Started my first real ecommerce business, posting the process and asking for tips here.

[JNagtegaal]

To start off i will first introduce myself, my name is Jari Nagtegaal and i'm from The Netherlands (excuse some of my bad english). Now at almost 21 years old i have started a couple of online businesses, which for the most part existed of dropshipping and i created a site for online fitness coaching which i did not even launch because i noticed i was too inexperienced for the market.

About 6 months ago i read The Millionaire Fastlane for the first time and since then i have been pondering upon what kind of fastlane business i wanted to start and take seriously. 4 months ago i started my ecommerce business selling luxury skincare for men. (www.true-skincare.nl) if anyone wants to check out the site, its all in dutch so good luck reading it for the most of you .

The first 2/3 months were very exciting and i made 6 sales totaling €262,50,- I do have to mention that all of these sales were close friends/family who bought the product more out of "charity". The people that tried my products were very excited about them and happy with the quality.

The last month however my sales have stalled completely. I have run multiple ads on facebook without any success, i do get a lot of link clicks but no conversions. Currently i am trying out tiktok ads with a video an influencer created for me. I have recently tried 2 paid partnerships with small influencers both with little to no success.

I hope there are some people on this forum who have experience with ecommerce businesses and maybe ran into some of the same problems. My current guess is that people click on my ads because they like the marketing text and are looking for a good skincare product, but are possibly shocked by the prices. I dont want to lower my prices because i see this as a "last resort" because the marketing should sell the product for the price i am offering it. Let me know if i'm in the wrong thought process or if anyone has tips on this subject! Thanks

 

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[Rafael R.]

To start off i will first introduce myself, my name is Jari Nagtegaal and i'm from The Netherlands (excuse some of my bad english). Now at almost 21 years old i have started a couple of online businesses, which for the most part existed of dropshipping and i created a site for online fitness coaching which i did not even launch because i noticed i was too inexperienced for the market.

About 6 months ago i read The Millionaire Fastlane for the first time and since then i have been pondering upon what kind of fastlane business i wanted to start and take seriously. 4 months ago i started my ecommerce business selling luxury skincare for men. (www.true-skincare.nl) if anyone wants to check out the site, its all in dutch so good luck reading it for the most of you .

The first 2/3 months were very exciting and i made 6 sales totaling €262,50,- I do have to mention that all of these sales were close friends/family who bought the product more out of "charity". The people that tried my products were very excited about them and happy with the quality.

The last month however my sales have stalled completely. I have run multiple ads on facebook without any success, i do get a lot of link clicks but no conversions. Currently i am trying out tiktok ads with a video an influencer created for me. I have recently tried 2 paid partnerships with small influencers both with little to no success.

I hope there are some people on this forum who have experience with ecommerce businesses and maybe ran into some of the same problems. My current guess is that people click on my ads because they like the marketing text and are looking for a good skincare product, but are possibly shocked by the prices. I dont want to lower my prices because i see this as a "last resort" because the marketing should sell the product for the price i am offering it. Let me know if i'm in the wrong thought process or if anyone has tips on this subject! Thanks

If you're happy with the CTR of your ads but you have no conversions, the issue is probably your website.

Consider adding testimonials, shouldn't be hard to get some, since you already sold some products to friends/family.

Maybe the copy isn't that convincing? Consider hiring a copywriter, or try doing it yourself. Plenty of tools out there.

Also ask yourself what problem is your skincare solving? For what kind of people?

 

[JNagtegaal]

If you're happy with the CTR of your ads but you have no conversions, the issue is probably your website.

Consider adding testimonials, shouldn't be hard to get some, since you already sold some products to friends/family.

Maybe the copy isn't that convincing? Consider hiring a copywriter, or try doing it yourself. Plenty of tools out there.

Also ask yourself what problem is your skincare solving? For what kind of people?

I added testimonials in the form of reviews under the products in the beginning, also tried to make my ads/product page tell people what it does(Helps with acne etc.). I’ll look deeper into the copywriting, thanks!

 

[JNagtegaal]

Here is a little update, I got a copywriter to completely rewrite my website for €50 and I do have to say it makes a massive difference. I released a new Facebook advantage+ campaign but this still doesn’t bring my desired results.

I have been reading a lot on this forum about the “Why” or purpose of a company and how much value it offers people. I do believe my products offer value (a better skin = more confidence etc.) but without sales this is very hard to prove.

