Most dropshippers believe that the success of their various dropshipping businesses is solely dependent on how well they advertise their store. While it is true that promotion is essential in the dropshipping business, there are still other basics that should be addressed. So, inexperienced dropshippers spend a lot of money on ads without considering the foundational block on which other blocks, such as ads, rest. The product for which the store is set up can be the foundational block in a dropshipping business; therefore, the consensus among expert dropshippers is to always choose a product that has not yet gained traction. The reason for this is that one can easily claim a new market share for a new product in the market, and the product can eventually become a winner.
What if you don't want to deal with the stress of product research, but instead opt for one of these saturated winning products? Remember that the fact the product is selling well indicates it is a very good product in terms of market demand.
In this post, we will look at how Nick Barner was able to promote a saturated winning product while still making progress.
Nick Barner is a young internet entrepreneur who specializes in organically growing social media accounts such as Twitter, Instagram, and even TikTok, and he has made money from some of the stores he has previously opened. He has a YouTube channel where he teaches people how to make money online by doing things like social media marketing and dropshipping.
According to Nick, He said:
"I have been dropshipping for a few months now and I would not say it has been going not too bad for a beginner like myself; however, I have yet to find those life-changing results that a lot of these well-known dropshippers have achieved. I have studied all these gurus and I know one thing they all say is to not reinvent the wheel while dropshipping."
Reinventing the wheel takes a lot of effort, and one may spend quite a fortune while doing so without assurance of being successful at the end of the day. In order to play safe, let us look at his strategy and learn from it. So, he decided to promote an already saturated product and we are going to see how he selected it, how he got traffic and the cost of the whole campaign.
Finding A Saturated Winning Product
The first step is to find the saturated winning product. In describing a winning product Nick said:
"This is just a product that has already proven to get a lot of sales and has already gone through the market".
There are several ways of looking for this particular type of product, and one is by using Tiktok. Another way is to go to online marketplaces such as Amazon and look at both the trending products and the top-selling products.
Nick chose a back stretcher as his product that is already oversaturated, but at the same time, the product is very successful. In fact, we have covered this particular product in one of our posts. Many dropshippers and even YouTubers have shared their revenue from selling this product on numerous occasions, indicating that it is a valid saturated product. The revenue of the popular YouTuber we used as our previous case study for this product is shown below.
How to Source a Product for Your E-commerce Store
There are various ways to source for products depending on your preference and goal. If you want to find winning products on e-commerce sites, there are many marketplaces you can check out, such AliExpress, 1668, and even Amazon.
Checking Aliexpress, this product is selling for $10.79 including shipping, and a quick look at the competitor's prices we can see that they are selling it for $45, which is the exact price Nick decided to sell his back stretcher. With this price, he has been making roughly $34 in profit for every item he sold.
Building Your E-commerce Store
The next step after choosing the product is to build the store. There are various tools you can use, but Nick built his store using Shopify. Bare it in mind that you will have to make some expenses in order to set up a very good store, and one of the expenses is buying a domain name that costs him $14.
The above image is a screenshot of what the store looks like. It's a simple layout, and you will notice an email sign-up program that always pops up, offering customers $10 off their purchase. This trick will convert a lot more visitors to the site because many people like to get discounts when they shop online. So, this discount reduces the profit from each sale by $10, but he decides to compensate for this loss by charging $5 for shipping the products to buyers. As a result, the profit per sale jumps to $29 per sale.
The main goal of this method is to collect emails from site visitors, which will be a very useful database. An email database is a valuable asset in online businesses because it allows future offers to be easily sent to everyone in the database.
How To Promote Your With Facebook Ads
One way Nick promoted his dropshipping store is through Facebook Ads, and it is important to note what Nick said concerning his experience. He said:
"I am going to be real when it comes to Facebook advertising, I do not have much experience, but I focus more on the actual ads that people will be seeing rather than just tinkering around with all the Facebook ad settings".
He created the Facebook page, the pixel page, the target audience, and the actual video ads that the audience will see for the ads. Nick simply went to Amazon, typed in the product's name, and then saved the video reviews that people left for the back stretcher. The videos were trimmed and combined, and then some text was added highlighting the product's benefits as well as some other ways the product can be useful.
