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Starting an e-commerce store can be a challenging but rewarding experience. In this case study, we will be examining the strategies an online marketing professional used to promote his e-commerce store to generate over $50,000 in revenue within three months.
Jorge Moita Vieira is a digital marketing and e-commerce expert, and he works with multiple international clients to grow e-commerce businesses in different industries. He has a YouTube channel for seasoned professionals and beginners to get essential tips and guides for kickstarting an e-commerce business with advanced strategies.
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Let's dive into this article...
Product Review
The winning product Jorge chose for his store was a double-layer glass.
Although he has tested several products in the past, they all failed to meet the standard of being a winning product. Jorge said,
"I found the double-layer glass in a simple Facebook ad, not even in the Facebook ads library. I noticed that the product had a lot of engagement, but when I looked at the actual store, I saw that even though they were getting a lot of success, they were not scaling that much."
Jorge built a professional dropshipping store for the double-layer glass store using the Ecom Solid from the Shopify theme store. The theme allows Jorge to use the template for subsequent winning products in the future without spending too much time on building a store from scratch every time he wants to start a new one.
January to December Sales
Jorge used Facebook ads to promote his store, and the ads were launched on January 9, 2021. In January, Jorge ran three active campaigns. Among the three campaigns, one was a test campaign he used for testing many ad interests- a category of people that may be interested in seeing the ad. Only the ad interests with many impressions were allowed to run.
Also, since the CPC (Cost Per Clicks), $0.39, $0.27, and $0.16, were reasonable for the three campaigns, the double-layer glass proved to be an excellent product that can easily scale up and generate tons of sales. Also, Jorge chose to run a picture ad that had a CTR (Click Through Rate) of 3%. While commenting on the CTR, Jorge said
"It is very good to have a reasonable CTR. Usually, a picture ad gets somewhere between 2% and 3%, so we knew this was probably a very good product, and we just kept testing interest."
Furthermore, Jorge tested feeds and stories separately. The feeds have a 1x1 square creative, and the stories have a 9x16 vertical creative.
Jorge continued testing different ad interests, and any ad interest that didn't generate sales in the first 24 hours was turned off. Turning them off was because the double-layer glass was very cheap, and running ads for more than 24 hours without generating sales will result in spending more on ads with little or no profit. In the case of an expensive product, the ad can run for 3 to 4 days, and if the ad is unprofitable after four days, it should be turned off.
Fortunately, the double-layer glass was profitable. According to Jorge,
"During the testing phase, I didn't spend more than $300."
In other words, the amount required to launch the double-layer glass at a scalable level does not exceed $300. Initially, some days weren't profitable for the $50 per day ad spent, but the sum of both the profitable and unprofitable days stayed at $300.
As soon as Jorge found the best-performing ad interests, he moved them into a scaling campaign. The scaling campaign was profitable, with ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) of $1.74 and $2.31, breaking even at $1.6 with about 37 sales. Jorge also launched a basic retargeting campaign after scaling consistently and it started making a profit in two weeks.
February Sales
The store faced one of its most significant challenges in February: a supply shortage due to the Chinese New Year celebration. During the festival, every manufacturer in China has to halt production for about three weeks, which is not good for the store. Luckily, Jorge was smart enough to stock many of the glasses. Unfortunately, the stocked glasses only lasted a week and a half due to enormous customer orders. So the high demand and no-supply situation were what led to a gap in February revenue.
During this period of running the ads, Jorge learned an important lesson, which he said,
"Facebook stores your data for seven days even if you turn your ads off. So we were able to turn the ads off for a few days and did not lose optimization because we didn't leave the ads off for longer than seven days after that."
The store made $14 732.34 in revenue in February.
March and April Sales
The revenues in March and April were $42 779.52 and $67 574.62 respectively.
Jorge had another challenge in March and April, PayPal denied him full access to over $10 000 in his account. This means he can't use the money for his scaling campaign, and it was quite unfortunate because the store was running profitably.
