“I’m Extremely Motivated”, Marco’s Inspiring Dropshipping Experience

Choosing between different options of a low-investment business startup, new entrepreneurs typically end up launching ecommerce ventures of different kinds. Marco, our today’s guest, is following the same path. Thrilled with the opportunity to run an online store without inventory, he tried up the dropshipping business model. Let’s see how it’s working out for him!

Disclaimer: all the success stories published in AliDropship blog are the results of interviews conducted in the written form. Even though the editors may make some minor changes to the grammar, spelling, and/or punctuation, the respondents’ writing styles, views, opinions, stores screenshots and personal photos are left unchanged.

Hi, please introduce yourself!

Hi, I’m Marco Silva from Portugal, currently living in the UK. I have worked in a university in Portugal for 11 years, and then moved to Venezuela in 2011. There, I have worked as a Math and English private tutor, and eventually relocated to the UK in 2015.

In England, I have been working as a postman, and in April, 2020, I launched a part-time dropshipping business.

Why did you decide to get into dropshipping?

I was looking up different options of starting an online business. The dropshipping model seemed attractive to me for two main reasons. First, it does not require a big investment of money to start. Secondly, I really liked the idea of selling a product before I had even bought it.

Researching the providers of low-investment business startup options, I found AliDropship’s YouTube channel and got interested in their concept. I contacted the support team and asked for more information about the options. When I realized that I could start a business for $300, I decided to go ahead with it.

How did your dropshipping business journey begin?

I have started dropshipping with AliExpress by buying a Premium Store from AliDropship. I’ve chosen the Buy It Carl store to be copied for me.

Three days after I had the store running, my first sale happened. Earlier, together with my wife, we have posted some of our products on our store’s Facebook page. After that, we began inviting our friends from our personal Facebook pages to like our Facebook Business page. My wife’s workmate was one of the many who accepted the invitation. She liked the product shown in one of these posts, a selfie ring light, and bought it! I felt extremely motivated about the future of the business.

How is your business performing now?

I have made US $1,304.98 with this only store, and I believe this will increase in the future.

What is your product strategy?

My niche is quite wide as the store originally had a variety of products. Still, I keep adding more: I try to see what is new that can be interesting for my customers. And obviously, when it comes to seasonal products, I always import them to have them available for buyers.

When adding new products, I follow AliDropship’s guidance to see the items’ potential. I always check the number of sales the product has had, the shipping cost, customer reviews, and the sellers’ rating.

And also, I’m using several more product-related solutions that are heavily automated and save me a lot of time. So far, I have been using the Import List Products and also have tried the AliDropship Premium Products. I liked the Premium Products more, however, as they seem to be more complete. Their descriptions have more content, which helps you get a better SEO ranking (I check and improve it with Yoast SEO).

How do you promote your store?

Mainly, I run Facebook ads and advertise the winning products I was offered by AliDropship when I bought the Premium store.

Interestingly, there is a different customer segment for every product I am advertising. I had purchases from male teenagers for a certain product, as I had from 35-50 year old women for another kind of product. As my store has a wide variety of products, ads targeting gets really crucial.

What can you say about managing your online business on a daily basis and planning your further strategy?

It’s a part-time project, as I already mentioned, so I spend about 3 hours a day on the business. The most time-consuming task for me is creating unique product descriptions, and I view the creation of attractive content for product pages as my most difficult challenge. To deal with it, I search for similar products in other stores, and use them as an inspiration.

I am keen to register my business officially: it seems to be easy, even though I don’t know all the legal requirements yet. My next goal is to increase my sales and launch another store as I would like to make a living from this business. I am supported by my friends and relatives who like the products, the prices, and the look of the website in general.

Overall, even though my life hasn’t changed a lot yet, I am sure this enterprise is worth trying. It is a low-investment business and once you find the path, you become successful!

Turns out, even a low-investment business can yield quite promising results! With the right set of tools at hand and a careful approach to crafting a product strategy, Marco is simply bound to succeed – and so can you! Choosing your own Premium Store from the multiple versions available (just like Marco did!), you can skip the business setup stage and only work on driving visitors to your store. How would you like that?