Dropshipping Journey to a Consistent $100 per day

Update: I have used my failed store here as a lessons learnt to develop a new store. Results: Made $100 profit 2 days in a row.

At the early initiation stage, I am seeing pretty decent success with a 60% operating margin and a handful of sales in a few days. It was initially going to last 7 days, but I am not confident with the Ali Express suppliers - so I will be pausing here before I go any further. The reason this is critical for me is my pricing for the product is relatively high and so I want to make that my customer journey also reflects the prices I put up. If my products were cheaper, I would let it the stage last longer.

I am about to scale as I am satisfied with the initiation results so far and I am going to dip my toes a little deeper into the water. By scaling, I mean improving the quality of entire dropshipping process (ie. better shipping times, confirmed quality of product, more transparency and better products). If the results continue, then I will be scaling the ads.

Pro tip: Don't be afraid to be honest with your flaws and find a way to learn and beat your previous failures.

What has happened in the last 3 weeks?

I have still made a couple of organic sales per week, without ads on. So it looks promising so far.

I have paused my ads and engaged a agent to ensure quality control of my products. The reason I had done is because my products require strict quality control, given the prices my customers are paying. I am not overly fussed with shipping times as this doesn't appear to be an issue yet. I am hoping in the next week or 2, I can turn the ads on once I am confident with the quality of my products.

Whilst I am looking for quality control, I am now looking for other marketing platforms to engage in as part of the scaling process.

Update: Whilst I wait for my test products to arrive, I am currently looking for more products to add to my store to see what also works outside of my local country. The principle is to not stay still and keep looking for opportunities.

I was still making unexpected sales in the last 3 days. I realised that I had paused my ads, but hadn't paused my store.So now I have paused my store, while I get the supply side sorted.

Hopefully, the test product will arrive in 2 weeks time and I can resume my ads.

I am really nervous because what if my supply side fails or my ads no longer are effective? Oh well, the risk is worth it. And it's another invaluable learning experience/

I am also excited because of the potential.

But I can't focus on the potential, only the process.

Anyways, I don't expect to have much update in the next 2 weeks as I will be ironing out some other issues such as analytics and conversion tracking that wasn't working previously. And doing some more research on other suppliers and marketing avenues.

Update: I am still waiting for my test products to come in. Supplier has recently just sent through the tracking orders. It has taken about 3 working days and 5 calendar days to fulfil my test order. The shipping time should take maximum 15d. This is more than I would like, but at this stage - can't complain as this feels more trustworthy.

In the meantime, I have ironed out the analytics and conversion tracking.

Upon my research for products, I have come across a potential niche that is less likely to have quality issues. I am thinking of developing another store concurrently. I will have an idea by the end of the week whether this is worth it. I will most likely be utilising a different marketing avenue due to the nature of the product.

I am following this journey. Thanks for the updates so far. You are making this as more realistic as possible.

Please can you find some time to tell us what you did differently to bounce back?
What are the necessary to-do's for someone who wants to start a drop shipping store?
How effective was SEO in the growth of your recent store? Like did you do any KW research.
Are there resources u used that u found helpful to your recent progress that you can share?

Thanks and look forward to your answer.

Tukolony said:

I am following this journey. Thanks for the updates so far. You are making this as more realistic as possible.

Please can you find some time to tell us what you did differently to bounce back?
What are the necessary to-do's for someone who wants to start a drop shipping store?
How effective was SEO in the growth of your recent store? Like did you do any KW research.
Are there resources u used that u found helpful to your recent progress that you can share?

Thanks and look forward to your answer.

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Sure. Some of the key things I did to bounce back was I looked for products that weren't overly saturated in terms of marketing ie. there isn't 50 dropshippers advertising the exact same item. The second thing I also did was I decided to pay people on fiverr to develop my website and do product descriptions, as I found it too time consuming to develop a website that is not the standard dropshipping type.

Most of the information required to do dropshipping are pretty similar across most resources. 1) Good product 2) Good website. 3) Good copy and 4) Good marketing. I don't have 1 specific resources that I followed. It was me looking through facebook, reddit, youtube and blackhatworld to help get an idea on how to address those 4 things.

