Top 5 E-Commerce Platforms to Start Dropshipping Business in Nigeria

Dropshipping business in Nigeria, as you might have learned, is currently one of the biggest business ideas to make hefty and income online, provided you choose the right e-commerce platforms available for dropshipping. In fact, after cryptocurrency (which is even risky), there’s no other legit business you can invest in, and earn substantial money.

Many smart entrepreneurs like you have made and currently, making thousands of dollars with dropshipping business after their initial and once-in-year investment. I know you’re also ready for this but before getting started, you need to be enlightened on choosing the right e-commerce platform that’ll be good for you.

There are lots of e-commerce platforms to build your dropshipping business in Nigeria but I’ve tailored it down to the top 5 of them.

Permit me to ask you this; do you know what dropshipping is all about?

I believe some of you know it and with confidence, you can say something about it. But in case of those guys who are hearing it for the first time or would like to know more, let recapitulate what dropshipping is all about.

What is Dropshipping?

Dropshipping is part of e-commerce business in Nigeria that deal with selling of products you really don’t have in stock. This involves partnering with a large e-commerce marketplace website with option for dropshipping and help them sell in return for commission.

But wait; don’t mix dropshipping up with “affiliate marketing”.

You all know Alibaba.com – The biggest e-commerce platform in China, you can use a plugin popularly known as “Alidrop” on WordPress to dropship their products to your own website and make money online in Nigeria.

The word “clone” would have been better to describe this. But because dropshipping is 100% legit, I won’t use such phrase.

How Dropshipping Business Work in Nigeria

In simple explanation, it’s just when you are sitting in your room but you put a banner outside your house that you sells “ice cream”.

Meanwhile, you don’t sell anything not to talk of ice cream but you have a friend nearby who sells ice cream.

So whenever customers comes for ice cream, you’ll immediately call your friend and he will come to deliver the ice cream instantly. To appreciate what you’ve done, your friend will give you a token.

Let say he gives you $5 on every $50 ice cream he sell through you, it means you’ll be making $100 on every $500 he sold.

If this continues, you’re going to keep making money selling ice cream without actually selling it yourself.

This is the best explanation to give on dropshipping business in Nigeria.

The “banner” you need to put outside your house to attract customers is when you choose the right e-commerce platforms for dropshipping. While the process through which people see the banner and your friend come to deliver the ice cream is called “dropshipping”.

Now you may be asking……

What are the benefits of starting a dropshipping business in Nigeria?

The benefits are as follows:

• You earn passive income without leaving your house
• Unlike other e-commerce business, you don’t have to own any goods in stock or in warehouse
• You don’t have to fear that a cargo is coming on sea
• You don’t have to deliver any goods purchase from your dropshipping store
• You don’t have to be afraid or trouble when customer doesn’t like the delivered goods
• Everything is automated, so no manual settings
• You can also do another job and still, make money on dropshipping business
• And so many benefits…

But you’re going to enjoy these benefits if you set up your store using one of these trusted platforms for dropshipping business available for Nigerians:

Top 5 E-Commerce Platforms for Dropshipping Business in Nigeria

1. Shopify

Shopify tops our list of top E-commerce platforms for dropshipping business in Nigeria. Currently, there more than 800,000 stores which is powered by Shopify. This figure keeps increasing as the years go by, this has been the case for the past thirteen years.

I’m sure you will want to know why Shopify is used mostly for dropshipping and I’ll tell you.

Many reasons has led to store owners adopting Shopify as their preferred platforms. With Shopify you get access to lots of themes that should make your store amazing leading to more customers. There are more than 70 professional themes created by expert designers.

Besides this, you also get the chance to customize your store, tune it to your taste using the provided templates. These templates have been created to keep your store mobile friendly which is required in order to grow in dropshipping.

In terms of security, all stores powered by Shopify comes equipped with a 256 bit SSL certificate which secures customer’s personal details. Major forms of payments are supported and secured with security similar to those used by banks.

If you’d like to go with Shopify, here are some pros and cons you need to consider;

(PROs) Benefits of using Shopify for Dropshipping Business in Nigeria

• Getting started with Shopify is pretty easy and straightforward with various templates to choose from.
• Customer support is great—a live chat, phone and email support channels is available to customers 24/7.
• You can set up a store with multiple languages.
• There are tons of themes to choose from.
• Security is provided by default to all stores—you don’t pay extra for this.

(CONs) Demerit of using Shopify for Dropshipping Business

• SEO isn’t top notch and it’s sadden.
• Expensive for beginners

2. WooCommerce

This is plugin from WordPress which powers most of the world’s e-commerce platforms. WooCommerce is been used in 30% of active online stores. This platform can be likened to Linux open source system—its open source thereby supporting lots of customization.

WooCommerce give you lots options to tweak things up, even more than shopify.

