[[ Don't Make My Mistake! ]] Shopify Dropshipping Fail Story

[CannibalBurress]

So I'm a noob on this forum, and I'll start off by sharing an example of how to NOT make money:
I've worked in digital marketing for a few years, mostly doing creative stuff in house / freelancing. I got a bit of exposure with running Facebook Ads at my job, and got pretty good results!
I learned how to running campaigns, retargeting, spent a ton of time learning about budgets and how to test ads.

THE STORY

So late last year I made a Shopify page (Oberlo dropshipping) and spend forever trying to get it perfect. Ended up stocking over 100+ products in the raver niche, got review app to make product pages look legit. Spent 2 months making it as good as possible.

But as soon as we tried to run FB ads, my FB Ad Account would be deactivated a few moments or hours after launching the campaign; no idea why.
We were only selling apparel (maybe because some items had racy photos?)
No answer from FB about the specific issue of course; just the generic "policy violation" message.

Each time we'd appeal the Ad Account ban, FB would restore it after a few hours; however as soon as we tried to run ads again it would get banned again.
Our domain name also got banned (couldn't send the link in FB or IG messages), so we changed domain names.

After 3 days of this hell, my Ad Account got banned even WITHOUT trying to run ads, and my Personal Account lost the ability to make Ad Accounts altogether!

Tried to remove/delete my tainted Ad Account and its Business Manager and cut all connections between it and our website - but there are probably still linkages with my old (undeletable) Business Manager Also the website itself might be tainted?

Got my roommate to make a new FB Ad Account + Business Manager + Business Page for the website, ran some limited ads and it didn't get banned.
But we never did ramp up ad spending because we don't want his Ad Account to get flagged too, considering the fact that we were still on the same IP as before.

We tried running Google Ads, and got flagged for "malicious or unwanted software."
Google Ads support staff promised to help but didn't give us any actionable info, and only wanted to sell us a $3000/Month ad package (while our site can't even run ads!) Shopify support was useless on this issue as well.

THE LESSONS

1) DON'T build a massive site before running traffic, start small and run test ads early
2) Farm FB Ad Accounts

THE QUESTIONS

1) After so much sketchiness, I am wondering if the site is just toast? What is the best way to try and salvage this site? Is it possible or even worth it?

2) I definitely want to have another go at doing FB PPC to Shopify, but I definitely need to learn how to set up Ad Accounts for white hat FB PPC (VCCs vs PayPal? cloaking?)

3) I've heard some people mention Multilogin but it's hella expensive, can I use fresh IP with VM ware or Windows User accounts to farm FB Ad Accounts?

Thanks for for listening to my long ass story...please let me know if you have other suggestions or picked up on some other stupid things I did! Glad I found this forum, and I'd love to hear from you all!

 

[Monzani]

I create dropshipping sites every month, including with newly created fake profiles, Facebook is getting harder and harder to accept ads, and new policy updates are reducing spending limits

recently one of my accounts has been deactivated 5 times in 5 days, appeals have always been favorable to me, you need to access the Facebook chat and ask for help, with me I always do this and it is enough if there are no policy violations

tips:
- avoid using too many emojis in your ads
- avoid using link shorteners
- if you want to spend + $50USD per day, buy an ad account + verified business manager

about your questions, I would duplicate my site and create a new store with a different domain

a good long term strategy is to buy an aged profile + verified BM, you should warm the account for a few days

to reduce the risks, you could buy an aged profile (for example if your credit card to pay for the ads is German, buy a German profile and use a German proxy)

Anyway, I don't know your niche or if your ad potentially violates any policy, but you should try to do some of the things I mentioned

 

[XspekulaX]

SO far, I've never run into this kind of problems so far.
But I think it has something to do with your domain ?

Did you use an expired domain ? Maybe it's already flagged for spam.

 

[VinceC]

Dont upload over 100+ items at one go. You can try upload 15-20 products first. Make your advertised product at the home page. Try Ads for 3 days and if no sale, dump it and change to another product. Dropshipping is for fast in n out biz. You simply cannot stay long promoting trendy stuff.

