$720,000 My FIRST YEAR on SHOPIFY (Products & Ads Revealed)

this is the exact video that i wish existed when i was first starting on shopify i'm going to show you how i sold over 700 000 in my first year of drop shipping and i'm even going to be doing something that i haven't seen before i'm going to be showing you the exact products and ads that i use to generate those results and lastly i'll share some crucial lessons that i learned along the way that if i had known them would have saved me thousands of dollars and months of experimentation so make sure to stick around to the end because this is going to be an extremely value-packed video on this channel i'm currently documenting the entire process of building my ecommerce brand with as much transparency as possible so that i can lead by example and help you start your own online store this year so if you're interested in starting your own online store and you want to support your boy make sure to hit that subscribe button down below because i'm going to be dropping a new video every single friday but without further ado let's get started with today's video alright so i started this store in june of 2017 with a good friend of mine and it was actually a general store so i got the idea for a general store from a couple people that i've seen on youtube like sebastian gomez and franklin hatchet at the time those were some of the biggest creators and i still got a lot of love for sebastian as well now at this time i was pretty broke i had like fifteen hundred dollars total between me and my business partner when we were starting this business and we were pretty much prepared to go all in on this so me and my friend were like let's do this we decided to build the store we both had a background in web design and working on stuff online so we were able to put the store up in like a day and we launched our first product the next day after and the product completely flopped it was so bad which is totally normal if you're new and you failed in the same way as part of the process so that first month of june it felt like every product i was testing was just a straight up failure i was testing all kinds of crap and i'll throw it up on the screen i was testing necklaces and bracelets i was testing random pet products that made no sense i was testing a variety of drop shipping products that i've seen on apps like ecom hunt and pexta and nothing was working then at the end of the month i took a whole evaluation of my strategy that i was following and i said this is not the way to do it i need to find products that are already selling and use my skill set to make those products better and it was from that that i had my first small success so let's take a look at that small success so if we go to the month of june and july you'll see that things actually kind of started to work a little bit i had went from making only sixteen hundred dollars in june to making eight thousand dollars plus in the month of july the biggest change came from that strategy approach that i just told you about i stopped trying to test random products that i thought would work and i started focusing on products that were already working and making them better so let me show you these products that started working in july inside of the ads manager so this is the month of july and as you can see this month was really dominated by one product and it was actually an ocarina the the instrument that link plays in the legend of zelda i've always been a big gamer and when i saw this product i thought it was super sweet and you can see it's a very simple photo ad just of this ocarina i used very simple ad copy i was like are you an original legend of zelda fan if so this is a must-have for the targeting it's pretty obvious what i was targeting i was targeting zelda and nintendo and game informer and i didn't become a millionaire of this product let me tell you but this product gave me a glimmer of hope that yo this business can actually work and i was thinking that i was going to get rich this month i was looking at my store and i was seeing like whoa you made six hundred dollars in a day you made five hundred dollars in a day but i wasn't making next to any profit i think at the end of this month even after making nine thousand dollars we only made like a thousand dollars profit and i was having my money held on shopify because when you first start scaling a shopify store they put a 25 hold on your account so i didn't make any money i was so confused i was like seeing all these deposits hit but no money came into my bank account and at the end of july i had to assess my whole situation and kind of re-evaluate everything so going into august i had a ton of motivation because now this business that was making me zero dollars before was at least showing promise that it could make me hundreds of dollars a day so i was primed and ready to kill it in the month of august and sure enough if you take a look in the month of august this store did the same amount of numbers it did around 8 300 bucks so i was like yo we did it again this product is still selling but the profits are low so what if i take the same exact approach that i did with this product and find a product with better profit margins and that's exactly what i did as you can see in the month of august i started testing a bunch of products because i had a little extra budget now i had about a thousand bucks so i was like let me just test that so i started testing like a 3d knee pad it's like a knee brace that you wear for injuries i started testing some height boosting insoles i'm sure you guys have seen that product before i was testing all types of stuff magnetic lashes portable juicer i tested a projector a mermaid glass i mean man i was going hard this month this was the first month when i was back in college after the summer of building this business and i did not want to stay in school my entire focus was to build this business to the point where i was making enough income to convince my parents to let me drop out of college and i actually got to that point but it took a little longer than expected once again in the month of august i really didn't make that much money i made about another thousand dollars in profit but shopify was holding our money and this is where things got a little scary because i knew that i had profit coming in but since shopify was holding it and since i was paying for inventory and the facebook ads i was starting to run really low on cash like dangerously low in cash to the point where i couldn't even keep up with running my business anymore and that's when the hustler inside of me activated and i just figured it out so since i was running low on money i needed to figure out a way to generate income online and maybe some of you guys are in that same position you're trying to start your ecommerce business but you're failing and you ran out of money listen man go out there and get a job if you have to but if you have some type of skill set that you can monetize do that because that's what i did and it worked for me so i started editing videos for other drop