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Jessica: Meet Kory and Rodney. Last year, these guys started a dropshipping new store in the fantasy gaming niche and they made over $340,000 in nine months. Along the way, Kory and Rodney learned a lot about how to test niches on a shoe-string budget, how to price products for the maximum profit possible, and how to get the most out of every dollar spent in their Facebook ads.
Today, Kory and Rodney will share these insights and more while recommending products that you can start dropshipping in 2020. Okay, thanks so much guys for joining us today.
Kory: Thanks for having us.
Rodney: Thanks for having us, exciting.
Jessica: And you’re joining us from Vancouver, Canada, right?
Kory: Yeah, that’s correct, yeah.
Jessica: Okay, I wanna catch up our audience a little bit of a conversation that we were having before we started filming because I know you’re sitting here now but last year when we published the video with Scott Hilse, you guys were watching that and you hadn’t even started your store yet.
Kory: No, yeah, yeah.
Rodney: Yeah, that’s true. It was just a pipe dream. I guess for us at that time and we really hadn’t even considered dropshipping until we started watching more videos on YouTube and we started to work into it and develop it as we went.
Jessica: What was interesting to me is that, unlike Scott, who was very much like “I can never work for someone, I love being my own boss.” You guys had really stable, good jobs in Canada. So why even get into this dropshipping thing?
Kory: Where we’re from, Vancouver, Canada, is just way, way, way too expensive for people our generation and even though we had really stable jobs for a municipal government and we were making a lot of money in over $30 an hour, it just still seemed like it wasn’t enough. And by not enough meaning we wanted to be super wealthy but not enough to really even get by.
Jessica: Interesting. So these jobs that used to seem so secure actually didn’t seem as secure to you guys and the lifestyles you wanted?
Kory: No, yeah. But then you see the whole side of ecommerce and the online industry or working in digital marketing, and if you can put the time and effort in to learn which is all free education, you can learn everything online for free and through trial and error and YouTube and reading blogs and reading books, then you could probably make or achieve that dream that you’re going for so.
Jessica: Now, I’m curious, the store that made over $340,000 in its first nine months that… Was that your first dropshipping store?
Kory: No.
Rodney: No. So we had tested a bunch of different stores over a bunch of different niches that we were just kind of wetting our toes with. We actually started one as a prank to one of our friends, selling Santa suits online just to see if we could build a functional website and we could get someone to make a purchase on it or enter their credit card information. And it actually ended up working which was pretty surprising to us and that kind of sparked our interest to see that, “Okay, this is something that we could actually do.”
Jessica: Okay, so it took multiple stores to get to this really successful one. How did you know you were on the right track because a lot of our viewers will start a store and they’ll run into problems and then it feels like the whole dropshipping system doesn’t even work?
Rodney: Right. So with that, we started a bunch of organic Instagram accounts and we wanted to test a bunch of different niches and we went with one that was getting very high levels of engagement and we kind of went with that and we started to develop that account a lot more and once we started to get feedback from our kind of community that we had built, we started to realize, “Okay, this would be the niche that we could sell to.” So we started to develop that and go from there.
Kory: I was gonna say, seeing how quickly it grew in comparison to all the other accounts that we were running, we just had that itch, like, “Okay, this is it.” We’re putting the same amount of effort into all these other ones in terms of posting and finding content. But this one’s growing at a rate two or three times compared to the other ones. So this has to be something worth looking into deeper. So, yeah.
Jessica: This is something that really sets you guys apart from other dropshippers that I’ve had on the show here because you tested these niches with Instagram for free, just investing your time and that’s how you came upon the niche that ended up being the foundation for your profitable store. But let’s not tell them any more about that now because I wanna get into product recommendations and I want to explore that in a lot more depth.
Rodney: Awesome, yeah, let’s get into it.
1. Blue Light Glasses
Jessica: Okay, Kory and Rodney, the very first product you recommend are these blue light glasses and I’m so excited because I wanna hit you with a really hard question right out of the gate. Someone else already recommended these blue light glasses on our store so obviously, if we’ve got two dropshippers recommending it… Three, sorry, count you two. Then it’s saturated, right?
Kory: Wrong, wrong.
