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Shopify + Facebook optimization (need help!) (10)

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I've been running eCommerce campaigns for about 1 week now and I have a group of three products that are all selling very well. Each product has a markup in the range of 100% - 150%.

The $ value of profit per sale for each product is $10, $20 and $25.

I'm having trouble getting my Facebook ads profitable. Seems like I'm hovering between a slight loss and a slight profit day-to-day.

Here are my Shopify / Oberlo stats (I think these are a bit inaccurate because I had to fill some orders manually instead of going through Oberlo. Total sales are somewhere around 2,250 USD):



And here is a snapshot of my current three FB campaigns:



I've mainly been trying to optimize my ads (testing images, testing different geos, testing different ad sets and targeting combinations).

Any advice for rules or strategies I should be using to optimize FB ads? For choosing the best performing ads, I've been running a given group of ads for a while, then running the stats (clicks / conversions) through the Peak Conversion AB split test calculator then cutting anything with low probability of being best.

For geos, I don't really have a great setup. Basically just been looking at which geos are giving the worst ROI and then cutting them. Here's a screenshot of one campaign:



I cut USA, Brazil, Singapore and Thailand from these geos.

I know that approach isn't very scientific, so open to any other strategy there.

Are my profit margins too small? Should I be testing more products? Seems like the sales volume on the current product set is good... I just need to optimize the ads, but correct me if I'm wrong.

What should I do in terms of campaign and ad set budgets? I currently have my campaign budgets uncapped and each ad set is capped around $50 daily. My reasoning was to keep the daily cap low until I optimized the campaigns further and then just remove the cap until sales drop down again. Any thoughts on that approach?

How does everyone track their stats for Shopify dropshipping operations? Right now I have Oberlo to manage my orders and fulfillment, so I grab stats from there + Shopify and then I've just been exporting my FB stats and manually pushing the numbers around in a spreadsheet to get my profit / ROI.

Any advice on how to better organize that stuff? Any spreadsheet templates you recommend? Or should I just continue with my current setup?

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So, I was able to get all 3 products profitable. One is performing better than the other two, but I think it's just a matter of continuing to iterate on the FB ads to drop the average price per purchase.

Still looking for answers to the questions I posted above if anyone has advice!

Also, have a few more additional questions as I move forward:

1. Should I be working on SEO and optimizing the site so I can do more organic traffic? Or just stick to paid ads for right now? Any advice on building up SEO for Shopify stores?

2. I'm using Oberlo as an interface between Shopify and AliExpress but placing all the orders is becoming rather time-consuming. Any advice on streamlining this so I can spend my time on other areas of the business? I was thinking to export all orders for a specific product to a CSV and then delivering that to my AliExpress sellers at the end of each day. Thoughts?

3. I tried upping my daily budget for each ad group and it didn't seem to increase sales at all, so I just dropped it back down to $50. Any advice for scaling campaigns faster with FB ads?

Any advice is much appreciated

Also, if you're doing eCommerce and want to toss around ideas on Skype or something, just PM me and we can trade info.

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Sorry I didn't see this one sooner!

Top thing I'd suggest since you have a decent list of people who have converted is to start running Lookalike Audience campaigns. I'd separate them out by geo and run them in your best geos, and split-test various percentage lookalikes against each other.

Test a lookalike for purchasers, and also for people who have just viewed the content - the latter often does surprisingly well.

Are you running one ad per ad set? If you're running multiple ads in a single ad set, that can screw up your optimisation, as Facebook will more or less decide for you what it wants to run.

Also, what's your targeting? In the interviews I've done for the eCommerce Cookbook, I'm surprised to hear that a lot of the split-testing that works for very big ecomm folks is down to split-testing various targeting groups rather than ad copy, images, or similar things. In particular, if it's appropriate I'd highly suggest gathering the names of a bunch of relevant magazines, and then targeting on them.

Other obvious stuff that you've probably already done - trust badges, testimonials / reviews (get in touch with people who have bought from you), cart abandonment protector, mailing list, upsells.

