My (Still New) Journey

[inkerina]

Hi everyone!

So in lieu of sharing personal journeys I thought I'd share and keep a public diary of mine. Downloaded the Alidropship plugin June 5th and admittedly ghosted it for a month b/c I was overwhelmed with all the information about dropshipping, but I've been REALLY cranking my butt off to launch my site and, for the most part, it's 90% complete: www.bottleswag.com/blog

Made a lot of mistakes on the way (being cheap and not buying an SSL until the very end, being lazy with copywriting, etc.) , and tbh I'm still struggling but I am also still learning and intend to push at it until I make my first sale.

With the help of Youtube tutorials and FAQs, I was able to create my 1st website, 1st sales funnel, 1st marketing strategy, and hopefully 1st sale. I will keep update everyone when I become a dollar-ionnaire, but any critiques/suggestions would help

 

[Andre M]

Looks good Keep good work

 

[Kat]

Hi,

Nice product niche, and good work, just one thing which is apparently very important, you should get rid of water marks. It will look much more professional and unique to yourself.

 

[aurelion]

OK inkerina nice to hear!! Checked your website and looks good for first try. I would change the header into video or featured products (as you show with the buttons). At the moment you cant read the text very well. And the buttons arent related to the pictures. I would try to make your store more "human" with pictures of for example fitness athletes which show a bottle or something that they can get in your store.

 

[Doug]

Nice store and niche, the products looking really good.

But please remove right now all the banner slides, it's just horrible sorry for saying that.

Change it for better-looking pictures with better quality.

 

[jubran]

Welcome to the community

Well, your store looks okay. However, it needs A LOT of work.
1. Why are you having your store in a "blog" directory? having yourdomain.com/blog is pretty confusing if it's a shop. I mean if it was an actual blog it would make sense and it it was yourdomain.com/shop then it's okay (although not recommended).
2. Your header images look really bad. And without a proper contrast, people can't see the text at all.
3. You should look into your product page. Make a proper title, remove a variation if it had only 1 variation, product images are plain white, no proper product text copy.

And I only spent 1 minute looking on your site, so I am sure you'll find more things. And definitely make some QA before you open the store.

And take this tip if you don't want to throw your money in the sink: don't advertise most of the products you have in your store, they won't sell. Instead, get a high quality & much-needed product that will potentially solve someone's problem or at least make them motivated to be such product and then apply cross and upsell techniques to drive more sales and increase average order value.

Good luck!

 

[inkerina]

Thank you everyone for your replies and critique! I was a little AWOL this week b/c I was editing the site, but I'll answer to everyone:

@Andre M - Thanks!!
@Kat - Thank you, I was thinking the exact same, but I downloaded the beta Alidropship plugin (ver 1.5) which didn't have the watermark removing option. I will probably redownload the latest version and get right to that
@aurelion - Thank you! I will take heed of that. I agree about the banner, it might just be best to replace with actual products used by other people.
@Doug - No worries, others have commented that the banner throws them off as well. I appreciate your honesty! Will update the quality soon

@jubran - Thank you for the thorough response! I'm working on editing my product pages now (especially titles and descriptions), it's just been taking me awhile since I imported a lot of products. For the banner, I might just listen to everyone else and remove it altogether, or replace the theme of the site so the banner won't be there + get rid of the images.

Also a big reason why the domain is at /blog instead of home is entirely my fault due to a wacky technical error. I will have to transfer its location to its proper home page, and will fix that soon.

Also, yes yes I will only focus on 10-20 products to test! I've been working on my upsells and crossells strategy using the Alidropship beta plugins. But if you have other suggestions for plugins/apps for that, let me know!

Again thank you everyone! Next week, I hope to give another update!