and also make sure you enter in the correct mobile number because zoho needs to verify that we're a real person by verifying our mobile number so once you have entered all of those details in and like i said with admin in here just click on proceed now from here you can just go and make sure that everything is correct and now we're just going to click on sign up so now just wait a few moments and zoho is going to send us a text message so that we need to go and verify our account so over here it's going to ask us to enter in the verification code so just go and get that code from the text message that they send you and once you have entered in that code just click on verify my mobile so now just give it a few moments to load so now from here we can actually go and set up the professional email address with our domain name so over here it's going to go and ask us to select our dns manager so we can just go and choose others over here now what we're going to need to do is is we're going to need to verify that we own the domain now we can't use this txt method so click on this cname method over here so click on cname method and what we're going to have to do is enter in these details in our hosting account this is really easy so firstly we're just going to go and copy this where it says name host alias so just go and copy this head back over to your control panel so this one over here now if you don't know how to get here once again you can just click on control panel once logged into your pro free host account and you will come over to here now click this little grid icon over here and we will come back to our control panel and from here we can go and type in cname so once we've typed in cname we're going to go and click on cname records over here so click on cname records and we're going to add a new cname to our domain so the record name is going to be what we just copied from zoho mail so this one over here then where it says value points to destination we're just going to copy this head back to our control panel under cname i'm going to go and paste that under here then just go and click on add so now that we have added that we can go back to the zoho mail setup and we can go and click on verify by cname now the first time you click it you may get cname validation failed now don't worry if it comes up with this that just means we just have to wait a few more moments because it hasn't kicked in straight away so just click x on this i'll just get rid of this chat and let's just leave it for a few moments and i'll come back and click verify by cname again so i have just left this for a couple of minutes and now i'm going to go and click on verify by cname again so once you click on that it will verify that you own your domain and it will say congratulations your domain has now been verified now over here you will see that we are creating this account so like i said earlier make sure that this is just admin so we are going to use this email address later on when we want to get our free ssl certificate so leave this as admin and just click on create account now it's going to ask us if we want to add any users now we're just going to go and stay with one user so we can just go and click on skip over here and then you can go and create groups as well if you want to but once again i'm just going to go and hit skip for this part now from here we are going to have to go and add some other records to our dns zone within our hosting so over here we are just going to go and copy this first one where it says address and we're going to head back to our cpanel so once again just click on this grid icon over here and let's just close this ad and we're just going to go and advance to cpanel so i'm just going to go and log back in so let me just go to control panel over here it's just going to ask me to log in so just give me a second so i'm just going to go and log in and we are going to go and head back to the cpanel so we can go and add those records for our professional email address so we're just going to click on manage over here and now we're going to go and click on control panel so it's just going to redirect us to the control panel over here and now from here we can just go in here i'm going to type in mx so we're going to go and click on mx entry over here and from here we are going to go and add in some mx records so firstly we've got this one over here so we're just going to go and delete this so just go and hit delete on this one over here and we are just going to go and add those zoho ones so in here firstly we're going to go and add in the first one that we copied with a priority of 10 and click on add then we're going to go head back over here the next one is this second one and the priority is going to be 20. so let's head back over here paste that in there and make the priority 20 and click on add and then we are just going to add the final one which is this one and the priority is the priority is going to be 50. so let's head back over here paste that in there and we're going to make the priority 50 and click on add so now that we have added those mx records we can come back over here and we can go and click on mx lookup and as we can see the following mx records are available so everything has worked correctly so we can just go and click on ok so now that we have done that we can go and click next so we can just go and skip this we don't really need to do this to use the email address and once again we can just go and skip email migration and you can go and download the mobile app if you want to i'm just going to go and click skip so now that we've done that we're going to go and click on go to zoho workplace and what we are going to do is we're going to go and open up our email account so we just click no thank you so over here we've got these unread emails so just go and click on this so now we have our email inbox open so the next thing we're going to do is go and get a free ssl certificate so i'm just going to click skip on this so in order to get our free ssl certificates we will be using this website xerossl.com so once again i will leave a link in the description so what we're going to do is we're going to go and enter in our domain name over here and once you have entered in your domain name just click on next step over here now from here we're just going to go and create an account so enter in your email address and pick a password and once you have done this just click on next step so as you can see i've already used this email so let me just go and pick a different email and as i said we're just going to click on next step now from here we can go and start getting our free ssl certificates so where it says i need wildcard we don't need this so just leave this unticked this is the one that you have to pay for but we don't actually need to use that and just to clarify an ssl certificate basically just gives you this little padlock over here in the url and this is really important for drop shipping and ecommerce stores because this tells your customers that your site is secure so when you are processing payments and things like that this just builds trust with your customers so it's really essential to have so we're going to go and click on next step over here we are going to go and get a 90-day certificate now don't worry you can go and renew these 90-day certificates it just means you have to go in and renew them but if you do want to pay you can go for the one year certificate but we are setting everything up for free in this video so this is we're just going to go for the 90 day certificate so click on next step then over here we're just going to leave this as auto generate i'm going to go and click on next step now from here we're just going to go for the free account so click on next step again now from here we are going to go for email verification and that is why i mentioned earlier that it was very important to go and put admin at your domain because they want us to go and send the email verification to this email address so we're just going to go and select this and we're just going to go and hit next and now we are just going to go and hit verify domain so now it's just going to say that it's pending the verification status so what we're going to do is we're going to head back to our zoma zoho email inbox and we will just go and refresh this so let's just refresh this very quickly and we'll just hit no thank you let's go back into our emails over here so we just click on mail and we should hopefully see that it comes up so let's just go and have a look so just give it a few moments for that email to come through so the email hasn't come through yet so if that does happen to you just head back here and click on resend email i'm just gonna hit it again and then we'll head back here and just wait so you can always just go and resend it if it doesn't come through straight away so now as we can see under notification we have these three emails so we are going to have to go and verify two versions of our ssl certificate so i'll just show you what i mean so this one is going to be one for just the normal domain and one for the www dot so this one over here is going to be for the www dot so what we're going to do is let me just have a look at the two ones we've got let's just go for the first one so we're just gonna go and copy this verification key and then we're gonna go and click on go to verification page i'm just gonna go and enter in that verification key and click on next so now we can just go and close the window so now if we head back over here and we refresh the status we can see that the email has been verified so now we're just gonna go and click on install certificate so now that we've gone and done that what we can do is we can go and download the certificate so just go and click on download certificates over here and now we will see that we've got this zip folder so now that we have downloaded the ssl certificates we need to go and upload this to our domain in order to open your ssl certificates you are going to have to use something called notepad plus plus so once again i will just leave a link in the description to notepad plus plus and just go and download the version that is compatible with your laptop so if you're using windows 10 you probably can go and use this top release over here this is the most recent one that i'm using and just go and install that on your laptop so once you have gone and done that you can go and head to your downloads and you will find that zip folder that we just downloaded so we're just going to go and right click this i'm going to go and hit extract all and then we're going to go and hit extract so now that we have extracted that we will see that we have our certificates over here so we've got ca bundle we've got certificates and we've got private key now when you right click this you can go and edit with notepad plus plus so that's why i say that we need to go and install notepad plus plus on your computer so that you can go and open that so what we're going to do now is we're going to head back to our cpanel we're going to click on the grid over here and now we are going to go and type in ssl so go and type in ssl and click on this first one ssl tls and over here we're going to go and configure the one for our domain name so let's just go and hit configure over here so firstly we're going to have to go and add this private key so if we just go back over here we can see we've got the private key so just right click this and click on edit with notepad and we are going to go and copy this whole private key so just highlight everything and copy this i'm going to go and paste it in here i'm going to hit upload key so now we've gone and uploaded our private key the next thing we need to do is go and upload the certificate so just give this a few moments to upload so once this has finished uploading we can now go and upload the certificate so once again we're just going to head back over here and where it says certificate just right click this and click on edit with notepad plus plus now once again we are just going to go and copy all of this so just highlight everything and just copy it and now just paste it in where it says certificates and click on upload certificate so let's just give this a few moments to upload again so once that has finished uploading we can actually go and check that our website has got an ssl certificate now so if we just go and copy our domain over here and we can go and head over to a website called sslshopper.com so what you're going to do is you're just going to go and put your domain name in here i'm going to go and click on check ssl and it should be able to show us if we have a valid ssl certificate so as we can see the certificate will expire in 90 days the host name is correctly listed in the certificate so we have a valid ssl certificate for our domain name now so that means we'll get this little padlock over here so now that we have gone and set up our ssl certificate and our free professional email address the next thing that we are going to do is install wordpress onto our domain so once again head back to your cpanel and if you have logged out of your cpanel don't worry just go to pro free host and click on control panel over here and you're just going to go and click on this little grid icon over here and now what you're going to do is from your cpanel dashboard we're going to scroll down and we are going to go and find this soft oculus apps installer so just go and click on this over here and once you click on this you should be brought over to this page over here so it will say softaculous over here now we will see we've got wordpress over here now my image is not loading so you should see the wordpress logo over here but don't worry if you don't so we're just going to go and click on wordpress over here and now we are going to go and click on install and from here we are going to go and choose our domain but we're going to change this http protocol so make sure you change this to https now don't worry if it doesn't say if it says a trusted ssl certificate was not found don't worry if it says that because we have already confirmed that we have an ssl certificate so like i said you make sure that you definitely choose https because that is what is going to give us the padlock and from here we can go and install wordpress on our domain so we can go and start building the drop shipping store now site name over here is going to be the name of your site so we can go and change this to chill cut so let me just go back to install toolkit ridge and the site description can sort of be what your site is about now don't worry you can go and change this so if you've just put something in for now you can always go and change this so i'm just going to call this the best hiking gear online so you can go and put a tagline like that in for your site description but like i said you can always go and change this so don't worry too much about this for now now from here we're going to go and choose our admin username admin password and admin email for the wordpress website so for your store so this is really important make sure that you have something that you're going to remember and you save your password and your username somewhere because you're going to need these credentials to log into your wordpress store and so that you can start changing things and looking at orders and fulfilling orders and all of those types of things so go and choose a username and a password so once you have selected your username your password and your admin email and make sure your admin email is an email address that you can actually access so once you have it gone and chosen all of those things don't worry about selecting a theme because we're gonna go and pick that later on in the tutorial so just go and hit install over here so now it's just going to take a few moments to actually go and install wordpress onto your domain and once wordpress does finish installing you will see congratulations the software was installed successfully now from here we're going to go and click