I wrote how further up in the post and there is a thread on this forum on how to do it.
New User, New Journey [Long]
- Thread starter Tokay
- Start date
Don James
Active Member
Hi Tokay
I used the Alidropship guide and set-up Stripe using my Singapore details
Got notification through email that my account is live
I tested buying from my webstore with credit card using different browse and successful
Thank you Tokay for guidance in the earlier message.
Hope now i get more sales because I have alot of payment abandoned
regards
Don
Glad to hear. Yes I found that Stripe helps alot. of the 16 or so orders I got, maybe 11 were paid through Stripe.
DropshipPlanet
New Member
Yes Facebook is a lot of work. My last attempt using audience from my site pixel and set to conversions didn't go so well. Very little reach and no conversions. On the bright side it only used up about 50c of my budget.
IG influencers are hit or miss. When I first started I contacted about 15 influencers and tested them all, I was even scammed by one. I've spent over $300 on shoutouts and they've eaten quite a bit into my profit margin. You also need to be lucky with the sales. As an example I've spent $15 on a shoutout and came out with $50 profit. Great right? Not so much; I've also spent $15 to make $1 profit, so a net loss of $14 or you could even make no sales.
It's not a magic "make a shoutout and get sales" formula like I and many others have thought. You need to spend money testing and finding the best influencers. Of all I've tried there really is only 1 that has gotten me consistent, steady sales. Even then it's still a crapshoot. Eg. I did a weeklong promo with him, 2 posts a day for 7 days and where I'd make decent sales on the one offs, this time I was in the hole about $30. You also have to work around their schedules and prices. Chances are there are others using the same strategy in your niche, hell in mine there's one large shop that blanket buys promos. They must spend $1000s on promos every month and I often have to book my promos a few days in advance. This isn't really a bother as I've found sales are much better Thurs-Sunday. Because of this last point, it's been slow lately.
I've been travelling the past 2 days so haven't had the time to post or work on the site much. Here's my stats for the 4th week;
Only $50 difference from my 3rd week. Was only able to run 1 shoutout since the last post and Facebook ads didn't go as well as planned. Unfortunately I didn't make my $1000 sales mark. It's a slow process but getting there.
Here's my financials so far;
Gross Sales: 651.18
Supplier Costs: 352.62
PayPal/Stripe Fees: 30.05
Expenses (shoutouts/FB ads/hosting/etc): 533.96
Total: -265.65
Of course this includes hosting, plugin, which alone make up for around $170. My net loss increased by $40 from last week from testing FB ads. I will keep trying with shoutouts a bit more and aim to start making profit this month. Slowly but surely
jojo
Member
someone's experience regarding stripe:
For everybody who wants to know whether this works here is my story:
I did try as the article suggests and twice, but account gets suspended in twenty something days. First every thing works well your customers can pay you and you even get the funds transferred to you and you can withdraw them on ATP, which is great, but after a week or two you get a message asking you to submit the SSN again and then again everything works for a while but then I got this:
======================================
Hi,
Thanks for signing up with Stripe.
Unfortunately, we will only be able to accept payments for xxxxxxx for a bit longer. Stripe can only support users with a low risk of customer disputes. After reviewing your website and account information, we’ve found that your business presents a higher level of risk than we’re able to work with.
As noted above, your service will not end immediately — we understand that moving away from Stripe can take time. To help with the transition, we are able to provide you five additional days (beginning today) to switch to a new provider. Because of the elevated dispute risk here, your account balance will be placed on reserve for the next 90 days, the industry-standard period during which most payments are disputed. During this time, the reserved funds will help cover any disputes or refunds on your account. The remaining balance will transfer to your bank account at the end of this period.
======================================
I would really love to hear from anybody who has different experience and is actually able to sustain the account long term.
what do you think about it?
https://medium.com/@preslavla/for-e...ether-this-works-here-is-my-story-c5b3e32b53e
For everybody who wants to know whether this works here is my story:
I did try as the article suggests and twice, but account gets suspended in twenty something days. First every thing works well your customers can pay you and you even get the funds transferred to you and you can withdraw them on ATP, which is great, but after a week or two you get a message asking you to submit the SSN again and then again everything works for a while but then I got this:
======================================
Hi,
Thanks for signing up with Stripe.
Unfortunately, we will only be able to accept payments for xxxxxxx for a bit longer. Stripe can only support users with a low risk of customer disputes. After reviewing your website and account information, we’ve found that your business presents a higher level of risk than we’re able to work with.
As noted above, your service will not end immediately — we understand that moving away from Stripe can take time. To help with the transition, we are able to provide you five additional days (beginning today) to switch to a new provider. Because of the elevated dispute risk here, your account balance will be placed on reserve for the next 90 days, the industry-standard period during which most payments are disputed. During this time, the reserved funds will help cover any disputes or refunds on your account. The remaining balance will transfer to your bank account at the end of this period.
