Another Long Term Shopify + Instagram Business

Week 4, 5 & 6 Update

I'm not actually sure if anyone is still interested or following this journey but I'll continue posting at least for few weeks.

Nothing much happened during the last 3 weeks as I was pretty much away for winter and new year's holidays but now my first store is ready, my social media is ready and the first instagram AD is about to go live tomorrow Jan 13 and I'll continue running one ad/day until Friday, when I'll probably post all the results here.

Here are the prices I've managed to negotiate:
62k followers, 8% engagement rate - $40 for 12 hours post + story + link in bio
73k followers, 12% engagement rate - $33 for 6 hours post + story + link in bio
52k followers, 13% engagement rate - $30 for 6 hours post + story + link in bio
317k followers, 6% engagement rate - $40 for 4 hours story + link in bio
579k followers, 7% engagement rate - $65 for 5 hours story + link in bio

I've managed to negotiate a good price for most of the promotions from their initial quotes but some of them were too expensive and I've decided to run them for a shorter amount of time. For example, the last one with 579k followers asked for $180 for a 12 hours ad which seems fair for the amount of followers but it was way out of my budget.
All these accounts are highly niche-related, most of them are rarely running paid promotions and they all have great engagement rate, so I can't wait to see the results.

So far that's almost ~ $220 for 5 different promotions and $15 for domain so that's a TOTAL of $235 spent from my initial $300 budget.

See you guys next Friday

Would love to continue getting updates from you! Good luck with your business!

I had 2 stores fail, 3 store found my winner. I never had success on Instagram advertising. Took my 3rd store 0-20k in one month and than Facebook bans my account. Back to square one building ninche store and start over. How is your journey so far have you launched some ads? Be careful with Chinise new year

Good luck, I'm curious to see the results of paid promotions.

Hope it will be successful.

Btw go get "droppoint dot site" its $5 a month and you can see exactly what videos and products are working on fb. Filter by low views high comments, over 1k likes and select Us Canada United Kingdom and Australia. Once you find a product you like search for atleast 3 competitors and go to their Facebook ads library, if they been pushing the same product over 2 months your golden. Hope this helps for product research if you have any questions I would love to help just pm me.

GamingFTWHD said:

Would love to continue getting updates from you! Good luck with your business!

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Thank you! I'll post the next big update at the end of this week, probably on Friday at the end of the last promotion.

Hustle2020 said:

I had 2 stores fail, 3 store found my winner. I never had success on Instagram advertising. Took my 3rd store 0-20k in one month and than Facebook bans my account. Back to square one building ninche store and start over. How is your journey so far have you launched some ads? Be careful with Chinise new year

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At the moment I'm not sure how good will the promotions perform but I had some great engagement results in the past with IG influencers but of course that's a little different compared to making them pay for a product.
I've heard so many stories about facebook banning accounts when ads were performing great. Do you have any clue why this happens? In order to avoid this I've tried to give fb as many details as possible about my business and the products by filling in all the fields. I'm not sure if this helps or not but..
No results so far as today I'm running the first promotion. The plan is to bring as much targeted traffic as possible to build data for the pixel, but of course I hope I'll have some sales. Great point with the new year, I think the official date is 25 January but I'll have all the orders filled in by Sunday so hopefully they will manage to send all the potential packages by Wed 22.

lukaslukas said:

Good luck, I'm curious to see the results of paid promotions.

Hope it will be successful.

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Thank you! I'll post the final results as soon as I'll have them.

Hustle2020 said:

Btw go get "droppoint dot site" its $5 a month and you can see exactly what videos and products are working on fb. Filter by low views high comments, over 1k likes and select Us Canada United Kingdom and Australia. Once you find a product you like search for atleast 3 competitors and go to their Facebook ads library, if they been pushing the same product over 2 months your golden. Hope this helps for product research if you have any questions I would love to help just pm me.

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This advice came a little too late but it's great to know for further projects. I've seen some youtubers talking about that platform and I'll definitely try it in the future. I don't think I can send PMs but if you'd like to connect you can PM me.

Week 7 Update

Guys, it's finally Saturday and the final results of my campaign are here.

