Sourcing：Reddit Author：infamousios
Just recently started dropshipping a couple of months ago while in high school. Wanted to let everyone know that it’s still possible to make money with the business model. I make around 10-20% profit margins, which is on the lower side. Finding dropshipping fast shipping options and fast delivery dropshipping suppliers is key to maintaining competitive edge and customer satisfaction. Feel free to ask questions, and I’ll try my best to answer!
Comments:
C1
Congrats! This is super inspiring. I had a couple of questions. 1.) What is your method for being able to test new products quickly? You mentioned starting with a one product store. When a product didn’t work did you create a new store each time? 2.) what is the general framework for the creatives? Were they photo ads? And for video ads did you film the vids yourself?
Thank you!
OP
- I just make a extremely simple store design takes me 1-2 hours and no I use the same store I just set the product as draft if it doesn’t work
- Video ads, I just compile videos online and edit them. Making them myself takes up too much time
But wouldn’t you get shadowbanned on TT and IG? I did and have been shadowbannned since April! I can’t get traction doing organic!
OP
I don’t do organic, I do Facebook ads it is better
That makes perfect sense. What ad metrics are you looking at when deciding whether or not to kill a product? Or how much do you let a product spend before killing it?
OP
look at the ROAS, CPC, CPM. Typically I spend around $50-100 and I’ll look at the metrics and if it’s bad I’ll kill it immediately
Hi, sorry for interrupting. When you say imidiately, what do you mean by that? Do you kill them like right in 12:00 on a lunch when you see that morning don't have good metrics? or you are waiting till lets say 16:00 or till next day? and my last question is, I run one adset just broad so meta can say by them self where they see most potential. But if I have just 200$ spend on Meta ads. Should I kill the ads in a same time as I have spend 2000$?
Thank you for your answers!
OP
- I typically wait until next day when it spends $50+
- Yes i would definitely manage ads differently if one had a budget of $200 and one had a budget of $2000. if that is what you're asking
What defines good metrics to you? Did you get sale on first day of running up ads?
OP
Good cpc/cpa, yea typically if you don’t get any sales first day you should cut the product
Any particular place you source the videos from? Also, any useful tools for editing to save time/costs that you can recommend?
OP
aliexpress, tiktok, amazon any editing platform work i personally use capcut
What template do you recommend
OP
refresh or sense
C2
You say that you found your product through Facebook ad library and that made me curious so I search for fb ad library on google but after trying the website I still don’t understand how did you get to find yourself a decent profitable product so can you explain it a little bit more how did you use fb ad library to find product your product
OP
I search up basic key term like “shop Now”then I keep scrolling until I find dropshipping ads. I would validate the product based on how many active ads they have, how long they ran the product, and if their website looks good. if it passes my checklist I would then make my own ads and try to surpass them. Hope that makes some sense
C3
Congrats !
What country are you in ?
How are you driving traffic ? Paid ads or organic ?
What does your tech stack look like in addition to Shopify ? What apps are you using ? What are u using for order fulfillment?
What’s your average order value ?
Where are you getting the product from ?
OP
- United States
- Paid ads
- Kaching bundles/ali reviews/sendvio/parcel panel
- I have my own private supplier 5.Around $40
Where do you go to find a good supplier?
OP
I would stick with aliexpress in the beginning, their delivery time is much faster than you think. but once you find a winning product you should contact agents and work with them
Should I ask those aliexpress sellers if they have some unique products? Or what do you mean
OP
Yea, ask the agent if they can source your product and make sure they offer good delivery times and pricing
how does it work exactly when you receive an order. Do you need to contact the supplier on ali and then get them to ship it or
OP
no you add them as staff on the store and they do everything
C4
Around how much have you pumped in untill reaching these profits?
OP
I spent around 1.5k I believe until I finally found a winning product
Someone
And how much and time spend on this product?
OP
Took me a week to find this product. I was spending like 12 hours a day studying and testing products
What's your approach to finding products
OP
I use Facebook ad library, I would validate the product based on how many active ads they have, how long they ran the product, and if their website looks good. if it passes my checklist I would then make my own ads and try to surpass them.
Makes sense, on average how long would you say it took to find products you thought were winners.
OP
Hard to say, I typically find a winner every couple days, but sometimes if there is too much competition or if you have bad ads it won’t work.
That's true. I'm in the phase where I keep looking for products but they just don't seem to be good products
OP
Try to find products that solve something, those usually work best.
If possible could you give me an example of a past winner you've had. Not looking to copy products but more so get an idea of what one should look like
OP
this is my first winner. I mentioned finding winning products every couple days but I often made bad ads and it didn’t work out. As I’m still a beginner
Does „a winner“ stay relevant? Or just Fall of and becomes irrelevant days/weeks later?
