$100K Dropshipping Story (Long Read)

exonerate said:

One product as far as "only one product" or different colors and sizes as well?
E.g. dog toys: It's a bone chewing toy - just this one or maybe in different sizes, accessorizes, etc.?

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theseogamer said:

the only 'Proof of success' indicated is an Instagram link that does not work?

mhm

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Crazycam727 said:

This post might get fairly long, so buckle in.

How I Got Started (March 2019)

I was actually looking for a job in a local coffee shop (mainly just as an excuse to work with my girlfriend at the time ) but my parents didn't let me get one as they thought it would distract me from my studies, I was supposed to be taking my A levels this year and go to uni next year, so I guess that was understandable.

Anyway, I did the classic "how to make money online" search. Came across dropshipping and yeah , you all know how that goes - so I'll skip to how I actually got the capital to start

To start, I actually had literally £0 in my bank account and was unaware of this community - so I had to think of a way to make money to begin.

Getting The Capital To Being With

With nothing in the bank , it's actually not as hard as you may think to make some $. For me, it was ebay dropshipping that really got me some decent money to start with. I was selling sand filtering towels and fake airpods, to generate me around £1,200 ($1,500) in sales. Profit after ebay and paypal fees was around the $500.

This is a really good method to use as long as the shipping time is reasonable, I know ebay are against dropshippers, but if you essentially lie and set the item location to US on the ebay listing, AND ONLY use aliexpress US suppliers that offer a FedEx or USPS shipping option, you should be good to go.

Always upload your tracking numbers to the eBay orders too, this will result in less paypal holds.

The beauty of this method is that it literally costs 0 to start with. I found a working eBay viewbot for mac , it does boost your listings up and you won't need to pay extra to promote your listing. I'll link it here. Figure out how to use it on your own, doesn't take that long. It's free of course:
https://github.com/washedgram/ebay-view-bot

My Actual Start into Shopify Dropshipping (May 2019)

So as you know, if you've read my previous thread I made 50 stores before making my first sale. Now this was actually a blessing and a curse - I kept thinking that my sites themselves weren't trustworthy enough so I kept posting them on r/reviewmyshopify and other various forums, including the shopify community itself to ket literal boat loads of feedback. By the time I realised that marketing is the second massive piece in the puzzle, my stores were looking better than 80% of dropshipping ones out there.

To cut that long story short, the issue for me wasn't actually the stores themselves, it was that I had aboslutely no idea how to market. In my experience , shit store + great traffic > great store + shit traffic.

In terms of strategy, I was watching a shit ton of youtubers and mixing their strategies together - this didn't get me anywhere, I actually got more demotivated as I was applying all this knowledge and just kept losing more and more. The key is to find one channel you like and just stick with it.

Also, try and stay in good standing with google and facebook, I slipped down into their bad books for a LONG WHILE, trust me it will make your path to success a LOT easier and faster. With all the time you may be spending figuring out the best way to churn and burn, that time could be spent on actually improving your business and actually learning proper facebook and google strategies.

I would go into the failures and successes of each of my 50 stores, but that would take forever, so I'll detail my failures, and the solution to them at the bottom of this post.


My Minor Successes (September to December 2019)

So after months of trying to unsuccessfully create new ad accounts on the SAME IP for facebook and google (more about how I got around that below) , I decided it was a waste of time and went down the influencer marketing route on instagram.

I had one page and store that sold these halloween masks, I'm selling them again this year. If you're new, start making a store to sell these now:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/400...earchweb0_0,searchweb201602_,searchweb201603_
Here is the main storefront I used for the mask store. Wish I still had the store up, but hopefully it provides a bit of value

View attachment 140953

For another store I sold the classic fake airpods. The halloween mask ig page no longer exists, but here's the ig page for the fake airpods:

https://www.instagram.com/stealthpodsofficial/
I sold the store on ebay after it reached $1k in sales for about $700 at the beginning of December, I believe the new owner has taken the store down.

Here's a note I wrote about my influencer marketing strategy on Instagram, this was written in December of last year, but it still applies if you want to make a little $

View attachment 140948

All of that is fairly basic , and won't make you a lot of $$ but it's a good place to start. My influencer marketing ad strategy was Trending Topic + Meme + Funny Product
At this time, 6ix9ine was getting made fun of for being a snitch, so here's one I made. Like I said, it's nothing groundbreaking, but it was a start for me:
View attachment 140949

Here's the revenue for stealthpods,
I guess you could say it was my first Minor success and proved that the concept could work for me:

I only made around $300 (£240) profit on this store for the month, but at the time that was a monumental amount of money to me.

