/biz/ - Business & Finance

[Anonymous No.1800363]

So far today my drop shipping store has earned my £1 per visitor. Better than average.. but in the past few days I have been in profit.

Today's profit is sitting around £30 due to product cost and advertising spend.

Still got roughly £15 left of adwords budget left in the day. Spent £15 so far. So hopefully I can squeeze a couple more sales out of today... That would mean I reached my ROI goal and can increase ad spending tomorrow to see how high I can go while keeping similar ROI...

If all goes according to averages from my (profitable) testing stages.. then when I reach £100 per day on adwords I will be averaging £80 profit per day after all costs.

Maybe it sounds like not much to a lot of you guys. But to me it would mean I can quit my wage slave job, which is my ultimate goal.

P.S The PPC competition from some of the "big guys" with high DA is brutal in my niche... probably in most niches too.

They spammed my with lots of canceled orders and abandoned checkouts (100+ in one day) and consistently click on my ads... But google identified them quickly as "invalid" so I don't pay for them... but I'm convinced they are still managing to do so somehow with proxies maybe. Some of info I'm getting from google analytics at certain times of the day is really sketchy.

But... I guess they are doing it because they see me taking top ad spot at certain times in the day and undercut them all in terms of price.

Tips on how to fight back? I've been trying to waste their time on their "live help chat" thing today... Should I invest in a good VPN service to click their adds? I guess they are averaging between 0.7-1 ££ per click based on research, and definitely make lots more sales than me... but I've only been competing for a few days.

>add clicking with proxies
>get friends to give bad reviews on trustadvisor
>send nasty emails with poo image attachments

What else can I do to win the cut-throat PPC competition?

[Anonymous No.1800370]

>>1800363
P.S

I haven't started FB adverting yet. I hear this is much more profitable but I am still working on my social media pages and don't want to add another marketing method into the mix yet because if I focus solely on one strategy, then it is easier to evaluate the performance before adding a 2nd strategy... If I was great with math then I could probably be doing both at the same time :(

[Anonymous No.1800390]

>>1800363
Gratz anon!

Happy to see that your drop shipping business is doing somewhat decent. How long/after how much money spent did it take before you make any profit? Thinking of starting a business in the next month or two so.

[Anonymous No.1800404]

>>1800363
I don't have much in the way of advice, but good on you, OP. I hope you continue to see growth and success!

A friend and I are planning to start a dropshipping-based business (along with other services) in the next two months, so it's sometimes nice to see "success stories" in the field.

How long have you been at it, if I may ask?

[Anonymous No.1800412]

>>1800390
Thanks man.

I guess not much. Here's a break down of all costs and when I hit profit.

>-£20 profit samles
>-£2 domain and email
>-£25 shopify hosting
>-£5ish loss on first day of advertising

Profit each day since. So I've broke even already. But I guess I need to be prepared for the possibility that my initial success is a fluke lol

[Anonymous No.1800413]

>>1800412
>-£20 product samples

...Sorry I've had a few drinks as I write these lol.

[Anonymous No.1800419]

>>1800404
Hey dude, thanks. Hopefully in a different niche!

But yeah dude. It's been much easier than I thought it would be.

I had been working on the website for the past month. Been selling for about... 10 days now.

[Anonymous No.1800422]

>>1800413
Only 20£ product samples? What kind of product do you sell of you don't mind sharing?

[Anonymous No.1800430]

>>1800422
I probably shouldn't say because this is 4chan and people might send me emails with images of their poo :(

But it's cheap chinese shit. Only ordered a couple of the products. Didn't have the money to test everything but I'm getting everything from the same supplier so it should all be similar quality (i hope)

I didn't really have any savings to start this with. I've been going without to spend money on this project.

I literally have been going to public bathrooms in shopping centres and supermarkets with a backpack and stealing their toilet-paper so I don't have to buy any lol.

It has been rough recently, but it will all be worth it when/if I see consistent profits and can finally start paying off my debts lol

[Anonymous No.1800432]

>>1800430
Woah.. Hope it turns out for the best anon.

