I used to dropship with Shopify in 2016 and 2017. Then I stopped dropshipping due to some other projects in crypto. In 2019 after a break I got back to dropshipping and started from Shopify, but it didn’t work for me at all.
I moved to ClickFunnels in May with a budget of $2000…
…and we finally reached 100k USD revenue in one week, so I would like to to share some insights which I believe might be beneficial for you 🙂
My insights are below.
1 Separate Stripe Accounts
When you create a new funnel (new domain, new products), make sure you create a new Stripe for every single funnel. The problem was that even though I knew this, it still happened to me and Stripe froze my account with all of the money in it. I was out of business for 12 days. I bet I would have reached even higher results if I were in the game the entire time.
2 Diversify Payments 💱
Use PayPal in case Stripe locks your money up to make sure you can run your ads and collect payments to PayPal and ViceVersa. Big THANKS goes to CF Pro Tools for their PayPal extension. It is worth to say, PayPal is even more significant of a pain in the ass with chargebacks and frozen money. This is an option for diversification.
3 Several Products for the Same Niche
I started dropshipping with niche sports equipment. When I built an audience, I launched another three products in the same sports niche. It was super easy to bootstrap as I already had a Lookalike audience for the first product, and the audience was already semi-warm. In conclusion, you spend less money on facebook ads looking for a target audience.
4 Cross Sales
I cross-sold my products among the same customers. I used the first product as an upsell for second and third funnels (all funnels have a target to the same niche). The second product was a 2nd upsell product for the first funnel. I sent newsletters to cross-sell products (first product to the customer of 2nd and 3rd funnels and vice versa). 12% of total sales came from cross-sales. This means that synergy between products is strong.
5 Facebook Ads 📲
Try, Measure, Try again, Measure again. Use as many strategies, audiences, videos, photos, thumbnails, copies, etc. as possible. What works for one product won’t work for another. For instance, my most converting Lookalike audience for one of my products was 3%, for another same niche product – 5%.
Conclusion: try and measure results, find what converts best for your product, and then try again.
6 Automated Fulfillment
When I reached the threshold of 50 orders per day (current average order volume is 250 per day), it was time-consuming for me to fill orders and manage tracking numbers. I use Dropton which places ClickFunnels orders in a few clicks directly on AliExpress (no need to integrate Zapier, Shopify, Oberlo or Google Sheets). They also collect all tracking numbers in one place. It saved me a lot of time.
7 Shipping Time From AliExpress
The most common bottleneck is shipping time for dropshipping from an AliExpress business. What did I do and how did I solve the problem? I launch a product and ship from China first to see if there is traction for the product. When I see traction, I asked the seller to ship products to his US warehouse. Yes, you need to check sellers with US warehouses (most of the trusted sellers already have a US warehouse or are considering opening one). When you have your products in the US warehouse, it takes up to 7 days for delivery.
8 Reduce the Risk of Negative Facebook Customer Feedback Score (FCFS)
As already mentioned in insight #7, shipping time is a bottleneck. When a customer does not receive a product, and Facebook asks them: “How was your experience with store N?” The customer most likely will rate you negatively. So, first of all, go to FCFS Settings and set delivery time to your Actual shipping time + Reserve (eg.: 3 weeks + 1 week). In addition, we sent an automated email asking customers how was their experience. If experience is negative (don’t like the product, didn’t receive, etc.), the customer will most likely reply to you. There you have one chance to increase customer experience by solving the problem. If you resolve their issue, you improve the chances they will rate you higher when the customer receives the FCFS (at least not negative). We sent the customer experience email one week ahead of when FCFS asks the customer to assess us. I’d love to share more information, so if you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask me in the comments below
