Hi all,
I have been checking again, which alternatives to Oberlo are out there in the iSpace, however, the one and only good one is AliDropship. Nothing more to say about that. Considering that eCom stores with Wordpress and WooCommerce or Wordpress and AliDropship are an accountable and saleable asset and Shopify is only a rented cloud space, we’re fine off. And for a very fair price consisting of a one time fee, a state of the art kBase and excellent customer service. Congratulations to the AliDropship Team.
However, there are around 1,7 billion domains out there and around 200,000,000 active websites, yes - 200 millions. Having only a web shop is not enough. It's just the start. And then, after having optimised SEO, product descriptions, photos and provided ease of shopping, safe payment, free shipping etc. - no sales. That is kind of normal, as a website is only kind of an online catalogue that can be visited, seen and forgotten. There's just too much out there. You could compare Facebook and Google Ads with handing out flyers to people in order to see your website or catalogue. And that is exactly what they are doing. See your website - and go. You can apply all kind of conversion tricks and rules - its still just a simple standard offer and there is too much distraction on a regular website like menus, links and other information that draw away the unshared attention of the customers of the only thing we want them to do - to buy.
I have 522 products in my shop, had more than 5000 visitors in a month, 1230 on my best day … but only ONE sale, and that was only test whether the checkout works properly.
Additionally, visitors who are looking for a specific product and get somehow by organic search or paid ads to your product page will look for other pages, as well, and compare price, shipping, extra offers etc. and probably end up buying at Amazon or eBay where the AliExpress suppliers are selling their products for the same price as in AliExpress themselves. No chance for a normal eCom owner to compete for the intentional specific product searching customer. We cannot compete with these prices and are therefor doomed to loose.
So, if you don't have a stand alone own product that cannot be purchased somewhere else - you're spoiled. This market sector is obsolete for the traditional dropship web shops and there is nothing to earn. The only necessity of an own domain and website is to gain customer trust and confidence and proof that your are a real business.
The most important lesson is to focus on passionate impulse buyers and not on the classic intentional product searcher and comparer. These kind of visitors can only be attracted by Facebook and Instagram ads. No other way.
I started my web store in February 2019 and started promoting end of February,. Then I stopped advertising in Facebook around March 17 and started again with a Post boost, a dynamic ad with a product carrousel and an engagement ad to gather some likes for my Facebook Fanpage by April first for around 9 days. The Google Ads paid search brought only 5.4 % of the traffic, even less than the organic traffic. The vast part of the traffic is caused by advertising in social media. I spent around 540 Euro for my Google lesson and about the same for Facebook (about 85% of the traffic. At least, I could convince 1 (one) visitor to buy something on my website and gain a lot of likes for my fanpage ... but that was a quite expensive lesson. All in all 1200 Euros in Ads for 1 sale of 34 Euros …
Another extremely important observation is that the vast majority of my website visitors are mobile users. Therefor an extremely fast loading of the product pages and an attractive design is question of life or dead.
According to my charts we have exactly 42 seconds for page load, conversion and easy mobile checkout. At the moment we are far away from that - a point that Google takes very serious - plus there is no such thing like an easy mobile check-out.
Well, the point is that we have to adapt to changed market requirements and work with instruments like Sales Funnels. See: https://help.clickfunnels.com/hc/en-us/articles/360020781894-Claim-Your-Free-T-Shirt-Plus-MORE-
I am NOT an a Clickfunnel affiliate, I do not earn any money or honours with recommending to watch anything from them - I don’t even recommend them.
But please watch the first video. It's very clear and convincing, just common sense, what Russel is saying is the rough truth - and it is worth the time for this short video. The first one will do. So: don’t sign up because of my thought and don’t buy his Free book with only US 14.95 shipping
- just relax, watch and learn.
For those who already made their experiences … please share with us what you learned.
There are some other Funnel software providers out there, however, ClickFunnel is the loudest one and best known. Examples are: WooCurve, wooshark, WooCommerce Sale , Funnel, Ezusy, Unbounce, Instapage, Leadpages, Builderall, Pipedrive, 10 Minute Funnels, OptimizePress, Samcart, HubSpot, Landingi, Funnelcockpit and some others.
The principle is always the same:
I find that a Wordpress plugin like ELEMENTOR which is free or cheap in the pro version (49 US$ yearly) could easily be combined with AliDropship in order to set up "single product promo pages" and/or Sales Funnels.
The point is how to manage "Add to Cart", "Click to continue" and the Checkout in order to channel the orders through our AliDropship fulfillment, tracking and email system. Couldn't it be kind of a "page in page" integration?