======================================
I would really love to hear from anybody who has different experience and is actually able to sustain the account long term.
what do you think about it?
https://medium.com/@preslavla/for-e...ether-this-works-here-is-my-story-c5b3e32b53e
Very interesting. As of yet I've received a notification 3 days after setting the account up that I needed to update my SSN but nothing since then. It is now 26 days and so far so good. It seems however that Stripe had a problem with the things this user was selling, rather than his personal information.
They also did mention account information so that might be relevant, but upon reading at least to me it seems to be more the case that they had a problem with whatever the individual was selling having a high risk of disputes - this is usually the case with people selling counterfeit/fake goods. Hard to say without knowing what he was selling. In other threads it seems like this method is still working.
Only time can tell! Worst comes to worst, not the end of the world and I guess I'll have to find some other payment gateway.
They also did mention account information so that might be relevant, but upon reading at least to me it seems to be more the case that they had a problem with whatever the individual was selling having a high risk of disputes - this is usually the case with people selling counterfeit/fake goods. Hard to say without knowing what he was selling. In other threads it seems like this method is still working.
Only time can tell! Worst comes to worst, not the end of the world and I guess I'll have to find some other payment gateway.
Hi all!
Haven't abandoned my store but haven't been very active lately since I'm currently on vacation visiting family. Didn't do much at all since my last post apart from run a few shoutouts and spend (waste lol) more money on FB ads. I'll give FB a rest for now and keep focusing on shoutouts. Admittedly I've been a bit lazy, only doing shoutouts with 1 particular influencer whilst testing a few others and mostly on the weekends since that's when I made most sales with him.
Since then I've decided to look for more influencers in the niche and am currently testing another 2. 1 has already made me sales, the other will launch our first shoutout tonight. If all goes well I'll have 3 solid influencers that can generate sales. Till now I've only been running shoutouts with 1 influencer at a time. Does anyone have experience with running multiple shoutouts with multiple influencers? I'm very analytical and like to trace my sales to particular influencers but I feel in the long run this won't really allow for growth.
So I've been lazy for the past 2 weeks but decided that I need to expand my store if I want to grow. I've chosen an "oversaturdated" niche with a lot of competition but the fact that I'm making sales, albeit slow, proves that it's a viable niche. Yesterday I decided to expand the store within the general niche, think like a fishing store expanding to include hunting gear - both different sub-niches but under the big outdoors niche - if that makes sense. My reasoning behind this is that to make sales I need to advertise. Advertising with 1 or 2 influencers alone wasn't cutting it so I found another "sub-niche" with more influencers and got in touch with them. I launched my first test shoutout yesterday and made 2 small sales. They were small sales but enough to at least cover the cost of the shoutout and bring in around $1 profit. +1 is better than -1. It also helps prove that his audience is viable since in my experience Mondays are usually slow.
My aim for this week is to test all by the end of the week and hopefully next week be running shoutouts with multiple influencers on the same day. Hopefully this will work as money is tight and it takes around 2 weeks to get the money from Stripe to Payoneer to my bank account - this is one of my largest obstacles so far.
Here are my financials from my last post (5th oct) till now.
Gross Sales: 434.32
Supplier Costs: 210.29
Stripe/PayPal Fees: 17.87
Net Profit: 206.26
I think its also important to highlight my expenses too;
FB Ads: 49
Shoutouts: 166
Recurring: 14
Total: 229.
I had tested a few influencer accounts for shoutouts which provided no sales + the FB ads, hence the end result was a loss of $22.74. This is mainly my fault for being lazy the past 2 weeks, not doing my homework and just gambling with the wrong influencer accounts - in total I put in maybe 10 hours of work which isn't enough. It's a learning experience, I've learned a lot and will use the knowledge gained in the coming weeks. My end goal is to break even on this site and then use the profits to launch another site in a different niche where I can (hopefully) avoid the mistakes I made with this one and use the knowledge gained to speed things up.
Stripe: In case anyone was wondering, my stripe account is still going strong, about 1 month and 2 weeks since I opened it.
Thanks for taking the time to read my post, any and all feedback is appreciated
Haven't abandoned my store but haven't been very active lately since I'm currently on vacation visiting family. Didn't do much at all since my last post apart from run a few shoutouts and spend (waste lol) more money on FB ads. I'll give FB a rest for now and keep focusing on shoutouts. Admittedly I've been a bit lazy, only doing shoutouts with 1 particular influencer whilst testing a few others and mostly on the weekends since that's when I made most sales with him.