A total of six ads were launched, with a daily budget of $10 for each ad, totaling $60 per day. Please keep in mind that you may have to wait a few hours for the ads to be approved before they become active.
Facebook Ads Campaign
On the first day, the ads were launched, a total of $26.60 was spent on advertisements, and a total of 1 065 impressions were made which resulted in 30 link clicks; however, there were no sales.
After day one, an improvement was made to the store by optimizing the mobile view of the website. This was done with the expectation of correcting any formatting errors that were overlooked during the site's setup. Some videos outperformed others on day two, so Nick decided to switch the rest of the ads to the higher-performing video in the hopes of gaining more traction. Not only that, he also shifted the old video ad audiences to a few new groups that might be interested in the product, such as video games, golf, and healthy food.
Of course, making these changes means that Facebook will have to review half of the ads again. Fortunately, the new changes were quickly approved, and at the end of day two, the following statistics were obtained: a total of $53.57 was spent on ads that received 2 271 impressions and resulted in 76 link clicks. Four people added the products to their carts as a result of these 76 link clicks, and he also received two checkouts, which were his first set of sales. This is the first indication that this strategy could be profitable.
Unfortunately, Nick received a notification from Facebook on the second day that his ads had been disabled. So, he requested a review from Facebook, and thankfully, the restrictions were lifted, allowing him to continue running the campaign. Furthermore, at the end of day three, which, according to Nick, was a particularly difficult day. The cost of ads was $41.30, and it achieved 1 619 impressions which generated 53 link clicks. Out of these 53 clicks, one person moved ahead to the add-to-cart page.
By the end of day four, a total of $68.47 had been spent on ads that received 2 043 impressions and 51 link clicks. There were four items added to the cart, three checkouts, and two sessions that converted out of the 51 link clicks which gave total sales of $173.60.
Finally, on day five, a total of $59.17 was spent on ads, which received 1 517 impressions and 39 CPM, resulting in 45 link clicks, of which two were added to carts, three reached the checkout, and one session converted for $50.90.
Summary of Revenue and Income
Day 1
- Revenue: $0
- Cost of New domain: $14
- Cost of Ads: $26.60
- Income: minus $40.60 (loss)
Day 2
- Revenue: $50.90
- Cost of Ads: $57.53
- Other fulfillment costs: $13.77
- Income: minus $20.40 (loss)
Day 3
- Revenue: $0
- Cost of Ads: $41.30
- Income: minus $41.30 (loss)
Day 4
- Revenue: $173.65
- Cost of Ads: $68.47
- Other fulfillment costs: $52.58
- Income: $52.60 (profit)
Day 5
- Revenue: $50.90
- Cost of Ads: $59.17
- Other fulfillment costs: $13.77
- Income: minus $22.26 (loss)
- Total Revenue: $275.45
- Cost of Domain: $14
- Total costs of Ads: $253.07
- Total Fulfillment costs: $80.12
- Total expenses: $347.19
- Income: minus $71.74 (loss)
This analysis is for 5 days alone, and the venture is beginning to make a profit. Though a decent amount was spent on ads, we got $275 in sales with this product. If you can be patient enough you should be able to break even from the 14th day upward according to Nick.
Conclusion
We were able to demonstrate in this post that selling a saturated dropshipping winning product is not entirely a bad idea. You should first source your products from marketplaces such as AliExpress, Alibaba, and 1688, and then set up your Shopify store. The next step is to launch a Facebook ad campaign to increase sales. You may also want to look at social media ads to get an idea of what products sell well and can be promoted.
One thing to note however is the nature of Facebook restrictions concerning ads. They are becoming more strict day by day, but if you can find your way around it, the sky is your limit.
However, this is only a five-day trial to see if saturated dropshipping products can still make us money online, and the answer is yes. In this article, Nick earned $275.40 in five days, indicating that there are still buyers for his chosen product and that if he optimizes his Facebook ads, he will start making profits.
