Dropshipping basic question?

With dropshipping, especially with shopify and aliexpress, when a customer orders and pays for the product and the money goes through shopify, can you then use that money stored in shopify to order the product from aliexpress? How do transactions fully work in dropshipping overall and thus would I need to put any money up front in these respects?

You should have money with you up front. I'm a U.S. citizen, and shopify payments take a few days to transfer over to my bank account. You can do it in theory, but if you use the buyers money, the shipping will definitely be extended a few days which might not be something you want. I do paypal and shopify stripe payments and have been doing dropshipping since February. However, paypal payments are usually instant upon buying. I don't use paypal to purchase products from aliexpress though, so I don't know about the transaction process with regards to that. But yeah, you should have some money on you when someone buys so that you can fulfill the order pronto.

many thanks!

Yes money has to be put up front. The process goes like:

1. Set up shopify store (gonna cost like $50 or so)
2. Import products
3. Run some sort of ads ($0-100 is a good budget depending on how you do it or start etc.)
4. Sell a product, customer pays through PayPal or Credit Card normally
5. If it comes through paypal, the money is available immediately (if you have a trusted, aged account), if it comes through credit card, the payments come on incremental days
6. If your just starting out, you'll probably have to purchase the product from AliExpress from your own pocket