Also, I haven't actively done any SEO yet.

I don't have much of an answer as I am still learning on the go, so hope that helps

naz10101 said:

Sure. Some of the key things I did to bounce back was I looked for products that weren't overly saturated in terms of marketing ie. there isn't 50 dropshippers advertising the exact same item. The second thing I also did was I decided to pay people on fiverr to develop my website and do product descriptions, as I found it too time consuming to develop a website that is not the standard dropshipping type.

Most of the information required to do dropshipping are pretty similar across most resources. 1) Good product 2) Good website. 3) Good copy and 4) Good marketing. I don't have 1 specific resources that I followed. It was me looking through facebook, reddit, youtube and blackhatworld to help get an idea on how to address those 4 things.

Also, I haven't actively done any SEO yet.

I don't have much of an answer as I am still learning on the go, so hope that helps

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Yea sure.Many thanks for your response.
I wish you the best.
I would be following your journey and as time goes I will ask more questions.

Very interesting journey, best of luck!

Update: While I wait for my test products to arrive, I have been researching additional products to add to my store and I have stumbled upon a niche within my niche. I have added these products to my store and now I will sorting through the products to include and edit quality images, updating product descriptions, importing comments etc.

I will also be looking at back up sourcing agents / suppliers in general. If anyone has any suggestions, please feel free to send them through.

naz10101 said:

Update: While I wait for my test products to arrive, I have been researching additional products to add to my store and I have stumbled upon a niche within my niche. I have added these products to my store and now I will sorting through the products to include and edit quality images, updating product descriptions, importing comments etc.

I will also be looking at back up sourcing agents / suppliers in general. If anyone has any suggestions, please feel free to send them through.

Click to expand...

Good luck with your Journey, maybe you should Look into IG influencers if u want to spend money.

Update: I have received my sample products from a sourcing agent. I am pretty pleased with the shipping times. It was about 2 weeks. The quality seems pretty decent. Minor issues but almost negligible.

The next step will be to strategize how to utilise the sourcing agent (ie. it might be beneficial to use them for a particular set of products in my store, and use ali express for others depending on my risk tolerance and comfort).

For the new products, I have updated prices, edited photos and uploaded. I hated doing this part but this is now all done. An underrated thing that took more time than I would've liked was actually sorting through the variants.

Next step is the product copy, which what I will also not like too much, but its gotta be done.

I am a bit nervous about resuming my stores and then not continuing any sales, but that's part of the game I suppose.

hi naz

we have a very profitable product if you are interested in. it's kind of skincare device.
We run it as brand and promote it in US and EU market, there are also some agents in other countries, such Russia.

Please let me know if you want to know more!

moonswamp said:

hi naz

we have a very profitable product if you are interested in. it's kind of skincare device.
We run it as brand and promote it in US and EU market, there are also some agents in other countries, such Russia.

Please let me know if you want to know more!

Click to expand...

Hi Sorry, I am not in skincare at the moment.

Update: I have resumed my ads about 1-2 days ago and have made approximately $350-400 worth of sales.

My first day the ad expenditure was quite significant with 1 sale. So I had to review the ads and restart with some minor reconfigurations in the settings. This worked and I made a couple more sales with limited adspend.

I think in this phase my margins are a bit lower as the supplier is providing my prices on the go, so right now I am optimising the price point to get a reasonable margin. I expect that the next week I will be playing around with the price levels to hit a reasonable margin. I suspect that this will be another learning phase, understanding how to improve the process before I scale further.

I am also going to be investigating how to address abandoned cart recovery.

Wow, weird looking back at this.

Just as a summary, this experiment didn't blow up as I wished it did but I did make some profit in the end but some critical lessons learnt throughout the last 1.5 years.

I will create a new thread for a new experiment and see how this one goes. maybe this is the one haha

naz10101 said:

Wow, weird looking back at this.

Just as a summary, this experiment didn't blow up as I wished it did but I did make some profit in the end but some critical lessons learnt throughout the last 1.5 years.

I will create a new thread for a new experiment and see how this one goes. maybe this is the one haha

Click to expand...

Looking forward to it