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WooCommerce + Dropshipping (21)

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In this follow along I am building a Wordpress + WooCommerce e-com store and drop shipping physical products to customers. I will use FB Advertising to start and possibly also Google. I am selling phone cases and similar accessories and targetting women.

Vertical: Fashion/Accessories
Niche: Phone Cases for women
Traffic Source: FB/Google
Budget: $2000

What I've done:
So far I have registered a domain and installed WordPress.

What I am currently working on:
Setting up my site. WooCommerce is new to me and there are many things I'm not sure about. Payment processors, for example. Should I use PayPal? Stripe? Amazon Payments? Any advice here is appreciated. I already have a PayPal account and they accept all major CC's so I'm going to start with that. I also need to decide on a theme. I want my load times to be fast. I have installed a minifying plugin, an image compressor and a Cache plugin to help with this.

I've done some market analysis and found 3 other stores in my niche that are selling products from AliExpress. I am taking notes of what commonalities they share and, using Atilla's Shopify spying guide, I have identified the first set of products I will add to my store.

One thing that will work against me is the shipping times from AliExpress to the US. My competitors must have some US-based inventory because they offer standard 3-7 day USPS shipping. I'll shop around and see if I can find US-based suppliers that drop ship.

One question I have is once I'm selling products how do I prevent getting scammed or getting phony charge disputes?

Thanks for reading, I will update this follow along at least once a week. I am hoping to get my site setup finished this weekend and launch a few test campaigns next week. I have a lot of learning to do but I'm trying not to overthink stuff.

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Shipping times are definitely working against you at the beginning but I think they shouldn't be decisive to get started and learn how to get customers. Afterwards, if you want to scale, of course it would help to either dropship from local suppliers or just have some inventory in your biggest geo.

PayPal and Stripe are the standard payments, they cover basically everything you need - both hate dropshipping though, and will keep your funds to cover their risk.

What do you mean by getting scammed once you are selling products? With phony chargebacks?

One question about your setup: Why WooCommerce and not Shopify?

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Yeah exactly, shipping products and then getting chargebacks or cancelled payments? Is this common and is there any protection?

I'm somewhat familiar with WordPress and I want to have full control of my site I guess. I should learn more about Shopify though, what do you like about it?

Two more things since yesterday - I had to ask KnownHost to give me a dedicated IP for my SSL. I also had them upgrade my PHP to version 5.6 so it is compatible with the latest version of WooCommerce.

I'm still overthinking the theme and layout (shopify may have been easier lol) so tonight I'm going to focus on adding products. I'm going to try to shoot for 3-5 product categories with 10 or less products each.

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Shopify is a service, it's great - you click a few buttons and you are live. I'm a huge huge fan of such services to get a product going. I don't want to waste time setting up servers, setting up the right version of PHP and whatever database(s), etc. It may be worth doing such a thing later but your initial goal with ecommerce is to find your audience. That means you want to run ads asap.

Have you ever used Voluum for tracking affiliate campaigns and compare it to a self-hosted solution? Maybe the difference is even bigger with Shopify.

Regarding chargebacks and cancelled payments - I don't know what is a normal frequency but of course they happen. And they will keep happening as long as you sell stuff online of offline - I think it's an unavoidable challenge to manage, you cannot avoid it. My suggestion is just to account for a certain % of chargebacks happening, do whatever the customer wants and "take the hit" up until a point where it gets problematic to your business. Too many such events could also mean your products are not what customers expect. It's something you have to minimize but never expect to have disappear in my opinion, just like domains getting flagged when running affiliate campaigns.

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Man I feel like I've already put a lot into this site but I don't want to fall victim to the sunken cost fallacy. Since I have some momentum I'm going to stay on my current course but if I run into any issues with wooCommerce I'll switch over to Shopify.

I'm currently adding products to the store - trying to just use good descriptions and put up good pictures so the customer knows exactly what they are getting. All the items i've added have good ratings on AliExpress as well as my competitors stores so chargebacks should be low. Interestingly enough, most of the complaints are actually about the long lead times.... That's not good, but once I find some products that sell well I get a local supplier.

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i am about to ask the same Question .
Shopify is the Best .
it will handle the transactions and every thing for you + more professional and faster .
better then WordPress and bunch of plugins that will make your website slower .

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The downside of using Shopify is it's not open-source and you'll be trapped to use/do whatever they ask you do.

They don't like your store/what you sell, they shut you down.

Wanna use Braintree? Not available because they brokered a deal with Stripe.

I think Woo+Wordpress is good enough if you're adequately technical. Buy an instance on DO/Vultr, use ServerPilot to install WP. Then everything else should be smooth sailing. There's a few really good/customizable themes on ThemeForest that you should look into as well.

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Thanks yeah I've been eyeing a few different themes, trying to keep it light. Here's a few I like:

https://wordpress.org/themes/shophistic-lite/
https://woocommerce.com/storefront/

I know that the plugin bloat can occur with WordPress easily so I'm keeping everything as light and easy on the server as I can. It looks like Shopify would be easier but I'm using this opportunity to work on my Web Development skills.

I've added 3 cases to my store. I found one seller in particular that has a great reputation and lots of cases, plus many cases for the latest generation phones.

It is a tedious process saving and editing images, adding them to the store, writing a description and entering all the color/phone variations, entering the shipping info etc. It's taking a while but I'm developing a system.

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Do you have a merchant account already?

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It's good to compare the 2 solutions (Shopify and Woo) but I think you should certainly not get stuck in them. Getting sales, learning your audience is way more important anyway - you can change the service you are using later if needed

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I don't and I just realized I will need that to accept CC payments. Thanks!