Since then I've decided to look for more influencers in the niche and am currently testing another 2. 1 has already made me sales, the other will launch our first shoutout tonight. If all goes well I'll have 3 solid influencers that can generate sales. Till now I've only been running shoutouts with 1 influencer at a time. Does anyone have experience with running multiple shoutouts with multiple influencers? I'm very analytical and like to trace my sales to particular influencers but I feel in the long run this won't really allow for growth.
So I've been lazy for the past 2 weeks but decided that I need to expand my store if I want to grow. I've chosen an "oversaturdated" niche with a lot of competition but the fact that I'm making sales, albeit slow, proves that it's a viable niche. Yesterday I decided to expand the store within the general niche, think like a fishing store expanding to include hunting gear - both different sub-niches but under the big outdoors niche - if that makes sense. My reasoning behind this is that to make sales I need to advertise. Advertising with 1 or 2 influencers alone wasn't cutting it so I found another "sub-niche" with more influencers and got in touch with them. I launched my first test shoutout yesterday and made 2 small sales. They were small sales but enough to at least cover the cost of the shoutout and bring in around $1 profit. +1 is better than -1. It also helps prove that his audience is viable since in my experience Mondays are usually slow.
My aim for this week is to test all by the end of the week and hopefully next week be running shoutouts with multiple influencers on the same day. Hopefully this will work as money is tight and it takes around 2 weeks to get the money from Stripe to Payoneer to my bank account - this is one of my largest obstacles so far.
Here are my financials from my last post (5th oct) till now.
Gross Sales: 434.32
Supplier Costs: 210.29
Stripe/PayPal Fees: 17.87
Net Profit: 206.26
I think its also important to highlight my expenses too;
FB Ads: 49
Shoutouts: 166
Recurring: 14
Total: 229.
I had tested a few influencer accounts for shoutouts which provided no sales + the FB ads, hence the end result was a loss of $22.74. This is mainly my fault for being lazy the past 2 weeks, not doing my homework and just gambling with the wrong influencer accounts - in total I put in maybe 10 hours of work which isn't enough. It's a learning experience, I've learned a lot and will use the knowledge gained in the coming weeks. My end goal is to break even on this site and then use the profits to launch another site in a different niche where I can (hopefully) avoid the mistakes I made with this one and use the knowledge gained to speed things up.
Stripe: In case anyone was wondering, my stripe account is still going strong, about 1 month and 2 weeks since I opened it.
Thanks for taking the time to read my post, any and all feedback is appreciated
Hi All!
Not much in terms of updates, a few more sales since then but nothing so significant as shortly after the last post I traveled back to Thailand and neglected the site for a little while last week. I was still able to make a few more sales via the IG account alone. Been doing a bit of research into other niches but am having difficulty finding influencers for these niches. The main reason I came to post this is to tell an interesting situation I went through.
Yesterday I had a customer make a fairly large order and shortly after I processed it on AE he emailed asking for a refund. Fine, pain in the ass because that means now my money would take up to 2 weeks to be returned to me and I lose the $50+ profit I was so happy about but whatever. I cancelled the order on AE like I've done in the past and thought all was well. After the refund he orders the same things again, because before he forgot to put in a discount code. Had he mentioned this earlier I would have just given him a partial refund and saved the hassle of all that happened. From the message they sent, the merchant wasn't too happy either. Ah well fine, I re-order and think all is OK. This morning I received another order and processed it like normal. A few hours ago about 1pm I received an email from AE saying the order I made yesterday was cancelled and my account was suspended (email below). Strangely enough, this morning's order was perfectly fine. I tried processing other orders but these too were denied. I'm sure the first seller got pissed off and reported me. This has never happened before and I've cancelled/re-ordered items before. I'll turn my experience into a mini-guide at the end of the post.
In the meanwhile, a few ramblings;
Slowly regaining my initial expenses and each month my sales keep increasing as I'm making less mistakes and running better shoutouts. Once I figure out the next niche and find influencers, I'll hit the ground running!
Operating a dropship business and learning from scratch is definitely not for those who want to get rich quick, but its definitely viable! For 3 months now, every month my potential profit has been increasing. Maybe not as explosive and amazing as some of the other success stories but slowly but surely I'm working my way up and if I can make an extra $3-500 a month from this store I'll be happy.
I've already made double profit compared to this time last month. One of the biggest obstacles I face is the small number of decent influencers. I only have 3 good ones and they are often booked by other stores. I might not be able to run a shoutout everyday but I'll take what I can get and using multiple influencers on the same day has so far produced a +ve ROI. Sales and profit, at least for now, are still heavily dependent on shoutouts though I did gain a few sales without shoutouts with only 1.5k followers.
