Hello fellow Entrepreneurs. Andreas here, So far I've gotten a lot of good advice from here with regards to my first e-commerce website and I thought I'll talk a bit about lessons I've learned so far. It might be something most of you know, but it took me awhile to understand.
First of all, i would like to say that Salehoo has really been the key to some of the success I have received. More on this later
A bit of background - I've started Japan Goods in January, with an idea to create a new UK based Japanese merchandise shop. I was to start off with t-shirt dropshipping as my competitors didn't seem to have good anime and japan inspired t-shirts + it was a fairly easy to get into as I wouldn't have to get an inventory and could scale with no problems. Eventually, when I'll make it a bit profitable, I would start selling everything else which requires inventory: accessories, snacks, figurines, etc. And that's pretty much it.
Product Strategy
So starting off with t-shirt dropshipping. Unfortunately so far I've invested much more than I've gotten back. I still think my idea of outsourcing to Japanese artists is pretty unique and resulted in cool designs, it's was too expensive and I would have to wait few weeks to get a design. That resulted in very small product range and even if I managed to get >1000 page views in a day for a bit, most didn't buy anything simply because they didn't find what they wanted.
So my suggestion would be to avoid doing t-shirts, especially if you are not a designer yourself and your niche requires something of high level rather than some text on a t-shirt.
For now, I've stopped outsourcing designs and started to make perhaps simple, but my own which resulted in much faster product releases and 0 money spent. I am definitely coming back to outsourcing, but I need to increase my revenue stream first.
P.S. I've also decided to test selling accessories, which I buy on Salehoo (but only high-quality items), but I have yet to see how it goes. But profit margin is much higher and as I've already invested, even if I don't sell, I can use it for free give-aways to get more exposure.
Social Media
As with everything else, I didn't have any experience in social media and marketing in general, so there was a pretty steep learning curve. But its been a fun ride so far and here are my results:
Twitter
It's been the most successful channel so far from me. While I started to juggle between Twitter and Facebook at the beginning, I've decided to concentrate 90% on one of them and it was worth it.
First of all, I would like to highly recommend Narrow for automatic following and liking. It's been very accurate so far and I've been gaining engaged and real users. While I am still hesitant about following, it does give the most back in term of followers. So I switch it on and off regularly. Plus it automatically cleans up follows its done, which very handy.
Users are usually very engaged, so you can build real connections really quickly. I spent maybe an hour every day twitting to most engaged users and to other bloggers/websites in my niche, which is both fun and rewarding in terms of retweets and hence higher exposure.
For monitoring, I've tried a few tools, but Twitter Counter is definitely the best in both features and general execution. I am using it for free for now, but definitely see myself upgrading in the near future
Facebook
Less excitement over here, perhaps to lower engagement or little knowledge. I've heard it can be a very powerful tool and can see why, but it just didn't work out for me so far.
Ads have been ok, but I've gotten much more engagement on Twitter almost for free, while even spending over 100£ a month on facebook ads resulted in almost no follow-up.
I am also very sceptical about Facebook page promotion. You can find quite a bit of talks about that online, like this brilliant video on Veritasium and I've certainly seen that. You gain likes really quickly with promotion, but you CAN'T SEE THEM. Sometimes you will in Recent Likes, but it was perhaps 5% of gained followers. I honestly believe you see really likes in there while your counter just gets updated... I may be wrong, but I don't see myself using that feature ever again.
So in my opinion stick with Twitter, you'll get interaction you can see and followup on.
Instagram
Not much about Instagram, I am only just starting on it as I've heard with visual based niches its a very good traffic source. I'll definitely write about it sometime in the future.
Marketing/CEO
This was definitely the most fun part of running a business so far. It took me awhile to start getting results, but after I did I started to feel much more engaged. So I've talked about Social Media, but what about everything else.
Advertising
I haven't done much of Google Ads, but enough to give me an idea on when to use it. So in my opinion you should avoid it at the start. I've probably spent around 500£ on it and never gotten any real results (traffic yes, purchases - no). It takes time to learning how to use Google Ads as there are a lot of options and I don't have a degree in marketing, so it had to be trial and error most of the time. I did manage to optimise my ads quite a bit, but in the end due to competition having higher budget (hence position), more products, bigger audience, my ads just didn't stick out much. So when you start out, try create organic traffic as much as possible and when you are getting enough traffic and purchases, you can start thinking about scaling with google ads (facebook ads as well).
Instead, use this money on niche advertising. That is sponsored blog posts, youtube videos, websites and so forth. You'll probably get much better deal if you personally reach out to bloggers, website owners and influencers than you'll get from using general google ads. You can get more targeted than that.
T-shirt dropshipping is very competitive and if you are not a designer or can't outsource and get very unique designs, probably avoid at the start. Avoid Google and Facebook Ads at the beginning. Definitely don't use Facebook Page Promotion as its mostly fake likes. Twitter is awesome, you should try it as your first media channel and really invest in it. Try to find niche websites and influencers, then get sponsored or not mentions from them for massive traffic boost. One of the ways I was able to get good products were through a product called Salehoo which hooks you up with suppliers.