shippers via facebook groups and a couple chats that i was in and i started making 200 bucks a week from doing this is it a lot of money no but it gave me the budget and the extra amount of money that i needed to continue working on this without the pressure of running out of bread and it really paid off because going into the month of september i had my most successful month with e-commerce that year and this was the first month where i was able to look at my bank account and say oh wow like this is a real business this is something that i can use to live whatever life i want to live looking at 50k in revenue now does it excite me like it did at that time you guys got to understand i was living with my parents going to school i was pretty miserable because this is the only thing that i wanted to work i would literally be sleeping right and i would wake up in the mid i'll put my phone right next to my ear and i'll wake up in the middle of the night to the chatting sound effect on my phone and i would just wake up with like a smile on my face like i don't know if you guys know that but if you know you know so you can see this month of september i scaled up to at the maximum around four thousand dollars a day in sales and this was when i was like yo like i'm done with college i'm not gonna stay uh age i was 18 years old i was like yo this is crazy like i'm making more money than my parents and i can leave school and all these things that i had dreamed about for so long i had more motivation than ever i had a budget and the money from shopify that was on hold got released so i was up so the way that i scaled to a 50k in september was following what i was doing before so you can see in august i was testing a bunch of products and nothing was really slapping but september 1st i tested a new product it's this knife sharpener here and i'll go ahead and show you guys the ad i'll throw it up on the screen this product was a banger like i was making 30 profit on every single sale with this product you can see right here i was only spending 17 to get a customer and this is simply a matter of everything that i had learned from all the failure the months prior coming into fruition now going into october i had a little bit of a reality check because i scaled even higher i thought you know if it can do 50 it can do 100 so i was trying to push this thing from 50k to 100k and if you look what happened in october my roads just jumped off a cliff and i actually was scaling this product but you guys just heard my margins right i could only make 30 per sale so i lost money this was the most eye-opening month ever because i saw 70 bands on my phone i thought i was like up i thought i was getting rich and i didn't have a bookkeeper at this time and i was just going off the shops by deposits but after all the bills were paid in october we didn't make any profit and i was like so upset about that because in the middle of october i put in my papers i dropped out of school and i was on my own now but the pressure really set in in october because i thought i had made it but clearly i didn't so this is when things really got big i was stressed out in october i just left school i needed to turn this into something much bigger than what it already was so i took everything i had learned all the little you know twelve thousand fifteen thousand dollars i had accumulated and i started testing hard i started testing a ton of products every single week i was probably testing like five ten products a week and in the next month i found an absolute banger take that as a lesson that you get better over time and don't be discouraged if it's not working right away so the product that i end up finding in november was this portable lunchbox i'll throw it up on the screen right here and wow this product was going crazy so if we go up to november and we look at the entire month i mean this was the month where i was like okay this is what i'm gonna do for the next five to ten years i love this business this is going crazy i made 168 000 in sales in one month my profits for this month i mean we spent around 63k so we had 100k left over after that we paid for our orders i think i made like 30k to 40k profit in one month i had next to no living expenses at this time i was driving a beat up toyota corolla so i didn't worry about spending any money i just had a bunch of cash in my bank account more cash than most 18 year olds should ever have to be honest with you and i was super hyped so just like a real simple breakdown of how i scaled this product i just launched a conversions campaign so if we go like the first week of november you can see that i tested the product with a couple different ad sets i saw they were selling well so i just started launching more ad sets every single day i started to find more ad sets that are working and i duplicated the ones that were really performing well after that i just kept duplicating and going to higher budgets this isn't the same exact strategy i use now i'm gonna do an updated facebook ads tutorial for you guys soon but in 2018 2017 this was what worked the best so i just kept duplicating thousand dollar budget 300 budget had a bunch of campaigns running and yeah at the end of the month it was a great month it's funny about this one this product is just a simple photo ad no videos and it absolutely crushed and going into december with everything that i had done in november i just scaled up for the first two weeks and then i scaled back for christmas and that pretty much wraps up the year of 2017 for this business to be honest with you i was on top of the world i was this 18 year old kid that was coming up from literally nothing and i had really made a bunch of money in one year and it gave me the confidence that i was lacking in my life i always knew i wanted to be an entrepreneur but this really showed me that i was and that i really could build something great and what happened next is not the most fun part but i think that is going to be the most valuable part of this video because it would have saved me a lot of headache and i would have made a lot more money back then so make sure you listen very closely to what i'm about to tell you so that year i had made a couple hundred thousand dollars and honestly i wasn't prepared for it at all i was still fulfilling with aliexpress and that backfired really badly i didn't have a team of bookkeepers i was only using order metrics and just looking at this dashboard numbers there i didn't have accurate bookkeeping at all and quite frankly my supplier was doing a terrible job the best thing that we had going for us in that business was my marketing skill set the products that we were selling and our customer support team if we didn't have my customer support agent who i still work with this day if you're watching this video shout out to you we would have been totally screwed basically because i didn't do my due diligence on this supplier properly we were getting a ton of fake tracking numbers for the lunch box and these products were not shipping out in a timely manner at all some of them weren't even shipping