The Pros and Cons to shopify… Is it worth it?

Hey everyone! Today I’m stepping inside the e-com realm and giving you the pros and cons of utilizing the platform Shopify and is it worth it for you to start now. If you’re reading this is because, you’re heavliy thinking about joining the platform to create your own online business. You’re wanting to tap into the world of E-commerce and believe it’s a big ass world. Growing by the billions in terms of sales. Without further adue, let’s begin.

 

Pros

Shopify is trusted by over 325,000 entreprenuers (myself included) and is growing by the day. Here are some of the pros that you’ll enjoy when utilizing shopify:

• Cheap to get started ($30/monthly subscription)
• Beginner friendly
• The amount of control you have
• Thousands of apps that’ll help you run your business more effectively
• Staff accounts (when your business gets bigger and you need VAs)
• Small trainings the platform provides

Shopify gives you a chance to utiize the internet and gives you a platform to sell any product and recieve payment from it. Some of the most successful brands on shopify would be Kyliecosmetics, Fashionnova, MVMNT watches, and that’s just a few. These shops bring in millions of dollars a month. Now I know what you’re about to say, “Yeah but they have strong social presence.” Although that’s true, there’s thousands of other shopify brand stores bringing 6-7 figures a month. Besides, everyone starts at zero so don’t let that scare you.

Now these pros are important because, anybody just starting out in the online business world, you want to be able to set up everything without going through unecessary hills and hoops. Its as simple as setting up your store, importing your products and market traffic to your store. You also have massive control over your data information. Everything with who visited your store, people who added to their cart, abandoned carts, sales, and other key information you’ll need to keep track of your business results.

Best part about this, it’s only $29/month to get started. Now depending on the apps you download to your store (some of the apps aren’t free to use or have inside-app purchases) will determine your actual monthly price. Other than that, it’s super cheap to get started. To think all it takes now a days to start a 5-7 figure business, starts with less than $30. Man times have changed truth be told.

 

Cons

Now one thing we know about this world and everything in general, nothing is perfect. So with that being said here are some cons that’ll make you think about using this platform so you can double check to see if you really want to do this. So let’s go ahead and name some of these cons already:

• Low price = High saturation
• Limited theme customization
• You can’t actually use the store until you’ve payed for the monthly plan
• You’ll be spending hundreds/thousands on getting traffic
• Low profit margins

So two of these cons aren’t really a big deal. If you have a creative taste to you, having limited theme customization isn’t a problem. Also since the store is only $29 to get started, applying for the plan isn’t a deal bigger. You can still cancel however before your 14 free trial is up and you WON’T be charged. Now lets get into the other three cons that will probably 97% of people who won’t go for this.

High saturation is definitely a big problem when using this platform (specfically if you’re doing drop-shipping) because, people think all you need to do is pay for the subscription, set up everything & just wait for the customers to start coming in. Also some of these Shopify “gurus” on youtube give a false hope to most of these people wanting to make some extra money. Promising you, you’ll be making 6 figures your first month. Not saying it’s impossible because some have done it, but those people that find success in the first month 99% of them already had the marketing experience or had the resources already or both.

You’ll be also spending a lot of cheese on promoting your products on these social media platforms such as Facebook ads, Instagram ads/influencers, Youtube, Google ads, and many more. Now my best advice for people starting this platform is for one get good at using one social media platform at a time so you’re just not throwing money in the black hole. You’re also going to fail a few times as well so if you’re not okay with losing money in the beginning to learn I highly recommend STRONGLY do NOT do this.

Now with low profit margins, this will only be a issue when you’re scailing your store into higher numbers a day. For example you might have a product that cost about .29 cents to buy but selling it for $15-$20 dollars. You might be profiting big time right now, but when you start scailing your product, your ad cost will go up which will decrease the amount of profit you’ll be making. On top of hiring a few VAs to help you run your business, you’ll be paying them as well. You’ll also be spending money on creating content for your marketing. At the end of all of that you’ll probably be profiting 20-35% maybe 40%  of your actual sales. But I mean when you’re making $100,000+ a month you wouldn’t care about those margins to be honest.

 

So is starting Shopify worth it?

In my opinion, yes. Shopify gives you a very flexible platform to bring your dream business online and gives you a chance to start multiple streams of income and expand your variety when comes to monetizing your ideas. If you can deal with a slow start to a long lasting path then I highly recommend you start and take that chance. However, if you’re not willing to take the cons about this platform Irecommend your try a different business model, because truth be told you won’t last long in the world E-commerce. You could try affilate marketing, social media marketing, amything else, but Shopify wouldn’t be your best bet. Just being honest.

