Starting from Zero: How This First-Time Entrepreneur Found Success Online March 21, 2019 bizadmin In this story, there’s no fancy business degrees, no network of knowledgeable mentors, and no pile of money to draw from. It’s just a story of a regular kid who started from zero and figured out the path to business success all on his own, pushing through the struggles and setbacks along the way. Yuanda Wang is 21 years old and from Hamilton, Ontario. He’s spent the past year and a bit exploring the world of e-commerce and dropshipping and has grown his most recent store to $18,000 revenue in four months. But this success almost didn’t happen for Yuanda, who until recently was planning to pursue a very different path in life. Starting From Zero: An Average Kid “A little over a year ago, and before that, I was just an average kid,” he says. “I was in high school, and then I went to university and I had no clue what I wanted to do when I got older.” So following the advice of his parents, Yuanda enrolled to study life sciences at university. “At that time my parents wanted me to become a doctor, so I just went along with that path. I was like, ‘Oh, it seems like a good job, it pays well. I might go ahead and study life sciences and see where it leads me,’” he says. At the same time, Yuanda was spending a lot of time on forums about online businesses. He’d browse the forum and read stories of entrepreneurs launching and running their businesses. He’d hear all about the endless new ways that it was possible to start an online business and the seemingly endless potential that lay out there in the big world wide web. At 15 years old he even tried to make a little money with affiliate marketing (it didn’t result in much). But as he began to read more about different online businesses like e-commerce, he started to get curious. “When I started reading about entrepreneurship, e-commerce and online marketing, that really interested me. I never found anything that interesting before,” he says. “I would watch YouTube videos, and I would read articles endlessly. That’s the first time that I had this feeling of passion for something that I enjoy to do. That’s when my perspective changed completely.” But Yuanda was starting from zero, and apart from his brief attempt at affiliate marketing, he had no business experience, but more importantly, no money. As much as he was intrigued by the idea of running his own e-commerce business, he knew it was going to be difficult given his current situation. That’s when he heard about dropshipping. The e-commerce business model would allow him to operate an online store without needing to buy inventory upfront. He’d only pay for the products once they’d already been sold, and his supplier would ship them directly to his customers for him. “It appealed to me because I didn’t have to take too much of a risk. drop shipping As a student at that time I wasn’t drop shippingworking, so I had I would say $100 in my bank account,” he says. “I thought to start a business would be a very expensive process, but through drop shipping, I realized that it’s very accessible. Anyone can start it as long as you have some money, to begin with for the necessities.” Reframing Failure Just before Christmas in 2017, he began building his first stores. He used Shopify as the e-commerce platform and used Oberlo to find products from dropshipping suppliers across the world. He was starting from zero, and unsure of what to sell at first. So he dabbled in a variety of different product niches. He tried selling makeup, and wind up music boxes, and also had a general store stocked with a variety of trending products. He’d spend his evenings after university engrossed in YouTube tutorials and blog articles, trying to learn as much as possible. It was trial by fire. He was reinvesting all of the money he made from his early stores back into the business, so he had his hard earned money on the line every time he tested a new advertising strategy. And it didn’t always work out. “There was one point where I ran a huge advertisement on a big meme page. And it was very expensive. It was around $800 and it didn’t pay off, it didn’t generate that many sales. I lost a lot, would say $400 after expenses, cost of goods, and everything,” he says. But rather than being knocked back by the loss, he decided to reframe things. “That was a hard moment, but for me, the way I view failure is that it’s just a temporary thing. If you fail, you learn something from the process. You learn that you made a mistake and it will only help you to grow more,” he says. “So even in times of hardship, I understand that it’s gonna be hard, you’re gonna fail sometimes, but it’s more so how you react to the failure rather than how you react to the wins that determine your success.” Finding His Winning Product His early stores made a little money, but it wasn’t until his latest store that things started to take off. And it was all thanks to the discovery of one product, an iPhone adapter. The adapter, which sits in the phone accessories niche, took his store from zero to over $18,000 in sales in just four months. “This product, in particular, I have a friend that I talked to about dropshipping that I met through my Facebook group, and then he showed me that his store sold this product in the past, and his store did $20,000 in revenue in a month,” he says. He searched for a supplier of the same product and found one on AliExpress. To assess the competition level, he looked closely at the product’s order history, where he noticed there had been a flood of orders from AliExpress customers. “In the order history, you can usually tell if someone is drop shipping,” he says. His first tactic is to look closely at the timestamps of the orders. If there’s a string of orders placed around the same time, that means it’s usually a drop shipper who is bulk fulfilling their orders. The delivery location can provide hints too. Most organic sales on AliExpress are delivered to European customers, but most drop shippers sell products delivered to the United States. So if you see a whole lot of stars and stripes in the order history, it’s safe to assume this product is currently being drop shipped. This trick, Yuanda believes, is crucial to finding potential winning products. “I think one of the biggest criteria now that I look for in products is organic sales from people who use AliExpress as consumers and not drop shippers. That shows that there is a demand for the product, but in that exact moment that supplier is not drop shipping heavily, so you have an opportunity to come in and get a slice of the pie,” he says. Niche Check: Phone Accessories The phone accessories niche that Yuanda chose is brimming with potential. Google Trends shows us that it’s a niche that has remained popular over the past five years, and it’s not going anywhere. The great thing about the phone accessories market is that it’s huge. It’s estimated that there are more than 7 billion mobile phones in use in the world. In the US alone, that number is more than 327 million. Even if you manage to capture just 0.001% of the US market, you’ll have 327,000 potential phones to accessorize. If you choose to sell phone accessories, you can sell products like phone cases, wireless chargers, or ring holders. And because phones are so personal and important in our lives, people want to buy products that match their style. This means there is a potentially limitless amount of designs you could offer. And it’s not just Yuanda who has made it big selling phone accessories. Check out other these success stories from phone accessory entrepreneurs: The Single Product Website: This Entrepreneur’s Simple Formula for Success 6 Lessons from Two Hustlin’ High School Entrepreneurs The Small Details That Make a Big Difference When he launched his phone accessories, Yuanda was sure about two things: He wanted his store to feel like a premium brand Advertising doesn’t work if it looks like advertising Yuanda has worked hard to make the first one true, focusing on the details of his store experience to communicate a premium brand feel. The first step to doing this was to include just one type of product on his store, with three variations in style. Because of this, he was able to use a stripped back variation of the theme Brooklyn, which funnels users quickly towards the “Shop Now” or “Add to Cart” buttons. “The idea is that I wanted to make the store look like a brand, not a dropshipping store, and not a general store. It’s a one-product store that looks like a real brand,” he says. “Many general stores are just random collection of products. And I feel like as soon as someone sees a random collection of products, they automatically think of Amazon and then they start thinking, ‘Oh can I get a better price on Amazon?’ And that’s when you lose out.” But it doesn’t end there. Yuanda has been thinking about the even smaller details. (Like decimal points small.) “Something that I’ve recently been doing is reading a lot about pricing. I think one thing people are often getting absolutely wrong in e-commerce is the way they do their pricing,” he says. “So a lot of people, they always recommend ending your price in 0.99. But I noticed that the only people who really do that are retail brands like Walmart, Loblaws, and some e-commerce brands like Amazon. So these are all really big retailers, and people come to Amazon and Walmart because they want the best price. But when you are trying to convince an impulse purchaser, you don’t want them to think of price at all. You want them to think of your product as a premium product that they can only get from this one site. So the way I do my pricing now is I just leave them at whole numbers like $20 or $22. It gives it that professional brand feel. Big brands like Nike that sell online, none of them use 99 cent pricing, they use $17, $47, or $100 or something like that.” For his advertising, he stuck firmly to the belief that the best ads don’t look like ads. “That’s something that I believe in, creating content to post that does not look like an ad. Because if it looks like an ad, people won’t like it, instead they’ll scroll by. Then you’ll have a harder time getting it shown to people due to the Instagram algorithm favoring posts that have high engagement,” he says. But it took a while to get to this realization, and he admits that when he was just starting, his ads needed a lot of improvement. “When I started, I didn’t know how to make engaging content at all,” he says. “The difference between now and then is now I understand that people don’t want to see ads, so you have to make your ads super subtle, make them in a way that it doesn’t seem like an ad.” His strategy now is to create content for Instagram that features his product, but also fits seamlessly within his audience’s newsfeed. Then he pays related niche accounts with large followings to repost it to their followers. “For example, some of my ads would look like a meme. It would just look like a very organic post that does not look like an advertisement,” he says. To learn more about Yuanda’s advertising strategy, check out his mini case study video. After experimenting with the Instagram shoutouts tactic in his earlier stores, he already had the process down pat by the time he launched his phone accessories store. “For my phone store, I knew exactly what to do. I’d run more ads, find new pages to run them on, then keep stacking. And pretty quickly I was hitting $300 a day in revenue consistently within a week or so of launching the store. So it was pretty profitable right off the bat,” he says. Advice for Beginners Even though Yuanda was able to start with zero and reinvest his profits bit by bit to help his business grow, he advises that this probably isn’t the best approach. “I think a really important piece of advice is you need money to start,” he says. “If you don’t have money, and you wanna start your own dropshipping business, you need to find a way to get money. You need to either get a job, start freelance work, find some way or some source of income.” He recalls how frustrating it was for him to be in that position, without enough cash flow to grow his business. “I was in that stage, where I had no money to spend on my dropshipping business. Even though I had made sales with it, I wasn’t able to scale it. Last Christmas, I made sales with my music box store, but I wasn’t able to scale it because I simply didn’t have the money,” he says. “Over the summer, I ended up getting a job, part-time job working in an office. And it was the exact moment that I got this job that my second dropshipping store started making incremental sales. I think it’s because I had that confidence in the fact that I have money coming in, so I can spend on ads without being worried or scared.” He suggests a startup budget of $1,000 so that you’ll have enough buffer to test different products and scale up with what’s working. After that point, you should be able to begin to generate sales and reinvest your revenue back into more ads for the business. But importantly, he warns that you have to be comfortable with the idea of burning through it all. “Scared money doesn’t make any money,” he says. (And that’s a point that Young Jeezy agrees with him on.) The Impact of Starting His Business Starting his e-commerce businesses set Yuanda off on a very different path to what he had planned a couple of years ago. It’s even made him rethink his path towards a career as a doctor. “I’m still studying science, but I ended up swapping to another type of science, which is psychology,” he says. “I feel like it’s been helpful in understanding how to do my writing, copywriting my product description, and also understanding the mind of a customer or potential customer when they’re scrolling through social media.” But the impact of the business has been greater than the degree he’ll be leaving university with, it’s transformed his outlook on life, and given it a whole new purpose. “It has impacted me in so many good ways. Starting my business has given me a good source of money to live off of while I’m in university, but I think it’s also really changed me to be a better person,” he says. “Before I would spend my free time just lounging around watching Netflix, and not really being productive. And now I feel like it’s given me a sense of purpose. When I wake up in the morning, I have something that I know I can work on and it can be a bigger thing that really motivates me to get out of bed and start working hard right away.” Want to Learn More? How to Start a Dropshipping Business in 2019 Dropshipping Niches That Are Steady, Not Trendy How to Find the Perfect Dropshipping Products 100+ Best Products to Sell in 2019 [Ebook] Venetia Anderson Venetia Anderson is a content marketer at Oberlo. She’s passionate about discovering great stories from entrepreneurs, as well as plants and disco music. Follow Venetia on Twitter at @venetia__a.
In this story, there’s no fancy business degrees, no network of knowledgeable mentors, and no pile of money to draw from. It’s just a story of a regular kid who started from zero and figured out the path to business success all on his own, pushing through the struggles and setbacks along the way. Yuanda Wang is 21 years old and from Hamilton, Ontario. He’s spent the past year and a bit exploring the world of e-commerce and dropshipping and has grown his most recent store to $18,000 revenue in four months. But this success almost didn’t happen for Yuanda, who until recently was planning to pursue a very different path in life. Starting From Zero: An Average Kid “A little over a year ago, and before that, I was just an average kid,” he says. “I was in high school, and then I went to university and I had no clue what I wanted to do when I got older.” So following the advice of his parents, Yuanda enrolled to study life sciences at university. “At that time my parents wanted me to become a doctor, so I just went along with that path. I was like, ‘Oh, it seems like a good job, it pays well. I might go ahead and study life sciences and see where it leads me,’” he says. At the same time, Yuanda was spending a lot of time on forums about online businesses. He’d browse the forum and read stories of entrepreneurs launching and running their businesses. He’d hear all about the endless new ways that it was possible to start an online business and the seemingly endless potential that lay out there in the big world wide web. At 15 years old he even tried to make a little money with affiliate marketing (it didn’t result in much). But as he began to read more about different online businesses like e-commerce, he started to get curious. “When I started reading about entrepreneurship, e-commerce and online marketing, that really interested me. I never found anything that interesting before,” he says. “I would watch YouTube videos, and I would read articles endlessly. That’s the first time that I had this feeling of passion for something that I enjoy to do. That’s when my perspective changed completely.” But Yuanda was starting from zero, and apart from his brief attempt at affiliate marketing, he had no business experience, but more importantly, no money. As much as he was intrigued by the idea of running his own e-commerce business, he knew it was going to be difficult given his current situation. That’s when he heard about dropshipping. The e-commerce business model would allow him to operate an online store without needing to buy inventory upfront. He’d only pay for the products once they’d already been sold, and his supplier would ship them directly to his customers for him. “It appealed to me because I didn’t have to take too much of a risk. drop shipping As a student at that time I wasn’t drop shippingworking, so I had I would say $100 in my bank account,” he says. “I thought to start a business would be a very expensive process, but through drop shipping, I realized that it’s very