Dropshipping From A Cabin In The Woods (24HR Challenge)

What's going on guys? Today I'm going to build a Shopify store, create social media ads to promote the store, and then sit back in the comfort of this beautiful cabin in the woods and collect millions of dollars. I'm even going to show you guys a hidden secret to creating high-performing Instagram or Facebook story ads that get an insane amount of swipe-ups. With all that said, if this video gets 100 likes I'll also be releasing a free guide that outlines the exact steps that I used to build my seven-figure e-commerce business through social media. So drop a thumbs up and subscribe if you like money! Now you're probably wondering, dude, why are you making this video in your cabin? Shouldn't you be outside enjoying nature? All I can say is that I had a dream the other night about making a video just like this. So today I decided to drive up to my cabin and create it. It's a nice little day trip. The good news is that I don't think I've seen any e-com vids on YouTube that have been filmed in a setting like this. So at least it'll be kind of unique. But that's enough filler content to increase the length of my video and hopefully get more watch time. Let's get into building this store. Alright, so since I'm in the middle of nowhere, I had to kind of prepare for this video a little bit. So I already have a product picked out that I can ship directly from AliExpress to our customers. Yeah, that's right, we're dropshipping. I also ordered one unit of this product from Amazon so that we could create some beautiful content in this beautiful setting for our website. Now let me show you the product that we're working with today. Oh man, it's stuck. There it is. It's this box. But this isn't just any box. When you open it, you can see it's got this message engraved on the inside panel here. This one was made as a gift for a mom, but they can be customized to be for a grandma, niece, grandpa, dad, sister, or anyone that's special to you. The best part about this box though is it's a music box. And when you turn this lever here in a circle, it plays You Are My Sunshine. It's just so beautiful. I ended up picking this product because I own several large Facebook pages in the inspirational and faith niche. And the main demographic for these pages is older women. When I saw these music boxes on AliExpress, I just thought immediately that these would really resonate well with these audiences. So I decided to roll with them. The price point for these music boxes on AliExpress is about $4 to $5 per piece with free shipping. And today with my new drop shipping store, I'm going to sell them for $19.99. So we should have a pretty decent profit margin. I also really like the fact that there's so many different options to choose from. That way, there's a little bit of something for everyone and our customers will be able to find that perfect personalized gift. So we already have our million dollar winning product. And that means the first thing we need to do is build our store. And I'm only going to be spending about an hour doing this because I need to get this video filmed and head home. So it's definitely going to be a pretty bare bones Shopify store, but I really want to show you guys how even a simple store can generate sales if you promote your products to the right audience or niche. So let's make this Shopify store. Cue the cabin montage. All right. So you can probably tell that I'm back home in my office. I ended up having to head home from the cabin because the weather was just getting a little too sketchy and I didn't want to be stuck in a storm. I definitely could have built our website and launched our ads within probably an hour after I filmed the last part of this video. So I think I'm still going to put 24 hour challenge in the title of this video, even though technically it's the next day. Please don't get mad at me guys. YouTube is just so hard to grow on. And unfortunately, no one is going to click a video that's titled something like I tried dropshipping. So I got to add a little pizzazz, you know, but anyways, I did finish our Shopify store before I drove home. So let me show you guys how it turned out. All right. So when the homepage loads, you can see our logo in the top left corner here. I went with the name song box just because I think it describes what the product is really well. And I think in this cool cursive font, it just looks kind of cool. As we scroll down, we've got this banner and I actually took this picture at the cabin against some nice greenery and kind of, it kind of looks like a forest, I guess. And then over that banner, it says personalized music boxes for the ones you love with the shop now button. Scrolling down, you've got a white background image here that just kind of shows that the box plays music. And then it says the perfect gift for someone you love with a little bit more text here and another shop now button. Scrolling down even more, there's another white background picture with somebody turning the hand crank on the side of the box. And underneath that image, it says just turn the handle to play. You are my sunshine, which is the song that plays when you turn the handle of these music boxes. And again, there's another shop now button. I can't stress this enough that you need to put these shop now buttons everywhere on your homepage. Underneath that, it says shop now again, and this is a direct link into the product itself. And underneath that, there's a few testimonials here that are just reviews from AliExpress for these music boxes. Last but not least, there's just a few images of these music boxes in kind of cool lifestyle settings. And that's pretty much it for the homepage. I didn't really spend a lot of time on it because I'm actually going to be directing my customers directly to the product page. So let's get into that now. All right, so here we are on the product page. As you can see, our product images are right on top here. Scrolling down, you can see it says the original song box. And then underneath that, it says our price, which is $19.99. Underneath that, there's a dropdown menu where the customer can pick which box they want to buy. You can see that there's mom to daughter, dad to daughter, grandpa to granddaughter, grandpa to grandson, basically every combination possible. Underneath that, we've got our add to cart and buy now buttons. Scrolling even further, I actually did include a video at the top of this product description, which is pretty cool. Scrolling down even further, we're into the product description. And the first thing in the description is a video that I made of the product up at the cabin. I basically just prop my phone up on a piece of wood and then use the lake as a backdrop and then just film myself opening the box and then playing the song that it plays. It turned out pretty nice. And I've found that videos really do help with converting customers. Underneath the video, we've got our written product description, which is a paragraph and just a few bullet points, pretty basic stuff. And then underneath that, it sort of mimics the homepage a little bit. So we've got an image and then it says the perfect gift for someone you love. And then underneath that, we've got that image again of somebody turning the hand crank. And then it says, just turn the handle to play. You are my sunshine with even a little bit more text. And then finally, at the bottom of this page, we've got our customer reviews, which were imported again, directly from AliExpress. So that's our store. Like I said, it is pretty bare bones, but I think it'll be just enough to get us some sales. Now, all we have left to do is make our ads to promote this new store. And I'm going to be posting these ads on my pages story. So they're going to need to be vertical full screen videos. And because the website uses a lot of visuals from the scenery up at the cabin, I'm actually going to try and match that aesthetic with my ads and use some of the clips that I filmed up there. That way, the ads match the vibe of the website and everything just feels on brand. So I'm going to go edit those up now for about 10 minutes, and I'll see you soon. All right, guys, well, that didn't take too long. Let me show you what we ended up with. All right, so for ad number one, I made this sort of unboxing type of video out on the dock. And I wrote, I just bought this beautiful gift for my mom at the top and then swipe up to get yours at the bottom. And this ad uses a format that I found to be really successful in the past, where you basically crop the video to a square or rectangle and then add text above and below in the white spaces. It sort of gives it that meme look that people are just kind of used to on social media. So it just fits in better and people don't think it's an ad necessarily. For ad number two, I ended up going pretty basic. I just filmed a video of me using the music box with the lake as a beautiful backdrop. And I think that it turned out pretty eye catching. I also added text over the top that says Also, remember at the beginning of this video, I told you I had a secret for story ads? Well, let me share that with you right now. So I've tested a lot of different story ad formats, but I've found that it works best if you post two to three in a row. A lot of times when someone sees an ad on their stories, they skip it right away once they realize it's an ad. But if they hit another one right away, you force them to rethink their decision and a lot of them as a Trust me, it works. So I'm actually going to be posting both of these video ads that I showed you guys earlier on my Facebook page of stories right in a row. And then after the two videos, I'm actually going to throw up this still image. This way people can see that there are a lot more options than just the box that I made these videos with. I know that three story ads in a row seems like a lot of advertising, but people's attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. And I've tested this a lot and it definitely works. Also Instagram and Facebook actually already automatically do this through story ads that you buy through their platform. So if Zuck is doing it, it must be working. But now I'm going to post these ads on my pages and I'll see you guys in about 24 hours or so with our results. Drop a thumbs up and wish us some luck. All right, guys, well, it's been about 24 hours now since we posted our ads, so it's time we get into the results. Did we make millions? Probably. But in all seriousness, before we get into these results, I do want to mention something really quick. I'm not really a huge fan of dropshipping as a business in 2021. I just think it's so saturated and there's so many people trying to do it. So here's what I'd recommend instead. And it's pretty simple, but basically it goes like this. Focus on building an audience first and then build a business around that audience. If you build your audience first, it gives you the option to try several different products or several different businesses and then you can pick the one that resonates best with people in your audience. But I'm not going to waste any more time. I just want to reiterate what I did in this video. Yes, technically it is still dropshipping, but I'm not buying Facebook or Instagram ads or anything like that. I already had an established, built audience and that's where I advertised my product. So our advertising is essentially free, which is huge. OK, let's check out our results. So first off, I want to take a look at one of the ads itself and see how many impressions it got, how many clicks it got, all that kind of stuff. So here's one from one of the larger pages I posted on. As you can see, the ad was seen by 6.7 thousand unique accounts and it had 238 swipe ups. So that's not bad. Scrolling over from that, the next story ad on the same page, because remember, we posted three in a row, was seen by 4.7 thousand unique accounts and had an additional 191 swipe ups. And then finally, on this page of story, we had that still image with all the different music box options. And that part of the ad saw 3.6 thousand unique accounts and had 86 swipe ups. So as you can see, it's super important to post three ads in a row or two ads in a row on a story. If we only posted the one ad, we only would have had 238 swipe ups instead of a total of over 500, which is what we ended up with on this page. I also posted these ads on a couple smaller pages that I own, too, that are super similar. So we did end up getting some more clicks from those pages as well. But now let's get into the money. All right, guys, let's refresh Shopify here and then get into our results. So as you can see, our total sales were $179.91 in the past 24 hours. As you can see, most of our sales came in on the 16th and then a couple came in on the 17th. Moving over here, you can see we had a total of over a thousand sessions. Our returning customer rate was 12.5 percent. That's sort of irrelevant because the store has only been up for like 24 hours. Scrolling down even further, you can see our total conversion rate was .79 percent. Not the worst I've seen, but pretty bad. We had 34 add to carts, 28 reach checkout, and then eight sessions converted. The average order value was $22.49. So that means it's likely that one or two people ordered two of these. Again, total orders was eight. Total units sold was nine. Our main source for traffic, of course, was social because we posted these ads on Facebook. The United States was our top location, which is great. And then as you can see, the high majority of the sessions were on mobile. So those are our results. Not too shabby, but would I continue with this product? Probably not. I've already seen this product a lot on social media. I just thought that it would work well with my audiences. So that's why I gave it a try with this video. Based on the conversion rate alone, I'm not seeing it. Yes, of course, we could make a ton of updates to this website and probably get that over 1% for sure. But I just think that there are better, less saturated products than this. Real quick, because I know I left this out in a couple videos before, I'm going to pop up a screenshot of our profit loss statement for the store. That way you guys can see how much money I made doing that. The best part is, again, that there were no advertising fees. But that's going to be it for this video. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Please be sure to drop a thumbs up and subscribe. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time. Peace.