Giving it a shot

Eric S.

Active Member
Take your time to do audience research in Facebook before running ads. That will make or break your campaign. Normally you run ads per interest group - magazines, brands, websites, fan pages, clubs/associations, b-list celebs etc but your product is a bit general in this case so it probably makes sense to look for competitor websites, brands and fan pages because you're looking for buyer audiences in your demo.

Search for ads/posts on facebook too around your niche to see what people are running.

I've spent a ton of time analyzing FB audiences, but it's true it's part art and science, both of which I'm still learning. I ran some small trials and found one ad that performs very well for CPC, but is not converting very well. Like you say, my niche is broad but there are some sub-niche's that might pay off. I'm doing some more competition research now.
 

Eric S.

Active Member
This shout-out was less fruitful. It was a Fiverr gig that I thought the audience could translate, but no sales from it. A decent follower bump at least. I just hit 400 followers in IG.

In an interesting switch, a couple IG'ers have DM'd me asking to promote the product. I'm not real excited about either, but interesting nonetheless.
 

Eric S.

Active Member
Immediately after my last post another order came through, not from the shout-out but via a FB ad. So I'm up to 8 total orders and almost $200 in revenue. I have not yet calculated exact profits. I'm essentially roughly putting any profit back in to shout-outs and FB ads at this point. I plan on giving a full breakdown later.

One interesting observation: only one purchaser has used my discount code. I don't know if that is because it is difficult to find in the cart or not. I'm wondering if some sales have been lost because they could not find where to enter the code.
 

Doug

Member
Thanks for sharing, it would be great to know about the math from your advertising.

The promo code field is very hard to find, I think it needs to be changed to a better position.

I will run an Adwords advertising on google for some keywords but first I need to get the credit card gateway working, so after that I can share here the results.
 

Nor

Member
Thanks for sharing, it would be great to know about the math from your advertising.

The promo code field is very hard to find, I think it needs to be changed to a better position.

I will run an Adwords advertising on google for some keywords but first I need to get the credit card gateway working, so after that I can share here the results.

google adwords will cost alot of money, much more than facebook ads but good luck if your able to get cheaper clicks through adwords than fb ads
 

Imran Shaikh

New Member
I am dropshipping from AliExpress and using the same buyer protection system. I don't see the problem with using this banner.

I understand the point @Yaros . But majority of us sellers wouldn't want our buyers to see that we're dropshipping from Aliexpress. There's a range of reasons behind it. One of them is, if they can get it from aliexpress (cheaper than my store), why would they order from my site? And an icon like that can lead them directly to aliexpress, at least to those buyers who have a keen eye to details.

Therefore, my personal opinion is to have an option to change the buyer protection icon with may a custom-made one.

Let me know what you guys feel about it. @dezigna & @Eric S.
 

Eric S.

Active Member
My take is I've already spent a fair amount of time personalizing the site to differentiate it. I did what I felt was a minimum to test the viability of a niche. The plug-in and theme give a quick way to do that. If the niche is profitable, I will likely continue to improve the the site and make it more unique and appealing to visitors, including replacing more of the iconography etc including the buyer protection icon. If it turns out to be really strong, I could see an all out branding effort.

However, I don't want to keep putting time into a site that is not profitable. The impact of that one icon on the viability of a niche is negligible, if any. So I'll leave it for now.
 

Eric S.

Active Member
Journey Update - last 48 hours

I've spent a fair amount of time (and some $$) on FB ad experiments. I have hit on a couple audience sets that provide some fairly low cost traffic. (< .25 CPM, < .05 CPC). Conversion rate is not so good as it's only led to a couple small sales. I'm still tweaking and limiting where to target while trying not to spend too much.

On others recommendation, I enabled the one-click buy option with PayPal on products. This has led to 8 'Buy One Click' abandoned orders. I placed two orders myself just to make sure that PayPal was working and configured correctly (it was).

Instagram has continued to provide the most excitement and pain. I've about given up on shoutouts as I cannot find any cost effective influencers in my niche. The last 2 quoted me $5 and €7 per 1k followers. They were over $200 per post. However, I'm branching out to some other methods. I have ordered a couple items and shipping them to someone so they can make posts utilizing the items. I also launched my first giveaway with an influencer today. This seems to potentially be a good source. All the influencer asked for was the product and some good images. It launched 15 hours ago and I've gained 300 followers to now be at 800. I don't know if this would be effective in all niches, but mine seems to particularly like that kind of thing.

