How I Built a Dropshipping Store That Made $6,667 in Under 8 Weeks
“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” – Les Brown
I believe that everybody has the potential to become a successful entrepreneur, and I set out to illustrate this for you.
I wanted to document my entire process of building, launching, and running a dropshipping business, so you can follow every decision that I made, and use my journey to fuel your own success.
In 8 weeks I built and launched my store. During those 8 weeks I made $6,666.73 in revenue.
Let me be clear, I’m no genius. I’m just an ambitious entrepreneur, like you, with a huge drive to succeed.
I was running this business in addition to my 9 to 5 job (which isn’t related to ecommerce at all), so I had to work on my store after work, or on the weekends – just like many of you.
Even with all the obstacles in my way, I did it, and if I can, you can too.
So, follow along with my journey to find out how I chose my products, which marketing tactics worked best for me, how I made my first sale, and learn the challenges that I faced as an entrepreneur.
Let’s get started!
Finding a Niche
When I start a new business, I always like to think about what I’m going to sell first.
Even though there are amazing online tools which can help me find a profitable business idea, I usually start by brainstorming on a piece of paper.
Why did I use paper? I’m a huge fan of keeping it simple, so I just wrote down everything that came to mind for 10 minutes.
I don’t want to overthink the ideation process. There were good ideas in my head, just like there are in yours, and all I had to do was put them to paper.
I used the following criteria when I was picking my products:
- No food. (I didn’t know about the quality of food from overseas)
- No electronics (easy to break which can lead to a lot of returns)
- No heavy goods (high shipping costs)
- Low-priced items (if a refund was necessary I wouldn’t lose that much money)
Now, these were just my criteria for a product. There isn’t an exact science behind this, but I’ve found success using these criteria in the past, and successful entrepreneurs double down on what works.
I came up with nine solid product ideas (as shown above in green) with some further thoughts (circled in yellow).
I already had some rough ideas for what I should sell, but I still wanted to check the bestselling lists from:
I’ve found success in the past with products that can be found in at least two of these marketplaces.
After checking these marketplaces, I settled on three product ideas.
1. Pineapple Bracelets
Both Amazon and Etsy had the same products in their bestselling listings, which was a good sign that there was demand for this product.
2. Steel Strap Watches
Watches with a steel strap also proved to be popular. Seemed like these products could be a good option.
3. Pineapple Hats
And again; both Amazon and Etsy listed similar products in their bestsellers list. I found it very interesting that both platforms had pineapple hats.
I had three ideas, so it was now time to validate them.
Niche Validation
Validation is one of the most important steps when you’re starting your own online business.
This process will allow you to understand if there is demand for your idea (product) or not.
If you skip the validation process your business can end up being a waste of both time and money.
Niche Validation #1
As I had three ideas, I had to find the one which had the most potential to become a success. The easiest way to do this was to use Google Trends.
All of these product ideas seemed great. There weren’t any crazy trends, but there were definitely signs of an increasing interest across the board.
With this graph I had the confidence to continue moving forward with these product ideas.
Even though “steel watch strap” had a higher search volume on Google, my intuition told me that I should look more into the pineapple products because:
- The search volume for both pineapple products was on the rise,
- These products fall under a specific niche,
- There is a wide variety of possible products to sell.
I already mentioned that spending too much time on finding products to sell isn’t ideal for me.
Then it hit me. I thought to myself: “why not build a huge pineapple dropshipping store?”
I wanted to stick with my gut feeling, and move forward with this idea. So, it was decided: I was going to launch a pineapple store.
Finding Products to Sell
Now that I’d decided on the niche for my store, it was time to start researching some products.
I started by checking Amazon to gauge if the pineapple products were available.
I made a point to take advantage of the drop-down suggestions (as shown in the images below) after I had entered my search term.
This was a very important step. These suggestions are based on the activity from buyers who use these websites, and their algorithms have learnt which products I might be interested in.
Ultimately, these algorithms are meant to coax me into purchasing more from the platforms. And if they work for me, they’ll also work for my audience.
So, I simply searched for the term “pineapple” without pressing enter, and made a note of the results.
Amazon’s suggestions:
I cherrypicked these results for the products which looked most interesting and, combined with the results from my research, I compiled a list of 10 ideas:
- Pineapple corer
- Pineapple decor
- Pineapple backpack
- Pineapple float
- Pineapple popsocket
- Pineapple necklace
- Pineapple earrings
- Pineapple dress
- Pineapple bikini
- Pineapple hats
I was very happy with these results, but I still took the time to dig a little deeper and explore some more products.
After all, the more product research you do, the more likely you are to find products which will be successful for your business.
I spent around one hour reviewing these products, and I came up with a couple more solid ideas for my inventory.
I now had 17 product ideas in total. Bare in mind that each product also has dozens of different variants and color options, so my store’s inventory was looking good so far.
Read the full article here:
https://www.oberlo.com/blog/how-i-built-a-dropshipping-store-that-made-6667-in-under-8-weeks
