We all want to make money as easy as possible. We are in an exciting time where we have opportunities to build businesses lightning fast and can make millions with very little overhead of employees or inventory. It's amazing!
I run two e-commerce websites, both dropshipping with 0 hassles on inventory. I also do marketing for other e-commerce websites so I know exactly what the winning formula is.
Here are some stats you can look at, where you can see the type of potential by running a dropshipping business. Anyone that tells you its dead, they're full of shit.
Below will be a short version, however if it gets enough steem, i'll do a more in depth video showing everything on D Tube. I just don't want to do an entire video and nobody really cares about it. Then again, its easy money!!
- Determine the type of store you want. The easiest is a 'general store' that has a ton of winning products that could be considered 'viral'. How do you know what these products are? They're typically videos you see on Facebook and on pages like Fatherly, Viral Thread, etc.. These are products that can be bought from China REALLY fast.
Here are some dropshipping stores (none of these are affiliated with me)
https://thecreativeitem.com
https://choicest1.com
https://shopfray.com
https://stealthtactical.com
https://dudegadgets.com/
https://hazelharper.com
http://9gifts.net/
- Understand your profit margin per product. You want to aim for products you can sell for $20 - $35 and ideally have 'bundles' that can increase your Average Order Value (AOV).
This number is also important because you need to spend money on Facebook Ads and should know what kind of spend you will have in order to determine how far in the green you will be and not in debt.
- Look on the following resources to buy.. So what dropshipping means is that you are essentially getting an order from a customer, then you go and buy it somewhere else much cheaper and have that product delivered to them. This can be done primarily in China.
• Ali Express
• 1688.com
• world.taobao.com
- Start a Shopify website with the Brooklyn theme. This is a super easy, mobile friendly site. You can have this site ready in a day. Don't sign up until you have products already picked out that way you can spend time during the trial tweaking the site design. Also, have FREE SHIPPING. Add the shipping into the cost of the products. Trust me, its a pain in the ass to calculate and keep track.
Plugins I recommend getting:
What you do is add products to your site with good descriptions, add some urgency to the payments
Set up Stripe and Paypal accounts. This takes like 5 minutes.
Your domain and logo should be catchy but don't spend a ton of money on something. Remember you aren't building a brand, you'll building a store. Branding takes a lot of time.
Hire a Virtual Assistant on Upwork.com for $6/hour. Tell them you need a Shopify manager who can process dropshipping orders and customer service. There are a ton of pros in the Philippines. I recommend hiring one to start and once you have a system hire three, one for each shift so you have someone managing 24/7.
**Before you hire someone, make sure you know the entire system inside and out yourself first! And put a training manual together so that if you fire someone, you can replace them as quickly as possible. I typically create videos using Screenflow and I have it all in one big shot so anyone new on board goes through the training.
- To get immediate traffic, I recommend Facebook. Facebook Ads are really easy once you get the hang of it. You'll want to build multiple ad sets don't be affraid to spend budgets, however you need really good audiences defined!
Course I recommend doing, you can finish this in a weekend: https://pages.smartmarketer.com/3-part-facebook-video-advertising-mastery-watch-video-1/ Although this funnel is a little technical, I think I'm going to build a quick 'How To' to get you up and running FAST.
Expect to burn through $2k the first week or two and get maybe a couple of sales. This can be normal; facebook uses all of the data to find your audience. But again, you still need a solid audience defined, Ezra has a great system for building audiences.
Join this FB Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/adbuyers/ Tons of successful people on there willing to help out for free.
Don't just target US because that is very competitive.. Try some Norwegion countries, UK, Australia, etc.. Spread the love.
Ok, you got some sales! Now you go to those websites, and make purchases, sending the products to the person. I normally put in the notes: DROPSHIP PRODUCT, DO NOT INCLUDE INVOICE AND MAKE SURE PACKAGE LOOKS PROFESSIONAL. THANK YOU. This way they won't show the customer you paid $5 for something they paid you $40 for.
The shipping process can take time. I recommend making sure you have ePacket selected when shipping because its the fastest way and it comes with a tracking number. Normally I set an auto responder through Klaviyo telling the user in an email 'Our factory is a little overloaded so there is a slight delay with shipping times. We will keep you posted every step of the way'. And a week later, send an email update automatically saying 'Our US warehouse is sold out so we're sending it directly to you from our factory in Asia. It should arrive in another week or two'.. Something along those lines, you need to get an idea of shipping times.
Once you reach about 500 sales, you can go back into Facebook and build a Look a Like Audience with that data. This is when it gets really cheap and amazing. Facebook looks at all of that data and finds people with the same exact traits and can target up to 2 million of them per Audience. This is a 'next step' type of process and with this you'll want to scale up. The goal is to be spending at least $1,000 a day on advertising, giving you at least $3,000 - $4,000 in sales (which is called a 3x - 4x).
When you have a site for about 3-6 months, you can then shift your focus on SEO and get some of that organic traffic coming in which is pretty much free money. I'll be able to provide that information as well.
Feel free to ask questions below and I'll answer them as best as possible.
FAME360
p.s. I noticed that the numbers in the preview are not in order but I'm typing them in order, there should be 15 steps to this all in sequence.
when you are first starting out and when you are scaling how are you dealing with "Returns" on orders with unsatisfied customers?
You need to understand that you'll get a % of returns and to be honest, the margins are so high from dropshipping, you are better off just giving the person a refund and letting them keep the item. Another route is to have them send it back to the factory and they have to pay shipping, but you'll get a negative customer than, all over a $20 item.
And if the quality becomes an issue, then you need to quickly adjust your suppliers to make sure it doesn't keep happening.