eCommerce Newbie - Time to Get Serious (45)
Been going through a slump lately. Motivation to work dropped off a cliff after coming back from a vacation. Closest I've ever felt to being "depressed"...
Unbelievable how down I've been feeling since this is objectively the best time of my life (financially, socially, success in hobbies). What I'm missing is a challenge.
Something that will get me out of bed in the morning with a burning desire to work hard.
My affiliate SEO business is bringing in consistent profits in the $3-5K range. Passive, minimal work to maintain. Don't see myself scaling the content business much larger though which is why I turned to paid traffic AM and now eCommerce.
I've found logs like this to be hugely helpful in staying motivated and disciplined. Plus, I've received some great help from people who read my logs in the past.
So here I go again...
I'm going through the eCommerce cookbook.
I have money to spend on testing ads, store ideas, etc. Let's call it $1k per month testing budget to start off with.
I created a list of interests, hobbies and also problems as the guide recommends doing.
I've started going through the list and writing down ideas, discarding niches, etc.
Already have 1-2 ideas for sites that I can get excited about. I'll wait until I've worked through the entire list and then hopefully have 5+ viable ecommerce ideas.
Next steps:
1. Research products for all niches
2. Narrow down to best 5 and start first one
3. Build the site using
4. Create ads
5. Try different products and ads until it works or I move on to the next niche
Deadline for next step: Finish research phase by Saturday morning
Don't overthink this, use products that are already selling. Use niche miner or which ads work to show you... I run the 
Originally Posted by lifter123
good luck!
totally can relate to what you're going through... still trying to get out of that hole too...
Great start.
As you want the business to motivate you, it's so important that it's something you have a passion for.
I would even go as far as to say that your passion should be your only focus. The money will come and since you already have a passive income (to a very large extent), it doesn't need to come anytime soon.
If you don't mind one of your hobbies to become a business, explore that more. Get out, talk to people, go to conventions, games, clubs and find out which role you want to play there.
Then fulfill that role. Whether that's making the best X, creating a youtube channel, selling supplies, creating another infobiz in that niche. You can choose whatever you want.
You've basically freed yourself from work, which normally holds us back from thinking about our purpose in life. Sounds great, but "work" is to a large extent what we use to define ourselves.
So as much as you have a great opportunity here, it's scary as well. Because how do you define yourself now?
There's no "copy this", "go for that niche" here.
If you want to be happy and driven, find something worthwile to put devote your time to.
For further exploration, here's an interesting link to an article with links out to plenty of other interesting material. Great site in general to start exploring: https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/0...d-vern-kousky/
Good luck and let us know how things develop.
As Pekadis says, you're in an unusual situation here. As such, I'd give you a few additional pieces of advice, based on a couple of decades of running businesses I'm passionate about:
1) Prioritise running something you're excited about. The primary thing you want here is to be interested and engaged in what you're doing, so don't get too ruthlessly efficient and lose sight of that. (It's easy to do - a little too much "practicality" can really screw a plan like this up). If in any doubt, go for "this is something I'd really like to do" over "this will make cash". You'll have more chance of getting engaged and interested - and as I mentioned in my speech at AWE, you'll probably have more chance of success too.
2) Likewise, once you get going - prioritise "I want to do this" over "this is practical" more than you usually would. My (book) agent, who handles multiple bestselling authors, mentions that one of the biggest mistakes she sees in authors who are also entrepreneurs is trying too hard to be practical and not indulging what they find interesting and want to do, for example. Don't go haring off on whims, but if, for example, you want to improve quality in your product even though it will cost a bit more, and even though you don't think you'll get a higher ROI, you should probably go for that.
3) I wouldn't normally recommend this, but in your situation: consider actually making something new rather than reselling. It's harder, it'll stretch you more, but if you're genuinely bringing something new into the world you're more likely to get really engaged with it.
4) I'd give more focus to content marketing and community outreach in your case. If you're already doing something that's a passion area for you, it's much easier to create good-quality content in that case, and you'll naturally want to interact with the community. Doing this and being genuine about it can give you a huge edge - and offset the costs of marketing too.
