Another Long Term Shopify + Instagram Business

[WhaTheFak]

Not only about the low risk but also about the flexibility in term of viral products & trends, I've considered that one of the strongest points for starting a dropshipping business.

I can see what you say about the VAT & taxes and that wouldn't be the biggest problem at all. Shipping the product in time and keeping track of all the parcels would be a huge challenge.
Unless I'll have a legally registered business I won't be able to get a contract with a shipping company, and that would be the only way to get a decent rate for shipping. Also having a registered business, as far as I know, requires mentioning exactly the type of product/service you are selling so you can get the right registration code for your activity. For example if you are selling car parts you'll have a completely different activity registration code compared to selling art.

When selling in EU you also have to keep in mind that you are required to offer free returns for something like 60-90 days for your customers and that would be a quite a challenge for me.

I'm not 100% that all the legal facts I've mentioned are correct, so please don't take those for granted.

Wrong. Free return is 14 days - and if you sell hygienic or cosmetic products you don't need to offer returns.

 

[WhaTheFak]

But good luck to your journey - hope you are targeting elders, handicapped or low IQ people, because I don't know who else would buy a product with such long shipping times.

 

[paulpaul25]

Wrong. Free return is 14 days - and if you sell hygienic or cosmetic products you don't need to offer returns.

That's actually true, I've just checked that and I was totally wrong, is 14 days like you've said.

But good luck to your journey - hope you are targeting elders, handicapped or low IQ people, because I don't know who else would buy a product with such long shipping times.

Thanks I guess, but I don't know what's the point of saying that. I mean, being old or handicapped doesn't make you an inferior human being. The shipping time is also not that long as I only use epacket shipping and some of the packages arrived in 5-6 days. I would consider that fairly reasonable considering the fact that the shipping is "free".

 

[Matta28]

Keep it up! The last few days I've been really watching alot about dropshipping on YouTube, I'm so pumped lol!

But I've learned a trick, or is it really a trick?
A guy wants for example $50 for 24h shoutout, maybe try to re-negotiate to $20 for 4h. That will be $120 for 24h, but still cheaper than the $50. And if I don't remember wrong, you said you got the sales like 3-5h in to the shoutout? But I'm not a expert on this field!

 

[paulpaul25]

Keep it up! The last few days I've been really watching alot about dropshipping on YouTube, I'm so pumped lol!

But I've learned a trick, or is it really a trick?
A guy wants for example $50 for 24h shoutout, maybe try to re-negotiate to $20 for 4h. That will be $120 for 24h, but still cheaper than the $50. And if I don't remember wrong, you said you got the sales like 3-5h in to the shoutout? But I'm not a expert on this field!

Just don't let yourself be too excited to a point where you'll miss things in the process. You should really focus hard on each part of setting up the store, creating the ads and getting everything together. I mean some youtubers make things look a little bit too easy & fast.

I've used that trick too, and seems like it works perfectly, but I would like to try a 24 hours ad in the near future just so I can compare the results, but so far looking at the sales, most of them came in the first few hours so I can totally vouch for this strategy.
Have you started your journey yet?

 

[Matta28]

Yeah I agree, I have to learn to make homepages/websites. In high school I had a course where we did this with adobe dreamweaver, but now I don't remember anything. Yes thats so true about the YouTubers

It's not bad I think, you could get amazing results with 24h too, for me I have accounts on instagram that doing bad in the first few hours, but let us say after 12h the followers finally wokes up and sees my story. I have not started my journey yet, since I wanna try to use the money I earn from shoutouts etc om that, and that Business is not going well atm

Btw, how did you track how many sales each accounts had from the shoutout?

Just don't let yourself be too excited to a point where you'll miss things in the process. You should really focus hard on each part of setting up the store, creating the ads and getting everything together. I mean some youtubers make things look a little bit too easy & fast

I've used that trick too, and seems like it works perfectly, but I would like to try a 24 hours ad in the near future just so I can compare the results, but so far looking at the sales, most of them came in the first few hours so I can totally vouch for this strategy.
Have you started your journey yet?