accessible. Anyone can start it as long as you have some money, to begin with for the necessities.” Reframing Failure Just before Christmas in 2017, he began building his first stores. He used Shopify as the e-commerce platform and used Oberlo to find products from dropshipping suppliers across the world. He was starting from zero, and unsure of what to sell at first. So he dabbled in a variety of different product niches. He tried selling makeup, and wind up music boxes, and also had a general store stocked with a variety of trending products. He’d spend his evenings after university engrossed in YouTube tutorials and blog articles, trying to learn as much as possible. It was trial by fire. He was reinvesting all of the money he made from his early stores back into the business, so he had his hard earned money on the line every time he tested a new advertising strategy. And it didn’t always work out. “There was one point where I ran a huge advertisement on a big meme page. And it was very expensive. It was around $800 and it didn’t pay off, it didn’t generate that many sales. I lost a lot, would say $400 after expenses, cost of goods, and everything,” he says. But rather than being knocked back by the loss, he decided to reframe things. “That was a hard moment, but for me, the way I view failure is that it’s just a temporary thing. If you fail, you learn something from the process. You learn that you made a mistake and it will only help you to grow more,” he says. “So even in times of hardship, I understand that it’s gonna be hard, you’re gonna fail sometimes, but it’s more so how you react to the failure rather than how you react to the wins that determine your success.” Finding His Winning Product His early stores made a little money, but it wasn’t until his latest store that things started to take off. And it was all thanks to the discovery of one product, an iPhone adapter. The adapter, which sits in the phone accessories niche, took his store from zero to over $18,000 in sales in just four months. “This product, in particular, I have a friend that I talked to about dropshipping that I met through my Facebook group, and then he showed me that his store sold this product in the past, and his store did $20,000 in revenue in a month,” he says. He searched for a supplier of the same product and found one on AliExpress. To assess the competition level, he looked closely at the product’s order history, where he noticed there had been a flood of orders from AliExpress customers. “In the order history, you can usually tell if someone is drop shipping,” he says. His first tactic is to look closely at the timestamps of the orders. If there’s a string of orders placed around the same time, that means it’s usually a drop shipper who is bulk fulfilling their orders. The delivery location can provide hints too. Most organic sales on AliExpress are delivered to European customers, but most drop shippers sell products delivered to the United States. So if you see a whole lot of stars and stripes in the order history, it’s safe to assume this product is currently being drop shipped. This trick, Yuanda believes, is crucial to finding potential winning products. “I think one of the biggest criteria now that I look for in products is organic sales from people who use AliExpress as consumers and not drop shippers. That shows that there is a demand for the product, but in that exact moment that supplier is not drop shipping heavily, so you have an opportunity to come in and get a slice of the pie,” he says. Niche Check: Phone Accessories The phone accessories niche that Yuanda chose is brimming with potential. Google Trends shows us that it’s a niche that has remained popular over the past five years, and it’s not going anywhere. The great thing about the phone accessories market is that it’s huge. It’s estimated that there are more than 7 billion mobile phones in use in the world. In the US alone, that number is more than 327 million. Even if you manage to capture just 0.001% of the US market, you’ll have 327,000 potential phones to accessorize. If you choose to sell phone accessories, you can sell products like phone cases, wireless chargers, or ring holders. And because phones are so personal and important in our lives, people want to buy products that match their style. This means there is a potentially limitless amount of designs you could offer. And it’s not just Yuanda who has made it big selling phone accessories. Check out other these success stories from phone accessory entrepreneurs: The Single Product Website: This Entrepreneur’s Simple Formula for Success 6 Lessons from Two Hustlin’ High School Entrepreneurs The Small Details That Make a Big Difference When he launched his phone accessories, Yuanda was sure about two things: He wanted his store to feel like a premium brand Advertising doesn’t work if it looks like advertising Yuanda has worked hard to make the first one true, focusing on the details of his store experience to communicate a premium brand feel. The first step to doing this was to include just one type of product on his store, with three variations in style. Because of this, he was able to use a stripped back variation of the theme Brooklyn, which funnels users quickly towards the “Shop Now” or “Add to Cart” buttons. “The idea is that I wanted to make the store look like a brand, not a dropshipping store, and not a general store. It’s a one-product store that looks like a real brand,” he says. “Many general stores are just random collection of products. And I feel like as soon as someone sees a random collection of products, they automatically think of Amazon and then they start thinking, ‘Oh can I get a better price on Amazon?’ And that’s when you lose out.” But it doesn’t end there. Yuanda has been thinking about the even smaller details. (Like decimal points small.) “Something that I’ve recently been doing is reading a lot about pricing. I think one thing people are often getting absolutely wrong in e-commerce is the way they do their pricing,” he says. “So a lot of people, they always recommend ending your price in 0.99. But I noticed that the only people who really do that are retail brands like Walmart, Loblaws, and some e-commerce brands like Amazon. So these are all really big retailers, and people come to Amazon and Walmart because they want the best price. But when you are trying to convince an impulse purchaser, you don’t want them to think of price at all. You want them to think of your product as a premium product that they can only get from this one site. So the way I do my pricing now is I just leave them at whole numbers like $20 or $22. It gives it that professional brand feel. Big brands like Nike that sell online, none of them use 99 cent pricing, they use $17, $47, or $100 or something like that.” For his advertising, he stuck firmly to the belief that the best ads don’t look like ads. “That’s something that I believe in, creating content to post that does not look like an ad. Because if it looks like an ad, people won’t like it, instead they’ll scroll by. Then you’ll have a harder time getting it shown to people due to the Instagram algorithm favoring posts that have high engagement,” he says. But it took a while to get to this realization, and he admits that when he was just starting, his ads needed a lot of improvement. “When I started, I didn’t know how to make engaging content at all,” he says. “The difference between now and then is now I understand that people don’t want to see ads, so you have to make your ads super subtle, make them in a way that it doesn’t seem like an ad.” His strategy now is to create content for Instagram that features his product, but also fits seamlessly within his audience’s newsfeed. Then he pays related niche accounts with large followings to repost it to their followers. “For example, some of my ads would look like a meme. It would just look like a very organic post that does not look like an advertisement,” he says. To learn more about Yuanda’s advertising strategy, check out his mini case study video. After experimenting with the Instagram shoutouts tactic in his earlier stores, he already had the process down pat by the time he launched his phone accessories store. “For my phone store, I knew exactly what to do. I’d run more ads, find new pages to run them on, then keep stacking. And pretty quickly I was hitting $300 a day in revenue consistently within a week or so of launching the store. So it was pretty profitable right off the bat,” he says. Advice for Beginners Even though Yuanda was able to start with zero and reinvest his profits bit by bit to help his business grow, he advises that this probably isn’t the best approach. “I think a really important piece of advice is you need money to start,” he says. “If you don’t have money, and you wanna start your own dropshipping business, you need to find a way to get money. You need to either get a job, start freelance work, find some way or some source of income.” He