In one of my previous posts I've made a list of all the costs/ad/page and the engagement rate, and now as I'll use that list again to share the results. So here they are:

- Monday (62k followers, 8% engagement rate): 6 sales with a total profit of $72
- Tuesday (73k followers, 12% engagement rate): 13 sales with a total profit $156
- Wednesday (52k followers, 13% engagement rate): 2 sales with a total profit of $24
- Thursday (317k followers, 6% engagement rate): 7 sales with a total profit of $84
- Friday (579k followers, 7% engagement rate): 11 sales with a total profit of $132

That would be a total profit of $468 BUT the initial ads cost $235 hasn't been included, which means somewhere around $6/sold product, which reduces my total profit to $233 (payments processing fees, and additional small fees not included, I don't want to think about them haha)

The product was from the beauty niche and it was listed for sale for $19.99 and the product & shipping cost was ~ $8.

Results & More

Getting my first sale notification from Shopify app was the best thing that happened to me in 2020. This is my first dropshipping journey so I don't even know what to say about the results & profits. What do you guys think?

I've noticed that I got all the sales during this week in maximum 2-3 hours since the ads were posted. After 4 hours the traffic also dropped massively which means I would have been able to reduce the ads costs by running them for only 4-5 hours/day.
Is this a general thing or it was just a coincidence?

I was hoping the sales will explode in the last two days based on the size of those pages and the results of the first two days, but that didn't happen. The owner of the 317k followers page posted my ad almost 4 hours later than we've initially discussed and I've noticed that overall is kind of a hard work to sync everything and everyone based on a specific schedule or plan.

Next Step

I got a lot of fb pixel data from this week's campaign so the plan is to start using FB Ads to retarget that audience.
As someone mentioned earlier, it's the New Year's holiday in China so I'm pretty sure I won't start running any ads until the 3rd of February.

paulpaul25 said:

Week 7 Update

Guys, it's finally Saturday and the final results of my campaign are here.

In one of my previous posts I've made a list of all the costs/ad/page and the engagement rate, and now as I'll use that list again to share the results. So here they are:

- Monday (62k followers, 8% engagement rate): 6 sales with a total profit of $72
- Tuesday (73k followers, 12% engagement rate): 13 sales with a total profit $156
- Wednesday (52k followers, 13% engagement rate): 2 sales with a total profit of $24
- Thursday (317k followers, 6% engagement rate): 7 sales with a total profit of $84
- Friday (579k followers, 7% engagement rate): 11 sales with a total profit of $132

That would be a total profit of $468 BUT the initial ads cost $235 hasn't been included, which means somewhere around $6/sold product, which reduces my total profit to $233 (payments processing fees, and additional small fees not included, I don't want to think about them haha)

The product was from the beauty niche and it was listed for sale for $19.99 and the product & shipping cost was ~ $8.

Results & More

Getting my first sale notification from Shopify app was the best thing that happened to me in 2020. This is my first dropshipping journey so I don't even know what to say about the results & profits. What do you guys think?

I've noticed that I got all the sales during this week in maximum 2-3 hours since the ads were posted. After 4 hours the traffic also dropped massively which means I would have been able to reduce the ads costs by running them for only 4-5 hours/day.
Is this a general thing or it was just a coincidence?

I was hoping the sales will explode in the last two days based on the size of those pages and the results of the first two days, but that didn't happen. The owner of the 317k followers page posted my ad almost 4 hours later than we've initially discussed and I've noticed that overall is kind of a hard work to sync everything and everyone based on a specific schedule or plan.

Next Step

I got a lot of fb pixel data from this week's campaign so the plan is to start using FB Ads to retarget that audience.
As someone mentioned earlier, it's the New Year's holiday in China so I'm pretty sure I won't start running any ads until the 3rd of February.

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Great job. Why don't you continue with this IG tactic?

lukaslukas said:

Great job. Why don't you continue with this IG tactic?

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I'm thinking that FB ads is a much solid option in term of scaling but I repeating this strategy for a few times with IG influencers might be good option for generating even more data and why not, a few $$$

@paulpaul25, Thanks for your story. Good luck my friend

GamingFTWHD said:

Would love to continue getting updates from you! Good luck with your business!

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Me too

hoasendep said:

@paulpaul25, Thanks for your story. Good luck my friend

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Xromano said:

Me too

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Thank you guys! I really hope I'll be able to inspire others to start their own journey and to start getting things into practice, as you've seen I'm not a PRO at all, I have some experience with influencer marketing but that's all, no ecommerce or dropshipping backgrounds.

