[Ecommerce] From $0 to buying my mum a house in 399 days - watch me do it (25)
bmcer1 good luck on your jorney!
Moving this thread to the Ecommerce section to get more love from ecommerce experts!
Best of luck on your follow-along!
Amy
Ecommerce campaign is getting hotter nowadays,good luck !
Good luck my friend. I am sure you will succeed!
hey man, your store is showing the password page for me. You need to remove the password needed in settings.
Good luck 
Good luck on your journey! Hopefully mumma's getting a brand new house soon!
Few things:
1. Your store is not open to the public yet.
2. I'm no FB expert but you will probably need to build your campaign in a much more systematic way, so you could split test different audiences/behaviors/interests etc.
3. Ad copy seems a bit lacking. The problem/question should come first. youll have to test different ad images as well.
Too early to make any assumptions on stats as the FB algo needs 48 hours.
Like the fact that you want to buy your mom a house, but as far as goals go, as it is now, this is difficult to quantify.
So, you need to define your goal better, check what you need to do and then see if it would work.
Example:
You want to buy your mom a 250K house in 13 months
Let's say you can make $15 profit (net, so after all our cost have been deducted) per mirror
This means that you need to make a profit of 19,230 per month
This means you need to sell (19,230 / $15) = 1282 units per month
That's 42 per day
You now need to figure out whether that's doable.
If you want to refine this:
- factor in returns, lost packages etc
- determine how much cash you need to keep an adequate amount of stock
If the numbers don't work out, see if you can increase the order value or customer LTV. Upsell etc
You really need to refine your plan here if you really want to reach your goal.
I know it's tempting to just dive in and get to work, but you have set yourself quite an ambitious goal, so your plan needs to be on point too.
In any case, good luck.
Is the ad pointing to a site where people can actually buy? I can only see a placeholder page.
hope you can insist on this goal!good luck !
Fantastic advice pekadis, thank you.
Hi there!
Congrats on your new start and this amazingly interesting follow-along! I think you chose a good product, and you have the right thinking, so no worries, I'm sure you can get to your goal and make your mom even happier 
At
In general it feels like your website is fresh - its way too clean, and on one side it's great to keep it simple, but on the other it feels a bit too empty. I think with time it will fill up by itself though with more products added, more things will appear at the home page. You can add some sections as Current promotions, Reviews of customers, maybe some real photos.. As you mentioned, photos of a real girl using the product are going to make a big difference!
Would be great to have a video, with actual review of a Mirror, I guess you guys can do it already now and it doesn't require much time, but will give a user a clear feeling that this mirror exists and it's really useful
Another thing - what about taking the users from Facebook to the product page directly? Like this one https://illuminamirrors.com/products...or-with-lights
If you send users to the home page first, you give them extra time to think and walk around. People are lazy, they often don't explore that much the website, instead they have a fast intention to buy, something unconscious, and you shall use it. Especially now, that your website is fresh.
Don't let them think too much, otherwise they will be having doubts, then postpone their decision, then forget... You need to catch them in that moment when they just see your ad, get interested, and then go to the page and buy, with no extra movements and clicks.
Oh, and since Christmas is coming, don't forget that this could be a great gift for any women, so you could include men as your target and suggest them to offer the mirror to their women (wife, mother, sister, etc).
Don't be afraid to be a bit pushy. There are lots of online stores right now, and the ones that push the products - sell.
I hope it helps, and will be looking forward to see you succeed! Best of luck!
I'll go back to the calculations first.
When I talk about net profit, what I mean is the sales price minus taxes minus all your cost. That's your net profit.
Right now, you don't know these cost yet, as you don't yet know how much it costs to acquire 1 buyer.
So $15 is your gross profit.
And that makes a big difference in your calculations.
So keep that in mind, or you'll be disappointed at the end.
The good thing is, you're taking action and moving forward, so keep it up!
Week 2 Update
Last Week's Goals
- sell 20 units - not done
- get FB data on current ads and have a new batch of ads ready to run by next Monday - done
- add 5 more products to site - done
- post one guest article/have all metas done - not done (too soon)
- create a lead magnet/email capture form - not done (too soon)
- take pictures of real products if they arrive this week - half done (took some pics, some products were crap and some didn't arrive)
Week 2 is over and no more sales. There are probably several reasons for this but I think the main ones are that the website needs more work/better selection of products and that we need to get more traffic coming to it. While it's disappointing not to get more sales, looking back at the site I posted last week I don’t feel like we deserved any more.
We got about 15 additions to the cart and about 7 people made it to the checkout before they ditched. Based on the feedback I’ve received, my own opinion and our results, the website and the checkout are definitely weak points so we’re going to get these up to speed before we re-launch and keep running more ads. We've got another iteration of the site in the works which we hope to release this coming Sunday. I bit the bullet and bought a theme and I definitely think this version of the site will be the first “respectable” one.
As far as FB goes, the split testing we did delivered up a clear winner and we've been getting higher click-throughs as we gradually refine our testing. We've also decided to focus on the US market as there is a much larger consumer base there, USD has better purchasing power than AUD and the Chinese/US supply chains are well established so most of the shipping from AliExpress is fast and free.
