Case Study：How I made $178,492 by Aliexpress dropshipping
Why did I choose Aliexpress dropshipping? In fact, I have considered for a long time before entering the industry, which platform should be better for cross-border e-commerce. Amazon, Wish, eBay, etc., these e-commerce platforms have their own characteristics, and their sales regions and key countries are also different. Amazon may be more suitable for factories and brands. For small and medium sellers like us, the opportunities now may not be too much. The Wish threshold will be slightly lower than Amazon, but it may take a long time to wait until your reputation value is high before there will be traffic.
In recent years, the dropshipping model of Aliexpress + Shopify is more popular. Compared with Amazon, which has a large number of merchants pouring in, the traffic and opportunities left to us are too few, it is better to start building your own e-commerce website. However, although Shopify can help us build a site quickly, the disadvantage is that we must drive traffic to our own Shopify store. It does not as same as Amazon if there have been comments and there will be traffic and orders. As an independent website, we must rely on ourselves.
So, why do I choose Aliexpress and Shopify? First of all, we must understand that most people are still used to shopping on Google and Facebook, which is an advantage for us with independent websites. Secondly, dropshipping is very convenient: no inventory, reducing a lot of cash investment; without our own packaging and transportation, reducing labor costs; Shopify helps us quickly build a website, saving the cost of hiring a technical team. In short, we can start dropshipping with no money.
Can you make money dropshipping? Yes!
1. Determine the field you want to enter and find your dropshipping niches
First, you need to understand what your strengths are. Are you good at SEO operations and know-how to operate stores? Or do you have quality and cheap product sources? Or you have a special understanding of a certain type of customer, such as the crowd who are interested in comics, you fully understand what they like and want to buy. and so on. When you understand your strengths, you should find ways to leverage your strengths.
So, how to determine our dropshipping niches?
If you have some resources or think of what to sell, you can go to Google Trends to search for recent changes in the popularity of these products. For example, this is a change in the popularity of the smartwatch on Google Trends in the past five years. We can see that from November to December each year, its search popularity will have a substantial increase, and at other times it is basically in a state of steady fluctuations, but the overall trend is rising every year. If you happen to have a good source of smartwatches, then you can try them.
Of course, in most cases, we don’t know what to sell and we don’t have a good supply. At this time, we need to use a third-party tool to select dropshipping niches. This is also the advantage of Aliexpress dropshipping: you can choose the source of supply according to market changes, and Aliexpress can almost provide all the products you want.
If you don’t know enough about Aliexpress dropshipping, you can check a blog I’ve written before： “A Complete Guide For Aliexpress Dropshipping In 2020 | FindNiche”. In this blog, I introduced what Aliexpress dropshipping is and how to choose reliable suppliers in detail.
Now, let's discuss how to choose the right, profitable dropshipping niches. This requires the use of some tools, such as Ecomhunt, NicheScraper, FindNiche, Pexda, etc. These tools have their own advantages and disadvantages, we can choose one that suits you. Take FindNiche as an example.
Usually, I will use these two functions to pick dropshipping, "Products" and "Niches". "Products" usually recommends products with high order volume but low unit price. "Niches" recommends products with high unit prices and high profit. What you choose depends on your needs and the stage of operation of the store.
Through FindNiche, we can see the supplier price of products, its sales price in Shopify, product profit, whether it is a brand merchant, whether it is acceptable to PayPal, recent order quantity, total order quantity, the number of wishlists, the core selling country, etc.
We can filter products by different conditions, such as total order quantity, growth rates, price, country of shipment, country of sale, product category, etc. Or you have your own target product, you can filter the product by searching the corresponding keywords through the search box.
So, what kind of products have the opportunity to become explosives?
I think they have these characteristics:
- Their overall score on AliExpress is between 4.6 and 4.9
- The number of its wish lists and the number of comments on Aliexpress cannot determine whether it will sell well.
- The price of the product cannot determine whether it will sell well, but the profit of the product must be high enough.
- The recent order growth rate and profit growth rate are rising
- In a special period, a certain type of product will be sold accordingly. For example, when an outbreak occurs, sales of masks, daily disinfection supplies, and simple fitness products that can be performed at home will suddenly increase.
- It has been growing rapidly in the near future, but the number of comments and the number of being added to the wish list is not high, so the product has the potential to become a hit.
Here are three blogs for reference:
2. Research the competitor's Shopify store
After deciding what we want to sell, we can build our Shopify store based on our product characteristics. Before that, I will look for some great and top Shopify stores to conduct research and study. Reference from several aspects such as store design, store operation, and where have the traffic comes from.
The first step is to find reliable and excellent Shopify stores. This has to mention the amazing feature of FindNiche! Through the "Shopify Store" section, we can find an almost complete Shopify store directory. And we can see the recent advertising of these Shopify stores, their popularity on Facebook, and their website rankings. Click on the shop name or shop domain name, we can directly link to the shop's homepage.
For example, if I want to sell a phone case, the FindNiche search results will show us all the Shopify stores that sell phone cases.
Taking the top three shops as an example, in fact, their styles are different. The first one is for the crowd who love comics, the second one has a "girlish sense", and the third one is more suitable for the mature business crowd who care about quality. From the website design, you can see the respective target groups.
There are two blogs here, I recommend Shopify stores that I think are very good, you can use as a reference:
3. Build your own Shopify store
First, you have to give your store a name that people can remember, and buy a corresponding domain name. There are some rules to follow when choosing a name. For novice sellers, it is better to be short, easy to remember, creative, and considering SEO optimization effects are the most basic. Especially considering the SEO optimization effect is very important. Being able to rank high in Google’s search results makes your store easier to be seen. This requires that we must consider some long-tail keywords.
I once introduced the method of how to name your Shopify store in detail in a blog, everyone can use it as a reference：
There are many online tutorials on how to use Shopify to build your own e-shop, so I will not repeat them here.
4. How to operate Shopify store and how to drive traffic to your Shopify store
There are several basic methods for operating a store.
First, appropriate discounts and promotions attract users to consume.
Second, guide users to subscribe to mail through a number of different methods. Here is the case of the Shopify store which sells phone cases mentioned above, these are the two most common forms.
Third, keep the frequency of new products on the shelves.
Next, let me introduce a few methods of how to drive traffic to your Shopify store.
First, carry out basic SEO optimization.
Your store's front page and some main column pages are your main positions for SEO optimization.
- Write appropriate TDK, make full use of some long-tail keywords with low difficulty and high traffic.
- Blog, so that more pages in your site are indexed by Google.
- Content marketing on the homepage and main page
Second, email marketing
Through fixed frequency emails, wake up your sleeping users and attract them to buy products.
Third, make paid advertising
As we mentioned earlier, people are used to shopping on Facebook and Google, so the most mainstream way to drive traffic is Google ads and Facebook ads.
Before advertising, we need to understand two things: what is the average CPM in the near future, and what are the targeting audience of our Shopify store.
As for how we query these data, it is not described in detail in this article. When I have the opportunity, I will introduce to you in detail how to promote the store through paid advertising.
Fourth, see what channels your competitors are driving traffic from.
Through SimilarWeb, we can clearly see competitors' website traffic sources, and even be able to view more detailed social traffic. This gives us some directions and lets us know where we can attract traffic.
Here are two blogs detailing how to drive traffic to your Shopify store. Friends in need can use it as a reference.
The above is all about How I made $ 178,492 by Aliexpress dropshipping. I want to say a lot, but because of the limited space of the article, let’s end here. Hope these contents can help you successfully start your dropshipping business.
