Over the course of this month, I am building an e-commerce business. Originally I chose to sell iPhone accessories but I am now choosing to sell political T-Shirts. I will customize the shirts and use a third party to supply them. I am now completing week 2 so it is time for an update.
Recap of Week 2
I ended up running ads for the smartphone accessories and after two days I spent 11$ to reach 17,000 people. My ad was clicked 11 times. After some consideration, I decided to switch products and sell political shirts for the 2020 election year. I decided this was a more specific niche that I can target rather than the broader spectrum of people with smartphones. I thought they would sell better since it is an election year. Also in these times of Covid-19, the iPhone products were coming from foreign suppliers while the T-shirts were manufactured in America. As the coronavirus sweeps the world, global supply chains come to a halt so there is some benefit in having a domestic supplier.
I am Learning New Skills and Tools
This week taught me to use FB Ads, Canva, Printify, and Shopify. Each site was responsible for the different departments of my business.
FB Ads: Running FB ads taught me about writing concise copy. Social media ads are great for 1 line ads as people scrolling their feed might not stop to read a long paragraph. I also learned about prospecting and targeting a specific group to run ads for. This was my strategy to market iPhone accessories. I created copy for an advertisement on Facebook and set my target audience to 18–65-year-olds in the United States. Looking back, I should have narrowed down my target to people below the age of 35 as that was 63% of the exposure.
Canva
Canva is a great tool to use for creating advertisements, and custom items such as T-shirts. I got creative and designed 6 Trump shirts:
Pretty cool, huh? Canva is amazing because it’s free. Anyone can access Canva so anyone can design a T-Shirt.
and if anyone can design a T-shirt, then…anyone can use Printify to manufacture a T-shirt.
Printify
Printify is great because you upload a design to a blank template centered on a T-Shirt. To do this, you download the design from Canva to your computer and then upload the file to Printify. Through Printify you select a supplier which you will eventually pay to manufacture the shirt. Printify taught me a lot about suppliers and manufacturing.
Shopify
Without Shopify, I don’t have a store. I use Shopify as the link for my ads. Traffic is driven to my Shopify store where customers can choose a product and buy it. This starts the domino effect as I then order shirts through Printify and ship them to the customer.
Skills
This experience is teaching me how to research products, market products, and manage an E-commerce website. The systems I have in place teach me great time management and time efficiency. I am learning to copy write and design web pages and merchandise.
This next week I will focus on marketing through Instagram influencers. This will cost some money so I don’t know how large of scale I can market.I will reach out to multiple pages, though. I will write a blog next week for another update!
