Never Do These Mistakes in Dropshipping | Top 5 Mistakes
I wanna talk about my top five dropshipping mistakes. Honestly, I could talk about 100 of them, okay, but I wanna boil it down to the top five. So if you're watching this and you're looking to take ecommerce a little bit more seriously, if you're looking to take your drive to your store to the next level, just watch this video and trust me, the next five things that I'm gonna outline are really gonna save you a bunch of time, it's gonna save you some mistakes and it's gonna save you money, ultimately. Before we get into that, I do wanna give a quick shout out to our contest winner from last week. I did mention a giveaway for a 30-minute consultation call. And we could go ahead and pick our winner right here.
I got my laptop open, so we're on this comment picker app, but I'm just gonna paste this link from the last video and then we'll go and select the YouTube comments. Over 300 comments in that one and we'll just start the raffle. And the winner is Mya Vids, okay, so Maya Vids has 10K per day on Shopify. You inspired me to get my first sale. Well, Maya, first of all, congratulations on getting your first sale. That's actually really dope and that just goes to show you the power of this content on this channel. It's enough to get the ball rolling for you. But congratulations, 30-minute phone call.
All you gotta do is send me over a email with confirmation and proof that you are the owner of this profile and I'll go ahead and reply with a link, so that you can book your 30-minute phone call and we can hopefully get you from not just making that first sale but scaling that up and generating a couple thousand dollars a day with your store, all right. So congratulations, Maya, but let's get into the video. If you want a chance to win a 30-minute consultation call just like Maya did, go ahead and comment on this video, dropshipping mistakes and whatever comment you feel. Okay, so put dropshipping mistakes and whatever comment you have and I'll enter you in the next video as a raffle, so you could get the chance to win that same phone call, all right. Top five dropshipping mistakes, okay, and the first one is going to be apparel.
Okay, do not do apparel if you are just getting into the ecommerce space. Am I saying it's not profitable, am I saying that you shouldn't do apparel at all? No, but what I am saying is if you're someone who's just getting into the ecommerce space, especially if you're dropshipping different types of fabrics and different type of SKUs, it's gonna be very, very complicated for you to even grasp managing the inventory, the sizes come in different sizes when you're shipping from places like China. So it's just gonna be a huge headache. I tried this myself, especially because the business I did have before I got into dropshipping was a t-shirt business and sizing was a very, very, very big I would say point of emphasis when it comes to apparel. You want it to not only look good, but you have to think about the fit.
And because the fit is so important, it's going to lead to a lot of returns. Whether you're on ecommerce or just a brick and mortar store, when you're dealing with apparel, the return rates are a little bit higher because everybody's bodies are different. Everybody wears and things fit differently. So it could be perfectly made, but if it doesn't fit the person how they would like, you're usually gonna see that they're gonna return it and that's gonna cause you a lot of headache, especially as someone who's just getting started. But if you are a little more seasoned, if you know exactly what type of fabrics you wanna use, exactly how it's gonna fit and you have a good grasp on all of that in your product, definitely do apparel because the margins are high there and there's a lot of room for scalability, even though it is such a competitive space, everybody needs clothes. Everybody's shopping, everybody's ongoing going to be purchasing new clothes at some point. So that's my take on apparel. The second thing is to actually let your ads optimize, okay.
So as dropshippers, a big part of what we do is the advertising and this is what we pride ourselves on. This is what we believe we should be good at. And if you're good at advertising, the point is to be aggressively patient. Stay with me here because a lot of people would immediately launch an ad and then they expect the results to come in right away. It's gonna take time for your ads to optimize. It's gonna take time for Facebook to collect that data for you. And if you cut off your ad sets early, you've actually done more harm than just not running the ad set at all. So I would really suggest have that patience. As soon as you launch new ads or you're testing new ads on Facebook, don't go and change the budgets because you think something is not working. Trust that you set it up the right way, close your laptop and go enjoy yourself outside of the ecommerce space, all right.
