Conclusion of a WooCommerce dropshipping website

byMark-AI

536 followers

Updated 3 years ago

Why I didn't succeed with Dropshipping

About a year ago, I decided to start a case study where I would build a dropshipping website on WA using WooCommerce.

The objective of the case study was to produce $1000 in profit per month with in a year using no PPC (pay per click) advertising. When I started this project, I intended to give you weekly updates on my progress to help other people who wanted to try Dropshipping.

As it turns out, a year later this is actually my first update blog in regards to the progress I made.

Why I didn't post monthly updates

After the first month passed and I was due to write my first progression report, I cam online to write about what I had done. The truth is I was so busy with the setting up of my store and the initial issues that arose from my lack of knowlege, I couldn't justify spending time writing a progress update when I had so much more work to do.

Was I wrong to not post updates? If I had of, maybe I would have been more accountable to myself, or at the very least may have found some great information from my followers rather than making mistake after mistake.

The issue was that I didn't percieve the time spent writing updates on a blog as valuable. in hindsight, there would have been a great wealth of value to writing update posts and I should have done it.

What happened with my dropshipping website

Since I missed it at the time, here is a month by month report of what I should have published.

Month one:

My first website was shut down due to copywrite and trademark infringement. This was a massive over sight on my behalf as I was naive and believed that the supplyers I was using had genuine right to sell the products I was listing. I learned the hard way that it is 100% your responsibility to check first.

It wasn't just my website that was shut down. My payment processor account with Stripe was also shut down with no way to appeal the ban.

After about a week I made a nerw account under a different email address and Stripe didn't ban that account. Perhaps I was lucky but my dropshipping plans could once again continue.

Month two:

After spending weeks researching a new niche, I decided to go into the jewelry market, focusing around the steam punk niche.

I built a new website with a new domain name and started adding products to my website.

I did this for the entire month, editing product descriptions as I went along so that none were missed.

Month three:

I spend the next month photoshopping the images of the products that I displayed. This was a mammoth task as I had no previous experience in image editing.

Most of the changes I made involved adding backgrounds to the images of the products to make them look more interesting (as well as removing the branding that was on some of the product photos.

Month four:

I though I was ready to start promoting my website when I found out that suppliers rapidly change their inventory and that many of the products that I listed where no longer available.

This turned out to be a huge challenge as I would need to check products daily to make sure none of them had been removed by the supplier and this almost left me with no time to promote my website.

To free up time, I made a spreadsheet of all my products and the website links to the stores that I could get them from. This really sped up the checking process and allowed me to free up enough time to work on my website once more.

I spent the remaing month writing content around the steampunk niche to drive traffic to my store.

Month five and six:

I spent another two months writing content, around 3 articles per week.

Month seven:

Over half a year through my project and I hadn't started making any traffic yet. I decided to branch out to social media and created a Facebook page for my website.

I posted on Facebook daily. Sometimes when I didn't have the time to write an article, I found someone elses online and posted a link to that instead. The reason I did that is because although the link would not direct to my website, it still provided useful information to the people who watched my page.

This helped me bnuild my Facebook page to 50 followers in the first month.

Month eight:

I decided that I needed to learn more about drop shiopping so I spent a whole month watching dropshipping videos on Youtube.

It ended up being quite the rabbit hole but I found one person in particular extra useful as he had a very good natural business sence. He didn't talk about just strategy and dropshipping, he talked about business. You should really check Sebastian's channel out https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZ59iKBmGRfQlnl73sOX0Lw

Months nine to eleven:

I doubled down hard on my blog writing and Facebook page and finally started to see some traffic. Around 10 hits per day.

As the time went on I was sure I would see a sale but nothing.

To ensure that the website worked, I placed an order through my own website as if I was a customer, made a purchase using my own credit card and then had the item shipped to myself from my supplier. It worked perfectly and I recieved the product on time.

The problem wasn't my website logistics, it was the sales copy and my funnel to my store.

Month Twelve:

I focused a lot on sales copy and landing pages to drive sales through my store but even with 25 clicks per day, I could not make a single sale.

Then I saw one of Sebastians videos and I reallised what was going wrong. I seriously underestimated the scale of the project that I was doing. I may have been getting traffic and eventually, someone might have bought soemthing but I wasn't even close to the point of making regular sales.

At this point I decided, I know what I could do to move this business model forward but I was not prepared to do the work. I chose to go back to affiliate marketing because the numbers made more sence for me.

About my dropshipping experience

Even though I spent a year trying to build a dropshiopping store and failed (making many mistakes along the way) I learned so much from getting involved in the project and just giving it a go.

My image editing skills have improved dramaticly as well as my Canva skills. Due to the work that I put in, I honed my writing skills and my SEO skills as well as my researching skills.

When all said and done, I do not consider this project as a failure because of the knowlege I gained by doing this project.

Also I had fun. It was exciting owning a store and deciding what products I would sell and at what price. It was fun editing the images and creating videos for them. It was fun thinking of sales copy to write and I am happty that I gave it a go.

What I would advise someone else who is thinking about starting a dropshipping website

If you want to start your own dropshipping website I would say go for it. It is a very sensible business model and can be a lot of fun.

I do have some tips for you if you would like to start your own dropshipping website:

• Hyper Niche - Niches that are broad like camping or sportsware are going to be too hard for you to be successful at. Avoid any Niches that can be found at your local mall. Find small passionate niches that you can highly
• Sell unique items - Don't sell things like T-shirts and basic jewlry. Try to find things that people haven't seen before. If they like the T-shirt you are offering, they will probably go to the mall and buy a similar one. If you sell something your customer has never seen brefore, they are a lot more likely to make an impulse purchase
  
• Do a ton of research and learning - I would recomment at least 3 months of solid research and learning before you begin to build your store.
• Be prepared to work like you have never before - Building a dropshipping website is easy. Building a succesful dropshipping website is another game all together. You will need to test ad copy, test landing pages, test products, test everything! You will need to build 3 varients of a sales funnel and then gather data to see whgich one works best. Then you will need to take the most succesful funnel and make 3 more versions of it but with a different product image. Then make 3 more versions of the most succesful version of that but with different ad copy and so on.

There is a lot more work that goes into selling products from your store then there is with affiliate marketing and you will need to learn a lot of new skills along the way. Is it worth it? Yes it was worth it to me.

Would I do it again? Maybe in the future but affiliate marketing is my model and the only one I will stick to for the forseeable future.

I hope this message helps you decide what you want to do and adds value to your business. If you appreciate my information then please leave a like and a comment so that I know I have helped you and so that this information can be found by others.

Thank you for reading and best of luck with your business.

Mark Frost-Foster