Among today's entrepreneurs, e-commerce has become the most popular way to make money online and has become a trend since last year. In this detailed article we are going to cover how people using Shopify stores to make 100000$ per month through their brands and Facebook ads.
WHY E-COMMERCE?
Image credits: http://blogs.nasscom.in/ecommerce-in-india-fueling-a-billion-digital-dreams/
Ecommerce allows consumers to electronically exchange goods and services with no barriers of time or distance. Over the past five years, the electronic commerce has expanded rapidly and is predicted to continue at this rate, and even accelerate. More and more businesses move sections of their operations onto the Internet due to which in the near future, the boundaries between conventional and electronic commerce will become increasingly blurred.
The road to creating a successful online store can be a difficult if unaware of ecommerce principles and what ecommerce is supposed to do for your online business. To become successful with online store building, one must research and understand the guidelines required to properly implement an e-business plan is a crucial part.
In this article depicts about how to make money online by selling your products through an online store without the hassle of stocking, handling and fulfilling products. We are talking about drop shipping and below we are covering this business model in detail!
There are ample number of e-commerce platforms but Shopify has become the most popular for this business model.
But why is Shopify so popular?
Using shopify you can build a professional online store in one day and it is affordable. Shopify is easy to use, fast to install and is very affordable compared to other e-commerce platforms. It offers all the great tools you'll need to sell online, complete freedom, control of your customer's information and it offers great design on their store templates.
How are People and Brands Making Money with Shopify Right Now (2017)?
There are many different ways to make money with your own online store and in this article, we are going to discuss some models:
- Selling your own products
- Buy wholesale
- Drop shipping
The three types of business models that are using several brands and people are easily making money with their shopify stores.
Selling Online Your Own Products
Product development is for those willing to set up their own business in any field by doing what they love. It is usually done by making changes in any existing product or creating a whole new product by yourself. Many great and unique products have been born with these kinds of brands. It is worth mentioning that if you create your own products, that involves more than just making what you love to do. Product development is a process that involves various steps and processes.
Below is the costs and processes involved:
- Product Development: Time and materials
- Material costs
- Warehouse, machines and workforce
- Producing and building your own inventory
- Inventory tracking & storage
- Packaging
- Shipping
- Marketing
- Online store costs and management
- After sales support
The new product development process is testing platform where errors and exceptions can be made, designs can get trashed, and losses could be recorded. Having your entire team working in tight synchronicity even if reinventing your own wheel, it will ensure the successful launch of goods or services. Productivity during product development can be achieved if, and only if, goals are clearly defined along the way and each process has contingencies clearly outlined on paper.
Shopify allows to manage your online store in a sophisticated way, and when you use it becomes an essential working tool. Your product inventory can be very easily and fastly managed and organized. You can also add several variants of one single product and change the price and picture of each one if needed.
Being a unique brand, it's very important to showcase a professional image to the customers. Shopify Stores are specially designed to offer your customers a great user experience because it is fast, easy and reliable.
If you already have your product price list and pictures, you can easily set up your Shopify store in a matter of hour or so.
Recommeded & Helpful :
Shopify Useful Resources Shopify Blog Shopify Plus Shopify MagentoSell Online Wholesale Products
The foundation of a solid business model is the purchasing of wholesale products and selling them at a retail price. The concept is simple - a product is purchased at a low price and resold at a higher price. However, there is much more than becoming a successful retailer than just buying products at low prices and selling them at higher rates. It is primarily about determining what to sell, where to buy it and how to resell it at a profit.
Also, compared to manufacturing your own products, the minimum quantity of items to order to apply to wholesale programs is much lower. It completely depends on the wholesale supplier's guidelines and the type of product brought. By this you'll be able to acquire more variety of products of different brands also.
The total costs and processes involved when buying a wholesale product involves the following:
- Inventory tracking and storage
- Packaging
- Shipping
- Marketing
- Online store costs and management
Drop Shipping with Shopify
The drop shipping method is a retail fulfilment method where any store doesn't keep the products it sells in stock. Instead, when a store sells a product to its customers, it purchases the product directly from a third party and have it shipped directly to the customer. Thus, the merchant never sees or handles the product.
The biggest difference between drop shipping model and the standard retail model is that the selling merchant doesn't keep a stock or has its own inventory. Instead, the merchant purchases inventory as needed from a third party, it is usually a wholesaler or manufacturer to full fill orders.
If you need to find a high demanded product, you can easily get it from a drop shipper at a very cheaper price and showcase it on your own store with a higher price to the right people or to the customers. It sounds easy but it is actually harder than it sounds. We will talk about some ways to find hot products later and how to reach your target market.