WooCommerce comes with lots themes—as it should. There are unlimited themes to choose from which comes by default, there also theme providers which create themes that are readily compatible WooCommerce.

Still on customizations, there are many templates — hundreds of them which makes customizing seamless and straightforward.

Unlike Shopify, hosting doesn’t comes by default, there lots of hosting providers to choose from, Bluehost is recommended and there are many more to choose from such as Namecheap, Siteground etc.

SEO is great, using WooCommerce ensures better SEO performance among all other e-commerce platforms for dropshipping business in Nigeria.

Some advantages and disadvantages this platform if you choose to go with this platform are as follows:

(PROs) Benefits of using Woocommerce for Dropshipping business in Nigeria

• Great SEO performance
• Lots of themes and templates to spice up your e-commerce website.
• Seamless social media integration into your online store.
• Multiple form of payments to choose from
• Plugins are available for almost everything you want to do

CONs of using Woocommerce for dropshipping

• Below par customer support
• Poor multi-lingual support

3. Magento

Magento is another top E-commerce platform for dropshipping business in Nigeria, they make owning an online store quite easy. There are lots of cool features available when using Magento for dropshipping.

Opening an e-commerce store using Magento doesn’t require much of technical knowledge, you are provided with lots of easy to customize templates. Using these templates, you don’t need to build from scratch, just drag and drop, and you’re good to go.

Aside templates, there is a page building tool that lets you edit individual pages.

Stores created on the Magento platform are well optimized for every device—they are mobile friendly. With this, SEO performance is better.

Security wise, Magento is compliant with level 1 PCI, this provides adequate security for its users.

(PROs) Benefits of using Magento for Dropshipping Business in Nigeria

• Ease of use
• Highly customizable
• Awesome security system
• Good customer support

CONs of using Magento for Dropshipping

• Relatively expensive

4. BigCommerce

BigCommerce is another top brand that makes it to our list, they strife to give customers a worthwhile dropshipping experience with their wide array of products and services.

In 2009, BigCommerce was launched and since then they’ve powered lots of e-commerce websites, making over $200 million in profit.

Aside making profit, they do provide great services to all customers. Like with most platforms, they provide lots of themes to aid customization easier. With BigCommerce, your dropshipping store is well optimized for mobile viewing which helps in SEO rankings.

Still on SEO, your links are customizable; this can lead to a much better SEO performance. You could also integrate social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram to leading, this should let you capture more customers.

BigCommerce is PCI level 1 certified with this your customers are safe whenever they’re on your BigCommerce powered site. There also multiple data centers to back up your data in an event of failure.

(PROs) Benefits of using BigCommerce for Dropshipping Business in Nigeria

• Mobile friendly
• Highly customizable store themes
• Multiple language support
• Fast servers with Google cloud support. Additionally, servers are always available for 99.99% of the time.

CONs of using BigCommerce for Dropshipping

• Insufficient amount of themes—this make your store comes alive but unfortunately there isn’t much of this by BigCommerce.

5. Wix

Last on our list is Wix, which is a pretty good platform for dropshipping business in Nigeria. Wix lets you create professional looking website that can rival any top site.

Building your online store on the Wix platform is pretty much easy, there lots of templates to help you as a first time user and also subsequently. Similar platforms lets you drag and drop different properties on your website, this feature is also available on Wix.

You could also add multiple payment gateways to your store, there are lots of payment gateways including Authorize.Net and PayPal.

The payment platforms supported by Wix have track record of securing payments. Also there no charge in terms of commissions—they’re free to use.

Pricing wise, setting up a store starts at $23 dollar monthly which is relatively less expensive. All there isn’t additional charges for extra features—you only pay once.

Furthermore, tax and exchange rate are automatically calculated by Wix, you don’t need to rack your brain in order to come up with the final price.

(PROs) Benefits of using Wix for Dropshipping

• Lots of templates to aid you in creating a professional store
• Support numerous payment plans
• Good SEO performance
• Relatively cheap
• Easy to use

CONs of using Wix for Dropshipping

• Average customer support
• Most features are available to only those in the US.

Rounding off – Best Platforms for Dropshipping Business In Nigeria

If you’re really serious about dropshipping in Nigeria as I’m sure you are, I will advise you to be patient while choosing any of these e-commerce platforms and don’t forget to consider your budget.

Honestly, there are two best platforms for dropshipping which are having Head-2-Head presently in eCommerce industry. They are WordPress’ Woocommerce and Shopify.

We’ll be writing on the comparison very soon – I mean the differences between WooCommerce and Shopify including their CONS, PROS and other things you need to know about the two content management systems (CMS).

So here guys are the top 5 platforms for dropshipping business in Nigeria, they all offer great products, services and nifty features. But as with all things, they’ve got their pros and cons.

What do think? Which do intend using? Let us know in the comments!