Dropshipping Australia with Zero Ad Spending | The only 3 things you need
By the end you will have an amazing store set up for free, products ready to sell and an audience who wants to buy. With zero money spent on ads!
1- Get a free shopify trial account. Don’t worry about the store name and details, we can change them at any point once we’re making our store.
2- Once it’s setup by using the guide, we install the Oberlo app and import any interesting products we find for our niche.
3- After you have completed the steps and have your store and IG account set up you will make and deploy your marketing chatbot.
Dropshipping Australia and Retail Arbitrage - How to make $1000+ a month with zero ad-spend
We use a combination of automation tools and apps to pull this off, It’s not as complicated as it seems, but takes a fair amount to work to get off the ground. Once launched you will be making money as you sleep.
we do not need to buy stock, pay to have an online store developed or spend money on ads with this method.Although we do not need to buy stock, pay to have an online store developed or spend money on ads with this method, there is still a chance you will not sell anything at first, with perseverance and willingness to learn you can make a lot of money though, with little to no risk.
Most people make sales in the first week of setting up their stores. conversion rates are good for the traffic we get because of the targeting we use when with the chatbots. These are typical first (slowest) month results from a recent store I set up. I got about 600 people onto the store in the first month and 23 converted.
A conversion rate of 3.8% and I did not pay a cent for that traffic. The product they bought was automatically shipped by a 3rd party so I did not need to have the item myself. The sales happen while I sleep. The next month I concentrate on increasing order value and traffic via bots.
dropshipping australia with shopify and oberlo
It’s important to note that this is gross revenue, however when all deductions are made I keep 65% because no money went to ad spending. So in the first month I made $480 profit which does not sound like a lot, however this is where we scale and add more bots, products etc. It also means that even if I did nothing else I should see sales every week as it’s on autopilot.
Once I see people buying, I spend time scaling until the store makes $1000 net profit, and then I move onto other ideas so I have a portfolio of decent earning stores.
Shopify Australia | How Much Does It Cost?
Your only costs will be buying a website domain name (business name) for about $15 and once you are ready to go live with your first store after the free 14 day trial you will need to pay for a Shopify monthly subscription to accept credit card payments to your store, this is $29 and can be cancelled if the store is unsuccessful.
These are the only overheads you will have and are unavoidable, you should make this back very quickly. Apart from these costs, everything else is completely free, no ordering stock or burning money on Facebook or Instagram ads.
This gives us a huge opportunity as early adopters of this new landscape.
The 3 Building Blocks We Use
I’ll explain briefly how this system works before getting into the step by step guide.
BLOCK 1 | Shopify Store Templates
Shopify Free Trial (Website + Product page/payment processor)
To quickly and cheaply create beautiful stores ready to sell our products, we use the free Shopify trial to set up our shop. When we are ready to launch and start making sales, we will then activate the store and have to pay the $29 fee. It means we can learn the ropes and play around and set up our store for 14 days free until we are ready.
Their website templates are built specifically to simplify eCommerce, drive sales and convert traffic. So it’s worth it in every way. They have everything you need to start, including payment processors so you can get paid easily once you start taking orders.
BLOCK 2 | Oberlo and Aliexpress for Dropshipping and Order Fulfilment
Oberlo are where the magic happen, it’s a plugin for your store that connects direct to AliExpress (Factory suppliers of all sorts of products)
Oberlo Australia Pricing, how it works and is Oberlo Free?
The short answer is yes, for what we need it for, the Oberlo app is free. They do have paid plans with some extra features but we wont be needing any of them.
Oberlo is a free app designed to connect Shopify directly with product manufacturers on AliExpress. This helps cut out a middle man and gets rid of any logistics usually associated with online retail.
With Oberlo you don’t need to pay for the stock, ship to customers or ever even see the product. Orders are only placed once somebody buys through your site.
By using Oberlo we can search for any product on the backend of our Shopify store that we want to sell, we then just add the product to our store, usually the suppliers have product images too but we will get into that later.
using this technique we can make sales without spending any money on advertising!
Once it’s imported into your store, you can sell them straight away. When somebody browses to your website and buys the product, the supplier will directly send the order to the customer.
Block 3 | Instagram Automation Strategy using bots (Free targeted traffic to your website)
The Secret Sauce - This technique I show you allows you to be surgical with your marketing. Even better, using this technique we can make sales and grow a brand without ever spending any money on advertising! The only caveat is that they take a percentage of sales, this is not an issue though as we factor that into the price we sell our products. Consider it a risk-free marketing budget.
