Cutified Pets - Pet Themed Apparel and Pet Costumes
- Thread starter Fernand
- Start date
Great story, wish you good luck with the store, looks good! I've tried downloading your balance sheet template as I found it quite nice, but the link does not seem to be working anymore?
larrysy
Member
Hi Fernand, thanks for sharing. I have one question about the "Free+Shipping offer" - how did you do it when all your other products are offered with free shipping? Does it matter if your buyer sees that all your other items are with free shipping? Did you just set the price to 0 and your shipping to the price you are selling? Do you have a duplicate product page (one with the standard free shipping and one for the free+shipping)? Thanks.
Direct Webstore
Well-Known Member
Because I want my sites to last many years and build up a reputation of honesty and trust ... I will NEVER resort to transparently scammy tactics like that. Sure ... some say it works and I believe it does ... in the short term. But if you want to build a quality site that will last many years ... keep things "honest".
larrysy
Member
I'm just starting and seeing all the "gurus" on YouTube promoting it (I watch the "free" YouTube tutorials but take them with a grain of salt), I thought of using it. But in the end, I agree with you 100%.
I gather it's easy to do on Sho...fy but hard to do on the AliDropship platform, which is geared towards free shipping out of the box. I tested some sites using Sh..fy. You don't get to see your final price (which is the shipping) unless you enter your information (I used fake emails to test) - as you said - "scammy".
Direct Webstore
Well-Known Member
No it's not. There are several shipping options with the Alidropshop Plugin and it could be done ... but I still wouldn't do it.
I can't think of a single, well established online retail business that does it. Only small, fly by night, get rich quick types use it. Only idiots would believe they are actually getting something for "free". Smart people can see through it immediately. I want to sell products to the smart people AND the idiots. LOL
Secondly ... if you are "paying for shipping", you'd expect to receive the product pretty quickly. That's simply not going to happen with Aliexpress. People may get away with this scam for a short time with sellers in their own country and FAST shipping times ... but it just won't work well at all with Aliexpress SLOWWWWW shipping.
Bottom line ... anyone who does the "free product, pay for shipping" scam and uses Aliexpress are short sighted fools who may make a bit of quick cash at the beginning ...but it won't last long.
Slow shipping is a given fact with Aliexpress. You can't avoid it. Basing your store on "shipping" in this case is just idiotic. I'd rather take the stand with my customers that the "shipping may be slow, but the product prices are rock bottom" ... i.e Draw attention to the "prices" and distract from the "slow shipping".
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larrysy
Member
While researching, I found this page which was able to do the free+shipping and regular shipping on the same store. The webstore was made with the WooCommerce version of AliDropship. It's quite easy to spot - all the team members in the about page are the same ( A lot of stores have the same "team", I wonder why people keep them). Anyway, just to make the story short, check out the comments on the top facebook post - it shows all the actual problems associated with a free+shipping promo.
Direct Webstore
Well-Known Member
Seriously? How lazy! I scrapped that entire page and made my own. But I have seen a few Alidropship sites around and about the ONLY thing they have changed is the logo. These are usually the same people complaining about no sales. If you're too lazy to customise your site, you're probably too lazy/stupid to do any effective marketing too.
I noticed in one of the Facebook posts the owner of the site (MrOwlie) put a link to the site and it says "Mr Owlie, Just another Wordpress site." This guy is even too lazy/stupid to change the main slogan of the site.
Pretty much proves my point. It's either technical hassles or people who find it hard to believe the site is giving stuff away for "free".
They also seem to be selling "fidget spinners" too. What do they have to do with owl?s No idea.
As an experiment, I also made a post on his page with the single word "Aliexpress" ... and it was posted! (I deleted the post afterwards.)
It's essential with Facebook pages that you go into settings, down to "Page Moderation" where you can block posts containing certain words. I included the words "aliexpress, alibaba, ebay, amazon, scam,scammer, spam, spammer, China, steal, rippoff, dropshipping, dropship, drop, bullshit, crap, low quality"
But I'm really quite happy there are people running their stores like that ... reduces competition ... lol
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