So currently it feels like i’m stuck between writing new Facebook marketing texts, testing them and not getting any results. The person who did the new copywriting for my website also offers help with marketing campaigns so maybe that would be a good move? I have a monthly marketing budget of around €1200 that is being paid out of my fulltime job. But of course when €150 spend on ads does not bring results why would €1200?

Not looking for a easy “do this and your business will skyrocket” answer, but does anyone have tips on where to go from here that I am not seeing? Also want to mention that I tried Snapchat and Tiktok ads as well and spend €1300 on 2 influencers that did not bring any results.

 

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[Sonny Liston]

Here is a little update, I got a copywriter to completely rewrite my website for €50 and I do have to say it makes a massive difference. I released a new Facebook advantage+ campaign but this still doesn’t bring my desired results.

I have been reading a lot on this forum about the “Why” or purpose of a company and how much value it offers people. I do believe my products offer value (a better skin = more confidence etc.) but without sales this is very hard to prove.

So currently it feels like i’m stuck between writing new Facebook marketing texts, testing them and not getting any results. The person who did the new copywriting for my website also offers help with marketing campaigns so maybe that would be a good move? I have a monthly marketing budget of around €1200 that is being paid out of my fulltime job. But of course when €150 spend on ads does not bring results why would €1200?

Not looking for a easy “do this and your business will skyrocket” answer, but does anyone have tips on where to go from here that I am not seeing? Also want to mention that I tried Snapchat and Tiktok ads as well and spend €1300 on 2 influencers that did not bring any results.

I would recommend to translate the page to english or make an option to choose for english language, because at the moment only the people in your country can understand what youre selling. Also you can pay google to show your site first or one of the first if people search for such products.

 

[nopalmer]

For your niche, I think it's a good idea to team up with an influencer, so thumbs up for that. You could also do another check on your target audience. I think the high prices you mentioned make it a bit smaller and more specific than a large group that uses skin products. Along with this, you should do research on your competitors - again, specifically targeting luxury product sellers. See which platform they choose to advertise. One extra thing to do is consider a mobile marketing strategy. More and more people do online shopping via their phones, so apart from optimizing your website for all screens, here are some small adjustments you can easily make to provide a better experience to your customers. Hang in there and good luck!

 

[LiveFire]

I added testimonials in the form of reviews under the products in the beginning, also tried to make my ads/product page tell people what it does(Helps with acne etc.). I’ll look deeper into the copywriting, thanks!

Referring back to a post from Lex DeVille
"Testimonials are not the key to sales. People buy things that they perceive as solutions to their perceived problems.
Humans are not logical. Therefore, the buying process is not logical. Therefore, testimonials are not necessary for sales."

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[Yula]

Welcome @JNagtegaal! Great job on taking action and learning along the way.

I’m from the Netherlands as well so if you ever want to have a quick chat let me know.

I could give you some tips and tricks on how to improve your conversion rate as well!

Good luck on your journey!

 

[JNagtegaal]

I would recommend to translate the page to english or make an option to choose for english language, because at the moment only the people in your country can understand what youre selling. Also you can pay google to show your site first or one of the first if people search for such products.

Sorry for my late reaction, i did not see the notifications of this thread for some time. The problem with this would be that i should also sell to countries where English is the main language. I know MJ says "Fastlaners think globally, not locally", but currently this would bare too much difficulties with rules in my country (I have looked into it) plus the international shipping costs. Thanks for the reaction!

 

[JNagtegaal]

Welcome @JNagtegaal! Great job on taking action and learning along the way.

I’m from the Netherlands as well so if you ever want to have a quick chat let me know.

I could give you some tips and tricks on how to improve your conversion rate as well!

Good luck on your journey!

Hi Yula, also sorry for the late reaction to you. Sounds like we could do some good talking at the meetup soon. You are the admin of the Whatsapp group right? I'll send you a text so we can talk in Dutch

 

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[JNagtegaal]

Furthermore here is a update of what the past 2 months have been like since my last update.

