I often get asked about my journey of making money online and being able to earn a full-time income.  

And my answer always remains the same – Money doesn’t come easy. You have to be willing to experiment and to fail again and again until you figure it out. 

This post contains affiliate links. For more information, see my disclosures.

Dropshipping was a term completely unknown to me until a year ago when I started reading about people making six-figure incomes with it. Although I was new to dropshipping, I was very much familiar with shopify and the many features that it offers. 

For those of you who don’t know, my online journey began in the year 2020 with selling printables on a shopify store that turned out to be a huge failure. As disappointed as I was at the time, I knew I couldn’t allow this experience to stop me. I went on to build two successful blogs and a failed dropshipping store after that, but my desire to have an online store never went away.  

So this year in February, I decided to start a second dropshipping store to see if anything had changed since the last failure. I read and researched for a few days about the nitty-gritties of dropshipping because I really wanted to make it work this time. Having spent a good $400 on my previous failed store, I also wanted to be careful with money this time. Needless to say, planning the expenses was the first thing that came into play. And I firmly decided not to spend anything more than a $150 and a month of my precious time on the new store.  

Building A Store 

Unlike earlier when shopify subscription alone ended up costing me a good $300 for 1 year, I managed to get a link for a free trial this time around followed by a meagre $1 fee for the month after. 

I guess this was something that they do to encourage more people to try out the platform. And since I was already familiar with the amazingness of shopify, I immediately took the offer. 

I chose the Basic plan as it had all the features that were needed to create a store.

I had decided that if it didn’t work this time, I would be convinced that dropshipping wasn’t for me. I couldn’t afford to lose more money but shopify’s free trial and a next-to-nothing fee gave me a strong reason to go ahead. 

It took me nearly 3 days to set my store up for success. Now if you’re wondering what I did differently with my new store to make sure that I didn’t replicate my previous failure, then keep reading. 

While starting my first dropshipping store, I didn’t care to invest in a domain name. Since I already had a blog running successfully (askmisswhimsical.com), I created a free subdomain called shop.askmisswhimsical.com and used it as my store URL.

Yes!! You can call me a FOOL!!  

How on earth could I think that someone would buy from a store whose domain name sounded like a walking talking scam!?  

But this time, it was the first thing I paid attention to. So I bought a domain name that resonated with my store’s niche and connected it to my shopify store.  

I used hostinger to buy the domain name as the prices were cheaper as compared to other domain providers.

While registering the domain name, I discovered that shopify has already collaborated with GoDaddy to make it easier for its customers to buy a new domain on the platform itself. But since I had already bought one from hostinger, I decided to go ahead and connected it to my store. 

The process of registering a domain with shopify was pretty simple: 

1. I simply logged in to my shopify account and clicked on the Settings tab at the bottom of the menu on the left-hand side. 

2. Under the Domains tab, I clicked on Connect Existing Domain and entered the domain name I had just bought.  

3. I then followed the specified instructions and within a few minutes, my store got a URL of its own. 

I then created a logo for my store. Since Logo was something that I didn’t pay attention to last time, I made sure that I now have a logo that stood as a perfect representation of my store. There were a host of logo designs to choose from and luckily, I didn’t have to pay a single cent for my little logo. Thanks to Canva, I was able to create one within a few seconds!  

Over the next couple days, I built a pretty-looking Contact page, a Privacy policy page, T&Cs, FAQs, Return & Refund Policy and an About Me page. Having missed on a lot of these pages while running my previous store, I now knew that I had to get each one of these pages up and running because of reasons that were more important than I thought. 

A store’s return policy, T&Cs and Contact page brings a sense of seriousness to it and assures the prospective customer that their money is safe.  

I also went ahead and set up my Payment options, shipping, billing and cart – all this while making sure that my store was easy to navigate through.  

Finding A Winning Product 

My next challenge was finding a product that had the potential of bringing in sales. I had seen shopify stores thrive on a single product and people becoming millionaires because of it.  

There was no way I could ignore the importance of investing my time in finding that one product that could keep the cash registers ringing.  

They say failure teaches you more than any degree or diploma can.  

On my previous store, I tried to sell cell phone cases, cotton slippers, trendy apparels and a lot of products that I thought would sell immediately. After spending hundreds of dollars on facebook and google ads built around promoting the products listed on that store, I realized that it was all money down the drain. Despite the fact that my store had the best product pictures and an attractive theme, they never reached Checkout. 

