The best thing about Affiliate Marketing or being in the online space is that skills you learn in one venture are mostly transferrable to the next.
What do I mean by that?
If you’re first venture is attempting to sell Clickbank products on Bing and half way through, you decide to stop and try something else, than you will find the new thing you start will be much easier to wrap your head around because of what you learned initially.
Just like how setting up a simple WordPress blog for the first time will make that second time much faster, even if the second blog is in a completely different niche!
Same concept with Teespring.
What skills do you learn here?
Basic Marketing comes down to finding where your ideal demographic lies and giving them the best product you can possibly offer them. In online marketing terminology, ‘laser targeting’ and ‘offer selection’.
Teespring, if you’ve done a lot of it, will drill this in to you.
You will learn how to laser target and sell phsyical product on FaceBook.
So naturally, after being succesful with Teespring or Gearbubble or any other custom merchandise platform, why not try dropshipping?
What is Drop Shipping?
Drop Shipping is the process of selling something on your front end store/website and sourcing the product from your supplier, shipping it directly to the consumer.
The store below is my test site,
it’s set up via a simple wordpress theme with the woocommerce plug in to create a store.
A visitor will come to the store, select a few products and checkout on the store.
I’ll get notified of the order and manually purchase the same items in the order from my supplier using the customers shipping address.
The supplier ships direct to the customer. I make my profit, the supplier makes his money, and the customer gets their product.
Everyones happy.
Testing Before Committing
I’ve mentioned that this is my ‘test store’
What do I mean by that? It’s a generic store where I basically add a product and market it on FaceBook with $30-$60 to see if it has any life.
If it sell well, I’ll make a dedicated store for that niche.
I’m a big believer in product validation before you commit all your time, energy and money to something.
I’m not the type to have an idea about selling dog product online, buy $3,000 worth of stock and spend the next 6 months trying to sell it online.
This is not good business.
Good business is selling $300 worth of Dog products, then ordering the dog products to ship to your customer, seeing if this demand is sustainable and only then committing to scaling.
This is what I’m doing here. once I see something like ‘car key chains’ dong well, I’ll make a dedicated store for it, market it as long as it’s profitable on FaceBook and incorporate proper SEO for long term traffic and sales.
Making Those First Sales
The first sales are always the sweetest.
Was I profitable? Nope! In fact I think I lost $30 overall but at least I know the model works!
There’s over 100,000 products I can test to over 150 countries and countless more angles, funnels and up-sells. Surely I can get something working. Right?
The money came through to my PayPal and bank account. I then proceeded to Aliexpress.com and shipped them straight to the customer.
It feels like my early days in Teespring. I’d get a few sales here and there until I found something huge.
The difference in this case is I can build a store around it that will not only make me money but will also be a complete online store which I can sell as a business!
An ecommerce store generating around 2-4k/m in profit can sell for over 30k easily on flippa!
FaceBook Advertising
I used good ol FaceBook advertising for this. My ads looked like the below,
Nice and simple. The product is nice and clear with an incentive to buy.
I’m going to try a variety of different ad copies from sales to discounts to clearances.
Testing will tell me what works best but I’ve learnt the biggest thing that contributes to your success is the right product – demographic fit. If you get this right then the other factors will barely matter.
That’s all for this post.
I’m going to be testing a bunch of things in time to come so keep posted
Mateen
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So your suppliers are only from Aliexpress and they ship your products free? What if your suppliers are out of stock and your customers order them already? And how is the return process?
You have any specific course that you can recommend?
You mentioned about doing one niche but when I can see that your website has different niches. Are you just testing out which is doing best then will continue with that one product?
Yes, postage is usually free.
If your suppliers are out of stock, you simply refund your customer. If it’s a well selling product with a lot of orders than usually there is always inventory.
No course at the moment. I’ll make some videos soon, once I get something working consistently.
I don’t think I mentioned one niche? I never do one niche :p
I always test pretty much every niche under the sun and go for the one with the most promise as you can see with the test store.
So does it mean that you test every niche and if you find a good one then you will focus on that niche on a different website or the same website? How do you promote your products with Facebook ads when there are so many different niches?
Basically yes.
The same way you promote a Teespring shirt.
