How to build a Shopify dropshipping store with CJ Dropshipping
Dropshipping with Shopify and CJ Dropshipping means you sell products in your own Shopify store, and CJ — a supplier with warehouses in China, the US and Europe — packs and ships each order to your customer. You never hold stock. This guide walks through the whole setup, in the order you'll actually do it, including the parts most guides skip: pricing on landed cost and what happens to an order after a customer pays.
- Open a Shopify store and a CJ account
- Choose what to sell
- Pick products in CJ
- Price on landed cost
- Set up the store
- How an order reaches CJ
- Test, then open the store
- The faster way
1. Open a Shopify store and a CJ account
Shopify. Start a store on Shopify's free trial. You can build the whole store during the trial, but to take real orders you need to choose a paid Shopify plan — a store on a trial can't check out customers.
CJ Dropshipping. Creating a CJ account is free. You pay CJ only when you place an order: the product cost plus shipping, from your CJ balance or card.
Connecting the two. CJ connects to other software with an API key, not your email and password. In CJ, open the account menu and go to My CJ → Authorization → API, click Add API and choose the type API Key. Keep the key private — it can place orders on your account.
2. Choose what to sell
A store that sells one kind of thing to one kind of buyer is easier to trust and easier to advertise than a store that sells everything. A good niche for dropshipping usually has:
- Products that ship well — light, not fragile, not sized so precisely that returns are likely.
- Enough range for a real catalogue: three to five categories with several products each, so the store doesn't look empty.
- A clear buyer you can describe in one sentence — that sentence becomes your homepage, your product copy and your ads.
3. Pick products in CJ
Search CJ's catalogue for your niche and shortlist products. For each one, check:
- The photos. Supplier photos often carry badges, watermarks or collages. You'll want at least one clean picture per product.
- The variants (sizes, colours) and that each one is in stock.
- The shipping quote to your customers' country — cost and delivery time, which vary a lot by warehouse and carrier.
- Duplicates. CJ lists many near-identical items under different titles. Two copies of the same product make a store look unfinished.
4. Price on landed cost
This is where most new dropshipping stores lose money without noticing. Your cost is not the product price on CJ — it's the product plus shipping to the customer, the landed cost. Shipping is often more than the product itself.
| Priced on product only | Priced on landed cost | |
|---|---|---|
| Product on CJ | $5.03 | $5.03 |
| Shipping to the customer | not counted | $9.83 |
| Your real cost | $14.86 | $14.86 |
| Price at 2.5× cost | $12.58 — a loss on every sale | $37.15 |
A real example from CJ's catalogue. The same product, the same supplier: one price loses money on every order, the other leaves room for ads, payment fees and refunds.
Two more rules keep the margin you planned:
- Order with the same carrier you were quoted. A different carrier at order time changes the shipping cost after you've already set the price.
- Don't add shipping twice. If shipping is already inside the price, set shipping to free in Shopify — or keep it out of the price and charge it at checkout. Not both.
5. Set up the store
- Theme and brand. Pick a theme, a name, a logo and two or three colours, and use them everywhere.
- Products. Write your own titles and descriptions — what it is, who it's for, what it's made of, the size. Supplier text is written for other sellers, not for your customers.
- Collections. Group products into the categories from step 2 and put them in the main menu.
- Pages and policies. About, Contact and FAQ pages, plus shipping, returns and privacy policies (Shopify can generate drafts under Settings → Policies). Say honestly how long delivery takes.
- Homepage. Open with what you sell and who it's for, then show products straight away.
6. How an order reaches CJ
When a customer buys, nothing ships until the order is placed with CJ. Step by step:
- The customer pays you in Shopify.
- You place the same items with CJ, with the customer's address and the carrier you priced on. CJ charges you the product and shipping.
- CJ packs and ships. The tracking number usually arrives days after the order, not at once.
- When it arrives, you mark the Shopify order fulfilled with that tracking number, and Shopify emails it to the customer.
Done by hand, that's a few minutes per order plus checking back for tracking. CJ's own Shopify app or a tool connected through the API key can do it for you.
7. Test, then open the store
- Payments: turn on a payment provider under Settings → Payments.
- A test order: place one with Shopify's test mode and follow it from checkout to fulfilment, so the first real customer isn't your test.
- Remove the password: new stores are password-protected; remove it under Online Store → Preferences when you're ready.
- Visitors: a new store gets no traffic on its own. Plan where the first visitors come from — short videos, ads, or communities where your buyers already are.
The faster way
Storecraft does steps 2 to 6 for you. Describe what you want to sell and how the store should look; it builds the store in your own Shopify — brand, palette, CJ products priced on landed cost, written descriptions, categories, pages and a homepage — and then places the order with CJ each time a customer buys, and adds the tracking when it arrives. You can see a demo store from your own description first, without an account.