Home > Paid Traffic Sources > eCommerce

---

How I made $100,000 On Shopify In 5 Months (57)

---

What's up!

I'm new to the forums. I came here basically to learn more about CPA and had no clue there was a eCommerce section. Saw some helpful posts so I thought I would share my success with you in this field.

I started out doing eBay dropshipping in 2013 and did OK. Nothing major. My income really exploded when I started doing Shopify in July of 2015. My friend showed me a course and I took action immediately. At first I thought it was stupid but I re watched it and was like "wow, why am I not doing this!"

The first week was pretty bad as I was losing money on ads. I was running a free plus shipping offer which is an item that is $0.00 but when the customer checks out the shipping is $9.95. I basically re watched the course my friend sent me and just decided to advertise the item the instructor was showing off. It took off very fast. This is when I stopped trying to reinvent the wheel and just copy whats working.

Was it all rainbows?

No

After I had my biggest day which was $2,200, my Facebook account got shut down. This was devastating and I was basically out of commission for about 2 months. Luckily my friend introduced me to someone who could get me a new account. He basically told me to create a Facebook business account and use a new card. It worked!

A quick tip is get a netspend debit card as they allow you to create unlimited debit card numbers which can be used for new FB accounts. You can also use a friend or family members account.

Once I got my account back up I started some new stores 1 of which only took off out of the 2. Its been selling consistently ever since. There where a few days the sales where bellow normal but out of 5 months its only been about 3-5 days that tanked. Other hiccups where my VA accidentally ordered 30 of the wrong product and my bank got disabled 2 times. And of course the occasional crazy customer. This is expected for any eCommerce business. Comes with the territory. I just checked and across my 2 main stores its around 100k gross. Probably around 35-45k profit.

Screenshots





If you think that is a lot think again. I have friends doing way more than me. To be honest I haven't gone as hard as I could have. Making $500 day will make you very comfortable. Just being straight up lol.


Now that I gave you my story

Here are the 7 steps to making money with Shopify [quick version]


1. Pick a niche.

Nothing has changed over the years, this is still required lol. You can just go to ali express and browse around to see whats selling. You can also go on amazon and browse through the magazine section to see what topics are the hottest. Research other shopify stores and sell what they are selling. There is no magic bullet to this process. Lazy research will generate lazy profits. Don't slack on this step. There is no such thing as "I cant find an item". Your either not looking hard enough or don't really care. If it takes you a month to find a product that makes you 10k a month would it be worth it? I see a lot of people try and find a hot product in 1-2 days then get frustrated when they don't find anything. Don't be that person.

2. Set up your store.

The most important things you need are policies in the footer, proper shipping, apps, and your Facebook checkout pixel which is in your settings -> checkout -> additional contents and scripts. Everything else really isn't that important like the theme etc. Populate your store t with 3 products and move on. I'm obviously over simplifying it but the mundane details you can figure out its not rocket science.

Apps you MUST get.

Ali Importer
Notify
Abandoncart Protector <<<< BEAST almost guaranteed increases in revenue
Persistent Cart
Contact Form
Retarget App <<<< BEAST almost guaranteed increases in revenue
Aftership
Hurrify
McAfee Secutiry
Mailchimp For Shopify


Disclaimer: I do not own any own these apps.


3. Run website conversion ads on Facebook

First you need to generate your checkout pixel. This pixel can be found in the ads manager under "pixels". The old pixel is being phased out soon but you can still use it. A checkout pixel is something that tells Facebook to optimize for people who are more likely to actually checkout rather than window shop. You basically create a new camapign for WC's and create the adset and ad. its really simple. The adset is where you select your targeting and schedule for ads. Set to $5 a day for the next day at around 4am. Make sure your targeting is on point. For the ad this is where you select your post from your fanpage or you can create a dark post. Either one works fine. Then click upload and your done. Thats it. You could literally have a store up tonight making sales tomorrow. With the proper research of course.

4. Fulfill Orders

I mainly use Ali Express as my supplier and its been good. I use ePacket when ordering most of the times. Its pretty easy with the new ali importer app. Initially you would have to order manually. I also recommend building a relationship with your suppliers. They will be more likely to do favors for you. Remember that time my VA ordered 30 products on accident? My supplier let me cancel all 30 and we went ahead and re ordered the proper items. They also lowered the price so we could re order. What happened was I went to sleep when the discount was over and my VA fulfilled the items without knowing I would not be in profit if the sale ended.

