Another Long Term Shopify + Instagram Business

Hello everyone,

I've been on this forum for quite some time but never had the courage to start my own journey here. But now, at the end of 2019 here I am, planning to start a new shopify business.

Current Situation

23 years old, living with my parents, having my own car, having enough money to live decent on monthly basis and roughly $10000 in savings.
I'm working as a freelancer, specialized in brand design including logo design, packaging, stationery etc. I'm in the process of getting traction as this is my 3rd entrepreneurial journey in this industry and I'm working at maybe 60% of my potential, including timing, projects capacity, marketing etc.

Short-Term Goal

- Reach a profit of $100 per day with Shopify in less than 2 months.

Long-Term Goal

- Transform everything into a real business by the end of 2020, open multiple stores (3-4) which will allow me to save enough money to be able to start investing into real-estate (five-figure per year).

Dropshipping Strategy, Resources & My Plan

I'm not yet sure if I should start this journey in the next two weeks or wait until January 2020. The only problem is that I'm facing some rough deadlines for the main branding business and I don't have enough time to do the proper search for the product.

I've limited my initial budget to $300 which will be used for: Website (custom domain, importing feedback & product reviews, other Shopify apps and plugins) + Instagram Promotions + Additional Ads Costs (video creation, editing etc).
**I have a separate budget for the first potential orders.**

My strategy is to start getting traction by promoting my store using Instagram niche pages. At the moment I don't know exactly the niche of my first store but I will be looking at pages with 50 - 300k followers and an engagement rate of at least 3% with a low sponsored post ratio. I'm going to manually search for each page and contact the owner asking for their rates.
I'm going to invest at least $200 from the initial budget into sponsored posts, so I'm estimating 3-5 different sponsored posts. I'm going to run all of them in one single day, but 1 post/day for 12 hours each.

I want the website to be a clean, intuitive one product store. I'm going to create the full color scheme, custom logo + additional design elements.
I want to import all the product reviews and feedback including product pictures, a short relevant description of the product and some high-quality pictures with the same background & theme.

Don't know much about the first product at this moment, but I want to focus on specific niches and I want to keep the profit margin to at least $12 with a maximum price of $35.

What if I got no sales during during the first campaign?

I will look take a closer look to the results and find the problem: the product, the ads, the website, the audience or the promotion itself.

What if I got the lucky ticket and succeed with the first campaign?

I will try and scale everything as soon as possible switching to FB Ads, tracking the same audience using the Pixel.

Currently Missing

- the product
- the product finding strategy
- IG promotions strategy & content strategy (video vs. image) (post vs. story) etc.

This is my plan at the moment. I've opened this thread looking for some motivation and recommendations from you guys, as I'm pretty sure that most of you have a lot of experience and advanced knowledge compared to me.

The plan is to update this thread once or twice a week, but as I'm not sure when exactly I will start this journey so I'm not sure if I'll manage to be consistent during the first few weeks, but I promise to do my best.

Week 1 Update

After the first research I’ve found 4 potential products in 4 completely different niches, and few Aliexpress sellers who matches my criteria.
Haven’t made a decision yet as none of them have video reviews of the product and I’m also not sure what content strategy I should follow for the first sponsored posts.

In addition to that I’ve sent some DMs to few IG pages for each niche, asking for their promo rates.

Good luck on your journey!

If you can get yourself some samples from your suppliers ASAP so you get a better idea of shipping times, quality, etc. it also helps when customers start email you with questions.

I’d recommend shooting some of your own videos and photos. The more original content the better.

So far what’s worked best for me with influencers is 3 story posts 1st talking about the product benefits 2nd showing the product and the last one a swipe Up link to product page. If they aren’t a “personal influencer” probably best to shoot the videos yourself just in case they don’t want to

codenamefrog said:

Good luck on your journey!

If you can get yourself some samples from your suppliers ASAP so you get a better idea of shipping times, quality, etc. it also helps when customers start email you with questions.

I’d recommend shooting some of your own videos and photos. The more original content the better.

So far what’s worked best for me with influencers is 3 story posts 1st talking about the product benefits 2nd showing the product and the last one a swipe Up link to product page. If they aren’t a “personal influencer” probably best to shoot the videos yourself just in case they don’t want to

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Thank you so much!

It will be a little bit harder for me to track the real shipping time as my main audience will be from US and I'm based in Europe. Because the national post is so bad here the average EMS shipping time is like 14-15 days and the regular China Mail 25-35 days...
As far as I've seen everything is much faster for the China - US route especially the ePacket option.

Thanks a lot for the IG promotion tips. I've decided to go with video format and I'll also try the 3 story posts format and I actually think it's pretty clever as people will stay engaged longer with your content.