I researched more about what I might have been doing wrong and learned that the products listed on my previous store were being sold for much less on amazon and Walmart.  

Moreover, while promoting the previous store, I had designed the ads to target the most saturated markets in the world – US, Australia, UK and Canada. I still call myself a fool for even thinking that my shopify store could be a success in countries that already had so many options, better deals, faster shipping and many other factors that could easily defeat me.  

After spending hours on google, TikTok and Instagram, I finally found a product that I was sure would be a success – A rocket launcher toy that looked something like this.  

The fact that many young moms out there are always on amazon looking to buy a great toy for their kids made this product a perfect selling opportunity. Now all I had to do was find a seller for this product and create a great landing page. 

I quickly logged into the shopify admin zone to look for a great supplier. Having heard about cjdropshipping before, I knew it had to be the first supplier app that I need to check out for my product. 

To my relief, the rocket launcher toy was in the list of products they had. Besides, the supplier also had a free video of the product that could be used for promoting it. 

The Real Deal 

Now that I had found the product and the supplier, the next step was deciding on the price point. As the product was being supplied to me at $18.99 (including shipping) and it was available on amazon for $29.99 (including shipping), it was obvious that I had to list it at a lesser price, or it could turn the customers away.   

$28.99 + Free shipping

That’s true! That’s what I did differently this time. I listed the product at a price that would leave me with a profit of $10 and still be cheaper than amazon. Also, since products with free shipping convert better than the ones that demand shipping, I added the shipping cost into the price and made sure that it’s the best deal a potential customer could get. 

It took me a few minutes to list the product on the site and get the landing page ready. I made sure that I had every detail mentioned in the product page for maximum conversion. Here’s how my landing page looked like: 

Creating the campaign 

Now that the product was up on my store, I set out to work on a promotional strategy that could bring in maximum results.  

Since cjdropshipping already gave me the video that could be used in promotions, I wanted to make sure that it stood out from the other stores that were also using this video to sell the product.  

Since I had been using Invideo for a while now, I decided to give it a go for editing the said video. For those who suck at editing, invideo also offers an AI approach to turn your text prompts into great video content. How amazing is that! I plan to use this feature more in future to create videos for my dropshipping store.  

In order to make my campaign look unique, I used invideo to change the background voice and music to make it look more playful and different.  

Now all I had to do was use this video to create a great facebook campaign to sell my product. 

Here’s the final ad that went out on facebook: 

In order to get the attention of viewers, I decided to offer a discount of $10 on the product. But since the discount wouldn’t have left me with any profits, I marked up the product by $10 for the time I planned to run the ads. 

This means that the product that I previously offered for $28.99 now got listed at $38.99. And the $10 discount was applied when the customer added the product to their cart. 

Promoting the product 

This time, instead of serving the ads to developed nations with a saturated market, I decided to focus on countries that were still untapped. After researching for a few minutes, I came up with a list of 7 countries that served as a perfect market for my shopify store. 

Italy. 

Norway. 

Germany. 

France. 

Spain. 

Netherlands. 

UAE. 

Considering that the spending capacity of these countries was growing at a fast pace and the growth opportunities were high, I decided to direct my ads to young moms aged between 24-36 residing in these 7 nations. I also happened to include the age group of 48-65 since many people belonging to this age group are grandparents to kids who might love this toy. 

The Final Result: 

I ran this campaign for a week and spent $18 a day.  

The end result was astonishing for me to say the least. Here were the exact figures: 

$400 in a week from a single product! Now that was huge for me. Remember that I had also incurred an expense of $9.99 on the domain name, $126 on facebook ads, $1 on shopify and an additional $15 on invideo to gain access to its advanced features.  This left me with a net profit of $248. 

Now imagine how much money I could have made by increasing the ad budget and adding more winning products to my shopify store. Isn’t it amazing? 

Now this may not look like too much of an amount to most people, but it’s huge for someone like me who has only experienced failures every time she gathered the courage to start a shopify store. 

I sure don’t want to stop here. Dropshipping industry is bound to grow multifold in the coming years and I can’t wait to explore more of it. 

I plan to try out Influencer marketing to promote my next product. Be sure to come back to see how it turns out.