View attachment 140951

My Second (bigger, but still small) Success (March 2020)

Okay, so I actually have @WritersBlok to thank for this one. We worked together for a pretty short while, his reddit front page service got my 53rd store to almost do it's first $1,000 day. I was absolutely ecstatic. I'd recommend contacting him, if you're having some issue with facebook and google ads with a limited budget. Your time and money will be better spent investing into him or IG influencers, rather than doing what I did - spending months trying to fix the google and facebook issues with no money to find an actual solution.

There were no instagram influencers used for this store, however I did make a pretty decent ig page for it, you can take some branding tips from it:

https://www.instagram.com/thetrinitybag/
The store unfortunately had to be shut down due to COVID supplier problems, I know it came at the time I was starting to get some traction , but I didn't let anything stop me.

View attachment 140955

That store generated around $3,000 in sales before it's closure. I could finally see some consistent progress, but still had not dabbled in facebook or google that much.

View attachment 140956

What I Learnt From This Store:

The main thing was that alternative traffic sources can be useful, whilst I'm focusing solely on google and facebook right now, beginners should focus on alternative cheaper sources that won't completely annihilate their budget to begin with.

The BIG Break (April 2020)

So school in the UK had just recently closed for us, no more 5 am wakeups to get into the library 4 hours before school started , I now had more time to focus fully on the business at hand. This was where the fastest progressions were made. I won't be going over all of my strategies for two reasons:

1. I actually took a course (From Charlie Brandt... for free) but I'd rather not divulge the contents, as I paid for it when it made me this substantial amount. Either find it yourself, or pay for it

2. It would take too much time to go through everything, if you have a specific question just drop it below. As long as it's not "What is your product" or "Do it for me" , I'll be happy to answer it.

How Did I Find The Product?

Unlike what a lot of people will tell you, there isn't really a "winning product" whilst yes, some are better than others - 90% of what you see will sell, otherwise why is china pumping out resources and time to make it.

I sifted through the alibaba manufacturer directory until I found something that looked interesting, then cross checked that product with keywords for it on google (using a tool called KW surfer, it's free.) Once I found a product that had sufficient search volume (the main keyword having 50,000+ searches a month) I'd start looking at competitors stores and using google search filters to find their bestsellers.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/keyword-surfer/bafijghppfhdpldihckdcadbcobikaca?hl=enhttps://www.alibaba.com/Products?spm=a2700.8293689.scGlobalHomeHeader.705.2ce267afcRgq6D
That's the basic outline of how my method works. So after about 3 days, I found my current winner.

How Do I Make The Page and What Apps To Use?

So I don't actually use that many apps, for the most part I use:

DSERs, it's just better than oberlo and allows for direct bulk fulfilment with Aliexpress
Klaviyo
Reconvert post purchase upsell
A review app

To make a landing page, I usually just use gem pages. It allows you to make custom product pages and has a lot of integrated functions into it that will save you quite a lot on additional app fees. The actual shopify theme isn't that important in my experience, as with google shopping ads and facebook ads, you'll be directing to the product page created in gem pages anyway.

Here is a page that has a very similar layout to mine (he took the same course):
https://livinshape.com/products/homefit-3
They've done around $90k in a month, which is A LOT higher than me. So there's is a good template to base yours off.

What Was The Marketing Strategy?

Okay, here's where a lot of people make mistakes to start. This is what you need to do:

Use google shopping and search ads (SKAGs) AND connect google tracking code ----> connect facebook pixel to capture google conversions
-----> get around 200 google conversions tracked on the fb pixel ----> custom audiences using fb ads.

This is the most cost effective way, as with google you only pay if someone clicks on the ad. This will give you enough hyper targeted data so that when fb ads start, you'll be only paying for impressions on the best of the best traffic.

Again, I won't go into the whole strategy, but thats the way I've been able to scale to around $50k this month.

How Did I Handle COVID?

So this was a big concern for me starting out with this project, essentially when I got to around $10k in sales I had my shopify payments shut down, which was when I realised just how slow the shipping time really was. Luckily I was able to scrape together enough money to buy the product in bulk and send it to a warehouse in the US (I use mintfulfill.)

This is the best way to go, however only do it if you get consistent profitable sales everyday for at least 10 days in a row with google. After this you can either risk dropshipping your existing orders, or refund them (there is no negative impact to your merchant account if you do this, just as long as they don't chargeback.) Then pause ads, set product to out of stock, and wait for bulk shipment to arrive at warehouse.

