Life in the E-Commerce Lane

As you all know I'm disabled and need to make money so back at the end of Oct. I started listening to Webinars about E-Commerce stores and Shopify. At the time, all my training here at WA had been about Blogging and they will come. That's all good but I needed money now.

I still have my Blog and Affiliate Golf site here but had learned nothing about E-Commerce here yet. BTW my Site here actually made a bit of money this month too but with CJ's rules you must have $100.00 in Commissions to receive a check. :(

So with my training here I decided to try Shopify Nov.1st and I built a store there called "Totally All Some" and proceeded to jump in with both feet. I built a General Store, not a niche store because I didn't want to be tied down to one line. Building your website is a bit different from here but easy enough to learn and Shopify has great support. I now have a store with close to 100 products that are dropshiped. Most have Reviews, and I have all the legal pages,a menu and about me for easy access at top of header along with my URL and an affiliate link to ebates, lol. Then come my collections.

All that's been fun to do, the tough part was finding the right place to advertise for the money. I have found that Pinterest gives me more impressions and clicks than anywhere else and that Facebook is a rip off in my opinion. I also use Bing Shopping Network which is fairly inexpensive for what you get. I'm also on Instagram but still figuring it out ,lol. I have also made a couple U tube video on my page there !

Well I opened my doors last week when I started my ads and I've had over 1400 visitors so far which I feel is not bad for a New store (in the top 11% of stores that opened when I did) and I finally made some sales this weekend for almost $200.00 on 6 sales.(I was starting to get a bit worried when it went to 900 visitors and no sales yet ) but I'm feeling much better now !

One thing about Shopify they will look at your store and give you advice if you ask for it, they want you to succeed ! The irony of the whole thing is that after I started this venture WA started running Friday training on E-commerce, Dropshipping and all the things i wanted to know about. Just my luck ! But I wouldn't trade this experience for the world. !

A unique thing with Shopify and Oberlo (Product supplier ) is that they are linked up and it only takes a click to import the product to your store, therefore there is no coping and pasting to do. A lot of time saved there. If you use any other distributor you have to copy and paste everything.

A word to the wise. Look out for these distributors that want you to pay to join their service and then so much per month thereafter. They are nothing but a rip-off and the products they have are very overpriced to you,

One of these services is American Dropshiper. They try to get you in by telling you all product come from America and have a ship time of 3 to 7 days. I joined for about 2 days and then realized that all the product priced to me was higher than what everyone was selling them for in the market place. Plus all their products were not just from America, and the ship times stated on the products was higher than what we were told so needless to say I got out of there quickly but it took a lot of emails to do it and several more to get my refund.

In summery it been a growing and learning experience and I'm glad that I had the courage to try it and I believe it to be a success in the making. I know once Christmas slows down and I get some spare time again I'll get back to my training here and hopefully finish it next year along with a couple more websites.I extended my membership for a year so don't think I'm going anywhere lol.( I still got 23 websites to finish !) Everyone have a GREAT day and I hope you enjoyed my little old success story and I'm in no way putting WA down. Without WA I wouldn't of had the courage to pursue this adventure !!!

Bob Elliott