Does Dropshipping Have Future?

This question has been hovering in my mind for a really long time. If anyone knows that they can get the same products with really low price from AliExpress, why will they be willing to spend much more money and buy from an unknown store? Besides, AliExpress has been putting more efforts in the advertisement on global media and Jack Ma has been so famous and popular with his Alibaba and AliExpress empire. Where is dropshipping's future? 

I think the answer is "Yes", only if you can find a niche that you are able to add value. Dropshipping could be profitable, but it's not going to be easy. 

Before starting a dropshipping store, you have to think clearly about the marketing plan. How will you advertise the products, with videos, Facebook ads, Google Adwords, Blogging, etc? Millions of stores are out there selling the similar products, you have to compete with them and stand out. In order to achieve such goal, you need to: 

a). Know your customers well, identify the selling points of your products and convince the customers that they need them. You can't just set up an online store, upload products and then wait for the customers to visit your stores and give their credit cards to you. Money doesn't come that easily. 

b). Plan well on the selling price. Calculate how much margin you have and how much you can spend on advertising. If you lack of knowledge in this field, do necessary research and study first. You don't want to operate a money-loosing business, after all the time and money invested. 

Here is the advise given by Mr. Yaros, who successfully operates several online stores with dropshipping method. This is his formula for setting the selling price: 

• $0<Supplier Price<$2=Your Price: $7.95

• $2<Supplier Price<$5=Your Price: $9.95

• $5<Supplier Price<$30=Your Price: Supplier Price x 2

• $30<Supplier Price<$50=Your Price: Supplier Price x 1.75

• $50<Supplier Price<$100=Your Price: Supplier Price x 1.5

• Supplier Price>$100=Your Price: Supplier Price x 1.35

If you have made up your mind to grow your business with dropshipping, you have to give your best efforts, research deeply, plan well and work hard. 

"Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours." (Mark 11:24)

“When you really want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” (The Alchemist)

General Store vs Niche Store

If you are thinking about diving into the dropshipping world, but wandering between a general store and a niche store, hope this article will help you in your decision making.  

Though there are many dropshipping gurus and specialists on Youtube and other channels teaching about the theory of opening a general store first, testing the products with it then setting up the niche store with the winning products. They may succeed with this method and it pays off their efforts very well. But honestly, after searching in depth among many forums, websites as well as my own experience, I will vote for working on the niche store directly. Here are a few reasons why niche store is the better choice: 

1). Easier to win customer's trust

After attracting potential customers to your site, all you want is having them buy your products, which relies greatly on how well do you convince the visitors that you are a specialist in the product filed they are looking for and your products worth their trust. However, can you imagine what the visitors will think when they browse your site for iphone cases but find the baby pacifiers on the hot-sale section? How likely will they buy the iphone cases? This could be why your ads bring you visitors, but no sales.

2). Easier to market and target the right audiences

We all know the old saying - "You can't please everyone." Same for the business, when you target for every customer, you will not have any customer. 

Most dropshippers will use Facebook ads for marketing their products and brand. And usually a fan page is required before creating the Facebook ads campaign. However, it would be really troublesome to advertise a general store that selling all kinds of products, since you have to create many different fan pages, in order to target and attract the specific customers. And the name of the fan pages may not be the same as the store name, which will confuse the visitors and not being effective in branding.

3). More efficient for blogging 

Blog is an efficient and effective way in supporting and branding the products. It's quite a popular strategy in providing value-added content with blogs for the potential customers and attract them to your site, then get them take out their credit cards. And such method works well with a niche store that sales products in a well-defined field. You can create an educational content, at the end of the post, you can introduce your products to the readers, and let them know that they can actually get it from your store...

4). More effective in increasing SEO ranking in search engine 

Most likely a niche store is named with the same keywords as its domain name, which increases the chances of the store being searched and exposed. Besides, the blogs content of a niche store are more likely to contain the keywords of the store title, which helps to add more links to the store. And the number of the links a page receives is an important factor for Google to determine the page ranking. 

Conclusion

To be a winner in the dropshipping world and be effective with your time and money, start with the niche store. Do necessary researches and home work first, be familiar with the niche industry that you plan to dive into. 

Right direction, comprehensive planning and hard working increase the chance of being successful.  

Value-Added Dropshipping

1. Why adding value is important?

Adding value is the most crucial factor for creating a successful ecommerce business, otherwise, your store will be just another "Me Too" store, selling the similar products with millions of other stores out there.  

People look for products because they run into problems and they have the needs of getting them solved. If your products can meet the needs, add value and help them, you are going to taste the sweetness of success.

