What did I learn while trying to run 2 e-commerce stores(closed) in Dropshipping model?
Hey There,
Welcome to my blog! 😊
In this blog, I am trying to share what all things I came
across while trying to run an e-commerce store(twice!) and what I learned from
it.
What is Dropshipping model that you mentioned in the
title, Sanket?
Okay…so, for those who are not aware about it already,
dropshipping is a business model to run e-commerce business with the least
amount of risk. Basically, we don’t have to manage any inventory in order to
have this type of e-commerce biz.
“Then, who will have the inventory and how will it be managed?” you might ask!
Here, we simply connect the suppliers of any product with
the customer of that product. Essentially, we run a website where people come
and select the products that they like/want, and we get them shipped to their
home with the help of the supplier.
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| What is Dropshipping? |
Okay..so now that we know what is dropshipping, let’s
continue our discussion.
Now, the question would be “How can one start this?”
There are so many platforms out there in order to start with
this e.g. Shopify (the famous one), Oberloo (probably part of shopify
now), meesho, Dukaan (Indian player who entered recently in e-commerce)!
Now, opening a store on any such site is made very easy by
them, so one won’t need to be a rocket scientist in order to do so! 😅
After opening your store, there are 3 important aspects which
need to be taken care of:
1st is Store Design
2nd is Products listing and
3rd one is Marketing
(The above list is not exhaustive and isn't necessarily in the order of
importance)
Unfortunately, I did not capture the snapshots from Shopify admin while the stores were open to share here! 🤦
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| Shopify Accounts Page |
️
The stores’ link: kuchhbhikharido.myshopify.com, your-own-store-online.myshopify.com
I do, however, have snaps from Google Ads console, through
which, one can measure how their ads are running and contributing to the store
sales. 💸🤑 I will come back to this in the
later part of the blog.
So, now that we have the base ready, let’s discuss how does
one find products for selling.
I went with a generic store so that I could cater to wide
range of audience, since I was just starting. Hence, I had multiple products in
my stores ranging from shoes 👞, personal care 👜 to pet care🐕, etc.
Also, I tried to have seasonal products. As, I had
started it in December, I added certain Winter products as well. 🧤
Now, the natural question here would be:
“How can one find and add products in a store?”,
“Since we don’t manage inventory, how do we source products
and send them to customers?”
Here comes the role of suppliers which source different
products, manage inventory and let us give them orders as we receive, and send
the products to the customer at their doorsteps.
From my research I could find 2 suppliers, one for India and
one for international shipping. They are GlowRoad and CJDropshipping
respectively. These platforms are integrated with Shopify so you just need to
search and add them as a supplier and then you can add products from their inventory
on your store.
Once you create an account, the process is quite intuitive and you can easily add products on your store and as and when you receive any order, you can fulfill it with their help!
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| CJ Dopshipping homepage |
Once you Register with your email-id and fill in basic
details, you’re good to go. There are so many options to fulfil your order as
they have many warehouses in China, USA, Europe, etc. If we go into more
details, this blog would be very long to read!!! Will try to cover this part in
my next blog! 😄
Now coming to one of the important parts of running an
e-commerce business or any business for that matter: Marketing!!!
Without marketing or advertising, no one will ever know that
your store exists and that you sell what you sell! 😬
When it comes to marketing, there are many platforms/sources
through which you can let the world know about your store/shop and the products
you sell! Especially in this time of social media, it has become comparatively
easy to do so. You can leverage the platforms such as Google, FB (now Meta),
Instagram, TikTok to reach your potential customers by running ads.
I personally used Google Ads for my experiment as it is the
cheapest and easiest option out there!
There can be 2 types of ads in Google, too!
One is Search ads, the ads which appear before and after the
results when we search for something
and the other one is shopping ads which are mostly in the right-hand
side of the results page generally with a photo and price.
One can start and run any type of ad from single website i.e., ads.google.com.
I ran only search ads, so let me share few deets around it.
There are certain jargons which we need to be aware about
while using Google Ads.
These are Campaigns, Ad groups, Impressions, CPC(Cost-Per-Click),
Conversion, CTR.
