Anyone else?
Who /ecom/ here?
Yeah. I made $6 million between nov 2018 and may 2019 in revenue. Right around then facebooks adpocalypse started happening and I’ve been losing money since. About to pull the plug on all of it
What happened with Facebook? I don’t use it for traffic. Is that all you use or have you diversified? Are you going to sell or just quit?
It was all I used. I experimented with some other traffic sources but the results were never as good as what Facebook could offer. It wasn’t even possible to diversify because I was running at maximum capacity basically 24/7 and going with other traffic sources just for the sake of diversification would invariably mean less profit that month because I’d have to surrender some of my capacity for that less profitable traffic. FB basically rolled out a bunch of new systems to penalize advertisers who aren’t delivering a quality user experience so anyone selling alishit was hit hard. Don’t know if I’ll quit but I want to walk away from it for at least a year. It feels like an unpredictable mess to me and I am fatigued from trying to unscramble it
I made a Shopify store (AUS) that made, 300k rev and ~50k profit in its first year. It's all about winning google desu. blogging is broken and so is getting a URL with the auto-win keyword in it
Are you still making any money on FB? We’re you banned at all?
Paid or organic? Dropship or what model?
Both paid and organic. But if I were to start again, i'd just go all organic. Its all about that slow grind in getting a broad keyword basis of the content e.g. "top 10 best dicks to eat", "how do i buy dicks in x location". you just smash out 1500 word blogs for the first year and watch and wait.
Dropshipping is aids, as people hate to wait and you at the mercy of china. We did get some local distributors for the product tho and these were able to do next day dropshipping. The middle man kills the money :/. Its good when you are starting and have low stock, just gotta keep all the customers calm on email and let them know it might take longer to arrive etc.
tldr: stock is king and when google says jump, you say "how high sir!".
Ps. watch out for Chinese new year if you are buying from Alibaba ;)
How’d you go about finding a good US dropshipper company?
Making a little but not much. I wasn’t banned no
how do you start one?
Ali-express lol. Just dropship from some Chinese seller for a while and you might get lucky and let into some inside info. Alternatively, you can pay some Indian on fiverr to give you b2b leads and find some mum and dad shop that wants to go online.
You win with being tech-savvy. Perfect SEO e.g. 100/100 mobile load speeds, landing pages made around keywords and not doing dumb shit like fake backlink chains.
If you can win at Pinterest that crazy good to, but its all about the product on that platform (stuff girls will buy).
I'll give you one last tip if you are doing a big ticket item +200ea. I'm not sure if its the same in the states, but in Aus, people hate Chinese products as they think they are cheap. For example, Japanese knives are worth lots of money as they use "real" Japanese steel! Little do people know most are made in China, as are the German ones lol. Yet chefs will pay 500+ for some 440c steel blade, that only cost you 80usd each. Basically find some market that people are too lazy to do research on and just default to, Japan = quality.
Do you do genera store model or single item?
Great info thanks man. Any idea how to get that fast of a load time? Any themes capable of 100/100 on Shopify?
Speed can come later, as content is king. If you are playing the google game it take 12 - 24 months before your blogs start to boom. load speeds are just to stop high time preference people bouncing from your site. Its all a numbers game. Google's 'AI' will put any page at rank 1 if the data says so (positive user experience). Therefore If you search, "best watches blue watches 2020" rank 1 will 'generally' will be highly relevant to what the majority of intent is with that specific search term. Plus you can always write a better blog than rank 1, e.g. more info on the topic or more relevant to what the majority is after.
If you have money to spend though, just pay someone on Fiverr to make your site quick or get whatever is the recommended fastest theme for 2020. Avoid too many plugin and stay light on image sizes.
why fiverr? why not upwork?
Single item. We have stores but it’s always one item doing 95% of the volume
Is everyone who did FB slowly dying out? Is this why there’s so many courses now?
Thanks for the info. Any other faster ways of getting something going?
>the virgin shopify
>the CHAD WOO
Best theme for woo? Any woo specific tips?
