meeyule
Active Member
After being in affiliate marketing for many years, I'd been thinking more and more of going the dropshipping route.
Then around May 2017 I read Yaros's post about his WorldOfHarry site, and was inspired. I read everything I could about dropshipping, registered a domain and started building. Bought the AliDropship Woo plugin, imported 100 or so products, and finally decided to go live in July 2017.
As this was an experiment for me, I decided to rely solely on free traffic from SEO and social media. I set up a Facebook page and an Instagram account and set up SocialRabbit to post to them.
After 6 months, here are my sales from that site:
The big drop in sales occurred when my dad got ill and I had to go back home to help my sister to look after him, she couldn't cope on her own - he had Alzheimer's as well as the other issues and was very difficult to handle. When he died and I came back to Amsterdam I started working on the site again, and sales started picking up again.
I made many mistakes, of course, as all beginners do. The biggest mistake was not securing the site with SSL. Somehow I always thought it would be very expensive and complicated - when I discovered a couple of weeks ago that there is actually a free alternative, and setting it up is really easy, I did it right away
I wonder how many sales I would have had if I'd set up SSL from the beginning. Probably way more.
Another mistake was not offering credit card payments. I'd only set up Paypal. I'm in the process of getting a credit card payment option set up now.
For a site without any paid advertising, with no SSL, and getting on average only 16 visitors a day, I actually am pretty pleased with the result. There were probably many canceled sales because of the lack of SSL, I should have installed the abandoned cart plugin right from the start as well. I've now installed it, and am interested to see if my sales will pick up now, especially when I have the CC option added.
Anyway, based on the results I decided to start another dropshipping site. This time I decided to go for the AliDropship Ultimate package. When I'd set up the first site it had taken me months of research and tweaking, this time I wanted to leave it to the experts, and try to learn as much as possible from them along the way. So I purchased the Ultimate package at the end of November and was amazed at how quickly the site progressed. The process was exciting and enlightening, and whenever I had a problem or question along the way, it was solved quickly and efficiently. In just a couple of weeks Daria and her team worked their way through the massive to-do list, and suddenly I was the proud owner of a brand-new eCommerce site.
Apart from one paid ad to get followers on Facebook, I have gone the same route with this site: no paid ads, just SEO, social networking and SocialRabbit. Here are my sales so far:
Not bad, considering the meagre amount of visitors. I'm now researching Instagram shoutouts, and plan to do my first one after the Chinese New Year celebrations. I'll do an update on that once the results are in
So far it's been quite an experience. I love the AliDropship plugin (both the original and the woo version) and I love dropshipping.
Then around May 2017 I read Yaros's post about his WorldOfHarry site, and was inspired. I read everything I could about dropshipping, registered a domain and started building. Bought the AliDropship Woo plugin, imported 100 or so products, and finally decided to go live in July 2017.
As this was an experiment for me, I decided to rely solely on free traffic from SEO and social media. I set up a Facebook page and an Instagram account and set up SocialRabbit to post to them.
After 6 months, here are my sales from that site:
The big drop in sales occurred when my dad got ill and I had to go back home to help my sister to look after him, she couldn't cope on her own - he had Alzheimer's as well as the other issues and was very difficult to handle. When he died and I came back to Amsterdam I started working on the site again, and sales started picking up again.
I made many mistakes, of course, as all beginners do. The biggest mistake was not securing the site with SSL. Somehow I always thought it would be very expensive and complicated - when I discovered a couple of weeks ago that there is actually a free alternative, and setting it up is really easy, I did it right away
I wonder how many sales I would have had if I'd set up SSL from the beginning. Probably way more.
Another mistake was not offering credit card payments. I'd only set up Paypal. I'm in the process of getting a credit card payment option set up now.
For a site without any paid advertising, with no SSL, and getting on average only 16 visitors a day, I actually am pretty pleased with the result. There were probably many canceled sales because of the lack of SSL, I should have installed the abandoned cart plugin right from the start as well. I've now installed it, and am interested to see if my sales will pick up now, especially when I have the CC option added.
Anyway, based on the results I decided to start another dropshipping site. This time I decided to go for the AliDropship Ultimate package. When I'd set up the first site it had taken me months of research and tweaking, this time I wanted to leave it to the experts, and try to learn as much as possible from them along the way. So I purchased the Ultimate package at the end of November and was amazed at how quickly the site progressed. The process was exciting and enlightening, and whenever I had a problem or question along the way, it was solved quickly and efficiently. In just a couple of weeks Daria and her team worked their way through the massive to-do list, and suddenly I was the proud owner of a brand-new eCommerce site.
Apart from one paid ad to get followers on Facebook, I have gone the same route with this site: no paid ads, just SEO, social networking and SocialRabbit. Here are my sales so far:
Not bad, considering the meagre amount of visitors. I'm now researching Instagram shoutouts, and plan to do my first one after the Chinese New Year celebrations. I'll do an update on that once the results are in
So far it's been quite an experience. I love the AliDropship plugin (both the original and the woo version) and I love dropshipping.