Campaigns can be related to real life campaigns where
you can have multiple ad groups as per certain strategy.
Ad groups are, well you guessed it right! 😉,
the group of ads which you want to run together or separately.
Impressions is the number of times your ad was shown
on Google search page or google partner site. Please note you don’t pay a single
rupee when someone sees your ad, you pay only when someone clicks on it!
CPC is the amount a single ad click costs you.
Conversion is what is defined by you, e.g. One ad
click can be of conversion value ₹ 100 for you if you get around that much
profit by selling the advertised product. So, this one can vary store-by-store,
person-by-person. Other example maybe a phone call for inquiry or signup for a
newsletter.
CTR or clickthrough rate is to measure the
effectiveness of your ad, it is calculated as number of clicks/number of
impressions. Simply put, it states how often people click on your ad once it is
shown.
Using Google Ads and some organic marketing (WhatsApp
stories and group forwards), I could get around 200 views on my store, however
there were 0 sales!! Ultimately, because of which, I had to close the store
after the trial period ended!
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| Google Ads Homepage |
As you can see, I could get around 8300 people see my ads out of which 116 clicked and landed on the store page.
I will show you how you can also use that and what amount I
earned as part of this!
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| Google Ads Account Promotions and Earnings Page |
As you can see, I received a full match for what I spent in ads in Dec cycle (of course excluding GST😅)!!!
You’ll ask… “Sanket, you mentioned that you will share how can
anyone get benefit of such promotional offer?”. So, here it is: one needs to
search on google (duh… 🤭) for Google Ads 2000 and click on the first
ad (well, yeah! :P), which will mostly lend you on a google form where you need
to enter your email and some other details so as to get one promo code which you
can enter while creating an ad account (if not created already) before you
start your campaign and ads.
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| Google Ads 2000 Promotions Page |
Do read the T&Cs of the promotion. In my case, 31 days
were needed to spend on ads and after that amount was to be matched by Google.
I chose to use ₹500 to run this experiment.
Promotion Earnings Email
Now a natural question would be: “How does one start running
ads??” 🤔
The keywords are really important
in Google Ads, as we want to target our potential customers who search for
specific products on Google/ partner sites of Google (e.g., YouTube). You can
use relevant keywords in order to show your ads more number of times. You can
setup an amount (sort of a budget) which you want to pay to Google for running
your ads, crossing which you’ll get notified and your ad campaigns will be
paused!
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| Google Ads Accounts Campaigns Page |
The home page gives many details around how your campaigns
and ad-groups are doing as you can see in below snapshot.
Google Ads Performance Metrics Page
Here, you can see which keywords helped me get more clicks
and how much did they cost me.
Also, notice the budget I had set which was ₹ 100/day. Plus,
we can see what type of searches brought people to the store more. In this
case, it was “louis vuitton shoes”!
More analytics can be done using these insights as to which
part of the country cost me more and what type of audience saw my ads.
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| Google Ads Demographic Distribution Graphs |
As you can see here, Himachal Pradesh has highest Avg CPC
which means, I paid highest for the ads shown and clicked in this state
compared to rest India. Also, we can observe that Male b/w age 18-24 is the
major audience which saw the ads.
If we want more details, like what type of devices our
audience use and which ads out of a group did well, we can scroll down and see
that as well. Basically, all sort of analytics can be done from the home page
and we can optimize our ads/budgets accordingly so as to get better
performance.
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| Google Ads Devices Distribution for Ads Performance |
As we can see only 2% of my total spend (₹466) was
for computers, there was actually only 1 ad click from this type of device.
Most of my audience saw and clicked on ad via a mobile device and there is no
share of tablets at all! So, if I were to use this insight to improve/optimize
my ads, I’d try to tweak how the ad is getting formatted on a device and try to
make it more clickable so to say! 😅
So..yeah this is it! I still need to
explore this field as you saw I could not generate sales in this experiment! I’m going to learn more and do some new things and will definitely share later
on!
Do let me know your thoughts in the comments below! 😊
I will try to cover more in my upcoming blogs!!
Till then, chao 🖐 and thanks for stopping by!!😁
Oh…yes!!! If we are not already connected on LinkedIn, do hola
at me! 😄
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