Self Reflection
In this blog post I would like to debrief the creation of first online business. I’d like to explore primarily the actions which I took, and the mistakes and lessons learned over the three main areas of:
- Finding a winning product
- Building a store
- Marketing my product
Before we get started, here’s a quick summary of the costs I’ve incurred while building an online shopify business:
Finding a winning product
What I did:
- I found a product on CJdropshipping.
- It looked like it was on an upward trend in sales on Aliexpress dropshipping centre analytics so I decided to go for it.
- **Note: I wanted to choose a product quickly to avoid analysis paralysis and try to get through all the steps of starting up a store ASAP so understandably there will be a lot of mistakes to try to learn from why this product wouldn’t work.**
My mistakes and lessons learned:
- It was quite a chunky, outdated product – there were similar products which done the same thing which were a lot smaller/more compact and better. This was battery powered whereas the competitor/newer ones were USB charge. Lesson: when choosing a product, research what else is out there, look at competing products. The product needs to have a competitive advantage, an edge over other products in that category.
- One of the silliest mistakes was that there was a brand on this product I think. When dropshipping to find a winning product, maybe try to choose one with no label/brand so when customers get their product they wont be confused with a different branded product haha.
- I think I need to perform more in depth analytics when choosing a winning product, such as looking at the competitors selling the same product, try gauge if they’re successful or not – I think there may be apps out there to let me spy on competitors and see how they’re going.
- Choosing a product which I may be able to resonate with. “to catch a killer you have to think like one”. I think it would be extremely difficult for me to ‘believe’ in a product if I do not resonate with it at all. I think people who are most successful in selling particular niched products are the ones who understand their audience at a really deep level which will allow them to really engage with them and influence them to buy the product. I have never seen an eye massager in my life LOL and although it looked cool, it is a bit hard for me to sell it to someone else if I cant even sell it to myself.
Building a store
What I did:
- Watched a Youtube video on how a one product store is created
My mistakes and lessons learned:
- Watching a video for a one product store may be good, different products will call for different designs to suit the products. For example, a fitness & gym store will look completely different to a beauty store. First impressions matter, and attention to detail is what will separate a great store apart from a mediocre one. While I did gain a relatively decent amount of experience with this first store, I should try tailor it to suit the particular niche by looking at what actual stores in that niche (in this case, beauty) looks like – what colours they use, font, how they lay out their products, etc.
- The name of the game is differentiation. I’ve come across a lot of stores where it is SO OBVIOUS that they’re dropshippers, and it is quite easy for me to spot since I am well aware of what dropshipping is. To be honest, with the store I’ve made I would be able to call it out as a dropshipping store quite easily haha, since it does sorta follow a similar template as to those of other dropshipping stores, no matter the product. So, what I need to do differently next time round is to up my web design skills to make my site a lot more legit.
- A lot of sites have things like “Shipping & Returns”, “Contact Us”, “About Us”, “FAQs”, “Terms of Service” and all that. It does look quite professional having all these things – perhaps I should invest some time in familiarising myself with these and see if there is a way I can streamline a process of adding all these in when creating a new store/product so it doesn’t take to much time. I feel that this adds value to the store and will need it for next time.
- Maybe also have the shipping details clear on the site. I think going with CJdropshipping over Aliexpress does offer a competitive advantage with the fast shipping times which would be more enticing for customers and make me look better than the competitors.
- One additional thing which I could’ve improved on are my customer reviews. Customer reviews re important for social proof and builds trust. Theres some apps which let you import real customer reviews from Aliexpress onto your site which looks more legit because there’s customer photos and stuff so would look more believable than my fake reviews haha.
- Also, making a Facebook AND Insta page will also build trust. Can have these links on my store too to make it more official and everything.
- Instead of building my website to look like other dropshippers, build it to look like real, successful e-commerce sites.
Marketing my Product
Marketing my Product
What I did:
- Decided to ignore FB ads for now and just go with an influencer
My mistakes and lessons learned:
- Along the way I did learn that follower count isn’t everything and that I need to assess the analytics of the influencer to ensure that they’ve got mostly US followers since the US is what I’m targetting.
- What I learnt was that despite this factor of finding a US-based influencer, I think not all influencers are created equal So I do need to think about influencer engagement with their followers and all the stuff like that. This ‘influencer’ was just a popular beauty page with a lot of followers (~500k) so I thought it would be sweet. But it seems as though they’ve posted many ads before and the ads have a lot less views than actual posts which are made on the page. It’s just like a random ass page which people just happen to follow somehow and maybe just forgot about and they wouldn’t care at all about what the page posts. People are sick of ads – I just scroll through silly ads since I don’t care about them, especially from a random ass page haha. Lesson here is to choose the influencer wisely.
- I think I can do this by checking the influencer engagement. I saw this somewhere in a Youtube video, will need to look into it more and explore what it really is.