The method to use when you’re scaling your online business through Facebook ads…

So one of the fun parts of building your online business is to get to the part of scaling your business. What does scaling means? Well in short terms it just means to grow. Once you’ve started to get steady sales and you’re making great progress you’ll start investing more money to 5-10x your sales and your business. So today I’m going over how to scale your business utilizing Facebook ads for your business. Whether it be a E-com business/drop-shipping, affiliate marketing, etc… This will be very important to building longevity in your business.

 

Different scaling methods…

So I’m sure most of you that use Facebook ads are most likely taught how to scale vertically when it comes to increasing your sales and for a while that’s how I was taught, but as of recent I’ve learned why that’s not really an effective method of scaling your business. Now vertically scaling is when you increase the budget of your ad in order to get a bigger reach in the one audience you’re using. Now for people who have a big budget upfront and don’t mind loosing money and not gaining much of anything at the end, this can be for you and for some it has worked, but let me explain why it doesn’t work as effectively anymore.

So for example let’s say you’re spending $100 dollars a day and in return lets say you’re making $400-$500 a day from which will leave you $300-$400 profit left over off 1 adset. Now you want to scale because you have a winning adset and you’re making a lot of money, so you increase the budget to $1,000 dollars a day. What would normally happen is that you would either break even or make a little bit under $1,000 dollars in sales and now you’ve tired your audience out. If you just increase the budget in one adset you’ll just end up hitting a wall in your scaling and you’ll go from making money to either breaking even or losing money.

Now there’s another method of scaling called the horizontal method. What is the horizontal scaling method? Well instead of just increasing the budget on your winning adset, you’d just be duplicating the winning adset 10 or more times WITHOUT increasing the budget. So for example, instead of spending $1,000 dollars on one adset and hoping for the best, you would duplicate the adset 10 or more times. So you would be spending $100 each on every adset you duplicate off the winner. Each adset your spending $100 you’re getting back $500 back so that leaves you with $400 profit. $400 times 10 equals $4,000 dollars. So instead of spending $1,000 dollars on one adset and only breaking even or not even making the money back at all, you’d still be spending $1,000 but spread out with 10 duplicate adsets and make back $4,000, which leaves you with a $3,000 profit a day.

Warning, this method although produces faster results and gives your more bang for your buck, this method can become complicating and out of hand very VERY quickly. In fact, Facebook doesn’t even recommend that you use this method as this isn’t Facebook friendly with their algorithm. What makes this complicated is that you’re spreading out instead of going up. So in order to have 10-12 winning adsets, you’d have to create 40-50 adsets just to find the ones that work and don’t. Also this method isn’t really beginner friendly just because you’re losing money in the beginning to do this method and most people aren’t willing to lose a few hundred or even thousand upfront. However, the return can be massive if you execute this method correctly. You could spend $2,500-$3,000 upfront but can make back $40,000-$60,000 off 1 winning adset. Now imagine making that same amount for 10-20 different winning adsets, crazy as shit, but very possible.

Now there’s a lot more that goes into this method scaling, but today I’m just giving you an overall view of horizontal scaling and why you should be utilizing this method when you’ve reached this point of your business, but only use this method when you’ve got to that point. This method won’t work if your product or service is shit. If the product is shit already, it’ll be shit when it’s being scaled so make sure that you’ve already found and established product or service that can be scaled to a higher level. This blog post will be a little shorter today, but I’ll be going over more detail about horizontal scale in future blog post so stay tuned!

 

 

Key tips you need to know when starting a shopify store…

So today is going to be completely different. I know for the most part I give affiliate marketing advice when it comes to this content. But remember, before I was doing affiliate marketing I was building shopify stores. I’m sure some of y ‘all reading this have probably been on the same boat or you’re thinking about stepping inside the world of E-com in order to 10x your income already. So with that being said I’m going to be going over a couple key tips you’ll need to know when creating your first store. I hope you’re ready because this will be a basic guide you can follow to give you a sense of direction.

So what is shopify for people who don’t know? It’s a platform that entreprenuers and business owners can utilize to sale anything online. Some of the biggest stores which you’ve probably heard of at least a good 4-5 times, Kylie’s cosmetics(Just crossed over a billion dollars in sales), Fashion Nova, Mvmnt watches, etc… Each of these stores utilized the internet and now are killing the competition! However we aren’t here to talk about these stores, but how you can start one.

So just like affiliate marketing you need to think about these few things;

• Picking a niche
• Picking a product
• Setting up your store front and social medias
• Marketing

I’ll go over one by one and go more into depth on why you need to focus on these key factors in order to have a successful shopify store. DISCLAIMER, although shopify isn’t expensive to start, I strongly advise you to already have some capital upfront to invest in this. At least $500-$1,000 if you want a better chance of hitting success sooner off the jump.