Note: Ali Express does not ship to Washington due to some sort of tax in-compliance. Take off Washington in your shipping zone on your store.

5. Scale

Now that you know your product is selling SCALE. This isn't CPA so scaling is a bit different. Markets get saturated a LOT faster and the cpc will increase the more competition you face. Facebook will gladly take your money if you set the budget to $100 a day. BAD idea. Your telling facebook send me any kind of traffic. I like to duplicate my ads and keep them at $5 an ad. If its a untapped niche you can raise the bid. Test Test Test! There is no right or wrong way to scale.

6. Outsource

Once you hit $300-$500 a day its time to outsource. Although you no longer have to pay for someone to fulfill orders thanks to the ali importer app you will still need someone to do customer service or it will drive you nuts. Never do customer service for your own company. Also you will need someone to upload tracking. Shopify is getting strict because certain people are not shipping out the orders which is hurting shopifys reputation. This also probably happened with eBay when it first came out.

7. Sell Store

If you managed to create a store that does not contain any branded or trademarked items and is making some decent income you can sell it for some good money. There are people who are looking for a 1 and done system. You can go on sites like flippa or even the shopify forums and list your store. I would only do this if you really needed the money or want to work on another project that requires more funds. I personally wouldn't let mine go for anything less than 35k-50k but thats me. The bigger your store the more you can potentially make. I would use escrow to protect your ass. If you sell your site through Paypal your just asking to get screwed over. Especially if you do not know the person your selling the store to.

What am I working on now?

I figured that my current store cannot be scaled any further so I partnered with a friend on a separate store. I also plan to create a third store and focus on local suppliers and advertise using the google display network. I was actually going to do this when my Facebook ads account got banned. Dropped 1k on a google display shopify course which I should be using but facebook has been keeping me busy.

Also want to do some CPA. One thing I love about CPA is that there is no order fulfillment, customer service, etc. You just drive traffic to offers and hopefully profit. I think having a good mix of income is good to have. Facebook hates CPA so I plan to run offers through different netwotks. Bings been giving me problems as the traffic is barely coming out lol. But I digress.

If you have any questions on shopify or eCommerce let me know.

---

Huge congrats to you on your massive success with ecommerce! And so soon into your marketing career, no less.

Thanks for sharing such an in-depth guide--I'm sure this is exactly what many people in this space needed to see some success.

I just have one question: Why were the Facebook accounts getting suspended? Was it the free item + shipping, bad customer reviews, the product or something else?

Thanks again for sharing and hope this massive success continues to multiply for you!

---

Congrats man! Great success.

---

Congrats!

What is the reason your FB accounts got banned? Selling prohibited stuff in your shops? Ads being too aggressive? Too many negative comments?

---

Great post man.
really enjoyed reading it.

now you should take the next step and really dive into the CPA world.
I'm positive you will find this Forum to be very valuable for you in sense of knowledge and connections.

looking forward to follow you progress and read more posts of success

---

Nice work! How does your store complete with businesses like eBay/Amazon? What are typical margins? (where did you lose most margin unexpectedly?) Depending on your store type you should set it up with an affiliate program.

I suggest applying the same hard work to affiliate marketing and you will make a killing.

Goodluck on the journey, and welcome to AM!

---

Pretty cool,

I looked into drop shipping a little last month, how do you get past the shipping times being so long since most items are shipped from China? Don't customers get annoyed with such long shipping times?

That's the only part I couldn't get my head around.

Cheers.

---

You just tell the customer upfront how long the shipping takes. I also have a CS rep that handles the emails. Once you start really killing it you should bring the items in yourself

---

I don't really compete with amazon or eBay even tho my item is being sold on there for much cheaper lol. The truth is people just don't double check. I sold on ebay for 2 years and the customers would never compare shop. But as people get smarter we will have to find other products to sell or create our own. But for now its a free for all.

---

Congrats on your success and thanks for sharing it here. would you mind share which Shopify course you took or wich one you recommend?

---

Selling on my personal account while receiving bad reviews by not being upfront in the ad.

---

Great post man!

So as I understand it, you can have a Shopify website, and then a "shop" directly on Facebook. Would you direct traffic to that "shop" or to the Shopify website?

Also, you wouldn't happen to have the course your friend showed you, would you?

