Another productive day for e-commerce learning. End of the day, I wanted to make progress that was measurable. Spent quite a bit of time reading threads in warriorforum.com. Username "Yaros" had an awesome thread of his own drop shipping store experience. It was so addictive I ended up reading all 5 pages on that thread. There is so much information for a newbie that it was all worth my time. Today, I woke up at 10 am as I had slept late night after binging 4 episodes of House of Cards Season 3 until 3:30am. As before, I jumped right into drop shipping learning mood after the morning rituals. There were no house inspection appointments today and the weather was rainy, so I ended up spending most of my time in the house, with my wife and daughter.
I am still undecided whether to take Anton's DSL course. He recently raised the price from a grand to about $1300. Although it may all be worth, it makes it even harder for me to jump on it because of my financial situation. In the meantime, I have been trying to learn as much as I can about drop shipping and e-commerce in general on my own. It appears to me that the more I dig deep, I find out that yes, achieving success has lot to do with product selection, good marketing is also equally essential. I would be okay with average product and great marketing rather than vice versa. I learned that no matter what product niche I was going to select, I wouldn't be the first one. There is going to be competition. The only way I have a realistic chance at selling the same product at my brand new store and be successful that many others have been selling before is with unmatched value add and great marketing. Having a great product will help the matter significantly. So, as a newbie I realized that the following three things would be a good place to start:
Niche selection:
Andrew Youderian has a nice blog ecommercefuel.com. Whenever I come across new websites, first thing I like doing to estimate their credibility is to check their traffic via similarweb.com. Because Andrew's ecommercefuel.com website had significantly more traffic than anthonmethod.com, I was inclined to listen to what he had to say. Even more, it seemed his material were mostly available at no cost. So, I signed up for his "Profitable-ecommerce" ebook which was delivered via email. The reason I chose to read this ebook was because it talked about niche selection. There is more to the book but at this point all I am looking to know about is niche selection. Here is what it talks about on this particular topic that struck me:
I will talk about marketing in the near future when I do enough study on that but I wanted to share another valuable finding today. Aliexpress platform is used by quite a bit of people to find wholesale suppliers. Once you find the right supplier for your product in aliexpress, all you have to do is list their products AND copy their contents to your site (technical contents I mean). I checked out two such US based businesses that sold using aliexpress, a common thing between them was shipping information. Even though most of the suppliers in aliexpress give 14-35 days shipping estimate, their US based drop shipping sites promise 7-30 days free shipping anywhere in the world. This shipping info was found in both those websites, run by separate people. This could be a hint that the business is using drop shipping service to sell the product.
I am still undecided whether to take Anton's DSL course. He recently raised the price from a grand to about $1300. Although it may all be worth, it makes it even harder for me to jump on it because of my financial situation. In the meantime, I have been trying to learn as much as I can about drop shipping and e-commerce in general on my own. It appears to me that the more I dig deep, I find out that yes, achieving success has lot to do with product selection, good marketing is also equally essential. I would be okay with average product and great marketing rather than vice versa. I learned that no matter what product niche I was going to select, I wouldn't be the first one. There is going to be competition. The only way I have a realistic chance at selling the same product at my brand new store and be successful that many others have been selling before is with unmatched value add and great marketing. Having a great product will help the matter significantly. So, as a newbie I realized that the following three things would be a good place to start:
- Niche selection
- Value Add
- Internet Marketting
Niche selection:
Andrew Youderian has a nice blog ecommercefuel.com. Whenever I come across new websites, first thing I like doing to estimate their credibility is to check their traffic via similarweb.com. Because Andrew's ecommercefuel.com website had significantly more traffic than anthonmethod.com, I was inclined to listen to what he had to say. Even more, it seemed his material were mostly available at no cost. So, I signed up for his "Profitable-ecommerce" ebook which was delivered via email. The reason I chose to read this ebook was because it talked about niche selection. There is more to the book but at this point all I am looking to know about is niche selection. Here is what it talks about on this particular topic that struck me:
- Pick a niche where you can add value to the product.
- Try to sell "Passion" or "Problem" product.
- Matured women buy more stuffs online than men but men spend more per transaction than women. Medium priced product catering to matured women would be ideal.
- Range your product between $100-$200.
- Accessories sell with much higher margin than the actual product, sell both.
- Find something that's hard to find locally but has enough demands overall.
- Repeat customers are high margin client, so sell something that's disposable or consumable.
I found that it was also very very very important to learn about tools that are available to narrow down with niche selection. One of the tools I learned about today was Google Keyword planner. You can type in any phrase and get historical statistics on search volume that can also be broken out by countries and regions.
I will talk about marketing in the near future when I do enough study on that but I wanted to share another valuable finding today. Aliexpress platform is used by quite a bit of people to find wholesale suppliers. Once you find the right supplier for your product in aliexpress, all you have to do is list their products AND copy their contents to your site (technical contents I mean). I checked out two such US based businesses that sold using aliexpress, a common thing between them was shipping information. Even though most of the suppliers in aliexpress give 14-35 days shipping estimate, their US based drop shipping sites promise 7-30 days free shipping anywhere in the world. This shipping info was found in both those websites, run by separate people. This could be a hint that the business is using drop shipping service to sell the product.
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