I don't think there will be much to post in the next 2 weeks as I'll be putting things on hold until the chinese holidays are over, so let me know if you'd like me to go into more details about about the product finding strategy or any aspects of my journey.

paulpaul25 said:

Thank you guys! I really hope I'll be able to inspire others to start their own journey and to start getting things into practice, as you've seen I'm not a PRO at all, I have some experience with influencer marketing but that's all, no ecommerce or dropshipping backgrounds.

I don't think there will be much to post in the next 2 weeks as I'll be putting things on hold until the chinese holidays are over, so let me know if you'd like me to go into more details about about the product finding strategy or any aspects of my journey.

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That's great! We are waiting to hear good news from you, bro!

Week 10 Update

Nothing much happened during the last 3 weeks as most of the chinese sellers and manufacturers stopped their activity during the New Year Holiday. I was thinking that I will immediately repeat my strategy or start scaling things as soon as everything gets back to schedule but seems like there are some real problems with the virus in China and I couldn't find any solid information about how this will affect the ecommerce industry.

I'm not going to get into much detail about this virus situation as I don't have any professional knowledge, I just want to say that I've seen many people being racist and extremely hostile with the chinese people, and it's really sad. I think we should support and pray for them during these hard time, because at the end of the day, we are all humans and we are meant to live together and help each other.

At this point, I'm a little bit frustrated because I've already missed the valentine's day which is a great opportunity for ecommerce, because of my non-out-of-the-box thinking.
I should have considered searching for a US supplier and keep the ball rolling, as I had a lot of time to search for influencers, set up the store and prepare my ads.

Hope that those of you who already started their dropshipping business haven't made this mistake.

As for the next weeks, I'll try to contact multiple Ali sellers and ask about the virus situation, and worst case scenario, I will try to find a US supplier for my previous product and continue with IG influencers for one or two weeks before moving on to FB Ads.

Just don't stop updating this thread. I wanted to start DS too with a winning product, i'm 100% sure, but the coronavirus and chinese new year thing messed up my plans.

watching and along for the ride.

Find a product and stick with you. You are not going to knock it out of the part the first time around. Once you have you a great product. Data is key Look at what customers are doing on your site. Then based off that info make changes to the site. Keep doing this until you narrow the site down and its converting for you.

Don't lose focus Most people start something up and within 3 to 4 months they are done as they have spent more money than they have made. Set a game plan and stick to it.

Best of luck for 2020 and beyond.

In your posts you've said:
- You're looking to build really focused one-product stores
- You've found some products and dropshippers on the likes of Aliexpress
- You have $10,000 savings

I might be missing something, but why aren't you looking at buying say 100-500 units in bulk and shipping directly to customers? If that's too much you could even aliexpress 10pcs at a time to yourself.

Get it to customers in a day or two and that's already reason to buy from you rather than every other dropshipper doing the same thing and has got to translate to a higher sell-through rate (higher return on those advertising costs!).

In any case, good luck with this journey!

arcticb said:

In your posts you've said:
- You're looking to build really focused one-product stores
- You've found some products and dropshippers on the likes of Aliexpress
- You have $10,000 savings

I might be missing something, but why aren't you looking at buying say 100-500 units in bulk and shipping directly to customers? If that's too much you could even aliexpress 10pcs at a time to yourself.

Get it to customers in a day or two and that's already reason to buy from you rather than every other dropshipper doing the same thing and has got to translate to a higher sell-through rate (higher return on those advertising costs!).

In any case, good luck with this journey!

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Yes I have $10k + in savings but that's not the point, it was strictly related to my background, I'm not going to use 10k on this journey as I've limited my initial budget to less than $500, because I'm pretty new to dropshipping and I don't want to risk something I can't afford to lose.

During the research stage I found few potential products from various niches, but I'm not able to vouch for any of those except the one that I've tested so far. But again, being my first store and my first journey I'm not able to say if that product was truly successful as I have nothing to compare with, I've made some profit but it's not all about that.

I'm also living in Europe and here we have a lot of taxes to products coming outside from EU, ~ 20% VAT and custom fees which for 100-500 units can get crazy high to a point where I won't be able to make any profit, and the overall risk will be to high. Not mentioning the fact that shipping via DHL or UPS to the US would cost me something like $50-$80.

Basically I would need to sell a $8 product with $100 to make the smallest profit, haha.

If you are talking about an US-based fullfilment center, I'm not quite there yet, but as a long term goal, this would be the one.