Just to be clear: these are not general pieces of advice for anyone starting an ecommece store. They're specific to @lifter123's case where he has a decent stable income already and is looking for a passion project.
Finally - if you can, have a watch of my talk at AWE17. I spoke specifically about using your affiliate skills to make a success of passion projects - it's exactly targeted at what you want to do.
Good luck, and do let us know how you get on!
Thank you all for your thoughts and encouragement. I find it interesting that you seem to have interpreted my words as me wanting to start a "passion project". I honestly hadn't thought of it in that way, I just want to get back to work and make tons of money
I'm not quite at the stage yet where money doesn't motivate me. I just want a new challenge that will realistically take me closer to becoming truly rich.
Anyway, today I finished up my brainstorming and research phase. I have a list of 8 store ideas that could work. 4 I am excited about and 4 are so-so.
Here it is:
| Swiss Trout Fishing Store | |
| Football store for coaches | equipment for coaches, physio equipment |
| MMA home gym | |
| Fitness equipment | |
| photography home studio | |
| games room at home (billiards, darts, etc.) | |
| kitchen utensils | |
| DIY Physio |
The ones I think are most likely to work are:
DIY Physio
Kitchen utensils
photography studio equipment
fitness equipment
My knowledge on the topics varies from minimal to in-depth. What I see as a good sign for all of those, is that I don't think branded products play too big of a role in any of these markets.
I am still undecided which of these store ideas to pursue first. I am also considering setting up a "sports goods" store that could combine fitness equipment, physio and some soccer-specific items as well.
As far as I can tell, the store as a "brand" doesn't matter too much in the starting phase. It's just about getting a product that you can profitably sell via Facebook ads.
Also, I am a native English and German speaker so I'll probably try targeting German-speaking countries with these store ideas as well.
Of those my guess would be that photography equipment would do well. There's a lot of really nice photography kit coming out of China, much of which will be available on AliExpress, and the community has very strong gathering points you can target.
Also, a lot of the kit is comparatively light, which could be an issue with fitness equipment - shipping costs. Having said that, there's a fair bit of lighter fitness kit too.
DIY physio could do very well too - lots of options, plenty of quite literal pain points. I'd go heavy on the SEO in addition to Facebook in that case.
Given your clarification on your goals, I'd also add that both are easily large enough markets to make you serious cash
Looking forward to your next updates!
I have decided to combine the physio, fitness and some other sports product into one store. I received the advice to keep the store as broad as possible so I can try many different products under the same umbrella store.
This store is in English, but if it doesn't convert after trying 4-5 ads and products, I'll try the same idea in German. I've done most of the initial set up with
Next, I need to finish adding products, work on the design and launch my first ad campaign on facebook.
Today I added around 30 products to my store using Oberlo. I grouped them into three collections and made a basic design for the homepage.
Next, I'm going to write the descriptions for the 3-4 main products and then start advertising one on facebook.
While that ad test runs, I'll have time to finish writing copy for all the other products.
While that ad test runs, I'll have time to finish writing copy for all the other products.
Check this site, its one of the best ecomm sites ive seen so far: http://mellerbrand.com/
It looks good. What is it that you like about that site?
I've written the copy for 2 products and started advertising one of them on facebook. Haven't exactly followed the blueprint for this ad, wanted to keep it even simpler for this first trial run.
Been running fb ads for one product with no success as of now.
Launched a second campaign for a different product, but keeping the original one running for another day.
I've decided to share the site and ads in here because this is about learning paid traffic and dropshipping rather than making tons of money (which is unlikely at first anyway). Hopefully, sharing more info will get me some better feedback from experienced members on the forum.
The product pages are:
And the ads I've created:
Hi lifter123,
Not sure about the ladder but foam rollers are bit saturated.
BTW, I think you should make the images focusing on your products. People on facebook get overwhelmed by ads so your ads should catch them at the very first sight, especially in this highly competitive niche.
Just my two cents
$130 spent across 3 products with no sales yet.
Thought I was being clever there targeting the speed ladder ad with a tennis image at people who like tennis. Problem is, there is no reason they should be interested in a speed ladder. They may just enjoy watching tennis on TV!
