Why My E-commerce Journey Is Unique
Dropshipping is typically undervalued. People are smart and now are starting to understand the basic principles of dropshipping, especially in the USA. It’s a great business model, and it’s designed to have zero to little start-up cost, but it also comes with tremendous barriers that people don’t recognize until you get started.
Truth is, if you have a decent amount of experience working with social media, watching Youtube videos in order to teach yourself things, and basic-level marketing skills you can probably start a store and get a few ads up and running pretty easily. And then you will probably get disabled and quit. The part that is undervalued is NOT building your debut-theme Shopify store and slapping on a product that has 1000+ orders on Aliexpress and then using Aliexpress creatives when running your ads. This is the typical way that dropshippers do things when first starting out and now in 2021 this way of doing things will be a surefire way to lose money and fail.
There’s a few basic rules that people tend to go by when you actually have an intermediate level of skill around dropshipping. If you have watched a few hundred hours of dropshipping Youtube videos you will know what I am talking about:
a.) Find a product that solves a problem
b.) Test lots of interests, placements, creatives, and countries with FB ads to get results (not $30 for one ad and then give up when it has no purchases)
c.) Market it in a way that differentiates yourself with GOOD (preferably your own) creatives. Stock pictures from Aliexpress suppliers are a no-no.
These are the basic rules that tend to actually produce results in e-commerce but it’s the BARE minimum.
I’ve only told a few people this story before so I’m not sure why I’m telling the internet. Nonetheless, my story is that I was too hard-headed to do a lot of product research and figure out what I could sell that would make me money, not what I could sell that would make me look cool. I started in the clothing niche (I can’t believe I wanted to start a clothing line lol) which I quickly realized was a horrible idea and gradually changed over to accessories. I only moved over to accessories because my first sale when my “clothing brand” was still a clothing brand was actually a necklace. Typically accessories are a weird thing to dropship because when doing so you’re not solving a problem, it’s not a pain product, and it doesn’t really play on people’s emotions (other than the fact that it looks pretty) which tend to be the products that do the best in dropshipping. But accessories don’t come with the headache that clothing lines do. There’s not really any sizing issues and there’s usually no quality problems unless you dropship low quality copper or alloy products.
A week after I decided to try to move things gradually over to accessories I saw an Ad on Instagram for an accessory that I would buy. I almost bought from them actually. Instead, I found the product and listed it on my store and ran ads for it. I got orders. It wasn’t exactly perfect and I was still learning so much. There were a lot of problems. But finally I was almost profitable.
After a few more weeks of tweaking ads I ordered the product that was selling the best and I got some original photos of it. This in turn made the store look less “dropshippy” and things were pretty good overall. Then my Facebook Ad account got disabled after I did a couple thousand dollars in sales. Long story short a few weeks later I was back up and running, better than before.
Anyway, today I have several thousand followers on my businesses Instagram account with tons of people that reach out to me about collaborations or influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers that offer to promote the products for free. I have a decent amount of loyal returning customers and a decent sized following of people who like the store and see it as different. I definitely market the store in a way that caters towards a very specific type of person. None of my products are from Aliexpress anymore. They have fast shipping time and they are sourced high-quality from an agent. I’m finalizing moving things into a 3PL warehouse this week. I have consistently generated thousands of dollars in profit a month from a very simple idea that is now a branded group of niche products. That’s a huge amount of growth for a 6-month old store.
The point of this story is that I never really sold a product that was a typical dropshipping product. I don’t know if this store could ever reach a million in sales. A lot would have to happen to achieve that. Today, the store tends to run on autopilot. At most I would need to do around 5 minutes of work a day to keep it going. But obviously I’m always changing things and trying to find how to grow it and keep it going. The goal with the store is to eventually create original accessories that go viral and keep the brand different from the rest. But you have to start somewhere.
Samantha Fudens xx