 

Picking a niche…

So this isn’t like affiliate marketing where you can just pick out of the top three niches(health, relationship, and make money online) and be good right off the jump, you’re going to have to take careful research upfront on the niches that are killing it and the ones that aren’t really that popular what so ever. What you want to first want to do is find out what people love the most and see if there’s a niche out there for it.

Example, dogs… I don’t know anybody who doesn’t love dogs more specifically puppies. If you go on Instagram or Facebook pages and search puppy pages, most of them have millions of followers, likes and views. That is an example of a good and long lasting niche. You could jump in that niche or many others that involve animals or anything else you would like to do. An example of a bad niche to go into is like going into like bugs. A lot of people hate bugs so why try to start a bug E-com store? Won’t be getting a lot of sales, very little to be honest.

Picking a niche in the beginning is crucial because if you pick the wrong one you’re going to be wasting a lot of money and believe me that’s something you don’t want to do. It happened to me a few times and each time sucked more than the other time. If you need a guide on how to pick the right niche, I suggest looking in Google Trends when doing some niche studying. You can type in a niche you might be interested and it’ll show you a graph if it’s popular or not and what states is the niche popular in.

 

Picking a product…

This is more for my future dropshippers. When it comes to picking a product it’s always good to pay attention to trends around you. What styles and cool gadgets are people utilizing? If you can catch the trend before it blows up, you’ll be banking in big bucks and on top of that you’ll be the main go to store to buy said product. Now I know, most of you don’t have that ability to see out trends before they happend. I use to be the same way, but with anything you’re going to have to practice to develop that 6th sense to use it.

So here’s what you do if you’re just starting and have no idea what product to sell. First off identify what season it is. I know that sounds weird, but most people buy certain things depending on the season. So for example you could sell sunglasses because spring and summer are arriving. After you identify the season, then go to Google Trends and type in products that identify with that season and see what’s popular or what’s about to take off. Remember ever year certain products have a sudden spike in demand due to the need of them, prime example if you go to google trends and type in sunglasses you’ll see there’s been a recent spike in demand.

So after you’ve identified your product and you see it’s trending or it’s getting ready to spike then you must see if there’s an audience for that product to be sold to. There’s nothing more wrong than having the right audience with the wrong product or the right product with the wrong audience. I did shopify for now two years and I can definietly tell you, that it is a pain in the ass when you make the mistake numerous times. Don’t worry your first few times you’ll make that mistake as well, but stick with it and you’ll get through it.

 

Setting you store front and social medias…

Simplistic wins the race. My biggest lesson in my time doing shopify is keep this shit simple. Keep it super simple. Before I go into why I’ll give you a brief story on why I should of done this and it costed me all of my money. So I just got off work from Ups and ya boy wasn’t making much already($75-$150 a week). We worked a super week and I ended up making round $250 dollars the most I’ve made ever at that job. I had a general store and I thought my webisite was the shit to be honest. Fast foward I spend $220 dollars on 4 instagram influencers and for two days I had got over 1,000 visitors, but only 1 sale… I damn neared cried my eyes out.

I said that to say this, keep your store as plain as possible. All white background with a touch of color. Don’t put too many pictures or products on your store because most people’s attention span isn’t that high(about 5 seconds). Study the big stores that I mentioned earlier in this blog and you’ll see what I mean. Simple, not in your face, effective store. Same with your social medias, have a facebook fan page and add manager(for a pixel to track your customers) and have an Instagram to utilize these major social media platforms.

 

Marketing…

This will make or break your store. It doesn’t matter how good or shit your product is, if you can’t market it to your audience. That’s why you right now could take a t-shirt and maybe 1 person will buy it from you, but somebody more seasoned in marketing can take that same shirt and make $1,000,000 million dollars from it. You have to one know your audience and tailor your marketing around them. If you’re audience is more for younger adults than use tatics young adults would respond to and vise versa for the older generation.

If you don’t know how to market, don’t worry it’s all good it just means you’ll have to research ways on learning how to market and do it more effectively as well. Check out Legendary Marketer’s 15 day business builder program and it’ll take you through 15 days of marketing content so you’ll be sharp and ready when you get ready to start your business. After you go through the 15 day period come back to your store and utilize what you’ve learned so you can have a sense of direction of where you’re going.

Once you’ve got your marketing down to the T than you can literally take any product and sell it. Remember when you don’t have to be in the sales room to be the best salesmen. Some people have never did any type of sales job in there life, but thanks to the internet all you have to do is learn the knowledge and take what you’ve learned and excute it. Once you’ve followed all of these keys and put them to use, you will kill it in your shopify store. Now I can go into a lot more details, but tonight i’m just giving you the basics.