SEO: complicated question. Is this a niche or a general store? If it's a niche store with a community you can get involved in, definitely start on SEO - you can start by just making sure that all your meta descriptions and titles are good.

Hope that helps!

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Thanks for the response, caurmen!

Sounds good. Will do.

Oh! Interesting... I had no idea about this. But makes sense. I've noticed some of my ads get very low impressions. I was wondering why.

So, if I want to test different ads, I should build separate identical ad sets and run one ad per set?

Already doing cart abandonment. right now, I just manually send abandonment mails with a discount code ~6 - 12 hours after abandonment. What percentage is considered normal or good for card recovery?

I've been considering doing a two or three step cart recovery process with different copy in the email for each step. Any thoughts on that?

Is this the plugin your referring to? https://apps.Shopify.com/linkerfrien...nagement-tools

I have trust badges already.

I don't have any reviews yet because the store is quite new, but I'll start to reach out to some former customers for those.

I've been collecting emails, but no proper email marketing strategy in place yet. For mailing strategy, I was thinking:

1. Email blast when I launch a new product
2. Periodic discount code blasts / limited-time-offers

What else should I be doing with email?

Good call on upsells. I haven't implemented any yet, but I have a couple products that I could upsell or cross-sell, so I'll work on that.

It's a general store right now, but once I get a better idea of the better performing products, I could probably split them off into niche store(s) and then SEO those.

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Just a quick one: if your order management is taking too much time, write out the procedure (with screenshots) and get a VA to take care of this.

For email:

- abandoned cart mail
- new product launch
- product suggestions (with mailchimp, this is something you can set up to run on auto pilot)

Focus on the ones that can be done automatically first, as that's basically set-and-forget.

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Definitely, yes. It's a bit of a pain but it'll get you much more reliable results.

That'll depend a lot on why people are abandoning - which is a question worth asking in abandoned cart emails, incidentally.

If it fits in with the way the store works, I'd strongly recommend trying to keep your list warm with useful tips for your audience - NO SALES CONTENT in these emails, just stuff they'll find useful.

Generally I'd go for a 2-1 ratio minimum of content to sales.

However, this very much depends on if your audience is one where you can genuinely pump out useful info to them on a weekly/biweekly basis.

If you can, this is an absolutely killer strategy. You know it's working when you start getting customers asking where their friends can sign up to your list!

This may be less useful for your current store, though. Keep it in mind for a later store.

One thing you could do right now is assemble a quick "post-purchase tips" list for each of your products, and send that out to your customers after the product should have arrived. Again, no sales in this - although you can then do a subsequent upsell. The idea's just to give people warm fuzzies.

FINALLY: one of the most useful uses of email is to ask customers questions. Try sending out email to customers asking what they thought of the product, if there's any elements of the purchase process you could improve, if there are any products they'd like to see from you, etc. Customer research is incredibly valuable - often this sort of thing will point out a huge, obvious hole in your funnel you had no idea existed.

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It's been a while since I updated this thread. I'm just about wrapping up my first 30 days with eCommerce and I've been able to do quite well in terms of revenue, but my profits are rather embarrassing...

Here are the numbers (all USD)

Total Revenue: 19,205.61
Dropshipping Costs: 10,500
Facebook Ads: 6781.79
PayPal Transaction Fees: 948.77
Shopify Fees + Apps: 403.45

Net Profit: ~509

That's an embarrassingly low profit margin of 2.65% !

On the bright side, I was still SLIGHTLY profitable and I have a pretty good understanding of what's hurting me. My initial goal when signing up for STM was to do $XX per day in profits and I've done that with eCommerce this month (avg daily profit of $16) ! So, I can't be too down on myself.