What I did When My Ali Express Account Got Suspended (Pending Appeal)
First off, you'll receive an email saying Your Order Has Been Closed. I received mine at 1pm.
"
We are sorry to inform you that we have to cancel your order for security reasons. To make sure your transaction is secure, please provide us with documentation by clicking My Appeal for further verification.
When we receive your documents, we will verify them within 3 business days. If the documents are valid, you can reorder on Aliexpress.
"
If you click the link in the email, it will take you to a page saying the server is busy and to try again later. I tried for 2 hours and had a feeling the page was dead, so I got onto live chat at around 3:30pm
The rep was very confused so maybe this doesn't happen that often but she directed me to create an account with AliPay (???), set up security questions and upload my verification document. In this case I opted for passport since I had a photo of it handy.
This is where I ran into an issue. There was a notice at the bottom of the page saying the information on my uploaded document needs to match the information I typed in, namely address. I am a foreign national residing in Thailand. The card I use to pay on AliExpress is Thai. My passport has no address info on it and I don't have a utility bill or anything with my name and current address on it since utilities are in my girlfriend's name. I can get a bank statement but it would be earliest Monday. I spoke to the rep about this. She asked me to wait to verify the answer (which happened a lot in our conversation) and then said it would be OK to just upload passport, contrary to what the website specified. The website then said it would take 7-10 business days for my info to be verified. I asked the rep again and after being put on hold again, she said it would take 3 days max. Since I had no other choice I just accepted the fact I might be out of action for 2 weeks. This was around 3:50pm
About 5pm, I received an email from AliPay (not Ali Express) saying my account had been verified. I then re-tried the purchase on AE and it went though, pending verification instead of being cancelled immediately like before. A minute later I got another email saying payment was successful.
This was perhaps the quickest website verification I've ever had. The fact that it was so fast and how confused the representative was makes me think this isn't normal, but hopefully this info will help some of you.
All in all could have gone much worse, especially since I had already prepaid shoutouts for this weekend and the weekend is when I get most my orders. I'm glad it played out so well and I didn't have to sit on my hands for the next 2 weeks.
The next hurdle is 11/11! Tomorrow is a big Chinese online shopping festival and I'm keeping my fingers crossed this will not affect processing times.
Has anyone experienced issues with Ali Express verification before?
Not much in terms of updates, a few more sales since then but nothing so significant as shortly after the last post I traveled back to Thailand and neglected the site for a little while last week. I was still able to make a few more sales via the IG account alone. Been doing a bit of research into other niches but am having difficulty finding influencers for these niches. The main reason I came to post this is to tell an interesting situation I went through.
Yesterday I had a customer make a fairly large order and shortly after I processed it on AE he emailed asking for a refund. Fine, pain in the ass because that means now my money would take up to 2 weeks to be returned to me and I lose the $50+ profit I was so happy about but whatever. I cancelled the order on AE like I've done in the past and thought all was well. After the refund he orders the same things again, because before he forgot to put in a discount code. Had he mentioned this earlier I would have just given him a partial refund and saved the hassle of all that happened. From the message they sent, the merchant wasn't too happy either. Ah well fine, I re-order and think all is OK. This morning I received another order and processed it like normal. A few hours ago about 1pm I received an email from AE saying the order I made yesterday was cancelled and my account was suspended (email below). Strangely enough, this morning's order was perfectly fine. I tried processing other orders but these too were denied. I'm sure the first seller got pissed off and reported me. This has never happened before and I've cancelled/re-ordered items before. I'll turn my experience into a mini-guide at the end of the post.
In the meanwhile, a few ramblings;
Slowly regaining my initial expenses and each month my sales keep increasing as I'm making less mistakes and running better shoutouts. Once I figure out the next niche and find influencers, I'll hit the ground running!
Operating a dropship business and learning from scratch is definitely not for those who want to get rich quick, but its definitely viable! For 3 months now, every month my potential profit has been increasing. Maybe not as explosive and amazing as some of the other success stories but slowly but surely I'm working my way up and if I can make an extra $3-500 a month from this store I'll be happy.
I've already made double profit compared to this time last month. One of the biggest obstacles I face is the small number of decent influencers. I only have 3 good ones and they are often booked by other stores. I might not be able to run a shoutout everyday but I'll take what I can get and using multiple influencers on the same day has so far produced a +ve ROI. Sales and profit, at least for now, are still heavily dependent on shoutouts though I did gain a few sales without shoutouts with only 1.5k followers.
What I did When My Ali Express Account Got Suspended (Pending Appeal)
First off, you'll receive an email saying Your Order Has Been Closed. I received mine at 1pm.
"
We are sorry to inform you that we have to cancel your order for security reasons. To make sure your transaction is secure, please provide us with documentation by clicking My Appeal for further verification.
