I’ve recently gained an interest in e-commerce because of the potential it holds. While passive investing is great, I would like to work on and build something on the side while still following my passive investment plan. I decided to begin my E-commerce journey basically around the beginning of September. In this blog post I’m going to explore my E-commerce plan & journey so far, as well as my first online business!

My original plan from 01/09

At the beginning of this week I decided to make it an aim to set up a dummy store in 2 month’s time (by end of October – 31/10). I broke this goal done into definitive checkpoints spread out along the 2 months, including:

Finding a winning product (due 19/09)
Figure out and prepare ways to market my product. (due 3/10)
Create my website. (due 17/10)
Launch my website (purchase domain) and launch advertisements (due 31/10)

I gave myself around 2 weeks per task to complete.

Shifting perspectives throughout the week

I was looking at my OneNote brainstorm of all the things required for building an E-commerce store and found myself to be petrified like Neville in Harry potter. I was in analysis paralysis.

I’m well aware of my vulnerability to succumbing to analysis paralysis (e.g. spending 2019 dreaming of action and not doing anything lol), so I tried to set boundaries and limits on how much information I will take in when making my dummy store.

Here’s what my OneNote brainstorm looked like:

And there’s a lot more stuff i’m not covering in this small brainstorm I’ve made! Talk about petrificus totalus lol.

“Be a guardian at the threshold of your own mind”

In this day and age, it is extremely important to place filters in your mind and process only what you need to. I tend to experience information overload at times when diving into the rabbit whole of something new, like dropshipping, since the learning curve is exponential for me at this point.

In the pyramid all I was doing was the passive stuff described in the pyramid. I got nowhere in that 1 year of trying lol.

Last year (2019), all I was doing was learning about success. All I was doing was consuming.

Consuming is great, but consuming without action gets you nowhere. I saw myself potentially falling into this trap again when facing the daunting task of building my first online store since there are SO many factors involved which the pros take into consideration to make their store, their marketing and their execution plan seem perfect. I felt like I needed to know all before I got started, so I could match what they deliver. Striving for perfection also added to analysis paralysis.

So with this in mind I’ve decided to shift my ‘philosophy’ or approach to new ventures with the simple question “What can I do right now to action what I have learnt?”

This has been a game changer for me and I think taking action and being active, no matter how little, will definitely lead to better learning and growth as opposed to consuming.

A funny analogy I thought of when I was a consumer was that it was almost I was taking all the protein shakes and gym supplements without lifting the weight lol.

The Balance

All things do need a balance, and I came to realise that although I would like to prompt myself with the question “What can I do right now to action what I have learnt?” more regularly, it does need to be healthily balanced with your fair share of study/assessment/due diligence with related factors before diving into action. I think this is something I will get better at as time goes on and as I become more knowledgeable in this field.

Execution

So as previously mentioned, my original execution plan for creating a dummy store was as follows:

Finding a winning product (due 19/09)
Figure out and prepare ways to market my product. (due 3/10)
Create my website. (due 17/10)
Launch my website (purchase domain) and launch advertisements (due 31/10)

Finding a winning product.

The sequence of steps I took are described below:

Browsing through Ecomhunt – Ecomhunt is a website which shows you some of the latest winning products which you can potentially dropship. It’s free!
I reactivated my Facebook for an hour or so just to look through some ads. Tried installing apps which wipes out anything from your newsfeed and leaves ads only but didn’t work lol – would’ve been a good market research method though…
Looked through a lot of different paid options out there for winning products. I then concluded that I was getting analysis paralysis in a way here too lol – It’s just a dummy store, I should stop being silly
I did however sign up for DropPoint Although I initially thought I don’t want to buy any product research tool for now, this one was actually really good because it was showing me the latest and hottest dropshipping ads being run on Facebook. It can allow me to get a vision of the dropshipping game right now, and also I can track back to years ago too to see what was trending back then which is quite helpful. I can also use this to search for particular products which are currently being dropshipped, as well as looking at dropshipping websites for a bit of inspiration. This would save me quite a lot of time as opposed to scrolling through FB just to spot ads haha.
One of my primary concerns with dropshipping the conventional way through Aliexpress was the shipping times. It looked like it could take up to 40 days for the customer to receive their product which would be very poor. After looking around for suppliers, I found Cjdropshipping, which like Aliexpress, offered a seamless integration of products through Shopify and onto your website. And the best thing too was that the shipping times were only 7-15 days!
04/09 – After fighting through analysis paralysis I thought screw it, I’m finding a product by the end of the day – this is only a dummy store and a training exercise for me so I won’t be to concerned with finding the best product. I scrolled through Cjdropshipping until I found some eye massager.

Not bad! I also wanted to check out how well the same product was selling on AliExpress. AliExpress have their own ‘dropshipping centre’ where you can analyse how well a particular product is selling. Typically from what I’ve learnt when choosing a product is that ideally you’d want one that is on an upward trend in sales, so as you can see below this product ticks that box!

Of course there are many other variables I would need to take into account when picking an actual product, but in the interest time and just needing to choose a relatively decent dummy product to going ahead and move forward with everything else, then this would suffice.