recalls how frustrating it was for him to be in that position, without enough cash flow to grow his business. “I was in that stage, where I had no money to spend on my dropshipping business. Even though I had made sales with it, I wasn’t able to scale it. Last Christmas, I made sales with my music box store, but I wasn’t able to scale it because I simply didn’t have the money,” he says. “Over the summer, I ended up getting a job, part-time job working in an office. And it was the exact moment that I got this job that my second dropshipping store started making incremental sales. I think it’s because I had that confidence in the fact that I have money coming in, so I can spend on ads without being worried or scared.” He suggests a startup budget of $1,000 so that you’ll have enough buffer to test different products and scale up with what’s working. After that point, you should be able to begin to generate sales and reinvest your revenue back into more ads for the business. But importantly, he warns that you have to be comfortable with the idea of burning through it all. “Scared money doesn’t make any money,” he says. (And that’s a point that Young Jeezy agrees with him on.) The Impact of Starting His Business Starting his e-commerce businesses set Yuanda off on a very different path to what he had planned a couple of years ago. It’s even made him rethink his path towards a career as a doctor. “I’m still studying science, but I ended up swapping to another type of science, which is psychology,” he says. “I feel like it’s been helpful in understanding how to do my writing, copywriting my product description, and also understanding the mind of a customer or potential customer when they’re scrolling through social media.” But the impact of the business has been greater than the degree he’ll be leaving university with, it’s transformed his outlook on life, and given it a whole new purpose. “It has impacted me in so many good ways. Starting my business has given me a good source of money to live off of while I’m in university, but I think it’s also really changed me to be a better person,” he says. “Before I would spend my free time just lounging around watching Netflix, and not really being productive. And now I feel like it’s given me a sense of purpose. When I wake up in the morning, I have something that I know I can work on and it can be a bigger thing that really motivates me to get out of bed and start working hard right away.” Want to Learn More? How to Start a Dropshipping Business in 2019 Dropshipping Niches That Are Steady, Not Trendy How to Find the Perfect Dropshipping Products 100+ Best Products to Sell in 2019 [Ebook] Venetia Anderson Venetia Anderson is a content marketer at Oberlo. She’s passionate about discovering great stories from entrepreneurs, as well as plants and disco music. Follow Venetia on Twitter at @venetia__a.
60 Best Shopify Stores for Inspiration January 14, 2019 bizadmin Starting an online business can be intimidating. There are so many things you have to deal with, like how not to go broke or how to optimize your landing pages. But, let’s put that aside for now. Here is a list of 60 inspiring online Shopify stores. All of them are successful ecommerce businesses. Each of these businesses carved their own way to success. And, for each of them, success meant different things. I’ve highlighted the greatest accomplishments, usually monetary, for these Shopify stores. Their successes vary from having high-end clients like Ben Affleck to earning multimillion-dollar investments and six-figure revenues. Hopefully they will get you inspired about your own online business. Best Shopify Stores for Clothing Negative Underwear This company’s goal is to help women feel confident in their own bodies. They don’t want to rely on push-up pads or bows for women to feel sexy. And it must be working for them since this Shopify store’s revenue grew 150% just a few years after they launched. They have gained acclaim from big names such as Forbes, Vogue, and The Wall Street Journal for making a place in the industry and bridging the gap between functionality and appearance. Unconditional Unconditional’s website design is nothing but striking. It’s simple, yet eye catching. Starting up in London, this Shopify store is now 11 years old. They describe themselves as “a winning combination of the laidback and the edgy”. Sir This Shopify store is bold, it’s big, and it’s beautiful. With its serene photography style, it does a great job sending a calming message through the theme of the store. Located in Sydney, Australia, this store steals a place in our list for one of the most striking Shopify stores for clothing. BlackMilk This Shopify store is bursting with color. It gives a feeling of fun, happiness, and adventure. There’s so much to say about this store and the colors that they add to their clothing. When they aren’t grabbing your attention with their vibrant colors, they get you with their exciting prints or occasional Disney heroes you can spot on their clothing. Learn more about the difference between dropshipping and wholesale Taylor Stitch Taylor Stitch launched its online Shopify store in 2010 selling custom and tailored menswear. Their aim is to make sophisticated dressing affordable. This Shopify shop creates a bond with their customers by encouraging them to share their individual stories. Over the years, their customers have shared amazing stories and pictures from fly fishing trips, motorcycles crashes, hurricane clean ups, and wedding days. Since the launch, their revenue has tripled each year. Just three years after their launch, the company made an expected $1.5 million in sales, and is continuing to grow since then. Triangl An Australian couple launched this swimwear line in 2012. The idea of this Shopify store first came to Erin Deering, one of the founders, who realized that she couldn’t find any bikini that she liked that was also affordable. By the end of TRIANGL’s first year, the company made over $5 million. The following year this top Shopify store earned five times that much, at $25 million. TRIANGL offers simple and sporty styles in bright neoprene fabric. HELM Boots Founded in 2009 in Austin, Texas, HELM is dedicated to classic style with a versatile, modern perspective. HELM casual & work boots and shoes are produced and sourced in U.S. facilities, making them 100% made in the USA. This young boot retailer is gaining quick traction and getting orders from the likes of Ben Affleck. Introducing their Shopify shop in 2009, they have since then been committed to crafting handmade leather boots with pride, care, and purpose. Marc Wenn All products are designed by Marc Wenn in London. They focus mainly on shoes, wrist watches, and backpacks. Marc Wenn advises doing many things that don’t scale to ensure good business at first. For example, personally emailing the first 100 customers to say thank you will go a very long way for any business, just as it did for this Shopify store. Khara Kapas Kharakapas, means ‘pure cotton’. They sell Indian-culture-inspired and handmade boutique clothing. Their clothes combine an understanding of the elegance of cotton, earthy colours, versatile prints, and minimalistic design that are a celebration of the uninhibited spirit of style. Their products are produced locally in India, but they provide shipping worldwide. With its modern take on heritage, this Shopify shop racks up over $1,500 sales per day. Ugmonk Originally, Ugmonk started as a side project for its founder, Jeff Sheldon. Today, the company shipped over tens of thousands of products to over 60 countries worldwide. Their products range from everyday clothing to workspace related products and many more unique prints and designs. The shirts from this Shopify shop have been spotted all over television and online, including in an episode of Project Runway and Cougar Town. SoYoung Inc This line of bags for both moms and their children earns 25% of its revenue from their online Shopify stores. The profit margin on those sales is higher due to the higher margins thanks to direct sales. On their Shopify website they have a wide variety of different collections for adults, kids, and babies to choose from. THINX An amazing women’s company which sells period underwear is making big headways and big bucks. This Shopify shop raised $130,000 in 2014 from crowdfunding and has grown 23 times since. 