Go hang out, just forget about it. The best way to go about it is to just consider the budget that you put in as a loss, okay, just consider it gone and that way at least you'll be worry-free because at least you expected to not make a return. And usually if you do everything the right way, you will make a return. But that is my take on that. And also don't edit your budgets, okay, it's really frowned upon to let's say you have an ad set that's running for two days and it's doing really well, so you decide, you know what? I'm gonna take the budget that's at $5 a day right now and I'm gonna up it to $20 a day. You shouldn't do this at all, all right.
And just because it's a machine and when the machine is programmed to learn and optimize in one direction, any little change to that machine is going to reset the optimization stage. So I would recommend if you do plan on changing budgets or anything specific about the ad set, just go and make a whole new ad set and cut that one, that existing one that you have, just cut it off and start over because it's equivalent to doing that if you were gonna change the budgets. So that is my second mistake of all time. It's just constantly not letting the ads optimize and thinking, oh, there's probably something wrong. It's not giving me the numbers I want, so I have to change something. Just let it rock. The third mistake I would say is hiring a marketer.
Don't hire anyone of these people who are professional marketers, digital marketers, whatever. They might be promoting their services for you, but ignore all of that, okay, just because these people aren't really professionals. Everybody can just put up a website and say they're an agency, but they're running ads out of their parent's basement or something. So don't fall for these, don't hire. And usually you'll see that they're gonna charge high rates. They're gonna charge like 1,000 to $2,000 a month. If not, they'll try to do a revenue share with you where they say, oh, I want 10% of your whole revenue not even of your profit, but of your revenue. And this can a lot of time leads to a lot of pain and a lot of headache down the road just because there can be some discrepancies between, oh, I generated 1.2 million this month and they're saying, oh no, you actually generated 1.5 that's contributed to our ad.
So you wanna avoid that confusion in the first place. And the bottom line is marketing is the thing that you're supposed to be good at. If you're actually good at the marketing, you won't need to hire anybody else to do your marketing unless you just don't enjoy marketing at all. But what I'm trying to get at is if they're so good at doing the marketing, then why aren't they doing it themselves, to build hyper profitable businesses themselves? And just from speaking back to my experience, I remember hiring a marketer just because I felt like there was some things I might have been missing. I felt like there was some things I could've learned and got better at. So I hired this marketing agency and what happened was, one, they wanted a $3,000 set up fee. So they wanted me to pay them $3,000 right off the bat with no results and lock me in on a contract for three months. But then, a lot of their ads didn't do well.
The ads they were running actually performed a lot worse than the ads that I was running. And part of the reason why is because, one, they have to now learn your business all over again. So imagine you coming into a company having to learn their product, their business, everything and having to align the marketing message up for them from scratch as a different company. It's actually taking a whole step back and just hopefully be able to produce you a return. The second part is I realized that the ads that I was running on the side because they was running ads, so they had a few ads that they were running and testing out and they was going as planned. But I ran ads on the side just to see, one, I didn't want my revenue to slow down, but two, I wanted to see if there was a difference in the results that we were getting.
And I come to find out that my results were two times better than theirs in a span of three months. So that was just a huge waste of money. Don't think my cure to not being good at Facebook Ads is to hire somebody else to be good at Facebook Ads for me. It basically removes all your leverage. Your leverage as a dropshipper is not that you're great at building businesses. It's that you're good at marketing and you're good at acquiring customers and driving traffic to your website. That's your thing.
If you give that up to somebody else, then you really have no significance and that person can easily kick you out at some point, no matter how the business is structured. Bottom line is you wanna be the person in charge of your marketing because what you'll find is a lot of times these marketing agencies and other gurus and things like that are usually just trying to experiment with your money and they're not attached to your advertising dollars as much as you are. All right, so don't hire anybody else. I only suggest hiring for simple tasks that are product research, things that you're gonna have to do anyways. Customize a specific thing on your store, but don't hire somebody to do the marketing. The fourth mistake that I would avoid as a beginner is trying to sell multiple products at once, okay. It's very uncertain and that's fine.
