Validated Strategies to Build a Winning General Store (Success Story)

A success story shared by Chris includes something you might want to know about how to dropship well.

Chris Wane, who battled through self-doubt and negativity from others around him, who laughed and dismissed his budding business as a “get rich quick scheme,” is proof that persistence pays off. It took him five failed ecommerce stores and hundreds of trialed products before he struck a winning formula.

Less than two years later, Chris’ life has changed before his eyes. His dropshipping business, Big Red Gadgets, has made more than $537,457 in sales, with a 20% profit margin bringing his take-home pay to more than $100,000.

Discovering Dropshipping

What is Dropshipping?

Finally Cracking the Code

Achieving Financial Freedom

Chris’ Winning Product Selection Strategy

Chris’ Facebook Advertising Strategy Step 1: Audience Targeting Step 2: Testing His Sales Pitch Step 3: Campaign Optimization Step 4: Conversion Campaign

Chris’ Advice for Beginners

Discovering Dropshipping

Three years prior, Chris Wane was a typical 27-year-old living in his hometown just outside of Manchester, the UK, and holding down a full-time job. However, the cubicle life didn’t sit well with him, and he recognized it right away. I’ve always wanted to run my own business, but I never knew how to do it, he says. “I can’t see myself staying in an office for the rest of my life.”

And when he learned about dropshipping from a YouTube video, it seemed like a way to start a business and get out of his current financial situation.

Your store can be linked to thousands of suppliers and items by using a marketplace like Modalyst. Dropshipping is an ecommerce business model that enables business owners to run an online store and sell products without having to buy inventory up front. Only after a sale is made do you pay your supplier, who then ships the goods directly to your customer.

At the time, Chris was living paycheck to paycheck and was under a lot of stress due to his lack of savings and budget flexibility.

Consequently, when I first learned about dropshipping, I thought, “This is actually really accessible for me.” It was still a possibility for me given my financial situation.

He believed that, if he did it correctly, he could earn an additional $200 per month, which would be just enough to cover his expenses and leave him with some extra cash for travel.

But there was one obstacle: He had no idea how to go about doing it.

I had no idea what I was doing with Shopify, designing the stores, and marketing it, he admits.

So he started to participate in Facebook groups, read dropshipping blogs, watch endless YouTube videos, and devour dropshipping blogs.

Finally, he was ready to start, and then came the trials, and many, many mistakes.

He tried opening a store in a market he was more familiar with, fitness equipment, but it failed again. He started a niche business by following the advice of other business owners he had seen online. His first store was for snowboarding equipment, but he had no luck selling any of it. His second store was for beard oil, since that was a fairly popular product at the time.

“It was naivety from my point of view around what I could do, and it just didn’t work,” says Chris, who can now easily see how much he didn’t know about how to run his businesses.

He was worn out from repeatedly trying and failing, but he wasn’t yet ready to give up.

Finally Cracking the Code

Now that I’ve tried it six times, I thought to myself, “Right, this is going to be the last time I try this.”

This time, he chose to turn away from the idea of creating another specialized store.

In his words, “I entered a general store because I thought instead of building a store and failing, then building another store and failing, let’s just build one store I can throw any product on at first and just see if it works.

Thus, Big Red Gadgets was established in August 2017.

In order to find a profitable product, he gave himself a $300 budget. He then dove headfirst into additional study to fill in his knowledge gaps.

Because Facebook ads account for the majority of his website’s traffic, he says, “the difference with Big Red Gadgets is the number of hours I’ve actually put into researching and reading.”

After brushing up on Facebook advertising information, he started testing various products while running Facebook ads to see how his customers would respond.

Chris began cautiously, spending $5 per day to run a single advertisement for a product because he knew the stakes were high and he really wasn’t in a position to waste any money.

“I recall that it didn’t sell on the first day, and I thought, ‘Oh my god, I can’t afford to lose $5. What am I doing this for again?’”

However, he maintained his composure and waited until the results the following day.

He exclaims, laughing, “I made a fiver! “On the second day, it made a sale and my profit margin was $15, so I spent $10 on my ads and made $15. I had made $5, and I remember running around the room thinking, ‘Oh my god, I’m going to be rich.’”

