Late to the Party: Reverse Engineering a Dropshipping Store

80ish hits with no conversions. No bien. I'm making a few changes to try and improve conversions based on what I've seen my competitor do. I've also got to clean up the mess of ad campaigns today and redo them all from scratch so I have some semblance of tracking going on.

I've a new test going up which... Could be incredibly interesting. The margins are doubled, market is scalable and the customer service would be minimal. I should hopefully start seeing the results of this test by tomorrow. Not massively hopeful for it but we'll see.

Focused on this project a lot today.

Made a lot of onsite conversion changes. Normally it's a bad idea to test multiple things at once but this is reverse engineering an existing site I already know is performing. Replicated most of their changes to see if that shifts conversions.

I've tidied up my ad campaigns so they're a lot more manageable now. It'll ding traffic for today but it'll make it easier for me to track what's going on.

Started new campaigns for new products. This is probably the highest daily budget for paid ads I've ever set. Trying a new technique with some of the ads as well to see how they do.

Tests are going live for the new product type as well. Great margins but I've no idea what conversions will be. Heavily expecting to lose money on the ads to begin with while I figure it out at least.

Not done yet. I've another hour or two in me before I'm mentally fried so I've got to tweak some of the tech stuff then I can scale into a new range of products in a new niche. They should go live tonight.

With the new ad campaigns I'd tried decreasing the ad spend but I might have pushed that a little too hard. Only a few dozen hits and no sales yesterday. Increasing my spend and I'll leave it to run again today.

The new tech side of things seems to be stable at least. I'm heading to the office with a fuzzy idea of what I'm actually going to do today but I might just keep plodding away and adding new niches. It's pretty cheap for me to test them so I might as well.

The new product type had some interesting results last night. It's going to require some big onsite changes to convert well but I ran some tests and got a very, very clear answer which I think I'll work on scaling today.

Are you doing a general store?

I've had my time taken up by two other gigs in the last day or two and it looks like I'm probably slammed for another two or three days but I find it hard to turn down another passive revenue source. I'll be back to scaling this early next week.

At the moment my onsite conversion changes didn't seem to shift. It's gone from a couple of days of around 4%+ to 0% and offering faster shipping and lower prices didn't bring it back. I also cut my margins in half to bring my price down but in order to make it viable I had to cut ad spend ad well. Cut it too low and there's not enough traffic for decent testing now.

I'm going to have to take another look at it. I'm hoping I've done something stupid which has broken the site and would explain the huge fluctuations in conversions. When I get a moment I'll tweak the margins again a little and push the ad spend a little higher again so proper testing can resume.

On the good end of things the scaling potential is there. I was able to go into two new niches with a few minutes work and pick up traffic. If I can see a cause for the conversions crashing then I'll keep that scaling up.

LarryM said:

Are you doing a general store?

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No. I haven't tested but my assumption is a general store wouldn't convert quite as well. I'm basing my strategy based on what I'm seeing the profitable store doing which is niche specific.

you using what ad?

I got a little sidetracked with another big project. Luckily it was building automation set up so now I just keep that running and I can bring my focus back to making this work.

Trying lower margins with a lower CPC was a flop. The conversions didn't improve and the traffic fell off a cliff since my competition was able to easily outspend me at those margins. Had a slight hiccup with the FB ads around the same time which probably didn't help matters.

Increased the margins and the spend again. Orders have been picking up again and I've managed to keep the CPC a lot lower. It's been looking pretty good but scaling is tricky at this point. Either I increase to the point where profitability becomes questionable or I keep it pretty low traffic with a couple of sales here and there.

Today we spent about $5 in ads for a little over $55 in profit. Obviously we can afford to go up a bit from there but I'm still working on scaling into new products as well which could keep the same level of profitability. I should have some better time to test tomorrow.

YujinTan said:

you using what ad?

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SEOMadHatter said:

I got a little sidetracked with another big project. Luckily it was building automation set up so now I just keep that running and I can bring my focus back to making this work.

Trying lower margins with a lower CPC was a flop. The conversions didn't improve and the traffic fell off a cliff since my competition was able to easily outspend me at those margins. Had a slight hiccup with the FB ads around the same time which probably didn't help matters.

Increased the margins and the spend again. Orders have been picking up again and I've managed to keep the CPC a lot lower. It's been looking pretty good but scaling is tricky at this point. Either I increase to the point where profitability becomes questionable or I keep it pretty low traffic with a couple of sales here and there.

Today we spent about $5 in ads for a little over $55 in profit. Obviously we can afford to go up a bit from there but I'm still working on scaling into new products as well which could keep the same level of profitability. I should have some better time to test tomorrow.

Click to expand...

so you using FB ad ? Google ? or ?

I’ve not been doing much with this for the last month after getting caught up in so many other projects. The theory here was pretty sound and I think it could be profitable if I found the right niche however the margins have been just too tight so far.

The ads have been off for the last two weeks but I’m starting to consider what I can do to improve things. Either the conversion rate or the value per customer has to improve. Upsells are probably the answer to my problem here I’ll have to look into what the setup would entail.

YujinTan said:

so you using FB ad ? Google ? or ?

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I ran both. Google traffic has more intent but Facebook is cheaper.

Facebook might be cheaper for impressions but not really sales in my experience. A product that on google would cost 7 bucks per sale would cost about 10 on facebook (not that either was profitable for me). Maybe try growing a facebook page using ads for impressions and then getting those people to share a funny video to build more then advertise once you have a solid base. I spent 50 bucks boosting a funny video and had 10,500 thruplays and 21,000 people reached. The shares are really what help reach people for cheaper. I had 90 shares on that clip.

Absolutely. There's value in building a following which you can then market to at a later date but it just wasn't within the scope of this project. I wanted cold traffic to convert and then go away and leave me alone.

Overall the project has been break-even so far which isn't bad for a dropshipping experiment honestly.

My problem is my product source is too expensive and my competition is able to charge a lot lower because they're holding actual stock. I can't afford to outspend them so it's hard to scale it to a level where it's worth even checking in on the stats.

I think this was a good proof of concept and a learning experience but I need to pick a better market where I can scale easier. Pausing the current campaigns for now until I find something where I can get a better edge.