Should stay good selling for a while unless it‘s a trend right?
OP
yea it would stay profitable for a longer period time if it's not a trendy product.
C5
Someone
General store or specific?
OP
Specific
C6
Well done for this. Is it a product you can create a brand around and eventually exit?
How did you make the transition from AliExpress to private supplier. We have a store doing well atm still using AliExpress. I do wanne move to a private agent but still unsure
OP
yea, I’m currently in the works of branding this store
I Transitioned to a private supplier when I started doing around $500 revenue a day because manually fulfilling orders take up too much time.
Make sure you find the right supplier, a lot of them aren’t great. Ideally you should call them and see what they’re like
What do you mean by manually fulfilling the orders? Did you collate the order details and key it into aliexpress one by one?Admirable_Plastic840
Most likely they will be using something like DSERs but it is still sort of manual as you have process it and make payments etc.
C7
That’s amazing man, I’ve been dropshipping for 1 year and a half but I couldn’t scale or get a winner.
- How many ads you test in the testing phase for day one, CBO or ABO. TikTok ads?
- High ticket or low ticket product, how much brands testing it and did u rip ads from pipi/minea or re edited with fresh new videos and ads?
- What niche is this winner?
OP
- 3-5 ads, i use ABO at first, i find ads from tiktok,aliexpress,amazon and edit them myself
- not sure what's considered low ticket but under $60, i re edit the videos
- don't want to go too in depth of the product, but any niche can sell
Hi bro congrats for your results, i hope you still crushing it ! I've sent to this thread because i'm about to maucn mh first ads. My first question, is how much are you investing daily on your campagne ?
OP
Currently spend around 4k daily
C8
I really appreciate you taking the time to answer questions. Did you do any organic posting or do you only do ads. I've been trying a kitchen store and trying different products that are kitchen based but I'm not very good at making social media videos. I have tried organic because I don't have that much to spend on ads just yet
Never tried organic, but I would first save up more money to start paid ads
C9
Finally, a post with an op that responds, and isn't afraid to deny some questions, if it gets too deep into his selling idea. That is complety fine and understandable. My question: how many hours a day, on avg, were you putting into this? I know it can vary for some, but ideally, for some of us who are already working, spacing out our time is more effective. I'd like to gauge how many hours I may or may not, need to spend om research and testing. Thanks OP!
I seen 12 hours a day but want to learn about the delta between your first product and this winning product, with regards to time effort.
OP
I started 3 months ago, first 2 months i was studying everything about the business model and the different types of strategies and i would spend probably like 6 hours average per day due to school. then on month 3 i started testing products myself and i spent around 12 hours a day until i eventually found the winner.
C10
Congratss... you use zendrop, sup, aliexpress ?? For dropshipping ? And what method do you use for product hunting.
OP
Aliexpress and I use Facebook ad library
C11
Did you started with a general store and after moved to one product store? For testing ads what was your daily budget? And how many creative you used?
OP
I started with one product store and my daily budget is $100. I test 3-6 creatives
Hi there, you say budget is $100 so it for a day or how many days? And for 1 ads or 2-3 ads. At first do you use shopify payment and paypals, is it ok if only have paypal?
OP
$100 budget for a day. I use 3-5 ads and no you should definitely have shopify payments or stripe, PayPal only is not enough
So you basically put 3-5 ads in an adset with 100$/day budget, is that correct?
OP
No the adset should only be $10 a day. And I have 10 adsets which equal up to $100
Optimised for purchase straight away?
OP
yes
Can you give me a little more info, in those adsets, how many ads do you place, and are those for the same product?
If all 10 adsets are for the same product, do you use different interests? If so, how many per each adset?
How well is broad working?
Do you use advantage+ or manual campaign?
OP
3-5 ads, yes different interest 1 interest per adset. I’m currently experimenting with DCT it’s working extremely well for me. Manual when testing, and ASC when you start to scale
C11
How much profit have you made so far?
You say 10-20% profit margin, so ~$1,871?
OP
Yep around that per day
C12
How much did you spend on ads this particular day? What is your total cost per product? (Not the price you're selling it for) What platform are you running ads on?
OP
- I spent around 6k
- Product is around $10
- Run ads on facebook
So you netted around $2k profit for the day?
OP
Yes, around 2k for the day
Also, what is your ad structure on FB? do you just run conversion campaigns, do you do detailed targeting or broad? Etc.
OP
I do interest targeting, although broad is also effective
Do you just do conversion campaigns or do you have some tofu?
