Drop Shipping Reflections After 500k in Sales
Drop Shipping Reflections After 500k in Sales by rikilii
I have been trying to drop ship for 2 years. 10 months ago, me and my business partner hit the e-commerce equivalent of gold. In that time we generated a little over half a million dollars in sales. This was the first place I heard about drop shipping and I want to write one of those success story posts that I always see, so here it goes, and feel from to ask whatever:
Luck Dropshipping is difficult to break into. There is a huge amount of luck mixed in with making good decisions. Drop shipping is not one of those things where you grind every day and eventually you are top tier. If it isn’t working for you, you should just move on to a new type of business or try out a different niche. Don’t sink your money on extra things you may not even need. Never ever ever buy one of those scam guides on how to get rich off of drop shipping. These guides are a complete scam all of the information people are paying for is available for free online!
About Us We are in a niche that very few or no people are in. I’m not going to blurt what the niche is, but I will say we got really lucky after trying several niches. We wasted time/money selling shoes, belts, accessories, the stuff that everybody else seemed to be doing. Part of the reason we were failing so hard was because we weren’t driving traffic to our site proportional to what we were shelling out. We don’t use any AdWords, FB/IG ads, etc. Nearly all of our sales are directly from Reddit, Imgur, or a search query.
Getting our name out It is a waste of money and it takes forever to find an ad that actually makes money and works. If you can actually make money using ads, do it. You’re lucky and should milk that for everything you can. If you haven’t found a way to do so, then you should be stopping literally yesterday.
We came up with a good niche and decided it was worth dropping some extra money on getting help from somebody experienced in digital marketing. The people we hired got us to the front page of Reddit and got us an overwhelming amount of sales because of that. A few news outlets picked us up because of the front page post on Reddit. After that, our SEO went through the roof and we ranked for several of our targeted keywords.
The traffic from Reddit brings in super high quality visitors unlike with Adwords. These are people who have already read your pitch from whatever post got to the front page and are somewhat sold on your idea. Once you have them on your website there is a good chance they will buy from you. The conversions are ridiculous and there is no chance in hell I am ever going back to making Ads on MS paint or hiring someone on Fiverr to make ads for me.
4) Choosing a niche Much more important than what you’re actually selling is the way in which you are selling your product. A lot of people thinking of drop shipping as a scam because you buy off of AliExpress and mark up the price. Drop shipping is useful because you do all of the work for your customers by finding stuff in a specific niche and putting it all in one convenient place.
For example, let’s say that you are running a “starter pack” site where people can get started on a hobby easily. If somebody wants to learn how to paint and type in “Painting supplies” on AliExpress they are going to get absolutely garbage results. On your site, you have already grouped everything together into one convenient package (Brushes, paints, easel, Bob Ross book, etc.) What if your niche is Cosplay and somebody wants to dress up as Cho Chang from Harry Potter? They will have zero luck finding it on AliExpress, but you can index that on your site and have the full costume wrapped up and ready to go. tl;dr Focus on a cool way to sell your product, not the actual product. Anybody can find a pair of boots on AliExpress.
5) Website K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple stupid!) We have a ton of white space and an easy to navigate site. We don’t use a million annoying pop-ups and bullshit “deal ending soon” crap. Don’t overwhelm your visitors, you’ll drive them away. Keep track of your bounce rate on Alexa or Google Analytics for a good estimate on how much engagement you’re getting on your site. We put things for sale right at the front of our store, people could check out in about 4-5 clicks if they wanted to. Don’t make people go searching for what you’re selling. Have a one (two MAX) sentence clear+concise tagline about what your site is all about.
tl;dr The biggest impact on our success was hiring help to get us to the front page of Reddit. In addition to that, focusing on the way we were selling products so that didn’t look like run of the mill drop shipping garbage had a huge impact on how people perceived us.
edit: some proof of sales – https://i.imgur.com/fDkRIC7.png
edit2: since I’m getting nonstop PMs about the marketing agency it’s elmparkalliance.com
Q&A
How did you get started with getting your store out there. Like what were your first steps that got you your first 50 orders
Made a nice looking Shopify
Imported nice images from AliExpress and made them non-reverse searchable.
Hired the marketing experts to help us design a campaign that would do well on Reddit. We ended up going with a meme and a top comment that linked back to our store.
Got overwhelmed with orders and spent a couple nights drinking a lot of coffee.
Would you be able to share a bit more info on #3? I have a product that we manufacture and sell in our niche but we’ve grown on basically just instagram and facebook posts with minimal ads. With our new products coming out I’m looking to seek marketing help but not sure where to start.
It is a huge investment to use those ads to grow as you know. If you have an actually awesome product you could probably benefit a lot. As far as specifics go, I’m not 100% sure about all of the timing and customization. I understand that the firm I used has access to moderator accounts in big subreddits and that is some how used to help you get to the top. I would suggest dropping like 750-1000 to get a pretty high quality campaign. It’s a good way to test the waters.
What did you do to ensure your images weren’t able to be reverse searched? Did you use a watermark or filter or something? Your marketing on reddit is fascinating. Was the meme directly related to the product? Thanks for all the help!
To make your images not reverse searchable it’s pretty easy. Most images on AliExpress have a white background, so just open it up in a photo editor and move the object around, shrink it a bit, change the saturation, flip the image, just make tiny tiny changes until the photo yields 0 results on AliExpress. It takes about 5 minutes per photo, so if you have a lot of products it can get exhausting.
The meme was kind of linked to the product. It’s harder to get away with a “direct link” on Reddit which is why you should put the name/link of your site in a top comment. You can definitely get away with it on Imgur, though. Which IMO grabs a lot more traffic.
What did the meme say? I look at memes everyday but rarely do I see one that makes me want to purchase. How did you change that mentality if that makes sense! Thanks for you help!
Just an example.
Title: MRW my dad buys me a subscription box full of unidentifiable Japanese snacks so that I can survive the semester
Image: https://i.imgur.com/dbAbXxn.jpg
Top comment: Where can I get this subscription box?
Reply: (url here)
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