When it comes to dropshipping everyone has seen the videos on social media showing off how they made millions in a month with it. But what is often overseen are the many who failed. I’m one of those who failed doing dropshipping. And in this post I want to share the lessons I've learned with you.
It’s a real business
As most of you already know. Dropshipping is a real business. And you have to treat it as one.
There’s no get rich quick. Of course you’re making fast money in the scaling phase but it takes a lot of effort beforehand. From the registration of your business, to customer support, all the way to figuring out how to finance your marketing costs. There’s a lot of work that needs to get into your dropshipping business. It’s not just running ads and searching for winning products. Also, you’ll need to have a clear plan on how much you anticipate to spend. That’s a big one for me as when I was freshly starting with dropshipping I added that extra, here another extra and there a professional logo design, oh wait, I also need a product video — bought! I’m rich tomorrow, right? Well, not quite.
You need to know exactly how much you can afford to spend — based on how long the money you saved up should last — and then should’ve better not spent it on half of the things you bought because they turned out that they’re not necessary. But you of course only know that when you’re out of money.
So, when you’re freshly starting out and only remember one thing of this post — get mentally already in the state of thinking that you have no money to spend. And that’s not just regarding dropshipping. This applies to every business you’re starting.
You don’t know what a winning product is
There’s a theme in dropshipping. And it’s called winning product. For those who don’t now what this means — a winning product is a product that gets sales and is profitable. When you’re starting out you don’t know what this will be. No matter how much you’ve planned. How much product research you’ve done or asked other people. There’re just too many factors included besides if people like it or not. Starting with the price — which is determined by your product costs, but also marketing costs (which you don’t know at the beginning)— continuing with if you can identify the right target audience all the way to if you can even connect with them and understand the problem they want to solve. You just simply don’t know what a winning product is. But don’t get encouraged thinking that the pros know it. They don’t. They may have experience that you haven’t BUT this only increase their chances of having more winning products not because they know what works. But what definitely not works. And you need to apply the same mindset.
Don’t think about what will be the next winning product but what will definitely not be the winning product.
But there’s also a strategy you can apply for finding a winning product. And no — it’s not spending your money on a service that’s doing it for you. Well. Kind of. But what I mean with this is that you shouldn’t try to find the one site that you pay a premium price that will give you the next winning product — because they don’t — it’s about having your own strategy to find winning products. Because first of all it’s saving you money and you can improve based on what you’re learning. So what’s it then? Well, you want to find as many products as possible. From different categories but also different variations within a category. Select as many products as your marketing budget allows — for this orientate yourself on how many clicks and views you’ll get for your spending. Set up on your website all of the products you selected and create for all of them advertising materials. This may take a while and so it’s recommended to start out with search. There you can iterate quicker as the material is mostly just text — the name and description of the product. Finally, you take all of the ads you created and bundle it under one campaign. And — this is very important — you want to run it for at least a month.
Once you’ve done that you should have a good idea of what people respond to — or maybe are even willing to spend money on — which will give you a way clearer picture on what you should focus on and what to avoid. Besides you oftentimes end up already with promising products to focus more onto.
To sum it up: Better Data — Better Decisions
Final words
While this wasn’t an extensive list it was one with real nuggets. Nuggets that were found through trail and error — pain, sweat, tears — and by spending a lot of time and money. If you want to make it in dropshipping you’ll definitely need to have mastered those. There’s just no way around them. So the faster you can get through them and apply them in your own business the faster you’ll find success. Let my failure help you find faster the success you earn. And keep in mind that everything in life takes time. There’s no fast success — there’s only fast learning.
If you got any questions that you want to get answered — or if you just want to learn more — you can visit my newly launched website BizQ&A. On there you’ve currently the chance to get your question answered by me. So don’t let this opportunity slip through your hands and take action!