It's okay to be uncertain and not know what product is gonna work. But don't try to cure it and battle that uncertainty by just testing everything at once. 'Cause what you're gonna find is usually, one, you're not gonna know what to look at anyways because you're just getting started. Two, it's gonna be a lot more of a headache. It's gonna be a lot more SKUs for you to deal with and it's gonna be harder to brand your store down the line because you're gonna get attached to the little trickles of revenue that might be coming from one or two products even though 80% of your revenue is coming from just one product.
I also realized that just focusing on one product is gonna allow you to really scale it, 10 times more than you would be able to scale it if you had your focus shifted towards two or three other products. It's really, really easy if you get one product to work, that is all you need. It's equivalent to having 10 different products because with the power of the internet all you have to do is up your budgets a little bit, duplicate some things here and there, take what's already working and just increase the input and you're gonna realize that you'll end up leaving with a lot more revenue than just doing a few different products. And I can speak to this from experience because I owned a general store and you guys seen me on this channel launch multiple stores just for example purposes and I actually don't like doing that. The reason why is 'cause it takes my focus away from my main store and that main store is already working.
What's the point of building something that's gonna work just to leave it and go and try to build something else that's gonna work? You're just chasing your own tail. Just focus on one thing. Power of focus and if you guys haven't seen my video called Six Figure Manifestation, I'll link it up here. It really goes in on just backing it up from not even on a dropshipping level, but from a life perspective how to be able to focus in a time and age where people love instant gratification, people want results like that. The people who can focus will win. The fifth mistake and probably the most crucial mistake out of all of these is to try and have a perfect launch.
Do not, do not, do not try and have a perfect store and a perfect advertising campaign, perfect product before you even launch anything because you're gonna get killed. It's probably the worst thing that you could do because, one, perfectionism is gonna kill you. Two, everything that looks good or you might assume looks good, probably doesn't look good in your customer's eyes. So I see a lot of people go and try and build out this perfect store for their demographic. They make all these assumptions like, oh yeah, this is gonna sell to this type of person. I'm gonna sell this baby product to moms in this area and doing this and the store has to be a baby, it has to have these baby fonts in it. You don't know until you start driving traffic to your store. You don't know from a data standpoint how people are gonna react to your perfect store.
So I don't suggest having a perfect launch just because, one, you're probably gonna anticipate and misjudge a lot of things before that launch date and two, when that launch comes, you're gonna be very disappointed by the results 'cause you're gonna realize you could've got the same results by just starting a scrabby store where the only button that was working was the checkout button and at least people were able to pay you. It's just a lot of headache. My motto is don't make the right decision, make your decisions right. It's okay to learn as you go. You're not gonna catch a disease because you didn't launch a perfect business or you don't have the most beautiful theme in the world. Start with a free theme on Shopify, start you at 14-day free trial. Go ahead and build these stores. Get comfortable with using the platform. It's very easy in the first place, but just go and work with these free themes. See how that works out for you.
Once you have something that works, then you wanna invest in it. But there's no point in investing in something that you don't even know works yet. So that's why I'm saying perfectionism will kill you, setting launch dates and things like that, it will kill you if you don't even have a grasp on what is gonna work or not. So the first thing is don't sell apparel as a beginner. Don't sell apparel. The second thing is don't edit your budgets, don't change anything on your ad sets. If you let them run, let them optimize. Let them do their thing. The third thing is do not hire a marketer. Don't rely on somebody to get good at marketing for you. It's actually a lot worse than you think. And the fourth thing is not to focus on too many products and testing too many things in the beginning stage. You don't wanna overwhelm yourself, especially if you don't know what to look at. And the fifth and final thing is not to have a perfect launch. Just go start something, drive some traffic, at least you'll be able to see from a numerical standpoint what works or not and then at that point everything else after is considered an investment to make it better.
Okay, you start scrappy, then make it look good, then make it optimized and then have that seven figure store that we all wanna have. So those are my top five mistakes. If you did like this video, make sure you like, comment and subscribe. I try to squeeze in as much value even though it's just five mistakes. But make sure you like, comment, subscribe if you learned something. Also, I'm thinking about doing a live Q & A on YouTube 'cause I think I just unlocked that feature 'cause we hit that 20K sub mark. So thank y'all for that, first of all, but let me know. Do y'all want me to do a live Q & A, would you show up? Let me know if you're interested in that and I'll go ahead and consider setting that up sometime over a weekend. We can just hang out on YouTube for about an hour or two, answer you guys' questions.