so orders were taking weeks to show up and our customers were really upset we were dishing out a bunch of refunds you know we were helping these people out it's not like i was just scamming them we were refunding them we would send them replacements we would do everything we can to make sure they were happy but regardless 60 of customers got their product but like 30 to 40 percent were just taking forever and some of them didn't even get shipped going into the year of 2018 it was my goal to never let this happen again and do things the right way honestly i should have just fired my supplier at that point but we spoke a lot and she was telling me why this was happening and that it would never happen again stop the cap and how she was gonna fix it so like an idiot i trusted her going into the next year of january if we take a look at january for this store you can see that i fired the ads back up and we almost had another hundred thousand dollars in sales and the crazy part is if you look at the roads and the cost per purchase in january the numbers were even better than they were before like a 3x roads 20 cost per purchase it was going really good in january now i had made another critical mistake in this month of january instead of just focusing on this lunchbox product and becoming the best seller for this product i just started testing a bunch of other products because i was like well you know you don't want to just rely on one you want to have 20 winning products which is no longer my philosophy and if somebody is trying to teach you that strategy i just don't stand by it the only way i would recommend that is if they're all in the same niche or they're all very related otherwise i wouldn't do that at all i was testing everything under the sun so that i could have multiple winning products now thankfully i found two more winning products i found the sandblaster which i've talked about in a video before and i found this metallic marker set so now on this store i had three winning products but my business still wasn't optimized and my supplier really wasn't doing the things that she promised so it was time to let her go and figure out a new solution for that so after i fired her i found my first agent basically it's somebody that has a bunch of connections in china to get you faster shipping cheaper manufacturing and the best quality of your product going into february i was armed with this new level of confidence because i had this new agent and once again we had another 100k month but unfortunately your boy messed up again this was an agent that did not come recommended to me from somebody this is somebody that reached out to me cold because at the time i was making youtube videos so i was getting hit up from these people and i got on a call with this guy and he was selling me the dream i thought that this guy had the best service since sliced bread his service sounded like exactly what i needed and i was ready to work with him for the long haul turns out i was his first customer he actually had no idea what he was doing and he was like using me as the guinea pig for his new service as a result of that he was not prepared to handle the level of scale that my business was doing and the same thing happened to me again so at this point end of february i just decided to slow down scaling i was like look i got enough cash to live for like at least like two years with my current expenses i'm just not gonna do this scaling thing right now i need to make sure that everybody's good on the customer side and that we don't deal with this issue moving forward so that's pretty much what march and april was it was dealing with a ton of negative feedback from our customers i think i dished out like 20k in refunds very painful and the sad part is that we were still getting a ton of orders just organically i mean it's not sad but it's just unfortunate because you know this brand was doing really well can't even really call it a brand it's a general store but i just didn't build the systems properly to maintain it and you know it's a couple reasons why that is i was inexperienced i was young i had bad habits in my personal life i think that allowed me to not focus entirely on this the way i should but thankfully i learned from those mistakes and that brings me to the phase of what happened after so after all that happened i decided to take some time to just make sure all of our customers were good and after all that was finished i actually took a break from e-commerce for a couple months i wanted to use that time to reflect on everything that i had learned from that situation and make sure that the next time i did it those same problems wouldn't happen and a few months after that i started my first branded drop shipping store and that was where things started to change and go really in the right direction and now using that same branded drop shipping approach that i've been doing now for over two years i'm generating over a hundred thousand dollars a month consistently my customers are happy i love the products that i'm selling and i really have long term potential with these brands that i am building so the moral of the story is that you're gonna have to make some really painful mistakes in your journey at first the painful mistakes were me just losing money trying to test products and find winners and then at the end of that first year the painful mistakes were just not taking care of my customers as best as possible but if i hadn't made those mistakes i wouldn't have learned those lessons and been able to fix them moving forward but thankfully for you you watch this video where i broke them down so please for the love of god do not make the same mistakes that i did save yourself the headache save yourself thousands of dollars and try your best to do things right from the start mistakes are inevitable you're gonna have your own screw-ups but just don't make the same mistakes that i made in my journey and i promise you you will thank yourself for it so i hope that you guys enjoyed this video i hope you appreciate this quality of content if you did give me a thumbs up and go ahead in the comments let me know what is the biggest struggle you're having in your ecommerce journey or if you're somebody who has seen success tell me the biggest lesson that you've learned in your journey because i'm still a student of the game and i want to learn from you guys so let me know in the comments down below hope you have a great weekend talk to you soon peace you

Channel: Jordan Welch

Views: 799,392

Keywords: shopify, shopify dropshipping, winning products shopify, shopify winning products, shopify store, winning products, shopify tutorial, shopify case study, jordan welch, beast of ecom, shopify products, ecommerce, nate schmidt, ecom, shopify training, shopify general store, facebook ads scaling, shopify 2021, shopify for beginners, facebook ads, make money online, aliexpress, shopify tutorial for beginners, arie scherson, dropshipping 2021, shopify 2020, verum ecom

Id: bJQd3DOVK7I

Length: 19min 40sec (1180 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021