Where to sell to?

P

pinno

Member
Hello,
I understand that it is best to use ePacket as our shipping method and after some research, I now know that ePacket only works for only about 30 countries. So here's the question: where do you guys sell to? Do you sell to all countries or do you limit them to just those countries where ePacket is available? I am asking this because I also want to limit my target countries when I buy fb ads...so this is kind of an important thing to find out first i guess...anyone would like to share their wisdom? also, I have been trying to find a complete list of aliexpress shipping destinations but with no results....could someone please share if you have the info? Thank you for your help.
B
 
M

Mostafa

Member
Hi Pinno,
Before I answer your questions, I just want to highlight that I'm still building up my store, It's not active yet, but what I'm going to tell you is what I'm planning to do when I launch it.

My main target audience will be located in USA as the ePacket service is over there and it takes only couple of weeks or three for parcels to reach there. I'm not sure what are the other countries that support ePacket and how long will it take for the package to arrive, but I'm talking about US because I sent a parcel to a friend as a test to see how fast it will be delivered (of course it won't be the case always, some delays might happen)

My secondary target will be the rest of the world, but I will be adding a disclaimer that all orders outside USA might take 45 days and up to 60 days. If my customer did not get their items after 60 days I will give them full refund (of course I don't know the mechanism of this process yet) and will offer a 10% coupon as an apology for this delay.
 
Direct Webstore

Direct Webstore

Well-Known Member
pinno said:
where do you guys sell to? Do you sell to all countries
Click to expand...
Use Google Trends. Type in your niche ... and below will be a graph displaying the popularity in various countries. Target the countries with the highest levels on the graph. Done. :)

On the other hand ... if you're like many people on this forum who are running general stores (and hardly making any sales), rather than niche stores, the above strategy would be useless. You would just have to target general markets with the largest populations and or spending power. i.e The U.S, U.K, Australia, Canada and Western Europe etc.
 
Last edited:
P

pinno

Member
Hello Mostafa,
Thanks for sharing your plan. Youre a very generous person. I like your plan a lot and I dont see any reasons why that shouldnt work. I did a test too a little while ago using epacket to Malaysia and it was 2 weeks to the custom and 3 to be delivered to my place. The whole process was trackable so it was good. I wish epacket is available in all countries unfortunately it is not. Apparently it is available in only these countries now:
  1. Australia
  2. Austria
  3. Belgium
  4. Brazil
  5. Canada
  6. Denmark
  7. Finland
  8. France*
  9. Germany
  10. Greece
  11. Hong Kong
  12. Hungary
  13. Ireland
  14. Indonesia (currently in a trial run)
  15. Israel
  16. Italy
  17. Japan
  18. Kazakhstan (currently in a trial run)
  19. Korea
  20. Luxembourg
  21. Malaysia
  22. Mexico
  23. Netherlands
  24. New Zealand
  25. Norway
  26. Poland
  27. Portugal
  28. Russia
  29. Saudi Arabia
  30. Singapore
  31. Spain
  32. Sweden
  33. Switzerland
  34. Thailand (currently in a trial run)
  35. Turkey
  36. Ukraine
  37. United Kingdom**
  38. United States***
  39. Vietnam (currently in a trial run)
We have several other shipping options in aliexpress, one of the them is called "AliExpress Standard Shipping" and I am trying to find the full list of destinations we can ship our items to using this service. China Post Air Parcel and China Post Registered Air Mail seem interesting too perhaps we can use them for countries that do not have epacket but it looks like very often no tracking info is available with these services. I wish I could find a list of destinations, tracking services, delivery time info for them but so far I have found nothing.

I am almost done with my store too but still have a lot of checking to do before launch (i was going to launch it last week but....). Good luck with your store building! I wish you best of luck!!
 
Last edited:
P

pinno

Member
Hey again Direct Store,

How many drinks do I owe you now? :p
So I reposted my question here and I got two answers - but why couldnt you just answer me when you saw it in the other forum before? o_O hehe

I have just checked out Google Trends, but perhaps because it is something new to me I dont see how much more helpful it can be compared to other trend checker websites. I will keep it in my bookmarks tho one day perhaps it will be helpful.