2. What products are more suitable for adding value?

The successful ecommerce business owner knows that he/she is not just selling products, but providing guidance, knowledge, information, insights and solutions. If you can provide customers with professional advise or expert guidance within your niche, you will differentiate your store from other competitors. 

For some products, it will be much easier to add value, compared with other products. Basically, you will be looking for: 

a). Products that have many components: 

Which products need more support, a necklace or an entrance excess device? The more complicated and confusing a product is, the more likely people will search for solutions and answers, and that's where you can jump in and offer your value. You can provide detailed information about what the functions of these components are and how to assemble them together, etc. 

b). Products that are adjustable / customisable: 

If your products can be adjusted and customised, according to customers' specific condition or needs, it will be a great way of providing guidance and adding values.

c). Products require technical setup: 

The customer who purchased an entrance access device is very likely to be confused and feel frustrated by the complicated installation and setting up procedures. If you can provide a short & clear instruction video, presenting the setting up procedures in an easy-understanding manner, you are helping customers to a great extent. 

3. Ways to add value:

Educational content is the most widely used and popular strategy for adding value. You can: 

a). Create a comprehensive buyer's guides:

Explain to customers in details about what they need to watch out or check, in order to choose the right products;

b). Prepare a detailed product descriptions and listings:

Let customers have clear and thorough information about the products you are selling. 

c). Prepare installation & setting up guides: 

Create a short video with a clear presentation, guide the customers through the whole process of installation and setting up the products. Solve the nightmare for the customers.

d). Create a comprehensive users / maintenance manual: 

Explain clearly to the customers about the how the products work, what they should do to keep the products in good condition for a longer time, etc.

Conclusion

Adding value with quality information, guidance, educational content is the most effective and crucial way of creating a successful dropshipping business. Think hard about it and you will get the business rolling bigger and stronger.

Worth Reading Posts About Ecommerce

There are quite a lot of blogs teaching ecommerce business and providing practical tips and strategies. I spend quite a lot of time browsing the blogs each day and I will list down here the ecommerce-related posts that are well worth reading, for you, as well as for myself. The list will grow longer, as the time goes on. 

1.  Ten Mistakes I Made Running Two Online Stores (And How You Can Avoid Them) 

Author: Shabbir Nooruddin

Blog: Bootstrapping Ecommerce

In this post, Shabbir shares with us what he had learnt from his ecommerce mistakes, which are most likely the mistakes you and I are making now. He did a really detailed analysis and provided profound tips & strategies about running a successful ecommerce business, which worth taking time to read through. And his personal blog is widely recognised as one of the 11 Top blogs that ecommerce entrepreneurs shall follow. 

2. Beginner's Guide to Content Marketing.

Author: Ezra Firestone

Blog: Smart Marketer 

A series of 15 videos, teaching beginners and more advanced merchants how to develop a content strategy to increase traffic, sales and repeat business. A quite detailed and thorough teaching about Content Marketing, which will benefit online store owners a lot. 

(More To Come...)

5 Proven Ways To Increase Online Sales + Things You Need To Do Now

So you are operating an ecommerce store and you want to make more sales? The good news is people want to buy more online. Nowadays, people spend more and more time browsing the internet. Is your store optimised for this great opportunity? If not, there are 7 simple things that you can implement in your store and experience the efforts getting paid off. 

1. Choose one ecommerce goal. 

Identify which stage is your online store now. Is it at planning stage? Or no visitors, no sales? Or you get tons of visitors, but no sales? Know your current position clearly, then choose one main goal to focus on, such as making more sales or attracting more traffic. Step by step, you will achieve your goals. 

2. Plan for mobile shoppers. 

It's a great trend around the world that people spend more time with their phones, quite sad though. However, it brings the opportunity for the online store owners to optimise this trend and sale their products. To achieve this, efforts are needed in making it more user-friendly and attractive for the mobile visitors. Add more visual contents and re-size the website to fit the mobile devices are essential for keeping the mobile visitors. 

3. Choose the right landing page. 

Choose the right landing page to keep your visitors and convert them into customers. It's recommended to set the parts of the site where they can purchase your products as the landing page. And it's important to make sure that the landing page is clear and visitors won't get distracted or loose their interest in your store and quit. The main purpose of the landing page is to get customers to pay your products.

4. Free shipping. 

Studies have shown that free shipping is the best and most effective way of convincing customers to willingly purchase online. It works for Amazon, ebay, etc. Adjust your product prices and apply this model to convert traffic into sales.

5. Focus on SEO.

Invest more time and efforts on SEO and focus on the right keywords that can bring your store ranking to a higher position in Google search. For a new store, Google search is an effective way of bringing new customers. 

