Dropshipping Diaries: Episode 1 – How We Made $14k in just 30 Days

Hello everyone, as I have promised in our community that I would show how to scale up an ecommerce store with my friend Alex and how we earned up to $14k in just 30 days.

When Alex contacted me a few days ago and asked for help to start an ecommerce store, an idea occurred to me.

Alex initially proposed the idea of starting a general store, which he still believes is a lucrative approach.
However, my experience in the ecommerce industry has shown me that you should not go for anything that is general or broad. That’s where I suggested him to go for a particular niche to target a specific audience.

It is easier said than done, but to make the most profits and finding the potential audience for the store, having a laser focus approach is best for an online entrepreneur.

Alex did agree with me and decided to go for a particular niche.

Talking about the niche, one question:

What niche should we select?

Protip: Always choose the niche in which you have some expertise or at least some prior knowledge and interest.
I come across a number of queries on a daily basis where people ask about which niche should they enter.

I always have one answer: Go with your interest.

Since Alex and I are huge sports enthusiasts, this motivated us to penetrate into the ‘sports and outdoor niche.’

Well, coming back to this post. I am going to tell you every expense and resources that we used to run our online store.

Let’s start…

The number of employees we hired?

In the initial phase, three kinds of assistance are required to make sure that the store runs smoothly:

2 VAs (Virtual Assistant) and 1 Designer

1 VA for Facebook Ads: $5 per hour.

1 VA for Order fulfillment: $5 per hour.

1 Designer: Mainly $5 for a simple banner but that depends on the art.

What was this month’s ad expense?

I am sure most of you are eager to know about the ad expenditure.
Well, we were little extravagant to spends on ads but it was worth it.

The total amount spent on ads = $2,817.41

What was the testing strategy?

As we were running our ad from scratch, so the pixel was new and we did not have any prior data to make LLA (Lookalike Audience).

That makes it very simple to run ads.

1- We run ads worth $10 for Video Views.

Next step: Get Views > make Custom Audience > make LLA.

2- For the product, we went with broad targeting approach.

Although I have always recommended going with laser targeting approach, but under such a situation broad targeting worked for us.

How many products were tested?

We tested 2 Products every day.

Even though we are getting sales from some products, we continued our experimentation.

Caution: This is a new Pixel

How much was our total expense?

No one shares the data with the complete facts and figures of their expenditures and revenue. All ecommerce gurus just share the screenshots of their store’s revenue.

But I don’t want anyone to be feel left out so here is the complete breakdown of my revenue and expenditure of the store.
2 VA’s Cost             = $300

Designer Cost         = $300

Product Cost           = $8,750

Total spend on Ads = $2,817.41

Total Expense = $12,167.00

Total revenue = $14,345.75

Profit or loss. What we made?

As we have expected, our store showed a green sign in the revenue graph.

We made profits this month.

Total Revenue = $14,345.75
Total Expense = $12,167.41

Net profit = $2178.37

How many returning visitors we get from this?
Once you create a good funnel and value to your customers, then you can experience the blessing of returning visitors.

In this case, the store is pretty much new and still in the experimental phase, so a good funnel is yet to be made.

However, creating value is in our hands.

To create value, I start sending candies with each order. I have made a deal with my supplier from Aliexpress that I am working for a long time. I asked him to put some candies in each of my orders.

Some candies and a greeting card along with the discount code, all these are the efforts that I made to establish a potential customer base. These small tweaking points help a lot in creating value.

Do we get any successful scaling?

Before getting into the success of scaling, let’s clarify first; what is scaling?

To define scaling, I have divided it into two phases.

First Phase – Consistency

Make sure that sales are consistent every day. For that, you need to learn from your mistakes.
Write down every change you make. Like if you remove a Discount Pop Up, do write it down and check its impact.
Then take decisions.

Second Phase – Increase sales
To do so, I focused on the following things:
1- Increasing the AOV (Average Order Value)
2- Facebook Ads Retargeting
3- Email Upsells.

Did you receive sales from just one product or multiple products?  
There were multiple products. Therefore, we are just analyzing and testing data.

What were the mistakes or hurdles we faced?
One big mistake that we did from our side was:
Mistake: The order fulfillment VA is new. As we decide to create a new team for this project, but the VA was new. He put the wrong product on many orders. We had to check the sheets and that took a lot of time.

Learning: Always hire a team with some prior knowledge of the industry or train them first before giving them big responsibility that could compromise your store’s credibility.

Summary of this month!

So far, we have successfully generated revenue and profits from our store. Although it’s not new for us, however, to use this data that we have collected from ads and use it for retargeting will take some time to show good outcomes.

Stay tuned for our upcoming blog in this series where we take you through our journey!