As I have seen by now, there is no way of entering an order manually from a point after the checkout. The products would have to be added to the cart in AliDropship's product pages and then sent through the checkout process. As we don't know the Credit Card details of the customer (neither want to) we would have to create a "one time coupon" for the whole purchase (for every single customer) and then go through the checkout. The problem is that the customer would receive a "Thank you for your order" email with 0.00 as purchase price ... so, that is not an option.
Dealing these orders manually with purchasing the products one-by-one from AliExpress and then send out manually one-by-one emails with the order confirmation, shipping details and so on neither.
And that's one of the many reasons, why ClickFunnel draws away so many eCom entrepreneurs from Shopify and other eCommerce platforms. There is no need for an own website to use ClickFunnel.
I have integrated the "Add to Cart" button simply by copying the code and entering it in the product description. It works fine. If something like this would work with i.e. Elementor - we would have found the Holy Grail and AliDropship would catch all the users of Shopify AND Clickfunnels as grateful new customers to their system.
Many Shopify users changed because the monthly fees for Shopify, Oberlo and many other add-ons are simply too high, especially if there are no sales because of a lack of proper marketing and extra costs and commissions for Amazon, eBay etc.. Same for Clickfunnel. You can choose between a cheap (97 US$ monthy) simple basic version and a complete premium version (US$ 297 monthly). And there is still a TRANSACTION FEE of 4.6 % for each sale ... The better selling or producing funnel templates cost between US$ 69 and US$ 297 APART. These are not included in the free funnel collection. And for both - the costs for the social media and Google Ads have to be added to make them work.
If we could link Elementor PRO and AliDropship Woo that would be only US$ 89 one-time-fee for the AliDropship plugin and US$ 49 yearly for the Elementor Pro version. That's it. Plus the expenses for ads, of course ... but who would not want to get all the benefits of an own eCommerce Website plus the boost of the sales funnels for that money? Who would not want this? Or the AliDropship developer team sets up a THIRD AliDropship version that includes Sales Funnels. Well, I would be probably the first to sign up for that.
I hope AliDropship can provide a solution to this topic soon. We MUST use more progressive marketing tools in order to survive. Simply exhibiting products in a virtual showcase is not enough. 200,000,000 others do the same.
I look forward to hearing from you!
Matthias
I have been checking again, which alternatives to Oberlo are out there in the iSpace, however, the one and only good one is AliDropship. Nothing more to say about that. Considering that eCom stores with Wordpress and WooCommerce or Wordpress and AliDropship are an accountable and saleable asset and Shopify is only a rented cloud space, we’re fine off. And for a very fair price consisting of a one time fee, a state of the art kBase and excellent customer service. Congratulations to the AliDropship Team.
However, there are around 1,7 billion domains out there and around 200,000,000 active websites, yes - 200 millions. Having only a web shop is not enough. It's just the start. And then, after having optimised SEO, product descriptions, photos and provided ease of shopping, safe payment, free shipping etc. - no sales. That is kind of normal, as a website is only kind of an online catalogue that can be visited, seen and forgotten. There's just too much out there. You could compare Facebook and Google Ads with handing out flyers to people in order to see your website or catalogue. And that is exactly what they are doing. See your website - and go. You can apply all kind of conversion tricks and rules - its still just a simple standard offer and there is too much distraction on a regular website like menus, links and other information that draw away the unshared attention of the customers of the only thing we want them to do - to buy.
I have 522 products in my shop, had more than 5000 visitors in a month, 1230 on my best day … but only ONE sale, and that was only test whether the checkout works properly.
Additionally, visitors who are looking for a specific product and get somehow by organic search or paid ads to your product page will look for other pages, as well, and compare price, shipping, extra offers etc. and probably end up buying at Amazon or eBay where the AliExpress suppliers are selling their products for the same price as in AliExpress themselves. No chance for a normal eCom owner to compete for the intentional specific product searching customer. We cannot compete with these prices and are therefor doomed to loose.
So, if you don't have a stand alone own product that cannot be purchased somewhere else - you're spoiled. This market sector is obsolete for the traditional dropship web shops and there is nothing to earn. The only necessity of an own domain and website is to gain customer trust and confidence and proof that your are a real business.
The most important lesson is to focus on passionate impulse buyers and not on the classic intentional product searcher and comparer. These kind of visitors can only be attracted by Facebook and Instagram ads. No other way.
I started my web store in February 2019 and started promoting end of February,. Then I stopped advertising in Facebook around March 17 and started again with a Post boost, a dynamic ad with a product carrousel and an engagement ad to gather some likes for my Facebook Fanpage by April first for around 9 days. The Google Ads paid search brought only 5.4 % of the traffic, even less than the organic traffic. The vast part of the traffic is caused by advertising in social media. I spent around 540 Euro for my Google lesson and about the same for Facebook (about 85% of the traffic. At least, I could convince 1 (one) visitor to buy something on my website and gain a lot of likes for my fanpage ... but that was a quite expensive lesson. All in all 1200 Euros in Ads for 1 sale of 34 Euros …
Another extremely important observation is that the vast majority of my website visitors are mobile users. Therefor an extremely fast loading of the product pages and an attractive design is question of life or dead.