The biggest advantage to drop shipping is that without having to invest thousands of dollars in inventory up front, it is possible to launch an ecommerce store. As compared to traditional approach, the retailers had to tie up huge amount of capital for purchasing the inventory.
With the drop shipping model, you don't have to purchase a product unless you have already made the sale and have been paid by the customer. Without large amount of the up front inventory investments, it is very much possible to start a successful drop shipping business with very little money.
Easy to Get Started - running an ecommerce business today is very much easier when you actually don't have to deal with physical products. With drop shipping, you don't have to worry about:
- Managing or paying for a warehouse which is very expensive for individual purchase
- Packing and shipping your orders to the destination on time
- Tracking the inventory details for accounting reasons
- Handling about the returns and inbound shipments
- Continually ordering the products and managing your stock level
Low overhead - Because you don't have to worry about purchasing an inventory or managing a warehouse, your overhead expenses are quite minimized. In fact, many successful drop shipping business are run from a home office earning less than $100 per month. As your store or business grows, these expenses would likely increase but will still be very low as compared to those of traditional brick and mortar businesses.
Flexible location - A drop shipping business can be run from anywhere in the world with an internet connection. If you can communicate with suppliers and customers easily, you can run and manage your business very effectively.
Wide selection of products - Just because you don't need to pre-purchase the products you wish to sell, you can offer an array of products to your potential customers. If suppliers stock an item, you can list the items for sale on your own personal website at almost no additional cost.
Easy to scale - With a traditional business, if you gain a profit three times as much business is then you would obviously need to do three times as much work. But with the help of leveraging the drop shipping suppliers, most of the work to process additional orders will be done by the suppliers which allows you to expand with a fewer growing pain and less incremental work. The sales growth will additionally bring additional work, especially related to customer service, but business utilizes drop shipping scale particularly well as compared to the traditional ecommerce businesses.
All these benefits make drop-shipping a very attractive model to both beginning and established merchants. Unfortunately, drop-shipping isn't all roses and rainbows. All this convenience and flexibility comes at a price.
How can you target an audience? With Facebook ads, you can filter an audience by location, age, gender, interests, behaviours, etc. This is by far the most popular way to target people nowadays.
You can add a new product to your store and start running ads in minutes with Facebook Ads. If the product isn't selling well, you can target a different audience, ad type, ad design or either move to another product. You can try and test the different campaigns of variety of products at the same time to learn about which products are strongly selling with a particular audience, ad type and ad design.
Popular Drop-Shipping Suppliers
Nowadays, people are working as suppliers with some big wholesalers capable of fulfilling their business needs as retailers. Some of these big suppliers have become popular among the entrepreneurs. Following is featured some of them:
AliExpress:
If you're not familiar with AliExpress, here's a quick primer: it is a huge online retailer owned by the Alibaba Group. It's a multi-billion dollars' corporation that started as a business to business buying and works as a selling portal. It has since expanded its services to business to consumer and consumer to consumer, cloud computing and payment services.
The maximum sale in a singles' day by Alibaba is over $14 billion which was on 11 November 2015.
The popularity of Aliexpressamong entrepreneurs have caused the development of tools like Oberlo. Oberlo is an application that allows you to import products from Aliexpress directly to your Shopify Store. Oberlo provides you with the feature of saving time and money because it fulfils the orders automatically itself and it maintains your prices and inventory on a regular basis.
When imported, you can customize your products with different text, images and variants. It also provides features like integrated order tracking and switching between multiple users account.
There are also different alternatives of drop-shipping for different niches.
Top Brands on Shopify
Some think Shopify is only suitable for small businesses. Shopify provides you with everything you need to run a successful online store in the name of a large brand. Following are few examples of many big brands doing that:
Budweiser
For over 160 years, Anheuser-Busch have been brewing some of the world's most popular beers, it is described as one of the world-class brew makers as they have now expanded the Budweiser empire and is currently selling branded merchandise on their e-commerce site.
WaterAid
WaterAid is an international non-profit organisation. Its goal is to transform the lives of the poorest communities in the world by providing them with amenities safe water, sanitation and proper hygiene.
The Economist
The Economist online offers an authoritative insight and opinions on international news, politics, business, accountancy and finance, science and technology. The e-commerce store keeps a wide range of economist in the form of printed and audio books, as well as a range of office stationary and diaries.
Condor
With the help of the unique knowledge, skills and experience, Condor is specialised in bike building. Each of their bicycles follow a unique fitting and build process that ensure the correct fit and feel for each rider.
Tesla Motors
Tesla Motors was founded by a group of engineers in Silicon Valley in 2003 in order to prove that electric cars could be better than gasoline powered cars. Tesla is not just an automobile maker, but also a technology and design company with an aim of energy innovation.