Now, onto my ideas for improvement:

1. The PayPal fees are absolutely slaughtering me and I didn't really notice them until I did my accounting this month. I tried to use Shopify's payment processing (via Stripe) when I first signed up, but they rejected me for not being "based in the US" (I'm a US citizen, but live overseas). I tried to explain my situation to them and offered to show them a passport, US bank accounts and my US Stripe account, but they still turned me away. Is it worth reaching out to them again, or is it unlikely at this stage?

2. I've typically marked up my goods somewhere in the range of 100 - 150%, but I'm really having trouble getting a decent profit per purchase with the ads, transaction fees, drop-shipping costs, etc. So, open to any ideas on how to drop ANY of those costs lower.

3. I had one REALLY profitable product in my first two weeks, but it's fairly niche and I think I drove the campaign as far as it could go. Sales have dropped to almost zero and cost-per-conversion on FB ads is out of my profit margin by now, so I think that product was short-lived and is now dead. I tried making a look-alike audience and running a new ad set with that audience, but was unable to make it profitable.

4. I've been running a general store so far, testing out many different products across a few different categories. I haven't found any "evergreen" products that I think would warrant me focusing exclusively on them and building out a new store for. Most of the things I've been selling seem to have a limited window before they die out.

5. I had one product that was doing OK in English speaking geos, but the profit margin was very low. I found sales in a couple non-English speaking countries, so I translated the ad and product page, then targeted my FB ads accordingly. Dropped the cost-per-purchase down DRAMATICALLY and got that product to be quite profitable, but sales have dropped off again recently. So, I'm excited to test out non-English geos. May even consider building out separate stores for different languages once I have a better idea which products are more evergreen or generally promising.

6. Expanding on what I said in 5: should I even be trying to find evergreen products? Or should I just aim for short-term winners and then just churn out those short-term products in cycles? I guess both are viable strategies, but would like to hear what others think.

7. Based on some of the fashion products I tested, I have a few ideas for niche fashion products that I'd like to test. Does anyone design their own fashion products (hats, shirts, stuff like that) and sell on a store? Any recommended places I could get custom designs printed and shipped relatively cheap?

8. I've also had a few customers who had poor delivery from AliExpress (ePacket). The package was in bad condition or the product was damaged. How do you usually handle these types of customers? Is there any way to improve delivery from China? Or any best practice for dealing with angry customers?

I've paused all of my campaigns for the time-being while I figure out my strategy going forward. I'm feeling a bit stuck and back to square one after doing all the accounting today. Hopefully some of you guys can offer some advice and motivation for me going forward...

Thanks again to everyone who's commented in this thread so far.

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Seems solid setup but are you retargeting ?

I was just breakeven like you until I started retargeting Campaigns. With FB (Based on Store ATC custom Audience), Retargetapp .
Also email Sequence with Mailchimp, I have 5 differents sequences for each product.
This will put you in the green....

Also, as others said. VA for Oberlo, LLA with your ATC or purchase or views.

Good luck !

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I was doing a bit of retargeting, but it's clear that I need to be more thorough about it. I have a retargeting ad set running alongside all my normal ad sets for each product now. I'm just retargeting people who visited that specific product page in the last 30 days (same ad). If anyone has any ideas on improving that strategy, please share.

Regarding my problem with transaction fees (I'm getting hit twice on PayPal and Shopify), I looked at Shopify's plans and noticed their transaction fees scale with the fixed monthly price. So, for starters, I'll probably upgrade to the next tier to save 1% on each transaction.

I wasn't getting much success with my cart abandonment email, so I modified it a bit and added an extra email to that series. Also made a few other automations for browse abandonment and product recommendations.

As usual, open to any advice or critique!

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Having a quick scan of your results, one idea springs to mind, although it may be impractical depending on the market -

Can you raise your prices?

You've got converting ads, but your profit margins are razor-thin. Depending on how price-sensitive your audience is (and it's my experience that entrepreneurs always think their market is more price-sensitive than it is) you could potentially get to a healthy profit just by raising your prices a bit.

Obviously if you're selling something super-commoditised you can't do that, but otherwise I'd definitely recommend split-testing a price increase.

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