I really like Salient. Absolutely gorgeous theme if you're looking to actually build a real brand and not a shitty one-product shopify store woo is the way to go
Excellent thanks. I have a brand in Shopify I want to migrate over so I’ll check it out. Any other useful plugins/etc?
I'm a programmer (so all the tech stuff is easy peasy) that would like to try it out.
Any processes/references to know / have a clue about what to sell ?
I guess that's the key to succeed
I run a non-dropshipping subscription box for kids.
I used Facebook ads to grow at first, but I just think thats a losing strategy. It didnt matter what I did, the ad would work for 2 days, and then my cost per result would steadily tick up. I blew $10,000 just on ads.
It still worked out, I guess, because I got a customer base fast, but I was basically just buying cashflow. Since then, Ive been focusing on organic by getting youtube reviews, etc, and that has been working.
Also, if I ever tried to offer a substantial discount with FB (first month free!), for some fucking reason FB would decide to show the ad exclusively to middle aged drug dealer men with the Joker as a profile picture who would subscribe for 1 month and then cancel.
How profitable is that model still? Any advice for trying it in a different niche?
>How profitable is that model still
All depends what your Niche is and how many competitors you have. I'd say the market is getting pretty saturated in many areas.
My advice is to have the value be primarily in the surprise. For example, Universal Yums is a box that sends candy from a different country each month. There is a clear up charge on the candy, but its something you cant just drive to the store and get, and there is a lot of value in the novelty, so the mark ups are justified.
Shit like fashion accessories, and all the other crap you see, You are competing not just with other boxes, but your local store as well. It will be a hard sell, and it will be difficult to command a premium.
Got it. How’re you able to grow enough without paid traffic/churn? Are you able to run it on your own or do you have employees?
Like I said, its a numbers game with influencers.
If you ask 10 people a day and get 1 yes, in a month you get 30 shout outs. Even if they arent in your niche, the links help SEO. Youtube is golden for that. Whether or not you call it free traffic is debatable. They usually do it in exchange for a free box or two.
Right now it is just my wife and I, but that might be changing soon.
>I run a non-dropshipping subscription box for kids.
lol are you me?
Not necessarily kids, but for a very niche collector group. I've taken a look at the people who buy from me, and I have no idea how they can afford a $100, $200, even $500 box every month or even every two weeks in some cases.
Like, I'll take their address and plug it into zillow and see what it's going for. I'm shocked more often than not.
>Like, I'll take their address and plug it into zillow and see what it's going for. I'm shocked more often than not.
I do that too, lol
One obstacle I wasnt anticipating was the amount of attrition just from people not having enough money in the bank.
I have a form on my site that asks for a reason upon cancellation, and one of the saddest things I've ever read was
"I really want to keep buying, but this has been going on my credit card for the past year. They won't let me spend any more on it but when I can I'll be back."
How do you know the niche is good? I dont want to spend a ton of time learning how to make websites, set everthing up, pay the host.. then find out niche is useless.
I've only had some success in YT. CTR and retention being the only thing that makes some sense in determining why a video was a success or not. But still seems pretty fucking random in the way it recommends videos, and recommended traffic is everything. Having tons of subs is useless unless you are a celebrity or some cult personality fag like pewdiepie when people just actively seek the videos. I depend on the algorithm because its a generic channel. Monetizing outside of adsense is useless because its mostly kids and young teens. Im too autistic to go on cam, its an anonymous channel, no one cares, they just watch the video, go onto the next one. I cant create or community, just try to create a decent video and hope it gets recommended. Im going insane at the fact that this is my only source of revenue. I would love to diversify but I have no fucking idea what im doing outside YT and it is random enough, to think starting from scratch with no monetization in months is depressing so I just stick to what i have already monetizing and create content there... which again is a trap because I lack diversification but at the same time you think, "i dont know how much this will last so might as well keep at this".
Anyway, wtf is CTR and retention equivalent in webpages? were does traffic come from and how?
Oh and im also scared of breaking some dumb google TOS in a webpage like misplacing an ad or mentioning the wrong thing and have my adsense account banned thus lose my YT monetization too, would kms.