To address the issue, Jorge said,
"I got an Excel sheet, then I calculated the number of days PayPal was taking to release the funds, and how much I could play with. I only scale with as much money as PayPal was releasing which accounts for all products' costs and other costs."
Eventually, PayPal stopped holding all of the money, only 30% of the money was held, and this allowed him to continue the scaling campaign. However, the only disadvantage was that he needed to make more money as Paypal was still holding 30% of his money and almost all his profits were used to finance the scaling campaign.
As for the ads, the scaling campaigns were still running, and many other active campaigns were added to the whole ad set-up. The campaigns he was testing were also running because of their importance in sustaining the ad scaling efforts. It should be noted that scaling campaigns only last for a while. So you must keep testing different interests to find the one worth scaling again, and by using broad targeting, there will always be an interest to test.
In addition, Jorge tests new creatives every week. If any creative he tested is profitable after seven days, he duplicates the ad creative four times and runs the ad on a CBO (Campaign Budget Option) campaign budget of between $50 and $150, depending on the profitability of the ad creative. To optimize ad performance, every week, Jorge looks at the creatives from the past week to see what worked and what didn't so that he can double his efforts on the things that work and apply them more in the coming week.
Unexpectedly, there was another big issue that customers complained about during the summer; the glasses were delivered broken. This was probably due to the effect of Jorge's scaling effort on the supplier. The supplier had so many orders to deliver that he needed to be mindful of the product's packaging.
Jorge had to go through the stress of responding to each customer complaint about the broken glass, asking for a picture, and then sending the image to the supplier so the supplier could reship new glasses. He requested that the supplier change the packaging material to a foam model instead of the bubble wrap used to pack the glasses and this solved the problem immediately.
It is always important to pay attention to customer complaints and respond promptly and cautiously. Customers buy products because they need the product to solve a need and the need cannot be solved if they have their complaint unattended to.
Equally important, avoid trying to do everything by yourself. Jorge stated that he was so busy with everything in his store but not with the important aspect of the store. Instead of focusing on improving the business and looking for more ways to increase profitability, he was responding to customer emails, feeding back the supplier with the broken glass images, creating ad creatives, and so on. He strictly advised that one should never be afraid to outsource time-consuming tasks to focus on the more important ones.
Sales for the Remaining Part of The Year
In the last quarter of the year—October, November, and December—the store made up to $141 410.64 in sales.
A Christmas campaign was launched in the last quarter of the year. Jorge requested the supplier to provide some cheap Christmas-themed packaging and products that can be sold on the store's website and some more cheap products for post-purchase sales, which all worked well. All the creatives for the Christmas campaign were made with professional Christmas backgrounds.
Unfortunately, this store faced its most significant challenge, which eventually led to its shutting down. The supplier couldn't handle the volume of orders during the last quarter, probably because of the extra scaling efforts. So, the supplier ran out of inventory and couldn't produce more products in time because there was much strain on logistics due to the Christmas season.
Unfairly, the supplier failed to notify Jorge until the Facebook Ad account was restricted on New Year's Eve. He later learned that his supplier had stopped shipping products to customers for the past two weeks. Eventually, when the supplier admitted he was out of stock, many things had gone wrong: the product's Facebook page had been restricted, and the pixel was also restricted because people were already complaining about the shipping time.
Jorge advises that
"Number one stop selling in early December because, unless you have Superman Logistics, you're probably going to run into trouble trying to get the orders delivered to people before Christmas. Number two, keep a very close watch on your supply chain and on your supplier's ability to fulfill the orders in time."
Revenue Review
Conclusion
In this article, we've systematically seen how it is possible to make over $67 000 in one month by promoting double-layer glass. The product was found by checking some Facebook ads, and the store was set up using the Ecom solid theme in Shopify. The store thrived throughout the year by using the necessary ad interest, optimizing the ad interest, and scaling it for more profit.
Lastly, Jorge faced various challenges in setting up and sustaining the store. From handling stock shortages due to the Chinese New Year celebration to restricting cash flow from PayPal. One should always bear in mind that to be successful in maintaining an e-commerce store requires perseverance.
