Journey to $100 a day [eCommerce / Dropshipping]

mcfc4eva

mcfc4eva

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I previously posted two journey's that failed - but they were the building blocks for this journey which is currently kind of stable and successful.

MY JOURNEYS SO FAR AND WHY I FAILED
I started off dropshipping on a one-product-store (OPS), tried instagram influencer marketing - it wasn't successful because it was a pet product, but I was getting pet fan accounts to market it. Unfortunately most of the followers are just people that LIKE pets and not necessarily people that OWN pets (my target audience). I was also trying to grow my own fan accounts, I faced multiple bans and then gave up because again, my followers were people that LIKE pets and not OWN pets.

I kept the same online store, as I worked hard on it. Attempted to do Facebook Ads. This failed. I suspect it was because facebook owns IG and I had already received multiple bans there, so a red mark against my account. I got banned on facebook ads. I tried to buy a hacked FB account here on the marketplace - lost a few hundred dollars when that got banned. Now I'm dropshipping and almost ALL dropshipping guides consist of 1 of 2 methods; Influencers or FB Ads. They both failed for me. I needed to think outside of the box.

Here are my failed journey's
Journey to $10 a day [Instagram + Dropshipping]
- Failed because I hadn't done enough research. I thought it was important to have a an IG account with a big following - it isn't. It's faster and easier to do paid marketing, whether that's advertising with influencers or PPC

Journey to $10 a day [Dropshipping + Facebook Ads]
- Failed because I didn't know enough about Facebook Ads and didn't anticipate constant bans.

BRIEF SUCCESS FOLLOWED BY MORE PROBLEMS
I launched ads on Reddit. This worked. I was getting sales, but it's hard to scale here because they don't take the customer's personal data like FB so it's impossible to create things like look-alike audiences or target very specific interests.

I hit a few $400+ a day sales back in May, but then I hit multiple hold backs such as shopify putting 25% of my funds on hold, my supplier raising the shipping price etc. I had to stop sales entirely until the shipping price returned to normal. This happened a couple weeks ago. In the meantime I have come to realise that dropshipping during COVID is very risky. I still have some customers waiting for their packages for over 2 months now, daily emails, complaints and disputes. I still may have to refund a bunch of them. So I've started ads, but on a lower scale. I'm just making about $80 a day in sales, not sure how many (if any) I'll have to refund - so I'm not scaling with dropshipping.

WHAT I'M DOING NEXT
I knew that everything was a viable business plan except the supplier/shipping so I decided to get my own stock and store it in the US. Souced the product on Alibaba, found a third party logistics (3PL) company in the USA that will store, pick, pack, post my orders. Ordered 600 units. I calculated the total cost of product + shipping + 3PL fees would increase my cost by only 10% so it's worth it to reduce my shipping time to about a week and stop customer complaints/disputes/refunds. The order is currently on a ship to the USA and should arrive in about 2 weeks.

In the meantime I created a new Facebook Business Manager. I'm not running Facebook ads yet, I've just installed the pixel for now. I am running low scale ads on Reddit just selling a few a day. I don't want to scale this in case I end up having to refund a lot, but I'm keeping a few sales coming in so I can build up my Facebook Pixel. I have found a Facebook Ads expert, completely whitehat. I'm going to pay her to run my FB ads once the bulk shipment arrives in the USA. Then I can scale. Once I start getting consistent sales, I'll make a sales forecast and figure out when I need to order more stock or scale ads.

I also started a new one product store in the health & beauty niche. I have just shipped 100 products to my friend in the USA and he will ship them to test the market. I have sold about 20 of them, through Reddit ads but it's not profitable. The cost of these Ads are eating up all the profit. I'm going to try and market them using influencers instead and see how that goes.

I'll try and update this journey weekly.