When we receive your documents, we will verify them within 3 business days. If the documents are valid, you can reorder on Aliexpress.
"
If you click the link in the email, it will take you to a page saying the server is busy and to try again later. I tried for 2 hours and had a feeling the page was dead, so I got onto live chat at around 3:30pm
The rep was very confused so maybe this doesn't happen that often but she directed me to create an account with AliPay (???), set up security questions and upload my verification document. In this case I opted for passport since I had a photo of it handy.
This is where I ran into an issue. There was a notice at the bottom of the page saying the information on my uploaded document needs to match the information I typed in, namely address. I am a foreign national residing in Thailand. The card I use to pay on AliExpress is Thai. My passport has no address info on it and I don't have a utility bill or anything with my name and current address on it since utilities are in my girlfriend's name. I can get a bank statement but it would be earliest Monday. I spoke to the rep about this. She asked me to wait to verify the answer (which happened a lot in our conversation) and then said it would be OK to just upload passport, contrary to what the website specified. The website then said it would take 7-10 business days for my info to be verified. I asked the rep again and after being put on hold again, she said it would take 3 days max. Since I had no other choice I just accepted the fact I might be out of action for 2 weeks. This was around 3:50pm
About 5pm, I received an email from AliPay (not Ali Express) saying my account had been verified. I then re-tried the purchase on AE and it went though, pending verification instead of being cancelled immediately like before. A minute later I got another email saying payment was successful.
This was perhaps the quickest website verification I've ever had. The fact that it was so fast and how confused the representative was makes me think this isn't normal, but hopefully this info will help some of you.
All in all could have gone much worse, especially since I had already prepaid shoutouts for this weekend and the weekend is when I get most my orders. I'm glad it played out so well and I didn't have to sit on my hands for the next 2 weeks.
The next hurdle is 11/11! Tomorrow is a big Chinese online shopping festival and I'm keeping my fingers crossed this will not affect processing times.
Has anyone experienced issues with Ali Express verification before?
Update: Apparently my order was closed yet again.My whole account is now frozen. I tried verifying, talked to 3 different customer support, used a different card. Nothing. I have no clue why they did this. I'm willing to show everything, proof of address, proof of ID, pictures of the card, etc to prove its actually me but they don't want to listen. They just say it will be looked into but don't give a timeframe, nothing. So as of now I'm F$@%D. My whole store has ground to a halt because of no reason other than they decided to suspend my account "for security reasons" and refuse to help. Shit.
Moha
Member
Does not look very positive. Why not open another account? May be in ur girlfriend's name.
It doesn't matter which account you use to place your order as long as our buyers get the products.
One of the chat reps actually suggested and insisted a new account would work- anything to get rid of me. It didn't. Card still blocked. I take back what I said, their customer service is hopeless and clueless. Different answers every time but the recurring theme is "your account has been temporarily suspended. We can't tell you why. A team is looking into this, we have no further details"
The most frustrating thing is it happened out of the blue, for no reason whatsoever apart from what I highly suspect is a seller feeling sour about a cancelled order (which I then tried to recorder less than an hour later). They have my passport, I verified my cards with by SMS. I'm willing to submit any ID documents but they just refuse
The most frustrating thing is it happened out of the blue, for no reason whatsoever apart from what I highly suspect is a seller feeling sour about a cancelled order (which I then tried to recorder less than an hour later). They have my passport, I verified my cards with by SMS. I'm willing to submit any ID documents but they just refuse
OK update. About 4 days after my account was blocked for no reason, after the 4th day of having passport uploaded and 2 cards verified by phone, after around 6 chat sessions with customer support, after losing $10 on an order because I had to place it through another website to keep the customer (who's order seems to have caused all this) happy; I received another order and decided to try it out. The payment was accepted and verified before I even had a chance to visit the "My Orders" page. I highly recommend everyone verify their details by creating an AliPay account, uploading ID and verifying card ASAP, even if everything seems fine, so that you can avoid the hassle and stress of downtime and uncertainty I faced . It's been a while since I gave a proper update and rambled about my store and the financials, maybe I'll do that later today or tomorrow. Not much has changed, the store is still not making pure profit but slowly edging there.
. It's been a while since I gave a proper update and rambled about my store and the financials, maybe I'll do that later today or tomorrow. Not much has changed, the store is still not making pure profit but slowly edging there.
Moha
Member
OK update. About 4 days after my account was blocked for no reason, after the 4th day of having passport uploaded and 2 cards verified by phone, after around 6 chat sessions with customer support, after losing $10 on an order because I had to place it through another website to keep the customer (who's order seems to have caused all this) happy; I received another order and decided to try it out. The payment was accepted and verified before I even had a chance to visit the "My Orders" page. I highly recommend everyone verify their details by creating an AliPay account, uploading ID and verifying card ASAP, even if everything seems fine, so that you can avoid the hassle and stress of downtime and uncertainty I faced
Thanks buddy for updating and sharing your experience.