OP
Yea conversions campaign is the best
C13
Is that name of the store a specific brand name or is it just a name that can fit with any product??
OP
Name that can fit with any product
C14
Great results, congrats! I’m having some sales with my store on a 40$ ad budget per day so I hope I might get similar results as you! Few questions from my side:
- do you only sell in your country (US) or internationally? If international, do you have to do anything special in regards to tax or import?
- how specific do you go for your Fb ad audience? I struggle between adding a lot of interests, behaviours, age range, etc or just putting a few behaviour and interest (such as : “parents” and “toys” for instance). What would you recommend?
- how did you scale your ad budget to go from 50$ a day to 6k? How long did it take you to make that transition?
- any advice on how / where to find a good agent?
Keep going with the good job 👍🏼 !
OP
- I only sell US, AUS, CA, NZ
- depends on the product, if the product is broad i would do completely broad and let facebook decide. But for interests i would aim for more narrow interests like "parents with toddlers"
- you just scale whenever you have good ROAS, scaling is much simpler than you think. To get to 6k spend it took around 20 days
- you can find agents on alibaba but to know if they're good you should call them and use your own intuition to see if they're legitimate or not
C15
Congratulations! Where are you dropshipping on? What drop shipping company are you using? And what type of products? Also how do you advertise? I started doing it on Etsy and Shopify about two weeks ago and still no bites. Would love some feedback
OP
I use shopify, don't want to get too in depth of the product i'm selling. I advertise through facebook because its been the most consistent to me. I've never used etsy before so can't speak much on that
Understandable lol. I’m doing electronics. Should I switch to something different. And I’ve been using zendrop should I switch? Also for Etsy I do custom clothes and stuff like that. Any info would really help. I’m a full time single dad with a 3 year old I just finished classes for IT support and now in school for cybersecurity so any extra income really helps. Can even private message me if you prefer.
OP
Never dealt with selling electronics, but yea if your not successful with it i would probably switch. Zendrop works but i personally use aliexpress at first. Never tried Etsy, selling custom clothes, it just seemed too saturated i could be wrong. If you do want to get into dropshipping, it's going to take a lot of time learning, it's not a get rich quick. You can private message me, I probably won't be able to answer questions immediately.
C16
Congratulations! when you say winning product means, how do you define them? you’ll keep selling that product or its for that particular day? thanks, trying to learn about what winning products mean.
OP
Winning product is a basically something that customers would buy without hesitation making your ads much more effective, and you can typically sell winning products for a long period of time especially if you create a brand.
C17
Congrats bro, how did you learn bro? Could you recommend any good channels, people in the dropshipping space?
OP
watch youtube videos all the info is out there, but do your research if you really want to buy a course. If you're low on budget wouldn't recommend courses at all
C18
When you work with private supplier? How do you manage the orders? I see your comment saying that you manually managed the orders when you are working through aliexpress, but how was it changed when you work with private suppliers? because you are in us and the supplier probably in china and the number of order is higher.
OP
My private supplier would be the one managing all the orders if that's what you mean. I manually manage the orders when I first open a store without a private supplier. you only get a private supplier once you start scaling
Yes, thats what i mean. i am still learning and the shipping procedure confuses me alot. so you just need to hand over your supplier the list of order information and they will take care of them for you? how much do you charge for the shipping from china to your customers?
OP
Yea you’ll add them as a staff to your store and they’ll do everything. It depends on your product price to determine how much you charge your customers for shippinn
C19
Congratulations! Amazing results so far!
That conversion rate is AWESOME! Are you getting most of your traffic from Facebook or Instagram? If Instagram, is it "reels"? That's just amazing - thank you again for sharing
OP
The traffic mainly comes from Facebook
Did you have to drastically change the winning creatives you saw others running at the time? Did you make a new offer or did you initially test with exactly what the others were selling?
OP
No I don’t test with their creatives because it won’t work as well. You don’t need to drastically change anything, just make a new ad targeting the same angle as your competitor
C20
Where are u upload ur ads tiktok fb or insta ?
OP
fb
How mush money u spend on these ads
OP
For the day, around 6k
So u spend 6k to get 12k sales but u need to buy product also
OP
Yea so for that day I made around 20% profit
C21
- What was your starting capital?
- Did you do organic only? Or you ran ads as well?
Congrats btw!
OP
- Around 5k but I didn’t need to use it all
- Paid ads only
C22
Can you tell a little bit on how to design the website ? What works as a trust worthy source ?
OP
just look at branded stores and basically do something similar to what they’re doing. Store design should be the least of your worries, product and creatives matter much more
Yep, I am not pursuing dropshipping in the original sense. I have inventory with me. Will be creating creatives myself.