After the rush of the first sale wore off, Chris began to worry that he still hadn’t found a product that was consistently selling and noticed that as he continued to spend more on ads, the remaining $300 budget was quickly running out.

His fortunes changed as a result of an accidental recommendation from a friend.

I was looking through AliExpress to find some products when my best friend dropped by my house one day. I told him, “You are into cycling,” because he is a huge cyclist. I asked him, “Have a look at these products; which would you buy?” He replied, “I would buy them,” pointing to a pair of cycling glasses. I threw them up on the shelf, and it just blew up right away.”

And when it comes to explosions, this one was nuclear.

Chris’ Big Red Gadgets store made over $13,000 in sales as a result of the cycling glasses in a little under six weeks.

He and I spoke in April 2019, by which time his store’s sales had risen to more than $500,000 USD.

Achieving Financial Freedom

Almost two years have passed since Chris first launched Big Red Gadgets, his last-ditch attempt to expand an online store.

Although he continues to work at his full-time job, he has noticed a positive change in his life since that time. The financial freedom that his business has provided him with has improved his quality of life.

“It has definitely reduced the stress of living paycheck to paycheck.”

Since that time, he has been able to purchase a car and go on a long-awaited vacation to the United States, where he spent three weeks traveling by car from New York to LA.

He could finally afford to make repairs to his home and decorate the areas that had been left unattended. He has also been able to take care of some of the smaller, frequently disregarded things in his life.

Certainly, the weight is simply removed. “I like how I don’t have to check my bank account every day just to make sure I’ve got enough for this and enough for that,” he says. “It’s all the little things.”

Chris’ Winning Product Selection Strategy

Along with his first successful product — the cycling glasses — Chris has also had success on Big Red Gadgets with jewellery, sunglasses, home décor, snowboarding accessories, and other products. One particular snowboarding product alone generated $100,000 over the course of three months.

His success is closed related to the method he chose products. He made the best profitable chosen by SimplyTrends, which is a real-time dropshipping-winning product discovering tool.

This tool does a lot of help in finding hot products with accurate data shows. Activate new business ideas with a keyword, and find out the winners that actually sell behind it. With of function of it, it is become easier to insight the current market trends and potentially highly profitable markets can be spotted. Not only save much of time of finding products, but also be at the forefront the market procedure by master products’ traffic real-time data.

Chris has developed a method for identifying the products that have the most potential after spending the last two years looking for and testing new products — “I’ve probably tested 300–400 products,” he says.

Chris considers potential products for his online general store by looking for items that:

1. Solve a problem for the customer
2. Can appeal to a large, mainstream audience
3. Has a ‘wow’ factor that will serve as a scroll stopper
4. Have very high order counts (over 10,000)
5. Aren’t currently being advertised on social media

He has attempted to offer items with relatively low sales in the past, but it hasn’t really worked out, so he now sticks to items that have already demonstrated their ability to be well-liked.

He visits Facebook to look for anyone currently promoting the product after identifying a potential winner with lots of orders.

He will search for posts promoting the product that have received a lot of interaction or any that appear to be the work of a significant AliExpress dropshipping operation.

He considers it a victory if he is unable to find any proof of anyone succeeding on Facebook.

This very strategy assisted him in locating the lamp, which later went on to bring in $18,800 in sales over the course of three weeks.

He explains, “For instance, this lamp had over 10,000 orders on AliExpress, but I’ve never seen any other dropshippers run it, and I’ve never seen an ad for it.”

“Those are the kinds of products I like to buy, the ones that are obviously doing really, really well, but I’ve never really seen advertised.”

He will perform one final check after assessing the product’s potential using the order numbers and social media platforms.

In order to determine whether a product is seasonal, he goes to Google Trends and SimplyTrends Here, he searches for peaks and troughs in the product’s popularity throughout the year. Ideally, he seeks out products that are either popular all the time or are about to reach their peak popularity.

Chris’ Facebook Advertising Strategy

His clever sales funnel for Facebook advertising (more on that later), as well as his astute sense for choosing products, are both responsible for his success.

Most of the time, Cris will search on SimplyTrends to learn some competitors first.

