WordPress Plugins For Dropshipping Business

These days, a lot of people are interested in creating a dropshipping business because of a low startup cost. Since you do not have to manufacture or acquire products, you can start a dropshipping business with a pretty small budget. All you need a website and marketing skills. Having said that you might have to spend quite a lot of money to create a website for your dropshipping business. If you do not have web designing skills, you need a designer to build a website, you also have to spend a lot of money on templates, themes, and plugins.

Popular eCommerce Platforms

Shopify, a popular ecommerce platform, charges between $29 and $2000, plus transaction fees per month.

BigCommerce plan starts from $29.95 per month.

Bigcartel plan starts from $24.99 per month.

Well, there are also a lot of Open Source, or free, ecommerce platforms.

Magento is not only one of the best free ecommerce platforms, but also one of the best ecommerce platforms out there. Even though there is a premium version of Magento, the free version is good doe developers and small business owners.

OpenCart is also free to use. It is highly recommended for start up ecommerce website.

PrestaShop is also a free to use ecommerce platform.

Aforementioned ecommerce platforms are stand alone ecommerce platforms. There are also ecommerce plugins that you can use with WordPress Content Management System and convert a simple WordPress site into an eCommerce site. Some of the popular ecommerce plugins that you can use with wordpress for ecommerce are Woocommerce, JigoShop, WP eCommerce etc.

Best WordPress Plugins to Create a Dropshipping Business

If you do not want to spend a lot of money and do not have programming skills, you can start dropshipping business with WordPress. WordPress is one of the popular platforms to create a dropshipping store because it is free, easy to use and highly customizable. Nevertheless, you need a lot of plugins to customize a wordpress dropshipping store. First of all, you need ecommerce plugin like Woocommerce. Woocommerce is totally free, however, you will have to buy extensions to customize your store.

With Woocommerce, you can add as many products as you want. If you are doing this manually, you do not need other plugins, however, if you want to automate product adding (import products with few clicks), you need other dropshipping plugins and extensions.

Popular Dropshipping Suppliers

In order to start your own dropshipping business, you also need dropshipping suppliers, here are some options to choose:

AliExpress, Alibaba, ChinaBrand, SaleHoo, Dropship Direct, Sunrise Wholesale, Doba, Wholesale2B, Worldwide Brands, Wholesale Central, etc.

Dropshipping With Aliexpress

Aliexpress is a popular dropshipping supplier. It is owned by Chinese eCommerce giant Alibaba. If you want to start a dropshipping business and source your products from Aliexpress, you can easily do with a few clicks by using some of these plugins.

AliDropship plugin is one of the popular dropshipping plugins for WooCommerce. The plugin automates the entire process involved with dropshipping business, from adding products from AliExpress to placing orders, and shipping products. The annual charge for AliDropship is $89. This plugin is not compatible with other themes. In order to use AliDropship, you have to use the prebuilt themes from Alidropship.

While Alidropship is for a WordPress website, AliDropship Woo is for Woocommerce. If you are using Woocommerce. AliDropship Woo is for you. In order to use Alidropship woo, you have to first install woocommerce on your WordPress site and then purchase Alidropship woo plugin and install on your store. In order to browse and import products automatically from Aliexpress through AliDropship or AliDropship Woo, you also have to install Alidropship Google Chrome extension.

Ali2Woo is WordPress plugin allows you to import products from Aliexpress automatically. By using this plugin, you can not only import products with few clicks but also edit product title, image, description, pricing etc. This plugin even allows you to import reviews from Aliexpress. You have two options, you can either pay $40 one time proce and import only 1000 products or pay $25 per month and import upto 10k products.

WooDropship is another WordPress plugin that you can use to build your dropshipping business on woocommerce platform. They charge you $14 per month, they also offer a free trial. You can use this plugin to import products automatically as well as fulfill orders with Aliexpress.

Woocommerce also has its own dropshipping extension called WooCommerce Dropshipping. It cost $49 for single website use, $99 for 5 websites use and $149 for 25 sites.

Conclusion

These are premium plugins, however, you can also find a lot of free wordpress plugins for dropshipping business.

Review of SiteGround Web Hosting

SiteGround has been rated 4.5 on average by many prestigious online and offline magazines such as PCMag , WhoIsHosting, etc. Currently, SiteGround is hosting more than 250,000 websites around the world. SiteGround offers web hosting solutions from $3.94 per month ‘(for shared hosting) to $429 per month (for Dedicated hosting). Different kinds of web hosting solutions are available through SiteGround, for example managed WordPress, shared hosting, dedicated server, and cloud hosting.

SiteGround Features

• You get a free dot com when you choose to buy one of the SiteGround web hosting services.
• The uptime guarantee is 99.9%
• Customer support is 24/7
• Server location is one of the plus points of SiteGround, you can choose among: Illinois (United States), Amsterdam (Europe), and Singapore (Asia-Pacific).
• Various kinds of WordPress hosting plans are available.

