First serious journey (Shopify)

[robebryant]

Good morning blackhat friends,

I've been a lurker on this amazing forum for quite a while now. I have had some minor success here and there but due to my personal lack of commitment and motivation, nothing ever worked out big time. Most recently I failed miserably trying to do YouTube.

All that is now the past, I have a game plan and I'm gonna stick with it this time,

My goal? Well for now I'm just focusing on learning and my goals will be dynamic, meaning a new goal is set only once the previous one is achieved

Now let's get to the fun part...

My plan is as follows:
- I am going to open a Shopify store and drive traffic from Instagram and facebook
- I have discovered a niche that I think will do really well with the type of traffic I will be sending to the store (I'm so excited about this niche and my idea that I almost couldn't sleep last night lol)
- I don't have that much start up cash so I'm going to have to start slow and work my way up, therefore most of my traffic is going to be free for now with the occasional shoutout here and there. But most importantly I need to have cash in the bank to be able to fulfill any order that might come in
- Yes I will be drop shipping from AliExpress, I've been in contact with multiple sellers and have a few products lined up and ready to sell

Pardon my super chaotic writing, I hope this is comprehensive at least a bit

My first dynamic goal is to setup my shop, import products and create facebook, oh and I already have an Ig with about 500 followers so yeah

I hope have all that done within a couple days since I also have uni work to do and a shit load of other stuff on my mind but now it's time to grind

I will update this forum without a schedule so bare with me,
Looking forward to giving an update in af few days and we can start hunting our first sale

Feel free to post your comments if you have any suggestions/ questions

Let's get rolling,

Peace out

 

[robebryant]

I guess I forgot to mention that my niche is extremely targeted and allows me to get also high targeted visitors to my store (hopefully since its not live yet)

 

[nihalsad]

All the best mate!

 

[LosPollos]

It's great that you are super excited. Hopefully you can channel some of your initial excitement into staying focused throughout your journey - good luck man!

 

[Branjohn03]

Not to be a party pooper, but how exactly do you plan to do this with no cash flow? You don't automatically receive the money from customer's orders. If you are in the U.S and are able to accept credit cards via shopify payments, it usually takes at least 3 days to receive payments. And PayPay is even longer, as much as 10 days. So you need to have money saved up, cash flow, to pay for 3-10 days of orders up front before you receive any money. And the amount of money you need to have saved for cash flow will only increase as you try to scale.

This isn't a method you can just decide one day to start with no money and be successful. It's a business, and like all businesses you need start up funds or you're not going to be able to maintain it for long, if at all.

 

[robebryant]

Not to be a party pooper, but how exactly do you plan to do this with no cash flow? You don't automatically receive the money from customer's orders. If you are in the U.S and are able to accept credit cards via shopify payments, it usually takes at least 3 days to receive payments. And PayPay is even longer, as much as 10 days. So you need to have money saved up, cash flow, to pay for 3-10 days of orders up front before you receive any money. And the amount of money you need to have saved for cash flow will only increase as you try to scale.

This isn't a method you can just decide one day to start with no money and be successful. It's a business, and like all businesses you need start up funds or you're not going to be able to maintain it for long, if at all.

Yeah, totally true my friend. I guess I didnt express myself correctly. I have enough cash to fulfill lets say a couple hundred orders. The thing is I dont want to go out and spend everything on traffic and then not have any funds to cover the sales. Like I mentioned this is why I am starting small and yeah, if I get flooded with orders it might be a problem but to be honest I am not expecting a thousand orders in the first days/ weeks with free or cheap traffic. Anyways thanks for the heads up mate

 

[robebryant]

All the best mate!

It's great that you are super excited. Hopefully you can channel some of your initial excitement into staying focused throughout your journey - good luck man!

Thanks for the support guys!

 

[robebryant]

Day 1 update:

So after a couple of hours of working on my store it is ready to go live

I currently have 5 products and my AliExpress sellers agreed to drop ship and not include any invoices or promotional items

I am going to test the waters and see what Profit margins work, generally I want to make at least 7$ pure profit per sale but I will know more once I get some traffic

I also managed to get my PayPal account upgraded to business, still during the process of verifying my bank and card though. I desperately need to add another payment gateway since I don't want everything to go through PayPal. Sucks I can't get Shopify payments in my country, if you have any suggestions let me know

I will start working my instagram magic as soon as I finish work so hopefully I will get some visitors within the next day

As you can see there is still a lot of work to be done but I'm stoked to have the shop all designed and ready

Now let's start hunting that first sale

Next update later on this week,
Peace

 

[Arkix]

How's your journey going?

 

[Andreihh]

And how are you trying to get relevant traffic to your store? Paid ads ? Using any particular technique ?

 

[robebryant]

Day 7 Update:
Well things are going quite slowly so far mostly because of Paypal. I got it limited back in 2015 and realised it still is limited so I spent most of my free time trying to resolve this but no luck as of yet. This forced me to add skrill as my main payment method on shopify but im afraid the lack of paypal will end up being quite a hassle

All that aside, my store is growing nicely. I have around 20 products and I am quite happy with the look and feel of it

For now I have only been getting traffic from my instagram ( 600 followers as of today) but still no sales ( did have a couple of abandoned carts) The total number of visitors is 21 so far

I have started to contact some bigger pages in my niche for shoutouts ( I even agreed with one guy but the deal fell through since i didnt have the option to use paypal, uggggghhh)

Also if I have enough time I will set up facebook but for now IG is my priority

Will check back once I've made some more progress

Let me know if you have any solutions for the paypal issue,
peace

 

[robebryant]

Just a quick update:

I've written to bunch of Instagram accounts looking for a shoutout and I have a 4$ shoutout deal secured. I don't know if it will be tommorow or in the next couple of days but I'm super excited.

The account has 120k followers but only around 2k likes so It's a little scetchy, however I only look at the engagement so the follower number is not important. His socialblade looks legit so fingers crossed this will give me a little boost and bring us a step closer to that first sale

 

[bonjovi91]

good luck to you!

 

[robebryant]

Well..
Another Huge obsticle is adding the damn payment method to shopify...
Paypal is limited and all the other options are not available in my country or I'm not elegible to sign up since i don't have a buisness properly registered. I could get it registered and I will eventually but I'm not going to do that now due to taxes and other bullshit issues.

Since there is no way in hell I'm giving up on this because of 1 setback, I'm going to create a new paypal, go against their terms of service and use a diffferent address, email, bank account, phone number and will login only using mobile data. Still my name will be the same so hopefully it will last long enough to ever see any money I potentially will earn.

Any Ideas??

 

[Baropi]

Do you target real followers or don't mind get it mixed with fake followers?

 

[robebryant]

Do you target real followers or don't mind get it mixed with fake followers?

I generally aim for only real followers, I'm sure that some fake ones do get mixed in but that doesnt really matter

 

[Baropi]

I generally aim for only real followers, I'm sure that some fake ones do get mixed in but that doesnt really matter

Once you get around 2k-3k then you can do sfs since it's all real followers, but you do need a good engagement first. What's your plan for contents just for Instagram alone? Anyway, best of luck!!!

 

[dtrump]

I generally aim for only real followers, I'm sure that some fake ones do get mixed in but that doesnt really matter

How's it going? there's any updates?
just looking to start my first shopify journey

 

[webmasterbd]

Hi OP hows the journey going?

 

[affffa]

keep goin