RoyalCobra777 said:

Just don't stop updating this thread. I wanted to start DS too with a winning product, i'm 100% sure, but the coronavirus and chinese new year thing messed up my plans.

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As long as I know people are interested in my journey I won't stop updating it.
If you can bet it's a winning product and you have all the marketing resources and stuff, do it! Don't sleep on it too much as trends are changing really fast and somebody else will do the $$$ for you.
The holidays are over in China and everything should get back to normal by next week, I can't say anything about the virus situation, but worst case scenario, try to find a US supplier.

Monkey Duds said:

watching and along for the ride.

Find a product and stick with you. You are not going to knock it out of the part the first time around. Once you have you a great product. Data is key Look at what customers are doing on your site. Then based off that info make changes to the site. Keep doing this until you narrow the site down and its converting for you.

Don't lose focus Most people start something up and within 3 to 4 months they are done as they have spent more money than they have made. Set a game plan and stick to it.

Best of luck for 2020 and beyond.

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Thanks a lot! I know this is not how it works, and I'm sure this is not a get rich quick scheme, but I'm also pretty sure that if you treat it like a real business, after failing and learning sooner or later you'll see the real business results.

At this point I can't wait to have everything running again for another week just so I can compare the results and figure if this product worths scaling or if I should drop it.
I'm not sure how much initial data would be enough for me to start scaling up a product via FB ads. I know that as you've said, FB ads is another game, and no matter how much data I have, I still have to narrow it down to find the best conversion, but I don't want to get into it too early and lose my progress.

paulpaul25 said:

Yes I have $10k + in savings but that's not the point, it was strictly related to my background, I'm not going to use 10k on this journey as I've limited my initial budget to less than $500, because I'm pretty new to dropshipping and I don't want to risk something I can't afford to lose.

During the research stage I found few potential products from various niches, but I'm not able to vouch for any of those except the one that I've tested so far. But again, being my first store and my first journey I'm not able to say if that product was truly successful as I have nothing to compare with, I've made some profit but it's not all about that.

I'm also living in Europe and here we have a lot of taxes to products coming outside from EU, ~ 20% VAT and custom fees which for 100-500 units can get crazy high to a point where I won't be able to make any profit, and the overall risk will be to high. Not mentioning the fact that shipping via DHL or UPS to the US would cost me something like $50-$80.

Basically I would need to sell a $8 product with $100 to make the smallest profit, haha.

If you are talking about an US-based fullfilment center, I'm not quite there yet, but as a long term goal, this would be the one.

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I understand you want to start small and try and keep risks low

If you're based in the EU and selling on Amazon US then that makes a lot more sense now why you're looking at drop-shipping rather than direct fulfillment. Indeed you need at -least- 1/4 of a 20' container worth of goods before considering shipping to an Amazon FC in another country.

If you were selling in the EU I'd say the ~20% VAT impact is much less than you think, being paid on COGS rather than Revenue when you're not VAT registered. I'd much rather be able to just pay 20% on a $5 item than hand over ~17% of a $35 sale hah.

arcticb said:

I understand you want to start small and try and keep risks low

If you're based in the EU and selling on Amazon US then that makes a lot more sense now why you're looking at drop-shipping rather than direct fulfillment. Indeed you need at -least- 1/4 of a 20' container worth of goods before considering shipping to an Amazon FC in another country.

If you were selling in the EU I'd say the ~20% VAT impact is much less than you think, being paid on COGS rather than Revenue when you're not VAT registered. I'd much rather be able to just pay 20% on a $5 item than hand over ~17% of a $35 sale hah.

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Not only about the low risk but also about the flexibility in term of viral products & trends, I've considered that one of the strongest points for starting a dropshipping business.

I can see what you say about the VAT & taxes and that wouldn't be the biggest problem at all. Shipping the product in time and keeping track of all the parcels would be a huge challenge.
Unless I'll have a legally registered business I won't be able to get a contract with a shipping company, and that would be the only way to get a decent rate for shipping. Also having a registered business, as far as I know, requires mentioning exactly the type of product/service you are selling so you can get the right registration code for your activity. For example if you are selling car parts you'll have a completely different activity registration code compared to selling art.

When selling in EU you also have to keep in mind that you are required to offer free returns for something like 60-90 days for your customers and that would be a quite a challenge for me.

I'm not 100% that all the legal facts I've mentioned are correct, so please don't take those for granted.