Red Bull
Red Bull is the highest-selling energy drink in the world, and this product is shopped through advertisements, events, celebrity endorsements, and music, through its record label: "Red Bull Records". The online store stocks official Red Bull related products, including products like hats, t-shirts, back packs, jackets and many more items.
LA Lakers
The Los Angeles Lakers are an American professional basketball team based in Los Angeles, California. That compete in the national basketball association and their online store offers a range of player's jerseys, sportswear, hats and branded gifts.
The New York Stock Exchange
It is by far the world's largest stock exchange. As part of their huge presence in the financial sector, they have set up a shopify store that sells NYSE labelled goods only. It has market capitalisation of many of its companies listed worth US$19.69 trillion as of May 2015.
Skinnydip
The "Skinnydip London" has grown into a brand with over 100 concessions. It was launched in the year 2011 by Lewis Blitz and two brothers James and Richard Gold. Skinnydip sales rocketed after being stocked in leading global retailers including Selfridges, Nordstrom, ASOS & Topshop.
Herschel
It was founded in 2009 by two brothers Jamie and Lyndon Cormack. The Herschel Supply Co. was named after their town where three generations of their family had actually grown up. It is based in Vancouver, Canada. Herschel Supply Co. is a design driven global accessories brand which produces some very fine quality products with a regard with its details.
P&CO
An engaging, creative lifestyle led this brand with a like-minded outlook and a similar interest both in lifestyle, fashion and design. They craft a uniquely classic, unpretentious expression brand that is P & Co which set out to deliberately take a different approach to fashion.
Famous celebrities killing with Shopify
Kylie Jenner, a celebrity with a huge influential following on social media , chose Shopify which provides the requirements needed for a huge amount of visitors at the same time. Check out her amazing video where she sold thousands of products in a few minutes just by posting 1 tweet and 1 Instagram post: This is super crazy and she just made lot of money with her lunatic fan following.
Recommeded & Helpful :
Shopify Useful Resources Shopify Blog Shopify Plus Shopify MagentoHow to Drive traffic to your Shopify Store?
We all know that organic traffic is the best traffic type to your online store. It is so because it's not only giving you the most targeted visitors, but because people are actively searching your products on the web. But they also don't cost any money per visitor that you get.
So, what are you guys doing to increase this traffic source to your website?
Direct Traffic is when your visitors arrive directly on your site and it can be done in different ways. The amount of direct traffic you get defines your success in marketing, which can be large in amount than others in some areas like email marketing. Email marketing when done correctly it becomes a great source of traffic to your online store. Many advertisers implement several marketing strategies in which the main goal is not to selling something in particular but get email subscribers instead. Why? Because even nowadays email marketing outperforms social media.
On comparing email marketing with social media, it was found that email marketing is better at driving direct conversions, targeted traffic as compared to social media which is better in engaging with your audience.
Referring Site Traffic or Referral Traffic is when the visitors click a link on another site while accidently landing on your site. One good example of this is traffic coming from social networks like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, twitter, Roposo, YouTube, etc.
Another tried and true method for getting traffic is landing your business in the press. You have a better chance of getting press from local news sites and community papers, but as in now you might not get covered from very big newspapers and sites, but that's ok. You have a good chance of being featured when you can tell your unique story, when you can present your product in interesting ways, and when you can write a good pitch.
Since reporters see lots of pitches, so it is advisable to use a concise pitch than the long pitch when reaching out to the press. To seek press attention, you should write a short and compelling email in which just tell them about what makes you different, and try to pitch yourself as a local success story.
Considering some Instagram personality, getting coverage from a popular blog, from a vlogger, or from the press can actually help you drive a lot of sales to your store. For doing this send them a sample and a short note and reach out to them just as you would to an Instagram personality.
Facebook owns a huge user base that can be grouped in audiences. Facebook provides multiple targeting options that allows you to hit audiences based on specific demographics such as:
It's a must to track your conversions and to group your audiences by their behaviour inside your online store.
A very popular paid traffic source is Google AdWords. AdWorks can provide you with a huge amount of traffic if you outbid your competition in order to be at that top position. AdWords allows you to do remarketing as well.
Try Facebook Ads First
If you are ready and willing to spend money online by making an e-commerce business, then you must take your time to think about which business model fits with your desired goals. The drop shipping model is a very great model for small beginners and it could help to bring you knowledge and experience for bigger goals to achieve and Shopify is also a great e-commerce platform to start with.
With a lower budget, it is always advisable to to try Facebook Ads first. Also, Facebook Ads gives you the advantage to target different and huge variety of the audiences based on very specific demographics and behaviours.
We recommend trying Facebook Ads as a paid traffic source for beginners because it is easier and cheaper. Stay tuned we will be having more detailed guides Facebook ads for Shopify stores!
