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"The Art of Finding Winning Products"
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Many dropshippers think, “Why wouldn’t customers just order the product cheaper on the suppliers’ website directly instead of buying from my store? “
But here is the truth —the product isn’t everything!
When people buy things, they’re not simply buying the product. They’re buying into the branding, marketing strategy, design, positioning, and lifestyle that these products represent. With dropshipping, you have more time to focus on branding, marketing strategy, and design of your online store in order to differentiate yourself from other eCommerce businesses.
This was what Prabir noticed before starting his dropshipping business. Prabir worked a 9 to 5 job in Canada just like many other people living the corporate lifestyle. He was bored of seeing dull faces on the subway while going to his job every morning.
“I didn’t want to be miserable like this for the rest of my life, working paycheck to paycheck. So, I wanted to do something for myself, and I decided to start an ecommerce business.” he said.
Moreover, he shared his entrepreneurial story with us, including how to start dropshipping, what his marketing strategy was, and how to use Pinterest for dropshipping, and made his first Pinterest sale in 48 hours!
Like many other new entrepreneurs, Prabir didn’t have any experience in dropshipping. To learn about dropshipping, he watched YouTube videos, read blogs, and bought an online course. To take dropshipping to the next level, he decided to work with a mentor.
“It was a good investment. I recommend that everyone stick with a mentor who has a different mindset and ideas to help when you get confused”
“I tried my best to find the right products that have reliable US suppliers. Starting my dropshipping journey with Spocket was really handy for finding good quality products along with dropshipping suppliers in the USA.”
Prabir gave us a three-step approach to selecting winning dropshipping products to sell:
product selection criteria:
By answering these three questions honestly, you can find a product that has viral potential for sales.
After deciding which products to sell, he created his store. For his strategy, he didn’t focus on finding a niche in the beginning:
“At the moment, I have a general store with different categories. Based on products that sell the most in the current store, I will begin a new niche store around it,” he says.
After discovering which items were gaining traction, he had a better idea of what niche wanted to focus on and stemmed from there.
Prabir wanted to get started dropshipping in the easiest way possible.
“I wanted to use Shopify. Anybody can build a store there easily. The amount of apps and store customization are amazing.”
Joining active Facebook Groups especially around dropshipping, eCommerce, or online businesses is extremely helpful as other people can give you advice and insights of creating a dropshipping store.
Prabir shared his favourite Shopify apps, and how they help him automate his dropshipping store.
Privy (free):
The leading pop up & email marketing tool for eCommerce websites. It helps to convert website visitors into customers with campaigns based on user actions. Prabir utilizes their exit intent pop up feature.
Tabs by station (free):
Creates customizable tabs and allows you to assign them to products by collections, tags, vendors
Power Tools Suite (paid):
It is a 10-in-1 app bundle. Apps help you to save time and optimize your store with smart deletion, auto-hiding products, and global sort orders. Prabir uses it to simplify his website navigation in order to find objects quickly and save time.
ManyChat (paid):
ManyChat is a simply designed Facebook Messenger chatbot for marketing. It automates customer service and provides service solutions without asking for an email address. It also unleashes a great channel for new leads.
AfterShip (free):
Helps you to build a tracking page that customers can track and trace all shipments. Also, it sends automated, timely and personalized emails. “It provides a strong emotional connection to the website even after the purchase. We value human emotions,” he says.
JSON-LD for SEO (free):
Shows your product details in the search results to increase the conversion rate from organic traffic. It reduces indexing time and shows ratings of the products on Google.
Omnisend (free):
A one-stop-shop for marketing automation, Omnisend lets you create automated workflows for all of your channels: email, SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber, push notifications, and more. This is the app for those who want to take email marketing to the next level.
Google Shopping Feed (free):
It syncs your Shopify store with Google Merchant Center to improve organic search traffic.“If your store is available on Google Shopping, the customer will believe your store is legit and trustworthy.”
Google shopping is now free for those who want to take advantage of the opportunity.
Bulk Image Edit (free):
Optimizes image sizes, alt-text and file names to improve SEO. Also, it can watermark your product and theme images to prevent your competitors from using them.
While creating his dropshipping store, Prabir focused on 4 things; Domain name, SEO, Design and Social Media Marketing.
1- Domain Name:“One word or two words are perfect, but more than that is difficult to remember most of the time.” Use creative business name generators that show you available domains as well as great ideas.