I had one order closed by Ali late last week for which I appealed. The appeal went through today so I'm now verified with Ali. I placed a number of orders without issue while the one was under appeal with no issue.

My biggest technical issue is the shipment emails not sending as HTML properly. I have held off marking items shipped until hopefully that is fixed in the next release (tomorrow maybe?).

I don't know if this helps anyone, but it's kind of cathartic to post this here during the up's and downs of launching a site.
 
Last edited:

The Dropper

Active Member
Wow, great journey ! i'm interested to know more about your results with Facebook ads , how much you spent ? & how much are the earnings ? do you use Conversion or Click campaigns ? please keep us updated .
 

Eric S.

Active Member
Wow, great journey ! i'm interested to know more about your results with Facebook ads , how much you spent ? & how much are the earnings ? do you use Conversion or Click campaigns ? please keep us updated .

I'm running conversion campaigns, but don't have the 'conversion' part set up right yet. I've spent $16.50 on 'experiments' that did not work well. I've spent another $28.50 on the good ads for 118,000 impressions with 1,500 clicks to my site. Since I don't have it set up right yet I'm not certain which orders originated from where. But I've only had 4 orders during the duration of the ad runs for sales of $52.50 (4 days). I'm learning as I go, but obviously I have some improvements to make.
 

The Dropper

Active Member
Thanks for the updates , conversion campaigns with Checkout events may work well with you , hope you setup everything correctly , Good luck & congratz again on the results .
 

nick

Member
@eric , you have spent a lot of time and made a great effort to get this alidropship to work, however it seems your efforts are in vain, personally i think that getting ranked in the search engines is the way to go.

I think the plugin is great for building the shop but Yaros has been a bit over enthusiastic with the marketing techniques he proposes to get sales and infact after doing some research , sem rush, websta etc you will see the truth that his websites have hundreds of keywords ranked in the search engines and this is where the buying traffic is coming from.
 

Matt

New Member
@eric , you have spent a lot of time and made a great effort to get this alidropship to work, however it seems your efforts are in vain, personally i think that getting ranked in the search engines is the way to go.

I think the plugin is great for building the shop but Yaros has been a bit over enthusiastic with the marketing techniques he proposes to get sales and infact after doing some research , sem rush, websta etc you will see the truth that his websites have hundreds of keywords ranked in the search engines and this is where the buying traffic is coming from.

On the contrary Nick, SEO will take a very long time and even then you are at the mercy of Googles algorithms. I think the business model is laid out perfectly. I never would have thought that having a brand new store around 3 weeks old would have generated upwards of $800 in revenue already. I imagine your probably having issues with the niche you selected not the actual business model.

If you have ever tried to build and rank a website (I have many times) you will understand how frustrating it is to have google sandbox you and there is not a single thing you can do about it. Of course im not saying to neglect SEO entirely but if you want sales NOW then social media is the way to go supplementing that with white hat SEO for the future is really the best course of action.
 

Glady

Member
On the contrary Nick, SEO will take a very long time and even then you are at the mercy of Googles algorithms. I think the business model is laid out perfectly. I never would have thought that having a brand new store around 3 weeks old would have generated upwards of $800 in revenue already. I imagine your probably having issues with the niche you selected not the actual business model.

If you have ever tried to build and rank a website (I have many times) you will understand how frustrating it is to have google sandbox you and there is not a single thing you can do about it. Of course im not saying to neglect SEO entirely but if you want sales NOW then social media is the way to go supplementing that with white hat SEO for the future is really the best course of action.

I'm agree with Matt. It is the niche selection that takes the most important part when starting an online business. If you have very good niche with high potential customers, thousand sales in few weeks is not an impossible thing. For me, I think impossible is not a fact, it was just an opinion. Keep focusing on your niche @Eric S. and build some enough audiences. When you think it is too tough, it is still not to late to change your niche. There's always an opportunity behind an error.
 
Top