Rodney: Over-saturation is a myth.
Kory: Yeah, of course, there are like industries that are way harder to penetrate but…
Rodney: At the same time, if someone else is doing it, you can find flaws in their system and build your business just in a better way than they are and reduce any inefficiencies that they’re currently using or currently experiencing.
Kory: If there are however many people that have access to the internet or however many millions of people that are online shoppers, you can’t tell me that there’s only one store supplying all of these people. Like what if they have a bad shopping experience on there or they’ve tried to purchase a product and they never received it or the customer service was horrible, they never got a response back? They’re gonna tell their friends never to go there, they’re never gonna shop there again, they’re gonna write a bad review.
Well, there’s your opportunity. Okay, what have they done wrong? You’ve read about them on Reddit or on other forums. Make sure you focus on the customer satisfaction side of things. Make sure you set up shipping options and channels that get them to the customer. There are infinite ways to pick apart a store if you can go and dig deeper into what they do.
Jessica: So is that what you mean by… ’cause I was gonna call you out for saying reduce inefficiencies like let’s bring it down a level. That’s kind of what you’re talking about. Actually find the stores that are selling this and you, you would go to those stores, look into the whole process and maybe even buy a product?
Kory: Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.
Jessica: Our beginner dropshippers are gonna say, “I have no control over packaging. I have no control over shipping times.” How would you respond?
Rodney: So I would just improve your marketing then and kind of build your own organic Instagram engine to see if there’s a market for it first and build a community around that. That way you can test, “Okay which type of glasses are these people looking for? What style of glasses are these people looking for?”
Jessica: Just one more question about this product before we move on. So you guys, your fantasy gaming niche store, it made $3,000 over Black Friday?
Rodney: Yeah.
Kory: Yeah.
Jessica: And then it made like $75,000 in December, right?
Rodney: Yeah.
Kory: Yeah.
Jessica: Bananas. And as we film this, we’re approaching the holiday season. Is it now or never for someone who wants to start a dropshipping store? Should they really try to start the store today and then try to get those holiday sales or what would you say?
Rodney: I mean, if you can, yeah like… for us, we did it on a whim. Just because Black Friday was coming up and we just kind of went with it and it ended up working. But I mean, it’s kind of when you’re ready to go yourself, right? You have to be mentally and physically prepared to enter it, I guess.
Kory: We definitely weren’t prepared on the backend. But we knew this was our best opportunity to enter the market. It was October when we pushed the website live and then from there we got one or two sales while we were building it and continuing to build it and then finally we saw Black Friday like four days away and we were like, “We need to do something.” But, more important than that is your website might not be polished, you might not have everything set up but what you can do is you can collect customer information and data and that for us is like digital goal. That’s the most important thing you can get ’cause over the course of Black Friday and then the holiday season, we got, we got our Instagram from 8,000 up to 20,000 plus… Collected over 30,000 emails and that set us up for the rest of the year.
Jessica: You guys had a really genius product that you sold on Black Friday but I wanna talk about that with the next product.
2. Reusable Collapsible Water Bottle
Jessica: Alright, so the next product that you’re recommending is a reusable, collapsible water bottle.
Rodney: Yes.
Jessica: Why?
Rodney: We actually bought this product before we went to Asia two years ago and we didn’t realize it was a dropshipping product and this is actually the exact same product that we bought and we paid I think roughly 30 dollars for it.
Jessica: Oh my gosh! And it’s…
Rodney: And it’s $1.10.
Jessica: It’s $1.10.
Kory: Yeah.
Rodney: Yeah and we were satisfied with our purchase too, and we used it all throughout our five-month trip.
Kory: Yeah, we brought them to Europe with us too.
Jessica: All the reasons that you just described for buying this water bottle or selling it sound pretty legit to me but I know… I’m gonna push you to think of some more creative reasons because tell… If you were to tell the viewers about the product that you were selling, the Black Friday when you started to make it big ’cause you took a product that anyone could have found and you added another element to it.
Rodney: Yeah, so with the niche that we’re working in, it kind of… With fantasy gaming niche, it comes with an element of surprise and chance so we wanted to incorporate that into our product so we took a product that wasn’t necessarily as flashy traditionally as it could be so we added an element of chance to this product so it kind of brought another level or another layer to the purchasing process for our customers to add another level of excitement for them.