 

[paulpaul25]

Yeah I agree, I have to learn to make homepages/websites. In high school I had a course where we did this with adobe dreamweaver, but now I don't remember anything. Yes thats so true about the YouTubers

It's not bad I think, you could get amazing results with 24h too, for me I have accounts on instagram that doing bad in the first few hours, but let us say after 12h the followers finally wokes up and sees my story. I have not started my journey yet, since I wanna try to use the money I earn from shoutouts etc om that, and that Business is not going well atm

Btw, how did you track how many sales each accounts had from the shoutout?

I had only 1 ad/day so it was pretty easy to track everything and haven't got any organic traffic & sales.

 

[Matta28]

I had only 1 ad/day so it was pretty easy to track everything and haven't got any organic traffic & sales.

Ah okay, but then you will also get better control about which influencer that work and not etc I guess

 

[GringoMonkey]

I have read a lot of journeys and seen a lot of courses that promote this approach and i will be honest it does not usually work and the journeys fail.

For this post i will concentrate on the marketing reasons why they fail.

It is a basic misunderstanding of how ig works for ecommerce. The problem is the real way takes time and costs money, which is not good to sell in a course.

Unless you are an established brand people will have never heard of you. So first you have to launch and build trust before you can really sell.

If you effectively launch, as the op is, with a typical ig campaign all you will really get are some likes/followers on your ig account and you will make very few sales.

So unless it is a high ticket item, in which case ig is the wrong place to promote it, if you build 1 product stores you cannot remarket continuous fresh content. Which is the point of social media and of getting the followers.

Ig is better for brand awareness of niche focussed multi product stores, NOT 1 product stores. Why? Because it is interruptive marketing.

Second you have 2 types of influencer account. I call them information and celebrity accounts.

As an example the difference is this, the information account publishes pictures of different babes, the celebrity account is the babe.

You will only get serious sales with ig once your brand is established and you work with a celebrity to endorse your brand. For example if your selling fashion they would be wearing it!

So unless you first build a niche brand, selling multiple products and then get celebrity endorsement of it, you will generate very few sales on ig.

Doing that properly costs serious money, not the $500 the op is setting aside.

 

[paulpaul25]

Ah okay, but then you will also get better control about which influencer that work and not etc I guess

Yes, that's exactly why I chose to have just 1 ad/day during the first campaign. I'm pretty sure there are methods to track where the traffic/sales come from using some custom links and stuff but I didn't want to overcomplicate things.

I have read a lot of journeys and seen a lot of courses that promote this approach and i will be honest it does not usually work and the journeys fail.

For this post i will concentrate on the marketing reasons why they fail.

It is a basic misunderstanding of how ig works for ecommerce. The problem is the real way takes time and costs money, which is not good to sell in a course.

Unless you are an established brand people will have never heard of you. So first you have to launch and build trust before you can really sell.

If you effectively launch, as the op is, with a typical ig campaign all you will really get are some likes/followers on your ig account and you will make very few sales.

So unless it is a high ticket item, in which case ig is the wrong place to promote it, if you build 1 product stores you cannot remarket continuous fresh content. Which is the point of social media and of getting the followers.

Ig is better for brand awareness of niche focussed multi product stores, NOT 1 product stores. Why? Because it is interruptive marketing.

Second you have 2 types of influencer account. I call them information and celebrity accounts.

As an example the difference is this, the information account publishes pictures of different babes, the celebrity account is the babe.

You will only get serious sales with ig once your brand is established and you work with a celebrity to endorse your brand. For example if your selling fashion they would be wearing it!

So unless you first build a niche brand, selling multiple products and then get celebrity endorsement of it, you will generate very few sales on ig.

Doing that properly costs serious money, not the $500 the op is setting aside.

Yeah, I was very tempted to buy a few courses before starting this but I'm thinking the same, they always say things you want to hear, not exactly the reality as it is.