March:

Currently i'm in the process stage of banging my f*cking head against the wall. The skincare company has definitly not taken off or shown any "real" growth, I worked together with a marketing company for 1 month but they spend €700 and that produced 2 sales (around €60,- revenue). They told me that the algorithm of Instagram/Facebook ads would need about 3 months to optimize and gather data and after that they could optimize the campaign for more sales. This just sounds like €2500 down the drain to me if we can't get "good" results with €700,- adspend. Notable to mention is that they did almost nothing with my suggestions to create good UGC content and they wanted to post photo ads, which as we all know produce everything except for sales in 2023.

I also paid them for creating my social posts, but I soon discovered Canva and realised I could easily do this myself, so I stopped working with them. So this was March.

April:

After thinking I could outsource my marketing and become rich overnight I decided to get back to the gritty work. Yesterday i finally received my UGC content from someone i met on Instagram, the content creation cost me €200,-. I have been running the UGC video on Tiktok for 1 day and i'm getting a low CTR (0,35%) but on my site i'm getting a 40% reached checkout. I have improved the checkout and currently set the best performing adgroup to €150,- a day just to get some numbers crunching. This will run for 2 days and if this does not generate anything of significance, I'll let the skincare company rest for some time.

What will be my next move?

Apart from the skincare company i have also created a new Shopify dropshipping store with a Dutch supplier that also accepts returns. This company will mainly be focussed on generating revenue and not necessarily profit. Ofcourse there is profit but no enormous margins, the idea is to get the company to a certain scale and then sell it to a big player in the industry for the "cashout". I have tested the suppliers shipping speed and packaging and this all seems good, according to my calculations people spend around 2-2,5 Million Euro's a day in this market, so for the marketing i think Google ads in combination with Tiktok UGC unboxing content will work best, since people are already looking for these products and it's nothing new but i just have to get them to buy from me on my USP's (Quick shipping, free shipping from €49,- and good service).

As always I'm interested in different opinions on the matter, so let me know!

 

[MitchC]

The site and branding is really nice, did you design this? I can’t read the copy but good job hiring someone.

Nice job taking action.

I have a couple thoughts.

Since you specifically asked about price, I will give my thoughts on this.

Gary halbert always talked about starting with your best ad, best price, best page etc, so that you know if that doesn’t work, it never will.

If you start with a high price you may be tempted to test a lower price later if it doesn’t work, which is just wasting more money.

Better to start low and increase it once the ads are optimised with pixel events and you have some reviews etc.

Second thing. There’s a review app but no reviews. Probably better to have no review app at all.

Third thing. There is not one photo of a person, skin, anything. Skincare is all about either lifestyle/brand/image or, especially if you are targeting acne, before and afters.

Take the videos or pictures of the influencers and put them on the site. Maybe do some gifting/paid collabs purely to get photos for your site. Maybe throw some stock images on there.

And last, I would stick to 1 traffic source, and I’d pick Facebook/Instagram as it’s the easiest, most consistent and reliable. You can do some TikTok organic too, but I wouldn’t do paid tiktok until you get that working.

As for influencers, I’ve never really had any luck with them, I think the money is better spent on “ugc” creators and paid ads.

You could spend 3k on a crap video from some egotistical influencer with 1m followers and maybe get 100k impressions of your target market if you’re really lucky.

Or you could spend $150 on a good UGC video and spend the rest on paid ads to your target market. $3000 at a $10cpm is like 300k views of your target market. You could make like 5 UGC videos $200 each and then spend 2k on 200k impressions.

Hope this helps. I can tell you’re going to win, that site is really nice and you seem to be realistic and willing to spend money to make this work, and also asking for help.

Edit: didn’t see the latest update before posting this. You’re way ahead of me on the UGC content, nice.

3 months to optimise Facebook is a joke, as is $700 for 2 sales.

3 months to optimise tik tok is possible which is why I suggested starting with Facebook as they have way more data on people.

Images creatives are good, nothing wrong with image creatives. You’re right, very easy to make them in canva. I like to make 10 variations for the same offer in canva then use dynamic creative adsets on Facebook.

 

[JNagtegaal]

Hope this helps. I can tell you’re going to win, that site is really nice and you seem to be realistic and willing to spend money to make this work, and also asking for help.

Thanks for these kind words and your feedback! Yes i did all the website design myself!

The reviews are currently all moved to the Try-out deal but i'm trying to fix this, so that's why you don't see them on the individual products. All my traffic is currently being sent to the Try-out deal so this is not a big problem for now.

