My Dropshipping - eCommerce Journey

[Geared]

Hey guys,

Well first off I'll start by telling a little bit about myself. I'm an Australian who is currently overseas in Mexico for a bit of an extended holiday. Since I have plenty of time on my hands and my laptop, I decided I wanted to start a few money making ideas online. I earn fairly good money in Australia doing my day job but online earnings is something I'd like to pursue even when I get home, even if it's a side thing. I'd like to use a combination of things like dropshipping services, affiliate and micro-niche blogging type sites.

I don't really have a goal, just a steady income of profit would be nice. So far I'm making a few dollars most days just dropshipping random things from China using Australian eBay. I want to get into the niche of selling loose leaf tea to Australia but I want my tea shipped from within Australia. So I contacted a bunch of Australian wholesalers and sorted out a deal with two of them that would dropship for me. So I now have a product to sell.

I have an online eCommerce store using wordproess. I have a hosting package for a gaming blog I do in my spare time, so all I needed to do was buy a domain, which I did.

I'm going to start my journey fresh in this thread and update with earnings when they come in. But to start out with I'm feeling a bit down on the whole eCommerce idea and the amount of time it's taking me. Here's a small table I did to figure out what I really want to invest my time when it comes to selling my product.

eBay
Advantages:
Instant huge customer base
Good feedback score on a good account with eBay store
Making money already
Very low time investment
No SEO or other things I need to outsource

Disadvantages:
eBay seller fees
Selling limit of 150 items
PayPal holds my payments for a period of time for each sale.

eCommerce
Advantages:
My own website under my control - I'm interested in webdesign
A Brand to build
No PayPal holdings
Already own a domain + hosting
Can use my blog writing skills to push traffic

Disadvantages:
No customer base
Need to invest in SEO services - I don't have a huge budget
Huge time investment - seems I'm constantly thinking about this
Would need to employ help for web design, as I'm never happy with my own work.

I've also thought about transferring to a Shopify store. But I'd then have to pay $30 a month, which without customers is a waste.
Well that's it for now, advice is very welcome!

 

[williamhgough]

Good luck OP! Sounds like you've got a decent plan and the fact that you've already made drop shipping arrangements is sweet. Keep us updated!

 

[Geared]

Good luck OP! Sounds like you've got a decent plan and the fact that you've already made drop shipping arrangements is sweet. Keep us updated!

Thanks for the good luck!
At the beginning I was having so much trouble searching for dropshippers in Australia. But in the end I decided to just get a list of the big wholesalers emails and email them all. I explained what I wanted to do and made it sound easy for them, and a good amount of suppliers got back to me straight away.
I'm in two minds with what to do with the eCommerce store now. Half of me wants to leave it up and half of me wants to invest in and implement the Aliexpress Affiliate plugin available in the marketplace.

 

[Geared]

Ok, so I want to expand my effort in as many different directions as possible. Today I had some free time, so I started work on two different avenues.
Avenue One
I read a thread about designing T-shirts on Teespring and making money out of it. So I decided I'd give it a go. I already knew of a Niche that I was into but it's more guy related, but I thought I'd give it a shot. I jumped into Gimp designed a quick logo and designed the Tee-shirt. I haven't had any sales in the first few hours, but I ordered a Facebook Ad. This is the first time I've ever done this, so it's more of an experiment.

Avenue Two
In my eCommerce researching over the past couple of months, I've noticed a big niche that has little to no information relevant to Australians. I'm going to take advantage of this and the information I've learnt. I don't mind doing a little writing (I worked full time as a writer for an Automotive magazine before I got sick of being in an office). So today I put together a bit over 6000 words of very relevant information. I plan to edit this up and design a cover for it tomorrow. Originally I was thinking about just launching it on Google Books or something similar and letting it go. But I'm now thinking about launching a small one or two page website with some other bits of good information with an option to buy my eBook. As well as having it available on Kindle, Google Books and other formats. I've never published an eBook before, so I'll need to do some more research which is tomorrows job.

That was today's dealings, hopefully I have some good news to report about the shirts soon enough.
Still making sales with the dropshipping as well which is nice.

 

[Geared]

Thought it was about time that I did an update to this thread. First off eCommerce has been slow but I've been making a few dollars. The difficult part has been dealing with eBay final value fees - its a killer for Dropshipping. It makes it so hard to compete because you know about 5% of your profit is going to eBay but you can't put the price up or you become overly expensive.

Avenue One Update
So I decided to buy some shirt designs off Fiverr. I set the campaigns up and have been advertising on Facebook with no luck what so ever. So pretty much just wasting advertising dollars on nothing. Which is a shame. My last effort at Teespring is to buy a twitter post to 140,000 people on Fiverr. That was completed a couple of hours ago - I'm doubtful about results.

Avenue Two Update
My eBook is written, had a cover designed and on sale. But only on my website where I also offer a blog and some other resources. I've had around 30 people like the Facebook page which promoting - although I've only had one sale of the eBook. It's only priced at $4.99. I'm hesitant to advertise and lose more money - so I think I'll just keep writing some good blogs and keep active on social media and hopefully see some results.

Thats it for now - As you can see mostly failed results. But I'll keep trying. I have been making a few dollars on Fiverr gigs, so atleast thats something. I've also ordered a small batch of items from China to sell on eBay Australia - I have my brother doing the shipping work at home since I'm overseas. But I will see how that goes. Heading home soon I think where I'll have more expendable cash to expand on projects.

 

[naskootbg]

Maybe eCommerce + g00gle shopping + PPC. Or stay on ebay/amazon. See which is cheaper and don't forget that the time is money!
The Branding is big plus for eCommerce, but ask yourself "how long".

Good Luck!

 

[Dioni]

Best of luck with your journey mate.

 

[Geared]

Thanks for the support guys I really appreciate it.
You're right Naskootbg. Given the bill I just got from eBay was not much less than the profit I made from dropshipping in the month I think I will be putting the work into the eCommerce side of things. Unfortunately in Australia eBay is the only real selling platform with a customer base, we don't have Amazon for them to compete with, so they screw us.

Once I make it back to Australia in the next few weeks I think I will invest in some wholesale products and set up an ishopify store (a bit of a change from WooCommerce) and use eBay to drive future sales towards my eCommerce store. With profits over the next couple of months I will put some aside for re-investment into advertising on Facebook and other social media platforms.

 

[Ambitious12]

I suggest you to read the blogs from Shopify,it would really be helpful to you.

 

[Geared]

I suggest you to read the blogs from Shopify,it would really be helpful to you.

I'll put that on my To-Do list for tomorrow morning, thanks for the advice mate!

 

[wild1]

@Geared,

Any updates on your eCommerce journey?