I've used IG in the past for my main activity which is graphic design, but I had a completely different approach and final target. When I first started using it, my goal was to build my presence on IG so I can finally add the IG icon on my website but I've slowly discovered that it has a great marketing potential as in 7-8 months, with 150+ posts and close to 1k organic followers it started generating leads without me trying to sell anything, and during that first year I got like 2-3 whale clients from IG.

When the CBD thing started to become more and more popular I've decided it's time to do a quick research for marketing purposes, and after contacting a few influencers and "information" pages as you call them, and running few paid promotions I've managed to get like 8-12 clients which for the design industry is a lot. That was the successful story, but it worths mentioning that after I've repeated this strategy a few times focusing on other different niches, the results were not always the same, some of them just got me a few new followers or likes but not a single client.

I can totally agree with you, in order to get sales on IG and in general, you need some kind of a social proof but I also see IG as a social proof channel if that makes any sense.

I feel like especially with the "celebrity" accounts you can get some traction and generate sales, as they help a lot building that social proof, I mean I'm pretty sure it depends on the niche and also the celebrity account itself. If Kim Kardashian would recommend me a graphic design software I'm pretty sure I won't even consider it, but if somebody who is a talented and successful graphic designer would do it, I'm sure I would at least check it out.

Because I've just started out, it's hard for me to vouch for a specific strategy and be 100% sure about it but at this point this IG thing is all I have.

Would you consider FB ads a better approach in term of costs? I'm asking this because I can see you have some experience with social media marketing, and everybody out there is saying that IG has the lowest cost/targeted view.

 

[GringoMonkey]

Would you consider FB ads a better approach in term of costs? I'm asking this because I can see you have some experience with social media marketing, and everybody out there is saying that IG has the lowest cost/targeted view.

Advertising and marketing are just tools. Marketing being what you say and advertising being where you say it.

Without knowing what your selling it is difficult to give you a precise answer, but if those two dont fit your campaign will fail.

In general when people want something now, they use a search engine to find it. If it is something they might be interested in later and you want them to be aware of your brand when they are ready to buy, then social media is appropriate.

As i said social media is primarily a brand building exercise, which is a very expensive way to launch a 1 product store and will generate you very few sales.

There are 2 exceptions to that. Low cost discount deals that can be impulse buys. But you cannot do that with a 1 product store. The second being really good at understanding how hiring micro-niche influencers works.

Other than that from what you have said I dont think your message (1 product store) and the places you want to say it (social media) fit well, so i think your journey will fail. Or you will need to invest a lot more in both time and money to get results.

 

[paulpaul25]

Advertising and marketing are just tools. Marketing being what you say and advertising being where you say it.

Without knowing what your selling it is difficult to give you a precise answer, but if those two dont fit your campaign will fail.

In general when people want something now, they use a search engine to find it. If it is something they might be interested in later and you want them to be aware of your brand when they are ready to buy, then social media is appropriate.

As i said social media is primarily a brand building exercise, which is a very expensive way to launch a 1 product store and will generate you very few sales.

There are 2 exceptions to that. Low cost discount deals that can be impulse buys. But you cannot do that with a 1 product store. The second being really good at understanding how hiring micro-niche influencers works.

Other than that from what you have said I dont think your message (1 product store) and the places you want to say it (social media) fit well, so i think your journey will fail. Or you will need to invest a lot more in both time and money to get results.

Thanks a lot of your honest opinion on my strategy, this is definitely something helpful.

I will try to re-think my initial strategy, as the plan was to repeat this plan just to gather data for the FB Ads campaigns, but now I'm thinking about building a stronger brand around few related products so I'll be able to play with the ads as you've mentioned.

 

[Leader777]

Best of luck with your journey can you please tell me how much traffic you got from thoes influencers?

 

[paulpaul25]

Best of luck with your journey can you please tell me how much traffic you got from thoes influencers?

Thank you!
Sure, but please note that I had all the ads up for less than 24 hours and some of them for less than 6 hours.