Critique my current first draft of the store ?
Shopagni.com
OP
Domain should not say “shop” and you should add some reviews
C23
So when you imported the product did you change anything like texts, pictures add something in the description and etc?
OP
Yea change everything, you can use chat gpt as reference when writing the text
C24
What do you consider to be high competition? How many active competitors in the market indicate a saturated market to you?
OP
doesn’t matter how many competitors in the market if they just started recently
Does 'recently' mean less than one month? I am trying to understand how to determine if the market is saturated with the product and if it makes sense to launch ads for this product
OP
yea ideally less than 3 weeks
C25
Congrats
Got a question
I here some YouTubers saying you shouldn’t scale budgets to fast as it can reset the learning phase, and then some are saying double it , I don’t know who’s right, but from your experience, how aggressive did you scale your ads, could you give an example was it 50, 70 , 100, 200 a day or gradually,
OP
Both can work, depending on your ROAS. If your ROAS isn't high, you should scale slower. However, if your ROAS is high, you can afford to double your budget more aggressively.
But, when you reach a $2k budget on a single CBO or ASC, I wouldn't recommend doubling the budget, even if it is extremely profitable. I would up budgets by like 300-500 to avoid deoptimizing performance
C26
Yo that's crazy good. Great job. I had a question. I am brand new to dropshipping and I understand the concept but literally nothing else. Would you be willing to perhaps provide some resources you used to learn the ropes or provide a general overview of how to get into it? The only thing I know about it is the following;
- You find a product
- build a shop to sell it
- Market the product
that's it. Also I saw in one of the comments that you do paid advertising, is that better to do compared to perhaps building social media content about the product?
OP
I learned a lot from youtube and joining paid discord groups ect. Wouldn't recommend buying a course or mentorship especially if your budget is small. Yea in my opinion paid ads are way better
C27
CONGRATS ONTHE SUCCESS 10k IS A HUGE MILESTONE!!🎊
1.) Do you buy domains for the store or do you just use the Shopify one?
2.) Do you test different products in the same niche if it doesn’t work since I imagine your stores names has something to do with that niche?
OP
Hey, thanks a lot ❤
- yea i buy domains for the store
- once you start scaling you should test more products in the same niche as your winning product. my store name doesn't have anything to do with the niche it can just be a generic name that fits all niches
C28
How graphically advanced is your site? By graphically advanced, I’m talking about the sleekness of your website. Does it look clean, simple and modern or pretty basic work-up (2-hour work as mentioned in your post)?
OP
website is extremely simple but it's clean. It took me around 1-2 hours to make
Do you do any custom designing work on your own for your website? (Ex: Photoshop, adding shadows to product images, adding background colors etc.)
OP
no none of that, it takes too long. I would only recommend custom designing your images if it looks extremely low quality.
Wow, here I am spending hours doing all the designing on website and images. Thank you and congratulations
C29
Hey man i started dropship a few montrhs ago, also in HS. Ive found ‘ok’ results, doing abt 700/day but cant seem to scale higher. whats ur fb ads method? i just do cbo, dynamic creative, 3-5 ads, 4 adsets(all the same)
OP
I personally just make a ABO campaign 10 adsets, $10 per adset in the testing phase. When the adset starts doing good (good ROAS) I would then put it in a CBO at $100 a day. I would also recommend making a ASC with your best ads they’ve been performing extremely well for me.
Could i send you my site and get some feedback from you?
OP
yea, you can private message me. So you can avoid leaking it to everyone
C30
Did you grow your social media from the start, like posting content, trying to get socialproof, or you just went it straight in paid ads?
OP
straight into paid ads
Did you warm up the pixel or something before? because I keept trying all kinds of strategies and you seem to do the most basic stuff and have 100x the results
OP
No need to warm up pixel, it’s a myth people say you need to do that
C31
Hi!! Super glad to see it. For your ads, since you don’t film it yourself, do you just take videos from TikTok or AliExpress? How do you not run into copy right issues this way?
OP
Both, and no one cares to copy right if your taking like 5 clips and mixing it together
Awesome. Im gonna try the same. Been doing organic traffic but never make more than 1k / month. Thanks!
OP
Yea try fb ads, and learn how to find winning products and making good ads most important
Oh also, would you say there’s a minimum order value for it to be profitable with ads? Would $20 be too cheap to make a profit if it cost $5 from the supplier?
OP
yes $30+
What’s your cpp and how much do you sell for to still profit?
C32
How do you avoid getting your FB ad account banned?