on the administrative url so click on this over here and it will bring us over to our wordpress site so now we are over at our wordpress dashboard and from here we can actually start building our drop shipping store and as you can see we've got the ssl certificate with the padlock so our store is completely secure and like i said from here we can actually start building the drop shipping store for completely free so firstly let me just give you an overview of your wordpress dashboard just to familiarize you with all of the different tabs that are available within wordpress over here so firstly we have home so on here you will just see some updates about wordpress and news about wordpress over here we have updates so anytime that you need to update your website you will see that under updates we also have posts so wordpress is originally a blogging platform so anytime you would create a blog post you would do it under posts we probably won't be using that very much within this tutorial next up we have media so this is where you go and upload all of the images for your site now we will be doing this straight from the front end but this is where all of the different media such as images and videos will be held for your store next up we have pages so if you want to go and create different pages such as the privacy policy the terms of service the about us you can go and do that under pages we also have comments so as i mentioned wordpress was originally a blogging platform so anybody who would write a comment on your blog you could go and see this in comments now once again we probably won't be using that this that much in the tutorial we have appearance over here so if you want to go and change the theme for your store if you want to go and create some menus for your store you can go and do that under appearance we also have plugins so this is a really important part of wordpress this allows you to go and add extra functionality to your site so we will be using this to go and add different functions to our drop shipping store we also have users so if you want to go and set up different staff members or virtual assistants you can go and do that under users and allow them to log into your store with different permissions we also have tools so you can go and import and export data once again we probably won't use that within this tutorial and then finally we have settings so you can just go and change some things with your store so that is an overview of wordpress now the first thing that we need to do in order to set up a drop shipping store using wordpress is install some ecommerce functionality and we will be using a plugin to go and do this and the plugin that we will be using is called woocommerce and woocommerce basically allows you to go and add e-commerce functionality to any wordpress website now unfortunately because we are using free hosting we are going to have to go and install woocommerce manually as opposed to doing it from the wordpress dashboard but don't worry this is very simple so i will be showing you step by step how to actually go and install woocommerce manually onto your store so firstly i will leave a link in the description to this page over here where you can go and download the woocommerce plugin so just go and hit download over here and we will go and see that the woocommerce zip folder has been downloaded now the next thing that you are going to have to do is go and download this over here so this is called a file manager an ftp file manager and basically this allows you to connect to your hosting and go and upload files manually to your wordpress website so i will leave a link in the description to this scp and all you need to do is go and download this and install it on your computer so once you do hit download it will go and download a setup file so you just need to go and follow through the steps to install win scp and it's really easy to go and install so once you have gone and installed it we can just go over here and type in winscp so we see we've got the winscp app over here so we're just going to go and open up this app now now once we open this up it's going to go and ask us to enter in a hostname a username and a password the first thing that you need to do and this is really crucial is we need to go and change this to ftp so we're going to change that to ftp next up we're going to go over to our pro free host account so log into your pro freeze host account and click on ftp over here so we can see we've got ftp so firstly we can go and grab the host name so we're going to copy the hostname and where it says hostname we're just going to go and paste that in there next up we've got the username so just go and copy this and we're going to go and paste the username in here and finally we have the password so we can just go and paste the password in here and then just go and click on login so now that we've logged in we can see over here these are all of the files for our website so what we're going to do is where it says your domain name so i've got chill cut ridge we're going to double click this then we've got htdocs double click this again then we're going to go and click on wp content click on this and then finally we're going to go and click on plugins so click on plugins now under here is where we are going to install the wordpress plugin so once again head over to your downloads and sorry that we're going to go and install the woocommerce plugin so head over to your downloads and you will find that woocommerce plugin that we downloaded earlier so firstly what you are going to have to do is you're going to right click this and you're going to go and hit extract all and just hit extract so i'm going to go and extract that zip folder so just give it a couple of minutes to actually go and extract all of those files so once the woocommerce zip file has finished extracting if we just go back to our downloads we will see woocommerce 5.00 so double click into this and here is the woocommerce plugin so what we are going to do is we are just going to go and drag this into our plugins folder over here so just go and drag this in here and then just give it a few moments to actually go and save that file under our plugins within our website so that process may take around 10 to 15 minutes to complete now once that has done we can just go and refresh this over here so just go and hit refresh a couple of times on this and once we have done that we can see we have the woocommerce plugin over here within our plugins so if we just come back over to our wordpress dashboard what we are going to do now is we're going to need to log out and then just log back in so we're just going to go and log out of our wordpress dashboard now just go and enter in your credentials and now we are just going to go and log back in so now that we have logged back in we can just go and refresh this and then we're going to go to plugins over here i'm going to go to installed plugins so now we can see that we've got this woocommerce plugin so we're going to go and hit activate on this woocommerce plugin so let's just wait for the woocommerce plugin to activate and now that it has activated it's bringing us to our woocommerce setup now for now we can just go and start filling some of this out so just go and enter in your address and once you have entered in your address just click on continue it will then ask you if you want to share some data it's totally up to you i'm just going to click no thanks for now the next step will ask you which industry your store operates in it doesn't really matter what you put here so just go and pick something so i'm just going to go for home furniture and garden and click on continue it will then ask you if you want to go and add any extras such as subscriptions memberships bookings so we don't need those for now so we can just go and click on continue it is then going to ask you how many products you plan to display we can just go and say 11 to 100. it doesn't matter there's not a limit so you can go and add as many products as you want and then you can say currently selling elsewhere it's totally up to you i'm just gonna go and put no so i'm gonna ask you if you want to go and install some of these extra plugins for now we're not going to install any of these so just go and turn all of these off and click on continue and then over here it's going to ask us if we want to go and install a theme for now we can just go and leave this so we can just go and click on skip this step over here it's going to ask us if we want to go and install jetpack we're just going to go and click no thanks for now so once we have gone and done that we can just go and click x over here so now we have woocommerce installed on our wordpress website so we are now ready to start adding products to our wordpress website so we need to go and start importing products so that we can go and create this drop shipping store but before we import any products from aliexpress we need to do one more thing to completely set up the store from the back end and that is to ensure that our store can send emails and this is a really important step of the tutorial because if your website isn't able to send out emails then your customers won't get confirmation emails when they purchase products from your store so like i said this is a really important step so in order to do this we will be installing the zoho mail plugin so we're going to come over to here where it says plugins i'm going to go and click on add new so from here we're going to go and search plugins i'm going to go and type in zoho mail and just go and hit enter and then we are going to go and install this zoho mail for wordpress so go and hit install over here and once that has finished installing we're going to go and hit activate over here so now we do have zoho mail so we're going to go and click on configure account so from here we are going to go and set this up so i will leave a link in the description to the zoho mail plugin for wordpress setup so what we actually need to do is go and create a few things so if you just scroll down over here we're going to go to the zoho developer console so click on this link over here and it will go and bring us over to our zoho account and we need to sign in so i'm just going to go and sign in with the email address that we created so just go and enter in that professional email address we created and click next and then we are just going to go and from here you're going to go and click on get started so click on get started now from here you're going to go to server based applications so click on this and from here you are just going to go and type in a client name so this will just be the name of your store next up we need to go and add our home page url so just go and copy your domain over here so we're just going to go and copy this and we're going to go and enter that in here and finally we need the authorize redirect url so over here you will find that so you can see if we go to zoho now configure account you will see authorization redirect url so we're just going to go and copy that i'm going to go and paste that in here next we're just going to go and click on create so now that we have created that you will see the client id and the client secret so just go and copy the client id and we are going to go head back over here and where we have client id we're going to go and paste that in there and then we have the client secret so we're going to go and copy that again i'm going to go and paste that in here now under domain you're going to go and pick one of these so when you are in your zoho account whichever it ends with you so you can see mine ends in e u over here so i'm gonna go and choose eu and now finally you're just gonna go and choose the from email address the from name and if you want your emails to be plain text or html i recommend plain text just because it makes it easier but actually we can go for html because we do want to go and you can go and change the colors of your emails that get sent out to your customers so the confirmation emails when they purchase products so go and enter in your from email address and your from name so your from email address should be the professional email address that you created and your from name can just be the name of your store and then just go and hit authorize over here so now it's going to bring us over to this page and we're just going to go and click accept over here and now we have completely set this up we will see access granted so now we can go and send emails from our wordpress store and like i said when a customer makes a purchase they will go and get confirmation emails and updates on their orders so when you've processed the order and things like that so we can go and send a test mail over here so you can just go and enter in a test email a subject and some content so i've just entered in an email address a subject and some content i'm going to go and click on send mail so let's just go and click on that and it will say mail sent successfully so now if we come over here we can come and see if that has been sent so let's just come back over here and we can see chilcott ridge thanks for your order so as you can see the emails are now sending from our website so like i said that's really important so now that we have completed that step the next step is to go and add a plugin to our site that will allow us to go and import products from aliexpress so once again we're going to go to plugins over here i'm going to go and click on add new now from here we're going to go and type in drop ship me so just go and type in dropship me and we will see this one over here dropship me so just go and click on install now so it's just going to go and say it's installing so just give it a moment and once the plugin has finished installing just go and click on activate so now that the plugin has been activated we can go to drop ship me over here and we can go and click on activation so from here we're going to need to go and add an api key so in order to do this you need to go over to dropship me over here and once again i will leave a link in the description and we are just going to go and click on start now it's free so from here we just need to go and enter in an email address and once you enter in your email address just go and click on get my plugin now now from here it will ask you if you want to purchase the alidropship plugin just say not now i just want the free plugin and then it's going to say your api key is this so go and copy your api key so i'm just going to go and copy this head back to your wordpress website and when it says api key we're just going to go and paste this in here and go and click on activate so now that api key has been activated we can see that we can import 50 different products so if we go and click on import products over here so from here we can go and start importing products so now that we have set up all of the backend we are going to now focus on adding a theme and building out the home page and then we will start looking at importing some products to the store so the first thing that we are going to do is go and install a theme so go to appearance over here and click on themes now from here we're going to go and click on add new and we are going to go and search for astra so search for the astra theme and it will be this first one that comes up over here now this is one of the best wordpress themes that you can use and it's totally free so we can just go and click on install over here so let's just wait for this to install and once the theme has finished installing just go and click on activate so now that we have activated that theme we can go and delete some of these other themes so we're going to keep this 2021 theme as a backup in case this one fails for whatever reason that doesn't usually happen but it's always good to have a backup theme so we're just going to go and delete some of these because they're just taking up space on our website so just click on theme details and click on delete over here and we'll hit ok and then we're just going to go