After that relatively risky period (that could get your merchant account shutdown if handled incorrectly) it will be smooth sailing for the most part.

In terms of customer service, upwork or onlinejobs.ph are both good options.

Proof of success from other thread:

View this content on Instagram

View this content on Instagram

Mistakes I Made Along The Way (A Lot Of Them)

This will be copy and pasted from my comment in my previous thread.

Failures (these aren't in order of occurrence):

1. Opening my second store, facebook IP banned me for some policy violation (Apparently a picture of a dog in an ad was seen as offensive) I didn't know any better and made another 20 or so accounts on that device - banned everytime.
This made me unable to use facebook ads for the better part of my first 8 months. It was only when I actually bought a completely new device and used a fake profile picture, got a flip phone, and a free pay as you go sim (can receive texts for free) that I was able to get going with fb ads again. ALWAYS read their policies. Haven't had an ID check by them yet.

2. Google ads got IP suspended (similar situation as fb) applied for a new bank account on my street, used that new card on the new device i bought, and on new google email - haven't had issues since then. NEVER miss your payments with google and always have a backup payment method on the account. Also sidenote: churn and burn is stupid.

3. My shopify payments account got disabled as I was scaling. I hadn't vetted my supplier and had no idea he was sending the orders with 50 day shipping ( as a result of covid.) Got lots of chargebacks as I scaled that store above its first 10k in revenue. Solution: switching my store's location to france so that I could connect it to stripe (then switch it back to your own location) This basically gives you a second chance as stripe and shopify payments are really just the same.

Solution to the supplier was to buy in bulk to a US warehouse. I'm using mintfulfill but there are other options. They offer 2 day FedEx delivery to any state for $9 irrespective of weight.

4. Got into massive paypal debt and they threatened debt collectors. This links to my supplier sending out the orders slowly. Solution was to just pay off the debt as soon as I realised it was there, then just don't use PP. I'm maintaining a 2.3% conversion rate with it, recently been climbing to near 3%

5. Whilst shopify payments had my money on hold, my bank account also got temporarily frozen as I had just started to scale up my ads without telling them (always notify them if there is going to be a big increase in spend). This resulted in me having to pause my ads for about 2 weeks and not being able to pay for the orders that kept coming in whilst my money was on hold. Had to refund a large amount of them.

6. Not so much a failure, but I started with literally £0 in the bank. Essentially my parents didn't let me get a job as they thought it would take time away from my studies, so in order to raise capital during the first 8 or so months, I had to dropship directly from aliexpress to ebay. Fortunately I did this before corona so shipping time was okay. It was disheartening that all the money I made was lost on google and facebook ads back then - as I had no idea what I was doing. (made around $1,200 in 3 months with it)

7. I was watching youtube gurus and tried to mix their strategies together, that didn't get me anywhere just kept losing money. Find someone you like and follow their strategy (As long as theyre not fake) I recommend Charlie Brandt.
- that's what worked for me.


Future Plans and Tips

So, if you're outside the US like me, I'd really recommend getting some kind of multi currency bank account. You want to receive money, pay for ads, and pay for product ALL in the same currency. Currency losses really build up over time

Personally, don't really mess with churn and burn accounts or farmed facebook accounts etc. Just focus on getting your account back / getting a new device to make a new one. You want to keep these accounts for the long term to reap the real benefits.

Always have a backup payment provider, it will really reduce both your stress and the amount of downtime your ads will have, if in the event your processor fucks you. If you actually are located in the US ecprocessing on instagram is meant to be good, but I've never tried him personally.

I'm actually experimenting on high ticket dropshipping from Ailbaba right now, still in the product research phase, but they often have faster shipping and better QC than aliexpress. Alibaba suppliers also reply MUCH faster than those on express, so I'll update you all on how that goes in the next couple of months.

So thats pretty much my journey. I know it's not the most neatly laid out thread, but hopefully there's some value in it. Wasn't able to fit everything in

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CFT said:

I've seen some of Charlie Brandt stuff So you literally copied his formula then Is Gempages really worth the $29 month?
Do you make a landing page from scratch? So you don't use any of the Shopify descriptions

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reissxr said:

You said you had 53 stores. What differentiated the 53rd success from the other 52 failures?

As in, did you use a different strategy for this one? Or do you reckon the product/targeting made it a winner.

Atm selling CBD, but it's pretty hard because there's so many objections you have to deal with in people's minds, not selling that much and Paid Ads for CBD is banned

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Evening said:

How much did you start for the Charlie Brandt strategy? Skags and shopping campaign together

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