Starting an online store, need advice

Hello,
My budget is 3500 Euros, I made myself a small plan and it goes like this.
2000 Euros on a stock as I want to own the stock because the store is targeting people from only one country and the delivery time to be as small as possible. The niche is woman clothing, I choose a big niche because I want to go on profit in the first month, a lot of competitors I know but there is room. As I said 2000 Euros, the rest 1500 Euros will go in fb ads and the rest in expenses. I'm a bit afraid that the advertising will not be enough, the prices will be higher with 30% of the retail price, so that will be my profit. I will invest 300 Euros the first-month in ads and hope to return the investment in the same month. I will also promote on groups, I have 3 old fb accounts and I will try to post at least on 50 groups every day, also I will post the products from my store on a local ads website hoping to get more sales from there. Prices will not be higher than any competitor, and I'm also thinking to offer free shipping to all the products for any price(I will include the shipping price in the product price of course. ).

I a bit afraid to start this, because I worked 12 hours/day in the last 6 months to raise all this money, some may know the feeling.
I need some advice, how is my plan sound? What are the chances of success after applying this plan, someone with experience can give me some advice, please?

Thank you!

I would say from all of what you said, my main question is how your site looks? This is what will make the difference, you have to make sure the site is "good looking" so to speak, you need to optimize conversion, so just CRO is an entire chapter in itself. Then you may do follow up email, another chapter. As you seem to have traffic sources, the money will be made depending on user experience on your site and in your sales funnel...

1500 euros on advertising is not a little money mate, think a lot about it before you spent this money on fb othewise you will see money drawing from your wallet only.
my advice: Before you do any ads make sure your store looks as a profeaional online store.

emilio83 said:

I would say from all of what you said, my main question is how your site looks? This is what will make the difference, you have to make sure the site is "good looking" so to speak, you need to optimize conversion, so just CRO is an entire chapter in itself. Then you may do follow up email, another chapter. As you seem to have traffic sources, the money will be made depending on user experience on your site and in your sales funnel...

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My site is inexistent right now. but off course, I will make him look really nice and professional, good images for fb ads. Also, I will collect emails but I don't really think that do anything in my country, I was thinking about phone numbers to collect, send from time to time some offers via sms and make some customers return. I'm still thinking about the website, I don't know the platform that I want to go yet, any proposition?

platforms: woocommerce & shopify are the big two most people use. research these two to see which fits you better as they're very different under-the-hood.
woocommerce runs off wordpress & is free, with lots of customization
shopify costs $29/month & while easier to configure for a layman, they upsell you a lot for addons.

uncutu said:

platforms: woocommerce & shopify are the big two most people use. research these two to see which fits you better as they're very different under-the-hood.

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I was thinking about woocommerce or something paid from my country but I don't know yet.

tbilisi said:

1500 euros on advertising is not a little money mate, think a lot about it before you spent this money on fb othewise you will see money drawing from your wallet only.
my advice: Before you do any ads make sure your store looks as a profeaional online store.

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I know, 1500Euros for me are a lot of money, but to make money you need money.

First I will test at 5$ day, multiple campaigns, I have to return the investment and maybe make more with what I invest in ads. I will not just invest, I'm aware that I will lose everything this way.

I don't know, I need to make some research on the platform and the theme. This will be life changing for me

.orion said:

I was thinking about woocommerce or something paid from my country but I don't know yet.



I know, 1500Euros for me are a lot of money, but to make money you need money.

First I will test at 5$ day, multiple campaigns, I have to return the investment and maybe make more with what I invest in ads. I will not just invest, I'm aware that I will lose everything this way.

I don't know, I need to make some research on the platform and the theme. This will be life changing for me

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can you pm me, I have some things to discuss with you in private

I also think it is better to not spend money on ads. I also do Ecommerce. And from what I have seen, organic audience is the best. With ads, you are competing against giant corporation who spend crazy amount of money on advertising so it is most likely that you lose more than you gain.
You should instead take a very good picture of your clothes, very fast at responding customer query (instant fast). Properly maintain your stock (by getting rid of out of stock items).These should be where you spend your time and money. So save that ads money

OP let me give you a advice save that money invest only few hundred $$$ and enter in drop shipping agreement with some cloth sellers. Start with small amount as its not that easy as it looks. So be careful with how you spend all that money.

Jklmno said:

I also think it is better to not spend money on ads. I also do Ecommerce. And from what I have seen, organic audience is the best. With ads, you are competing against giant corporation who spend crazy amount of money on advertising so it is most likely that you lose more than you gain.
You should instead take a very good picture of your clothes, very fast at responding customer query (instant fast). Properly maintain your stock (by getting rid of out of stock items).These should be where you spend your time and money. So save that ads money

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I know, but I want to create a brand. In my country aren't any big corporation. The 2 biggest competitors are kinda big, but I don't think they invest in fb ads.
I will also think about another method of promoting my store, I will maybe contact some big fb pages owner and pay them, maybe.

Nut-Nights said:

OP let me give you a advice save that money invest only few hundred $$$ and enter in drop shipping agreement with some cloth sellers. Start with small amount as its not that easy as it looks. So be careful with how you spend all that money.

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I did think about that, but I wanted to do something in my country because the 2 biggest stores are sh*t. For drop shipping will take up to 45 days to get the product from China to here and it won't be delivered directly to the customer.

You should not spend all of your money in one month. Try doing multiple ads targeting different audience in this country and based on those results scale on the bigger level. Best of luck and I hope you do well with facebook advertising as it can be tricky sometimes.

iBlackSky said:

You should not spend all of your money in one month. Try doing multiple ads targeting different audience in this country and based on those results scale on the bigger level. Best of luck and I hope you do well with facebook advertising as it can be tricky sometimes.

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I won't, I will test multiple campaigns in order to return that day investment, then I will put more into ads.

Which country do you live in?

Jklmno said:

Which country do you live in?

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Romania.

go with shopify, shopify best for eCommerce

I don't suggest that you start that big, start with less money and learn from your mistakes, why are you in such a hurry , anyhow good luck