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Video transcript: The holidays are just around the corner. So consumers are spending more time inside and online. If you were thinking about starting an online Shopify store right now is the perfect time to begin.
I’m going to cut straight to the chase and I’m gonna share five products that you should start selling in the winter of 2019 and 2020. This video will be perfect for anyone who is curious about making money online with Shopify and Oberlo. Because when you’re new to all of this, it can be tough to get a simple overview of Shopify, Oberlo, dropshipping and Facebook ads.
So in the process of sharing these products, I’m gonna tell you how Shopify and Oberlo work together and I’ll also give you an overview of Facebook advertising best practices. Whether you are a seasoned dropshipper or completely new here, you’re going to get a lot of value out of our next 15 minutes together, so let’s crack on.
1. Electric Shoe Dryer
We’re gonna get right to it. The first product that I recommend selling in a Shopify store this winter is the shoe dryer. Whether customers are going snowboarding or sledging through slush to the office, they might fall victim to cold wet shoes.
This product solves your customer’s problem by quickly drying out all types of shoes and boots. But, wait a second, if you’re new to dropshipping you might be wondering what this website is. This is AliExpress and it’s a Chinese ecommerce marketplace that sells pretty much everything but live animals. Anyone can buy products on AliExpress but many people don’t. There are several reasons for this.
First, as you can tell, the site can be confusing. A lot of the product descriptions are hard to understand. Second, the quality of the products on this site varies, some of it is top-notch and some of it isn’t. And finally, the vast majority of AliExpress dropshipping suppliers whose names are indicated at the top don’t market their products to customers outside AliExpress. And here’s where you the savvy entrepreneur step in, you know that these shoe warmers will solve a customer problem.
So you decide to sell them. First, you buy the shoe warmers from AliExpress to verify product quality, then you use Shopify to build an online storefront. One that’s much simpler to navigate than AliExpress. Next, you use Oberlo to connect your Shopify store to AliExpress and that lets you import the shoe warmers to your store in just a few clicks. After that, you write product descriptions that are clear, easy to understand and describe how these shoe warmers solve your customers’ wet feet problems.
By the way, if you want a template that makes this work a lot easier, you can sign up for Oberlo 101, it’s our ultimate step-by-step course for starting an online business. Finally, and very importantly, you do the work of marketing these shoe warmers to customers who are online. So that’s the 1,000-foot overview of how AliExpress, Shopify and Oberlo play together.
But figuring out which of those millions of products on AliExpress will get you sales, that’s its own challenge. That’s why it’s important to do thorough product research before you start spending money on advertising. I’ll show you what to look for in a winning product.
Let’s jump back into AliExpress. Right under the name of these shoe warmers, you can see that they have over 3,500 orders and over 1,800 reviews. Typically, when looking for products to sell online, the more orders, the better. It means that a product is in demand, and if the average review is high, say 4.7 or higher, then you have a potential winner on your hands.
These shoe warmers are great because they meet both of those criteria. The shoe warmers look promising, but if your store only sold these shoe warmers, it might look a little weird. Usually, customers expect stores to carry related items, which means you, using Shopify dropshipping, need to product research and find more items in this same product category unless you decide to sell this next hot item for winter.
2. Unicorn Onesies
Enter the onesie. Onesies are full-body pajamas. Customers love them because they’re cozy to wear indoors, and in cold weather. They’re also funny and they make for great photo opportunities.
If you click on the different colors here, you’ll notice that each of these are actually different onesies. That means that this is basically an entire onesie store in one AliExpress product. With Oberlo you can import this one product to your Shopify store and then split it into 28 different products super quick. By the way, those products are called different variants. Let me show you how this works.
First, you’re gonna sign into Oberlo, click on “manage products” on the left-hand side under dashboard, press “import product by URL”, copy and paste the URL from AliExpress into this section and press “import”.