OP
nothing special, Facebook bans randomly
C33
So I don’t do this stuff, just curious. Do you recycle the same website/domain every time you test a product? I think you mention you have 6 products with individual stores, so do you have 6 seperate domains?
OP
Yea just reuse the same website/domain everytime
C34
Someone
What payment processor are you using? I also got a winning product, scales to 10k per day no problem, but I have issues with payment processing... Stripe and Shopify Payment both disabled my accounts
OP
I use shopify payments I currently have a 20% hold. Did they give you a reason why it got disabled?
Someone
Not really, just saying Im a high risk business for them to support. I sell home decor mostly. Have you registered for Shopify Payments as a Sole Trader/Individual or as a company LLC?
OP
Individual LLC, if you have a lot of chargebacks or have misleading descriptions on the product i believe that can be a reason for them disabling it. If not just continue emailing them
Someone
Thanks for the info! One more question if you dont mind. Are you also a US citized, or a non resident with a US LLC?
OP
Us citized
Someone
Could I message you in DM, maybe we can workout something to work together?
OP
yea you can dm me
C35
can i contact you on private
OP
yea
C36
Hey so I wanted to follow up on a previous question u answered, about ad spend and product testing. 1) How much do you spend on a product before realizing it’s bad and finding a new one? 2)When testing ads/creatives, how long do you allow an ad to run before killing it and how much do u spend per test?
OP
Normally around 100-300 depends on your budget and if the CPC or CPM is bad I would just cut it instantly after like 50 spend. I let ads run for a day and if metrics are bad but buying intent is good, I’ll either test new ads or cut the product
C37
How do people trust your store and buy from you if it’s just copy pasted? How do you create content so easily? Would love to hear.
OP
It’s not copy and pasted, I make my own store design and copywriting. I just compile tiktok videos and edit them
C38
I need ad help. I definitely have a winner I just SUCK at marketing
OP
you can dm me and lmk the strategies you’re using currently
C39
Did u get samples of the products sent to you during testing phase when trying to find winner? or skip that?
OP
Skip that
Thanks and congratulations. Hope it’s still going strong. Im researching products for my store. I’m based in AUS but when I check if the product ships to the US it’s often more than the price of the product. Should I just stick to free shipping only suppliers or simply add the shipping price to the product?
OP
I would always start with free shipping when testing, then when you know the product is a winner experiment with adding shipping cost
C40
congrats but just just tell me start tell me in details how to start and ho you started cause i have some money i dont have jobn and nither i can findd one i have skill marketing sale logo designing stratgyies coding i personally dont know coding but i know other skill needed for dropshipping i am certified digital marketer but i really want to know how how to start like where is start why i am scared to start like i am in hard time i guess thats why i am scared idk just tell me what was your start like really not that bullshit stories like youtubers and gurus please
OP
I saved up a couple thousand dollars from working at a restaurant, and I decided to go all in on dropshipping because I didn’t think the college route was for me. I would recommend watching YouTube videos first to get an understanding of everything then maybe join some discord groups to continue growing your knowledge. You should expect to lose a few thousand if you do decide to dropship which is why I would recommend finding any job to get a steady flow of income. As for the skills of dropshipping, it’s extremely simple just product research, store design (takes 1-2 hours at most), and marketing which I can help once you get to that part
thanks can you suggest me some discord cahnels or may be if you can send me a invitation link of any discord channel in my dm
OP
Watch YouTube videos first, wouldn’t recommend them yet especially if your budget is low because the money can be spent on testing products
C41
can you please tell me in details about the product rresearcch how much time it took you and where you placed your ads and where you found your product and how you found the supplier and how much time it took you to build this
OP
It would take extremely long to type the exact research method in chat, but I would suggest just going on YouTube and look at Facebook ad library. I run ads on facebook and got my supplier from discord group, but in the beginning just use aliexpress. Took around 20 days to get to 10k days for the product
C42
Before you found a current supplier; were you fulfilling directly through ali express with a low MOQ or through a dropshipping supplier site linked to them?
OP
I was just using aliexpress then transferred over to private supplier once I started to scale
C43
Well done, dude!
Quick question: since you are using the same website, have you tried retargeting customers who may have bought product X and not Y?
OP
I’ve never tried that, it can definitely work if your store is branded but I’m doing dropshipping so they usually just purchase once and never again
C44
How did u it? Which product do u selling?
OP
I’m still selling the product so I don’t want to expose it, but I found it through Facebook ad library
C45
Someone
What product was it?
OP
Still selling so don’t want to expose it just yet
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(Should the author find this article objectionable or distressing, kindly reach out to us for its prompt removal.)
Found my first 10k+ winner!
byu/infamousios indropshipping