2- SEO: He followed Neil Patel’s guidelines for SEO and applied them to his store at first. But, to improve his search engine rank, he hired an SEO expert on Fiverr. The expert wrote articles for his store, provided backlinks from guest posting, and optimized website speed.
3- Design: Prabir believes design and marketing can sell any product so he focused his energy on store design. He used a custom paid theme called dropship theme by flyingstartonline and hired a freelancer for the logo.
You can look through the best Shopify themes for high converting websites to find one that matches your vision.
“I can tell you that I attached great importance to the psychological reaction text fonts and button colors create.”
4-Social Media Marketing: You should know which social media channels your potential customers use in order to reach them. To do that, Prabir created a buyer persona and focused on Pinterest marketing.
“I thought about dropshipping with Pinterest because Pinterest users are more likely to buy than Facebook users,” he says.
Pinterest has seen steady growth in the eCommerce field, and with an introduction to in-app shopping in 2018, it has 322 million users looking for inspiration and ideas.
For consumers, Pinterest is a place to hunt and gather. For brands, it is a gold mine. Consider this: as Shopify analyzed data from 37 million social media visits to over 520,000 Shopify store orders and found Pinterest had a 58.95% average order value while Facebook had 55%.
Pinterest was the second largest social source of traffic, and resulting visits had a higher order value than Facebook.
“Everyone who started eCommerce using Facebook Ads. It's a good platform, but it’s overused,” he says.
After choosing the right social media channel to focus on, it is time to create a community around it. Here are the 4 steps Prabir followed for dropshipping with Pinterest.
Prabir created his Pinterest account with the designer he worked with. He got help while setting up his board designs, marketing strategy, and automation process.
Besides the boards about the products he’s selling, he created relevant boards to get traffic to his Pinterest profile.
Pinterest gives you insight into trends if you set up a business account:
“Inspirational and motivational quotes was a section that drove a lot of traffic along with other boards”
After he set up his Pinterest account, he started to use the tailwind app to automate his dropshipping website. With the tailwind app, he shared posts automatically and rescheduled the sharing times to stay active.
By sharing regularly, you tell the algorithm you are an active user. Thus, the algorithm highlights your posts more on any social media platform, and you can reach more users.
“Once I set the post-automation, I forgot thinking about when to share. And thanks to it, I have more than 150,000+ monthly viewers on my Pinterest account now.”
“For finding the most saved pin on Pinterest, I used a software called adnalytics.io, recommended by Franklin Hatchett. And, it was really helpful.”
By analyzing most viewed pins on his dashboard, he could understand what his community has an interest in. It’s a really helpful way of optimizing posts and finding a niche to focus on.
Using this information, you can pinpoint what your target market likes, and then find dropshipping products that they’ll love.
“I started advertising on Pinterest after three months when I felt my account was fully warmed up,” Prabir says.
Once you analyze who your customer base is, it is easy to set up ads and get returns quickly. “I got my first sale on the second day of running ads on Pinterest”
His ad strategy is pretty simple. For one product, he sticks with $10 daily for five days. If he doesn’t get a sale from the ad, he stops it. However, he got his first Pinterest sale in 48 hours after giving the first Pinterest ad.
“I would say that I’ve spent $1000 up to now.”
He’s aware that it won’t be cheap to start a dropshipping business. And, he didn’t believe the dropshipping gurus who promote stating dropshipping for free.
“One thing I can tell is don’t be stingy; otherwise, you can’t be successful. And I don’t believe that you can open a dropshipping store starting with $0 investment. It takes time and some investment to get started. ”
This is only the start for Prabir. He wants to create his second store around a niche, and he wants to expand his social media network. Spocket Academy was a great initial resource in taking the next steps.
Prabir was able to improve his knowledge on running different types of ads on various social media platforms, branding, and analytics.
“I just created a Youtube channel and Instagram page for my store in order to add my product videos. I think videos are future eCommerce trends for dropshipping and marketing. I will continue with Youtube ads along with Pinterest ads for my dropshipping business,” he says.
Not only did he start a side hustle with dropshipping, but the skills he is developing with his eCommerce business will open up a future full of new opportunities.
With enough traffic coming in through his social media marketing, he would be able to wave goodbye to the 9-5 and work for himself only.
“Just like every business, it’s hard to get started but I believe I will succeed.”
Muammer is a marketing analytics manager at Turkcell and freelance contributor. He extracts meaning from the data and turns them into stories.
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