Pick item -> make image -> select targeting -> make ad -> test -> repeat
The text in your facebook ad can occupy up to 20%. Try split-testing a larger “Overstocked” headline and you should see higher ctr and lower click costs. Also a “Reduced from $129.50 to just $10 for today only” in the ad copy might help get it profitable.
Hey Jim, thanks for the tips! You’re right, I can try more text and better ad copy. Will incorporate in my next campaigns.
What about delivery? It takes about 7-30 days from Alliexpress. People will wait for car key chains 10 days (or more)?
As long as you state this on your website, people know what they’re getting into.
I’ve been able to upgrade to the ‘epacket’ shipping option which is 7-14 days delivery which isn’t too bad!
But there you have every product from another supplier. What if someone ordered different products?
All products are purchased from aliexpress which has many suppliers. As long as the product was ordered on my website, I can order it from any supplier quite easily.
Expanding your biz and trying new stuff is always good. Glad to see you try out new stuff!
Quick question: I know you’ve had a lot of practice with Facebook ads when doing Teespring, and I feel like most people say not to link directly to a product because “people on social don’t buy.”
Have you found that to be the truth or do you think it’s just a matter of targeting?
Cheers!
It depends.
If the product can be targetted really well and pretty much sells itself than you can link straight to it. (Most Teespring camps can be directly linked).
If you feel you need to presell it a bit, then maybe collecting emails, warming them up then pitching them a great product would be the way to go.
For Teespring and ecommerce in general, I’ll always direct linking to the product.
How about the customer service? You will handle it by yourself? What will you do if a customer is not happy and tries to return the product?
I haven’t had any issues yet but I will handle it myself for now. If many orders start coming in I will have to hire an admin!
How do you handle the return? Where should your customer ship back the items?
Most aliexpress suppliers take returns or will simply give you a refund if you’re not satisfied. If the customer wants a refund and it’s legitimate then you put it on the supplier to refund you as well.
At the end of the day, you will have a negligible amount of issues with orders but as long as you’re profiting in the long run, just count it as a small loss.
So your customer returns to you then you return to aliexpress?
And when your supplier ships the item to your customer, do they show the price you bought and your name?
Yes.
They will not show your name, only the name of the person who’s details you’ve put in. Some show price, some don’t, you can contact them directly and tell them not to.
Thanks for this Mateen.
Always like watching and reading your stuff and the simple, yet informative way you explain things.
Really looking into doing Ecommerce myself, so please, keep it coming and I look forward to seeing how you progress with it, so I and others can hopefully learn a few things.
No problem Mark!
It’s a new adventure for me so will be sure to blog about it as I learn.
Thanks for dropping a comment
Great Article Mateen, loved seeing your face again! 🙂
Thanks Samantha 🙂
Good Read!
I’ve always tried to stay away from Drop Shipping as I’ve found promoting affiliate offers or even Amazon or Ebaypartnernetwork much simpler and without hassle. When I think of drop shipping, I worry about customer issues or supplier issues. Maybe I haven’t fully looked into it yet, but it’s sounding interesting after reading this! 🙂
Hi Mateen,
Great stuff! Any updates on your test site? Looking forward to reading them.
Hey Travis,
I’ll be giving more updates soon!
Nice to see you branching out into dropshipping.
Do you use any audience targeting for these ads or do you keep it relatively broad with low price products?
I try not to sell broad. 99 times out of 100, broad products don’t sell profitably on FaceBook.
I always think of ‘who I’m going to target’ before I go ahead with the product. If it’s something like makeup, I’ll try targeting fashion bloggers but that’s probably as broad as I’ll go!
The only issues I have with this business model is
How can you automate the process of the sale?
E.g order occurs then manual aspect of going to the site to order the product.
Sure you can hire some one to do this for you but what would stop them from under cutting you by seeing you are selling a product for 10 dollars vs the order they place for you at 2 dollars?
Since the orders take an average of 3 weeks to ship from China this will be problematic when customers are use to getting products within 1 week or less
Also the refund polices of the vendors will all vary greatly. Does any one have any input ? I don’t see a technical solve for this 🙁
As a business owner you need to be able to take risks like this. There’s a lot of things people you outsource to can do but I’ve found if you’re well selective with who you choose, chances are very slim.
A lot of people you outsource to will be grateful for just getting the money you pay them for your services. For them to learn marketing, run their own FB ads profitably and beat you to a game that took a while to master, they’re going to struggle. Especially when the dollar value is a lot more there then here.