I am personally learning a lot from your experiences.
Ok time for a long overdue update.
My store went live in the 1st week of November, so almost 3 months. Here's the sales stats so far;
Plenty of visitors but conversion rate is low. This could be for a number of reasons, I think the main one is low quality traffic from some IG shoutouts. Still, for my first ever proper attempt at a serious store I personally think its pretty cool that over $2000 has passed through. From that $2217.86, the gross profit is $837.74 so an average of around $280 a month. I don't think this is bad considering I spend only a few hours a week on the site and only advertise using IG shoutouts 2-3 times a week on 1-2 accounts. My Net profit is actually -$124.22 so I'm still not quite in the green. I really don't mind this however, a lot of it were startup costs and learning experiences. Most brick and mortar, traditional businesses can only dream of being in profit within 3 months starting from scratch so I'm happy to wait.
My IG account has grown to almost 2000, its not as fast or as impressive as others but I get good engagement. Sometimes posts get as much as 1,200 likes but the average is 100-200. Still that's 10-20% of my entire following which is more than I've seen for other stores in my niche. I don't see the point in buying followers. I've seen other stores in my niche with around 80k followers but less engagement on their posts than me with 2000. I'd rather grow slow and organically since this increases the chance for sales.
For now I think I'll continue focusing on adding products and give FB ads another shot in the near future. I'm content with the shoutouts but the decent accounts are limited and as much as I'd love them to, they can't run promos all week, which in turn limits my store's income.
A few weeks ago I decided to lower the prices on stuff in the store in an effort to increase sales. They are now significantly lower than my competition. I've had 19 orders so far this month compared to 10 for the same period last month. My gross profit for the 10 orders last month was $186 and this month its $234, so almost double orders but only $47 difference. I might consider raising my prices just a hair, maybe $2-3 to see if that helps.
AliExpress blocking my account probably screwed me out of a couple more sales but that's done now. I've also had a few issues with the plugin like not auto updating the details so I was thinking shipping emails were getting sent out but they weren't and the biggest pain is not sending out of stock items to draft meaning I had to scramble around to find an alternate seller and in the latest case, can't find an alternate one and had to refund the order. Already emailed support and hopefully this will get sorted soon.
Well that's my rambling done for now, hope everyone else is doing well and best of luck for the Christmas season!
My store went live in the 1st week of November, so almost 3 months. Here's the sales stats so far;
Plenty of visitors but conversion rate is low. This could be for a number of reasons, I think the main one is low quality traffic from some IG shoutouts. Still, for my first ever proper attempt at a serious store I personally think its pretty cool that over $2000 has passed through. From that $2217.86, the gross profit is $837.74 so an average of around $280 a month. I don't think this is bad considering I spend only a few hours a week on the site and only advertise using IG shoutouts 2-3 times a week on 1-2 accounts. My Net profit is actually -$124.22 so I'm still not quite in the green. I really don't mind this however, a lot of it were startup costs and learning experiences. Most brick and mortar, traditional businesses can only dream of being in profit within 3 months starting from scratch so I'm happy to wait.
My IG account has grown to almost 2000, its not as fast or as impressive as others but I get good engagement. Sometimes posts get as much as 1,200 likes but the average is 100-200. Still that's 10-20% of my entire following which is more than I've seen for other stores in my niche. I don't see the point in buying followers. I've seen other stores in my niche with around 80k followers but less engagement on their posts than me with 2000. I'd rather grow slow and organically since this increases the chance for sales.
For now I think I'll continue focusing on adding products and give FB ads another shot in the near future. I'm content with the shoutouts but the decent accounts are limited and as much as I'd love them to, they can't run promos all week, which in turn limits my store's income.
A few weeks ago I decided to lower the prices on stuff in the store in an effort to increase sales. They are now significantly lower than my competition. I've had 19 orders so far this month compared to 10 for the same period last month. My gross profit for the 10 orders last month was $186 and this month its $234, so almost double orders but only $47 difference. I might consider raising my prices just a hair, maybe $2-3 to see if that helps.
AliExpress blocking my account probably screwed me out of a couple more sales but that's done now. I've also had a few issues with the plugin like not auto updating the details so I was thinking shipping emails were getting sent out but they weren't and the biggest pain is not sending out of stock items to draft meaning I had to scramble around to find an alternate seller and in the latest case, can't find an alternate one and had to refund the order. Already emailed support and hopefully this will get sorted soon.