Now hit on “import list” on the left-hand side. You’ll now see the onesie from AliExpress in Oberlo. Click on “variants”, then click on “more actions” and “split product”. Oberlo will now ask you if you want to split the product by color or size. Color refers to each different style so I suggest splitting it by color. Now, each style will have all the sizes attached to it. Once you split this into different products, you can press the checkbox on the top left hand to highlight all of them and import them directly into your Shopify store.
In Shopify, just edit the name and description of each product, make sure the photos correspond to the onesies you are selling. Now, your Shopify store is stocked with cute onesies. But before you start selling, you need a domain name for your business.
I suggest using a site called “name chck” without the “e” to find out whether a name is available as a dot-com domain name and as a social media handle. I did some of this research for you, ahead of time, and here’s a list of domain names available for your new onesie store, onesiemarket.com, onesieuniverse.com, grownuponesies.com and I love this one, by the way, because “onesies for adults” gets over 90,000 searches a month, onesiemarts.com, and hilariousonesies.com.
Now, before you build your onesie store, you might want to get a sense of how popular onesies are going to be in the next couple of months. And to get insight on that, let’s jump into Google Trends. Google Trends shows you relative search interest in a given search term. If I sign on to Google Trends, I can type in “onesie” to see the search activity. Make sure to change the date to the last five years so you can see general trends for the last few holiday seasons.
If you look closely, there are two spikes and searches around Halloween and just before Christmas. That means that people are searching for onesies more often around these time periods. What’s important to note here is that this has happened for the last five years consistently. And if it’s happened every year since 2015, you can feel confident that it will happen this year too. In other words, onesies are still very much in style.
3. Phone Neck Holder
Now, we’ve talked about how to find products to sell and how to add them to your store. So let’s talk money with this next product.
It’s a neck phone holder, this neck phone holder allows customers to watch videos on their phones without having to hold their phones in front of their faces.
This product is perfect for winter 2019 and 2020 because with winter coming up, people are Face Timing their relatives across the country, watching sports after a huge Thanksgiving dinner and keeping entertained on long car rides to grandma’s house. Let’s take a look at the options here. First, we can select where this product ships from.
If we select China, then we can check out shipping options here, change to “ship to” to see estimated delivery dates and costs for the countries you plan to sell to. And always, always, always like the ePacket shipping, it’s usually the fastest and most cost-efficient way to send products to customers anywhere in the world. In this case, if I ship this product from China to the US, I pay about $2 for shipping and my customer would get the product in about 16 days. That’s not bad.
I can also tell the supplier to ship this product from their warehouse in the United States. In that case, I would pay about $3 for shipping but customers would get the product in four to seven days. The choice is up to you. And honestly, customers are willing to wait 16 days for their product if you’re upfront with them about shipping times. But if you sell to customers in the US and you’re willing to pay more for shipping you can brag about seven-day delivery in your power descriptions, which could compel more customers to click add to cart. It’s important to stay on top of these numbers because they affect how much money you make online.
Let’s say you sold this product in your Shopify store and promised customers seven-day shipping. Whenever a customer buys this product from your store, you fulfill that order by buying the product from AliExpress and telling the AliExpress supplier to send the product straight to your customer’s address. Oberlo makes this process easy because it pulls your customer information and automatically fills it into AliExpress.
That means that for every order, you’ll pay about $2.50 for the product and about $3 for shipping. So you’ll spend a total of about $5.45 or so on product and shipping costs. So how do you make money with Oberlo and Shopify? Well, you set the price of the products you sell in your Shopify store. I have interviewed countless and six- and seven-figure dropshippers and I’ve asked them their secrets on product pricing. Most of them follow a really simple formula when it comes to pricing. It is: take the cost of your product with shipping included and multiply it by three.
So if this phone holder plus shipping is just under $6, then multiplying that figure by three gives us about $18. You don’t need to be right on the number. So you can price this product for $19.99. That way, you’ll have room to give customers an enticing 20 percent discount while still maintaining profit margins.