Stealing toilet paper huh.. RIP. Didn't you have to register your business though? Here you need to do that, but I'm thinking of starting without doing that at first just to see if it works, so.

And that's what I thought about product sharing on 4chan so dw.

Godspeed, brother.

[Anonymous No.1800439]

>>1800432
Here in the UK I think it's 4 months or something you are allowed to not register it. But yeah it would be silly to register a business etc and then possibly shut it down because it's not profitable 2 months later.

They have no interest in penalizing non profitable almost-businesses anyway. It's once you start owing taxes is when they give a shit lol so as long as you back-date all your books and pay anything relevant they should be happy with that :)))))

[Anonymous No.1800443]

How do you get the ball rolling with a drop shipping business?

Where do you look for suppliers and what materials do you offer them? Do you design/engineer your own stuff and they mfg it?

[Anonymous No.1800458]

>>1800443
If you're looking for suppliers to make things for you (or rather make adjustments to things they already make) then alibaba is a good place to go. Find products that can be changed slightly to fit your description.

But be warned you will pay more because they will need to spend more time on your custom product than the rest, plus they will need to store your product separately so you need to pay warehouse fee etc (which isn't expensive because it's china... but still costs money)

If you're wanting to just drop ship existing products from random chinese factories that all hold the exact same products, then aliexpress is good. Just put the products into your website, and when someone orders something, you just order it yourself and add their shipping details instead of yours.

But in any case, make sure you contact the supplier and explain that you don't want any "promotional material" with the orders... Some times they will slip in leaflets to their own stores or even receipts. So your customers will be angry that they bought something for £20 but it comes with a piece of paper saying it's worth £2 lol.


The Chinese don't understand marketing at all. So communicating with them is essential.... One of the samples I bought from my suppler came with a free phone case and a yoda key-chain... While it's a nice freebie, it really doesn't help with brand image hahaha.

[Anonymous No.1800463]

>>1800363
Did you bother to register a company?
Been looking into this for a while but can't find anyone else from the UK doing it on here.

[Anonymous No.1800464]

>>1800458
Thanks for the answers.

-Do you get exclusive rights to an item?
-Why don't the suppliers cut you out of the equation and open their own e-stores?
-How easily can your potential customer circumvent you to buy direct from the supplier?
-Does a dropshipper just add value by being a curator of sorts and marketer to a foreign market?

[Anonymous No.1800466]

>>1800463
Not yet. I didn't want to bother with that in case it went tits up lol.

Once I know it's something I can sustain then I will register as a sole trader... Will need to save some money up to copywrite my brand name etc which kind of sucks.

You can work "self employed" which includes small business for 4 months before registering as long as you back date owed taxes.

What niche you getting into? If you start up we can share backlinks or something. Help each other out... I'm going to be starting a blog soon to help drive sales and create backlinks to myself and future projects.

[Anonymous No.1800469]

>>1800464
cont

-is this basically the equivalent to buying shit from goodwill and reselling it, but done all on your computer?
-are there any successful (and large scale) examples of a drop shipping company you could link to?

[Anonymous No.1800480]

>>1800464
No problem man

>do you get exclusive rights to an item?
Definitely not. Even if you paid big money and designed a new item yourself and got it manufactured in china... You don't get exclusive rights because you can't do anything legal over there without speaking perfect chinese

>why don't the supliers cut you out of the equation and open their own e-stores?

Who knows. It's a different world over there. They are probably baffled as to why we buy so much of their worthless shit even for just £1.. They probably cost 0.10 to make max.

>How easily can your potential customer circumvent you to buy direct from the supplier?
Extremely easily... In my niche if they stay on the google search page, my ad is there. If they click on "images", they see the images that take them dierct to the suppler for 20x cheaper... But we need to just rely on the fact that people are lazy.

[Anonymous No.1800518]

>>1800466
Makes sense haha. Yeah, atleast it gives you a chance to get some cash together for all that.
That would be telling haha, wouldn't post it up on here but been sitting on the domain for a year or two, just never had the time.

Yeah, sounds good. Wanna drop me an email?

[e-mail]

[Anonymous No.1800551]

>>1800518
Sure thing