Jessica: Cool okay, so if you’re so good at taking a product that is commonplace and adding a level of mystique that really helps it to resonate with its target market…
Rodney: Right.
Jessica: Do that here. You’ve got a water bottle, why… How can I make this stand out to customers so it doesn’t compete with all the other reusable bottles?
Kory: When we travel, we travel with just our backpacks. We’re very minimalist people, we try to be as frugal as possible put everything back into our business. An opportunity with the water bottles here could be, you know, if you’re on a size budget with, you know, your backpack’s only 40, 50 liters, well the space that you’re saving by taking a traditional two-liter water bottle or however big it is and reducing that down to something that could fit in your pocket is huge for us.
Jessica: And as you guys talk, I’m seeing you… You’re kind of narrowing down, in the AliExpress description, we see the word “travel”, I’m sure outdoors is there but you’re niche-ing down, so it’s not just travel. It’s minimalistic travel.
Kory: Yeah.
Jessica: Or it’s not just outdoors, it’s maybe ultra-light hiking or whatever.
Kory: Exactly.
Jessica: There’s your content or your ad right there like one water bottle saved equals two extra camera batteries or whatever…
Kory: Yeah, exactly.
Rodney: Yeah, exactly. Or even just the reduction in weight as well, right? You’re gonna travel super light, you wanna have the lightest products available to you.
Jessica: So we’ve been talking about fairly inexpensive products so far and it’s not too hard to see how one could make a profit on this product but your next product is quite expensive and so I’m gonna really push you to explain your pricing strategy.
Kory: Yeah.
Rodney: Yeah.
3. Mechanical Keyboard
Jessica: Okay, what I see is a rainbow keyboard. But what you see is a mechanical keyboard? Explain this product to me.
Rodney: Yeah, so with the increased amounts of people gaming and participating in online activity, we’re kind of looking towards people who are looking for a more responsive keyboard and they’re looking for those kinds of gaming or PC setups that have the full light incorporation to make their… what’s it called…
Kory: A battle station.
Rodney: A battle station, yeah.
Jessica: Okay and this is an expensive product. This ranges from $25 approximately to $50. So how do you go about selling something like this and still making a profit or enough margins for ads?
Rodney: Right. So with something like this, you kind of really have to market it very well. You have to advertise it as a very premium product and your marketing has to reflect that. I would go through and show the benefits of all the lighting systems, the LED lighting system, the responsiveness of the keyboard, how it can improve your gameplay, how it can improve your just daily typing and highlight that with fully detailed and laid out benefits package of the product.
Jessica: Is this risky for new dropshippers to sell though because we often tell new dropshippers, “Be careful about selling electronics equipment because it could fail and then you get a lot of returns on your hands.” Is this like an advanced or intermediate dropshipping product?
Kory: For new dropshippers, like of course, a more expensive product and an electronic has more possibility for failure. The lighting might not work or it might not arrive. Whatever the situation may be, but for this, we would definitely try and get the product beforehand for sure.
It’s something that you need to test yourself. If you’re happy with the product and you’ve been using it for a month and you know, you’re on the computer, hours per day. Maybe you’ve gotten 50 hours out of it and nothing’s happened and the responsive time is working for you no problem, then it would be something I would look into further. Not to say that if you’re a new dropshipper, like totally cross it off the list. But it’s something where, as compared to the plastic water bottle, that is more often than not, not going to fail as there are no electronics involved.
Rodney: There’s a lot less risk with something like that, whereas with the moving parts of the mechanical keyboard there definitely is a lot more risk. But at the same time, there could also be more upside because of the barrier to entry of people scared to take that risk as well.
Jessica: That’s a really good point and this would be a product you could target towards gamers, it sounds like.
Rodney: Yeah.
Kory: 100 percent.
Jessica: Speaking of communities, you guys did something really special when you were launching your store in that you cultivated a bunch of Instagram accounts and kind of tested different niches against one another for free before spending any money on ads. So when you launched your store, it already had this foundation of the Instagram account.
Rodney: Yeah, exactly.