Even if your customer used that 20 percent discount code, they’d pay you around $16 for this phone, you’d pay about $6 to have the supplier ship the phone to your customer and you’d pocket the difference around $10.
But there’s just one cost we’re not accounting for here and that is marketing costs. So let’s talk marketing with product number four.
4. Foot Warmer
The next product I recommend that you dropship this winter is an electric foot warmer, the best dropshipping products speak to your customer’s emotions by solving a problem. There are different types of problems, but certain ones are more frustrating than others.
Well, having cold feet isn’t the end of the world, it’s really frustrating. Winter is coming and that means cold feet all the time. Just thinking about cold feet will make customers shudder. “No, thank you.” This is the exact emotion you want to draw on when you’re selling this product. If you can remind customers of what it feels like to have icy toes and aching cold feet, they’re gonna start looking for a solution to that problem, and that solution is your product.
Once you import this product into Shopify. It will just sit there unless you do something with it. And your job in this whole process is to become an expert marketer. An expert marketer needs to be able to advertise on Facebook. That involves paying Facebook to put your product in front of a specific target audience. But, what audience? If you can’t answer that question, you’ll pay Facebook to get that ad in front of people who don’t care about feet warmers.
To find the right audience for your ad, you need to do some research, you need to find out who has the problem that your product solves? And the problem this product solves is cold feet. So to find out who has cold feet, you can Google something like ‘cold feet symptoms,’ and there you’ll come up with a list of health conditions that cause cold feet, write those down. And then to start your audience research, I’m gonna suggest that you fire up Facebook Audience Insights. Facebook Audience Insights is a tool you can use to identify the size of different groups of people that you want to advertise to. You can start entering health conditions on the left here to see the size of a potential audience you want to target.
I found that cold feet was a symptom of diabetes and so when I enter diabetes, I see the American Diabetes Association. It has an audience size of 1 million to 1.5 million people. That’s perfect because I want to target US audiences on Facebook that is around 2 million. I would use this information in Facebook ads manager. When creating an audience, I’d enter “American Diabetes Association” as an interest for my audience.
5. Santa Dog Costume
Now onto our last and final product and one last marketing shortcut to help you out as you get started with dropshipping. It’s the dog costume. You’ve seen them outside, on Instagram and all over Facebook. Dog costumes are all the rage and for good reason.
Just look at this little pug with his costume and Santa on the top. It’s sure to pull on any dog owner’s heartstrings. There are a lot of dog costumes on AliExpress. But I chose this one for a very specific reason. If you hover your mouse over the first image, you’ll notice a play button, which means that this listing comes with a video. If you’ve been following our YouTube channel for a while, you’ll know that I always recommend video ads over photo ads, and if you haven’t been following our channels, subscribe now. Video ads are proven to perform better on Facebook and bring in more conversions.
The photo was cute. But this video just makes me want to buy one for my future pup. Now, not all AliExpress suppliers will allow you to use their videos. So it is important to ask. If you hover your mouse over a supplier’s name here, you can press contact now to send them a message. Simply tell the supplier that your dropshipping and request to use the video in your ads. Most suppliers have no problem with dropshippers using their videos. Sales for you mean sales for them too, however, it’s better to ask before you go through the process of setting up your store and your ads.
I suggest ordering a sample of your products so you can take your own videos for ads. But I know some of you want to start taking advantage of seasonal sales, right now. So just ask the supplier for the video and you can start using it in your Facebook ads right away. One more thing, be careful not to run into legal trouble with products like this. When it comes to costumes, remember to make sure that you’re only selling copyright-free costumes, which means costumes that do not refer to specific characters from a movie or TV show. Stick to Santa’s elves and pirates to be safe.
Now, I would love to hear from you. Have we missed the mark with any of these product recommendations? Are you willing to share your own product recommendations for winter 2019? Leave a comment and let me know, and I will chime in with my thoughts. And until next time, learn often, market better and sell more.