62k followers, 8% engagement rate - 148 visitors (12h ad)
73k followers, 12% engagement rate - 323 visitors (6h ad)
52k followers, 13% engagement rate - 98 visitors (6h ad)
317k followers, 6% engagement rate - 281 visitors (4h ad)
579k followers, 7% engagement rate - 466 visitors (5h ad)

What I can say after looking again at this traffic numbers is that the actual post seems to make a difference. The last two big accounts had no post, only the swipe up story + link in bio and the followers/visitors ratio is not even close to the first three accounts, but yeah, the engagement rate is also lower.

I was just talking these days with somebody who just started something similar and didn't spend too much time when looking for influencers (engagement rate, demographics) and he told me he is getting poor results in term of traffic, like 150-200 visitors from a 500k followers page.

 

[GringoMonkey]

How many are now following you / purchased?

 

[Leader777]

I was just talking these days with somebody who just started something similar and didn't spend too much time when looking for influencers (engagement rate, demographics) and he told me he is getting poor results in term of traffic, like 150-200 visitors from a 500k followers page.

Not bad tho since u are selling so there is profits even if there is low amount of traffic. I guess it also depend on the niche tho ! btw do you find influencers yourself or u use a website ? What's your plans to do next? Best of luck again and actually i may do something similar to this but i need to work some maths since it's not about selling to people it's something else so it need huge traffic

 

[paulpaul25]

How many are now following you / purchased?

I have like close to 230 followers, but no more sales after that week. To be honest I haven't posted that much on the IG page since I ran the ads last time.

Not bad tho since u are selling so there is profits even if there is low amount of traffic. I guess it also depend on the niche tho ! btw do you find influencers yourself or u use a website ? What's your plans to do next? Best of luck again and actually i may do something similar to this but i need to work some maths since it's not about selling to people it's something else so it need huge traffic

Thank you!
I did all the research by myself by searching for relevant hashtags and also looking at similar accounts once I found one which fitted my requirements. I've only used a few platforms to check the engagement rate of those accounts. There are more platforms to do that, you can easily find them by searching after "engagement rate calculator", some of them are completely free and some of them have like 3-5 free searches per day, but overall they all do a pretty good job. Good luck to you too!

I've set up everything for another campaign next week and I'll repeat the strategy and hopefully build some data and also make some sales.
I just want to make sure there is a solid demand for this product for the moment. After that I will consider starting building my brand as well as adding new related products and start running facebook ads.

 

[GringoMonkey]

So you got 230 followers from 5 campaigns. Divide the cost of the campaigns by 230 and that is your cost per follower.

Then you need to see if re-marketing to them by posting on your ig page yields any sales.

 

[Leader777]

After that I will consider starting building my brand

You are smart for building a brand name , at the same time you make profit and u have brand awareness so people look for you and come back to buy more. Best of luck again , thanks for the answers ( i'm really learning a lot from this ) i will be watching this thread for sure

 

[paulpaul25]

So you got 230 followers from 5 campaigns. Divide the cost of the campaigns by 230 and that is your cost per follower.

Then you need to see if re-marketing to them by posting on your ig page yields any sales.

I've done a similar calculation earlier but just to find out the cost/purchase rather than cost/follower, as at this point I have no guarantee that people who made the purchases are also following my page and vice versa. But I can totally see what you meant when saying IG is expensive for a 1 product store.

Update: I'm totally stupid for saying that. I can actually verify if they follow my page or not as I have their name, and because 230 followers is a very small number I would be able to do that in 15 minutes.

You are smart for building a brand name , at the same time you make profit and u have brand awareness so people look for you and come back to buy more. Best of luck again , thanks for the answers ( i'm really learning a lot from this ) i will be watching this thread for sure

I really hope that's going to work. Unfortunately at this point the one product I have is not something that needs constant replacing, it's more like a tool so I'm not sure if anybody of my previous buyers would come to buy more, but I will consider this when adding new products as I feel it's a good thing to have and test.