You know i actually am not sure if i am running a general store or a niche store now haha. It is kind of like a general store because i added just anything i like to it but the items are categorized by interests/themes. so does it sound more like a niche store? it scares me everytime when i hear people making no sales months after launching their sites. i sell online locally too where i live through a market place website and from my experience everything sells as long as your price is right. well yes, perhaps selling through market place websites (like ebay, amazon etc) and selling through your own website are two completely different games - with marketplaces you dont have to advertise yourself and we get trusted by the buyers because of the protections they get from the marketplaces. but still, no sales for months is quite a scary thing to experience. Have you ever done any research and try to see what are the exact reasons causing these sites not being able to sell? There's no reliable statistics that show who are making sales doing dropshipping, why they success and why they fail etc. there are gurus out there tho claiming that they make millions per year but who knows if theyre not lying, to me they sound like they are than not. you know what i mean? they are so very generous to sell you their tricks and info and just about anything to guarantee you too will be as successful as them but so far i have seen NONE who are willing to give us chance to even just have a peek at their own trillion dollar web stores.

at the beginning i thought this project is more about web building and design etc, but now i know it is about marketing more than anything else and unfortunately i dont have any background in marketing. Any research on marketing you have done before? anything you think you can share with us here? Yeah I can just target the US, Australia, Europe it's obvious and perhaps easy but I would love to learn a bit more. I'm doing it anyway why not have some fun, right?
Thanks always for your replies =) seriously one day when i make some bucks ill come to australia and let's have a few drinks!!
 
Direct Webstore

Direct Webstore

Well-Known Member
pinno said:
I have just checked out Google Trends, but perhaps because it is something new to me I dont see how much more helpful it can be compared to other trend checker websites.
Click to expand...
In relation to your question it can tell you what countries your niche is popular in. e.g .. If it was "Beach Wear" ... Alaska would have a very low rating in the graphs, so don't target Alaska. I know that's obvious, but it was just an exaggerated example ... lol
 
A

auiu

New Member
Mostafa said:
Hi Pinno,
Before I answer your questions, I just want to highlight that I'm still building up my store, It's not active yet, but what I'm going to tell you is what I'm planning to do when I launch it.

My main target audience will be located in USA as the ePacket service is over there and it takes only couple of weeks or three for parcels to reach there. I'm not sure what are the other countries that support ePacket and how long will it take for the package to arrive, but I'm talking about US because I sent a parcel to a friend as a test to see how fast it will be delivered (of course it won't be the case always, some delays might happen)

My secondary target will be the rest of the world, but I will be adding a disclaimer that all orders outside USA might take 45 days and up to 60 days. If my customer did not get their items after 60 days I will give them full refund (of course I don't know the mechanism of this process yet) and will offer a 10% coupon as an apology for this delay.
Click to expand...
Hello and thank you for your suggestion to make a statement of 40-60 days delivery for the country that doesnt accept epacking.
But i got another question,becouse i saw that some products do offer the epacking service bot not for the entire list of countries that are accepting this service (the 39 countries...).
So when whe make a statement of 45-60days delivery for the other countries,what about the countries that are accepting epacking but for that item this service is not accepted (for example :
A seller offers their product with epacking for USA,Germany, Uk, but not for Canda, Italy which normaly the service of epacking is active).
If we have a buyer from italy for example,regarding to the Statment that we make clear in our site,they would be waiting to recive the item for 12-20days(normal epacking delivery). In fact they will recieve it for 45-60 day ( normal post delivery)
How can we resolve this?
Thank you.
 
M

Mostafa

Member
pinno said:
Hello Mostafa,
Thanks for sharing your plan. Youre a very generous person. I like your plan a lot and I dont see any reasons why that shouldnt work. I did a test too a little while ago using epacket to Malaysia and it was 2 weeks to the custom and 3 to be delivered to my place. The whole process was trackable so it was good. I wish epacket is available in all countries unfortunately it is not. Apparently it is available in only these countries now:
  1. Australia
  2. Austria
  3. Belgium
  4. Brazil
  5. Canada
  6. Denmark
  7. Finland
  8. France*
  9. Germany
  10. Greece
  11. Hong Kong
  12. Hungary
  13. Ireland
  14. Indonesia (currently in a trial run)
  15. Israel
  16. Italy
  17. Japan
  18. Kazakhstan (currently in a trial run)
  19. Korea
  20. Luxembourg
  21. Malaysia
  22. Mexico
  23. Netherlands
  24. New Zealand
  25. Norway
  26. Poland
  27. Portugal
  28. Russia
  29. Saudi Arabia
  30. Singapore
  31. Spain
  32. Sweden
  33. Switzerland
  34. Thailand (currently in a trial run)
  35. Turkey
  36. Ukraine
  37. United Kingdom**
  38. United States***
  39. Vietnam (currently in a trial run)
We have several other shipping options in aliexpress, one of the them is called "AliExpress Standard Shipping" and I am trying to find the full list of destinations we can ship our items to using this service. China Post Air Parcel and China Post Registered Air Mail seem interesting too perhaps we can use them for countries that do not have epacket but it looks like very often no tracking info is available with these services. I wish I could find a list of destinations, tracking services, delivery time info for them but so far I have found nothing.