23 times. Gymshark Created in 2012 by teenager Ben Francis and a group of his high-school friends, Gymshark has grown from a screen printing operation in a garage, into one of the fastest growing and most recognisable brands in fitness. This Shopify store is a fitness apparel and accessories brand manufacturer online retailer based in the United Kingdom. Supported by over 3 million highly engaged social media followers and customers in 131 countries. The Candi Factory With it’s simple design and basic structure, this Shopify store is one worth mentioning. They keep it simple by adding some colors and expressions to their clothing line which helps them stand out and create an identity. All in all, their minimalistic design goes well with their products, that appear to be full of life. Best Shopify Stores for Accessories Toyshades This trendy Shopify store doesn’t shy away from adding a little bit of color to their shade collection. With only a few navigation options they have a number of collections to offer when it comes to products, which include autumn shades, winter shades, everyday eyewear and more. Hershel This Shopify store was founded in 2009 by brothers Jamie and Lyndon Cormack. They decided on their company name based on the town where three generations of their family grew up. This Shopify store is one that has gained international recognition for their accessories that they’ve been known to produce with great quality and fine regard for detail. Biko This Shopify store has a very simplistic design, with just a few navigational options. The element that makes it stand out is it’s photography. They describe themselves as a “modern nostalgic jewelry brand”. Based in Toronto, they hand-craft every piece that they make, with materials including sleek mixed metals and natural stones. WP Standard In 2013, WP Standard won Shopify’s Design Award, giving it some serious exposure to their target audience – the design- and quality-conscious tech crowd. It is one of the top examples of how design can play a huge part in the success of a Shopify website. Sunday Somewhere This Shopify store was developed in late 2010 by Dave Allison, but has reached worldwide recognition since then. The premium eyewear brand focuses on quality, simplicity, and originality for its strategy. Minaal sells high-quality travel gear for digital nomads. It was launched by two guys from New Zealand, who realized how dissatisfied they were with their travel gear, and thought it’d be a great idea to quit their jobs to come up with their own. In December of 2015, they launched a 2nd Kickstarter campaign and raised $707,631 from over 2,400 people. The campaign’s goal was only $10,000. This is a great Shopify store example of a business with a long-term goal that is passionate about the travel experience. Watch Outfitter The company was started by a 17-year-old who had a knowledge of watches and passion for jewelry. By the end of the first year, this Shopify shop was making $13,500 in monthly revenue. They source their watches from a number of different vendors within the U.S., Europe, and Asia. This allows them to offer wholesale prices, with high quality materials and design. Michael Nelson This trendy Shopify store made it to the list of top 10 creative Shopify stores to look forward to in 2018, and let’s just say it didn’t disappoint. With it’s funky colors and designs, it’s hard not to be amused by the creativity behind this great Shopify store. Bremont This British luxury watchmaker is a Shopify example of an award-winning company producing beautifully engineered chronometers. The annual production is approximately 8,000-10,000 pieces. In 2017, there were remarks of the company increasing its earnings to £14 million. Nerdwax Nerdwax is an all-natural and organic beeswax. The company rejected two offers from Shark Tank. This Shopify store is definitely doing something right if it has made over a million dollars in total sales to date. Best Shopify Stores for Cosmetics KKW Beauty KKW, the hugely popular beauty brand by Kim Kardashian West has been creating storms with the amount of recognition and fame it has gained. Hosting periodic sales, the products are not only very high in quality, but also are sold out within minutes. It is easily one of the top Shopify stores for cosmetics. Kylie Cosmetics Kylie Cosmetics, the wildly popular beauty company, uses Shopify to run their fantastic online store. Kylie Cosmetics hosts periodic flash sales which are some of the largest on the internet. This is another example of a Shopify store where the products sell out within minutes. Jeffree Star Cosmetics Jefree Star Cosmetics is the cosmetics brand of Jefree Star, an American make-up artist, fashion designer and model. With a hot-pink website look, Jefree Star Cosmetics include a tonne of holiday and special editions for their customers, as well as free U.S. shipping for products over $100. It is arguably amongst the top most popular Shopify stores for makeup and cosmetics. Concrete Minerals Founded in 2009, this Shopify store example is all about creating high-end vegan, cruelty-free cosmetics with a unique twist. Their policy is less and more — less ingredients, more pigment. They are committed to using no parabens or preservatives in any of their products, and are also 100% gluten-free. Located in Southern California, they provide free shipping worldwide on all orders $50 and above. NCLA Beauty This Shopify store offers a wide range of nail products and other cosmetic products, such as jelly balms and lipsticks. What’s interesting about their website is the way they’ve designed it. All we can say is that they’ve nailed the design! Beardbrand Eric Bandholz built an online business for men’s beard care. In less than a year the company was making $120k in monthly sales. Beardbrand’s email list also quickly grew to over 7 thousand emails. Best Shopify Stores for Health and Beauty Flex Flex is an alternative to tampons. The great thing is that it allows women to enjoy sex while on their period. If you don’t think that’s a worthy business idea, this Shopify store raised $4.6 million in the first half of 2016 alone. SkinnyMe Tea This Australian company sells all-natural detox teas. Founded in 2012, their mission is to help people achieve their health and wellness goals. In only-9 months after this Shopify store started, they were earning $600k in monthly revenue. Bootea In 2016, Bootea took over the dietary and lifestyle scene with its detox tea. With one of the best marketed Instagram products, this Shopify store has achieved listings with multiple national retailers and over 1 million customers worldwide. Little Sparrow Tea Little Sparrow Tea is a boutique tea company from London. Their goal is to create authentic and wonderful tea experiences. They offer a selected number of teas including white, herbal, black, and green tea. This Shopify store also has a tonne of information about the health benefits of tea, as well as other interesting posts on their blog. Happiness Abscissa The Happiness Abscissa (Ha) is committed to reflecting happiness. According to their philosophy, The Ha is a subjective scale that incorporates neurobiology and sensory elements that can be optimized to improve one’s sense of wellbeing. This Shopify store is another very well designed example that you can take inspiration from. Skinny Teatox Skinny Teatox is a 100% natural detox tea program that promotes good health and weight. With the undeniably appealing website design, this Shopify store has been included in the list of the top 40 Stunning Ecommerce Stores Built Using Shopify. All the ingredients in Skinny Teatox are 100% natural. There are no chemicals or preservatives. Ingredients include: tea leaves, senna leaf, ginseng, chrysanthemum, cinnamon bark, cloves, rhubarb, ginger, and more. Press London PRESS founders, Georgie and Ed, developed a love for cold-pressed juices and had come to rely on them as a convenient, delicious and healthy part of their diets. This Shopify shop is committed to providing juices that are not only a source of daily enjoyment but also helping them add their daily much-needed nutrition. Nutriseed Nutriseed is a Shopify store passionate about nutrition. They have grown exponentially in the last few years, from humble countryside beginnings to a current state of the art British manufacturing facility. They have a hands-on approach which requires them to maintain a complete control over the quality of their products, from start to finish. They have almost 50k followers on Instagram, and over 200+ products sold a day. Cookbook VillageCookbook Village sold cookbooks originally on eBay and is now thriving on Shopify. The founders have a background in marketing and utilized their store’s blog, email marketing, and Google AdWords to streamline their business’ success. Best Shopify Stores for Electronics and Gadgets GameKlip Ryan French created GameKlip, which sells game controllers for smartphones. Since its launch, this Shopify store has been featured on Gizmodo, ABC News, PC World, CNET, The Verge, and even Ask Men, among a bunch of other magazines and blogs worldwide. Master and Dynamic For all the audiophiles out there, Master and Dynamic is selling high-quality headphones. The products from this Shopify store are part of the $1 billion headphone market and rival Beats by Dre with their quality. Studio Proper This Shopify shop is a product design studio that’s based in Melbourne, Australia. They define themselves as “focused on simplifying everyday interactions technology in a beautiful and