Week 2 Update

Found a product, found 3 different sellers who offer the same product, all of them have at least 500-600 sold units and great reviews and they all offer e-packet shipping.
I've just did a wider research on this product on Amazon, Ebay and few other smaller platforms and it looks like the product is selling good enough.

I'm almost sure that I'm going to launch my first campaign using this product as I've already seen many YT content for it and I'm going to do my best and use parts of that content for the actual AD.
These days I'll download some videos with the product, cut them, add music, add text and convert everything to an AD video format and layout. If I won't be satisfied with the results I'll just hire someone to do it for me.

Because this product is completely new for me, different from the initial 4 products I've done another research, trying to find and contact influencers and theme pages.

Note: I'm a little bit nervous for starting this journey in Jan 2020 as I know from my experience the Q1 is not that great in finding clients, at least compared to Q4 but I've already missed this train.

Good luck OP. I'm starting a similar one product project in Jan 2020 Would be looking forward to learn from you. Following your journey.

stepdub said:

Good luck OP. I'm starting a similar one product project in Jan 2020 Would be looking forward to learn from you. Following your journey.

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Thank you guys! I will try to be as transparent as possible, as soon as I'll find a winning product and make a few sales, I will write a full guide for the product finding process.

Purush said:

good luck to the journey mate. you had a plan

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Thank you buddy, I'm pretty sure this plan has multiple missing elements but I'll try to stick with it and constantly improve it so in the end my journey will inspire others.

Nice plan, mate! Write any problems you get in this journey and BHW members will try their best to help

All the best in your journey. Don't worry about Q1 or Q4 l. It all depends on the product and niche. Some things are bought more in Q1 than Q4. Adjust your strategy accordingly.

Will be following this journey.

PHP-Rockstars said:

Nice plan, mate! Write any problems you get in this journey and BHW members will try their best to help

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Global360 said:

Looking forward to your journey. Seems everything is well planned. Best of luck on this. Please keep us posted

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I will constantly update this journey and as I've mentioned earlier try to keep everything transparent from the beginning to the end.
For the next week's update I will present both my current product and influencers/theme pages finding strategies. As I haven't tested any products yet I can only vouch for the IG influencer finding/selection strategy.

Just curious how many of you did shopify-dropshipping this year, and especially in the Q4. How were your results?
I've seen some people did great especially on the Cyber Monday with a total revenue of 10-15k in one day with 1-3 stores which for me is I-N-S-A-N-E.

youtube1001 said:

All the best in your journey. Don't worry about Q1 or Q4 l. It all depends on the product and niche. Some things are bought more in Q1 than Q4. Adjust your strategy accordingly.

Will be following this journey.

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That's the type of motivation I need for this. Thank you so much, I'll do my best to constantly adjust my strategy as I absolutely know this is not about a passive income, I will treat it like a real, full-time business.

Week 3 Update + Product/Influencers Research Strategy

One week before Christmas, lot of work with the side business, some hard deadlines, trying to get everything ready before the holidays but have some news for my journey too.
I've created a mockup of my first Shopify website and I've finished the branding process (logo, icons, color scheme). Just finished the facebook page, I've included as much information I could, all the descriptions fields, added working hours, linked the IG brand account.
I found out that it's kind of important to give FB as much information as possible about your brand because if everything looks like a legit business it's going to be less probable to get your ads banned. *Just a theory, not a fact.*

I've downloaded some videos of my product and want to edit everything based on a basic script, the first part showing the advantages of the product in comparison with its main rival, and the second part showing some real-life product testing. My goal is to manipulate the content as good as possible in the limit of 13-14 seconds.

Product Research Strategy *haven't tested the product yet*

I will mention this again, I haven't tested any products yet, I don't know if this strategy will help me make my first sale or not but I want to share it with you and hopefully we are going to see the first results soon. I won't say "do that" and "don't do that", I will just describe my journey and my strategy.

To be honest, in the beginning of this thread, I've mentioned that I already have some potential products, and this was probably my first mistake. I've done a superficial product research based on niches which I'm passionate about. Not because I wanted to create a stronger spiritual connection between me and the product but because I've considered that being passionate about the niche will help me understand the key features of each product and also analyze the competition and have a better understanding of the market in general.

After that, I started to watch some more videos, read some more articles about the product research and I've discovered a new strategy which I've considered significantly better.
I started searching on facebook for "free shipping" and filtered the results by showing only the videos, and discovered tons of recent ads for shopify stores and I've spent like 6-7 hours browsing through ads and stores, trying to identify their best selling products.
Based on the amount of views, the design of the store I was able to identify some hot niches and their best selling product.