Figure out and prepare ways to market my product

Again, there’s a whole other monster and rabbit hole here with marketing. Main ones being FB & Insta.

I sorta did go into quite a rabbit hole here and to be honest, it is quite intimidating and daunting to see how much I don’t know, and how precise target marketing can get.

However, taking a step back, from what I’ve gathered so far, it seems like for beginners like myself, Instagram is the way to go. One of the easiest methods is just finding an influencer to put your ad up on their story for 24hrs w. link in bio + post. So I decided for this first dummy store I’d just go with an influencer as a way to market my product.

Creating my website

For simplicity purposes, and also from Youtuber recommendations for beginners, I decided to go with a one product store. So I watched a YT vid on how to make a one product store and was actioning out what the tutorial was saying as it went along.

Also was playing around with logos and stuff. This was my first design lol:

Shopify has this pretty sweet app called Hatchful which generates these logos for you. I then thought Eternal Youth Beauty was a bit ugly and decided to change it to a name which more reflects the product im selling:

Final design ended up being:

Which I made on photopea.com – which is basically photoshop online for free. I’m quite grateful I played around with photoshop a lot before so I can sorta use it 😀

Next step was to launch my website and create an actual domain name (otherwise it would be something like store_name-my-shopify.com which is ugly and everyone will know its just a dropshipping store lol. So I purchased the domain glamoureyesmassager.com for $15/yr.

Oops – also forgot to mention I’m gonna need some good advertisments for my product! Usually dropshipping ads are most effective when there’s a good video made of the product so that’s what I need. It’d take too much of my time I reckon to try make one from video clips I find online of the product so I decided to just outsource this

Here’s what I found: website called Viralecomadz (recommended highly by a lot of youtubers I follow) so decided to give em a shot! I ordered a video package (45 sec) + animations (of the product) + IG video story (15 sec). Here’s the IG video!:

I couldn’t be happier! This was awesome and much better than anything I could’ve made haha.

Now I need to market my product! So what I done for this was firstly make an insta for my product:

Then I hit up a bunch of influencers to see their pricing. At first I was tryna compare the prices vs follower ratio. LUCKILY one influencer decided to send me their analytics and I saw that most the followers from Brazil lol, then I realised that FOLLOWER COUNT WASN’T EVERYTHING. Since I am targeting the US, I need to find an influencer with mostly US followers. So I sent a follow up message to ALL influencers I messaged for their analytics and follower count by country.

Here’s a comparison comparing two different influencers and their audience location %. I went with influencer 1.

This helped me narrow down which one would be the one I chose. Also, they’ve had posts of previous products they’ve posted up and it showed 2000+ views which I thought was ok.

After that I negotiated a price and agreed upon a time when they would upload my ad. I paid $45 AUD for this influencer to promote my product.

Come Friday 11/09 11pm (9am EST), the ad was launched. This felt great and was a big milestone for me – my first business was live and ready for people to see! 😀 I was also very happy because I managed to complete a task I originally planned for 2 months in 1 week because I really took the whole “take action” idea seriously :-).

I went to sleep pretty happy. But at the next day after the 24 hours I was pretty sad to see that not many people had visited my site haha :-(.

Here’s the result after 24 hours of how many people saw my ad on the infleuncer’s page:

I know that this was a dummy store that I made as a way to learn the ropes of e-commerce and I didn’t expect sales but I had a bit of a higher expectation of how well my ad would reach people. Out of 2000+ views, only 9 Americans visited my site, and a couple other from other random countries. So was basically $5 a click for a potential customer which I think is really expensive and a pretty shit result.

Conclusion

The good: I was pretty happy with what I was able to do build my first online business and market it in a week. I definitely learned something here and gained a new perspective. An element of urgency can be your best friend – it pushes and forces your mind to expand and definitely increases your productivity in many ways. Maybe I should try adding a sense of urgency and deadlines to my future mini checkpoint goals and see how i go!

The sad: I know that this was a dummy store that I made as a way to learn the ropes of e-commerce and I didn’t expect sales but I had a bit of a higher expectation of how well my ad would reach people. Out of 2000+ views, only 9 Americans visited my site, and a couple other from other random countries. So was basically $5 a click for a potential customer which I think is really expensive and a pretty shit result.

I was sorta down about this. But I did tell myself coming into this that I would expect an enormous learning curve and that I was expecting a lot of failure down the track. But I guess this little exercise sorta did make reality kick in a lot more of how far I still have to go. I think this calls for me to reframe the situation in a positive light – I need a… shift in perspective! *ba dum tss*

Since this blog post is getting a bit long, I’ll end it here. In my next post I would like to thoroughly analyse all of my actions I’ve done with this first online business, and bring to light everything I could’ve done better, so I can improve myself and become more competent in the e-commerce world.

I do anticipate a lot of failures in the road ahead. It is quite consoling to hear of the struggle the successful e-commerce Youtubers have had before reaching their success, and I guess I have to walk down my own path of ‘failing’ before reaching my own success.

There’s this quote I really like that I would like to end this post on with regards to ‘losing’:

“I either win or I learn. I never lose”

Thanks for reading & till next time!