I am almost done with my store too but still have a lot of checking to do before launch (i was going to launch it last week but....). Good luck with your store building! I wish you best of luck!!
Click to expand...

Thank you so much bud for sharing this list with me, I didn't know that ePacket was active for all these countries.

since you're new to this thing , like me :)

Here's how I selected my niche (Because I saw your conversation with "Direct Webstore")

- Facebook: I did a simulation that I'm creating an Ad for my audience, This will tells you the potential reach/audience within this country (Same apply for instagram)
- Google: To me, Google trend is Bullsh*t, I prefer keyword planner (since I work in advertising agency so the numbers are accurate) basically it gives you the monthly search volume for keywords, so I typed the keywords relevant to my niche and I found that a decent amount are looking for it. You can still get this search volume using any SEO tool such as Ahrefs, SEM Rush or AWR.
 
M

Mostafa

Member
auiu said:
Hello and thank you for your suggestion to make a statement of 40-60 days delivery for the country that doesnt accept epacking.
But i got another question,becouse i saw that some products do offer the epacking service bot not for the entire list of countries that are accepting this service (the 39 countries...).
So when whe make a statement of 45-60days delivery for the other countries,what about the countries that are accepting epacking but for that item this service is not accepted (for example :
A seller offers their product with epacking for USA,Germany, Uk, but not for Canda, Italy which normaly the service of epacking is active).
If we have a buyer from italy for example,regarding to the Statment that we make clear in our site,they would be waiting to recive the item for 12-20days(normal epacking delivery). In fact they will recieve it for 45-60 day ( normal post delivery)
How can we resolve this?
Thank you.
Click to expand...

Errrrr ... that's a problem.

I though when a seller provide an ePacket the delivery time will be 12-20 days no matter which country.

If I were you, I will do the following:

1- Look for another seller: I will look for another seller who deliver the same item for the designated country within this time frame.

2- Say the truth: If I can't find this seller, I'll tell my client that for some logistics difficulties this specific item will be delivered to you within 45-60 days. If they would like to proceed, I will do it, once he receive it, I will give him a 10% discount coupon and an apology for any inconvenience that has been caused for this delay.

To be honest with you, I'm not sure if this is a good strategy or not, but I love being transparent with my clients.

If someone here with better idea can help please do, I suggest @Direct Webstore to share his opinion with us.
 
Direct Webstore

Direct Webstore

Well-Known Member
Mostafa said:
I will do it, once he receive it, I will give him a 10% discount coupon and an apology for any inconvenience that has been caused for this delay.
Click to expand...
Similar to me. If a customer complains about the shipping time a couple of weeks after ordering, I offer apologies and reassurances and a 15% coupon for their next order.

To make it easier, I use Mozilla Thunderbird email client with pre-made templates to handle the different customer emails. e.g Slow shipping, order not received, refund requests etc. But I still have to edit them a litte for each enquiry.

Mostafa said:
I love being transparent with my clients.
Click to expand...
Me too. My FAQ, Shipping and delivery and Refunds and returns pages are all up front with honest info ... except for the fact that I'm "dropshipping". No one is perfect. lol :)
 
Last edited:
Mar

Mar

Moderator
Direct Webstore said:
Similar to me. If a customer complains about the shipping time a couple of weeks after ordering, I offer apologies and reassurances and a 15% coupon for their next order.

To make it easier, I use Mozilla Thunderbird email client with pre-made templates to handle the different customer emails. e.g Slow shipping, order not received, refund requests etc. But I still have to edit them a litte for each enquiry.


Me too. My FAQ, Shipping and delivery and Refunds and returns pages are all up front with honest info ... except for the fact that I'm "dropshipping". No one is perfect. lol :)
Click to expand...
I have a popup in my single product page just below the Add to Cart button that will show shipping time. Although there is a page about shipping in the footer menu, I add the popup to make it more visible.

download 16.png
 
A

auiu

New Member
The Html code for the pop up is a great idea. So the buyer can check at the right time the shipping procedure.
Well done
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top