Jessica: How would you coach new dropshippers through doing the same thing?
Rodney: So with discovering new products, we kind of went through the process of… We were searching the internet, scouring everywhere online. One of the places where we started was Shopify’s exchange where we could see other stores that had been successful and they were actually selling their stores to other people so we were looking at their products that they were selling and kind of what niches they were in and what products were working, just to kind of spark innovation and kind of give us an idea of what was working currently and then from there we also just went through Instagram, Facebook and we would like and engage with ads that we would see for other dropshipping products that we would notice and the algorithm would start to tailor those types of products to us. So on our Instagram feeds, every time we would scroll through, we would be seeing other dropshipping products.
So we would kind of just continually for hours just scroll through Instagram looking for other products that may work and looking for companies that were doing things that we thought we could do better as well and then we started to work with some of the niches that we finally decided on and we ended up going with the one that had the highest engagement rate and that was the quickest growing community.
Jessica: So if I were to create a recipe, it would be to go to Shopify Exchange, look at what your competitors are doing to get some kind of… But they’re not even your competitors at that point…
Kory: No.
Rodney: Yeah, yeah.
Jessica: It’s just… Look at what successful stores have been doing and then research those further by searching for communities and ads on Facebook and engaging with them so you get served more of that.
Rodney: Exactly.
Kory: Yeah.
Jessica: And then you started these Instagram accounts and you were just… What kind of content were you putting on those accounts to grow them?
Kory: Pretty much we would just scour other Instagram pages, think of our own kind of content or things that we think these people would be interested in; reposting memes or crediting other videos or other people’s work on the account and then just trying to get any and all types of content related to that niche; put it on the Instagram and then see what kind of feedback you get. If people are constantly saying “Oh, this is just a repost from somewhere,” okay, maybe it’s not a good idea. But if you’re crediting someone’s video and then trying to get them exposure, they might think “Hey, this is great; I’m getting more eyes on this.”
Jessica: That’s really cool because not only are you building what will turn out to be your first customer base, but it sounds like you were also learning to speak the language one post at a time? Okay. So, “They talk like this” or “This is what they find funny.” That probably helped with copy once you started to spend money on that.
Kory: Yeah.
Rodney: Oh my goodness, yeah. it just kind of fully immersed us into our niche and something that we weren’t as familiar with but as we grew our community we started to just be immersed in it and develop our own kind of, I guess, a monologue from there.
Kory: Yeah.
Jessica: So you guys aren’t fantasy game players?
Rodney: Not really, no. Maybe when we were younger a little bit more so. But not as much right now.
Kory: Yeah.
Jessica: So this was really a niche that you found and you analyzed rather objectively and then saw the potential and you’re like, “Let’s go for it”?
Rodney: Yeah.
Jessica: One more question before we move on to the next product. You’ve built this customer base on Instagram with your time. How much time does or should it take to do that?
Rodney: It takes a lot, to be honest. If you want to build a solid community and you want to grow it properly…
Jessica: You were saying you were like in the bathroom at work posting on Instagram, right?
Rodney: Yeah, yeah. So we were… It takes a lot of dedication; you gotta kind of engage your audience and be constantly uploading new content, and liking content, responding to comments, kind of finding new content to post and it’s very tedious. But ultimately, it builds a strong organic engine for your business and builds a community.
Kory: And like more importantly, it’s free, right? So for us, and as most people, like we said, where we lived, where we lived all your money is going into things just to get by. Well, then you don’t have the money, necessarily, to invest in a business that is… Very potentially could fail, and fail quickly, and that would eat a lot of your money. So for us, we figured, if we’re gonna do this we’re gonna bootstrap it the entire way and any money we do make from it we’ll reinvest back in, and that’s all we’re gonna do. We have living expenses covered for the next little while, so all we have to do is focus on this.
Jessica: It sounds like someone out there should definitely start an Instagram account dedicated to battle stations or mechanical keyboards.
Kory: Yeah, absolutely.
Jessica: So let’s move on to the next product.
4. Oil Diffuser
Jessica: Okay. For your next product, you recommend a humidifier with LED lights. I’m just gonna channel our viewers right now… They know how to find this on Amazon; I know how to find it on Amazon. Why won’t customers just find this on Amazon? Why would they buy this from a dropshipper?