and do that with our other theme so let's just go and click on the 2021 and we're going to go and click delete again so now that we have our theme installed the next thing that we need to do is install a page builder so we will be using a drag and drop page builder to create all of the pages on our site so just go to plugins over here and click on add new now from here we're just going to go and type in elementor so just search for elementor and we will go and install this one over here elementor website builder so just go and click on install so once elementor has finished installing we're just going to go and hit activate over here so now that we have elementor installed we can go and start building our home page so we are going to install one more plugin in order to start building our home page so we're just going to go to plugins and click on add new over here and we're just going to add this classic editor plugin so just click on install now over here and then we are just going to go and click on activate and then from here we can go and create our home page so go to pages and click on add new and then from here we can just go and type in home and then we can just go and hit publish on this page so now that we have published our home page we're just going to go to settings and go to reading and then where it says your home page displays we're going to pick a static page and we're going to go and choose that home page that we just created so then just go and click on save changes so now if you just click on your site name it will bring you to the front end of your website and we can see we have our homepage so right now it's looking pretty plain so we can go and change this so the first thing that we are going to do is go and click on customize so we can make it a full width page so we can get rid of this area over here so go and click on customize and once the customized area loads we can go and change this to a full width layout so if we go to global over here we can see we've got container so just go and change this container to full width contained so now it's going to go and make this full width so now we can go and get rid of this sidebar as well so we just go to sidebar we can go and click on no sidebar over here so now we can see we just have a page like that so the next thing that we can do whilst we are in this area in this customized area we can go and change any fonts for the site so once again if you go to global you will see typography so you see base typography so this is going to be any typography within the actual page so i'm just going to go and change mine to montserrat and then you can also go and change your headers as well so if we go to headings i'm just going to go and change my headings over here to josephine sans so i'm just going to go and change that to that and i'm going to go and change all of these headings over here as well all these heading 1 2 3 and 4 and so on so let me just go and change all of those so once you have picked the fonts that you want to use for your site we can just go back over here and click back again and just click back one more time so now we can just go and hit publish and we can just go and close this customize area over here so now over here we have our homepage looking pretty blank and we can start building from here so just go and click on edit page over here and what we're going to do is we're going to go and click on edit with elementor so let's just go and wait for elementor to load and once elementor loads we can actually now start building our home page so elementor is a page builder that allows you to drag and drop elements onto the page really easily so the first thing we are going to do we are going to go and create a hero image for our drop shipping store so i'm just going to go and show you the hero image that we have over here so we can see this is going to be the one that i'm using so pretty simple one over here and i'm going to show you how you can go and create this for completely free once again so the dimensions over here are 1335 by 465. so what we can do is we can go and head over to a site called canva.com and this is a site that allows you to create free graphics so we just go and click on create design over here and we can go for custom size and we're just going to go for one three three five by 465 and then we're just going to go and click on create new design now from here you can go and add images so depending on what niche your drop shipping store is going to be in you can go and search for an image so mine's going to be the hiking niche so i'm just going to go and type in hiking over here so we can see we've got this but we need to go to photos and now let's type in hiking so let's spell it correctly and you can see we've got loads of free images that you can go and use to create a nice hero image so let's just click on this one and see how this looks so you could go for something like that that might be a little bit too big so let's see if there's any other better ones that we could potentially use that are a bit of a better size so let's keep looking so some of them will be paid unfortunately but you will be able to find a free image so let's go for this one let's see so we can stretch that like this and we can go and add that like that so now go and think about the type of colors that you want to use on your site so i'm using a sort of greenish color so what we can do is we can go and add elements over here so we can go and add this square so down here here we have shapes so if we just go and stretch this out like this and we can go and add different colors so let's just say we're going to add a sort of greenish color like that and if we go and have a look back at the image over here so let's just go ahead and click on this over here we can see we've got supercell up to 40 off so let's go and close this so you can just go and add some text in so over here if we click on text we can go and click on add heading so we can say super sale and we can just go maybe make that a little bit bigger so let's just go for let's say 42 maybe even bigger than that so let's say 48 and we can drag that inside this box you can go and change the color of the text you can go and change the font so once again if i just go and use montserrat like this so i can say super sale so let's just go and have a look at that image once again sorry so we've got it over here super sale so we're just going to change this so this is going to become super on its own and we can go and make this a little bit bigger let's say 85 84. so we're going to go and put that in there and then you can just go and click this plus button to copy this and we can go and put sale in here now and we can make this even bigger so if we just go and make this 104 like that and once again we can duplicate this again and we can make this black like this and then what we can do is we can go position to back and we can just sort of put this behind here like this so you can use your arrow keys to sort of create a shadow like that and then once again we can duplicate this box over here so let's try and click on this green box let's move this out the way we can go and duplicate this and bring it down to the bottom once again we'll bring this text back into the middle and then we can just go and say what i've put in here up to 40 off so we're just going to add some text and we'll just put up up to and this one is just going to be some smaller text and we're going to go and choose our montserrat for the whole thing so let's go and choose that we'll make it white and we're just going to put this in here so we can make this a little bit smaller so it fits inside the box and then we can go and duplicate this and we can say 40 percent off so you can use this over here to drag and once again we could make this a bit smaller so let's go and move this into here like this and then you can go and play around with the colors so you can see this here looks a little bit weird so what we could do is we could just say up and we can duplicate this and put this as two and then we could put those a bit closer underneath each other sort of like this so up to 40 off so you can see it looks pretty much the same now like i said i created this one in photoshop and obviously this is only taking me a few minutes so you might want to take some more time just to play around make sure the colors look good make sure the images look good but generally this is how you can go and create a really quick hero image then all you need to do is just go and hit download so once we have done that we can go back over here and what we can do is we can click plus on this plus button and we can go and add in a new section so we're going to add a single section in here now from here if you click on this top bit over here that means we can edit this section so just click on that and now in here we can edit this section so we go to style and we can go to background and we can go and choose classic and then we can go and choose an image so let's go and choose an image i'm just going to click on select files and then just go and find the hero image that you created in canva so here's my one over here and we're just going to go and hit upload and we're just going to get rid of this image whilst we're here because that's just taking up space so let's just wait for our image to upload and then we can choose it and then we're just going to go and hit insert media so now that this has uploaded we can go and make this a particular size so what we can do is we can go to layout and go to full width over here and then what we can do is we can go to height we can go to minimum height and then you can go and choose whatever the minimum height you want it to be so if i go and choose let's say 600 you can see it gets bigger but i recommend to just go for 400 and that will give you this sort of nice hero image like this so maybe let's just go for a bit bigger let's go for 500 let's see what 600 looks like go for 500 and then what we can do is if we go to style over here you can go to the position of your image so you can go to center center you can go to top right or however you want to go and put it so i'm just going to leave it as default like this and then over here where we have size we can go to cover so that completely covers the whole thing like that so as a matter of fact what i might do is so i'm just going to click back here i might make this a little bit bigger still so under minimum height we might go for 600 let's see how that looks so we're going to go for 600. so what we can do next is you can go and add in a button or something in here so we'll just go and add a button in so we're just going to go and find our button widget so over here we can go and drag a button in and we're going to go and center align this so now you can go and add a button so it's sort of underneath down here so in order to do that we can go and add some margin to this button so if you go to advanced over here you can go and add some top margin so we could go to add sorry not margin we want to go and add a spacer so we're going to go and add in a spacer so just click on this little grid over here to go back to all of the different elements i'm going to add a spacer in here and then we're just going to go and say 2 let's say 300 maybe a bit more 400 so now we've added that 400 in there so now we can see we've got this button over here so what we're going to do is we're going to go and change this button and we're going to go and put in let's say shop now so now you can go and change all of the elements on your button and all of the styling so if we go over here to typography once again i can go and type in monteret and i can go and change the color of this button so if we just go and click on background i'm going to change this to a white button and i'm going to change the text color to black and we're going to make this a little bit bigger so i'm going to go and make the weight maybe not that thick maybe 700 and i'm just going to go and make the size let's say 25 let's see if that's too big so now we've got shot now there i think i'm going to leave it like that that looks pretty cool so now we can just go and hit update so now that we have done this let's just go and what you can do is click on these three lines and click on view page and we can start to see our homepage coming together now the next thing we're going to do is go and create a logo just so we can keep all of the branding of our site so once again in order to create a logo you can go and create a simple logo within canva again so if we go back to our canva homepage we can go and click on create new design and you can go and choose your custom size so down here custom size i'm going to go and choose 265 by 90. so you can just go and choose this now to create a logo we can just go and search for different elements so if i go to elements over here i could just go and type in let's see what happens if we type in hiking again we can see if we can find so we've got this i don't know if we can change the colors of this so you can go and change all of the colors of these little elements that you could use for your logo so we could go and put this in here and let me just go and change all of the colors now so i'm just going to go and change this orange to that green color that i've been using so i could go and change that to that and we could change this brown to another sort of greenish color like that so that would match with my store so now i can just go and add in some text over here and we can just go and add this in and i could just go and type in the name of my store she'll cut ridge we can make this a bit bigger and then what we can do is you can go and change the font to one that maybe you're using on your site so we've got ridge like that so now i'm just going to go and make this a little bit bigger so let's go for maybe not that big let's see 32 still too big 21 maybe and we could just go and align this in the center like this so this could be a logo personally i think it would look better if we just have it like this so let's bring this down here and we can go and center align it like that and then you can go and change the colors of your logo so once again i could choose this greenish color and i could go and duplicate this and i could make this black so let's go like that and then we can go and see let's send this to the back so we'll go to position and backward and once again you can sort of create that 3d effect like this so that's a really simple logo that you can go and create once again for completely free so if i just go and hit download over here and we'll just go and hit download on this and once that has downloaded we can just go and close this and close this and we can go and upload our logo so in order to upload our logo we'll go to customize again and once the customize area loads we can go to header builder over here we can go and click on logo and then we can go and click select logo then all you need to do is go and click on upload files click select and then navigate to the logo that we just downloaded from canva so i've already uploaded mine so i'm just going to go and choose this logo then you can just go and click select you can go and crop the logo a little bit if you want to and then you can just go and click crop image and then now we have our logo over here now we're going to go and get rid of where it says display site title so just go and get rid of that and it will get rid of this now you can go and make your logo a bit bigger so we could go make that 250 let's see what happens if we make it 300 so you can see with this logo if i make it too big it starts to get a little bit pixelated so just think about the type of image that you're going to use for your logo so you can just go for a plain text logo if you want to so now i'm just going to go and leave it like that so just go and hit publish and we just go and close this we can now see that we have our logo and once again for completely free now like i said you can just go and create a plain text logo if you want so i've actually gone and