Well that's my rambling done for now, hope everyone else is doing well and best of luck for the Christmas season!
Ok another update. Some good and bad news.
Good news; Tried a new approach on the IG shoutouts and product sales spiked when it went live. Seems like it worked as conversion rate went from around 0.8% to 1.14% as shown in the pic below. Number of orders were low but that doesn't bother me as they spent quite a bit. This was also the biggest 48 hours of revenue for the store, I was so excited!
Now time for the bad news. I noticed my first ever sale blocked by Stripe. A $250 order being made by a person in a high risk country using a US credit card that didn't match the name. Not a big deal, this happens I thought and I continue business as usual. During the night of 23-24 I receive an email from Stripe saying my payouts were suspended because of using copyrighted material.
I was selling merchandise similar to Yaros with worldofharry, except mine was a different show. I always knew there was a risk but figured it wouldn't be a problem since Yaros ran his store for years and there were so many in the exact same niche, but here mine is banned after 3 months because of a sales spike. My advice: don't do this. I now have around $400 in limbo and after exchanging numerous emails with Stripe Support still don't know when/if I'll ever see that money. Naturally my head was scattered and I didn't focus too much on sales during the weekend so they dropped and had a lot of abandoned orders since the only option was PayPal. I applied to 2CO and was also denied for the same reason: copyright. At least I was denied in the beginning.
Since then I picked myself up and yesterday added instructions on all the abandoned cart emails pointing to a link which explains how to pay via PayPal using a card, here are the results from last night (27-28), just a measly $10 from the awesome night I had last week even with 2 less orders
This was all through PayPal with no abandoned orders. I'm loving the slowly increasing conversion rate and the bigger orders.
Some more bad news: After making a withdraw request from PayPal for around $500, which is the biggest amount I've ever pulled from my account, I got a notice saying the withdrawal needs to be reviewed...great so that's now around $900 of mine floating around in uncertainty meaning I have to put in more of my own personal money to cover purchases which is quickly running out since its the end of the month..
Considering the $900 currently floating around, my site is now in $200 profit since the last time! Last week's net profit alone was over $300 profit and this week is already $100+. Considering its only Tuesday I'm hoping for another good week.
I'm still torn on what to do though. I knew eventually I'd have to find another niche and this was just an experiment. I have a lot of trouble picking niches, especially since I can't find any IG influencers yet for what I'm considering. For now I'll just keep working on my current site slowly and continuing to experiment, once I get the money that's owed to me I'll consider giving FB/IG ads another go. Its a bit too early to tell if this could be normal and I could have just got lucky especially with Christmas coming up but $200-300 a week is enough to keep me happy with this site. Hell, with $400 a week I'd be earning more than my full time job which would be awesome since I enjoy dropshipping more and work less on it.
Good news; Tried a new approach on the IG shoutouts and product sales spiked when it went live. Seems like it worked as conversion rate went from around 0.8% to 1.14% as shown in the pic below. Number of orders were low but that doesn't bother me as they spent quite a bit. This was also the biggest 48 hours of revenue for the store, I was so excited!
Now time for the bad news. I noticed my first ever sale blocked by Stripe. A $250 order being made by a person in a high risk country using a US credit card that didn't match the name. Not a big deal, this happens I thought and I continue business as usual. During the night of 23-24 I receive an email from Stripe saying my payouts were suspended because of using copyrighted material.
I was selling merchandise similar to Yaros with worldofharry, except mine was a different show. I always knew there was a risk but figured it wouldn't be a problem since Yaros ran his store for years and there were so many in the exact same niche, but here mine is banned after 3 months because of a sales spike. My advice: don't do this. I now have around $400 in limbo and after exchanging numerous emails with Stripe Support still don't know when/if I'll ever see that money. Naturally my head was scattered and I didn't focus too much on sales during the weekend so they dropped and had a lot of abandoned orders since the only option was PayPal. I applied to 2CO and was also denied for the same reason: copyright. At least I was denied in the beginning.
Since then I picked myself up and yesterday added instructions on all the abandoned cart emails pointing to a link which explains how to pay via PayPal using a card, here are the results from last night (27-28), just a measly $10 from the awesome night I had last week even with 2 less orders
This was all through PayPal with no abandoned orders. I'm loving the slowly increasing conversion rate and the bigger orders.
Some more bad news: After making a withdraw request from PayPal for around $500, which is the biggest amount I've ever pulled from my account, I got a notice saying the withdrawal needs to be reviewed...great so that's now around $900 of mine floating around in uncertainty meaning I have to put in more of my own personal money to cover purchases which is quickly running out since its the end of the month..
