Is Dropshipping A Good Home Business For Moms? Let’s Ask Valery!
What does it take to launch and run a profitable independent business when you’re raising kids? Which type of home business for mom is the one that’s worth it? To get first-hand insights from an actual business mom, we’re talking to a special guest today. As a full-time mother and a part-time online entrepreneur, Valery certainly can share a thing or two about a newcomer’s experience in ecommerce!
Disclaimer: all the success stories published in AliDropship blog are the results of interviews conducted in the written form. Even though the editors may make some minor changes to the grammar, spelling, and/or punctuation, the respondents’ writing styles, views, opinions, stores screenshots and personal photos are left unchanged.
Hi, please introduce yourself!
Hi, my name is Val Grace, I’m a full-time mum from the UK. I had a good job, but after I had my children, I stopped working and that was when I started looking for the opportunities to work from home.
Why did you consider dropshipping to be a suitable type of home business for mom?
I was looking all over the internet (and YouTube in particular) for work from home ideas. Mostly, I was interested in the options that would suit me as a person with no previous business experience. Of course, there was another important factor: low costs of starting such an enterprise.
YouTube videos about dropshipping caught my attention – and I thought that’s a business model accessible and promising enough to try.
How did you launch your home business?
One of the countless YouTube videos about dropshipping that I watched was made by AliDropship. I really liked that their solutions required a one-time payment only, and bought the Woo plugin to create my online store all by myself. It took me a while: with 0 experience, I was building the store slowly, and frankly speaking, I am still learning. 🙂
But, I registered it officially already. I know this is not a must-have and you don’t necessarily have to register a company if you want to dropship, but if you desire to create a large-scale business, it’s best to make it all 100% legal.
Do you remember the first sale made from your store?
Oh, it took a while! I was a newbie, so my first sale happened about 5 months after I bought the plugin.
I was reading guidelines on dropshipping SEO from AliDropship blog and understood that this part needs to be improved on my site. So I used the step-by-step guide to make the store more SEO-friendly, and soon afterwards, the first sale happened!
It felt awesome. I was so excited! It was true proof that dropshipping profits can be real. 🙂
How does your business perform now?
I still keep running the only store. Here are the numbers for the first 2 quarters of the year:
What is your product strategy?
To make the right niche choice, I followed AliDropship advice on niche evaluating methods.
And to get the right products for the store, I used and keep using DropshipMe. It’s super convenient because the products are already selected and edited, and it saves huge loads of time.
Besides, by now, I already have a number of trusted suppliers I partner with. So, from time to time, I ask them what’s new and which of their new arrivals they can recommend. And for such products, I use the recommended markup formula to set up new pricing rules without much trouble.
How do you promote your business?
I rely on free traffic heavily: as I figured it out from my first sale experience, SEO can work magic. Plus, I don’t have that much free money to invest in paid ads, so technically speaking, I have to pay for the business promotion with my time.
I also do my best to make catchy posts on social media, and from this point of view, Social Rabbit is fantastic. It saves a great deal of time and is very cost effective. I only made a one-time payment, but these social media entries have already proved to be one of my most beneficial marketing channels.
Does this home business for mom take a lot of time to be managed?
As I already mentioned, like any other business, dropshipping requires time and effort – especially if you can’t afford some paid solutions or services to manage it easier. I spend about 3-5 hours every day to improve SEO on my site and to work on social media activities like making friends and thinking of post ideas.
For sure, marketing is the most difficult challenge for me in this business, even trickier than customer relationship management!
Has your mindset changed in any way since you started your home business?
Sure! It gave me hope. I enjoy the kind support of my friends and family, and I hope to grow my business to a larger scale in the future. Anything is possible if you don’t give up!
Valery started out all by herself. You don’t need to deal with any hard lifting. Just get a ready-made turnkey ecommerce store & $100 voucher to take it to another level! Starting out has never been easier.
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