I targeted the kinesio ad at two groups: soccer players and physios, but this time I only targeted people who also had an interest in physiotherapy. I also chose very product-focused images this time as suggested in this thread.
My ads:
My product page:
I've linked adwords with Google analytics so I can start re-marketing visitors of my store.
On a separate note, I'm about to purchase an existing
@lifter123
Smart move by looking at buying a store. This can speed up things considerably.
Flippa has quite a few too: https://flippa.com/websites/Shopify
When you do buy the store, quick wins are:
- increase prices
- adding more products / more product options: good / better / best
- adding upsells
- adding accessories
- go to new markets (geographically)
- build an email list, or if it already exists, build more / longer campaigns
As always, do let us know how this develops.
Been busy working on my stores the last few days. Here's what I've done:
For the store I bought:
- added email list for store I purchased
- set up Facebook ads similar to what the previous owner used
- Clean up errors on the store (still working on this, products that are no longer available or supplier has changed)
- Set up Retargeting campaigns on AdWords, Facebook and also on Facebook through a
- Add email popup to the store
- add scarcity countdown timer to the store
- add social proof app to the store
For my own sports store:
- reached out to influencers
- ran fb ads
- set up retargeting
I'm learning a lot and enjoying the process, but...
No sales as of yet on either my own store or the one I purchased on Flippa.
I was starting to worry about the store I purchased on Flippa. No sales for the first 2-3 days despite spending almost $70 on ads using similar tactics to the previous owner. And had e previous customers complaining about shipping times and products not arriving. Yesterday sales suddenly started coming in. $125 in revenue yesterday and this morning has continue well.
It's great to finally sell my own products (well, sort of) as opposed to the affiliate marketing I am used to.
I've created cart abandonment funnels, customer up-sell funnels, set up email collection, added new products, created facebook ads and added a scarcity timer.
The product that sells best at the moment is a free + shipping option. The previous owner recommended trying free + shipping to get some conversions on the facebook pixel. We'll see if the conversions help the pixel improve, but I'm just happy to be making sales.
Unfortunately, Aliexpress has suspended my payments account temporarily while they verify my identity. That's a huge pain because I want to ship these products ASAP. Hopefully, it gets resolved soon.
Nice - it's always good to see sales come in (and reassuring after you've just purchased a site).
Sales fluctuate a lot from day to day, so it can be rain or shine. As long as it works out to what you expect in a period of a few weeks (even on a weekly basis, you can still see good and bad weeks).
Woo! Congrats on the sales!
I have some feedback on the ladder product you posted, but I'm not sure given your current stage of development on the project whether it would be useful, or whether you've moved past that already.
What's the best feedback/advice/suggestions we can all give you right now to help you move forward?
Originally Posted by pekadis
Originally Posted by caurmen
There's a lot to do and learn, but I'm loving it! I'm sure I'll have some more questions in the future as I get more accustomed to
Makes sense, and good call.
Looking forward to future updates!
The store I bought is doing well! My free + shipping offer is converting nicely and customers are adding other products to the order 30-40% of the time as well.
Overall I'm profitable from FB ads, but I can't take full credit for that as the previous owner certainly helped by pointing me towards the right product to advertise.
Unfortunately, my Aliexpress payments are currently not going through. My account has been getting verified for 4 days now so I can't place any orders.
That could be problematic when combined with the other problem I'm facing: Customers complaining about shipping times. I've had 2-3 complaints about products having not arrived even after 6 weeks.
I've been looking into setting up a fulfillment center in Germany (country I'm mostly selling to). It would be a large hassle and probably cost more at least until I get it up and running. For now, I think I'll stick to pure dropshipping, but I want to keep my options open as I believe dropshipping is only going to get more competitive over the coming years and the more extra barriers to entry I can create for my niche, the better.
I've also bought an expensive course on
@lifter123 - for Germany - why not look into Amazon FBA? Sell on Amazon and let Amazon ship to your customers?
Easy to set up, no mininums, no hidden fees, so I'd use that (as we do ourselves)
And man, I should really be creating a course.