minimal fashion.” The products that they offer include mounting solutions for the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, desk stands, travel accessories, wall mounts, and much more. They keep their website design simple and minimal. Pencil by FiftyThree In 2015, Pencil won a Crunchie Award for Best Design and numerous IDSA awards for its packaging and computer equipment. This Shopify store has been praised by big names such as Business Insider and Times Inc. for their creativity. Studio Neat Studio Neat uses Kickstarter to fund their product ideas. In 2016, they launched a new campaign for a smartphone tripod, raising almost $210k in 30 days. Their goal was just $50k. ZeroGravity This Shopify store makes it on our list for their trendy tech accessories. Based in Los Angeles they design all of their iPhone cases in house. What’s interesting about them is that they have very intricate and vibrant designs that are embroidered on iPhone cases for all shapes and sizes, and a huge selection to choose from. Shopify Stores for Home & Furniture St. Frank This Shopify store sells beautiful, handcrafted decor. They have it all when it comes to decorating your house, as well as a website with a sleek looking design. You can find all sorts of accessories for your home from this Shopify store, ranging from pillows to kitchenware. Mignon Mignon is a small online boutique that started off as a kitchen goods retailer, before expanding to include other types of housewares and party provisions. This Shopify store been listed part of the 25 Shopify Store Examples That Will Inspire You. Hem This Shopify store stands out for its modern theme that matches the products. Each product page is accompanied by a detailed description as well as big imagery and description of the designer of the product. It is definitely one of the top Shopify stores in terms of appearance. Floorplan This top Shopify store is about rugs, rugs, and more rugs. Not only do they give you a wide selection to choose your favorite rug from, they also give you the possibility to create a custom rug, exactly how you imagined it for your home. Wrightwood Furniture Wrightwood Furniture started as a store in Chicago. Today, the company makes over 12% of their revenue from their Shopify store. Their online Shopify store is a lead generator for their physical location sales as well. Some Other Great Shopify Stores Worth Mentioning Canada Icons Canada Icons is an online Shopify store – and a museum – which sells Canadian brands and goods. The business revolves around telling stories and is proud of its Canadian heritage. Sugarfina Just a month after launching in 2012, Mark Zuckerberg selected the company as a Facebook gift vendor. This helped the company achieve $120k in revenue in its first year. By 2014, this Shopify shop was making $3 million in revenue. Pipsnacks Pipsnacks sells healthy snacks and is a Shark Tank success story. The initial Shark Tank investment was $200k in 2013. In 2014 the company made $800k in revenue and was expected to increase it by at least 800% in 2015. The Ghostly Store The Ghostly Store sells all sorts of things, from leather wallets and coffee beans to art prints and vinyl records. In 2012, this Shopify store formed a partnership with Warby Parker to create a new line of sunglasses. Pure Cycle The cycling industry is worth $6 billion. In 2012, Pure Cycle, then Pure Fix Cycle, sold over 2,000 bicycles and made almost $4 million dollars. Tattly Tattly started as a side hobby for designer Tina Roth-Eisenburg. Today, it’s a growing temporary tattoo business. In 2015, this Shopify store shipped 2.6 million temporary tattoos ranging from $5 to $15 per sale. UPPERCASE UPPERCASE is a small, independent publisher of books and magazines for the creative and curious. Founded in 2009, it is loved by readers around the world and has been recognized for its design excellence. This proud store has been on Shopify from its early days. It is number 83 in Shopify’s database. GoldieBlox is a construction toy series focused on problem solving, adventure and engineering. In 2013, thi Shopify shop was making $300k in monthly revenue from all its different toys and books. Leather Head Sports Founder of Leather Head Sports, Paul Cunningham, had such success selling his sports leather goods he had to switch from Etsy to Shopify. He hasn’t looked back since. Craft and Mason This company sells specialty coffee and delivers it to your door. The founders focused on counting their pennies from day one and providing real value to coffee lovers to help grow their business. Conclusion Which of these Shopify stores did you enjoy the most? Which one of the stores inspired you the most to aim high with your own store? These Shopify stores vary in their successes but they are all great sources of inspiration for a successful ecommerce. Most of these examples make thousands of dollars in sales each month. Some have a reputation for really cool clients like Ben Affleck too. Maryam Mohsin Maryam Mohsin is a Content Writer at Oberlo. She is devoted to ecommerce and dropshipping, and loves to help entrepreneurs with everything they need to know to build their own business.
Dropshipping Niches That Are Steady, Not Trendy January 10, 2019 bizadmin Imagine having a dropshipping store already built, with ads in place and SEO thoroughly locked down, when search volume for “fidget spinners” did this: Anticipating that spike would have led to huge revenue – in the same way that winning the lottery leads to huge revenue. Instead of crossing our fingers in hopes of catching the next fidget spinner, let’s look at some more reliable and, alas, likelier scenarios for building a profitable dropshipping store. We dug into some data to identify the dropshipping niches that have had the most sustained success over the past few years. Not the dropshipping niches with the hottest trends. Instead, the ones that have been the most consistent. Whether you’re a budding dropshipper or an experienced store owner eyeing something new, you can use this data to explore ideas, products, and strategies that tap into the most enduring niches. Finding the Best Dropshipping Niches Here’s how we identified the dropshipping niches with the most sustained success. NOTE: We bribed our data team to do this – it’s not something that can be done inside of Oberlo. But we’re here to share the data, so let’s dive in! Step 1: We collected data about sales made with Oberlo since 2016, and divided those sales into categories. Oberlo has 22 “Categories,” and these are the most popular: Step 2: We then applied these time filters: January 1, 2016 – December 31, 2016 January 1, 2017 – December 31, 2017 January 1, 2018 – April 25, 2018 (Clearly the 2018 data is lighter than the other years… but we just couldn’t wait.) Step 3: Next we pinpointed the categories that have the most orders year after year. Here they are, with 1 being the best. Step 4: We identified the dropshipping niches that had the most orders within the most popular categories. These niches make up the umbrella categories. So “Action & Toy Figures” is one of 12 niches that make up the “Toys & Hobbies” category: This analysis will show us: The most popular niches In the most popular categories Over the longest periods of time In other words, these are the most consistent dropshipping niches over the span of two-plus years. They are also a good bet to thrive for the next two-plus years. The Highest-Performing Categories Here, again, are the top 10 categories: A few notes about these results. Women’s Clothing & Accessories ranked No. 1 in 2017 and 2018. It’s on fire. Beauty & Health was ranked No. 9 in 2016; No. 2 in 2017; and No. 3 in 2018. The Watches category comes in at No. 7 here, which might not appear all that spectacular but actually is. Watches isn’t nearly as broad as these other categories. Women’s clothing, for instance, contains items ranging from accessories to sweaters. Watches is just… watches. In that context, watches, which ranked in the top 10 each year, is a dropshipping product to keep in mind. At the very least, it can be incorporated into a store that features categories like women’s or men’s clothing. Now let’s put the best performing categories under a microscope and look at the specific dropshipping niches that are fueling their success. Dropshipping Niches in Women’s Clothing Let’s start with the reigning two-time champion – Women’s Clothing & Accessories. There are lots of dropshipping niches that fall under women’s clothing, including some don’t move the needle much – like, say, Bodysuits and Jumpsuits. There are, however, some annual winners. So, yeah, Intimates. This No. 1 ranking is no fluke. Intimates had the most orders of any dropshipping niche in any category in 2017, and it’s on track to do it again this year. If you aren’t sure exactly what the Intimates niche covers, it’s the sort of stuff: Accessories is a broad dropshipping niche that includes products ranging from headbands to