SUMMARY

Store 1 (daily average over the last week)
Daily sales: $72 (3 to 4 sales)
Product cost: $33
Advertising: $22
Other Fees: $8
Profit: $9

Store 2 (daily average over the last week)
Daily sales: $28
Product cost: $11
Advertising: $12
Other fees: $3
Profit: $2

Total Daily Profit
$11
 
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Thanks for posting, an interesting journey of affiliate vs corona. I didn't know Reddit has own ads platform.
 
This will be an interesting read, you got my full support, wish you all the best!
 
mcfc4eva said:
I previously posted two journey's that failed - but they were the building blocks for this journey which is currently kind of stable and successful.

MY JOURNEYS SO FAR AND WHY I FAILED
I started off dropshipping on a one-product-store (OPS), tried instagram influencer marketing - it wasn't successful because it was a pet product, but I was getting pet fan accounts to market it. Unfortunately most of the followers are just people that LIKE pets and not necessarily people that OWN pets (my target audience). I was also trying to grow my own fan accounts, I faced multiple bans and then gave up because again, my followers were people that LIKE pets and not OWN pets.

I kept the same online store, as I worked hard on it. Attempted to do Facebook Ads. This failed. I suspect it was because facebook owns IG and I had already received multiple bans there, so a red mark against my account. I got banned on facebook ads. I tried to buy a hacked FB account here on the marketplace - lost a few hundred dollars when that got banned. Now I'm dropshipping and almost ALL dropshipping guides consist of 1 of 2 methods; Influencers or FB Ads. They both failed for me. I needed to think outside of the box.

Here are my failed journey's
Journey to $10 a day [Instagram + Dropshipping]
- Failed because I hadn't done enough research. I thought it was important to have a an IG account with a big following - it isn't. It's faster and easier to do paid marketing, whether that's advertising with influencers or PPC

Journey to $10 a day [Dropshipping + Facebook Ads]
- Failed because I didn't know enough about Facebook Ads and didn't anticipate constant bans.

BRIEF SUCCESS FOLLOWED BY MORE PROBLEMS
I launched ads on Reddit. This worked. I was getting sales, but it's hard to scale here because they don't take the customer's personal data like FB so it's impossible to create things like look-alike audiences or target very specific interests.

I hit a few $400+ a day sales back in May, but then I hit multiple hold backs such as shopify putting 25% of my funds on hold, my supplier raising the shipping price etc. I had to stop sales entirely until the shipping price returned to normal. This happened a couple weeks ago. In the meantime I have come to realise that dropshipping during COVID is very risky. I still have some customers waiting for their packages for over 2 months now, daily emails, complaints and disputes. I still may have to refund a bunch of them. So I've started ads, but on a lower scale. I'm just making about $80 a day in sales, not sure how many (if any) I'll have to refund - so I'm not scaling with dropshipping.

WHAT I'M DOING NEXT
I knew that everything was a viable business plan except the supplier/shipping so I decided to get my own stock and store it in the US. Souced the product on Alibaba, found a third party logistics (3PL) company in the USA that will store, pick, pack, post my orders. Ordered 600 units. I calculated the total cost of product + shipping + 3PL fees would increase my cost by only 10% so it's worth it to reduce my shipping time to about a week and stop customer complaints/disputes/refunds. The order is currently on a ship to the USA and should arrive in about 2 weeks.

In the meantime I created a new Facebook Business Manager. I'm not running Facebook ads yet, I've just installed the pixel for now. I am running low scale ads on Reddit just selling a few a day. I don't want to scale this in case I end up having to refund a lot, but I'm keeping a few sales coming in so I can build up my Facebook Pixel. I have found a Facebook Ads expert, completely whitehat. I'm going to pay her to run my FB ads once the bulk shipment arrives in the USA. Then I can scale. Once I start getting consistent sales, I'll make a sales forecast and figure out when I need to order more stock or scale ads.