Never Do These Mistakes in Dropshipping | Top 5 Mistakes
I got my laptop open, so we're on this comment picker app, but I'm just gonna paste this link from the last video and then we'll go and select the YouTube comments. Over 300 comments in that one and we'll just start the raffle. And the winner is Mya Vids, okay, so Maya Vids has 10K per day on Shopify. You inspired me to get my first sale. Well, Maya, first of all, congratulations on getting your first sale. That's actually really dope and that just goes to show you the power of this content on this channel. It's enough to get the ball rolling for you. But congratulations, 30-minute phone call.
All you gotta do is send me over a email with confirmation and proof that you are the owner of this profile and I'll go ahead and reply with a link, so that you can book your 30-minute phone call and we can hopefully get you from not just making that first sale but scaling that up and generating a couple thousand dollars a day with your store, all right. So congratulations, Maya, but let's get into the video. If you want a chance to win a 30-minute consultation call just like Maya did, go ahead and comment on this video, dropshipping mistakes and whatever comment you feel. Okay, so put dropshipping mistakes and whatever comment you have and I'll enter you in the next video as a raffle, so you could get the chance to win that same phone call, all right. Top five dropshipping mistakes, okay, and the first one is going to be apparel.
Okay, do not do apparel if you are just getting into the ecommerce space. Am I saying it's not profitable, am I saying that you shouldn't do apparel at all? No, but what I am saying is if you're someone who's just getting into the ecommerce space, especially if you're dropshipping different types of fabrics and different type of SKUs, it's gonna be very, very complicated for you to even grasp managing the inventory, the sizes come in different sizes when you're shipping from places like China. So it's just gonna be a huge headache. I tried this myself, especially because the business I did have before I got into dropshipping was a t-shirt business and sizing was a very, very, very big I would say point of emphasis when it comes to apparel. You want it to not only look good, but you have to think about the fit.
And because the fit is so important, it's going to lead to a lot of returns. Whether you're on ecommerce or just a brick and mortar store, when you're dealing with apparel, the return rates are a little bit higher because everybody's bodies are different. Everybody wears and things fit differently. So it could be perfectly made, but if it doesn't fit the person how they would like, you're usually gonna see that they're gonna return it and that's gonna cause you a lot of headache, especially as someone who's just getting started. But if you are a little more seasoned, if you know exactly what type of fabrics you wanna use, exactly how it's gonna fit and you have a good grasp on all of that in your product, definitely do apparel because the margins are high there and there's a lot of room for scalability, even though it is such a competitive space, everybody needs clothes. Everybody's shopping, everybody's ongoing going to be purchasing new clothes at some point. So that's my take on apparel. The second thing is to actually let your ads optimize, okay.
So as dropshippers, a big part of what we do is the advertising and this is what we pride ourselves on. This is what we believe we should be good at. And if you're good at advertising, the point is to be aggressively patient. Stay with me here because a lot of people would immediately launch an ad and then they expect the results to come in right away. It's gonna take time for your ads to optimize. It's gonna take time for Facebook to collect that data for you. And if you cut off your ad sets early, you've actually done more harm than just not running the ad set at all. So I would really suggest have that patience. As soon as you launch new ads or you're testing new ads on Facebook, don't go and change the budgets because you think something is not working. Trust that you set it up the right way, close your laptop and go enjoy yourself outside of the ecommerce space, all right.
Go hang out, just forget about it. The best way to go about it is to just consider the budget that you put in as a loss, okay, just consider it gone and that way at least you'll be worry-free because at least you expected to not make a return. And usually if you do everything the right way, you will make a return. But that is my take on that. And also don't edit your budgets, okay, it's really frowned upon to let's say you have an ad set that's running for two days and it's doing really well, so you decide, you know what? I'm gonna take the budget that's at $5 a day right now and I'm gonna up it to $20 a day. You shouldn't do this at all, all right.
