 Hey, what's going on guys, welcome to a new video. So I do apologize then for the past couple of weeks. If you're subscribed to my channel, you know I haven't been uploading for the past couple of weeks. It's just been a crazy period really. Obviously with coronavirus kicking off at the same time as Chinese New Year holiday, the past couple of weeks for me have been pretty much just a problem solving time or period. But anyway, there's kind of some firm plans-ish in place in terms of order fulfillment. So fingers crossed I can get back to producing some regular content for you guys. So today's video topic then, I want to take you through the seven biggest mistakes I made with my very first dropship in store. So just in case you're new to the channel then, just to give you some quick background information, I started dropshiping in July 2016, so almost four years ago now. The very first store I ever created was called Shop Omnia. Omnia is Latin for everything, so essentially it meant shop everything, hence it was indeed a general store. And things went pretty well in the beginning. I won't go into too much information because I have documented it in past videos, so do make sure you go back and check it out. But I made some fundamental mistakes or kind of I had short term vision, which led me to making some pretty big mistakes and eventually the store kind of fizzled out and it failed. Now if you want to go and check that store out, it is indeed still live. It's not active so you can't buy anything but you can head across, see what kind of products I sold, see the design and layout of the store, et cetera. I'll put the link in fact in the video description below so you can find it nice and easy. And before we jump into mistake number one then, I just want to take this opportunity to say thanks very much for tuning in. Hope you enjoyed this video. If you do, please make sure you let me know by hitting the like button. And of course, if you enjoyed my content, please do make sure you subscribe as well. So with that being said, let's get straight into mistake number one. So the very first mistake then I made with my store and probably one of the biggest ones as well is the fact that I focused on seasonal products and I only focused on one season at a time. And for whatever reason, I was so narrow minded that I expected that product to sell throughout the whole year when in reality seasonal products are called seasonal products for a reason and eventually sales started to fizzle out to the point where I started to lose money. Now, I don't want to put people off seasonal products by saying you should stay away from them because the opposite is true, especially for a beginner, they're a great kind of entry into dropshipping because they're the easiest products to sell. But one thing to keep in mind then if you do go down that route is just make sure you have products for each and every season. So for example, then the products that I made this mistake with was the LED dog collar. And obviously kind of around this time in fact, kind of February, March time, the nights start getting lighter and the demand or the need for a product like an LED dog collar starts to fall off and therefore sales will start to fall off and therefore you need products to then pick up the slack and start selling correctly this time of year. So ultimately then to avoid this mistake just make sure that you follow the data using Google Trends and when it starts to kind of peak and it starts heading downwards in terms of the popularity that is the point in which you need to start testing other products and make sure you have products that are gonna pick up the slack when sales start to fall off. With that being said then moving into point number two is focusing on front end sales only and 95% of the people I talk to on Instagram or YouTube or on one-to-one calls whatever it is make this same mistake. So when I first started running Facebook had then my ultimate goal was to spend say whatever my daily budget was that day and then make twice that back. So if I was spending 500 pounds a day I wanted at least a thousand pound in sales in return from those initial ads that I was running and what I didn't focus on what I didn't pay any attention to was getting my existing customers to then come back onto my store and buy even more products because essentially you only pay a cost per acquisition once. So every time a customer then comes back onto your store and spends money with you then essentially you're getting that customer for free. There's no CPA involved in that customer which you've already paid it if that makes sense. So basically what I'm trying to say is that it's the most profitable way to make profit if that makes sense. So in terms of how you can monitor this or how you can increase this is to keep an eye on your customer retention percentage. Within your Shopify dashboard you will be able to find this and in the beginning then I was running at less than 1% and most pretty profitable stores certainly ones that kind of have established a customer base will run from anywhere from about 2.5% to 5%. So the closer or the higher you can get that number then the better. Another reason why your customer retention score is so important is Facebook ad inconsistencies with all experienced them. Some days you can get like a two plus ROS sometimes it'll be like 1.2. So by having a high customer retention score then ultimately if you have a bad day on Facebook then by bringing existing customers back onto your store will help increase your profitability. Just trust me in terms of like the number one thing you can do to sustain your business and make it profitable in the long term is by having a high customer retention score. That being said moving on to point number three which is I spent too much money on stupid things and justified it just because I had a business and I made this mistake countless times as well. It took me a while to actually realize what I was doing and just how stupid an immature I was being. So before I got into dropship and then I actually wanted to start a drone business and I spent money on like a 1200 pound drone even though I could have got something for like half the price I wanted the best of the best to start my business and I guess the kind of attitude I had was like I'm starting a business I need to spend as much money as possible I need the best equipment I need the latest iPhone and it was the same when I started dropshipping I had the attitude of I'm gonna be spending a lot of time on my computer so I bought a new computer I'm gonna be spending a lot of time on social media so I need the latest iPhone and that just isn't true. When you start a business you should start it with X amount that should be your budget you should work to that and if you have something that does the job adequately then keep using it you don't need the latest iPhone the latest computer or whatever it is because the last thing you wanna do then is kind of dig a hole before you get going if that makes sense you don't wanna be say two grand in the hole before you even start running Facebook ads with any new business the hardest thing is being profitable from the beginning so rather than spend two grand on new equipment new gadgets or tech or whatever it is then you better off investing that into Facebook ads or into your own education so you can be profitable from day one. Moving on to point number four then is that I didn't sample products or suppliers. Now this is absolute key unless you have a really established supplier and you've been talking to them on a daily basis and you can properly trust them so you have pre-existing business with them but one of the things I used to do then if I was moving existing business to a new supplier so for example if a supplier failed me is this