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I am so close to running some traffic. Gotta get my payment system live, make sure my whole checkout process is fast and efficient, flesh the site out more and Ill be ready.

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After looking into merchant accounts I think to start I will just use my existing PayPal acct. I can set it up to accept CC payments really easily. There are a few disadvantages to this, namely that PayPal can freeze my funds and also that the customers are taken away from my site to pay. Not ideal. If I have tons of last minute cart abandons or if I start doing a lot of volume Ill get my own merchant acct. But for now its the fastest and easiest way for me to get up and running.

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The site is up, it took much longer than I expected to get everything functioning correctly and looking decent. I have put up 10 products just to flesh the site out some and am running my first facebook ads currently.

FIrst off, I ran a "product catalog sales" ad but it has not gotten any impressions at all. I think it is because these ads only show to people who have already added items to their cart and my site hasn't had any traffic yet.

Second campaign is a conversions campaign, I'm using a carosel ad showing 5 products from my site. My main product is phone cases for women.
FB Targetting:
Women in the US age 18 - 35
iPhone owners who are ALSO interested in iPhone accessories or fashion accessories.
Also targetting new mobile/tablet owners, since they may not have a case yet.
Potential reach is 18,000,000 people.
Automatic Placements
Optimized for Purchases on my site

I currently have the conversion window set to 7 days click.

Here are my current stats:


Since I've found no hit products yet my plan is to systematically continue to add 1 item per day and run individual FB ads for each new product. I may also try individual ads for some of my existing products if the carosel ad doesn't yield any results.

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I think you are not niche/targeted enough honestly. General cases are available everywhere, you need your cases to be more niche imo. Some examples: cats, dogs, cars, safety (those tough cases that offer better protection than standard ones). And you would continue from that to create audiences for each to begin with. I'd certainly also use only one product per carousel and not mix products.

The problem with this general targeting and generic cases is that you are competing in an open field against the biggest guys out there.

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Cool, Manu_adefy thanks for the input! I have seen competitors divide their stores into sub-categories of cases like this too. I didn't think about the niche until I was making the FB ads and realized my products were varied and difficult to target for. I'm going to start building sub-categories into my site and test one product per ad. Here's some ideas I'll try:

-Country/Rural themed cases
-Sports team themed
-Super high fashiony blinged out cases (theres a lot of these so its worth a shot)
-Tough/Extreme Protection Cases
-Pop Culture Stuff (things w a cult following like nightmare before xmas)


I've got my work cut out for me. One other thing I was wondering - does anyone use paid ads to promote their FB page?

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Update: Tested 4 individual products in different niches. No winners yet. Here's some stats for each camp:


And the targetting for each campaign:

Product: Minions Phone Cord Protector
Targetting:
Location:United States
Age:18 - 35
Gender:Female
People Who Match:
Behaviors: iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPhone 5S, iPhone 5C, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6, iPhone 6S, iPhone 6S Plus, iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus
And Must Also Match:
Interests: Despicable Me (franchise), minions, Minions (film)
And Must Also Match:
Interests: IPhone accessories
And Must Also Match:
Behaviors: Engaged Shoppers

Total Reach: 3800 people



Product: Yankees Ballcap Girl Phone Case
Targetting:
Location:United States
Age:18 - 35
Gender:Female
People Who Match:
Behaviors: iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPhone 5S, iPhone 5C, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6, iPhone 6S, iPhone 6S Plus, iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus
And Must Also Match:
Interests: IPhone accessories, Behaviors: New smartphone and tablet owners
And Must Also Match:
Interests: New York Yankees
And Must Also Match:
Behaviors: Engaged Shoppers

Total Reach: 530,000



Product: Selena Gomez Print Phone Case
Targetting:
Location:United States
Age:18 - 35
Gender:Female
People Who Match:
Behaviors: iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6, iPhone 6S, iPhone 6S Plus, iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus
And Must Also Match:
Interests: Selena Gomez
And Must Also Match:
Behaviors: Engaged Shoppers

Total Reach: 6,500,000



I had a fourth campaign as well, but as I looked at the data I realized that it had the wrong targetting. Lesson learned: All ads in a single ad set share the same targetting.

For now I'll keep on testing.

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Hey man, glad to see you making progress with this. I have also been going the full woocommerce store route over the last month. Lots more work but i like the level of control you have.

Maybe i missed it by why you are not using onsite inline stripe payment processing? This makes a big difference.

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I have Braintree set up currently to accept CC payments. When a user adds an item to the cart they are automatically taken to the checkout page, which is a single page form submit on my site.
Ill check stripe out though. Ive never had a merchant acct for accepting payments before this so I dont know all the pros/cons of different solutions.

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Ok that sounds like it should work fine then. I am not in a stripe approved country so getting efficient ecomm payment processing is difficult and using processors that take the customer offsite had an impact on conversions. I found however that it was quite easy to get a stripe account even though it is not available in my country, which has been totally worth it. With the woocommerce stripe payment processing customers can pay directly in my cart very easily so my checkout to purchase CR's are usually great. But it seems like your current setup should work just as well so thats great.

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I think Shopify is getting more expensive. With Wordpress, woo and Alidropship plugin you can do much more for less. If you have good VPS and not using too much plugins with good theme it's much cheaper and better control. I am a web developer and already have shop with Shopify but going to move to WordPress. Shopify is taking % for every transaction as well. If you have some coding experience go with Wordpress. That's my opinion.

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