---

What's the e-commerce course and the Google course you're talking about?

---

Would be interesting to hear from OP as well but I hear eCom Experts Academy, Shopify Store Pro and Travise's Crushing E-Commerce are good.
To OP - how stable do you view your shops/niches to be - will they make money for you from a year from now as well? Also, do you do some sort of upsell marketing via email later on? Or send newsletters etc. to keep them engaged. Depends on the niche I can imagine - I mean makes sense to do content marketing via email if it's the health niche but wtf are you sending them besides hot-deals type of newsletters when you got them in by selling 5 dollar bracelets
Finally what's the average price per product for you? Around 100 bucks or lower?

Finally

---

Congrats, aaronbeast7! Impressive stuff.

Shopify's really been a revolution in how easy it is to set up a high-quality online shop. I've been consulting with a client using Shopify recently, and I've been very impressed with what they've developed into.

---

Great thread, thanks for sharing. I just have one question, you asked us to start ads at 4 AM, is it in our local time or in the US time (Since we're gonna be targeting the USA most of the time)?

---

Yes you are correct I've taken all of those courses. I buy everything ecom related basically even If I know most the material.

---

Dropship lifestyle by Anton Kraley. Going to dive in to the training today actually.

Also im selling $30 items now. So my average order is about $42. I don't really have a auto responder sequence for them even tho I should. Slacking lol. So far I have about a 2k list. I basically know what items are frequently bought together so I designed my related products in a way where it shows the top products below the product page.

---

Thanks, 4AM local time. This isn't a deal breaker either. You can run the ads whenever you want. Its just a rule of thumb.

---

Any suggestions on how you do this? Do you use a disclaimer at checkout? Do you specifically say "Shipping may take 30-60 days". I feel like this would be a major turn off from many consumers...

---

Nope, not a major turn off. I actually just made it even more visible to see and still making sales. I have a disclaimer in 3 places AND when they receive the receipt its there as well. mines usually doesn't take 60 days either. more like 10-20 days which is still competitive with basic shipping speeds of stores that are not ebay or amazon. A lot of people interested in Shopify get discouraged because of the shipping times but if I can do it so can you. People have been drop shipping since forever.

---

What Shopify plan do you recommend? I see one for $9.99/month, $14.99/month and $29.99/month

---

Wait, are you shipping from Ali to the client or from Ali to you and you are shipping the orders?

Are you ordering in bulk or just placing an order for each item as the order comes into you?

---

Single orders at a time.

---

$9.99 a month doesn't come with an online store front. Get the $29.99

---

You don't have to dropship from china Mateen. I'm sure that where you live there are companies that dropship but you won't get a big margin. This is what I did in the UK I only got 20% and then I had to hike up prices to break even and then my business died due to lack of sale. Check out ecommercefuel.com he's a dropshipper doing over 100k a year or more.

---

I've seen a lot of Star Wars related products in my newsfeed. Some of them are really cool but obviously not official merchandise.

Are there any issues with selling products like that?

---

Very interesting and inspiring! Thank you Aaron for taking the time to write up the process in such detail!



Amy

---

Hi Aaronbeast7,

Great story. Have you ever thought of opening up the affiliate channel? I'd love to talk to you to see if we can sell your products on a CPS basis.

---

People sell those at their own discretion. But the top guys sell branded products. Im currently not.

---

Thanks, maybe in the future as I create my own brand of products. I'm currently dropshipping.

---

hey Aaronbeast7, which Shopify course would you recommend is the best since you have gone through most of them?

---

I basically learn something from all of them. If you want to be great in this industry get every course and software you can find related to Shopify.

---

Hey @aaronbeast7, I was doing the same method but I had to change from Shopify to woocommerce. The reason for the swap was because Shopify wouldn't allow per item shipping. So if the customer were to buy let's say 3 products, the shipping would still total to $9.99 and I would then be at a loss if I had to go and order each product from aliexpress for $4 per product.
I prefer shopify to woocommerce and if I could have figured away around this I would have stayed with shopify. How is it that you have figured away around this with shopify? Do you have a plugin that fixes this?
Thanks

---

Hey aaron, do you mind me asking what your intitial budget was?

Just trying to see how much money it would take to get started with this.

---

Nice case study!

There are also some terrific step by step guides on the Shopify blog itself.