First of all, i would like to say that Salehoo has really been the key to some of the success I have received. More on this later
A bit of background - I've started Japan Goods in January, with an idea to create a new UK based Japanese merchandise shop. I was to start off with t-shirt dropshipping as my competitors didn't seem to have good anime and japan inspired t-shirts + it was a fairly easy to get into as I wouldn't have to get an inventory and could scale with no problems. Eventually, when I'll make it a bit profitable, I would start selling everything else which requires inventory: accessories, snacks, figurines, etc. And that's pretty much it.
Product Strategy
So starting off with t-shirt dropshipping. Unfortunately so far I've invested much more than I've gotten back. I still think my idea of outsourcing to Japanese artists is pretty unique and resulted in cool designs, it's was too expensive and I would have to wait few weeks to get a design. That resulted in very small product range and even if I managed to get >1000 page views in a day for a bit, most didn't buy anything simply because they didn't find what they wanted.
So my suggestion would be to avoid doing t-shirts, especially if you are not a designer yourself and your niche requires something of high level rather than some text on a t-shirt.
For now, I've stopped outsourcing designs and started to make perhaps simple, but my own which resulted in much faster product releases and 0 money spent. I am definitely coming back to outsourcing, but I need to increase my revenue stream first.
P.S. I've also decided to test selling accessories, which I buy on Salehoo (but only high-quality items), but I have yet to see how it goes. But profit margin is much higher and as I've already invested, even if I don't sell, I can use it for free give-aways to get more exposure.
Social Media
As with everything else, I didn't have any experience in social media and marketing in general, so there was a pretty steep learning curve. But its been a fun ride so far and here are my results:
It's been the most successful channel so far from me. While I started to juggle between Twitter and Facebook at the beginning, I've decided to concentrate 90% on one of them and it was worth it.
First of all, I would like to highly recommend Narrow for automatic following and liking. It's been very accurate so far and I've been gaining engaged and real users. While I am still hesitant about following, it does give the most back in term of followers. So I switch it on and off regularly. Plus it automatically cleans up follows its done, which very handy.
Users are usually very engaged, so you can build real connections really quickly. I spent maybe an hour every day twitting to most engaged users and to other bloggers/websites in my niche, which is both fun and rewarding in terms of retweets and hence higher exposure.
For monitoring, I've tried a few tools, but Twitter Counter is definitely the best in both features and general execution. I am using it for free for now, but definitely see myself upgrading in the near future
Less excitement over here, perhaps to lower engagement or little knowledge. I've heard it can be a very powerful tool and can see why, but it just didn't work out for me so far.
Ads have been ok, but I've gotten much more engagement on Twitter almost for free, while even spending over 100£ a month on facebook ads resulted in almost no follow-up.
I am also very sceptical about Facebook page promotion. You can find quite a bit of talks about that online, like this brilliant video on Veritasium and I've certainly seen that. You gain likes really quickly with promotion, but you CAN'T SEE THEM. Sometimes you will in Recent Likes, but it was perhaps 5% of gained followers. I honestly believe you see really likes in there while your counter just gets updated... I may be wrong, but I don't see myself using that feature ever again.
So in my opinion stick with Twitter, you'll get interaction you can see and followup on.
Not much about Instagram, I am only just starting on it as I've heard with visual based niches its a very good traffic source. I'll definitely write about it sometime in the future.
Marketing/CEO
This was definitely the most fun part of running a business so far. It took me awhile to start getting results, but after I did I started to feel much more engaged. So I've talked about Social Media, but what about everything else.
Advertising
I haven't done much of Google Ads, but enough to give me an idea on when to use it. So in my opinion you should avoid it at the start. I've probably spent around 500£ on it and never gotten any real results (traffic yes, purchases - no). It takes time to learning how to use Google Ads as there are a lot of options and I don't have a degree in marketing, so it had to be trial and error most of the time. I did manage to optimise my ads quite a bit, but in the end due to competition having higher budget (hence position), more products, bigger audience, my ads just didn't stick out much. So when you start out, try create organic traffic as much as possible and when you are getting enough traffic and purchases, you can start thinking about scaling with google ads (facebook ads as well).
Instead, use this money on niche advertising. That is sponsored blog posts, youtube videos, websites and so forth. You'll probably get much better deal if you personally reach out to bloggers, website owners and influencers than you'll get from using general google ads. You can get more targeted than that.
T-shirt dropshipping is very competitive and if you are not a designer or can't outsource and get very unique designs, probably avoid at the start. Avoid Google and Facebook Ads at the beginning. Definitely don't use Facebook Page Promotion as its mostly fake likes. Twitter is awesome, you should try it as your first media channel and really invest in it. Try to find niche websites and influencers, then get sponsored or not mentions from them for massive traffic boost. One of the ways I was able to get good products were through a product called Salehoo which hooks you up with suppliers.
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