Dropshipping Australia & Retail Arbitrage | 6 Step Guide to Your First Sale 2020
I want to give you as much value as possible in the shortest amount of time and help you start making money quickly. Once you’re up and running there will be a lot more to learn. Any questions you will have (and there will be many) please join the dropshipping Australia and Retail Arbitrage Facebook Group.
I will break it down into digestible chunks so we don’t get overwhelmed in the beginning.
Part 1) Sign up and set up your store, no design, just get it live and ready for business. We install the free template and Oberlo so you can begin browsing/importing products to sell.
Part 2) Importing a product into our store to sell right away. TIPS ON FINDING A NICHE PRODUCT INCLUDED*
Part 3) Setting up your shopify store and adding your product to the homepage.
Part 4) Setting up products for sales. Product descriptions and images.
Part 5) Set up an instagram account checklist included.
Part 6) Surgically target customers for free with by setting up our bots and target audience bot script & tips included. (more in FB group)
6 Step Guide To Your First No Risk Sale
PART 1 - Set Up Your Single Product Website
Click here to start and sign up for the free 14 day Shopify trial. It’s straight forward enough. Don’t worry about the business name too much here as these details can all be changed later on!
Once you sign up you’ll have access to the dashboard. We don’t need to worry about all the features of this just yet.
By default, we’re given a website name for free to host our store called something.myshopify.com. Obviously this looks terrible, so we should pay for a real website name. This can also be done through shopify and takes 5 minutes. It should cost around $15 to buy a domain name. If you’re just playing around to see how it all works, you can skip this step and keep the default Shopify name.
As my store is selling oil diffuser jewellery I choose to call my store Diffusey. Short, and brandable are what we are looking for here when naming your website. Also, don’t overthink it.
If you plan on selling something, which I would hope is your goal here, get a professional business name.
We will begin by acquiring our domain name. So customers will see my brand and website as diffusey.com instead of dffusey.myshopify.com.
The reason it’s important to pay for this should be obvious. You need your business and brand to look professional and credible if you hope to convert traffic into sales!
Install Your Shopify Theme and Oberlo,
Now you are signed up and have your business name (www.yourbrand.com) and have access to the Shopify dashboard we are going to install a basic template that we can add a product to and begin making your store pop.
We are looking for template stores that are build specifically for a small amount of products. These usually consist of simple designs with big beautiful images to get the customer to order without any distractions.
There are lots of free options, I use Brooklyn in my store. It’s free and does the job. Again, keep things simple.
Once it’s installed you can click the “Online Store” tab on the left to open your homepage. It will just have placeholder text and images. We will populate this later with our product images and text in the next steps.
PART 2 - Add Aliexpress Products To Your Store with Oberlo.
NOTE: If you need to log into Oberlo you can do so through the app section on your Shopify dashboard.
For the purpose of this tutorial we are going to assume you have a product in mind. If not don’t worry, jump into the retail arbitrage and dropshipping Australia Facebook group and we can brainstorm one with you, there are also some tips below. I’m trying to sell oil diffusers on my store, more specifically, oil diffuser jewellery.
The diffusers are unique, novel, lightweight (cheap shipping) and do not have many breakable parts. These are some considerations that make it a good choice. They are also cheap per unit and the mark up can be quite high on an item like this. I can get them on AliExpress for $1-2 with free shipping to the US and easily sell them for $15-$20.
We can browse Oberlo for keywords related to our niche to find product ideas. Then with one click, import a product to our store and modify the pricing, delivery method, images and product description.
Customers can then buy through our website instantly, when an order is place we simply place it with the supplier and they ship the product. Oberlo handles all this for us.
Tips for finding a niche product on Oberlo.
Ideally the niche market you will be targeting will be something you know a little something about, however it’s not essential. Sometimes you just find really cool products on AliExpress that fit the criteria and can then build a store and brand around them.
The most important thing is to make sure you have a clear audience in mind when picking a product. An example of a product I sold in the past would be a chakra bracelet, people who buy chakra bracelets usually identify with things like meditation, yoga, crystals etc. So using these hashtags, I am able to target the people I know are interested.
Shipping Methods Available - Make sure that it has ePacket as a shipping option. This is a shipping service that allows us to get products to the US customers in a reasonable time (20 days) for a reasonable price ($1-3). Even though we’re dropshipping from Australia our audience will largely be from the US depending on our niche. As the items we sell are impulse purchases and novel, people generally do not mind the longer delivery time, we also make this very clear (but in a well worded way) that delivery takes time.
