How I started building e-commerce brands
I’d love to start telling you how I’m making thousands of dollars dropshipping products from China but I’d prefer to start from how it all began when I knew nothing about dropshipping
I was scrolling through my instagram feed a few months back looking for an online hustle I could start when I saw a shopify sales screenshot
I knew people were making a lot of money online but I wasn’t sure how
So I decided to dig deeper and I found some YouTube gurus who were teaching people how to dropship products from China with facebook ads
For those who don’t know what dropshipping is — it is a business model where you position yourself as a middleman through an online store and sell products you’ve probably haven’t seen for huge profits
I was so intrigued to see 20 year olds making $10,000 a month doing this simple business
And from that moment I knew nothing was going to stop me from building my own online store
I did some light research and jumped into the Shopify platform a week later to build swimsuit store
I didn’t even do any product research because I had no idea what a product research was back then but swimsuits had to sell right? It was summer after all
It took me two weeks to complete the store and I launched my first facebook ad the next day
The gurus on YouTube had already said you just need to launch your ad and you’ll start getting sales
But It was a disaster!
I barely had link clicks talk-less of purchases
Looking back at the creative, ad copy and the store, there was no way I was going to be successful with dropshipping if I had continued like that
But my biggest asset was my mindset
I’ve always believed that as long someone else was doing it successfully, I will do it successfully too.
So I dusted my failure off my coat and started building my second store two days later
It was a health and fitness store and I completed it in less than 4 days
Faster yeah?
But something deep inside me still told me I was going to waste another ad budget on facebook ads
So I decided to submit the store for a review in a Shopify experts community
And I was right, I was heading towards another disaster
They sent me an audit and an expert to guide me
I’m forever grateful to that guy because he made me realize that running a successful e-commerce brand wasn’t as simple as the gurus on YouTube make it seem
I realized I was in a hurry to get rich overnight and needed to slow down to learn properly
So I started gathering resources all over again
I watched every single video on building branded stores on YouTube
Studied how the top e-commerce brands built their online stores
Reached out to the notable and trustworthy gurus for any advice I could get
Studied and understood their marketing strategies
I also want to appreciate Ads Alchemist on Twitter because he taught me a lot about facebook ads
3 months later I decided to build my new store
This time I had done a proper product research, knew what a branded store should look like and most importantly — I had a definite marketing strategy
I launched my ads and my new store did 7 sales at $89 per sale in the first week!
I made $2,300 in profit before selling the store on Flippa for $3,500 because I wasn’t feeling the niche
I built another one a week later following the same procedures and I had 5 sales at $50/sale on the first day!
That was when I knew I was unto something great, everything changed because I had taken my time to learn and implement
But unfortunately I had to pause the entire operation because the corona virus had just broken out in China and suppliers were closed
It’s 5 months later now and it’s time for project restart
I’ll be buying my products in bulk from China to a warehouse in the US where they’ll be re-branded and available for faster shipping
I plan on scaling this new store to the moon and the best part is that I’ll be documenting everything here!
So stay tuned if you’ve ever thought about building an e-commerce brand in the future
I’ll be showing you how I did my product research in my next post, you don’t want to miss it.