These are definitely must reads:

How I Imported Gaming Glasses With Alibaba and Made $2,416.51 in 5 Weeks
https://www.shopify.com/blog/7564416...-51-in-5-weeks

How a Craving for Sriracha Sauce Led Two Entrepreneurs to Build a Business That Went Viral Overnight
https://www.shopify.com/blog/2693472...iral-overnight

---

great post man. very useful. new to all this stuff. but really looking to get into both affiliate marketing and eCommerce. this was very helpful.

---

Question:

How can you tell which products are available to be private labeled and/or dropshipped on AliExpress?

---

I would like to know this as well

---

do you have skype?

---

Great post. I'm actually looking into this niche for a while now and you just gave the right push.

Keep going and sharing

---

Hey Aaronbeast7, this is really interesting. I'm new to this thing so smething is not clear to me: you don't have physical products in stock that you actually deliver to people, so how does it work? You basically make an agreement with a company telling them you're a dealer on Shopify. When you sell something you notify them and they make the delivery. You make the money with the mark up you put on the initial product price. You're responsible of the customer caring whit who purchased from you. Is this correct? How do you actually find a company? Thank you!

---

That was a great read @Aaronbeast7, thanks for taking the time to post.

I've been running an ecommerce business for over 2 years now, selling physical products which I hold in stock in a very specific niche.

I started the business with £230, in the first year turnover was £35,000, second year was £63,000, this year I'll be breaking the VAT threshold of £82,000, net profits average 57% and I now hold around £15,000 worth of stock at any given time and order new stock in twice a month.

A major headache for me, which held me back at the start was cashflow. Not having enough free cash to increase my inventory to supply the demand.

With dropshipping this simply isn't the case.

I'm about to start doing what you're doing, I'm hoping that I can apply what I've learned over the past few years and aggressively scale it, then replicate it into multiple stores/niches.

I'll be doing this alongside my existing ecommmerce business, I'm in front of the PC all day anyway lol

---

hey Aaronbeast7,

Such an epic post! Thanks for the share!

Quick Question:

I've been getting a lot of add to carts/abandon carts across all my active campaigns/products.

I've primarily been promoting free + plus shipping products with the shipping around 9.95 or 10.97.

People are clicking my ads and adding to cart but not purchasing (alot. I am getting a few sales here or there). Did you experience this when you were getting started? If so, what did you do to get it converting?

Honestly, I thought that it must be the high shipping costs that are making the biggest impact so I've been incrementally lowering the shipping to find the 'sweet spot'. But are you saying that it simply isn't the shipping cost that is the issue? If not, then what is?? lol

Note: Some of the products I'm promoting I actually got directly from a live training webinar, so I know that the products should be good ones.

Appreciate your insights!
Marcus

---

Hey Aaron - AMAZING STORY!! Very inspiring..

---

Thanks Aaron, great story. Iam wondering.. can you tell more detail about product research?

---

Great story. Shame there probably won't be a follow up, as he doesn't seem to be a member anymore.

---

Great read Aaron. Do you have Skype by the way ?

---

Congrats! So you buy and ship one-for-one. I.e. Visitor on your site buys on 'cell phone case', you then purchase one case on Aliexpress and have it shipped direct to them?

---

Hey Aaron, how are you handling returns? As far as I know, Ali express sellers dont accept returns. So are you taking whole return expenses on you?

---

Depending on the product, people know if that shipping is too high and will see it as a scam. People are smart when looking at shipping costs these days. Every website makes a big deal about flat rate shipping or free shipping. So even though the price may be free, they know that the shipping is being bloated. At that point, you lose all trust. People would rather pay $4.95 plus $4.95 shipping, instead of free plus $9.99 shipping.

---

@aaronbeast7

Thanks for you share of knowledge. Do you do mastermind?
I am trying with some product but already common product.

What is your criteria for choosing product/niche?

---

Wow!
Thanks for the share!

---

Did Aaron ever answered why his FB account was banned?

---

I dont think @aaronbeast7 is coming back...AARON HAS LEFT THE BUILDING... lol.. (since he hasnt replied..)

---

Hi. Thanks for sharing. I'm also here to learn about CPA. Only I don't understand anything (AM jargon confuses me a lot). Where do I start?

Also, about Facebook ads. What kind of ads do you have? What are your recommendations? Would you mind sharing a campaign that worked well?

---

This just blew my mind !

---

Home > Paid Traffic Sources > eCommerce