Your thoughts on the pricing are interesting, i am currently testing this with the Try-out deal, the deal price is just my costs for the products plus shipping and a little margin. I will keep your thoughts on this in my mind!

For the marketing, what i read online is that Tiktok ads are currently booming because people get all dopamine horny and will make impulse purchases. Maybe because of this reason people instantly skip the ad because they have no attention span? What are you're theories on this? For now i will get the new UGC content on my Facebook ads account as well and start testing on Instagram and Facebook.

Thanks again for your thoughts

 

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[MitchC]

Thanks for these kind words and your feedback! Yes i did all the website design myself!

The reviews are currently all moved to the Try-out deal but i'm trying to fix this, so that's why you don't see them on the individual products. All my traffic is currently being sent to the Try-out deal so this is not a big problem for now.

Your thoughts on the pricing are interesting, i am currently testing this with the Try-out deal, the deal price is just my costs for the products plus shipping and a little margin. I will keep your thoughts on this in my mind!

For the marketing, what i read online is that Tiktok ads are currently booming because people get all dopamine horny and will make impulse purchases. Maybe because of this reason people instantly skip the ad because they have no attention span? What are you're theories on this? For now i will get the new UGC content on my Facebook ads account as well and start testing on Instagram and Facebook.

Thanks again for your thoughts

Facebook is a mature platform with much more data and better signals so it should take less money to optimise and be more consistent.

Tiktok works, not for me yet, but you’re right it does work for others.

I think the key is the right product, and a very strong creative.

If you have a cheap impulse purchase and a very strong creative it should optimise much faster.

As an example my product is not very exciting and quite expensive.

The market can be targeted very easily and well using Facebooks data, but Tiktok hasn’t worked because it hasn’t found the audience yet.

I could spend more and more money and pray it finds that audience and optimises, but if I was just starting this business personally I would just pick Facebook for its consistency.

 

[JNagtegaal]

Facebook is a mature platform with much more data and better signals so it should take less money to optimise and be more consistent.

Tiktok works, not for me yet, but you’re right it does work for others.

I think the key is the right product, and a very strong creative.

If you have a cheap impulse purchase and a very strong creative it should optimise much faster.

As an example my product is not very exciting and quite expensive.

The market can be targeted very easily and well using Facebooks data, but Tiktok hasn’t worked because it hasn’t found the audience yet.

I could spend more and more money and pray it finds that audience and optimises, but if I was just starting this business personally I would just pick Facebook for its consistency.

Seems like Tiktok is maybe great from dropshipping aliexpress products etc. When your not really concerned about branding or people thinking about buying you're products for a day or two. I changed the ads to Facebook and will try this, thanks again and i'll update when i have some data!

 

[JNagtegaal]

So i’m back with some information and thoughts.

I ran my Facebook ads for a total of €150 and this generated 1 sale for €32,95 in revenue. In some way this is good news because it is another sale but if this would be the constant reality of the ads i would be able to generate 10 sales a month (in a perfect situation) with every penny I save from my job.

The problem with this would be that the price of €32,95 is almost the lowest I can go for both products so it would not take long before my complete wallet has been drained.

I decided to go to Brussels this weekend since I had a few days free from my job and decided it would be good to get out of my normal environment and have some time without the influences of others, I went over the lessons I learned with this skincare company and came to the conclusion that I am maybe in the wrong market. Or I have the wrong product in the market.

For the dropshipping company I realized that it is just a desperate attempt to get rich easy and it won’t generate anything worthwhile. so now you say “okay so wtf are you going to do then”

I have decided to stay in the skincare market but change my strategy to woman’s skincare, implementing the lessons I learned from the other company into the new one might be changes that are needed. Through this journey I have been able to find products that improve my own skin (I have pretty bad eczema, acne and clogged pores). But this has been improved significantly now thanks to these lessons.

In the book “Start with why” it states that loyal customers will be drawn to you’re company because of the “Why”(Helping people feel more confident through a better skin etc) instead of the “What”(Skincare products). And I will make my new company more value orientated instead of focused on sales. The theory is: If my products truly work and they are available for the majority of people (all products under €20). Happy customers will do the marketing for me.

All this will be backed by better product testing than before and more market research etc.

