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What to Realistically Expect From Your Drop Shipping Business

If you’ve read this blog before, you may have read some of the content that I’ve already written on dropshipping thus far. While e-commerce and dropshipping are very profitable in general, they are not as simple as most people market them to be.

I wanted to share my experiences with dropshipping so far to give you a more realistic overview of the journey, instead of the flashy end-result that you often see.

We launched our first store in Sept 2016. Our first sale happened in the first week. But it wasn’t until Feb 2017 that we were profitable. So it took us 5 months, 68 unique products in testing, and $10,000 in ad-spend before we figured out how this was going to work.

We targeted primarily english-native markets hence the competition was higher. It was also our first attempt with sales of any kind so we were inexperienced. But collectively we had over 10+ years of experience of running various internet businesses mostly related to content. So we weren’t completely inexperienced either.

From Feb 2017 till May 2017, we had achieved the flashy status that you often hear about. The margins were 40% initially but after scaling, came down to be about 23%.

Since then we’ve launched many stores targeting many different industries but drop shipping as a whole has gotten way more tougher. This is due to the obvious: more competition, higher ad costs, and lesser margins.

But it’s also because that in addition to ads getting more expensive, Facebook ads machine learning has gotten more advanced too. What it means is many marketers are now able to achieve results with little to no targeting options. Many times strategies have gotten as simple as running a broad ad with no targeting.

Since there’s lesser room available to outperform your competition with ad strategies, the competition now lies in creatives and product hunting. If you’re able to create better video ads than your competition, you stand a much higher chance of winning.

Over all, in the next few years, it’s going to be best product/creative takes all kind of game. Facebook ads are going to dumb down to just budgets and optimization goals.

What I’ve written above is related to my e-commerce experience in international and primarily english-speaking markets. Others may have had better or worse performances. In addition, e-commerce in developing and under-developed countries including Pakistan, has much lower competition and related ad-costs.

In summary, Pakistan is a much more potent market for early-stage entrepreneurs for e-commerce. We choose to work in global markets for a bigger scale although it comes with much larger set of challenges.

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