I actually am looking at Amazon FBA for this and as a further income stream in general. Not quite decided yet whether that is a road I want to go down for this business because it takes away some of the power of offering fast shipping. My idea with reducing shipping times is among other things to allow me to upsell better. I think the reason why my rate of returning customers is slow has to do with the long shipping times. Chances of someone ordering again within the first month are slim if they haven't even received the first order yet!
Also, I don't want to spread my attention too thin which is why I'm somewhat split on also trying Amazon FBA. On the other hand, there are plenty waiting times involved in Amazon FBA so it will give me plenty of time to focus on learning
Is it possible to use Amazon as a "dropshipper"? Receive orders on my
On another note, I need to look into scaling my facebook ads! Today I did my first $200+ day just from this one store!
Originally Posted by lifter123
You would have to create a product listing on Amazon in order to use it and set a selling date for a future date. Make sure your product complies with ALL of Amazon's T&C, you dont want to get banned.
I would also look up using Amazon's FC in Europe and not US if thats your main area of sales. Although, i dont know the T&C involved with that and how it differs from using US FCs.
You can read some more on MCF here:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/custo...0460#200241470
Also, good luck and good job on your dropshipping store. Nothing beats getting some sales going...
Thanks for your response! Very helpful, I will look into that for sure.
Originally Posted by dutchie
I've got a few facebook campaigns running, but haven't been able to scale much. Results are inconsistent at the moment except for my Lead campaigns which are still going strong.
Sunday I'm sending out the first of my weekly promotional emails. Very simple offer on a new product with a large discount (50%) profit margin with the discount is still around $12 per sale so hopefully this converts and allows me to start upselling people who have bought the free + shipping offers with margins in the $5 range.
Last week I made a loss of around $80 (not accounting for
Ad costs were 330$ - $250 gross profit
Considering that over $110 were spent on lead gen campaigns, that is not too bad. I generated slightly over 100 confirmed opt-ins although some of them will be new customers and not directly from the lead generation campaigns.
I still have no idea what a confirmed email opt-in is worth to my business. I'm planning to send out a few emails as part of an autoresponder and sending out weekly special offers with large discounts on 1 product every Sunday.
I'm considering pausing the lead generation campaign for now while I figure out what a lead is worth. That would also allow me to get a better idea of what my other campaigns are actually producing in terms of profits.
I'm still struggling a little to pinpoint where exactly my sales are coming from. Facebook pixel shows purchases and it shows "Return on Ad Spend", but I'm not sure how accurate the latter is. I don't know how it deals with my free + shipping offers for example (I believe it values them as $0).
Ok will try Thanks!
That'll also let you test your existing leads whilst everyone else burns their budget on the end-of-Q4 rush.
I've fixed some issues with my product pages and have seen an increase in conversions since. May also be because of the upcoming Black Friday weekend however.
I've paused the lead generation campaigns for now. The emails I've sent out kept getting lower open rates - my big offer last Sunday totally sucked (low open rates, practically no clicks). It definitely got flagged as a promotion, will try again this week and see if it does better because it has been a while since the last email.
I'm also getting close to launching a mobile app for my store (German version only as of now). Will see how it performs in terms of organic downloads and mostly sending paid traffic to it via App install ads. Exciting stuff that I don't see many small brands doing - but the leaders in ecommerce obviously are.
I'm also trying to hire a VA to take care of the following tasks:
- customer service
- Fulfilling orders (currently outsourced, but I'd like 1 person to do customer service AND fulfillment)
- finding and creating images for my social media profiles (I'm posting to instagram daily)
- creating images with text and logo for ads
In the future, I may also add the following taks to my VA's job:
- Reaching out to influencers
- Managing influencers with open product deliveries, making sure we get the images, creating reports on promotions with influencers
I am using onlinejobs.ph which was recommended to me. I've been using Upwork for a few years now (from both the client and freelancer side) and always liked it, but I'm looking for someone who will stay for longer than an Upwork freelancer.
(They are members of a freelance platform - if they do a good job with me, they will soon be getting other job offers because of their experience with me)
I'm sure there will be challenges to managing a virtual employee, but it's something I need to learn. With school, my social activities and running my business, I hardly have time to improve my knowledge in the areas I want to study (marketing, sales, Businss, Cryptocurrencies).
