[FOLLOW ALONG] 10M Revenue in One Year! Let's do it (13)
Alright, about a year ago, i started a follow along in the fb section - https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-General-Store
I shared my strategy, what I learned, results there and get a lot of valuable feedback from the people here. with your help, in about a year I grow the store to almost 3M revenue. Not bad.
But... I got lazy, slacked off for a while - took vacations, travel, watch too much TVs etc...and as a result, I was stuck in the $150k - 200k /month for the past 6 months, and watching the traffic getting more and more expensive, and margin gets less & less.
Until a few weeks ago, I woke up, and we got a first negative day - I haven't seen a negative day for months, and this hit me. I'm going to fully commit to this again, with the new goal of hitting 10M in a year with a 20%+ profit margin.
The strategy will be basically the same, general store testing products, take the winning product and build a better funnel & store around it.
The revenue growth is in direct proportion to how fast we can test and launch new store/funnels. so in the next couple months, I'm going to double down this strategy, and I'm doing to document this journey here.
Stay tuned.
Here is a list of what we have and what I think the risk factors are:
What we have
A team - 3 customer service, 2 product researcher & tester, 2 graphic & video designer, 1 junior media buyer & me.
Risk Factors:
Here are all the risk factors i can think of:
1) Merchant Account: We were pretty close to get our stripe account shutdown last year due to high chargeback. We managed to lower the chargebacks, and is still using stripe for all of our procesing, however, it's a risk I cannot understate.
How we are going to mitigate this issue - we are going to use load balancing among a few merchant accounts - we have custom software solution and have this setup already.
2) Facebook Customer Feedback Score
IMHO, this is the biggest risk factor for us. we don't have acct ban yet, but we were very close a few times with the score. I have not yet figure out a good way to solve this completely other than pulling GH with new account, new BM, new pixel, new computer etc). We have train out product research to research for quality products, and asked our sourcing supplier to double check on the quality. However, we were still very close a few times. (no we are not going to take on inventory, that IMHO is a different biz model, i'm partnering another friend to explore this model, but as a single person, taking on inventory management and logstics is just too much, also they eats valuable cash flow, increase risk by a lot)
Amazing @cawovt!
I'm really excited about this FA and I sure you will crush it.
Hit me up if you're interested for a mini-mastermind. I don't run general store, but I believe I can give you some cool insights whats working for other dropshippers.
Good luck and keep this FA alive! 
Originally Posted by wakeboarder
I'm really excited about this FA and I sure you will crush it.
Hit me up if you're interested for a mini-mastermind. I don't run general store, but I believe I can give you some cool insights whats working for other dropshippers.
Good luck and keep this FA alive!
You have been doing 150k per month with what margins ?
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Are you running so agressive because of the chargebacks? Or is it really quality product mainly?
You dont have better quality product available? Probably less margin but it will avoid the headaches right?
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Originally Posted by stickupkid
We only have 1 BM now, so the test account could impact other accounts when flagged. So I m thinking about separate them out to a separate BM.
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follow
The past few days have not been fun. Multiple our pages are hit with low customer feedback, so we’ve preemptively switched out the pages. Domains, etc.
The customer feedbacks increasingly becoming a major concern, so we’ve invest a lot of time to make sure the product are good quality and our supplier ships out within same day.
Still, our feedback score remains between 2-3, occasionally dip below 2 for a few times.
What do we do to mitigate this risk -
1) we made sure it’s good quality item with a reliable vendor.
2) we over staff our support staff, so messages gets answered (most of the time) in a few minutes. And with generous refund policy.
3) I m looking into a process for getting a few back up BMs, just in case.
4) I m also explore other traffic sources - top of the list is native & pinterest. Reason - we have a few senior products that I think will work great on native. Also a few women age 20-45 products should work well on Pinterest.
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Get off stripe ASAP, it’s just a matter of time until you run into issues and end up with a 90 day hold.
I’d strongly suggest bluesnap, they have been great to us. Let me know if you need a referral link.
When calculating processing costs, be sure to take into account the additional charges for out of country cards. In some cases if it’s foreign currency, it’s nearly 5% (!) all in to take the payment.
You’ll need to make sure packages arrive within at least 12 days, ideally much sooner. No matter how good your support is, if they get the fb survey and no package has been received... you’ll be stuck in the 2’s
If your running funnels, try to not have them on your main store domain - so if it gets burnt then you can easily run on a new BM
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Originally Posted by nickpeplow
what supplier are u using? dsers,silkroad?
Let me educate you a little on the ticking time bomb you have up your ass.
I did 7 figures a month on Stripe from 2015 to April of 2018.
We got an email.....a fucking email telling us to find another processor as our account would be shut down in FIVE DAYS. This was on a Thursday. NOT BUSINESS DAYS. Calendar days!
What in the blue fuck. There was no place to call. Could only send in a support ticket. I finally stalked all of the Collison brother's social media until I found Patrick Collison's personal email.
Yeah, never fuck with an internet marketer I will find you and dox you if I have to.
Patrick Collison himself (co-owner of Stripe) gave us 30 calendar days to unfuck our mess.
In fact, it took 60 days with NO PROCESSING until we got enough merchant accounts to make it work
Chargeback rate was 0.60%.
Go talk to Cristine at Soar Payments. They can set you up through EMS or one of the big processors.
But let me warn you. I'm sorry if this sounds like a sales letter, I have been writing them for years and everything sounds like that now LOL.
Getting on Stripe was EASY. You click a button, BOOM you have processing. I just did that for a hobby store I have.
Getting REAL processing is VERY hard, and you'll get it in chunks of 50 -75K per month approvals. Here is what we went through:
- Send out 30 applications for processing.
- All owner personal information must be supplied. Credit checks on all owners. ID required.
- Site visit by processor's representative.
- 6 months copies of bank statement
- 6 months copies of all merchant statement
- detailed descriptions of what you sell / how you do it.
- owner personal guarantee.
It's like a fucking home loan, or maybe worse.
You, my friend, are on borrowed time. Get up tomorrow and do NOTHING else except look for processing and send in apps. Your business and profit margins are not important right now.
Stripe will bitch slap you and cut your balls off so fast your head will spin. Better have another option or three.....
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