According to my charts we have exactly 42 seconds for page load, conversion and easy mobile checkout. At the moment we are far away from that - a point that Google takes very serious - plus there is no such thing like an easy mobile check-out.
Well, the point is that we have to adapt to changed market requirements and work with instruments like Sales Funnels. See: https://help.clickfunnels.com/hc/en-us/articles/360020781894-Claim-Your-Free-T-Shirt-Plus-MORE-
I am NOT an a Clickfunnel affiliate, I do not earn any money or honours with recommending to watch anything from them - I don’t even recommend them.
But please watch the first video. It's very clear and convincing, just common sense, what Russel is saying is the rough truth - and it is worth the time for this short video. The first one will do. So: don’t sign up because of my thought and don’t buy his Free book with only US 14.95 shipping
- just relax, watch and learn.For those who already made their experiences … please share with us what you learned.
There are some other Funnel software providers out there, however, ClickFunnel is the loudest one and best known. Examples are: WooCurve, wooshark, WooCommerce Sale , Funnel, Ezusy, Unbounce, Instapage, Leadpages, Builderall, Pipedrive, 10 Minute Funnels, OptimizePress, Samcart, HubSpot, Landingi, Funnelcockpit and some others.
The principle is always the same:
- Aquire visitors by social media and Google Ads
- Get them to the landing page which is a "Squeeze page" just to get the visitors name and email address, i.e. with the offer of a gift "Get a chance for your free camping folding stove for FREE including shipping by signing up and clicking on Continue" ...
- Visitor gets to the sales page of the first product which is usually an irresistible offer of a discounted niche product
- Then he gets to the first one-click Upsell page
- Possibly a second one-click Upsell page
- Normally there is then a one-click Downsell page, as well
- Checkout page with payment and shipping info plus the payment gateway
- Thank you page
I find that a Wordpress plugin like ELEMENTOR which is free or cheap in the pro version (49 US$ yearly) could easily be combined with AliDropship in order to set up "single product promo pages" and/or Sales Funnels.
The point is how to manage "Add to Cart", "Click to continue" and the Checkout in order to channel the orders through our AliDropship fulfillment, tracking and email system. Couldn't it be kind of a "page in page" integration?
As I have seen by now, there is no way of entering an order manually from a point after the checkout. The products would have to be added to the cart in AliDropship's product pages and then sent through the checkout process. As we don't know the Credit Card details of the customer (neither want to) we would have to create a "one time coupon" for the whole purchase (for every single customer) and then go through the checkout. The problem is that the customer would receive a "Thank you for your order" email with 0.00 as purchase price ... so, that is not an option.
Dealing these orders manually with purchasing the products one-by-one from AliExpress and then send out manually one-by-one emails with the order confirmation, shipping details and so on neither.
And that's one of the many reasons, why ClickFunnel draws away so many eCom entrepreneurs from Shopify and other eCommerce platforms. There is no need for an own website to use ClickFunnel.
I have integrated the "Add to Cart" button simply by copying the code and entering it in the product description. It works fine. If something like this would work with i.e. Elementor - we would have found the Holy Grail and AliDropship would catch all the users of Shopify AND Clickfunnels as grateful new customers to their system.
Many Shopify users changed because the monthly fees for Shopify, Oberlo and many other add-ons are simply too high, especially if there are no sales because of a lack of proper marketing and extra costs and commissions for Amazon, eBay etc.. Same for Clickfunnel. You can choose between a cheap (97 US$ monthy) simple basic version and a complete premium version (US$ 297 monthly). And there is still a TRANSACTION FEE of 4.6 % for each sale ... The better selling or producing funnel templates cost between US$ 69 and US$ 297 APART. These are not included in the free funnel collection. And for both - the costs for the social media and Google Ads have to be added to make them work.
If we could link Elementor PRO and AliDropship Woo that would be only US$ 89 one-time-fee for the AliDropship plugin and US$ 49 yearly for the Elementor Pro version. That's it. Plus the expenses for ads, of course ... but who would not want to get all the benefits of an own eCommerce Website plus the boost of the sales funnels for that money? Who would not want this? Or the AliDropship developer team sets up a THIRD AliDropship version that includes Sales Funnels. Well, I would be probably the first to sign up for that.
I hope AliDropship can provide a solution to this topic soon. We MUST use more progressive marketing tools in order to survive. Simply exhibiting products in a virtual showcase is not enough. 200,000,000 others do the same.
I look forward to hearing from you!
Matthias
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