Most of the brain-damaging advertising problems are solved by this little tool. Here can provide popular ads for popular products on different platforms, and you can not only analyze the traffic trends by observing the data changes provided here. He said, you can also download excellent ad copy and materials for your own use. By mastering some traffic codes, you can apply them to your own advertising strategy and achieve a soaring traffic.

But, before Chris could start to comprehend the approach that worked best for Facebook advertising, he had to make countless mistakes with his advertising over the course of many months.

“Much of my experience has come from trial and error, from failing within Facebook, with getting it wrong,” he claims.

Step 1: Audience Targeting

Although he initially took the advice of many others to target Facebook audiences based on various interests, he is dubious about whether this is the most effective targeting strategy in 2019.

The information that Facebook gathers from the thousands of advertisements that are running on the platform has been fed back into itself, after all, and it has continued to become smarter every day. The algorithms used in advertising are now very good at identifying the appropriate individuals to display your ad to.

Chris now relies heavily on Facebook’s algorithms to do the bulk of the work of finding the right audience rather than choosing interests himself that would match his target audience.

“In the past two weeks, I’ve had more success running products to everyone, like no interest targeting, just completely open to ages 18 to 65+ in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, wherever.”

It all comes down to optimizing for CPM for Chris, who chose to use broad targeting with his ads during the product testing phase.

When you’re running ads to a smaller, more targeted audience (including using lookalike audiences), you’ll be charged more to reach 1,000 people than if you are just targeting a very broad audience. CPM, or cost per thousand, is a term that is used to measure the amount of money it costs to get your ad in front of 1,000 people.

In other words, he could reach 3,000 people for $15. Chris, for instance, discovered that Facebook would charge him $15 to reach 1,000 people when he tried running ads using a lookalike audience, as opposed to $5 with broad targeting.

So, he explains, “you get three times as many people for the same price, and you still only need one sale in that.”

Step 2: Testing His Sales Pitch

The next step for Chris is to make three variations of his ads, each with a slight change to the copy, with the intention of testing various sales messages because you never really know which one is going to hit home.

“I’ve been quite surprised about what the ad that I thought was going to do well has done the worst, and the one that I didn’t think it was going to do well is actually the one that everyone is clicking, liking, and sharing,” he says.

Step 3: Campaign Optimization

Then, he selects the “engagement” optimization when he creates a campaign in Facebook Ads Manager.

You want to make sales, not just gather Facebook likes, so why would you run engagement-based ads?

It’s cheaper, which is the answer to your excellent question.

Because Facebook charges significantly less for campaigns that are optimized for engagement, it makes sense to spend less money while your product is still in the early stages of testing and you’re still determining whether your Facebook ad formula is effective.

“I don’t have to spend much on these ads, probably $30 to $40 to see which age range and demographics are performing and which ads people are liking and clicking through the most,” says Chris.

Step 4: Conversion Campaign

Chris launches a second campaign, optimizing it for “conversions,” and using the ad copy and audience demographics from his most effective ad from the first campaign as a template.

This campaign aims to move potential customers down his sales funnel and persuade them to become paying clients.

In conclusion, Chris’ Facebook marketing approach is as follows:

1. Target people broadly, with no interest-based targets.
2. Run engagement-optimized ads at the beginning (they’re cheaper).
3. Create multiple versions of the ad with different copy.
4. Create conversion-optimized ads based off the winning ad copy, reducing the demographics of your ad targeting to the ages and countries that are performing best.

Chris’ Advice for Beginners

In the past two years, Chris has experienced it all; he has come dangerously close to giving up and leaving, and now he is preparing to use the company as his means of financial emancipation.

Be good at using all practical tools to learn and discover, rather than waiting for opportunities to come. “Trying to retire from it is my next goal. I mean, I’m a little way off that, but that’s the dream.”

Anyone who is just beginning dropshipping should be aware that they are entering a difficult situation because they will have to deal with skepticism from those around them as well as self-doubt.

Don’t listen, Chris counselled.

If I had listened to those people, I would still be in the same routine I was in 18 months ago, struggling month to month, he says. “When I started, people laughed at me and said it was just another ‘get rich quick scheme’ and ‘it won’t work. I firmly believe that if you want something in life, you simply need to work hard for it.

Chris is currently instructing others in how to use his Advanced Dropshipping program to achieve similar success.