While FB has been improving, our CPC for the US is around 1.01 which I feel is very, very high but I'm not too sure? It's probably a "how long is a piece of string question but does anybody have any thoughts on what good CPC rates/ click-through percentages on Facebook are generally? What kind of figures would you be really pleased with?
The SEO optimization/lead magnet work didn’t get done last week but it was probably putting the cart way before the horse. The main priority is getting the first acceptable version of the website up by this coming Sunday.
Some of the products we ordered came through. Some were really good and some were really crap, some literally fell apart soon after using them — it’s interesting how some products you think will be great are complete crap and how others are actually really good. It’s really great to hold and use them so you know exactly what you are selling.
You also very quickly get a sense for which suppliers on AliExpress are more professional and which are quite sloppy. Some push the shipping time to the limit and some get it to you right away.
Takeaways
- AliExpress is the wild west and is actually quite a small fishpond once you get to know it (in my niche at least). It’s the wild west because it is complete chaos. You have tons of suppliers/retailers blatantly plagarizing each other and ripping pics (I know, I know, people who live in glass houses and all that…) but you even have people using pics of 3 different products for the same listing. That’s pictures of 3 slightly different products all being presented as the same thing…
This chaos means that many identical products are being sold at vastly different prices. I’ve also noticed that vendors inflate the price of products with lots of good reviews. While they have every right to do this, it also means that if you look around a little you’ll find TONS of suppliers stocking absolutely identical products for much cheaper than the most popular vendors.
AliExpress is small because once you familiarize yourself with your products and niche, there aren’t all that many variations of the most popular products and most can be traced back to just a handful of manufacturers.
- If you want quality pictures, learn everything there is to know about your product and then look on Ebay, AliBaba and Amazon. Amazon in particular will have identical products as those found on AliExpress but they’ll have waaaay better quality images. It’s an absolute gold mine for quality pics!
- I created a profit/cost document so I know exactly the ROI/cost/profit/permissible Facebook spend for each product. I also linked a live USD exchange rate to it. Here is a clean version of the document if anyone wants to use it https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing
Upcoming week’s goals
- Get the website up and ready for traffic by Sunday
Good that you got some units in so you can actually see what the products look like.
This is so important, as you have now experienced yourself.
This will help you select the right supplier, right product, price level and even help you with your copy.
Most important at this point is to continue moving forward and keep adjusting and learning. Better to pend more time now on getting a solid base and then be able to scale up quickly then to push forward.
Often, pushing forward too soon gets you to a local plateau and no way to scale up.
upwards and onwards!
Originally Posted by pekadis
Great product selection - this is a great Amazon product in the US right now - you're totally sidestepping that competition by marketing to Australia which just opened up Amazon.
Here's an idea that I'm using to rank on Amazon that might kill it for
Facebook Video Ad -> Manychat Comment to Messenger "Comment Enter for a chance to win, Tag a friend who would love this!" -> Enter to win a contest (5 people win it free, results are announced in 2 weeks) -> Immediately give them a chance to get it NOW for 25% or some great discount -> keep trying for the sale for the people that didn't buy
It's working incredibly well on Amazon, and it costs almost nothing to give away 5 units in return for several hundred people on your list.
I still just get a password protected page ...
when you find a winner contact supplier direct by skipping ali and negotiate a lower price.... this is instant roi
trick to ecom success is lifetime customer value.. you want them coming back.. ask your supplier to include a thank you for shopping at our store heres your 30% off coupon on next sale to encourage them to buy more
Originally Posted by cmdeal
Originally Posted by Zack
Week 7 Update
After a few week hiatus and trying to find times to work over the Christmas/New Year period, the latest version of the site is up and running:
https://illuminamirrors.com
Please let me know what you think!
I'll post as usual next week and continue every week from then on.
This week's goals
- Get $100 worth of sales
Originally Posted by bmcer1
If you don't mind, I would suggest small improvements on overall website appearance, like for instance the "FREE SHIPPING ON ORDERS OVER $93" I'd put it bigger, to catch more attention, and also if it was clickable - would be great! To click and start shopping for instance. Feel free to make brighter call-to-actions
Since there is a bigger diversity of products now, I believe it's time to add the Cart, and make it accessible from the Home page (without entering the acc and looking for the cart). Besides you could try to visually separate the sections of the website - a header, then Collections, then Sales, etc. I'd also put the image "Shine with an Illumina mirror" on top, then you could allocate the Sales section, then the Collection, then the most Sold items - I just think it's visually easier to perceive information in that way, but really up to you.
Otherwise - awesome, you even added a chat! Congrats, it's a nice website
That looks good. I'd have a few minor tweak suggestions, but honestly, I think you should just get on running traffic and proceed from there.
Good luck, and looking forward to your first results!
P.S. - did a little more testing after writing that and noted that your cart popup window isn't correctly sized on my monitor. I'm on a 4k screen so that may just be an unusual error, but it's worth checking to see it's not universal: that's the sort of thing that can damage customer trust.
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