 

[monkey2000]

Looks like facebook really hates url shorteners and not like people leaving fb.

Did you try to run ads to direct people to your fb page and from there get them to your website?

 

[CannibalBurress]

Really appreciate the responses guys!

I create dropshipping sites every month, including with newly created fake profiles, Facebook is getting harder and harder to accept ads, and new policy updates are reducing spending limits

Definitely noticed this. I had run lots of natural health product ads for my job in 2018 and never got account deactivation, they would just disprove the ad if they didn't like it and half the time we could just resubmit and it would get through.

recently one of my accounts has been deactivated 5 times in 5 days, appeals have always been favorable to me, you need to access the Facebook chat and ask for help, with me I always do this and it is enough if there are no policy violations

This was last November, maybe FB has restored support via chat but it was completely inaccessible then, possibly due to high volume during holiday season?

- avoid using too many emojis in your ads
- avoid using link shorteners
- if you want to spend + $50USD per day, buy an ad account + verified business manager

about your questions, I would duplicate my site and create a new store with a different domain

a good long term strategy is to buy an aged profile + verified BM, you should warm the account for a few days

to reduce the risks, you could buy an aged profile (for example if your credit card to pay for the ads is German, buy a German profile and use a German proxy)

Anyway, I don't know your niche or if your ad potentially violates any policy, but you should try to do some of the things I mentioned

Thanks for the tips! We didn't use any link shorteners nor emojis. Budget was set at $100 / day for 1 campaign, but the first deactivation came way before that got spent. I hear premium credit cards are best, but don't know how to source them yet. Are there good VCCs you can recommend?

Did you use an expired domain ? Maybe it's already flagged for spam.

No I found it in the regular domain search on Namecheap. Should I still have looked up the domain on SEMRush or something to check if for sketchiness?

Dont upload over 100+ items at one go. You can try upload 15-20 products first. Make your advertised product at the home page. Try Ads for 3 days and if no sale, dump it and change to another product. Dropshipping is for fast in n out biz. You simply cannot stay long promoting trendy stuff.

Thanks, that is my instinct too... hard lessons my man

Looks like facebook really hates url shorteners and not like people leaving fb.

Did you try to run ads to direct people to your fb page and from there get them to your website?

No link shorteners, cookies set up in Google Tag Manager. Yes we ran a few Page-Like ads from my roommate's Ad Account. Guess the game is just to go slow on the ads and try to run some Page Like or Page Visit ads before doing the real campaign eh

 

[JackFruit]

I create dropshipping sites every month, including with newly created fake profiles, Facebook is getting harder and harder to accept ads, and new policy updates are reducing spending limits

recently one of my accounts has been deactivated 5 times in 5 days, appeals have always been favorable to me, you need to access the Facebook chat and ask for help, with me I always do this and it is enough if there are no policy violations

tips:
- avoid using too many emojis in your ads
- avoid using link shorteners
- if you want to spend + $50USD per day, buy an ad account + verified business manager

about your questions, I would duplicate my site and create a new store with a different domain

a good long term strategy is to buy an aged profile + verified BM, you should warm the account for a few days

to reduce the risks, you could buy an aged profile (for example if your credit card to pay for the ads is German, buy a German profile and use a German proxy)

Anyway, I don't know your niche or if your ad potentially violates any policy, but you should try to do some of the things I mentioned

Great share.

 

[m0rph90]

Facebook is really random these days, we got blackhat site without any cloaking running for like 10 days and never found out how this could even be possible. On the other hand we burned masses of facebook accounts and BM's even with white hat warm up campaigns.

Actually it feels more like gambling at the moment.

 

[jaffreysp]

fucking yikes facebook is that dumb that you need to do some shamanistic dances with fake accounts to run ads on whitehat campaign

 

[RedReddington]

You could try purchasing a business account that already has some spending, this has proven to be beneficial in my experience.

 

[Arusiggi]

Anyone knows where to buy german aged facebook profiles?