Considering the $900 currently floating around, my site is now in $200 profit since the last time! Last week's net profit alone was over $300 profit and this week is already $100+. Considering its only Tuesday I'm hoping for another good week.
I'm still torn on what to do though. I knew eventually I'd have to find another niche and this was just an experiment. I have a lot of trouble picking niches, especially since I can't find any IG influencers yet for what I'm considering. For now I'll just keep working on my current site slowly and continuing to experiment, once I get the money that's owed to me I'll consider giving FB/IG ads another go. Its a bit too early to tell if this could be normal and I could have just got lucky especially with Christmas coming up but $200-300 a week is enough to keep me happy with this site. Hell, with $400 a week I'd be earning more than my full time job which would be awesome since I enjoy dropshipping more and work less on it.
Don James
Active Member
HiTokayOk another update. Some good and bad news.
Good news; Tried a new approach on the IG shoutouts and product sales spiked when it went live. Seems like it worked as conversion rate went from around 0.8% to 1.14% as shown in the pic below. Number of orders were low but that doesn't bother me as they spent quite a bit. This was also the biggest 48 hours of revenue for the store, I was so excited!
View attachment 1905
Now time for the bad news. I noticed my first ever sale blocked by Stripe. A $250 order being made by a person in a high risk country using a US credit card that didn't match the name. Not a big deal, this happens I thought and I continue business as usual. During the night of 23-24 I receive an email from Stripe saying my payouts were suspended because of using copyrighted material.
I was selling merchandise similar to Yaros with worldofharry, except mine was a different show. I always knew there was a risk but figured it wouldn't be a problem since Yaros ran his store for years and there were so many in the exact same niche, but here mine is banned after 3 months because of a sales spike. My advice: don't do this. I now have around $400 in limbo and after exchanging numerous emails with Stripe Support still don't know when/if I'll ever see that money. Naturally my head was scattered and I didn't focus too much on sales during the weekend so they dropped and had a lot of abandoned orders since the only option was PayPal. I applied to 2CO and was also denied for the same reason: copyright. At least I was denied in the beginning.
Since then I picked myself up and yesterday added instructions on all the abandoned cart emails pointing to a link which explains how to pay via PayPal using a card, here are the results from last night (27-28), just a measly $10 from the awesome night I had last week even with 2 less orders
View attachment 1906
This was all through PayPal with no abandoned orders. I'm loving the slowly increasing conversion rate and the bigger orders.
Some more bad news: After making a withdraw request from PayPal for around $500, which is the biggest amount I've ever pulled from my account, I got a notice saying the withdrawal needs to be reviewed...great so that's now around $900 of mine floating around in uncertainty meaning I have to put in more of my own personal money to cover purchases which is quickly running out since its the end of the month..
Considering the $900 currently floating around, my site is now in $200 profit since the last time! Last week's net profit alone was over $300 profit and this week is already $100+. Considering its only Tuesday I'm hoping for another good week.
I'm still torn on what to do though. I knew eventually I'd have to find another niche and this was just an experiment. I have a lot of trouble picking niches, especially since I can't find any IG influencers yet for what I'm considering. For now I'll just keep working on my current site slowly and continuing to experiment, once I get the money that's owed to me I'll consider giving FB/IG ads another go. Its a bit too early to tell if this could be normal and I could have just got lucky especially with Christmas coming up but $200-300 a week is enough to keep me happy with this site. Hell, with $400 a week I'd be earning more than my full time job which would be awesome since I enjoy dropshipping more and work less on it.
How you added instructions on all the abandoned cart emails pointing to a link which explains how to pay via PayPal using a card
Any guidance to follow
Regards
Don
I created a page on my site using screenshots I took of the payment process. If you have some basic knowledge of Wordpress this is very easy. Then I went into the AliDropship plugin section, Marketing, Abandoned Cart and inserted the link into the emails that are automatically sent. Before I did this yesterday I sent out an email manually to all the abandoned orders from the previous night.Which is also an option albeit a tedious one. One important thing to note is that you should always mention to try from a different device - my job also takes payments via PayPal and we have also had a lot of reports from people who did not want to make an account stating they had difficulty. I found this to be particularly true of Apple Devices for some reason. If they are serious about the purchase, then they will. This is the 2nd time a large order that previously had trouble was able to come through using my instruction. In fact one of the orders yesterday was $137, almost half of the total, which was an abandoned cart from the previous night so its always worth it.
Don James
Active Member
Hi Tokay
There is no email in abandoned cart, how to get email to send manually.
I had nearly 11 sales abandoned
https://alidropship.com/codex/set-abandoned-cart/
Otherwise to send emails manually its simply a case of taking each email from every abandoned email and writing to them.
Otherwise to send emails manually its simply a case of taking each email from every abandoned email and writing to them.