I Tried Dropshipping From Scratch (24HR CHALLENGE)

Dropshipping. We've all heard about it and as someone that's been in the ecom space for almost 10 years now, I've always been a skeptic. Wait a minute, something ain't right. But today we're going to give it a try. I'm going to be doing a 24-hour challenge where I find a product, build a store from scratch, and then market it to hopefully some potential customers. And my end goal with this is to at least make a couple sales within this 24-hour period. We'll see how it goes. But before we get into the video, let me introduce myself. My name is Steve Salazar. I'm an online entrepreneur that's into all things social media, e-com, business, all that fun stuff. And I also coincidentally make songs about dropshipping. Dropshipping is for you, an inventory product. You simply make a store, then advertise for it. Once an order comes, you buy it from your supplier, then they ship it to your awesome customer. That's dropshipping. Stop it. Get some help. But if you're into what I call internet entrepreneurship, please be sure to subscribe to my channel below. I'm new to the old YouTube and I'd really appreciate your support. But let's get back to dropshipping, the point of this video. To me, it just has always seemed too good to be true. Obviously, there are some great benefits with dropshipping. You don't have to hold your own product. You don't have to ship your own product. But to me, it just seems like it's a super saturated industry and finding winning products is a lot harder than you'd think. Not good. I do think that drop branding has the best chance of success for us today. This is basically where you take one product, build a brand around it, instead of building just a general store with a bunch of random products in it. Online customers these days are savvier than ever, and one little design flaw can really throw them off and cause them to not trust your store. That's why I think a branded approach is our best bet. That way, the store at least looks trustworthy and hopefully we can get some sales. So first things first, we need to find a product. Actually, wait, wait, wait. First things first, if you haven't yet, please be sure to give this video a thumbs up, because we're about to make some insane kitchen dropshipping, baby. So let's get back to finding a product. I'm going to keep it super simple for this video, and I'm just going to use AliExpress to find our product. It's got a super wide range of products to choose from, and I know there's tons of other options out there for dropshipping these days, but we're just going to keep it simple today. So here are the three things that I'm looking for with my dropshipping product. Number one, it's got to have a high perceived value, so something that we can get a good margin on. I'm looking for a product that we can buy for under $10 and sell for $20 to $40. Obviously, the bigger margin we think we can achieve, the better. Number two, we're hopefully looking for a product that can ship from the USA. It's not a complete deal breaker, but it'll lead to shorter shipping times and happier customers. And AliExpress actually lets you filter for USA-based suppliers using this filter here. And number three, we're looking for a product that we can build a brand around, not just some random necklace or weird electronic gadget. We're looking for something that we can actually build a vibe around. But now it's time to get to work. I'll hopefully be back with some different options, and we'll go from there. All right, guys, we're back. And surprisingly, that did not take very long at all. Let's get right into it. Here's our first product. So number one, we've got this mini car vacuum cleaner. It's got a really cool cylinder design. It looks modern and sleek. And I think we could easily build a brand around this product. The price point is a little higher than I was hoping for. It's $323, yes, but if we ship from the United States, it's $12.95 to ship it from the United States. So it comes out to a total of around $16 or so. I do think we could probably try to run $39.99 for this product. So that makes it a decent option. So number two, we've got this portable dog nail grinder. And this is an alternative to the classic nail clipper that you would use on your dog. With the classic nail clippers, you can oftentimes cut the nail too short, and that will result in a long-term injury for the dog. So this is a safer alternative to that. It's a problem-solving product. I think we could build a brand around this. And the price point is great. So $10.59, I think we could sell it for $29.99 easily. So there's about a $20 profit margin built into this product. So product number three is probably the most Instagram-y product of them all. It's these very form-fitting leggings that come in a bunch of different colors. I think this product would stand out on Instagram because it's quite eye-catching. But anyways, they come in a bunch of different colors, which is super cool. You've got yellow. You've got like a coral. You've got pink. You've got black. There's a bunch of different options there. And I think we could easily build a brand around this particular pair of leggings. Our cost is around $10.78 to $12.10. So I'm thinking this product could sell for anywhere from $24.99 to $34.99. Now let's go on to product number four. So for product number four, we've got this mini drone LED flying helicopter thing. It's basically a small little drone. Basically, you can throw it, and it'll come back to you. Or you can throw it to a friend and play catch with it. Super cool product. It lights up too. I think this product could work because it's got a really broad appeal. It charges with a USB cable, as you can see. Lights up at dark. The cost of the product is a little high. That's the one thing I don't like about this product. It costs $12.60 plus $3.47. So right around $16 or so shipped. But I do think it could support a price point of around $29 to, you know, $39. Somewhere in that range. So now it's time to decide which product we're going to move forward with. I've got some thinking to do. I'll be back in one second. All right, guys. So we're back again. And I think we've made our decision. It was a really tough decision. But we've decided on... Drumroll... The mini drone helicopter toy. I just think this product has the most viral potential. And since we're using an Instagram theme page to promote this product, we need to make sure that the algorithm picks up our video ad and shows it to as many people as possible. So now comes the fun part. We've got to build a store for this product. I'm only going to really spend about one to two hours building this store on Shopify. I'm definitely not looking for perfection here. So I'll see you guys in a little bit. Hopefully with a finished store. And we'll go on to the next step. I love dropshipping. Let's let some light in, eh? All right, guys. Back yet again. And here's the finished store. The name we went with is Aerospinner. And I created just a logo. It's a super simple logo. I probably made it in about two minutes. I think it looks all right. So you've got the logo at the top. The original catch-and-throw drone with a little description there. You keep going down. Shop now. Here's the actual product. You can click into it there. We'll get to that in a little bit. Scroll down. You've got a couple pictures here. A little bit more words and stuff. Some more vibe shots. I like to call them lifestyle pictures. And then a couple testimonials at the bottom. Now let's go to the product page. Click into the product page. You've got, you know, obviously the three different colors here. You've got black, red, and blue. And keep scrolling down. Gonna sell it for $27.95. We might put that up to $29.95. I'm not sure yet. And it's got a sale price. So original $39.95. And here you can choose your color. Add to cart. We've got a few trust badges. I put in a little GIF here that shows how the product can be used to play catch with your friends. A little description. Some more bullet points down here. And then I made this, like, how to operate your Aerospinner graphic, which shows, like, the different angles. If you throw it at different angles, it'll do different things. So just a quick explanation of how it works. Scroll down even more. You've got some customer reviews that I imported directly from AliExpress. I just use the Shopify app to do that. It's super easy to do. So just look up on... I forget which app it was called. But just look up on Shopify which app can be used to import AliExpress reviews. And you'll find it. So yeah, that's pretty much the site. I think it turned out pretty well considering I only spent about an hour and a half on it. We'll see how it goes. Obviously, if this was a store that I was going to be running for more than just a day, I would spend much more time on it. This is just for this challenge. And I'm excited to see how it does. I also want to mention that I did buy the aerospinner.com domain name to use. I just thought that using the aerospinner.myshopify URL just makes it super untrustworthy. So you can definitely run your store from a myshopify.com URL. But I highly recommend that you go to GoDaddy or some other domain provider and buy a custom URL. Also, during our last break, I took 30 minutes to create a quick video ad. Here's how that turned out. So to make this video, I just took random clips I found on the internet, went to YouTube, went to Instagram, and a couple other different sites, put the clips together, and then kind of made it into a meme style post. I think that making the post this way will get the most eyes on it in the Instagram feed. But now we have to find a theme page to promote this product on. As I said before, I do think that this product has a broad enough appeal. So I think I'll just hit up some viral videos slash meme accounts and see if we can work out a deal there. I should also quickly mention that I'm looking to buy a 24-hour post from one of these pages. Also, I have our product page link in the bio. That way, when customers see the ad on this page, they can quickly go to the link in bio and find our product. So let's go find ourselves a deal, baby. All right, guys. So it's been about 20 minutes, and I think we got ourselves a little deal. I found this page. It's got about 1.6 million followers. The activity on the page is good. So the videos on the page are getting lots of views. The pictures are getting lots of likes. All that good stuff. Like I said before, we were looking for a 24-hour feed post with the link in the bio, and that's exactly what we got. And as you can see here, the guy said it would be... Let's let that focus. The guy said it would be about $225 for that post. I tried to negotiate. I even said, will you take $220? That's just me being me. But we settled on $225. So I think it's a decent deal for this page. Like I said, the activity is pretty good on it. So I'm thinking we're going to have a decent amount of website visitors from it. So I'm going to pay him on PayPal right now. So I've got the payment almost ready to go. As you can see, $225. I've just got to click a few more buttons. And there we go. The payment has been sent. As you can see, like I said, I'm going to have to blur out some of that because I'm sure this guy doesn't want his information all over the place. So the payment has been sent. And now we have to send him our ad and our copy. I also want to mention, like when people say that dropshipping, you can basically get into it for free. I think that's a little far-fetched because, you know, you have your Shopify subscription, which you used to be able to have a 14-day trial and run a store from it. I think they changed it where you have to at least get the $29 subscription. So there's a $29 subscription that we got, plus a couple apps, plus your initial advertising. So there are some expenses to get started with dropshipping. And I think to assume otherwise just isn't correct. All right, guys, well, I have some good news. The post just went up. And as you can see here, here it is. Click here. There's our ad. Scroll down. There's some copy. Just to click the link in the bio, all that stuff. So the ad is live. And we'll be back in, you know, 24 hours or so and see what kind of results we get. I don't know about you guys, but I'm ready for that millionaire dropshipping money. First of all, I have so much jewelry. So I'll see you guys in a little bit. All right, guys, it's the next day and the results are in. I'm not going to lie, I'm a little surprised at our results. I didn't expect much going into this challenge. So any sales were going to be a win for me. So let's get into it. I don't want to waste much more time. So here we go. So first, I want to look at the actual ad and see what kind of engagement it got. Let's check that out first. Click right into it here. Looks like it got 4,058 likes, 238 comments. So the comments didn't go up much from the first hour that it was up, but still really good engagement overall. I'm happy with that. Now let's get into the fun stuff. Let's see what kind of sales came through from that advertisement. Tell them to bring me my money. Yeah! All right, guys, so we're here in the Shopify dashboard now. As you can see, we did a total of $167.70 in sales. And it looks like we had 463 total store sessions, which is pretty good, actually. That's a good amount of traffic coming to the site from one ad. What I was really impressed with, though, was that we had 18 add to carts and 24 sessions actually reached checkout, but only four converted, which is really weird. So I think if we, you know, took more time on the website and, you know, did some things that increased the trust of the website, we probably could have increased our conversion rate quite a bit. One thing that I didn't like from this advertisement, there was a good amount of United States traffic, but a lot of it was from India. And usually, in my experience, India traffic, it's just not, it doesn't convert as well for whatever reason. So I was a little disappointed by that, but there was still a decent amount from the United States, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, as you can see. Instagram was by far the biggest source of traffic for us here because that's where our advertisement was. It says three visitors came from Facebook, which is interesting, but I'm pretty sure all of them came from Instagram. So these are our results. $167.70 in sales, not bad, but we all know that sales don't really matter. So let's take a look at the bottom line and see how we did. So first things first, let's take a look at our actual expenses for this project. We didn't have many, but there's a few. So first off, we had our GoDaddy domain name, so aerospinner.com. That was $12.17. Then we had our Shopify subscription and apps. And actually, I think the app we used technically is on a free trial, but it would be, it would have a cost after that. So it was $29 for the Shopify subscription and $9.90 for the app that we used. And that app was used to import the AliExpress reviews into our shop. Next up, the big one, we've got advertising. And as you guys know, we spent $225 on that Instagram post. So that's a big one. And last up, we have the actual product costs. So I did find a supplier that would ship these for $13 each. We sold six, so that comes out to a total of $78. After we add all those up, our total is $354.07. As you guys know, our total revenue was $167.70. So our total profit was negative $186.37. And honestly, I thought it would probably be worse. I really didn't think we were gonna get even one sale out of this. So having four sales, not bad. Anyways, guys, my opinion on dropshipping has remained the same. I still think it's easier said than done. I think finding winning products is really, really hard these days and it's pretty saturated. So just be careful out there. In my opinion, you're much more likely to succeed building a brand instead of looking for these one-off winning products. But that concludes our 24-hour dropshipping challenge. I hope you guys enjoyed the video. If you did, please be sure to subscribe to this channel. It would mean a lot. Also, if you made it this far in the video and you haven't given this video a thumbs up, please do so. That really helps me out. But I'll see you guys next time. Peace.