created another logo using illustrator so i'm just going to go and upload that logo now so we just go to header builder and we just go to logo i'm going to get rid of this and we're just going to go and upload that other logo so we're just going to go and choose let's just see which one is the best size i'm going to go and choose this one over here and then i'm just going to go and select that image so hit select and we're going to go crop the image and we hit crop image and now we can see we have that logo so that one's a little bit too big so i'm going to go and make this one a bit smaller so let's say 150 let's see what 100 looks like 100 oh that's a little bit too big 110 we're going to leave it as 150. so we're just going to go and hit publish over here and now we can go and close this so we have our logo created now so we can see our home page is starting to come together so the next thing that we're going to do we're just going to go and create some categories so before we create some categories for our homepage let's actually just go and start importing some products so in order to import products we're going to come back over here so we're going to come back to our wordpress dashboard and we are gonna go and we're gonna go to dropship me i'm gonna go to import products so from here we can actually go and start looking at products to import and then we will go and create some product descriptions then when we have imported some products and created some categories for those products we will go and add those to the home page so let's start searching for some products that we can import so over here you'll have all categories and you can go and see loads of different products that you could potentially import to your store so there's thousands of products within drop ship me that you can go and import and you can go and look at these from loads of different categories so what i'm actually going to do is i'm going to go and start importing some products to do with tense so we're gonna go for hiking survival gear and tense so over here we can see we've got this tent so let me as a matter of fact just type in tent over here instead of tense and we can see which type of products start to come up so let's just give this a moment to load so once the products do load we can go and have a look at which products we want to import so we can see we've got some cool tents over here and if we scroll down there's a fair few tents that we can go and import into our store so i'm just going to go for this top one over here this basic one this lightweight camping tent i think this is a fairly reasonable price and we can sell it for a reasonable profit so we're just going to go and click on this now and when you go and click on the product you will see some information about the product so we've got the description we have the shipping we have the reviews and then you can go and find the aliexpress listing as well so what we can do next is you can just go and hit import over here so now we're just going to wait a few moments to actually import the product to our store it will then say that the product has been imported so we've imported our first product now we will go and have a look at editing the product in a moment but let's just go and have a look at importing one more product so let's just go and find another tent so a more reasonably priced one again so i think this one looks pretty cool so let's go and click on these three lines over here and we can go and find out some more information about the product so once again we can see we've got all of the images you can go and have a look at the description the shipping the reviews and all of those things so once we have done that we can just go and hit import again so i'm just going to go import this product so once the product has been imported what we can do now is we can actually go and start editing the products so if we go to underneath where it says woocommerce you can just go and click on products and click on all products over here and now we will see those two products that we imported so let's just go and edit one of these so what we can do is we can just go and click on edit over here and we can go and edit the product now from here firstly you can go and change the name so we've got lightweight camping tent for mountaineers so you can go and leave that now for the permalink you might want to just cut this down a little bit because google prefers a smaller amount of words used in this area so we can just say lightweight camping tent let's just say for example and hit ok and now from here you can go and change the description so we've got the description over here with all of the images in and everything like that so it's totally up to you i will go and show you in a moment how it actually looks from the front end and we can also go and add a category so we're going to go and display our categories on our homepage so over here we can go and click on add new category and we can just go and put in i'm going to put in hiking tents and we're going to go and click on add new category so now you can just go and tick this so this product is going to be part of the hiking tents category now you can also go if we scroll down we can go and change the pricing so if we go to variations over here you can go and change these different prices so if we just go and open this up over here we can see the regular price and the sale price now what i recommend doing is to go and just change these to 99 that just makes them look a little bit more normal so i'm going to go and change this and then we can go and open this one and change this to 99 and the regular price to 99 as well so i'm just going to go and do this for all of these variants over here so let's change this one as well to 99 and this one and then i'm just going to go and do it for the last two so once again 99 and like i said the reason that you want to do this just it just makes your store look more professional when the prices aren't all over the place and looking a little bit weird so we're just going to go and change this to 99 as well so you can also go and change the product gallery so which one you want to be the main product so i'm going to go and change it to this and you can also go and if we just scroll back down over here we could go and change this product image over here so it will have imported all of our product images so i'm going to go and make this one the main product image i think that looks more more enticing and a little bit more professional and then we can see we've got the product images over here so you can go and add a product image to the gallery so i'm just going to go and add this one to the gallery as well so now that we have done that we can go and add a product short description so i will show you what the difference is between the product description up here and the product short description so in order to add your product short description this is just going to be just a little bit of information about the product in terms of what it actually does and the purpose it serves and the product description is going to give you all of the in-depth information so in here you just want to go and put in a couple of sentences about the product so you can go and look at similar products like this and then that way you can go and get an idea of what you can put in the short description so i'm just going to go and put this in here so let's just copy this short description here and we can just go and head back to our store and add this in so we've got a lightweight three-person tent ideal for backpacking and wild camping now obviously we need to go and double check how many people can actually fit in this one so we'll go and have a look if it says this is a one to two person tent so we can just go and say two person tents made with two pole tunnel design obviously we need to get rid of this so we can go and say what's the name of r1 it's called the lightweight camping tent so we'll just say the light weight camping tent is easy to pitch it's waterproof flashy and ground sheet withstands rain making it suitable for wet weather conditions so that's the type of thing you would want to put in your short description so now we can just go and hit save changes over here so make sure you save your changes and then what we can do is we can scroll up and we can go and hit publish over here so now we have gone and published our first product so let's just go and click on preview changes over here and we can go and see what our products looking like so you can see that's looking really cool really professional so they can go and choose the color so if they want blue green or orange then they can go and choose it ships from outside the us so they've got their blue one they've got their green one and they can just go and hit add to cart now you can see here's the product short description and down here is the actual description so that's the difference between the two now you can go and remove the images from the description if you want to because we have them all here so i think i'm going to go and do that so let's just go back to the back end over here and we can just go and hit x on these images let's just go and get rid of those and once again we'll just hit update and now we can go and preview the changes again so let's hit preview changes over here and we should go and be able to see that we've just got the description here now so i think that looks a little bit better and just a bit more clean and professional so now you can go and click on choose from outside the us and they can just go and hit add to cart so that is our first product and as you can see it is under the hiking tents category so if we go and click on this it will bring us over to this category and we can see we just have one product within this category so you can go and add your other products to your category so i'll just show you how to do that again so if we go back to all products again over here and then from all products we can go and edit our second product so if we just go to edit over here and once again we can just do the same thing so if we just go and add this to the hiking tents category over here and i'm just going to go and get rid of the images in the product description so let's just get rid of these and then once again you can go to variations and change all of the pricing so i'm not going to do that but like i said you would just come in here put 99 at the end of all of these now these variations are basically all of the different color styles you've got yellow green and blue or you can just go for any color so some of the variations you can actually go and delete so this any color one we can actually just go and delete this because this one only comes in three colors so we don't need this any color one so we can just go and remove this over here and then once again you can go and add your product short description so go and have a look at some similar products so i've just gone and typed this into google so i could just go and let's just have a look at this one for example see if they've got a different description for this one so we can see we've got a short description here so we could just go and copy this and we could paste this in here and just say so what's this one called this is called the automatic pop-up camping tent so let's just copy this and where we've got this i could paste that in here the automatic pop-up camping tent uses a classic geodesic shape and robust rugged construction to gantry performance in the harshest conditions the special developed reflex poles are exceptionally so you want to go and have a look and make sure all of the information is correct based off of this over here but like i said you want to go and add in a short description that just sort of describes the product now from here once again we can just go and hit publish and now we have two products in our hiking tents category so if we just go and hit preview changes over here we should be able to see we have our second product over here so they can go and choose their color option they can choose the size one size and they can just go and hit add to cart so now over here it's showing us related products because this product is in the same category and if we go to the hiking tents category we can go and see we have two hiking tents over here so what you are going to want to do is just go and import some more products and add them to different categories so i'm just going to go and import some more products and i've gone for four categories so i'm gonna go for hiking bags hiking tents survival hiking gear and hiking binoculars so i'm just going to go and add some more products using dropship me so we'll just go back to dropship me over here so just go to dropship me and hit import products and like i said there are thousands of products over here that you can go and import so just go and have a look and i recommend obviously sticking to one niche like i said in the beginning of the tutorial so i'm just going to go and import some more products and then we will go and add those categories to our home page so i have just finished importing some more products and i have gone and put these into four different categories so we have hiking backpacks binoculars survival gear and hiking tents so now what we are going to do is we are going to go and add these categories to our home page and in order to do this we are going to go and install another plugin so go to plugins and click on add new plugin now from here we're just going to go and type in elementor once again and once we type in elementor we're going to go and install this plugin over here premium add-ons for elementor so just go and click on install now on this plugin over here and then we are going to go and click on activate for this plugin so once the plugin has been activated we can go back to our home page over here and from here we can go and hit edit with elementor now once elementor loads we can scroll down and we're going to go and click the plus button and we're going to go and choose three sections over here so we've got one two and three so now we can go and add those categories to our home page so we're just going to go and click the little six buttons over here sorry the little dots over here i'm going to go and change this to full width so now this is a full width section so what we're going to do now is we're going to click on the grid and we're just going to go and type in premium and we're going to go and choose a premium banner i'm going to go and put this in here so this basically allows you to go and display your categories so over here now we can go and upload an image so we're going to go and upload this first image over here so i'm just going to go and choose this now as you can see this image is 300 by 300 pixels now if you want to go and create these images so this is just a completely square image what we can do is you can go over to a website called unsplash so just go and type that in and basically from here you can go and get loads of free images so if i just go and type in hiking let's say for example and we can go and see we've got loads of cool hiking images now what you can then do is you can go and download these images and once again just go and head over to canva create a new one which is going to be 300 by 300 so if we just go for 300 by 300 and click on create new design and then basically you can go and download those images and upload it over here alternatively if you don't want to use unsplash you can just go to photos over here and once again if i just type in hiking backpack let's see if any images come up so we can see we've got some hiking images with people with their backpack so let's see if we can find any free ones so maybe this one over here and once again you can just drag it and i can just bring this over like this so then you would just go and download this image and then if we head back over here we can go and use this so like i said you want to make it 300 by 300. so we're going to go and insert this image over here so now we can see when we hover over it