aronax
Newbie
- Apr 10, 2015
- 16
- 5
Greetings fellow blackhatters,
First and foremost, a HUGE THANKS to all of you who share your experience on this forum and guide the little ones to inch their way towards success. I’ve been lurking in the shadows for several years now and I can say that your lessons are immensely valuable.
Long story incoming!
About me
I’m a 35-year-old dude that loves web design & internet marketing. Nowadays I have limited time resources when it comes to working on IM projects (family & job). Like all here I’ve tried and tried all kinds of methods & guides each with their own degree of success. Not going into details about them since that is not the point of this story, what is important is that I’ve picked up a couple of skills that made it worth the journey.
The point of this story
The longest project I stuck with was my dropshipping store. It was built on a niche that I was passionate about. I would really much love to come back to it since I truly believe it has a lot of potential. I’ve been out of the flow for a few years now and have minimally managed it until now (fulfilled orders and responded to customer emails, that’s it).
The AS IS + some technical stats
Website: The domain is 5 years old. I built the site myself in Shopify with a paid theme and linked Oberlo and started importing products. I mainly picked products on Aliexpress that were tightly linked to my niche, had good photos and good reviews from customers. I’m currently sitting at nearly 300 imported products, 2/3 of which show as Product is gone from supplier (yes, I know, BAD).
SEO: The next months after the site was done were spent optimizing for on-page SEO for all categories and subcategories as well as improving the product page. I’ve purchased some backlinks in the first two years but didn’t do much ever since. Here are some stats from MOZ to fill in the picture:
Traffic: In the beginning I did fb & insta ads but never got to find that magical one product that is promised by all YouTube gurus out there… the one that will get you 95% of your store’s revenue and reward all of your hard work. You know what I’m talking about... yeah, I never got that lol
I focused on organic traffic as much as I could and tried different approaches (shoutouts, giveaways, etc). I didn’t want to depend so much on paid ads. Most of the search traffic comes from US and English-speaking countries. Here’s a snapshot from beginning of the year from Google Analytics:
Social: I built some social profiles where I uploaded content relevant to my niche (major platforms only).
Facebook page: 800 likes
Instagram: 1 account 5k followers (had another one with the same number of followers that was banned when I used Later to schedule posts)
Pinterest (1k followers), last 30 days stats (they seem high to me, but I never got my head around their ads system:
Twitter too but not worth mentioning.
Email marketing: Mailchimp – 1.2k audience that is sitting idle. I have one campaign for abandoned carts and one for welcoming customers that run automatically. I used to send weekly newsletters with 6 newly added products but stopped at some point.
Revenue: In the past two years the store has generated around 2.9k gross revenue with half of that in profit (I know Oberlo doesn’t calculate costs all that well, even more so with ePacket gone for some time now). Considering the duration, this means between $60-$70 per month with an average order value of around $30.
Moving forward
I honestly don’t know what I should do with the site in its current state. Contemplated selling it though not sure what a fair price would be.
I would really appreciate some feedback from fellow dropshippers that are much more experienced than me.
Here are some questions/self-doubts I have:
PS: Please keep your comments relevant & constructive. Don’t have the time to answer trolls
First and foremost, a HUGE THANKS to all of you who share your experience on this forum and guide the little ones to inch their way towards success. I’ve been lurking in the shadows for several years now and I can say that your lessons are immensely valuable.
Long story incoming!
About me
I’m a 35-year-old dude that loves web design & internet marketing. Nowadays I have limited time resources when it comes to working on IM projects (family & job). Like all here I’ve tried and tried all kinds of methods & guides each with their own degree of success. Not going into details about them since that is not the point of this story, what is important is that I’ve picked up a couple of skills that made it worth the journey.
The point of this story
The longest project I stuck with was my dropshipping store. It was built on a niche that I was passionate about. I would really much love to come back to it since I truly believe it has a lot of potential. I’ve been out of the flow for a few years now and have minimally managed it until now (fulfilled orders and responded to customer emails, that’s it).
The AS IS + some technical stats
Website: The domain is 5 years old. I built the site myself in Shopify with a paid theme and linked Oberlo and started importing products. I mainly picked products on Aliexpress that were tightly linked to my niche, had good photos and good reviews from customers. I’m currently sitting at nearly 300 imported products, 2/3 of which show as Product is gone from supplier (yes, I know, BAD).
SEO: The next months after the site was done were spent optimizing for on-page SEO for all categories and subcategories as well as improving the product page. I’ve purchased some backlinks in the first two years but didn’t do much ever since. Here are some stats from MOZ to fill in the picture:
Traffic: In the beginning I did fb & insta ads but never got to find that magical one product that is promised by all YouTube gurus out there… the one that will get you 95% of your store’s revenue and reward all of your hard work. You know what I’m talking about... yeah, I never got that lol
I focused on organic traffic as much as I could and tried different approaches (shoutouts, giveaways, etc). I didn’t want to depend so much on paid ads. Most of the search traffic comes from US and English-speaking countries. Here’s a snapshot from beginning of the year from Google Analytics:
Social: I built some social profiles where I uploaded content relevant to my niche (major platforms only).
Facebook page: 800 likes
Instagram: 1 account 5k followers (had another one with the same number of followers that was banned when I used Later to schedule posts)
Pinterest (1k followers), last 30 days stats (they seem high to me, but I never got my head around their ads system:
Twitter too but not worth mentioning.
Email marketing: Mailchimp – 1.2k audience that is sitting idle. I have one campaign for abandoned carts and one for welcoming customers that run automatically. I used to send weekly newsletters with 6 newly added products but stopped at some point.
Revenue: In the past two years the store has generated around 2.9k gross revenue with half of that in profit (I know Oberlo doesn’t calculate costs all that well, even more so with ePacket gone for some time now). Considering the duration, this means between $60-$70 per month with an average order value of around $30.
Moving forward
I honestly don’t know what I should do with the site in its current state. Contemplated selling it though not sure what a fair price would be.
I would really appreciate some feedback from fellow dropshippers that are much more experienced than me.
Here are some questions/self-doubts I have:
- Since 2/3 of my products show as Product is gone from supplier is it worth the time searching for replacements from different sellers and override the listing? Or should I use this opportunity to clean up the site? Will this affect rankings?
- I tried (unsuccessfully) to find some reliable suppliers that have warehouses in US so that point 1 doesn’t happen so often and that I can reduce shipping times. I was discouraged by the fact they required company details which I couldn’t provide. I know this is ideal but not sure how to proceed here…
- What is your experience with blogging on a dropshipping store? I wrote a couple of articles on topics from my niche but didn’t publish consistently and eventually stopped. I didn’t actively promote them, I’m more of garyvee believer (give, give, give and then you will start seeing some good results).
- Once I bring the site in a better state product-wise, what would be the best option for me to not deal with products disappearing in the future? Is that even possible?
- Do you think this project is worth investing my time in? What would you do with it?
PS: Please keep your comments relevant & constructive. Don’t have the time to answer trolls