Rodney: Marketing; create a story around it; differentiate yourself from Amazon. So if you’re building a product page that can kind of immerse the customer into the brand and the story that you’re trying to tell and you can really engage them through that, then I think you can capture their attention and sell your product through…
Kory: Yeah, it’s definitely tough to compete with Amazon. There is no question they probably can always sell it cheaper than you can with their buying power but more often than not the market that we’re targeting with our own store is very competitive as well and we do compete with Amazon but we want to give them a better brand experience.
Rodney: Especially if you can put the right product in front of the right person at the right time. That is ultimately what it comes down to; if you can get that product in front of that person and your sales funnel is smooth, then there are limited amounts of friction and ultimately it can work.
Jessica: Yeah. That’s something that a lot of dropshippers say is, “Amazon is not advertising individual products with creative copy and video ads the way that dropshippers are.” And people aren’t going to Facebook to shop, which is why when you see an ad that’s interesting, the customer gets to that ad before they might go to Amazon.
Rodney: Yeah.
Kory: Yeah.
Jessica: But I’m still not satisfied. One of the things I know you guys do with your store is, you have like a community that has really kind of gathered around the store and it sounds like they’ll even jump at the chance to submit content for your website, for your newsletter.
Rodney: Absolutely.
Jessica: Is that something that someone can build into a brand for this and if so, I’m gonna push you to tell me what that might look like?
Kory: Of course, this is just one product but there are probably so many other things related to people that would buy this product and buy something else related to that, right? So there are a lot of moms out there, let’s say, that are super into essential oils these days. Well, are you able to source essential oils as well? You could upsell them or give them oils for free if they purchase your product from you, whereas in Amazon, you might get upsold the oils at full price. Depending on how you price this and what your marketing strategy is, it might work for you.
Jessica: I can see this being a cool product for people who are into aromatherapy and maybe… You talk about, you combine a drop of one oil and a drop of another… You create recipes and in that sense, you might be soliciting from your community what oils would you combine for your humidifier.
Rodney: Absolutely. Kind of create engagement through that as well and create comment sections where they can talk amongst each other and discuss their recipes or what aromatherapy oils are working for them… That kind of stuff.
Jessica: ‘Cause that kind of thing would never appear on an Amazon review.
Rodney: No.
Kory: No.
Rodney: Yeah. It’s less community-involved and less personalized.
Jessica: I have to just point out here how not lazy you guys are about your business. I think it’s really a key to your success because a lot of people will complain about even ordering one test product for themselves but you would even advise, “Go above and beyond, send a test product to a friend. Ask them how long it took to get there,” because you’re getting more and more data to use about the business that you’re setting up.
Rodney: Right. You just kinda wanna avoid get-rich-quick schemes here, if you wanna build a solid business, you have to ensure that your products are correct and that your customers are gonna ultimately be satisfied when they’re purchasing the products, right?
Kory: You don’t really make money once you make the sale. You make money when the customer is satisfied and they’re not trying to charge back their credit card or get a refund or dispute it with you. That’s just a nightmare. So make sure everything is streamlined first and then once you’re happy with getting the product to and from the supplier to the merchant or to the customer, from there you can say “Okay, it’s working,” and then maybe test a few ads or test on your Instagram once you get maybe 10 sales, 30 sales, if all those go pretty streamlined or maybe have a less than five percent hiccup rate in terms of suppliers not sending the product properly or it taking too long or them not receiving it, then you know you have something that’s worthwhile looking into on your hands.
Jessica: That’s cool. That patience that you had in building your business, it’s very obvious you spent it working hard so that now, you can travel the world and work on your business full-time.
Kory: Yeah.
Rodney: Yeah.
Jessica: Really cool.
Rodney: That’s the goal, yeah.
Jessica: Okay, let’s move on to the next product.
5. Wireless Bluetooth Adaptor
Rodney: Alright, so this is a mini Bluetooth adapter for your phone. So it plugs into an auxiliary port in your car or I guess any auxiliary port but it’s mainly used for cars with the aux cords without Bluetooth systems, so it essentially turns your car into having a Bluetooth stereo system without having to implement a full new stereo.