scarf clips to gloves. Lots of small stuff, basically. The average order value on accessories won’t be as high as, say, dresses, but it’s a dropshipping niche that has a track record of high-volume orders. Bottoms is a broad niche whose ranking has increased each of the past two years. Dropshipping Niches in Jewelry Women’s Clothing & Accessories may be tops, but Jewelry has enjoyed plenty of success as well. This category has finished no lower than fourth during our three-year window, and it was No. 1 in 2016. Let’s take a look at the best dropshipping niches within Jewelry. Necklaces & Pendants is the niche that performed best each year. Products within this niche are especially cheap for merchants. Lots of the time you could charge $2 and enjoy a 100% markup. Coupled them with matching earrings and you can enjoy an even healthier profit margin. Bracelets & Bangles was second place each year, and actually came pretty close to passing Necklaces & Pendants in 2017. If you’re not familiar with bangles, they’re a type of bracelet often associated with India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and other South Asian countries. Rings are a mainstay in the top three of the Jewelry category. This is yet another dropshipping niche that is cheap for you and popular for shoppers. Dropshipping Niches in Home & Garden Home & Garden is where you’ll find items for your flowers, your living room, your bedroom, and more. There are plenty of products that will earn a chuckle, and also some practical items designed to make your customers’ lives easier. Here are the dropshipping niches inside Home & Garden that have had the most sustained success since 2016. Home Decor has been solid for years. This niche includes items that add some life to your home, from gag decals for your toilet to fun scratch-off maps. The Kitchen, Dining & Bar niche is a combination of fun and practical. Fun like this gag mug, and practical like this pineapple cutter: The Arts, Crafts & Sewing niche gives us a good excuse to discuss the different filters you can use inside Oberlo. Here, you’ll see that the “Sort by” filter is set to “Lowest price.” Meanwhile, here is the same niche, but with the filter set to “Order count” – that is, the products with the most orders appear first. The products we see are totally different. The first filter gives us a handful of products that all cost $1 or less. The second filter shows us tapestries and a “Rose Wish Bottle Handmade Eternal Never Withered Flower.” (We’d probably want to tweak that product name when we import it into our store.) Dropshipping Niches in Beauty & Health Appearing in the top three most popular categories each of the last two years, Beauty & Health niches can roughly be summed up as “stuff you’d find in your bathroom.” Hair products, makeup, facial massage rollers, and other things to keep people looking and feeling their best. This isn’t “Health Care” like medicine and surgical tools. Instead, popular items include ear wax removers, anti-snoring apparatuses, posture correction belts, and other miscellanea. Makeup is more straightforward. Lipstick, fake eyelashes, powder brushes. This dropshipping niche is of course somewhat restricted to women, but that hasn’t stopped it from placing in the top three Beauty & Health niches three years running. With some of these products, it’s extra important to be careful with product descriptions. Anything that deals with health and physical well-being requires attention to detail – no wild promises. This foot and muscle roller, for example, is popular, but if you sell it in your store, you might want to dial back the out-of-the-box description: “Improve blood circulation and boost lymphatic drainage, give your metabolism a kick-start… treat headaches and migraine, offer good relaxation and regulation for your body, etc.” Conclusions on Dropshipping Niches The data we looked at today doesn’t show us everything. For example, we didn’t look at high-performing niches inside of low-performing categories. We also didn’t look at niches that performed poorly in 2016 and 2017, and are now pointing up in 2018. There are more gems out there than discussed in this post. But as you think about what you can sell at your new store – or maybe what you can add to your current store – keep these niches in mind. They have been moving the dial for years.
10 Challenges Every Store Owner Will Face (And How to Solve Them) December 4, 2018 bizadmin 10 Challenges Every Store Owner Will Face (And How to Solve Them) 1. So, You Told Your Loved Ones When I first told my friends and family I was becoming an entrepreneur. I didn’t get the level of excitement I was hoping for. Instead, conversations unfolded like this: “Why are you throwing your life away?” “Don’t you appreciate that your job gives you benefits and a steady income?” I tried to explain what I was doing in a million ways. But there was no getting through to them. All I could do was hide out at the library every day, with my phone off, to avoid conflict as much as possible. If I could go back in time, I just wouldn’t tell them until I had something to show for it. The second you tell anyone you love about wanting to be an entrepreneur – parents, friends, family, spouse, coworkers – there’s a pretty good chance someone will try to change your mind. At the end of the day, you need to ask yourself who you’re living for. Your parents, your partner, yourself, or a greater purpose. And if you focus on yourself or a greater purpose, well, at least it was your decision. And for the record, my loved ones have become more supportive of my entrepreneurial projects as I started to succeed. You just need to prove yourself before you tell anyone. 2. Store Build Exhaustion You made the common mistake of importing hundreds of products to your dropshipping store. And who wouldn’t when it only takes a couple of clicks? But you stayed committed and wrote product descriptions for them all. Trust me, I know how common this mistake is. Take a look at my current Oberlo dashboard – as you can see, I’m sitting on 92 different products. You don’t need to add all 92 products on your store that first day. But by the time you finally get around to launching your store, you’re as burnt out as toast lit on fire. So you create a Facebook ad or maybe create an Instagram post, but you don’t really put any thoughtful effort into it. You just want to get your first sale over with. But the ka-ching sound that the Shopify app makes for each sale – yeah, it never comes. How do you solve this? If you import hundreds of products into your dropshipping store out of excitement, pick 25 or fewer products to write copy for. And launch that same day. You’ll drastically reduce the burnout. Plus, your time is sacred. You’ve got that full-time job going, family to care for, and a million other responsibilities. While it’s important to commit to your new business, you don’t need to overwhelm yourself with a high workload. You can slowly build your store. Get a few early sales and keep adding products to your store as you continue to grow. 3. Fear of Failure For most, fear of failure can stop you from succeeding, even when you’re so freaking close to achieving your dreams. Heck, I’ve failed so many times I could probably end up with a Guinness World Record. But the biggest failure is not pushing forward. Don’t listen to that nasty voice in your head. She’s wrong about you anyway. You need to look at failure like a game. Like you’re trying to solve a puzzle where you need to guess all the wrong combinations before you finally figure out the right combination. If you don’t get it right the first time, no problem. But you still need to dig deeper to crack the code. There are famous failures who’ve failed so much worse than you ever could. And the reason why they ended up becoming leaders, millionaires, billionaires and got a place in the history books is that they refused to let some obstacle prevent them from achieving greatness. Treat obstacles the same way an Olympic hurdler does. Jump over them. And if you trip over one, pretend like it didn’t happen and keep jumping over the next ones. This guy knows what I’m talkin’ about: You’re allowed to feel sad when you hit a roadblock. But then you need to turn that sadness into a raging fire to push you to greater heights. Ignite that spark in you, you know you’ve got what it takes. 4. Disappointment After Your First Ad The feeling that you’re on the right track usually disappears after you create your first ad and end up with zero sales. It’s always such a bummer. Trust me when I say this, most first ads fail. Don’t lose hope because you didn’t hit jackpot on your first try. My first Facebook ad got zero sales. However, with time I ended up creating a six-figure store with the help of Facebook ads. People tend to make Facebook ads look easy with their copy and paste templates. But truth is, it all boils down to experimentation. Testing out different products, experimenting with different copy, and mixing up pictures. So if your first ad fails, don’t dive into your second one right away. Take the time to evaluate what mistakes you made. And make a mindful effort to improve on that first ad. When my first Facebook ad failed, I literally spent the next couple days reading every article on Facebook ads that I could find. My second Facebook ad converted at about 4-5 cents a click. Remember: you’re still learning. 