The circle of e-commerce is constantly evolving, and it's more important than ever for internet marketing agents to stay ahead of the curve. By taking advantage of Amazon's Movers and Shakers section, you have the potential to make over $300 000 in revenue in one week with a dropshipping store. In this case study, we will be examining the tactics that can help you achieve real success in dropshipping.
Dylan Rudzinski is a 20-year-old internet entrepreneur, a self-acclaimed eight-figure dropshipper, and an influencer. He has a YouTube channel he opened in 2021 with over 19 000 subscribers where he teaches online businesses.
How to Find a Product
The products that you decide to sell on your e-commerce store have a lot of impact on the profitability of your store; therefore, proper research must be carried out in order to be successful. Dylan did not reveal the product he sold with this strategy, but he was transparent as to the process and the reason he chose the product. Some influencers keep their products hidden so that their followers do not copy them and eventually become competitors. However, knowing the niches such influencers take their products from, and knowing the process they underwent to get the product is more vital.
The way Dylan found the product was through the "movers and shakers" section on Amazon.
The Amazon movers and shakers section contains all new products that have been selling massively for the last 24 hours on Amazon, using this section for product research is a great way to look for hot trending products. Also, the product Dylan chose was ranked first and second product on Amazon movers and shakers for about two weeks. As shown in the screenshot below, using an Amazon research tool called Helium 10, shows that the product has over 250 000 searches per month.
In addition, the product was trending on Tiktok with a lot of passionate audiences, while explaining how he came to know about the high rate of engagement of the product, Dylan said,
"We saw this in our average order value as customers were buying all sorts of other products related to the main product, which helped our margin a lot."
The product also has a low number of competitors, plus it was relatively cheap to source the product at just $8.80.
How to Build a Dropshipping Store
The store was a simple, branded store to make the buyers have a seamless time navigating it and built using the Debut theme. Below is the screenshot of a similar store using the same theme and Dylan's store structure.
Other important things to note while setting up a store are:
- Don't overstuff the store with unnecessary elements, this will make your store look scammy, and buyers are quick to detect a scam store.
- Only use one or two theme colors for the store.
- Do not put too many images in the product description.
- Use GIFs in the product description.
- You can also use an inventory countdown timer. For example, "X units of product left," but make sure the countdown matches the product well to avoid getting mixed reactions from buyers.
- You can also offer a price discount of 50% to 60% off sales on all the products in the store.
- If the store is a long-term store, use high-quality custom images; but if it is a short-term store, images from AliExpress can be used.
- You can provide bundling with the winning product if the product is usually bought more than once, for instance, "buy one, get one cent extra."
How to Test a Product for Its Scaling Potential
To make 6 to 7 figures from dropshipping, testing the product is very important. Since Dylan's store is a short-term store, the timeframe for the testing was only one day. It is important to note that the source of the traffic to this store was Tiktok ads, and Dylan used custom content to test the product profitability which means he didn't just copy other people's ideas and pass them off as his own. According to Dylan,
"I don't think stealing creatives is a sustainable strategy for finding winning products".
Dylan and his partners created the creatives they used, and looking at it from a cost perspective, it is a more affordable, and efficient method for testing the product. Since the profitability of the product is not yet known, it is unwise to spend more on outsourcing most activities when starting a new store. According to Dylan, it is not very wise to do so. So, Dylan's typical testing strategy is as follows:
- A $100 CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization) with five ad groups
- 5 creatives using ACO (Automated Creative Optimization)
- 3 sets of ad copy
You don't have to religiously follow his testing strategy, so we suggest you twist it around to suit whatever product is being tested. Unfortunately for this product, the key performance indicators (KPIs) (CTR (click-through rate), CPC (cost per click), CPM (cost per mile), etc.) were not performing well at the beginning of the day.
It wasn't until later in the day that the whole campaign started picking up, and to this, Dylan advised that,
"You guys should always let your initial testing campaign run for at least one day, allow the campaign to be optimized, and figure out who is buying the product and who's interested."
At the end of the test, the ad spent was $182, which is almost double the budgeted cost of $100. It may be necessary to have more than the amount budgeted for running ads in the initial stage when running tests.
Dylan decided to set up a lot of ads for the next day after analyzing the test results, and his decision pushed the store to the point of making over $130 000 in sales in one day.
How to Scale Up a Product for More Revenue
The approach used to upscale this store was an aggressive approach because the store has a kind of "pump and dump" business model. To determine which product to scale, you have to compare the Return On Ad Spend and actual the money spent on the ads, if the Return On Ad Spend is higher than the money spent, then it is a very good time to scale aggressively. Another thing about scaling this product is that only an ad account was used, and it was not an agency ad account.
When commenting on the difference between the orders tracked by Tiktok and the actual orders that came in, Dylan said:
"Keep in mind the attribution was about 50 percent off while scaling this product, so Tiktok tracked 14 167 conversions when we did over 26 000 orders."
Also, mass duplication of manual bids was a strategy that helped in the scaling of this product.
By using broad and automatic targeting with about five to seven creatives in an ad group, you can just test a lot of different bids with the desired CPA (Cost Per Action). Once you find a bid that is working, all that needs to be done is to go up and down by one cent and duplicate the ad group. From his experience, Dylan said that a budget of $200 works best to test scalability. He also made a warning note that the manual bids do not work every time, and sometimes you may end up spending unnecessarily a lot of money on budgets. However, you can counteract this by turning off the bids from the previous day and launching new ones. Dylan said
"When you're scaling to six figures a day, it can be a very time-intensive process, but it's one of the best ways to get extremely high ticket purchases."
Note that when scaling aggressively, you will inevitably run into issues with your ad account and payment processing, which Dylan also did, his ad account was suspended at a point, limiting the amount of money he could earn during the suspension period. Also, Dylan has two credit sources for funding the ad account, one was direct to the ad account, and the other was the availability of a lot of cash, so the scaling cash flow was smooth.
Sales Review
To help reduce costs and improve sales, you should source from many suppliers first and settle for the ones that have the best price to offer. The store started out shipping only to the United Kingdom and the United States and later expanded its reach to other countries.
With over 3 400 complement products sold alongside the main product, over 29 000 of the main product was sold. Selling complementary products is a very important post-purchase method based on the fact that, if the buyer has already decided to buy the main product, he may need the complementary product, which is relatively cheap.
Furthermore, three other variants of the main product were available in the store for the same price. The total number of products sold in the store was 31 163.
Income Analysis
Revenue in five days: $569 826.98
Revenue in a week: $805 785.67
Sales for Day 1: $1 543.81
Price per unit: $8.80
Total number of units sold: 26 674
Total Revenue: $234 731.2
Ad spend for Day 1: $182
Total Ad spend: $227 424
Estimated Profit: $306 830
Conclusion
In this post, we are not only sure that it is possible, but we've also examined the strategies used by Dylan and his partner to make a profit of over $300 000 running an e-commerce store for one week. Using the Amazon Movers and Shakers category for product selection, there are a lot of hot trending products that can be gotten. The store for the product was set up using the debut theme to ensure simplicity and aid buyers' navigation.
The recipe for success is to build a dropshipping store with a simple design easy for conversions and to scale up only when the products in the store have been tested to be profitable.
Scaling up a profitable product by comparing the return on ad spend and the money spent is very essential, as well as mass duplicating manual bids with little changes and running them again. In applying this strategy hard work is required as it can be labor-intensive, but highly rewarding if the guides in the article can be followed.