says premium banner so we want to go and change this so we're going to go to content now you can go and change the effect so if i go we can see that it goes like this or we can do this one so there's loads of different effects that you can try i'm just going to go for the default one because i like that one so now what we're going to do is we are going to go to content and i'm just going to go where it's premium banner i'm just going to go and put in high king backpacks and then i'm just going to go and delete this so you can go and put some extra information in there if you want to but i'm just going to go and leave it like that so now that we've done that we can go to style and we can go to title we can go and change this color to white like that and then you can also go and change the typography so i'm going to go and change this to montserrat and now we can see we've got our hiking backpacks and when people hover over it it goes like that so they're ready to go and click and go to that category so now that we've done that we can just go and right click this and hit duplicate and now we can go and drag this over here so we are going to go and add two sections to this bit so we're going to go and change the image over here and for this next image we're going gonna go for this one over here now this one is 570 by 270. so once again just do the same thing come over to here and create a new custom design within canva so we can just go for 570. let me just get rid of this 570 by 270 and then we're just going to go and click on create new design and once again you can just go and put anything in here so we could just go and say if we go to photos we could say camping let's go for that and i could go and use any of these camping images now alternatively once again so i could go for something like this let's say for the survival gear image and alternatively like i said once again you can go and use unsplash to go and do this so i'm going to go and upload this image 570 by 270 and hit insert so now we can see we've got this one so we're going to go and change this and we're gonna go and change the content i'm gonna call this survival gear like that and then people can go and click on that so now we're gonna right click this i'm gonna duplicate this one again so now we've got two so we're going to go and change this image and this one's going to be 570 by 270 again so we're going to go and add this one so this one is survival gear which one is this this one's binoculars so let's go and insert this so i'm going to change this one over here to binoculars so let's just go and change this to binoc and then we've got those now finally we're just going to go and duplicate this one as well and we can just move that one over here and then we can go and change the image so once again this is going to be 300 by 300 and this one's just going to be hiking tense so we can just go and change this to tense so now if we just hit this little arrow here we will see this is how our home page is looking so we're going to go and add some space around this so in order to do that we can click this again and we can just go and add some padding so we're just going to go and add 10 pixels of padding around this just to make it look a little bit more clean so now that we've done that we're going to add a spacer over here so let's just go and adding a spacer not there so sometimes it can be a little bit fiddly so what we're going to do is we're just going to go and click plus and we're going to create a new section i'm just going to drag this section over here so now we've got that little bit of extra space that we can go and add in there so we're going to put our spacer in here and now we've got that bit of space so what we can do is we can go and add in a heading over here and we can just center align this and we can go and say we're going to say in here basecamp essentials so just something that matches the brand and the type of products that you are selling so we're just going to go and change this now to black and once again we can go and change the typography so i'm going to change this to joseph and sans this time so let's go put josephine sans in here and now we have our basecamp essentials so that's looking really cool so now we need to go and add the links to these pages so it's going to go and hit update on this now what we're going to do next is you can just go and open your site in another link so i've got it open over here so you can just go and copy this and then just open a new tab and open your site in the backend so your wordpress dashboard now i'm going to go to products and click on all products and what i'm going to do is i'm just going to go and open these categories one by one so we're going to go and right click and open hiking backpacks we're going to right click and open binoculars we're going to right click and open survival gear and we're also going to go and open hiking tents so now that i've gone and opened all of those different categories what we can do is we can just go and we can click on view on each of these different products so now when we click this we can go to binoculars and we can see we've got the binoculars page so i'm just going to go and copy this page and then i'm going to go and head back to my elementor page builder and under binoculars i'm going to go and click on this and we are going to go where it says link we're going to turn this on and i'm going to go and choose a custom link and i'm going to go and paste that link in there and just hit update so now that we've done that we can go and open one of our tent pages so i'm just going to go and click view we'll click on hiking tents and once again we will just copy the link and where we have tents over here we will go and go to link custom link and paste it in there and hit update so now we can just go and close this let's get rid of this page and now we are going to go and open our survival gear so we're just going to click on view over here click on survival gear and then we're just going to copy this and we can go over here it says survival key go to link custom link and paste that in and then the final one so we've done binoculars and the final one is the backpacks so we just go to view and then once we view this we can click on hiking backpacks and i can copy this and under backpacks i can go to content go to link custom link and paste that in there and hit update so now let me just go and close all of these extra tabs that we have open we'll keep this one open just in case and now we can just go and click on view page so now if we go and have a look at our homepage don't worry this looks a little bit odd at the moment this header so we can go and change that so we'll change that later on in the tutorial but as we scroll we can see we've got this shop now button over here and as we scroll we've got our basecamp essentials we've got the hiking backpacks our binoculars survival gear and hiking tents and if they go and click on any of these it will go and bring them over to the products page over here so let's just go back to our home page so the next thing we are going to do we are just going to go and add some icons over here so that we can go and display free shipping and things like that so let's just go and hit edit with elementor to go and add those icons so once elementor loads let's just scroll down we'll click the plus button i'm gonna go and add this section of three then we're just going to go and drag this underneath our hero image and we're just going to go and make this a full width area and then we can go and add those icons in so we are just going to go and search for an icon box i'm just going to go and drag that in here now first we are just going to go and search for a truck icon so we just go and insert that truck icon in here and then we are just going to go and put fast let's just say free international shipping international shipping and then we can just go and get rid of this over here so now what i want to do is we're going to change the icon position to the left like that and then we can go and just change this to black and we're just going to go and change the text as well to black and we can also go and change the typography to monster rat so let's just go and change that so now we just want to go and make the size of this a bit smaller so let's just go and see what 20 looks like so that's looking pretty good i'm just going to go and change the icon size so let's just go and change the icon size to 30. so now it looks like that so that's pretty cool now what we're going to do is we're going to go and add some padding around this so we're going to go to advanced and we're going to untick this where it says link values together and we're just going to go and add 20 to the right and 20 to the left as a matter of fact let's just change that and put 30 to the right and 30 to the left let's just see how that looks so we might want to add a little bit more so i'm just going to go and click this over here i'm just going to go and change this to 50. so we're going to go and add 50 padding either side so let's see how that looks now that looks a lot better so now we are also going to go and add some padding to the top so we will just go and add 20 to the top like that so that's looking good so we've got free international shipping so let's go and right click and duplicate this and we can drag this over here now we can go and change the icon and let's go and look for a padlock so let's see lock so we've got a lock over here and we're just going to click insert and we're just going to go and say safe and secure check out and then finally we can just go and duplicate this one more time and i'm just going to go and change this to a star so let's go for this start over here and we can just go and say top quality products so now we go and we've got that now we're just going to go and change the color of this so we'll just go and click this over here go to style and go to background and choose a classic background we're just going to change this to a sort of light gray so let's go for something like that let's see how that looks that looks pretty good so we're just going to go for that so i'm liking that i'm just going to go and hit update over here now the next thing that we can go and add so if we just go and look at our home page still looks fairly plain so you could go and just add some best selling products or products on sale so in order to do this we're just going to go for woocommerce short codes so just open a new tab and just type in woocommerce short codes and then we are just going to go for this top one over here short clothes included with woocommerce and just scroll down and we are just going to go and find this product short code and we're just going to go for this one over here random cell items so just go and copy this long short code over here and now we can just go and head back to our home page okay just go and click plus we can just go and choose one over here and then we are just going to go and drag in so over here where it says search widget type in shortcode we're going to go and drag that in there and we can just go and paste in our shortcode so now it goes and shows our cell items so we can just go and now we can add a heading above this so let's just go as a matter of fact we can just copy this heading over here so just click copy and then we'll right click over here and click paste and we're just going to drag it to the top over here and we can just go and change this to best sellers and now if you want to again we can just go and add some spacing above that so now our homepage is looking like this so that's looking really cool so we've got this over here we can go and click shop now and then we've got some of our bestsellers and all of our different categories over here now another thing that we can do is go and add some cool features to our buttons so if we click on this shop now button if we go to style we can go to hover and go to hover animation and we can just go for something like grow so now when they hover over it just grows like that or you can go for shrink it gets a bit smaller so you can go and have a look we've got push so you can see there's loads of different animations that you could go and potentially use but i just like this grow one so now what we can do is we can also go and add in a link to our sell items or we can go for our best sellers so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to go and add in a link to the hiking backpacks over here and i'm just going to go and put that in the shop now link over here so now we can just go and hit update so now if we just go and view our page we can see that we have our home page and it's starting to come together it's looking really cool now we're going to go and change some of these colors because obviously they don't match we still need to go and create a footer as well and then we also will go and change our header at the end as well so what we are going to do next is we are going to go and change all of these colors and all of our woocommerce product pages so let's just go over to one of these product pages so let's just go and click on this product over here and what we can do is we can go and click on customize over here so once the customized area loads can go and change the colors on our site so we go to global and go to colors go to base colors so you'll see the theme color so i'm just going to go ahead and change it to my green color over here and this should start changing things over so you can see over here i also have the link color so i'm just going to go and change that to this green color again but i'm just going to make the link color a little bit darker so we're just going to go and bring this down so now the link color is just a little bit darker so we can see it looks like that so that looks really cool so we also have the link hover color so that just changes it to a sort of blackish color and now we can see we have this green color coming up now if you want to go and change some of the woocommerce stuff we can just go back we can go to woocommerce over here and then we can go to product catalog so over here it's going to show us our product catalog so this is all of our products together so what you can do is you can go and display this as categories you can go and display this with sub categories as well if you want to go and create those you can also go and change the columns so if you want to go and change this let's say to three you can go and change it so it's just gonna go and show three products within the catalog personally i like four so i'm gonna just go and put it like this you can also go and display how many products you want on the page at once so we've got 12 here you can go and put that up to 20 let's say and then it's going to go and have all of the different things that you display as well so you've got category you've got the title the rating the price and the add to cart so let's just say for example i wanted to get rid of the ratings i can just go and turn this little eye icon off and you can see it gets rid of those stars i'm just going to go and leave those ratings in there for now because although nothing has been rated i still think they look pretty cool so that's how we can go and change some things within our product catalog you can also go and change the checkout so we just go and click on checkout over here we can go and see that the company name and the address is optional you can also go and change the phone field to optional as well if you want to and later on we will go and add in a privacy policy and a terms and condition page as well so now that we have done that we're just going to go and hit publish over here and we will just go and close this so now we have gone and kept our branding in order for all of our different product pages so now we can see we have this nice green color and if i just go and click on this we can see where it says view cart is showing all of the same branding across the entire website so now that we have done that the next thing that we are going to do is create some of the