5. You Chose the Wrong Products You found a product you liked and decided to start promoting it. But the “No sales yet” on your Shopify dashboard isn’t doing you any favors. The success of your store boils down to winning products. All you need to do is find one. And that one product will carry the weight of your store’s sales. So how do you find them and how will you know? Search-based products are products people search for, like tools or equipment. Impulse buy products are products people don’t really need – but buy anyway when they pop up in their Facebook feeds. Don’t make the mistake of selling the right product the wrong way. If you’re selling search-based products, running a Facebook ad isn’t going to skyrocket sales. You need to keep experimenting to find the right products. Create several ads for different products. Which product outperforms the rest? Use that product and scale ads on that one. Don’t try to force a losing product into becoming a winning one. If it doesn’t convert well, test a different product instead. 6. You Freeze Up You spent months daydreaming about starting your online store. And you start to make some pretty good progress on it. All of a sudden, you’re second-guessing yourself. I can do this. No, I can’t. OMG. Freaking out. Executing is harder than daydreaming. Imagining all the money you can make, all the fame you can have, and all the power in the universe takes no work. Choosing products, designing your store, and marketing takes an endless amount of energy. I mean, doesn’t Elon Musk work 80-90 hours a week? You’re not gonna get into the big leagues by doing the 40-hour work week. Most people freeze up because there’s just so much stuff to learn and do. There just aren’t enough hours in the day or resources to do them. But in the beginning, you’ve just gotta suck it up and get it done. Break it down into smaller chunks. Set a timer. Create a schedule with different tasks you need to do. Work on the easy-to-execute projects first to gain momentum. Give yourself a hard deadline. Ask your partner for some help. Hire an intern. There’s always a solution waiting to be discovered. 7. You Don’t Actually Know Where to Start So much information. Too many dropshipping courses online. How do I know what’s credible? Who can I trust? Like you, when I first started I thought I needed to sign up for all courses. Read every article on every blog. And buy every book. But you don’t. The easiest way to succeed isn’t by absorbing information but by practicing. Say you dream of being a baseball player. Do you really think you’re gonna become an all-star from reading books? Or will you get closer to your dream by simply playing baseball. Same works with e-commerce. The best ideas come from making mistakes, trying things out, and sometimes talking to other people who are a bit better than you. So no, you don’t need to sign up and finish a course before you build your first store. Deep down you know you’re just procrastinating. Sit yourself down, design your store, and focus on getting your first sale. Experiment. Try new things. Put yourself out there. You don’t need to be an overnight success to become successful. 8. You Get Sucked Into a Negativity Vortex It’s easy to second guess yourself. You question whether you have the skills to succeed. And delay your business’ launch. You let someone else’s opinion of you get in your head. And you decide to do something completely different. You can hit a home run every time you go to bat, but there’ll always be that one guy in the stands yelling “You suck!” And sometimes the person yelling that to you… is you. One small easy-to-fix problem can get escalated to feelings of hopelessness pretty easily. There’s this really great book I recently read by Marilee G. Adams, Ph.D., called Change Your Questions, Change Your Life. In it, she shares questions to ask yourself to transition from a Judger mindset into a Learner one. Judger is basically that negative, defeatist mindset, and Learner is the positive, open-minded one. So when all your problems start piling up and everything feels hopeless you can ask yourself questions like: What assumptions am I making? What’s best to do now? What am I responsible for? What can I learn? What do I want? Feel free to check out the Choice Map PDF to find more questions that’ll help you get back on the right track when the negativity vortex starts swirling. 9. You Don’t Know How to Write Product Descriptions You might be the world’s greatest marketer. But sometimes the thing holding us back isn’t our mindset – its our lack of skills. For some people, writing product descriptions can be a bit overwhelming. Maybe you’re afraid that the words you add don’t sound good. Or you’re not sure how to structure your sentences. Try not to overcomplicate it. While having a great product description is important, your product photos are going to do the heavy lifting when it comes to sales. When I write product descriptions for my store, I tend to use this template most: Compliment the customer and connect it to the product Mention the product benefit and relate it to the feature Provide a simple recommendation Let’s apply this template to an actual product on Oberlo Verified suppliers. You deserve something as purrfect as this cat towel. This soft towel will soak up water with ease. And it’s antibacterial too – making it a perfect towel for kids or babies. Feel free to snatch up these towels in different colors so children know which one is theirs. Here’s a look at what it looks like on an online store: A little trick I do, as you can see in the example, is make use of puns. Whenever I write a product description, I’ll Google a keyword like “cat puns” so I can make silly jokes to make the copy more playful and easier to read. 10. You Run Out of Money Maybe you spent $1,000 on your first Facebook ad thinking you’d get the same results as a friend. Or maybe you didn’t have a lot of money to start with. Having money to pay for food and shelter is important, so if you’re shot down to zero, you need to rework your plan. You don’t need to give up, but you need to hit that pause button. Take the time to work on some side hustles where you trade time for money. Like a freelance gig or a part-time job. This is only temporary so you can recharge your finances. And then once your finances are back on track you need to look at your store differently. In the meantime, create content – blog posts, social media posts using hashtags, and videos on YouTube. It’s time to play the slow and steady race. No, you won’t be getting sales off the bat. But you’ll grow your audience so you can grow your sales long-term. It’s budget-friendly. And it’ll also help you build a more sustainable business. Feel free to scan through the Free Traffic ebook for other ideas on how to get traffic you can monetize without spending a time. Conclusion We all experience obstacles at some point. Fortunately, all those mental barriers and roadblocks usually come from our own doing, meaning the power to change it ultimately lies within yourself. Sometimes the easiest way to get those negative thoughts out of your head is by asking a different set of questions. Other times all you need is a little more practice to bring you closer to achieving your dreams. But if it counts for anything, you really can change the world. And I hope you do! Nicole Martins Ferreira Nicole Martins Ferreira is a content marketer at Oberlo and experienced ecommerce entrepreneur. She’s been building online stores since 2013 and sharing her secrets with Oberlo users since 2016. Follow Nicole on Twitter at @NicoleMarFer.
e-Commerce SEO for Beginners by Oberlo Dropshipping Application November 30, 2018 bizadmin SEO is a huge topic for beginners. But don’t worry. Oberlo will summarize up the key points here in this video for beginners like you and me. If you want to get started in SEO, then this video will help from Oberlo. This is to help e-commerce store owners get more sales using SEO. For the uninitiated, Oberlo helps automate Your Dropshipping Store with awesome features just like Shopzie. Oberlo has Free 14-Day Trial. No Credit Card is required with up to 10% Cashback. It Automates Dropship Stores with Auto Order and Tracking plus 1-Click Migration Tool. You might wonder, ‘What is Oberlo?’ Oberlo is an application, which allows you to easily import dropshipped products into a Shopify store and ship them directly to your customers – in only a few clicks. You can import and sell items that can be found on Oberlo Supply Marketplace or at Aliexpress.com.