My first Shopify store went well I would say. I broke even! I know I can do better though because I have the skills now required to earn the sale. I have attached a bunch of images to this post to show you what I have been going through in my business.

 I thought I was doing everything correctly, haha. However, I can see I was not doing so well with converting every person who came to my site.

Facebook remains a good strategy for online marketing.

Learning how to convert customers is a skill.
Converting shoppers to customers is not easy.
Marketing a store is not easy. For a while there, I figured using larger sites as leverage would be the best idea. I’m not sure how to market! There are so many strategies out there. I can tell you more about my current market strategy in a few. I have received a lot of traffic from social sites compared to search engines.Most of my visitors are from the United States! I prefer the United States because of the lesser shipping costs and avoiding customs fees.

I almost made it to 15 orders. I am still proud of myself either way.

Its important to know what pages people are landing on so we can focus our efforts on the right location.

Overall, I achieved about $500 in sales. I am so happy about earning money online.

While looking at the image above, most people were using their desktop to browse my site.

Overall, I was starting to get a ton of traffic to my store. I was receiving somewhere around 1.5 thousand visitors per month. I am astonished by my efforts. Life was hard for me during this time because I had just got out of serious relationship, and had lost my job at the same time because I quit.

A few people were reaching checkout and not finishing their purchases.

I learned real quick that my marketing campaigns suck! I think I was using Kit Marketing.

Even though I was receiving a lot of traffic. I was uploading products to my site that I could not sustain through efficient shipment philosophies such as too large of furniture. My philosophy now is to ship smaller items until I get good at the process.

Now, I know I need to sell the smaller items for sure because small items are selling better.

The sales were low towards the end of the month as seen below.

I am glad I ended the business when I did.

I received the most sales from search traffic. Figures, because I put a lot of effort into seo marketing.

So what did I learn from my first drop ship store?

It hurts to say goodbye to this website template, but the cost savings is about worth it. besides, I love to write regardless of the front.

This is what the site use to look like. So, beautiful!

What am I up to now?

I am starting a new e-commerce store for free! All that is required of me is my time to upload photos to Instagram, and products to the store. I am focused on a particular niche in the 3D PRINTING space. I can keep you posted on my accomplishments.

Now I am focusing my efforts on being specific with my product category. My new venture is with 3D printing filament. The reason I am focusing on drop shipping in this area is that I believe the future of civilization will depend on 3D filament.

Let me explain, 3D filament is used for constructing buildings now, and people are even eating filament. So, there’s a pretty good chance people will be going to filament stores to re-up on this stuff.

Will my theory be correct? Maybe, and then again maybe not. I have been wrong before. So, below you can see I created a Shopify store again and deleted the Modern Boardroom Supplies site because I wanted to keep costs down. Turns out, using Shopify is way to expensive for my efforts. I decided to go with Spreesy.com and Instagram. Both of these platforms are free to use; which will save me a ton of money while I figure out dropshipping. Once I am profitable, I will continue my marketing efforts and ship more filament out.

Below, you can see what the Shopify store looked like before I took it down and switched to Spreesy.com:

Now, don’t get me wrong. This site looked amazing on the front end. The look could not justify the cost every month though.

Here’s another image:

Obviously, filament comes in different shapes and sizes and colors.

I even went as far as getting banners to prove my trustworthiness towards future customers.

Again, I chose the filament space because the market is growing. Pretty soon, more and more people are going to have a 3D printer at home. Those same people will be manufacturing whatever they want and into whatever material they desire.

Spend your time on the right activities.

Don’t be Afraid to Sell!

Having sales is a great way to get people excited about your brand. It doesn’t cost anything to have the sale. All you would need to do is make sure your sales price is greater than your cost of goods sold.

Example sales banner for promotions.

Banners such as the one above are perfect for enticing customers to spend money at your store. For me, if I can’t sell something at the price I want then most likely I need to reduce my price. You may wish to try different strategies if you decide to create your own store.

The packaging is on point. The future of filament distribution will continue to improve.

The image above shows the “add to cart” banner encourages shopping.

The image above shows what folks are doing with the filament. Last but not least, where I am at not with my e-commerce dropshipping journey. The image below is my new logo for the new store. I can’t remember where I got the logo made, but it was free.. of course, it was free! What I essentially did was reduce my cost of owning a website to zero, and leveraging other platforms to distribute my content.  Obviously, I want to take this drop shipping business to the next level.  Once I start earning a lot of money from this new store, I am then going to invest in more product so I can have the items shipped to my house, and from there I can take pictures and improve my quality control, and hopefully build more trust with my customers, but first, I need to learn how to sell effectively; and so, here I am with another strategy!