How To Target Shopify n00bs For Fun And Profit
E-commerce is a current gold mine of potential profit.
For a long time, I’ve held back on e-commerce (although I have had an e-commerce store since 2010) because it’s trickier than the shovel-sellers would have you believe.
A lot of new guys get roped into the same thing; “Buy through my Shopify link” and “Buy this $997 FB Ads Course!”
It’s easy to get swept up in that stuff. But here’s the truth:
If you read and apply about 1% of the best practices I recommend on this site, you’re not one of the new guys who don’t have a clue.
So, assuming you’re not going to get swept away by the guru turnkey unicorn business claims, let’s talk about how you can profit from the Shopify craze without spending a penny.
Regular readers will notice that this is an updated method of the now private post I used for profiting from site auctions.
So, can you learn how to build an e-commerce empire by simply browsing a website and using your brain?
Let’s find out.
How To Profit From E-Commerce Auctions… Without Actually Buying Any Sites
You can go on a site auction website and buy a website. In a lot of cases, this is a great thing to do. Providing you read this site, you’ll know stuff that other people don’t. Stuff like:
- How to create websites that aren’t carbon copies of other sites
- How to write decent product descriptions
- Email marketing
- SEO
- Customer service
- Most importantly, how not to be an idiot wantrepreneur
Now, if you buy a website that makes $100 a month and you implement conversion optimisation tactics (i.e. direct marketing stuff) and get it up to $300 a month with a few tweaks, then you’ve tripled the value of the asset.
But what if I were to tell you that you don’t have to buy a crap website and try and make it better?
Because that’s what you can do. Flippa, one of the biggest site auction websites, now has a specific section for Shopify stores:
Case Study In Real Time
Now, for those of you who are unaware, Shopify is what all the guys who get an overpriced dropship course recommend. That’s mostly because it’s a decent hosted solution, but also partly because it has a great affiliate program so everyone recommends it. I think it costs $30 a month. We’ll come back to that.
So we go to Flippa. We put in some search terms. (I look for sites that are earning money.)
We see the top one. It’s allegedly making $6000 a month. So we click through, and it’s in the survival niche. If you’re signed in, you can see all the details. Here’s the important thing. Look at the home page:
This is some low effort work. (No offence intended if this site makes $6000 a month.) You can throw up a website that looks like this in no time at all.
You don’t even have to use Shopify. Use WordPress + WooCommerce because it’s a long-term smarter play. (You get access to all the best plugins, themes and customisations in the world and it’s self-hosted. You can also hire developers if you need custom stuff later on.)
But the proof is in the pudding, as they say, and the key to any ecommerce success is the product.
Let’s take a hint from the other day’s article about what dropshippers do wrong. We’ll do a reverse image search on the main product.
Uh-oh.
What do we have here?
I’ll tell you. We have a guy dropshipping from AliExpress to his customer. We’ve all got to do what we’ve got to do, and this guy is doing what he has to with a 4x profit:
Buy at $4.99, sell at $19.99. That covers a lot of FB ads ground. Especially when you do some searches on AliExpress and see the same product with cheaper manufacturers.
This whole thing is replicable. All you have to do is build your site, upload the pictures and spend some ad money to test.
If you already dip in affiliate marketing you might have spy tools that’d bring this guy’s campaign up. Or better ones. You can “take inspiration” from those.
Make It Better
Like I said, this is a low effort site. The popups are OK but you can do better, split-test offers and all that good stuff.
You could massively increase your site quality by a) designing it to not look like a template, b) putting all the trust measures on your site and c) getting better photos. (Even if you only have stock photos, you should put them through filters and flip them so that dastardly devils like me can’t reverse image search and they look better.)
Finally, and this guy says in the Flippa description that he targets worldwide because he sells in the Phillipines and India.
OK.
But shipping times are a pain in the arse for the West and they’re why a lot of dropship stores fail. If you could find a way to decrease the shipping times, then your site would be a much better prospect. You don’t have to have a ton of stock… just be creative with your terms and location and your pricing v. shipping.
Finally, if you really wanted to make the whole thing better – you could have some company make you these things so you had unique designs. That’s well outside the scope of this, but you know, not so tough on a scale of things for the enterprising fellow.
Anyway, I’ll leave the case study there and hope you experiment with it like I’m doing.
Final Thoughts
I’m 90% sure that investing in ecommerce sites will bring the biggest return you can get anywhere. Forget crypto, stocks or real estate. If you can build a template store selling face masks and generate thousands, then the returns are unbelievable. And they are sustainable.
They’re also easy to manage, you own them outright (if you don’t go with a hosted solution then this is even more true) and you can expand them to many times what they’re worth.
Throw in the fact that you can learn a ton of useful skills as you go – and you only need a rudimentary skill set to implement something like this – and you’re looking at something incredibly worthwhile.
As always, good methods (like this little thing here) involve you standing on the shoulders of giants and pushing that bit further. Except in this case, it’s not so much giants as people who don’t know how to run e-commerce stores.
Anyway, have fun and let me know how you get on.
P.S. This will become a private post at some time in the near future.
Every so often, I give too much away and people say to me, “Jamie… you’re giving away all the gold for free.”
This is one of those posts.
If you hop, skip and twist and turn this step-by-step guide, you can build, buy and sell ecommerce sites. You can make a lot of money.
Now, as much as I love giving away stuff for free, at some point we have to reward friendship and loyalty. So enjoy the post, try it out and find better ways of doing things.
As for the private posts?
It’s pretty simple. I only give out the password to friends of the blog. By that, I mean literal friends of the blog.
To spell it out clearly: I get thousands of visitors every month to this site. Yet I get so few comments that people think I’m talking to myself all the time. If you want the password, then comment on my site, chat on Twitter, and so on.
In short, blog friend = good. Engage with the content, share it, know who I am and let me know you.
Lurker = bad. Take all free stuff and then summarily ask for more free stuff. Don’t be a bad lurker. If I don’t know who you are, you aren’t getting a password.