necessary pages that we need for our online drop shipping store so we're gonna go and create our refunds policy our shipping page our terms of service and our privacy policy so firstly let's go and create our returns and refunds page so head back to your wordpress dashboard and from here we're going to go to pages and click on add new and then we are just going to go and call this page return and refunds so returns and refunds and then we're just going to go and hit edit with elementor so once elementor loads we can just go and click on the plus and we can just choose a single section over here we will just go and make this a full width section then we'll go to style i'm going to go to background type and classic we'll just go and upload an image so just go and select a file and i'm just going to go and choose let's just choose this one over here so we'll just go and choose this image over here and once the image loads we can just go and click on insert media so now we're going to go to layout we're just gonna go to height and we're gonna go to minimum height and we will just go and leave this as 400 then we can just go to content and we can go to position and let's go for center center let's see top center let's try bottom center maybe let's go for bottom center and then we're just going to go to size i'm going to go and choose cover so let's just go and change that to top center center center let's see how that looks so maybe we'll just go for that like that so now we're just going to go and add a heading on here and we're just going to go and call this returns and refunds and we can just go and center align this we'll just go and go to the style i'm just going to go and choose white like this and we're going to go and change the typography to joseph and sans so now we've got our returns and refunds like that so we're just going to hit publish so the next thing we're going to do is just go and hit plus over here choose a single section again and this time we'll leave it as boxed i'm going to go and add in a text editor in here so now we can just go and center align this and i've just got some dummy text over here that i'm going to copy but you can come over to the site she'll cut ridge dot co dot uk to just go and copy this text as well so we're just going to go and paste this in here and now what you can do is we're going to go to style again we're going to go to typography i'm going to go ahead and change this to monster at so now we've got one to that and then we're just going to go and make these questions bold so we just bold up the questions what are my delivery options so we can see over here we currently deliver all our items from our various warehouses worldwide and then we've just got european shipping we use parcel force you're shipping we use usps now generally when you are on aliexpress this is the shipping that they will use and then we've got rest of the world we use e packet so you can just go and leave that we've got what countries do you deliver to so generally on aliexpress you will be able to deliver to all of these countries except for these ones and then finally we could just put a space in here and then say how long does did we take now go and have a look at the type of products that you're selling and see how long generally that is going to take so on aliexpress it's probably going to take a little bit longer than this so we can go and say 20 to 30 let's say business days so now what we're going to do is we can just go and add a spacer in there so let's go and see how that looks so let's go and just reduce that a little bit we're just going to go and make that sort of 10 like that so now we've got returns and refunds and we have all of the information there now let's just go and play around with this let's just see what the text would look like over here like this i think that looks a bit better so we're just going to leave it like that we are going to go and add a spacer to the bottom so now we just got a little bit of space at the bottom and we're just going to go and add a little bit of space we're gonna go and change this maybe to 25 let's see what that looks like so that's looking a bit better so now we have our returns and refunds page we can just go and hit update over here and now we can just go and click on view page so now we've got our returns and refunds page so what we're going to do is we're going to keep this page open and just go and hit edit with elementor again and once elementor loads what we're going to do is we're just gonna go and right click this one over here and open the dashboard in a new tab so now when we have this open in a new tab we can go to pages and click on add new and now we can just go and call this one shipping and delivery and once again we can go and hit edit with elementor and once this page loads what we can do is we can just come over to our returns and refunds page that we have open in another tab we can go and right click this section click copy and we can go and right click and hit paste now we can just go and change this to shipping and delivery and then what we can do is we can come back over here and we can go and right click this big section come back over here right click and paste this section so now once again i've got some dummy text over here so i'm just going to go and copy this dummy text so let's go and copy this up to here and we're going to get rid of all of this text and we're going to paste this text in so let me just undo that so it's probably best to go and paste it in from here so now we've pasted it in from here once again we're just going to go and highlight these questions now like i said you can just go over to chillhookridge.com and just copy this from the pages yourself so we're just going to go and highlight these over here in bold and this one in bold and this one in bold and finally this one over here and i'm just going to go and change this to dummy so now you can see we've got over here that it must be returned within 14 days it must be undamaged it must have all the tags and be in the original packaging and it must be returned to the return center you can just go and make the return center your home address and then that way if a return comes to your home address if you make another sale of that product then you can just go and ship it directly from your address do you offer free returns so the answer is no they have to go and return at their own expense if the product is 40 i've just gone and put that they need to contact so this will be the professional email address that we created in the beginning of the tutorial so that was admin at your domain dot co dot uk so at your free domain that we created using zoho your professional email address then over here we have how long does it take to process so we just put in that it takes up to 21 days and then finally over here how can they check the status of their return when they need to go and contact their card issuer because it should come in within three to five working days so now we have our shipping and delivery page so we can just go and once again we can go and publish that page and click on so let's just hit update again and make sure it's definitely saved and now we can just go and hit view page so now we have our shipping and delivery page looking pretty cool and all of the branding is still going along with the rest of our website so the next thing that we're gonna do is go and create our terms of service and our privacy policy two pages that are really essential for any e-commerce business that you are starting so we can just go and head back to our wordpress dashboard i'm going to go to pages we'll go to add new and then we're just going to go and call this one in fact we'll call this one terms of service and we're just going to hit edit with elementor and whilst elementor is loading what i want you to do is go over to a website called get terms dot io so i will leave a link in the description to this and you can just go and get a free privacy policy and terms of service so we just go and click on select free over here all we need to do is just go and enter in some information about our website and once you have gone and entered in that information so if you've got your location you can just go and put the state you are in the u.s or your country whatever it is that is relevant to you we've gone and put in our professional email address our company name our website then over here we just need to go and tick some things so does your website click personal information well yes it does because we will be collecting payment stuff so as we go through here we're going to go and select some of these so we can just go and take name email home mailing address and phone number because those are the essential things that you need to collect on your dropshipping store when somebody is checking out then it's just going to say why you use this information so we can just go ahead and put contacting users personalizing experiences you can say analytics and market research as well and anything else so we've got compliance and dispute resolution and security and fraud as well so now we've got over here my website uses third party services so if you plan on installing a facebook pixel or google tag manager or anything like that then you will want to go and tick this and there you will want to go and tick my website users cookies as well now over here which is my website targets under the age of 13 depending on what you are selling if it's not so for my website it's not i can just go and leave this unticked so now also over here we have the privacy contact name so you can just go and put your professional email address in here and you can just go and choose email and phone we can just go and paste this in here again and now from here it's just going to say i understand this so just go and click on this and then we're just going to go and click on generate terms so now over here we have our privacy policy and our terms of service so as we're creating our terms of service page we're going to go to the terms of service and we're just going to go and click on copy to clipboard so now we're going to go ahead back over here and we've still got our returns and refunds open so we're just going to go and right click this click copy we'll come over here and hit paste i'm going to go and change this to terms of service and then once again we come over here we will right click this section hit copy and from here on the plus icon we'll hit paste and then finally we'll just go back to get terms we'll click copy to clipboard and we're just going to go and come into here and in here we can just go and paste that information in so now we have that information in here so what we're going to do is once again we can just go and bold up all of the headings so let's just make sure that we can make this bold so limits of use make this bold as well and intellectual property so all of the headings just make sure that you've got them in bold it just makes your website look more professional so we've got links that's going to be bold right to terminate bold and severance and governing law she's going to make all of those bold and we're just going to go and hit publish so now that that has published we can go just hit update again and now we're just going to go and click on view page so now we have our terms of service so the next thing we're going to go and create is the privacy policy so if we just go and close this now and we go and keep this one open so just open your website in a new tab so i'm just going to go and copy this keep your returns and refunds open and just open it in a new tab over here and then once again we're going to go to pages now this time i'm going to go to all pages now the first thing that you need to do is whenever you create a woocommerce store it will automatically create a draft privacy policy for you so just make sure you go and trash this one over here because we're gonna go and create our own one so then you're just gonna go to trash and we're just gonna go and hit delete permanently to get rid of that privacy policy so now we're gonna go and hit add new and this time we're gonna go and create a privacy policy and then once again hit edit with elementor and once again when animal took and once again one and once again once elementor has loaded we can just go and copy this from our returns and refunds paste it in here and we will just go and copy this section as well and paste that in here and i'm just going to go and change this to privacy policy then head over back to get terms we're going to click on privacy policy click copy then we're going to come back over to here and we're just going to go and highlight all of this so let's make sure we've got it all highlighted and we're just going to hit paste so now we've got our privacy policy so once again what we're going to do is we're just going to make sure that we bold everything up so information we collect is in bold log data bold then we've got personal information is in bold so like i said just bold all of these headings so we've got this one this one over here children's privacy disclosure of personal information and third parties so there's a fair few that you need to go through but like i said make sure that you go and do this because it just makes the website look more professional many customers probably won't come over to the privacy policy but it's always good like i said to make sure that it looks professional in case they do so we just delete this as well so now we have our privacy policy and we can just go and hit publish and now if we come over here we hit update and we'll go and hit view page so now we've got our privacy policy and that's looking good so one last thing that you need to do with your privacy policy is make sure that it is connected to woocommerce so head back to your wordpress dashboard over here then we're going to go to woocommerce and we're going to go to settings and then under settings you will see that we've got accounts and privacy so go and click on accounts and privacy and then we're going to scroll down and we should be able to see where we have privacy page so the privacy notices will not show up unless the privacy page is set so click on this over here and where it says select privacy policy page we're going to go and select our privacy policy and click on use this page so now we've got our privacy policy page set under woocommerce so that just means that on the checkout that this page that we just created people can go and click on it from the checkout as well so now that we have gone and done that the last page that we need to go and create is a contact us page and in order to create a contact us page we have to install another plugin so i'm going to go to plugins i'm going to go and click on add new over here now from here we're just going to go and type in contact form 7 so just go and type that in and then we're going to go for this one that's got a sort of volcano so just go and hit install now on contact form seven and once it has finished installing we're gonna go and hit activate over here and once contact form seven has finished activating we will see contact over here so then just go and click on contact forms and we'll see we've got contact form one so just go and hit edit over here so firstly we've got your name your email subject your message and they've got a submit button so that's how the contact form is going to look so if we come over to mail over here it's going to go to the site admin email now you can go and change this so you can go and put your professional email address in here you'll get ridge dot co dot uk and then it's just going to go from and it's going to say wordpress so you could go and change this from and just go and put your site title in but i would just recommend leaving it as that you can go and put the subject in so that's going to be the subject that the customer puts in so you can just go and leave it as that and then you've got the message body over here so it's just going to go and show the message from the customer so now we've got messages over here so