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Mio

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In the hope of a deeper understanding of this business model and making it profitable for me, I am asking for already successful dropshippers to advice me and tell me about the difficulties i might face if I start doing this type of work.

I would be thankful if you could tell me what books to read and what kind of knowledge to gather, and also what kind of toxic information to avoid (ex. scamming youtubers).

I see this business model as a good platform for making a world-wide brand, but I did not close off my options only on that, I am eager to learn about different ways to build a successful entrepreneurial career.
 
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aminmo

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If you're gonna dropship, don't use the Oberlo + AliExpress model. Instead, get yourself high quality suppliers located in the countries you want to sell your products.

That is, of course, if you want to create a real meaningful brand instead of making a quick buck.

I say this as someone who's made over $1-mil in revenue in 2 months alone (in 2017) using the Oberlo + AliExpress model. Trust me, even with good branding and amazing customer service, you'll get very little repeat purchases if shipping takes 2 - 4 weeks each time.

As for knowledge, dropshipping is literally just a fulfillment method. So the same business practices & strategies apply to dropshipping as it does to any other business.
 

Mio

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If you're gonna dropship, don't use the Oberlo + AliExpress model. Instead, get yourself high quality suppliers located in the countries you want to sell your products.

That is, of course, if you want to create a real meaningful brand instead of making a quick buck.

I say this as someone who's made over $1-mil in revenue in 2 months alone (in 2017) using the Oberlo + AliExpress model. Trust me, even with good branding and amazing customer service, you'll get very little repeat purchases if shipping takes 2 - 4 weeks each time.

As for knowledge, dropshipping is literally just a fulfillment method. So the same business practices & strategies apply to dropshipping as it does to any other business.
Would you tell me more about making shipping as fast as possible? I assume the answer is to get a supplier that is in lets say USA if my target are Americans, but what is the alternative to AliExpress model?
 

stevenknow

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1.You find a product from a USA company that doesn't sell online to consumers

2.Cold call/contact the company asking whether they dropship

3.Negotiatea deal/contract if they do

4.Sell the product on your website or through whatever method you'd wish

5.Customer buys

6.Send purchase information to company

7.Company handles fulfillment and money comes into your pocket








Sent from my HTC 2PS6200 using Tapatalk
 
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Roli

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In the hope of a deeper understanding of this business model and making it profitable for me, I am asking for already successful dropshippers to advice me and tell me about the difficulties i might face if I start doing this type of work.

I would be thankful if you could tell me what books to read and what kind of knowledge to gather, and also what kind of toxic information to avoid (ex. scamming youtubers).

I see this business model as a good platform for making a world-wide brand, but I did not close off my options only on that, I am eager to learn about different ways to build a successful entrepreneurial career.

Your biggest challenge will be finding product.

Your next biggest challenge will be marketing the product once you find it.

As @pingu says, try and find a product that doesn't sell online. If you can find something specialist like a bespoke display case or some kind of collectable you'll have a chance at doing well.

Expect to spend a lot of money on Google adwords and to do a lot of testing, the more testing you do, the less likely it is that you'll end up with a dud product.

Again as @pingu says, try and nail down an exclusive deal if you do find a good product, as you don't want all your hard work to be sapped away by someone else coming in and stealing your market.

Read @Walter Hay's importing posts and @Andy Black's Adwords posts.

Most of all, be patient, it is better to take 12 months to find a good product than 12 weeks to find a terrible one ... I speak from experience having done the latter myself.
 

Mio

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As for building a store, would you recommend Shopify or Wordpress, what are pros and cons for each option? I am interested in Shopify, but it is limited on the design side, most of shops look similar because people use those free themes..
 

Roli

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As for building a store, would you recommend Shopify or Wordpress, what are pros and cons for each option? I am interested in Shopify, but it is limited on the design side, most of shops look similar because people use those free themes..

A store is secondary to your product...

This should be your timeline.

Find product (with caveat mentioned in first post, exclusivity deal etc.)

Test it

Find another product.

Test it

Repeat till you find product that works.

Work out CPA (cost per acquisition).

Build landing page/run adwords campaign to test your assertions.

Scale campaign using profits.

Test different ads on same page.

Work out highest returning ad, then test that on different landing pages.

This process might take a year, or it might take a month (probably somewhere in between if you're on it, and have a decent sized budget).

After that you'll know what you need, with one product it probably won't be a Shopify store.

Don't do what I did, don't focus on the tools, focus on the product.

The only thing that matters is sales.

Ignore this and prepare to fail.
 
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Roli

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Would you kindly tell me more about testing, and what size of budget would you consider decent.

Now you're asking the right questions :)

I will give you a brief overview, but to really get a handle you need to check out people like @Andy Black @eliquid and @biophase among others.

One great way to test a product is to look at a popular competitor and to set up a google ad to the competitors page. This is called the 'buying data' phase, the obvious benefit to this tactic is that you haven't invested in the product yourself yet.

So let's say your product is unicycles and you see that Acme Unicycles seem to have a popular above the fold ad running when you type in the words 'buy unicycles' into Google.

So you run a broad match keyword ad and see what comes back, how many people are using that particular search term and others similar. You will also get other data back, like how many people viewed your ad and clicked on it, bounce rates, etc.

It is not perfect because a lot of the data will be hidden from you, seeing as it isn't actually your page, but this is a good tactic when wondering if ABC product is any good.

You can also buy data for your own products, so you have one or two unicycles and you set up a landing page for it, again you set up a broad match campaign and start analysing what keywords are good and what are duds. The good ones you keep, the duds you add to your negative keywords list.

Hopefully you come up with a great product that is keyword rich and lots of people want to buy, at that point you send out 'out of stock' emails and promise your new potential customers some kind of bonus for disappointing them.

You can do this just using a simple landing page and an email client like MailCheat(Chimp); or you can go the Shopify route, however that means you are spending money on the Shopify store from day 1, and it may take you several months before you're selling, which can prove to be expensive. Much better (I think) to have a landing page, that way you don't have a big (empty) store you're paying for.

You could also test on Amazon and ebay as well depending on the product, however Amazon fees, along with their ad fees could prove prohibitive.

As far as budget is concerned that very much depends:

Say you test out your unicycles and you find out that you can get 1 $150 sale a day spending $5, then you have to work out if it scales to $50 for $1500 or if the market is limited to 1 sale per day.

This is why you have to assume that whatever budget you have, you're going to spend (at first) the lion share on marketing.

Of course once you have your formula then it doesn't matter how much you spend because you have worked out your CPA and your ROI on ever dollar that goes out, in that scenario you can't spend enough!

So to give you a figure is impossible really, it depends what your selling. Some products you'll be able to bid $1 per click, some $50.

Like I said, stop by Andy's blogs and start diving deep into those; once you've found your product you can work out a budget based on your per click costs.
 

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