Jessica: Oh that’s cool. Okay so I can see the appeal of it, but one thing that I really wanna ask you guys about is product testing. So say a dropshipper thinks this is high potential, how would you advise them to test for that potential?
Rodney: So I would go through Facebook Ads and look for niches or groups or categories of people that you think would be the target audience for this product and I would create a couple of ad sets and test them out at maybe $5 to $10 a day just to kind of see if you’re getting clicks. If you’re getting any sort of engagement…
Jessica: And the ad sets would vary by audience interest?
Rodney: Yes.
Jessica: Okay.
Rodney: Yeah and then from there, if you’re not getting any engagement or clicks, I would check your ad copy and I would reverse engineer it to see what the issue is. So it may be the product, it may be the ad copy itself, it may be your target customers. So I would go through there and until you start to get some feedback from it, I would just continually test and if you’re not getting any feedback at all, then I would kind of rethink the whole process and…
Jessica: Does feedback equal sales?
Rodney: Yes and no. So just engagement in general, right? You’re not necessarily gonna get a sale right away with a $5 ad set but you can definitely… If you’re getting clicks, that means there’s interest in the product.
Jessica: Okay. Let’s talk numbers then. So this is a product that costs $2 approximately with shipping and say it’s priced for 10 dollars in a store and you were spending 10 dollars a day on two ad sets. Then based on that kind of math, when would you say, “I spent $100 on ads, I’m gonna kill it.” Or would you say, “Oh, don’t spend more than $30 on ads before you kill it?”
Rodney: I would definitely spend at least $100 if you’re serious about testing a product.
Jessica: Oh, really, okay.
Rodney: But then again, to get to that point, like we said earlier, you would order the product, ensure that this is what you wanna go with, right? So instead of just testing a bunch of products which we see a lot of the time, people will just get very hungry for just getting something out there and just testing something at random. There’s kind of no point in doing that until you’re sure that this thing is gonna work all the way through the supply chain, right? So from there, I… You’re gonna have to make an investment into testing it out and if you don’t wanna make that investment, you can again, test it with creating an organic Instagram account and kind of testing it through that method.
Kory: Especially with your cost per click, I mean it varies so much, right, sometimes it could be $5 or you could get it down to under a dollar so if your product is only selling at $10 and you’re getting ad clicks for under a dollar, then you might have something there. Right? It’s very new, your budget isn’t optimized fully on Facebook or even Google ads at that point, right? You don’t know, you’ve just started putting money and so you can’t expect to be getting the cheapest clicks possible. You have to know that you have to spend money to make money.
Rodney: I think it’s key for people to not get discouraged if you’re not getting sales right away, just because people don’t really realize that you’re collecting data throughout this whole process as well which is super valuable, right? So as you continue to collect data, you can target your ads a little bit more and continue to get the lower cost per click and continue to further narrow down who your target audience is.
Jessica: Okay, let’s move on to the next product.
6. Selfie Ring Light
Jessica: So this product is a selfie ring light and I want to ask first why do you think this is a good product for dropshippers to sell and then I have two really divisive questions I’m gonna end with.
Rodney: Okay, yeah. So just to start off, it’s fairly cheap on Aliexpress, it’s only $3.75.
Kory: Find a supplier that has ePacket shipping. If not test it buy it if the AliExpress standard shipping works and it comes within two to three weeks that it says, great but more importantly I mean to buy a full light setup to take photos is costly first of all.
Rodney: Costly, inconvenient you don’t wanna carry it around with you, right? This is something that people can fit in their purse or their backpack or any sort of thing that they’re carrying with them and it offers them the ability to get studio-quality lighting at kind of, like, a budget rate.
Jessica: Now I wanna know if someone clicks and they go to the product page, will they see a countdown timer? Should they see a countdown timer? Because dropshippers are always arguing about how many kinds of bells and whistles and apps you should put on the product page and countdown timers are a big one.
Rodney: I would say no I think it kind of looks scammy and a little bit overplayed. I think it was very prominent in dropshipping in the past and people are kind of acclimatized to that now where it’s they’re aware of it so if I see kind of a countdown timer, I feel like it kind of cheapens the website a little bit whereas you should let the product speak for itself. If you wanna promote a high-quality brand and a good brand presence, instead of trying to force them through a countdown timer. So I think… I would say no.
