The Third Week
This is a recap of my third week “Creating A Dropshipping Company in a Month”. Stay tuned for more weekly updates!
Working Out the Kinks
Last week I finished my initial edits for my online store and launched my site. After a few friends checked it out and a few made some purchases I was able to get a soft-open feel for how to operate my store. If you’re opening an online store I highly recommend you do this before launching social media, or any type of ads. Have your friends play around on your site and have them buy some of your products to see how the fulfilment process works “from receiving an order” to “shipment delivered”. Even if you have to reimburse them to get them to buy, it’s worth the money.
I found out my supplier is six times faster than the average supplier on Spocket. The usual processing time is an average of 4–5 days and my supplier processes and ships within the same day (lucky me). These are important things you would never know unless you do a soft run. One of my friends already received their water bottle in a Star White color and they purchased this item less than 7 days ago.
I played around with various marketing strategies from changing the payment method in order to allow for free shipping on all orders to changing the layout of my site and categorizing my products. I wanted to get all this straightened out before I attempted to generate traffic to my site. I decided to only offer free shipping on orders over $50 and I added another eight products to my store from the same supplier. After all of this testing, I was confident in my site and ready to put Poseidon out there.
Putting Myself On The Market
You’re probably wondering how a dropshipper makes ads if they don’t hold inventory. Although I am going to create a few ads and post pictures of the product that my friends purchased, I don’t actually have any product inventory to create ads with. You cannot use the original company’s pictures from their social media pages or from their website. If you do, you could risk your site being disabled or being sued for copyright infringement.
I was already using product images from Spocket to market the products on my store so naturally I did some research. It turns out Spocket has an Intellectual Property Policy which states that to become a supplier on Spocket, you first have to own the copyrights to the product photography so that retailers (me) can use the product photography legally. To break that down, it means when I click on a product on Spocket and want to push it to my store, whatever the promotion gallery attached to the product consists of is fair game for me to turn into ads.
With the confidence knowing my site won’t be disabled, and worse, of not being sued for copyright infringement, I went ahead and created some ads. I started by signing up for a professional account with Facebook and Instagram, updated my logo and website information and created an ad.
Using the above picture from Spocket’s product image gallery for the Gulf Blue water bottle in my store I created and wrote a simple copy incorporating a call-to-action button, listing the features of the water bottle with an enticing pitch.
My Copy:
The perfect accessory for your summer adventures!
- Eco-friendly!
- Leathery-soft luxury feel!
- Food-grade stainless steel!
CTA: Shop Now (Hyperlinked to Poseidon shop’s page selling the featured product- https://poseidonshop.store/products/17oz-insulated-water-bottle-gulf-blue-699059323)
I then went into detailed marketing to target a specific audience.
I chose to target coastal cities in the United States that were more progressive than others and more likely to interact with my website’s announcement header stating “A Portion of Each Sale Supports Ocean Cleanup!” and set the age range between 18–50 years old to better define my target audience.
I then set my budget for $6/day over 7 days for a total of $42 to reach around 25,000 people. My reason for doing this is because my profit margin on that Gulf Blue water bottle is $6.95 so I want to spend as close to what my profit margin would be for the product I’m advertising each day.
Shopify has their own statistics and analytics on the amount of traffic you need to generate before making a specific amount of sales.
This was on my Shopify admin page before I published any ads. This is the same statistic from my blog post “The True Cost”. Check it out to find out what it really costs to start a dropshipping store.
This is my Facebook Ads admin page the morning after I posted my ads! With 535 people reached in a day, six engagements on the post and five actual link clicks within 24 hrs, I was very hopeful. I can now scale and improve my site further by reviewing analytics and seeing at what point people left the site. I was just happy my money was working for me.
What Have I Practiced this Week?
- Copyright
- CTA
- Targeting Audience
- Generating Website Traffic
What I Still Need to Do?
In the last days of creating a dropshipping company in a month, I need to analyze the data that comes back in and recreate ads as well as maintaining a strong presence on social media. I need to learn Tik Tok and at least get two posts out there showcasing the store and product. I also need to research product and service questions and create an FAQ page, as well as a contact page. Stay tuned!