basically when they go and fill in the contact form it's going to say thank you for your message if there is an error it's going to show them this so you can go and change any of these if you want to but i recommend just leaving them as the default so the main thing is just to make sure that it goes to the correct email address that you want to receive the customer's messages from so we're just gonna go and hit save over here and once our contact form is saved you will see that you've got this short code over here so just click on this and we're just gonna copy this so now we're going to do is go to pages and right click and add new so we're going to go and add a new page and we're going to go and call this contact us and hit edit with elementor and once again once elementor loads i'm just going to go and copy this from my returns and refunds page we're just going to go hit copy we're going to go and paste it in here and this is just to make sure that all of our pages look the same so now we've got contact us and this time we're going to go and hit plus over here we're going to go and choose this single section and what we're going to do is we're going to go and drag in a short code so drag a short code in here and then if we come back over here once again we'll just click this short code copy it and we're just going to go and paste that shortcode in here so now we can see we have this contact form now what we can do is we can go and add an a spacer above here and now we can see we've got our beautiful contact us page and we can go and add in a spacer just beneath as well so let's go and just drag in a spacer over here just to add some space around the button and you can just go and add in a header if you want to so if we just go and add in a heading and just say we will aim to get back to you in two to three working days so you can go and say something like that and we will just go and make sure that all of the typography is the same so we'll go and choose monster rats and i'm gonna go and just make it a little bit smaller something like that so you can just go and create your contact us page like that so let's just go and hit publish now and now we can once again just go and hit view page and now we can see we have our contact us page so now that we've created all of our pages we need to go and add a way to let our customers actually go and access those pages so we're going to add them to a footer because they look a little bit weird having all these pages up here so we're first going to go and create our footer and add those pages to our footer and then we'll go and sort out the menu up the top in our header over here so let's head back to our wordpress dashboard over here and from here we can go and create some of those menus so we'll go to appearance and go to menus over here and firstly let's just go and create our main menus this is going to be our primary header menu so we're just going to go and call this main menu choose primary menu and click on create menu now from here you can go and add some things to this menu so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to go and add in the checkout in here we'll go and add the cart as well and then what we can do is if you go up to the top over here we've got screen options we are going to go and put product categories in here as well so i'm going to go and add in some product categories into this menu as well so let's just go and choose some of these and click add to menu and as a matter of fact let me just go and open up the pages i'm just going to go and choose the cart not the checkout and we'll just go and add that to the menu so now we're just going to hit save menu over here so the next menu are going to create is going to be the footer menus let's go to create menu over here and we are going to go and choose help and then click on create menu and then from here we can just go and add some of those help pages so to this one we are going to go and we're going to go and add the contact us we're gonna add the returns and refunds and we're gonna go and add the shipping and delivery so we're gonna go and hit add to menu so this is gonna be our help menu so i'm just gonna go and drag the returns and refunds under contact us and click save and then finally we're just going to go and create the menu with the terms of service and the privacy policy so we're going to click on create new menu again and we're just going to go and call this one let's call this info and click on create menu and then from here we're just going to go and add in the terms of service and if we can see our privacy policy it's not here so we're just going to add in the terms of service for now we'll click save menu and let's just go and have a look under our pages so let's just go to all pages and let's just see if our privacy policy is here so it's under privacy policy page so that might be a reason why it's not coming up under the menus let's go back to menus over here and what we can do is go to screen options and let's just have a look if we can go and find this so this could be under let's just have a look under pages again and just see if we can go and find it so maybe it's under posts custom links categories product categories woocommerce endpoints so if you can't find it that's not a problem what we can do is we can just go to pages and let's just go and open all pages in a new link in a new tab sorry and then we're just going to go and open the privacy policy so let's just go and click on view page and now we've got our privacy policy here we're just going to copy the link then in our menus so we're going to go and open up our info info menu and click select what we can do is we can just go and add a custom link so from here i'm just going to scroll down we're going to go to custom links and we're just going to go and add in the link in there and we'll just call this privacy policy and then we just click on add to menu and now we've got the privacy policy i'm just going to go and drag that to the top and click on save menu so now we have our three menus we can go back to our home page and we can go and add those many so we can see for the main menu i've already got this so we've got survival gear binoculars hiking backpacks hiking tents cart so you can go and add whatever you want to this main menu but i just think that that looks pretty cool and we've got our shop now button so now down the bottom here we want to go and add the links to those other pages so we're just going to go and hit customize over here and once the customized area loads we can go to footer builder and it's going to go and show us our footer so in order to go and add those menus what we can do is we can go and click on these plus buttons now if you want to go and add more columns so you can add different menus you can just go and click to three columns or four columns or where whatever it is you want to be i'm just going to go and stick with two columns so if you just got this little settings icon over here that allows you to change the columns so when you click plus over here you can go and add a widget so i'm going to go and add a widget one in here and over here i'm going to go and add a widget to so now if we go back we've got widget one and widget two so widget one we're gonna go and click on add widget and we're gonna go and search for a navigation menu so go and pick navigation menu and then we're gonna go and select our help menu and then over here we can just go and say help so we're just going to put that in there like that so that's our help menu so we can see over here so it's not climbing up let's just choose help again but i want it to be in capitals so we can go and put it like that help and then for widget two so if we just go back we're gonna go to widget two and we're gonna go and click add widgets and once again we'll go to navigation menu and we can just go and call this one information and then we can go and choose our info menu and we should be able to see that those pages come up so let's go and just choose that again so now we can see we've got that coming here so now what we can do is we can go and change the design so we can just go and click on this over here and what we will do is we're going to go and get rid of this line around the outside so let me just go and have a look in the design area and then from here we can just go and change this border to zero and then the bottom border we should be able to change this to let's have a look if we just go and change this one so we can go and change this one if we go to this design we can go and say the top border for this one will be one so now we've just got that line now if you want to go and change this copy right a bit you can just go and click on this and you can just go and say copyright and instead of powered by astra theme you can just go and leave it as your site title so copyright at chilcot ridge and then you can just so i'm going to go and change where it says information as well i'm just going to go and change that so i'm just going to go back into here and where we've got information let's just go back i'm going to go into footer builder i'm going to go into widget 2 and i'm just gonna go and put this in capitals so just make sure that everything matches so now i've got information so now we can go and hit publish so now we do have our footer menu over here and we also have our main menu now i'm going to go and change my top menu as well so my header because i want it to be black so i'm just going to go and click on this little pencil icon over here and we can go to design and then over here we've got color and image so i'm going to change this to black so let's just change this so now we can see everything goes black but now i also want to go and change the links so if i go and click on this we can go to design and then under here we will see colors so i can go to menu and we can see we've got link so i'm going to go and change this to white and then we've got background color i'm going to go and change i'm going to leave that as black actually if we just go to link we've got hover so i'm going to go for this sort of grayish so when they hover it over it sort of goes sort of gray like that so if you are going to go and change the background color of your header just make sure that your logo is a transparent background logo like my one over here otherwise it's gonna have a white box around it and that's gonna make it look really unprofessional now in order to go and add to remove the background of your logo sorry you can come over here and click on upload image and then from here you can go and choose the logo that we created earlier and you can go and remove the background of your logo so you can see the background has been removed so i can just go and download that and i will be able to upload it over here so let's just go and hit publish now and then we will just go and close the customized area so now we can go and see how that's coming along so that's looking really good and now down the bottom over here we have the help with all of our pages and then we also have our privacy policy as well so if we just go and click on the contact us it brings us over here now the really good thing about this as well is it's stuck to the bottom so it will show on every single page now if you notice there is a white line underneath here so we can go and get rid of that for the header as well so if we just go back to customize over here and then from here if we just click on this again we should be able to find a bottom border so we can see we've got the bottom border if we just change this to zero we can see we get rid of it now you can see you can make it bigger and smaller so i'm just going to go and choose that as zero and we're just going to go and leave it like that so let's hit publish and we'll just go and close this so like i said these will show on every single page now so if we go over to the returns and refunds over here we can see we've got our returns and refunds page so the site is starting to look really professional and it's coming together really well so the next thing that we need to do is make sure that our site is mobile friendly so in order to do this we are going to go and hit edit with elementor once again so once elementor loads you can go and view your site on different screen sizes so obviously right now we have the desktop mode so on desktop everything's looking good but if we go into the tablet mode we can see that some of our hero image starts to get cut off everything else looks fairly fine this could look a little bit better so we could go and change this to three columns let's say instead of four because it's making it look a little bit weird and then also what we need to do is just make sure that it looks good on a mobile as well so if we're going to have a look on a mobile it's looking good just except for that main hero image once again so firstly let's go and sort that hero image out so what you can do is you can go and display different sections with elementor based on the screen size so if we go and click over here we're just going to right click and duplicate this what we're going to do is we're going to have one which is going to be for desktop and then one which is going to be for tablet and mobile so in order to do this firstly we can just go and click on this we'll go to advanced go to responsive and we're going to go and click on hide on tablet and hide on mobile so now this is only going to show on the desktop version of our website so now if we come over to here and click edit section we're going to go and save for this one we're going to hide on the desktop so now let's go into mobile mode and what we can do is we can go and change the background over here so if we just go and click on this firstly you can go and play around with your image based on the position so if we go to center center let's say or let's say center right let's see how that looks or center left so for this image it's probably not going to work so if that happens to you what i recommend doing is go and upload a new image which is a square image so we're going to go and upload an image now so go to upload files and select a file i'm going to go and upload this image over here which is 800 by 800 pixels so once again just go and create this within canva the same way that we went and created the first hero image but just 800 by 800 pixels so i've already uploaded this over here so i'll just go to my media library and insert this so now we can see it's still being cut off so what i can do is i can go to bottom center let's go to top center and we can see that on a tablet that is looking good now so now we need to go and make sure that it looks good on a mobile as well so we're going to mobile mode we can see it's still being cut off a little bit on a mobile so let's go and play around with it on a mobile so let's go and see if we can go and change this to bottom center center center let's go and have a look so i think the best we're gonna get is like that so we're gonna have to go and just change some things around to make sure that it's looking good so let's just go one more time just make sure that everything is looking correct let's try bottom left so bottom center is probably going to be the best so we need to do we need to just go and make sure that we can move some things around on a mobile so we're just going to come over to layout over here we're going to do is we're going to say maximum height it's going to be 100 so now we can see that everything fits in now if you want to you can go and play around with the image so i could redo this image to make this a little bit more into the center so you can see how that works so now if we go into the mobile mode we can see this is how it's going to look on a mobile so overall everything's looking pretty good on a mobile like i said we could go and change this to just make it a bit more center aligned so let me just go and see if we have another image that i could potentially use to go and do this so we just go to choose image again and let's just go to upload a file let's go and just see if