new supplier I would get them on a Skype call and I would want them to show me their warehouse their factory, their offices just so I can make sure that they were legit and any legit supplier will be more than happy to do this for you or they can WhatsApp you or we chat you images of the products so just make sure you vet your suppliers and the products adequately before you start shoveling a load of business their way. Now this one is a really important point so please do make sure you follow this because it can end up costing you a lot of money even worse it can end up costing you or your business its reputation and reputation is a super important thing to give you an idea then of how costly it can be from a past experience of mine I was working with this supplier and everything was going really well for about two weeks and then all of a sudden rather than sending my orders through E-Packet they started using China Post registered email which can sometimes take up to three months and it was about two or three days after they started doing it that I realized so I'm talking about three to 400 orders and I'm guessing they did it to try and make a bit of extra profit out of me per order but at the end of their day it cost me a lot of money in terms of refunds a lot of orders had to be refunded or re-sent and I had to find another supplier and move of that business away from them Moving on to point number five again a really important mistake you mustn't make because this one will affect your reputation as a business is don't be lazy when it comes to replying to customers especially in the beginning it can be quite daunting when you get customers emailing you or contacting you however complaining that they're not receiving their order when people are complaining and they're in that state of mind the worst thing you can do is keep them waiting so the best thing to do is just kind of face the problem head on get in contact with them right away and put their mind at ease because trust me it can make a huge difference in terms of the amount of refunds that you have to process if you get in touch with customers right away and explain the situation apologize, offer them something in return essentially give them good customer service then you'll find that they're eight, nine times out of 10 most customers are completely fine with it and completely fine to wait as well this is what most people don't realize this is also why drop shipping can get a bad reputation is because you'll get so many people out there that don't respond to their customers and they are essentially scamming their customers out of money and it's just a bad way to go about doing things I'm a big believer in fact of what goes around comes around so if you provide good customer service and you look after your customers essentially then they'll look after you in return moving on to point number six is I didn't track my profit and loss for every reason I was just keeping absolutely everything in my head so what I was doing is I would go into my Facebook ad account I would look at what my ROAS is and kind of calculate it could be like right I spent 500 pound on ads I've got 1200 pound in sales and my product cost was say 400 quid therefore I made about 300 pound profit in the day whereas when you start to do that you kind of lose track of the long term ultimately long term what the most important thing is so make sure you keep track of your profit and loss because it can make all the difference trust me so to give an example again is when my first business had to go back registered I wasn't making enough profit to sustain the business once that 20% was taken out and because I weren't tracking my profit and loss I didn't know that my business wasn't very profitable at the end of the day profit is absolutely everything what I'm trying to say so just make sure you track everything and whatever you can do just try and increase that number so average order values for example make sure you offer customers up sales and cross sales be on top of your email marketing just anywhere you can to bring people back onto your store for free or to spend more money with you it's gonna increase your profit and it's gonna increase the sustainability and longevity of your business in terms of how you keep track then there's a few apps you can get that will integrate into your store me personally I just love spreadsheets because I'm quite nerdy when it comes to numbers and things like that and it also allows me to produce forecasts and kind of see I can basically just adapt it to what I want to see and how I want to see it so I prefer to do it myself just using spreadsheets point number seven the final reason I'm gonna go over in this video is that I didn't give people a reason to follow me on social media so I wasn't posting regular content across all my different platforms I Instagram and Facebook mainly so essentially what you wanna do is people will check you out they will go into your social media pages see what you're all about see what kind of content you're posting and just kind of gather a feel for who you are whether you're legit so if they go on your Facebook page or your Instagram page and you haven't posted for three months, six months and the very last post was someone so change their profile picture then it doesn't give off a very good impression so the best thing you can do is just make sure you post regular content now in terms of what regular is considered just as much as possible if you can do one post a day great if you can do one post say every three days great just make sure if you can do it at least once a week then that's better than nothing at all in terms of the actual content itself just make sure you post something actually useful that people will find useful that gives people a reason even if they don't buy from you it gives them a reason to follow you which means they'll be seeing your content every time you post and eventually they'll build up that reputation of your store they'll want to support you and if one day you put the right product in front of them then they're gonna buy that product because they become a fan of yours essentially and the reason being then is because if you look at the fundamentals if you read any book about sales or psychology then people buy from people that they like so for example then if you went into a showroom to buy a new car and the salesman was a complete moron and they offended you like the chances are you're not gonna buy a car from him whereas if somebody comes out and they're friendly they get to know you they ask you questions about your life and they make you like them essentially then you're much more likely to buy a car from them and it's the same with Facebook ads when you post your initial ad that might not be enough always to get somebody to like you so by getting them to actually like your page over time they'll build up that kind of relationship with your page as stupid as it sounds they will start to like you and the content you're posting and trust me that will make them more likely to buy products from you and with that being said then guys I'm gonna wrap the video up there so that is all seven mistakes the biggest mistakes I made on my first dropship in store comment down below let me know which mistakes are you currently making if at all any if you enjoyed the video please do make sure you let me know by hitting that like button any questions or comments whatsoever I do respond to absolutely everybody so please do make sure you comment them below I will get back to you and finally for regular content then I'm gonna be aiming for four videos every single week please do make sure you subscribe to my YouTube channel as well with that being said thanks again for watching I hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next one