And just because it's a machine and when the machine is programmed to learn and optimize in one direction, any little change to that machine is going to reset the optimization stage. So I would recommend if you do plan on changing budgets or anything specific about the ad set, just go and make a whole new ad set and cut that one, that existing one that you have, just cut it off and start over because it's equivalent to doing that if you were gonna change the budgets. So that is my second mistake of all time. It's just constantly not letting the ads optimize and thinking, oh, there's probably something wrong. It's not giving me the numbers I want, so I have to change something. Just let it rock. The third mistake I would say is hiring a marketer.
Don't hire anyone of these people who are professional marketers, digital marketers, whatever. They might be promoting their services for you, but ignore all of that, okay, just because these people aren't really professionals. Everybody can just put up a website and say they're an agency, but they're running ads out of their parent's basement or something. So don't fall for these, don't hire. And usually you'll see that they're gonna charge high rates. They're gonna charge like 1,000 to $2,000 a month. If not, they'll try to do a revenue share with you where they say, oh, I want 10% of your whole revenue not even of your profit, but of your revenue. And this can a lot of time leads to a lot of pain and a lot of headache down the road just because there can be some discrepancies between, oh, I generated 1.2 million this month and they're saying, oh no, you actually generated 1.5 that's contributed to our ad.
So you wanna avoid that confusion in the first place. And the bottom line is marketing is the thing that you're supposed to be good at. If you're actually good at the marketing, you won't need to hire anybody else to do your marketing unless you just don't enjoy marketing at all. But what I'm trying to get at is if they're so good at doing the marketing, then why aren't they doing it themselves, to build hyper profitable businesses themselves? And just from speaking back to my experience, I remember hiring a marketer just because I felt like there was some things I might have been missing. I felt like there was some things I could've learned and got better at. So I hired this marketing agency and what happened was, one, they wanted a $3,000 set up fee. So they wanted me to pay them $3,000 right off the bat with no results and lock me in on a contract for three months. But then, a lot of their ads didn't do well.
The ads they were running actually performed a lot worse than the ads that I was running. And part of the reason why is because, one, they have to now learn your business all over again. So imagine you coming into a company having to learn their product, their business, everything and having to align the marketing message up for them from scratch as a different company. It's actually taking a whole step back and just hopefully be able to produce you a return. The second part is I realized that the ads that I was running on the side because they was running ads, so they had a few ads that they were running and testing out and they was going as planned. But I ran ads on the side just to see, one, I didn't want my revenue to slow down, but two, I wanted to see if there was a difference in the results that we were getting.
And I come to find out that my results were two times better than theirs in a span of three months. So that was just a huge waste of money. Don't think my cure to not being good at Facebook Ads is to hire somebody else to be good at Facebook Ads for me. It basically removes all your leverage. Your leverage as a dropshipper is not that you're great at building businesses. It's that you're good at marketing and you're good at acquiring customers and driving traffic to your website. That's your thing.
If you give that up to somebody else, then you really have no significance and that person can easily kick you out at some point, no matter how the business is structured. Bottom line is you wanna be the person in charge of your marketing because what you'll find is a lot of times these marketing agencies and other gurus and things like that are usually just trying to experiment with your money and they're not attached to your advertising dollars as much as you are. All right, so don't hire anybody else. I only suggest hiring for simple tasks that are product research, things that you're gonna have to do anyways. Customize a specific thing on your store, but don't hire somebody to do the marketing. The fourth mistake that I would avoid as a beginner is trying to sell multiple products at once, okay. It's very uncertain and that's fine.
It's okay to be uncertain and not know what product is gonna work. But don't try to cure it and battle that uncertainty by just testing everything at once. 'Cause what you're gonna find is usually, one, you're not gonna know what to look at anyways because you're just getting started. Two, it's gonna be a lot more of a headache. It's gonna be a lot more SKUs for you to deal with and it's gonna be harder to brand your store down the line because you're gonna get attached to the little trickles of revenue that might be coming from one or two products even though 80% of your revenue is coming from just one product.