we have one that's in the center so i don't have one so like i said i could just go and move this into the center a bit we're gonna leave it for now and just to demonstrate that's how you can go and change it so what you want to do is just go and play around with the styles and go and play around with the minimum height and just make sure that everything looks good on a mobile and on a tablet now alternatively you can go and create three of these sections so you can duplicate it another third time and then you could have a different one for tablet and for mobile and for desktop but i just think that it looks okay on a tablet and a mobile so that's perfectly fine with me so let's just go and hit update so now what you are going to want to do is let's just go and view the page so now if we view the page we can see on a desktop it's still looking good now you're going to want to go and do this with all of your pages so if we just go over to the contact us page over here let's just go and hit edit with elementor again and now from here once again we can go and see what this looks like on a tablet so we can see on a tablet it looks perfectly fine now if we go into mobile view once again in mobile view i think it looks pretty good still as well so that's perfectly perfectly fine so just go and make sure that you check out all of the pages and make sure that they're all looking good and that way you can go and see if you need to go and change any of them so for all of the other pages that i've created it should be fine and we can see we've got our mobile menu here as well so what we're going to do is we're going to go and change this because you can see on a mobile when i click mobile menu it's coming up with all of these different pages so we definitely don't want that so what we're going to do is we're going to come back over here we're going to go ahead and click on view page and we're going to go and hit customize over here and once the customize area loads we're going to go into the mobile view and we're just going to go and click on this and we're going and click on this blue button over here so now that we have gone and done that where it says mobile menu over here we're just gonna go and close this we're gonna go and click plus and we are gonna go and choose primary menu so now if we go and choose this we can see we've got survival gear binoculars hiking backpacks hiking tents and cart so now we've gone and done that we can go and click on this again you can go and change the design if you want to so i could go and change the colors back to just completely white so let's just go and see if we can change that so we've got the background color over here we can go ahead and change it like that and we can go and change the links to black so now that looks a little bit more normal on a mobile so now if we go into tablet mode once again you can do the same thing so we can see in tablet mode it's looking like this so i could go and click on this over here and then i can go to the colors i can go to the link text and make it white and make the background make the background white and make the link text black like this and then finally if we go back into this mode it still looks the way it should so now we can just go and hit publish and now that we have gone and published that we can just go and click x so now we know that our mobile menu is looking good as well so now that we have gone and had a look at how to ensure that our website is mobile and tablet responsive the next thing we are going to do is go and set up the payment gateways so that we can start accepting paypal payments and debit in credit card payments as well so from here we just go and head back to our wordpress dashboard and in order to go and accept paypal and debit and credit card payments we need to go and install a few other plugins so we're going to go to plugins over here and we're going to go and click on add new plugin and first here we're just going to go and search in stripe so search for the stripe plugin and we're just going to go and install this one stripe for woocommerce so just go and click on install now for this one now we're not going to activate this one straightaway before we activate it we are just going to go and search for paypal as well so just go and search paypal and then we are just going to go and install this one over here paypal woocommerce checkout so just go and install this one as well so once we have gone and installed both of those plugins we can go to installed plugins over here and then from here we can just go and tick both of these so we're going to tick this one and tick this one then we'll come to the top and we'll just go and choose activate and hit apply so now we have activated both of those plugins we can go to woocommerce and we can go to settings over here and then under the woocommerce settings we can go and click on payments and then from here we can go and we see we've got paypal checkouts and we've got stripe credit cards so from here you can go and set up both of these so what you're going to do is firstly let's go and have a look at paypal so we're just going to click on manage over here now from here what you can go and do is where you see here it's got set up an existing or set up or link an existing paypal account you just need to go and sign up for a paypal business account it's really easy just go and sign up with your email address and they just go and verify a few details and once you have set up that account you can just go and click on this and just log in with your credentials and it will connect your paypal business account to your website so then customers can start paying using paypal directly through your website so that is paypal now if we go back to payments over here the next one is going to be for debit and credit card and that is the stripe payment gateway so just make sure that this is turned on as well and we can go to manage over here and then all you basically need to do is just make sure that you have stripe enabled over here then you just need to go and register a stripe account so it's really easy to go and register a stripe account you just go and sign up with your email enter in a few details they just have to go and verify your id so that's either a driving license or a passport just to make sure that you are a legit real person then once you have gone and signed up for a stripe account all you can do is just click on api settings over here and then from here you can just go and change this to live settings and then you just need to go and click on connect and that's it so once you go and click to connect your strap account you can just go and log in with your stripe credentials once again and it will go and connect your woocommerce website to your stripe account and then that way you can go and start accepting debit and credit card payments on your website as well as paypal payments so now that we have gone and had a look at how to set up payment gateways the next thing that we are going to go and do is create a test order so in order to create a test order what we're going to do is we are going to come over to marketing here and we're going to go into coupons so just right click this and open up coupons the reason that we are going to do this is because we're going to use a 100 off coupon in order to go and create a test order on our website so just click on create your first coupon over here we are going to go and create a 100 off coupon in order to create that test order so you can go and call your coupon codes whatever you want so i'm just going to go and call this 100 off you can go and add a description to say this will give you 100 off or whatever it is over here we're going to go and create a percentage discount as the discount type i'm going to go and make this 100 so you can go and add a fixed card discount for example 10 or something like that you can go and allow free shipping for this and you can also go and do a coupon expiry if you want to so we could go and say this coupon expires in a few days you've got usage restrictions so you can go and say minimum maximum spend for the coupon and for particular products that the coupon is allowed to be used for then you can also go for usage limits so you can go and say that we only have 50 of these coupons and only one person per user can use it so we're just going to go and put one and one for this just so that this coupon can only be used once for our test order so we're just going to go and hit publish over here now the next thing that you're going to want to do once you have published that coupon code is going to open up your website in another browser so i've just opened up my website in microsoft edge here and we're going to go and create a test order through here so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to come down here and pick one of these products so let's just go for this cooking system over here so we're just going to go ahead and click on this we're just going to go and choose the options and add this to the cart then we're just going to go to view cart over here and from here we're going to go and apply our 100 off coupon code and hit apply coupon and then from here we're just going to go and click on proceed to checkout so now we're just going to go and enter in some dummy information over here and once you have entered in that dummy information we can just go and hit place order over here so once the order has been placed it will say thank you for your order and now we can just go and head back over here now firstly we're just going to go and make sure that the order email comes through so let's just go and have a look over here so maybe it may come through to the junk mail so we can go and see that we've got the order over here now firstly what we can go and do is we can go and change these emails so at the moment you can see it's coming up purple so that's the default color from woocommerce so let's just go and change this so we're going to head back over to here we're going to go to woocommerce we're going to go to settings and then what you can go and do is you can just go to emails over here and you can just go and change the color of those emails so firstly you can go and see that you can go and change these emails here so when a new order comes through it's going to go and come through to this email address and then also the from email and the from address so you might want to go and change this to your professional email address that you created so that way when an order confirmation comes through to a customer it's from your professional email address so i can just go and put in admin at chillcut ridge dot credit uk dot uk and then down here you will see the base color so i'm just going to go and change my base color to black but you can go and change it to whatever color you want so for example that sort of odd green color that i've been using i could go and change it to that but i just think black will look a bit better and make it easier to read for the customers so now we can just go and hit save changes now the next thing that we're going to look at is fulfilling orders so if we go to orders over here we will see that that order has come through so there's that dummy order so if we just go and we click on this order over here now unfortunately with dropship me you cannot fulfill orders automatically so you have to go and do it manually so over here you will see place order manually so when you go and click on this it will bring you over to the aliexpress listing and all you need to do is just go and add the product to the cart and then when you go and check out then you can just go and find the customer's details over here so we've got their address and you just go and use that to go and fulfill the order so that's how you can just go and fulfill the orders automatically so it's really simple we can see everything is working so the last couple of things that we are going to do is just going to go and clean the site up a bit so i'm just going to go back to the front end of my site over here so firstly we want to go and add a little favicon over here so you can see it's coming up with the wordpress icon so once again we can just go to customize over here now from here we can go to header builder we should be able to go to logo and if we scroll down we can see we've got site icon so to create a site icon you can just use your logo this is 512 by 512 pixels so if i go and click on select site icon and i can go and click on select files and we can see over here i've got this 512x512 favicon so i'll just go and hit open so you can just go and create one of these in canva again using your logo but like i said just make sure it's 512 by 512. we just go and hit select over here and now we can just go and hit publish now another thing that i want to go and do i'm just going to go and add some of the other pages to the footer so i'm just going to go and add the my account page the checkout the cart all of those things i think they're important to just have those in the footer as well so let's just go and close this over here and now we should be able to see we've got a little favicon over here so that looks really good that just keeps the branding of the website so we're just going to go back again i'm just going to go and create one more menu so we're just going to go to appearance and we're going to go to menus and then we're just going to go and click on create new menu and we can just go and say we'll just call this shop and we'll click on create new menu and then we're going to go and add all of those shopping pages so we will just go and add the check out the cart the shop page and the my account page and just go and click on add so now we've got my account check out cart shop and click on save menu so now that we have done that we will go back to the front end over here and once again we will just go and click on customize and from here we will go to the footer builder once again we're just gonna scroll down i'm gonna go and change this to three columns so we're gonna make this three and i'm just gonna go and add a widget in here so we're going to go and add widget 3 and we will just go back and under widget 3 we will just go and add a widget we're going to go and search for a navigation menu again and then we're just going to call this shop and we will just go and choose our shop menu over here so now that we've chosen our shop menu it should come up so let's just go and choose it again and there we go so we have our shop menu so we'll just go and hit publish and then now that that has been published we can just go and close this and we should be able to see if we scroll down to the bottom over here and we can see we have my account checkout cart and shop and that just gives the customers an easy way to go and access all of these pages as well which are really important so now our store is basically ready to go and market and start making sales and as you can see it's a really beautiful and professional store and it didn't cost us one penny to make so the next step is to go and look at using free traffic methods if you want to go and test that out so go and check out my other video on using free and cheap traffic methods to go and start marketing your store i hope you have enjoyed the tutorial make sure to give it a big thumbs up if you have and make sure to subscribe to the channel for more e-commerce and drop shipping content and i'll see you all in the next video

Channel: Elliott Prendy

Views: 30,059

Keywords: How to Create a Dropshipping Store for Free, How to Build a Dropshipping Store for Free, How to Create a Free Dropshipping Store, How to Build a Free Dropshipping Store, How to Start Dropshipping with No Money, How to Start Dropshipping for Free, Start Dropshipping with No Money, Start Dropshipping Free, Free Dropshipping, Can You Start Dropshipping for Free, Can You Start Dropshipping with No Money, How to Make a Free Dropshipping Store, How to Make a Dropshipping Store for Free

Id: xBL4o-7qKQw

Length: 138min 51sec (8331 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 15 2021