To succeed in business long-term, I believe I need to delegate some of my current tasks and focus on higher-level processes and education.
Also, I hate customer service. I don't like humans enough to endure daily emails without it wearing on my mood and productivity.(especially average humans - you know, my customers)
Originally Posted by lifter123
lifter123 dose it work with the course by Alex Becker im trying to buy a course with coaching like 6 figure academy by Joshua Zitting or 7 figure academy BY AJ Jomah or drop ship life style dose any one can pick one im really confused and want to start now
looking forward to the next follow up.
Originally Posted by pavel_apostolov87
Your success won't depend on the course you choose (unless you go for a really bad one, maybe).
Black Friday weekend was pretty good for sales, but my profit margin wasn't actually all that great.
I'm building a list of customers, building a FB audience, collecting pixel data and learning from my experiences though while making a small profit (at least gross profit).
I've hired a VA who is creating images for my instagram, fulfilling orders and I have more tasks that I could possibly delegate in the future. I'll keep this thread updated on the success of working with a VA. It isn't talked about all that much in dropshipping discussions, but I think it could be a huge boost to a brand because there are many repetitive tasks that could be outsourced for a small cost.
International site is currently selling more than the German one which I'm proud of because it is entirely my creation unlike the site i bought.
And Facebook have locked me out of my account AGAIN. Haven't had it in a while so I thought I'd moved past this struggle, but apparently not.
I'm still locked out of Facebook while they verify my identity. This is a huge pain especially because I believe the ads are still running (from Black Friday weekend - using specific copy for the Holiday).
I have no way of knowing my ROI on the ads or where my sales are coming from. Does anyone know how I could get in touch with a Facebook rep to solve this?
It's my personal account (which I only use for business) that I'm locked out of. I think I will just have to create a new account as a backup and make sure it also has admin access to my business manager.
Still making sales though and working with instagram influencers daily. It all takes time to run promos with them because ideally, I'd like them to wear my clothes rather than just post screenshots so we need to get products shipped out.
VA that I hired has been a big help so far in her first week.
Bump! Can anyone help please?
Amy
Facebook reps don't deal with ID verification or payment issues afaik. Try contacting Facebook through their live chat option.
Other than that, can you check your CC dashboard for ads from FB to see your approximate ROI? You can always call your CC company and tell them to reject any FB transaction until further notice - this will pause your ads and create other problems but at least you won't be losing money.
It's strange to request your ID so many times. Do you have a history of doing dirty stuff on FB? Are your details legit? Personal account which you only use for business sounds weird - it means you have several FB personal accounts, right? You should have a Business Manager and connect your one and only FB account to it, and add your business email as a login to it, not your personal Gmail or whatever.
Originally Posted by manu_adefy
I suspect that my ads are breaking even or making a slight profit. However, some campaigns will obviously be doing better than others which I'd like to cut / scale.
I don't use Facebook for personal stuff. I have one other account which was created to create a page a few years back. I had a payments account disabled once a year or so ago (I believe because the payment failed for some reason and it was the first payment so they immediately shut the credit card down and blacklisted it.)
Doubt that qualifies as shady business. And it isn't my ad account that is disabled right now, it's my normal login which notably only has 2-3 "friends" (business contacts)
Finally got my account back!
I lost some money unfortunately because my ads weren't running profitably. The Black Friday ad was doing great when it started (Black Friday weekend) but for obvious reasons didn't do well later when I couldn't log in to pause it.
I've scaled back down to 3 ad sets at $5 per day each. I used the data that I gathered in the past few weeks to make some optimizations (targeting only insta on one ad set, choosing which ad sets worked best). I will let them run now and go from here.
I've also been working with influencers on Instagram quite successfully. Question is how to scale it from here once I have an Influencer + product + Ad combo that works.
While I'm overall in the red for this month, I'm getting quite a lot of sales and am fairly hopeful now that I have control of my Facebook ad account again.
I'm considering starting a new store in a different niche as well before Christmas just to see how it goes.
Here are my sales for December so far (just for the US site - which I launched myself)...
Pretty happy about it, but there's a long way to go as always.
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