Kory: Yeah, no I would agree it’s… It… first of all it can slow down your website especially as we’ve noticed that before. We didn’t see too much difference in our conversion rates when we had one and didn’t have one. We’ve definitely tested it out but we prefer not to. As he said, it looks like a scammer, it looks like you know… I just want to take your money right away, I don’t really want to give you an experience on my website. I’m not really trying to build a brand, I’m just trying to get you in and out as quick as possible.
Rodney: I feel like initially, it may work but in the long run, if you’re trying to really build a lifetime customer value that’s strong you kind of wanna have that clean presentation on your website versus having something that’s almost gimmicky because it works… It’s kind of like a one-trick pony, you get them in once and the next time they come back they realize okay, it’s another countdown timer. I’ve already seen this before so I don’t think this is real. I think a lot of people just see past that now it’s better just to go with a more authentic approach.
Kory: Yeah.
Jessica: Cool. Okay, and the second divisive question is free shipping, yes or no?
Kory: Yeah this is also a played-out thing as well. I mean definitely, offer free shipping or we like to offer free shipping after a certain point of purchase has been added in the cart but you’ve seen it over the past few years. I’ve definitely seen it on Instagram the whole this watch is zero dollars just pay shipping and it might be like $40 of shipping but like in what world is it anything that’s this light cost $40 in shipping or maybe $15 in shipping, like the watches we’ve seen it with bracelets like anchor bracelets…
Rodney: I definitely think that’s a thing to do if you’re trying to just create a quick buck and maybe try to… I feel like it’s gambling at that point just because you’re trying to get people in, get them to make a purchase as indecisive… Or as quickly as possible and kind of not thinking about what they’re doing but in the long run, I don’t think it works out very well.
Kory: Yeah.
Jessica: Okay so free shipping up to a point it’s kind of a good way to go?
Kory: Yeah but structure your shipping not to be crazy expensive either, right? We’ve tested out $7, $8 shipping and the conversion rate just dives after that but maybe between $2 to $4 maybe up to $5 that’s pretty reasonable. People are already pretty normalized to seeing having to pay shipping regardless so make it a reasonable price for them. If it’s a $30, $40 product and they’re paying an extra $5 in shipping great but if it’s also a $30 or $40 product and you have free shipping after $50 you will have a good chance that they’re gonna want to spend $10 or $12 more for another product just to get free shipping.
Jessica: Yeah. Kory and Rodney you guys have been a wealth of information today.
Rodney: Thank you.
Jessica: Before I let you go can you share one piece of advice for a new dropshipper.
Rodney: Fall in love with the process essentially just really starts you… Instead of getting discouraged when things go wrong, reflect on what went wrong and how you can improve upon it the next time and just keep pushing it through because eventually it’s gonna work.
Kory: And yeah to go along those lines I would say, ultimately, determine what your end goal is first. Whether that’s to retire early or to have a passive income if you can manage to get people to run the store for you eventually or just free up your own time. For us, we wanna be able to travel wherever and be free so that’s kind of our ultimate goal. Once you kind of flip the switch in your head of like, I know I can achieve this. There are so many other people out there doing it and then realizing that ecommerce is only growing, there are more and more people getting access to the internet.
Rodney: Exponentially.
Kory: And more and more and more people purchasing online. Realize that the whole saturation myth is… Yeah, there are definitely harder areas to penetrate but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
Jessica: Yeah yeah the saturation myth is what will keep your competition well.
Kory: Exactly.
Rodney: Exactly people kind of push the saturation myth so they keep people away from dropshipping.
Kory: There’s always a solution. That’s essentially our motto is like we’ve run into issues after issues over the past year. But we’ve gotten through it.
Rodney: Yes and anybody else that has a successful business, they’re just a person like you are. They just figured it out yeah you can just continually push through and you can do it yeah.
Jessica: That’s awesome that’s great. If you enjoyed today’s interview, there are a lot more coming. Until next time, learn often.
Kory: Market better.
Rodney: And sell more.
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