Videos have more influences than text and they have longer effects on search engine. Besides, you can also upload videos to Youtu, which is another powerful platform for attracting traffics. 

Above are the 5 proven ways that have been used by many successful ecommerce store owners. You can implement these methods to your store, by start taking actions to do the following things now: 

a). Browse your competitors' online store, who have been successful in operating ecommerce business. Check their websites out, learn from them and improve your own store. 

b). Look at your Google Analytics data, to get a sense of which part of your current site is attracting people, how long they stay, and how many of the visitors become customers ( the conversion rate). 

c). If possible, talk to people who work in the companies that are selling the products related to your niche. Ask them which product has worked well and which hasn't. 

Don't let your visitors or customers leave your website without purchasing products. Create your site to make it user-friendly and really easy for them to buy quickly. Give your best to your goal, though it might take you 6 months to achieve so. 

Top 5 Ways of Attracting Traffic & Making Sales Online

The biggest challenge for the online store owners is getting traffic to their stores and converting visitors to customers. Besides, ecommerce store owners shall know their position among thousands of other ecommerce sites. It's crucial for them to figure out the effective ways of standing out and making their stores well-known.

The explosion of growth in the ecommerce world has only made it tougher for ecommerce sites to attract the critical mass of visitors needed to stay in business.

In this post I will share with you 12 different strategies that you could use to increase your online community and get more sales. Pick the strategies and tactics you find most interesting and suitable for your business and start seeing your business grow.

1. Update content / blogs regularly.

It's important to keep your customers / followers being interested in your store. You could use the following methods to update the store content: 

• Add the latest and trending products; 
• Post interesting blogs that are related to your products;
• Create discount or sales activities; 

2. Using images while posting Ads.

Images tend to get people's attention fast. The best way to increase Ads engagement is by including images within the Ads campaign. Images help to make the ads connect with people's emotions & feelings, which are the vital factors for making purchase-related decisions. Studies show that posts with photos on Facebook generate 50% more likes than the normal text posts. Same effects happen for the Google Adwords. Image ads are generally more attractive and more easily to stir up people's curiosity, compared with text Ads.

With the help of Google Shopping free apps, it becomes convenient and simple to link the shopify store with the Google Merchant Centre, which simplify the process of advertising with product images to a great extent.

3. Make it easy to link your ecommerce site with other social media.

The more impressions that people have about your ecommerce site, the more likely it is for your site to gain traffic and customers. Make sure that you have embedded the social media icons (facebook, instagram, pinterest, twitter, google+, linkedin, etc) into your webpage. And make sure that they are displayed properly to the visitors, not hidden or blocked. And you could always be the first to like, share, or link your webpage with your other social media account. Do your part to bring your site to the friends, families and communities. 

And you may want to consider to place social media icons in the following places of your website: 

• Footer of the website & blog
• Header of the website & blog
• On the left/right hand side of the website & blog
• In your newsletter
• In you email signature
• Within specific blog posts

Check out this example of an outdoor product website. They list the social media icons on the side of the home page and make them stick there. Neat and tidy. A great idea!

4. Enable UGC (User Generate Content).

It is a great way to create trust and provide insights on your products by using UGC (User Generate Content), which will result in sales increase.

Yotpo is a popular free social review app that's available in Shopify's app store. Yotop helps you to increase sales by generating more site & product reviews with Yotpo’s signature in-mail review form. Besides, with it you can boost your customers' trust and increase conversion rate with tons of verified reviews & customer photos.  The app helps convert over 8% of customers to reviewers through their mail after purchase email which results in a large number of reviews being created. The best part is that this process is automated so you don’t have to spend time reaching out to customers to try and get new product reviews. Here's how it works:

5. Create micro content.

Nowadays, a great amount of people admit that they often feel overwhelmed by the overloaded information out there. World is changing too fast and too many things happen each day, leaving people helplessly, unable to digest such huge information. It means people have less patient and less time to consume content. An increasing trend among marketers which should be considered seriously by the ecommerce store owners is the creation of bite sized chunks of content, for quick and easy consumption. 

Vine is a great, free app for creating an up to 6s short video. Facebook also provide such video creating tool by using up to 10 images. 

Conclusion

Above listed methods have been widely discussed and introduced on other Ecommerce blogs or courses. And a great many of online store owners have won traffic and made great sales over their competitors, by applying one or more of the these strategies. 

Many people have heard some ideas, but only a few are willing to work hard and try them out. Take actions today and fight your way up in the ecommerce business!