I also realized that just focusing on one product is gonna allow you to really scale it, 10 times more than you would be able to scale it if you had your focus shifted towards two or three other products. It's really, really easy if you get one product to work, that is all you need. It's equivalent to having 10 different products because with the power of the internet all you have to do is up your budgets a little bit, duplicate some things here and there, take what's already working and just increase the input and you're gonna realize that you'll end up leaving with a lot more revenue than just doing a few different products. And I can speak to this from experience because I owned a general store and you guys seen me on this channel launch multiple stores just for example purposes and I actually don't like doing that. The reason why is 'cause it takes my focus away from my main store and that main store is already working.
What's the point of building something that's gonna work just to leave it and go and try to build something else that's gonna work? You're just chasing your own tail. Just focus on one thing. Power of focus and if you guys haven't seen my video called Six Figure Manifestation, I'll link it up here. It really goes in on just backing it up from not even on a dropshipping level, but from a life perspective how to be able to focus in a time and age where people love instant gratification, people want results like that. The people who can focus will win. The fifth mistake and probably the most crucial mistake out of all of these is to try and have a perfect launch.
Do not, do not, do not try and have a perfect store and a perfect advertising campaign, perfect product before you even launch anything because you're gonna get killed. It's probably the worst thing that you could do because, one, perfectionism is gonna kill you. Two, everything that looks good or you might assume looks good, probably doesn't look good in your customer's eyes. So I see a lot of people go and try and build out this perfect store for their demographic. They make all these assumptions like, oh yeah, this is gonna sell to this type of person. I'm gonna sell this baby product to moms in this area and doing this and the store has to be a baby, it has to have these baby fonts in it. You don't know until you start driving traffic to your store. You don't know from a data standpoint how people are gonna react to your perfect store.
So I don't suggest having a perfect launch just because, one, you're probably gonna anticipate and misjudge a lot of things before that launch date and two, when that launch comes, you're gonna be very disappointed by the results 'cause you're gonna realize you could've got the same results by just starting a scrabby store where the only button that was working was the checkout button and at least people were able to pay you. It's just a lot of headache. My motto is don't make the right decision, make your decisions right. It's okay to learn as you go. You're not gonna catch a disease because you didn't launch a perfect business or you don't have the most beautiful theme in the world. Start with a free theme on Shopify, start you at 14-day free trial. Go ahead and build these stores. Get comfortable with using the platform. It's very easy in the first place, but just go and work with these free themes. See how that works out for you.
Once you have something that works, then you wanna invest in it. But there's no point in investing in something that you don't even know works yet. So that's why I'm saying perfectionism will kill you, setting launch dates and things like that, it will kill you if you don't even have a grasp on what is gonna work or not. So the first thing is don't sell apparel as a beginner. Don't sell apparel. The second thing is don't edit your budgets, don't change anything on your ad sets. If you let them run, let them optimize. Let them do their thing. The third thing is do not hire a marketer. Don't rely on somebody to get good at marketing for you. It's actually a lot worse than you think. And the fourth thing is not to focus on too many products and testing too many things in the beginning stage. You don't wanna overwhelm yourself, especially if you don't know what to look at. And the fifth and final thing is not to have a perfect launch. Just go start something, drive some traffic, at least you'll be able to see from a numerical standpoint what works or not and then at that point everything else after is considered an investment to make it better.
Okay, you start scrappy, then make it look good, then make it optimized and then have that seven figure store that we all wanna have. So those are my top five mistakes. If you did like this video, make sure you like, comment and subscribe. I try to squeeze in as much value even though it's just five mistakes. But make sure you like, comment, subscribe if you learned something. Also, I'm thinking about doing a live Q & A on YouTube 'cause I think I just unlocked that feature 'cause we hit that 20K sub mark. So thank y'all for that, first of all, but let me know. Do y'all want me to do a live Q & A, would you show up? Let me know if you're interested in that and I'll go ahead and consider setting that up sometime over a weekend. We can just hang out on YouTube for about an hour or two, answer you guys' questions.
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