Please let me know you’re thoughts or points of attention that I might be seeing wrong. As always thanks for reading

 

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[JNagtegaal]

I need some feedback from you guys. Today I was talking to the owner of my gym and he asked me what kind of work I did, I told him that next to my normal job I also build webshops with my own products and that one of them happens to be skincare for men. He bought both products immediately in cash, since he wanted to try them. Of course as most of you will have had my brain started going on overload with ideas for the brand and what I should do with it.

What i'm thinking:
The new products for women should be getting delivered somewhere this week, ofcourse I will start a site for those and get to product testing etc. The gym owner is a pretty high value guy (owns multiple local business, is fit for his age etc etc.) The problem with my mens skincare is that I myself don't truely believe in the quality of the products and ofcourse the price is absurd. I gave this guy my products for €32.50 since that is my try-out deal but after tax and all costs this €32,50 brings a total of close to €0,00 in my pocket. Now I have done some quick research with suppliers and I am able to get skincare boxes with 4 quality products (need to test them but the ingrediënts look good) for a good price. If I sell the 4 products for €34,95 my net profit after all costs except marketing would be €16,20 a box.

The problem:
My previous men's skincare wasn't selling like hot cakes, so why would this? Well here are the new value skews:

- 4 Products instead of 2, more value for you're money.
- Better ingrediënts = better results, so people will like the product(value) = bigger chance of loyal customers.
- I personally would use the products and believe in them so I would not mind making my own UGC content etc, which might just make the difference.

I can get custom logo's and packaging at a MOQ of 120, so my parents attic would again be filled with new products that might not sell since there could just be no market for it. What is you're guys opinion on this and seeing the numbers and previous posts what would you guys do? Push on or let this project just be what it is? Let me know!

Edit:
I could also just like with the women's products buy let's say 10 products without a logo and rebrand the site. Then if I see differences in sales/interest I can get them with my own logo and go from there.

 

[Subsonic]

I need some feedback from you guys. Today I was talking to the owner of my gym and he asked me what kind of work I did, I told him that next to my normal job I also build webshops with my own products and that one of them happens to be skincare for men. He bought both products immediately in cash, since he wanted to try them. Of course as most of you will have had my brain started going on overload with ideas for the brand and what I should do with it.

What i'm thinking:
The new products for women should be getting delivered somewhere this week, ofcourse I will start a site for those and get to product testing etc. The gym owner is a pretty high value guy (owns multiple local business, is fit for his age etc etc.) The problem with my mens skincare is that I myself don't truely believe in the quality of the products and ofcourse the price is absurd. I gave this guy my products for €32.50 since that is my try-out deal but after tax and all costs this €32,50 brings a total of close to €0,00 in my pocket. Now I have done some quick research with suppliers and I am able to get skincare boxes with 4 quality products (need to test them but the ingrediënts look good) for a good price. If I sell the 4 products for €34,95 my net profit after all costs except marketing would be €16,20 a box.

The problem:
My previous men's skincare wasn't selling like hot cakes, so why would this? Well here are the new value skews:

- 4 Products instead of 2, more value for you're money.
- Better ingrediënts = better results, so people will like the product(value) = bigger chance of loyal customers.
- I personally would use the products and believe in them so I would not mind making my own UGC content etc, which might just make the difference.

I can get custom logo's and packaging at a MOQ of 120, so my parents attic would again be filled with new products that might not sell since there could just be no market for it. What is you're guys opinion on this and seeing the numbers and previous posts what would you guys do? Push on or let this project just be what it is? Let me know!

Edit:
I could also just like with the women's products buy let's say 10 products without a logo and rebrand the site. Then if I see differences in sales/interest I can get them with my own logo and go from there.

If you think the product solves a problem, has relative value and you believe in it, go.

You have a Job and money spent here is better than money spent financing a new car or money spent on bottle service in the club.

 

[MitchC]

Can you get stickers printed and stick them on yourself?

That’s how I do custom packaging with low/cheap MOQ

 

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[JNagtegaal]

Can you get stickers printed and stick them on yourself?

That’s how I do custom packaging with low/cheap MOQ

Yeah this should be possible, thanks for the tip!

 

[JNagtegaal]

If you think the product solves a problem, has relative value and you believe in it, go.

You have a Job and money spent here is better than money spent financing a new car or money spent on bottle service in the club.

True stuff, if I dont try I will probably regret it in a few months time. Thanks for reminding me