Hosting Plans From SiteGround

WordPress Hosting is one of the tailor-made hosting packages from SiteGround. When you choose SiteGround wordpress hosting, you can choose a variety of plans for small, medium or big websites. When you choose Shared Web Hosting Package from SiteGround, you can get one month trial, however, if you choose to stay with the plan, you need to pay at least one-year fees. The web host also charges set up fees. When compared to other web hosts, SiteGround’s Shared Web Hosting does not look lucrative. If you choose HostGator Shared Hosting, you can pay on per month basis.

If you are planning small, you can choose the Linux-based StartUp plan which will give you one website with 10 GB disk space. This plan is good for the websites that get 10K visitors a month. It will cost you $9.95 per month. You get unlimited emails and CloudFlare security service.

If you want a medium website that will have 25,000 visitors in a month, the GrowBig plan is a better option. The best thing about this plan is it supports multiple websites. You also get one year free SSL certificate as well as CloudFlare support. The plan starts from $14.95 per month.

SiteGround offers the GoGeek plan for big websites. It supports multiple websites, gives 30 GB diskspace, unlimited emails, a free SSL certificate for one year and CloudFlare support. The plan starts from $29.95 per month
There is four Cloud Hosting plans from Siteground. The plan starts from $60 per month upto $140 per month. The price differs according to the CPU, RAM, Storage and data transfer.

Dedicated Web Hosting from SiteGround stars from $229 to $429 per month. You can get upto 2TB disk space, 16 GB RAM, and 5TB of monthly data transfers. Many web hosts offer better data transfer, (upto 15 TB). SiteGround has Linux-based dedicated servers only.

SiteGround Pros

• Because of integration with CloudFlare, SiteGround provides better performance and security.
• No need for manual backup, automatic backups are available.
• Servers are located in different parts of the world, you can choose the server that is nearest to your visitors.
• They provide 99.99 uptime guarantee, and you can rely on their claim.
• Customer service is excellent.
• They have tailor-made hosting packages, which is good for newbie as well as professionals.

SiteGround Hosting Cons

• There is a limitation on storage and bandwidth.
• Windows server is not available.
• You will have to pay for at least one year for shared hosting.
• You get site backup from SiteGround, however, you have to pay $2.5 every month. Backup is free on many other web hostings.

Gist

SiteGround web hosting provides strong security. It is one of the best services for small business, as you can get managed WordPress hosting. Customer service is wonderful, however, when compared to other Webhosting, it fails miserably.

Check author’s website to learn more about website hosting, website design and SEO.

SSL Certificates: What Are They and Why You Need Them

A domain uses various protocols such as www, http, or https. When a domain is using a security certificate, it shows https where “s” stands for secure. SSL or Secured Sockets Layers is a certificate that encrypts data while transferring to a server. What does this exactly mean? Having  SSL means protecting sensitive data such as usernames, passwords, payment information, bank details etc. When a website does not use SSL, data will be sent as plain text, this leaves room for the hackers to steal your data. SSL is not only important for securing your data, but it also boosts in your search engine ranking.

SSL Certificate Validation Levels and Types of Certificates

There are different Certificate Validation Levels and different Types of SSL Certificates.

The Certificate Validation Levels are:

Domain Validated Certificates: provides low assurance certificate and the process is automated. Essential SSL is a domain validated certificate. Domain Validated certificates are ideal for small and medium websites as these certificates are cheap.

Organization Validated Certificate: provides medium assurance; domain ownership and company identity are validated by real agents. This type of certificate is useful for company websites. Examples of Organization Validated Certificates are Instant SSL, Premium SSL, Wildcard, Comodo Multi-Domain etc.

Extended Validation Certificates: Provides high assurance and validation process is complicated. This certificate checks whether the business is legit or not. This kind of certificate is mostly used by e-commerce sites. Some of the examples of Extended Validation Certificates are Comodo EV, Comodo EV Multi-Domain etc. When a website used Extended Validated Certificate, your website will show with a green bar and a padlock.

The Different Types of Certificates are

Single Domain: Secures your one domain. You can secure your single domain with the certificates such as Instant SSL, Instant SSL Pro, Instant SSL Premium etc.

Multi-domain: Secures up to 210 domains with a single certificate you purchased. In order to secure your multiple domains, you can use certificates like Comodo Multi-Domain Certificate, Comodo EV Multi-Domain Certificate etc.

Wildcard: Secures all the subdomains on your website. Comodo Premium SSL is a Wildcard Certificate that secures all the subdomains in a website.

Where to buy Security Certificate for Your domains?

SSL certificates are issued by Certificate Authority. GeoTrust, DigiCert, Symantec are some of the big Certificate Authorities. You can also buy a certificate from third party certificate resellers like Namecheap and Comodo.

Free Certificate vs. Premium Certificate

You can not only buy Security Certificates from Certificate Authority and Certificate reseller, but you can also get free SSL from Lets Encrypt. You can use SSL from Lets Encrypt if your host provides Free Certificate or supports Lets Encrypt. If you have the technical know-how, you can also install free SSL from Lets Encrypto by yourself.

Since you can also find free SSL certificate providers, you might ask if I can get it free what’s the point in paying extra to have a certificate on your website?

Free Certificates or self-signed certificates show your website as secured, however, it does not actually secure your website as these certificates are unregulated. In other words, your website can be compromised. Your website will still show secured even when it is compromised.