Dropshipping Diaries: Episode 3 (How Did We Loss After $59k Revenue)

What’s up entrepreneurs!

Welcome to the third episode of dropshipping diaries in which I will tell you about our store performance from 18 June to 31 June 2019.

But before that, here is a quick recap of what happened in previous episodes.

We (me and my friend Alex) started a dropshipping business, and I promised in our Facebook community that I would show the scaling up of my business and provide a bi-monthly or monthly report of my store.

In the first episode, we made $14k in the first 30 days.

In the second episode, we made $46k revenue in 17 days.

After getting overwhelming profits in just one and a half month, we thought there is no stopping for us to take our revenues into six figures in no time.

That’s where we get a wake-up call.

In this episode, I will tell you about how we made $59k in revenue and still ended up in losses. By our mistakes, you will learn the things to do and not to do in the dropshipping business.

This month mistakes

This month we made a fool out of ourselves and made plenty of mistakes, I can’t help but laugh at my actions.

If you remember the last episode, I mentioned the issue about firing our VA that left us 800 orders unattended, which eventually ended up in refunds and returns.

Guess what?

We are still dealing with plenty of customer’s chargeback and doing a lot of refunds.

However, this time, it was not because of our VA.

Then who?

The unreliable and non-credible supplier

Our supplier failed badly to produce and supply the large volume of orders that were required.

A new lesson learned – Always link with extra suppliers. Otherwise, you are going to ruin all your business.

Here is a little suggestion, when you start earning money from the dropshipping business you’d better take help from paid tools such as Jungle Scout, its supplier database feature helps you to find the authentic and professional suppliers. Check out this feature in the Jungle Scout Review.

Another lesson learned this month – Keep testing new products even you have the winners in your bucket.

This is a lesson for all those who fall into the trap of taking dropshipping business as an-easy-way-to-earn-money by seeing the big revenue screenshots.

Because sometimes it ends up stop giving any sales.

So firstly, take notes from the general misconception about dropshipping that I learned from my experience!

Can we do this business part-time?

A Big No!

Dropshipping business is a full-time job, or you need to make a team of expert to scale up your eStore.

It is not a one-man job because when the business scales up you are going to get many customers queries and if you do not respond your customers timely, you will end up doing nothing but returns with the hard blow of negative reviews.

Should I open the reviews section on my product page?

No, you should not. This will affect your business in two ways.

1- Facebook is going to put you in the negative category, and it will ruin all your Ads.

2- You will have a hard time finding new buyers.

“Plus, as I mentioned earlier about big gurus screenshot scamming hahaha! Like they can show revenue of 100K with no profit or maybe loss”.

Dropshipping business is profitable, but only when you are dedicated.

The Useful Facebook Ad tool

I have been associated with Facebook marketing for quite some time, but the most useful tool that I have found for Facebook Ads is CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization).

What is CBO?

Campaign budget optimization is a technique in which you are going to allow the campaign to set the budget automatically to the best-performing Ad sets.

For Example, we start standard campaigns of $20 each with purchase objective.

If it gives good signs in terms of sales, we just make a replica of that to CBO with the same audience of $100 each. This gives sales a boost, and again in my screenshots, you can clearly see that Upsell is going to work.

Final Wording

In the dropshipping business, the supplier is on the driving seat. No matter how excellent your customer service is or how much upsells you use to boost sales if your supplier does not supply the product all your efforts will all go in vain and with that chain of unsatisfactory customers.

Our supplier’s incapability of fulfilling the orders cost us a loss of more than $4000 even after generating a revenue of $59k.

So, I highly recommend having at least three suppliers in your contact in case one does not perform up to the mark.

To scale up your business, keep testing your product to find more winning dropshipping products. Do not just stick with one winning product; the product trends are capricious.

The hustle is a must for winning!