 Hi everyone, I'm Ely from AutoDS and in today's video, we're going to discuss what a realistic dropshipping startup budget is and how much you need to invest in your business in order to get started. Real quick, before we get into that, make sure to hit that subscribe button and give this video a like so you can always stay up to date with the latest dropshipping tips and strategies. So before we get into our budget, let's give a quick background of what dropshipping is for those of you who haven't heard of it. With dropshipping, you're essentially the middleman. Here's how this business model works. Let's say a customer places an order from your store. You forward that order over to your supplier, who then ships it directly out to your customer. So you're not even touching any inventory. Now what do you need exactly to get started? All you need is a computer, internet connection, and some dropshipping knowledge. So when it comes to cost, there are way lower startup costs when starting an e-commerce business than when actually running a physical store. But what are those startup costs? That's the question of the day. Your startup budget for dropshipping in 2022 depends on where you're selling. So we'll talk about three platforms in this video, eBay, Shopify, and Facebook Marketplace. Let me know down below in the comments which platform you want to get started on. All right. So first, eBay. Our budget there is going to be around $0 to $100, Shopify, $500 to $1,000, and Facebook Marketplace, $0 to $100 for your startup budget. Now let's break down all of those numbers going one by one for each platform. Starting with eBay, you're going to need to budget from $0 to $100. So let's break that down. So first off, starting your seller account on eBay is completely free and first listing and selling your first 250 items also free with eBay's managed payment system. Or without the payment system, you could list your first 200 items for free. But those numbers are always changing. So for more info about that, I'll leave a link down in the description. So what do people do once they pass their 250 product limit at the end of the month and they want to sell some more? What they can do is one of two things. The first one is pay an insertion fee in order to list any product above your original 250 or the second thing they could do is subscribe to an eBay basic store and avoid those fees. So with an eBay basic store, you're usually going to start out at around $21.95 a month for an annual subscription and you'll be able to list a thousand listings instead of 250. So more info about that link down below. A pro tip that I have for eBay is you're going to want to focus heavily on product research for those first 250 free listings. You're going to want to make sure that every product you have in there is a good product and that things are selling before you move on to making more purchases and buying more listings with your eBay store subscription because you don't want to waste those numbers. Make sure first that your products are selling and then when you want to scale, move up to the eBay store subscription. So let's review. Our needed budget is technically $0 for 250 listings and $21.95 if you want to get that eBay store subscription. So how did we get to $100 in our original budget? I'll explain now. So once we start receiving orders, we need to purchase those products from our suppliers and send them out to our customers. It can take eBay a few days to send us our funds from our buyers, so that's why you're going to need to put in $100 of your own money to pay for those orders until you receive your buyer's payment. From there, we continue using our cash flow so no more budget is necessary. In conclusion, you're going to want to budget at least $100 just to fulfill your orders on eBay, and that's the main thing you're going to pay for, either that or your eBay store subscription. All right. And a little tip for you guys, calculating your eBay fees and profits can sometimes get a little confusing. So I'm going to link below to our eBay fee calculator so you can calculate all of your profits and your prices in the correct way and really know what's going on with your store. Let's move on to our next platform, Shopify. When selling on Shopify, you're going to need a starting budget of $500 to $1,000. It's a lot bigger than what we were talking about on eBay. All right. Now here's the big difference between eBay and Shopify. On Shopify, there's no organic traffic, so that means you're going to need to invest in ways to get your product seen. So this means marketing. That's something that we're going to need to budget for, and that's going to be the largest portion of our budgeting for Shopify. So this could be for Facebook ads, Google ads, and influencer marketing, just to name a few things. AdSets should start at a minimum of $5 to $10 a day. So if you're doing that every day for a month, you're going to have to budget at least $300 for that, let's say. But if you want to learn more about ads and marketing, I recommend you check out our free Shopify course. I'll link to that down below also, and you can learn a lot there. Next, when it comes to influencers, they usually start at about $50 to $100 per shout-out to promote products and brands. So if you want to learn more about influencers, I'm going to drop another link below to a great blog article where you can learn all about it. The last thing we need to budget for on Shopify is paid Shopify apps. So within Shopify, you have a whole store of cool apps that you can use to help promote your business, get more of your product seen, and make more sales. So just to name a few, you've got things like cart abandonment apps, email marketing, product review apps, up-sale apps, and a ton more. I'll link down below to the best Shopify apps that I think you guys should be using if you choose to use that platform. To sum up, you'll need to budget for three things when it comes to Shopify. One, your store subscription. Two, for marketing. And three, for those Shopify apps. So depending on how much you want to spend, it can range anywhere between $500 to $1,000. So you might be thinking to yourself, if you're a beginner, why would I choose to use Shopify if you're telling me the startup budget is somewhere between $500 to $1,000 when you just told me that eBay could be between $0 to $100? So let me tell you real quick about one of the awesome benefits about Shopify that might make you change your mind about it. With Shopify, you can scale a lot faster than you can on eBay. Like we said before, on eBay, you're limited to 250 listings until you get that eBay store subscription. So with Shopify, you can list and sell as much as you want. Everything is fully in your control. And it's up to you how quickly you want to scale and grow your business. Our final budget is for Facebook Marketplace. And once again, just like eBay, we're at $0 to $100. So let's break down those numbers now. Much like eBay, dropshipping on the Facebook Marketplace requires no initial startup budget to begin. Facebook is free to use. All you need is a US Facebook account. That way you'll have all the shipping options to all the 50 states. There are no seller limits, so you can sell as many products as you'd like and scale up as fast as you want. And unlike Shopify or eBay, no store subscriptions. The only thing you need to budget for is paying for fulfilling your orders while waiting for Facebook's payout to you from your customer. This payout usually takes a few days until you provide your shipping information in your orders. Otherwise, it can take up to a few weeks. The average budget for Facebook Marketplace is $100. And that's really all for fulfilling orders until you get your payout. But this depends on how many orders you have and how expensive the products are that you're listing. If you're listing expensive products, you're actually going to need to make that budget higher than $100. So it really depends on you. For example, let's say you're doing high ticket dropshipping and you decide that you want to sell furniture. Your budget will need to be way over $100 since it's more expensive for you to buy those products until you get your payouts. While I think selling high ticket products are great, I would just wait a little bit more until you have enough experience, especially if you're just starting out. If you want to learn more about dropshipping on Facebook Marketplace, I'll link down below to a great tutorial that we made. All right, everyone, so let's sum up what our budgets are for each platform. On eBay, we've got $0 to $100, with our biggest expense being fulfilling orders and our store subscription. On Shopify, you can expect something between $500 to $1,000. Our biggest expense, marketing. Facebook Marketplace is going to be between $0 to $100 for fulfilling your orders. Oh, and I can't believe I almost forgot. You've got to budget another $1 in there to try out some amazing dropshipping tools. You can automate price and stock monitoring, product imports, automatic order fulfillment, just to name a few. So try them out for just $1. I'll put that link down in the description below. I hope this video gave you all a clear idea of what you guys will need to budget when you're starting your dropshipping business. Good luck with starting your stores and make sure to subscribe to the channel so that you can learn the latest tips and tricks for your dropshipping business.