Clear niche audience - Think, wooden straws being sold to people who hashtag things about ocean conservation)
Not common everyday objects or too easy to find on the web. Don’t sell everyday items like water filters for example.
Unique, novel or useful enough to your audience. The best products speak to how your customers self identify, chakra bracelets are a great example again, when you know your audience it’s easier to sell to them.
Lightweight - cheap shipping so you can bake it into the price and offer “Free Worldwide Shipping” in your website header. People love this as they don’t get a surprise at the checkout and abandon the cart.
No/few breakable parts - We want to reduce the amount of potential. returns
Impulse purchase products - Customers can buy without research, IG converts best with novel impulse purchases. Don’t sell things people can buy in the stores.
Inexpensive to source on Oberlo/AliExpress. Between $1-10 ideally with ePacket shipping included.
Another reason for this is that customers are price sensitive with impulse purchases, $20-50 is okay generally for most people, but ask for much more and that’s when people start second guessing. Also you will be able to write off any returns or items damaged during shipping as your costs will be so low. This cuts down on any stressful customer care.
If the item cost you $5-10 to order it form the manufacturer & ship it to them and you’re making $15-20 per sale you can just refund the 1 in 100 customers that look for a refund and it wont make a dent in your profits.
Profit margin - Usually I offer the customer a 25% discount to get them to buy, after that you should be aiming to take a 50-60% profit margin for yourself on each sale. My stores usually work at this rate. Average sale amount is approx $30 and I keep about $15-20 per sale.
PART 3 - Setting Up Your Shopify Store (10 Minutes)
Once you have your first product imported you will be able to begin setting up your store, this is a never ending process as you will constantly be improving as you learn more about e-commerce, but the video will give you and idea how to start.
You will want to add your own logo, more products and optimise your store over time. For the purpose of this tutorial we will not go into too much detail, this will be covered in the Facebook group for retail arbitrage.
PART 4 - Setting up our product for sales (Images, description etc.)
This section will be covered in more depth in a separate post as it has more to due with general marketing tactics. You will need to add product descriptions that turn browsing leads into paying customers, you can also pull product images from the original AliExpress product page and use them on your site. I would recommend you remove any watermarks and create your own product description.
For any design work or logos for your brand I use the free plan on Canva.
PART 5 - Setting up instagram account to convert
We will start by setting up a normal instagram account under our website name. So start by setting up a gmail like [email protected] and use it to set up your IG account. The tricky part comes when we try make 50. Which you will want. The more bots = more sales.
We will get into this in the Facebook group as the methods always change. For now, learn to manage 1 bot and scale from there.
Add you company name and profile pic (logo will do) don’t add your website address as we will get flagged earlier as a business selling stuff. We will add the link in the bot script later.
Add 2-5 images and follow/like 10-20 people.
Add your bio. I use the following format.
Diffusey Boutique
❤️| Beautiful Handmade Oil Diffuesers
😍 | Unique & Original, Just Like You
📿 | Bespoke Diffuser Necklaces & Bracelets
🌎 | FREE Worldwide Shipping
Once you have your account set up we will connect it to our bot. Sometimes it is advisable to wait 24-48 hours after creating your instagram account before switching it on. We can set up up right away though.
PART 6 - The Juicy Stuff - Surgically Targeted Customers Without Spending Any Money On Ads
Welcome to the holy grail of free targeted traffic.
Although we use bots to gain customers this can also be done manually, albeit a lot less efficiently.
It works like this.
Automation Step #1 The bot targets hashtags and people in the niche that you assign (#massage #essentialOil)
Automation Step #2 The bot posts on the wall of that person interested in your niche that you would like to talk to them about them working as an influencer for your store, asking them to DM you (Direct Message).
Automation Step #3 The person sees your comment and sends you a DM (Direct message) This initiates the bot script which you have prepared, in here we offer them a discount and other incentives.
This is not the usual botting method of following or liking in the hope people pay attention to your profile. This is a technique has a very high conversion rate at turning leads into paying customers as they are already interested in what you’re selling.
If you really wanted you could do this manually or hire a virtual assistant, but the bot is much more efficient, profitable and scalable.
Get access to the free bot strategy
I do not want to saturate this method so you will need to request access to the bot section, it’s 100% free so don’t worry, I just don’t want the page public.
To access the bot setup guide, you can find it in the private retail arbitrage Facebook group HERE where it’s posted.
Comments
Hi Dave.
Great article. Your content is almost the same as a course i bought.
I will implement it if you give access to the software bot.
Tanks a lot.
Very informative post. Something really new and exciting. Need to cash in. I already have a shopify store in steampunk niche. Thank you, Dave.