Extra tip: I've discovered that if you go to the Shopify apps and look at their reviews and feedback section, you can actually click and visit the store profile of the user who left the feedback. I think you can make a good strategy with this kind of research too, based on apps which are more appealing to mature stores, but I haven't got into this as I already found some products with the previous method.

My strategy was to focus on a single-product-store format and I've picked one niche I was kind of familiar with and few potential products. After that I've started searching for those and similar products on the largest marketplaces such as Amazon, Ebay, CL and noticed that some of the selected products were selling very good on those too. By that time I've also calculated the average price of each product.

The next and final step for me was to search for the final products on Ali and find the best sellers based on their reputation. I was mainly interested in the ones who have many reviews including pictures, as I want to import those into my store.
I spent some time doing the math, checking if the product price + the expenses + my profit still allows me to set a lower price compared to Ebay, Amazon and other main Shopify Stores.

After I've decided which product I will use, I also spent some extra time looking for quality video materials of that product. I know you can just copy-paste your competitor ads, but I don't really want to do that as I'm pretty sure that if I spend some time and do some quality ads sooner or later that is going to help me stand out from the competitors.

Influencers/Theme pages Research Strategy *tested*

My strategy is to start bringing traffic using IG influencers or theme pages to bring data to the FB pixel and also to test the product by promoting it to the right audience.

I've done everything manually, started searching for hashtags after looking at the recent google trends keywords for my niche. I've used "all-hashtags.com" to generate similar related hashtags. I ended up with a pretty long list of hashtags and using the IG app I went through all the recent popular posts for each of them and now I've ended up with a long list of potential theme pages/influencer accounts.

Only selected the 50-300k followers accounts which have an engagement rate of at least 3%. To test that I used the Phlanx.com platform which has a free integrated engagement rate calculator. I've tested that in the past with few of my personal accounts and results were accurate enough.

I also visited their profile again to take a closer look and see if they were doing any promotions recently, as I totally don't wanted to use an influencer who constantly spams his followers with ads.

I sent each of them a simple DM something like "hi, promo rates?" as probably they already have a lot of spammy DMs. I can say this works as 90% of them responded in less than 48 hours.

Sorry for the long post guys, feel free to ask me anything or let me know if I've missed anything in my process.

Have you tried building up your own profile through viral content yet? Perhaps with a combination of tiktok?

FranzH said:

Have you tried building up your own profile through viral content yet? Perhaps with a combination of tiktok?

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Not yet, both the IG and the FB pages are less than 1 week old and I won't spend that much time trying to get organic traffic, or at least not from my accounts. I was thinking to try a viral content ad style for one or two shoutouts, and hope those posts/stories will become viral and hopefully I'll be able to get some organic sales that way.
Haven't considered TikTok at all yet as I'm thinking that 90% of its audience is really young but I'm not very familiar with it, am I missing something?

dope thread ...lit a fire under my ass and made me want to make a thread also ...it keeps me motivated im also building a few things in the ecom space !!

NYC47 said:

dope thread ...lit a fire under my ass and made me want to make a thread also ...it keeps me motivated im also building a few things in the ecom space !!

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Do it! Starting this thread gave me an extra responsibility and somehow keeps me motivated to succeed and to respect my schedule.

NYC47 said:

dope thread ...lit a fire under my ass and made me want to make a thread also ...it keeps me motivated im also building a few things in the ecom space !!

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Do it! Starting this thread gave me an extra responsibility and somehow keeps me motivated to succeed.

Guys, great motivational news for today!
After talking to an old client and friend of mine who used to run his own POD business with custom patches & prints few years ago, I just found out this year he started a dropshipping store targeting a very tight niche.

The product is one of those ultra-realistic car models which looks like a real car but on a smaller scale, I think 1/18 scale or something like that. His store was mostly focused on vintage cars, like the Mercedes 300SL or the Ferrari 250 GTO..etc

I have to mention that he is an early active member in a large US facebook group related to that niche but his profits since September were at least 6-7k each month which for me is absolutely awesome.
He found a seller through a local contact but he told me that the seller has an Alibaba shop with parts for those "toy" cars.

I was shocked to find out that those cars could cost $200-$400 each.

For me, this is great motivation as it's totally different when you meet someone who actually earns from a Shopify store in real life compared to reading the online stories.

Good luck op, you have a nice amount to fund your ventures! Following.

rafark said:

Good luck op, you have a nice amount to fund your ventures! Following.

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Thank you! It's not that much, I just have the first few potential orders covered and of course the initial IG shoutout budget.
I really can't wait to see the first store up and running. Hope I won't disappoint you guys, haha.