- It seems as though ‘viral ecom adz’ or ad services will produce great content for your product, and it is said on their service that they are familiar with dropshipping so I’d assume they would be good at making these video ads and knowing what to caption. However this is an assumption, and going back to one of my first points in understanding and resonating with the product, perhaps I could curate what is said in the ads if I think there is something that would better resonate with the audience. This is a factor which should not be overlooked.
- When getting the influencer to post your video ad, ask if you can choose the thumbnail photo for the post so its not just some random segment from the whole ad which might look funny.
- Another lesson learned from watchign a successful dropshipping youtuber (Sebastian Ghiorgui) is that why he was so successful in marketing is because he understood psychology. He read a lot of psychology books prior since it was his interest and was able to greatly leverage that knowledge into dropship marketing. I do have a book, luckily, which I bought earlier this year called “Influence – The psychology of Persuasion” which I may begin reading now that there’s an even greater incentive to read it.
- The biggest lesson learned is that marketing is a HUGE part of the e-commerce game. I’m not only selling a product, I am SELLING VALUE to other people. I need to show VALUE in the best way possible. I think I head somewhere that 90% of success comes FROM THE MARKETING. I think this may be the biggest area where I need to improve in
- While a lot of dropshipping gurus online always talk about a winning product, I may need to shift my perspective to be more oriented towards achieving winning marketing. I think success will be more predicated towards successful marketing over a winning product in most cases.
Conclusion
After quite some reflection, it is quite apparent that my e-commerce journey ahead is quite long. However I shouldn’t be disheartened to see the mountain before me, it should be exciting – a call to adventure!
“I need to replace the joy of being proven right, to the joy of learning what’s true” – Ray Dalio
How can I move forward from this?
I’d like to make a reference to an idea in the book ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear. Here’s a segment of the book which relates to an idea called the “aggregation of marginal gains”.
“The organization, which was the governing body for professional cycling in Great Britain, had recently hired Dave Brailsford as its new performance director. At the time, professional cyclists in Great Britain had endured nearly one hundred years of mediocrity. Since 1908, British riders had won just a single gold medal at the Olympic Games, and they had fared even worse in cycling’s biggest race, the Tour de France. In 110 years, no British cyclist had ever won the event.
In fact, the performance of British riders had been so underwhelming that one of the top bike manufacturers in Europe refused to sell bikes to the team because they were afraid that it would hurt sales if other professionals saw the Brits using their gear.
Brailsford had been hired to put British Cycling on a new trajectory. What made him different from previous coaches was his relentless commitment to a strategy that he referred to as “the aggregation of marginal gains,” which was the philosophy of searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything you do. Brailsford said, “The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.”
Brailsford and his coaches began by making small adjustments you might expect from a professional cycling team. They redesigned the bike seats to make them more comfortable and rubbed alcohol on the tires for a better grip. They asked riders to wear electrically heated overshorts to maintain ideal muscle temperature while riding and used biofeedback sensors to monitor how each athlete responded to a particular workout. The team tested various fabrics in a wind tunnel and had their outdoor riders switch to indoor racing suits, which proved to be lighter and more aerodynamic.
But they didn’t stop there. Brailsford and his team continued to find 1 percent improvements in overlooked and unexpected areas. They tested different types of massage gels to see which one led to the fastest muscle recovery. They hired a surgeon to teach each rider the best way to wash their hands to reduce the chances of catching a cold. They determined the type of pillow and mattress that led to the best night’s sleep for each rider. They even painted the inside of the team truck white, which helped them spot little bits of dust that would normally slip by unnoticed but could degrade the performance of the finely tuned bikes.
As these and hundreds of other small improvements accumulated, the results came faster than anyone could have imagined.”
Source: https://jamesclear.com/marginal-gains
While exploring the world of the self improvement, I’ve always stumbled across the idea of how consistency and building habits will positively compound into the future. Although I heard it a lot and thought it must be important, I feel like I never really truly applied this concept to its entirety in my professional life.
But reading this, and also reflecting now on building a business, it has become more strikingly relevant to me, and I think there is a lot to gain from this perspective.
Each online business I build will reveal to me my shortcomings and inadequacies which I can learn from, and improve on the next time round. It’s as if I am tuning a guitar – there will be a lot of trial and error, plucking the string and listening to the feedback of the sound, before narrowing down on the correct frequency.
One other striking perspective shift which i’ve gained from this whole mini trial of building an online business is how cheap and easy it is to get started building a real business nowadays. I’m not saying it’s easy to be successful, but easy to just get started. Back then, you would need to invest thousands of dollars before you can even begin on things like inventory, a store, other costs, etc. for starting your own business but now you can start up a business in the comfort of your own home for little over $100.
Where in the investing world, I was able to truly grasp the power of the compounding effect with regards to growing wealth, this has given me a similar perspective in a different light.
Successful dropshippers who find a winning product start with the small investment into their business, and guide it to grow over time a lot quicker than the stock market.
The next time I think about $100-200, I won’t think of what I can buy, but what I can build from it.
“The greatest oak tree was once a little seed”
Thanks for reading and till next time!