How To Find Hot Selling Products On Shopify App Store & Facebook

Shopify App Store

Visit shopify app store, not to check out what apps we could use to promote our products or websites, but to find out who have purchased these apps, especially those expensive ones. 

a). Sort by "Popular", then search for the those expensive apps, not the free ones. 

b). Then click the selected app and scroll down to the "review" section. Click on any one of these reviewers, who have purchased the app. And it will lead you to that person's shopify store. 

c). Generally, the stores that use those expensive apps have higher chance of operating a successful business. You can browse their website and looking at their best selling products, by adding this code "/collections/all?sort_by=best-selling" right after their main home page URL. 

d). Check those hot selling products in AliExpress and import the products to your store. 

Facebook

Another way of getting the hot selling products and knowing what your competitors are selling, is using Facebook. 

Go to Facebook and like all the pages that are related to your niche, so that you will be your competitors' target audience. Within a few days, you will start getting your competitors' ads. You can visit their site, checking out what they are selling that you don't have, what they are doing which is better than your site and what their hot selling products are, by adding "/collections/all?sort_by=best-selling" right after their main home page URL. 

These are the fastest ways to find the actual best selling products that are related to your niche. As the saying from "The Art of War" says "Know yourself and know your enemy, and you will never be defeated ."

How To Find The Right Product Niche?

Finding the right product niche is one of the crucial steps of being successful in the E-commerce business. Here are some tips and suggestions about how to find the right product niche. We will go through the process of generating product list & evaluating the list to get the potential winning products. Hope they will help you!

Generate The Product List

1. Start from yourself. 

Your minds are already filled with many good ideas: products you like, your hobbies, your passions, trends that you think will become popular, etc. List them down, as much as possible, at least 10 products. We will discuss about how to evaluate them and choosing the potential bestselling products later. 

2. Browse other websites.

Spend a great amount of time browsing those existing, well-established E-commerce platforms, observing their best selling products, promoted products and offers. Learn and find out what are the hot selling products that people are already purchasing. They are the winning products. Add them to your list. Below are the links to some of these well-known platforms. Visit them often and make the best out of them! 

• AliExpress Weekly Best Selling Products 
• Amazon Best Sellers 
• Ebay 
• Lazada Top Sellers  

Besides above sites, you could also check out what other shopify stores are selling by Google "site: myshopify.com" + "The niche" (eg. site: myshopify.com, iphone cases). It's an effective way of knowing better about your competitors, feeling like a spy? 😉

Once you get the product list ready, it's time to start evaluating them and choosing the potential products that you want to sale. 

Evaluate The Product List

1. AliExpress Criteria

a). Store Numbers

Type your product name in AliExpress. Based on the numbers of the stores that are selling such product, we evaluate the store number score as below: 

• More than 2,000 stores: 5 Score
• 500-1,999 stores: 4 Score
• 100-500 stores: 3 Score
• 0-100 stores: 2 Score

b). Product Popularity

Get the average order amount from the top 10 stores that are selling such product. Based on the order amount, we evaluate the product popularity score as below: 

• More than 2,000 orders: 5 Score
• 500-1,999 orders: 4 Score
• 100-500 orders: 3 Score
• 0-100 orders: 2 Score

c). Supplier Positive Feedback

Get the average positive feedback from the top 10 stores that are selling such product. The product shall have min. 96% positive feedback. 

d). Product Price

For the beginners, who never have E-commerce / dropshipping experience before, in my opinion, it would be safer to look for products that are less than $5. Generally, cheaper products are more popular and tend to be hot selling products. Besides, such products are capable of "FREE + Just Pay Shipping" campaign method.  

2. Google Trend

Go to Google Trends and type each of your product idea into the search box and look what the trend is. Is the trend increasing or decreasing? Are there any patterns? Do you see any spikes? 

Take "iPhone cases" as example, we will get the following trend: 

Besides looking at the trend, you should also pay attention to the "Interest by region" area. It shows you from which country these key words have been greatly searched, and such information is very useful in the ads targeting stage. 

And you want to avoid seasonal products, such as Christmas decoration, Easter basket, etc. For the seasonal products have shorter life cycle, and it won't help you in making sales. 

3. Target Audience

While you are selecting products, please bear in mind that it shall be easy to find the target audience with such products, whether on Facebook Ads, Google Adwords or others. If the products are too general, cannot fit in any group of people, no matter how great the products seem to be, very unlikely they are going to make effective sales, and on the other hand, your advertising fees might be sky-high. We will discuss about targeting audience in details in other part. 

Above are some tips and suggestions in finding the right niche. Hope they will give you some basic ideas about getting the right products. Though this stage is important, don't spend too much time on it. It only works when other stages are also well-planned and developed. They work together to lead to a successful E-commerce business.