I also started a new one product store in the health & beauty niche. I have just shipped 100 products to my friend in the USA and he will ship them to test the market. I have sold about 20 of them, through Reddit ads but it's not profitable. The cost of these Ads are eating up all the profit. I'm going to try and market them using influencers instead and see how that goes.

I'll try and update this journey weekly.

SUMMARY

Store 1 (daily average over the last week)
Daily sales: $72 (3 to 4 sales)
Product cost: $33
Advertising: $22
Other Fees: $8
Profit: $9

Store 2 (daily average over the last week)
Daily sales: $28
Product cost: $11
Advertising: $12
Other fees: $3
Profit: $2

Total Daily Profit
$11
Click to expand...
$11 daily isn't bad considering the pandemic, keep up the good work!
 
I hope you are capturing visitor emails.

And also you can increase average order value by offering them some discount on 2 or more products. This way you can also sellout your stock quick.

And good luck keep us updated
 
Update (7th July to 14th July [8 days])

Store 1
I found a new supplier that promises 7 to 10 day delivery from China. I'm on the 7th day since I started using him and most of them are clearing US customs by the 5th or 6th day so I'm hopeful he delivers on his promise. Still waiting for my bulk stock to arrive.

I had a sudden increase in conversions for a couple of days - but I didn't change anything with my Ads or targeting so I'm not sure why. It seems to have returned to normal. Today I have dropped the unprofitable interests/subreddits and replaced them with similar ones to the profitable interests/subreddits. I have also increased my CPC bid on one of my most popular subreddits because I think I hit maximum daily impressions for my existing max bid.

Total sales: $692.68 (32 orders)
Total product cost: $345
Advertising: $72.75
Other costs: $70
Total Profit/Loss: $204.93
Average Daily Profit/Loss: $25.62

Store 2
This is a low cost item, so to get a higher average order value I had previously implemented quantity breaks (buy 2/3/4 get x% off etc) but it wasn't too affective, about 80% of my sales were still single products. About 5 days ago I removed the quantity breaks, increased the price of a single item and started a "buy one get one free" sale. It seems to be affective, my average order value has risen by about 70%. It worked really well on 2 subreddits but lost money on the other 3, in total losing money. I paused all ads for a few days because I ran a promoted instagram post with an influencer. I fucked this bit up. She had 36k followers, about 5% engagement and only wanted $100 for a post. Seemed like a great offer! I shipped a free sample to her to make the post which she did, and the likes came flooding in. Then I looked at the kind of people that were liking the posts - all bots/russian/middle eastern. I think I got about 2,000 likes but only 1 click onto my website and no sales. I should have checked the quality of her engagement, so I'll consider it a lesson learned. I'll try with a more trusted influencer some time in the future.

I've just restarted ads, dropped the unprofitable ones, and started up 3 ads targeting similar subreddits to the 2 that were successful.

Total sales: $216.97 (14 orders)
Total product cost: $113.7
Advertising: $193.76 ($100 influencer + $93.76 reddit ads)
Other costs: $20
Total Profit/Loss: -$110.49
Average Daily Profit/Loss: -$13.81

SUMMARY
Store 2 would have lost a bit of money anyway, but at least I got the data I needed to retarget in the profitable interest/subreddits. I really took a hit with the influencer though. Store 1 is doing well, I'll attempt targeting the better converting audiences and scale them slowly. Overall, still profitable.

Total Profit/Loss: $94.45
Average Daily Profit/Loss: $11.80
 
Flask said:
Thanks for posting, an interesting journey of affiliate vs corona. I didn't know Reddit has own ads platform.
Click to expand...
From what I read, Reddit Ads is still pretty new to the game. The platform is still pretty primitive. Because they don't collect much data about the users, only their IP Location and what subreddits they are interested in so it's pretty hard to scale, but the trade off is that I can get clicks for $0.10c, targeted by country and interest.

sus said:
I hope you are capturing visitor emails.

And also you can increase average order value by offering them some discount on 2 or more products. This way you can also sellout your stock quick.

