DropShipping
I Started a branded dropshipping business. Here’s what happened:
So a few months back I was tired of hearing all these annoying ads about drop shipping and finally decided to see what it was all about. I started doing a little bit of research and came across a video from Dan Vas; A two-hour-long tutorial about how to start your branded dropshipping business. I watched it and decided to start my Shopify free trial. A quick piece of advice if you want to do this, find a 30-day free trial, Shopify offers a 14 free trial which is fine to get started but you are saving about $15 with the 30-day free trial, I know a yes theory video has one in its description (I will put the link at the bottom of this post). Any back to the story, with my free trial started I could start building my website and more importantly my brand. This is where everything starts. With this one single video, only two hours in length the seed of my business is created.
The video starts with answering some questions people might have and introducing the idea of branded drop shipping versus regular dropshipping, in branding dropshipping you have the company print logos on your product and you focus on building a brand that lasts rather than a product that has to keep changing. After this the video jumps into product sourcing, he first had a list of niches that sell and here comes my first mistake, I select a product, contact the company with the template provided in the video and then move on. I didn’t spend the time researching and choosing a good product that has a market, I am not completely unsatisfied with my product I just think I could have been more successful if I had taken the time to research and select a product with a bigger market. The product I selected is a Bluetooth music plugin for your car. It plugs into the cigarette lighter and it connects to the radio, you set it to a certain station and you pair your phone to the device then you can play music from your phone as if you were aux’d in. I had selected my product and started my trial, next it was time to build my website.
Building my website was a long tedious process of installing, writing, taking pictures, editing, making logos and banners, setting up apps, and making changes until everything was just as I wanted. The video goes across selecting your theme, design and just general templates for your website. I get a few things set up that the video recommends and move on to the next step, apps. Apps are stressed as very important, to make sales on the “back end” most of the apps for this were marketing apps that email, text or Facebook message you with a discount if you abandon your shopping cart. I installed all these apps and did some basic set up and moved on to the next step, which at this point steered away from the video because the next step in the video was a big one, how to run Facebook, Instagram, and google ads.
At this time I still needed to hammer out a deal with the company from Alibaba (where I sourced my product) I needed a sample and I needed to find out how our relationship was gonna go. I ordered the sample which was the first expense, at $31.50 this included 7-day shipping and printing fees. While I waited for the sample to arrive I still needed to figure out what would be the price at which I could order product. The minimum printing order quantity was 2000 pieces which would work out to be just over $6,500 so that was out of the picture. I asked them if I could just order samples until I could afford to do a mass print, this wasn’t a great solution but I wanted to start selling, they said ok, however at that time I did not realize that they were saying ok to something else, there was a bit of a language barrier, their English was not the best. I later figured that out and discussed with them and they offered to do 100 piece print which would cost more of a base price but way less overall, it would still be in the $600 range which I had nowhere near enough money so decided I will not sell with the logo on the product for a little while until I can afford 100 print quantity. Now with that mess figured out I can move on to refining my website.
My website at this point was but a hollow skeleton with only one hand to make sales, but I still needed to fill that skeleton, make it complete, and so I did. I wrote up a decent description for my item on my product page and I took good pictures, I made them look nice using adobe lightroom and now I had a pretty decent product page. My home page was still as empty as my wallet. I got rid of some elements I didn’t want or need. I made some slides and wrote some more and also made a banner for the top of the page. Next, I filled in the FAQ which was thorough one of the apps I used. I made sure everything was in tiptop shape. I double-checked and triple checked that there were no holes, nothing that would make my website look unprofessional. Then I was ready to launch. Click… It was done.
Let me tell you that it was hard, but I did it and I was happy with myself. It was time to move on to advertisements. At this point, my free trial had ended and thus comes my second expense of $30 for my first month. Now before I did advertisements I need two things, a platform and a video so first I started on the platform, Facebook. I set up a basic, bare, boring, brittle Facebook page. Now if I could go back, I would have done Instagram and google too but, advertising scared me and Facebook didn’t seem so hard and scary so that what I went with. After completing my site I moved on to the video, this was a tutorial video and I did three times, each time getting increasingly better but I was never really happy with it. I just wanted to start the campaign, which would be for engagement which is likes and comments or “social proof”. The idea is once you run an engagement post you start another campaign for conversions using the same “ID” all the likes are transferred so you have social proof reassuring people that your brand is trustworthy. I ran this campaign while I was on vacation making this my third expense of $5 over 7 days which totaled to $35. One good thing and one okay thing came out of it. The good thing was that people were going to the website, I got nearly 100 visits which still is not a lot. The okay thing, I got likes but just 3 or 4.
Everything said and done I really wanted to move on to a conversions ad even though my engagement ad had not been very successful, I just wanted to start making money to encourage me to keep going, however, I was dry outta money and so I decided to try and build my Facebook page, something I should have done in the first place. This is where I am. I have hit a slump, I don’t have much desire or faith to push on. That’s why I decided to write this post- to remind me of all the hard work I’ve put in and how I’m so close to getting it to pay off. Success is determined by will, if you give up you’ll have no success, if you push forward, you will find you’re long sought after success. Thanks for reading, there are a few links down below if you wanna check out my website or if you wanna get the 30 days free trial from the Yes theory video.
My Website:
30-day Shopify free trial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=023NcazhBmI
Facebook page: