How I started a drop shipping business without following the rules.
Like everybody else(except my grandpa, who’s dead), I’ve decided to start a drop shipping business.
We millennials love the idea of not putting in the work and still making money. So if you really want to know our sense of business, I’ve summarized this for you.
My first attempt. “Dezolat” clothing shop.
Browsing AliExpress for some time, I’ve stumbled upon some really interesting clothes, and I was thinking that those are pretty different from what we usually buy in my country (Romania). At that point, I didn’t know anything about drop shipping.
After sharing a few clothing items with some of my friends and other people who I thought would like those kind of clothes, the feedback was pretty good.
So, I’ve decided to order a bunch of them to see if those items really do look the same as they appear in photos, how much it will take to ship them, and so on… because many people’s feedback on AliExpress was something similar with this:
Receiving the products.
After approximately 30 days of waiting, I received my items.
Pros:
- Quality is good.
- They look as advertised.
- Comfortable.
Cons:
- High price
- Shipping time
- VAT applied if product > $20
Again, back then, I didn’t know about drop shipping (sometimes, ignorance is bliss, business-wise.)
Creating the business model.
Planning
The first thing that crossed my mind was how I should sell this clothes without worrying about an inventory and not stressing about handling the shipping.
Later, I discovered that this was actually called drop shipping.
Okay, so as a rational human being, I was asking myself:
Me: Who on earth will buy something that takes 30+ days to ship?
Also me: No one.
Okay, but:
Me: There are plenty of premium shipping options.
Also me: Yeah, but who pays $20 for a t-shirt and $20 for the shipping?
Also me: No one.
Then, what I have to do is order a bunch of them and start small, just to see if this business model is feasible.
After I made some calculations, the total costs were somewhere around $1500, just for the clothing pieces plus the costs for design+branding+dev+advertisements and others. Luckily, I am a designer with good experience in HTML/CSS/JS and some branding chops. So, the costs got definitely lower. After all, this was a branding/marketing game.
Finding a co-founder.
As a freelancer I did not have enough time and resources to go all-in solo especially financial speaking because I was going through a not so great period of time and knowing that this is just an MVP (minimum viable product) to test the market, I knew I needed to split the expenses in half.
That being said, I reached out to one of my childhood friends and ask if he would join me on this. He was happy to, so he helped me. So he helped me with the financial and curating part.
How much should I sell them for?
Receiving goods from China in Romania would require a VAT customs payment if a product is higher $20. Another tricky part was that the goods are not received in the postal office or at the door, and I had to personally pick them up from the county customs office.
My profit margin was somewhere around 50% per item, and I still had a decent price for each clothing article. That was what I was aiming for.
So, I decided to just do it and see what happens along the way.
Creating the brand.
I knew I had to deal with people buying from brands like Zara, Bershka, Pull&Bear and H&M so to convince them to buy something from me, I had to have a competitive price and a different look and feel.
The idea was to make the shop feel and look as though we are a bunch of people who are trying to sell nice-looking clothes that are different from the fast-fashion brands but still affordable.
The question was:
How can we tell people that we do not have a large variety of clothes without making us look amateur? We started with 12 clothing articles with just one or two sizes available for each.
This was a statement used on the landing page:
We have a limited number of clothes, not because this is good marketing but because we don’t have enough money.
So I’ve tried to make everything as transparent as possible without being too lame.
Creating the shop.
The majority of drop shipping businesses are built with Shopify, so 99% of them all look similar to each other. Some even sell the same products. Imagine two different businesses that sale and look the same.
Being a designer, I had the advantage of creating something different, so I did.
Photography.
I tried to do my own product shots with my iPhone 5s and a friend of mine. Here are some shots:
Yes! I had the same thought, but instead of deleting them, I decided to use them for social media.
So I edited them a bit and added some character.
The main reason I wanted to use “real-life” images was to show potential customers that these clothes exist and they can buy them with no concerns. Extra points for the trust.
I had to use the Aliexpress images in such way that if someone right-clicked “Search Google for Image” they woulnd’t find it on Aliexpress.
Here’s an example of an image I took:
And transformed it into this:
Why did I do this?
- If you flip an image horizontally, it somehow tricks Google into not finding a similar image.
- I added a personal touch, so even if someone already saw it on Aliexpress, they would probably will think it’s something similar, if not, they will probably want to order from me because shipping will take two days and, then they will receive it at their door. They can also return it straight away if they don’t like it.
To give you more context, the brand was called “Dezolat”, which means “Desolate.”
Marketing.
The budget allocated for marketing was astonishing. More precisely, it was 200RON, which means somewhere around $50.
What did I do with that money?
- $15 — boost Facebook Post.
- $35— print some cards and use them as labels to clothing articles.
Here’s how the label looked:
What I did was remove the existing labels (I asked the vendor on AliExpress if they were alright with this, and they were ok.) and attach this to them.
Here’s the boosted Facebook post:
And these are the results:
So, it went pretty well. With some invites and this boosted post, we managed to get 327 likes, and we received ten orders.
Packaging.
This was a bit tricky. I wanted to use something different for packaging – I didn’t want to just be the usual boring packaging that other brands use. I wanted to add some personality.
The problem was that I had very little money for this. So I went to the local flea market and asked them if they had some empty bags. Luckily, I’ve found someone who just about to throw away the bags after they’ve unwrapped some blankets.
I looked at those bags and I thought they were pretty interesting and I asked the lady if she wanted to give me those bags and she did. 🙂
So to reveal the mystery, here’s how the bags looked:
Conclusion.
It was an interesting ride, and it seemed to be pretty decent in terms of sales. I know we could do more, but unfortunately, I didn’t have the money to refill the inventory and continue working on it due to other projects. My partner also didn’t have the money to continue with this but who knows? Maybe we will continue this someday. 🙂
This was my first attempt. The next story will be about my second attempt to start a drop shipping business. This time, I followed “the rules” of drop shipping and it ended pretty badly.
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