And good luck keep us updated
Click to expand...
Yes, I'm capturing emails.

This discount for 2+ products didn't work with store 2, but I've increased unit price and implemented a BOGOF offer - this works much better for this one. This tactic wouldn't really work for store 1 because most of my customer's don't need more than one, so maybe I'll implement quantity breaks in the next few days to see of it increases AOV. I'm also thinking about adding related products as an upsell at checkout, but still looking for a suitable product.
 
Thank you for such a detailed story on dropshipping. All the best for your journey to the ultimate success.
 
Keep pushing and don't give up.
Harder than it should be but rewards are right ahead.
 
You are making a profit on a daily basis, that is great!
Keep on going!
 
Update (15th July to 21st July [7 days])

Store 1
I tested out a bunch of new interests this week, a few lost money and a few just broke even which is why my profit margin was so low with this. I consider it an investment, hopefully it'll allow me to find a super profitable interest. I've found one, but competition is high so I need to have a high CPC bid. Overall profitable, but not by much.
I have started a 1-month contract with a professional facebook marketer to see how that goes. She comes highly recommended. I will not be sharing her contact though (sorry). I don't expect to see much of a change in sales for the first couple of weeks, but hoping after that they'll just go up.
My supplier has also proved that he can ship this product to the UK pretty fast, so I'm going to expand my targeting there over the next week.

Total sales: $398.82 (18 units)
Total product cost: $198
Advertising: $132.65
Other costs: $39
Total Profit/Loss: $29.17
Average Daily Profit/Loss: $4.17

Store 2
I made the mistake of testing new interests with a high budget this week and left it running for a few days. I noticed lots of orders coming in, but when I checked the ads, I was spending wayyyy too much. The result was a massive loss in ad spend. I found some profitable interests to target and even more unprofitable ones. And then I ran out of stock (my friend fulfills these for me in the US). I've ordered a bunch to the USA and a small amount to the UK to test the market there. They won't arrive for another week, so there'll probably be no update for a while.

Total sales: $443.76 (54 units)
Total product cost: $286
Advertising: $280.78
Other costs: $44
Total Profit/Loss: -$167.02
Average Daily Profit/Loss: -$23.86

SUMMARY
A bad week. An overall loss due to testing different target interests with too high budget. On some, I set the budget to like $30 or $40 a day which was foolish. Next time I'll just test with $5-$10 a day on new interests, if they prove profitable then I can increase it. I will also be expanding to the UK and see how the market is there.

Total Profit/Loss: -$137.85
Average Daily Profit/Loss: -$19.69
 
I have found some interesting idea on your thread. I wish you all the luck on your challenge to 1 millione
 
Update (22nd July to 28th July [7 days])

Store 1
I started selling in the UK, advertised to 2 interests, only 1 was profitable. My stock arrived in the US today and my FB marketer has started running ads and they're costing me a lot but not making any money.

Total sales: $422.63 (18 units)
Total product cost: $198
Advertising: $107.11
Other costs: $42
Total Profit/Loss: $75.52
Average Daily Profit/Loss: $10.79

Store 2
I've been out of stock, so paused all ads. My stock for this has just arrived in both the USA and UK, so I'll start up ads very slowly. I don't expect many sales over the next week.

Total sales: $0
Total product cost: $0
Advertising: $0
Other costs: $0
Total Profit/Loss: $0
Average Daily Profit/Loss: $0

SUMMARY
Nothing major to report. I'm working on store 3 which will focus on one flagship product but have several other related products to allow for upsells/cross sells and raise the AOV. I'm hoping to launch this in about a week.

Total Profit/Loss: $75.52
Average Daily Profit/Loss: $10.79
 
Good luck and seems that you're already making good progress so far. So, you are fulfilling the orders using Oberlo or other 3rd party apps? Also, would you mind revealing the 3PL provider from the USA?
 
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