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Successful Dropshipping Businesses In Detail: 4,100+ EUR In 30 Days

By Yaroslav Nevsky

successful drop shipping businesses
Here’s the newest addition to our selection of stories about successful dropshipping businesses! Martin, our customer from the Netherlands, shares his exciting experience in the field.

Hi, please introduce yourself 🙂

Hello my name is Martin and I’m having a couple of dropship websites and operate them from the Netherlands. The Internet and its technology in combination with marketing is where my interests & passions lies. I invest most of my off time into learning new techniques or methods.

Before you started dropshipping business with AliExpress, did you have any previous experience in e-commerce, or in trade, or in online sphere generally?

I’m into online marketing for a couple of years now. Earning some money with blogs (AdSense & affiliate), and dropshipping on eBay. The first website I build was in 2001. But in those days it was very technical to create one and the ecommerce market wasn’t so big as now.

Why did you choose the dropshipping business model, after all? How did it all begin?

I get my experiences from reading on the internet and trying things out myself. So I found the thread of Yaros where he was sharing his experiences while he was creating this dropshipping plugin. Initially I was asked to do beta testing for this plugin one year ago before it’s launch and so I shared my experiences with him. Dropshipping in its core value is without any big risk of investing money or losing money. That’s why I choose this model instead of having a big stock and its operational costs.

What’s your opinion about AliDropship solutions?

I have tried a couple of other plugins and solutions like Shopify to do dropshipping business. However I wasn’t satisfied. With AliDropship I’m very satisfied and it does it all in 1 plugin. You can get your own website with a dropshipping model live within 1 day.

How many dropshipping stores do you have now? What is their performance?

At the moment I have 6 dropshipping sites using the plugin. My first one is live since August 2016. All my sites are getting orders. For example, here is statistics from one of them.

successful drop shipping businesses

How do you choose the dropshipping business niches?

I’m choosing the niche by browsing websites especially AliExpress to get ideas and create my own combination. After that I do keyword competition research, competitor research and then I choose to go for it or not.

How do you choose products and dropshipping suppliers for your store? How often do you add new products, and how do you set the prices?

I’m choosing the products with good reviews and suppliers with good ratings with at least 95% in feedback score. I’m adding new products couple of times per month. At the other hand products will be offline and unavailable as well so you need to add new and more dropshipping products now and then. I have setup the pricing formula for creating selling prices.

Do you remember the first sale made from your dropship store? What have you done to achieve it?

My first sale was in August 2016 with my first ecommerce store. I believe the traffic came from social media. I’m still using Social Rabbit Plugin for auto posting. It can give decent traffic to your site if the niche and content is right.

How do you promote your stores? How did you understand who’s your target audience? Which channels are the most efficient for you?

I find Google Analytics & Facebook page analyzer good enough to checkup my audiences. At the moment I’m hiring somebody for creating backlinks to my websites. There are major impacts already on my organic rankings so this is a good progress. But SEO has a long term effect and is a way of investing money. So I’m using Adwords text ads & Shopping a couple of months. These 2 ways generates my way of revenue. Have tried ppc on social media however without any success besides getting extra likes and followers.

How much time does it take you every day to manage your stores?

I’m spending about 2 hours per day with maintaining my website. After that an average of 30 minutes per day answering emails and issues with orders on Aliexpress like delayed shipping, products out of stock. In that case I have to find other suppliers.

How do you deal with difficult customers (if you have any)? Do you have any funny/sad stories?

Well once you get more orders, the amount of people who will email you will increase as well. They ask where their package is and how long they have to wait. I have got a couple of disputes. This is the bad part of doing ecommerce business. Even if you upload evidence, the buyer is always in favor. The tracking shows clearly that they accepted the package and open a dispute that they never received it. I just check them, upload evidence and then the best thing is to move on and focus the main thing. Also I found out that the hardest buyers are the cheapest ones. They buy something for only €4 and keep emailing you day after day. Then they open a dispute 3 days after purchase. I will always answer them and be professional. Couple of times customers said they received the wrong item. Then you check their order and it’s just what they have ordered but they don’t believe it. Then you email them again and include a screenshot of their order and then they are quiet.

I will register this within the next months. As for now I have included this within my yearly salary so I have to pay income tax above this all. We have to keep record of every transaction. What’s coming in, and what’s going out. In the Netherlands we have 21% vat so that’s pretty high compared to other countries worldwide. Lucky enough I don’t sell here a lot. Mostly outside the EU. As the market in the Netherlands is over saturated and everyone wants their goods the same or the next day.

What are your plans for the future?

I want to improve the conversion rate of my websites. Filtering bad traffic and focus on those which bring in orders. At the moment I have plans for a few more websites. Also hiring virtual assistants to help me running and operating it.

What can you advise our readers – those who already run their stores and those who didn’t start the business yet?

Dropshipping is nice and once you setup it right it can be very profitable. However the market is 24/7 online so you are working mostly every day. Unless you will source it out someday once your business is getting bigger.  The online world can be pretty hard with a lot of competition but that’s what you have to deal with. Don’t see only the problems but look and find for solutions. The ecommerce market is still growing and there are a lot of opportunities out there. Once you think you found the right idea, try it and go for it.

We are really thankful to Martin for his kind feedback! We hope his story will inspire you to learn more about dropshipping and to try yourself in this fascinating business.

avatar
By Yaroslav Nevsky
Yaroslav is a founder of AliDropship Community helping people worldwide to start and run a successful dropshipping business.
32 Comments
waqas 6 years ago

Great story as usual …
Martin let us know about payment gateway which is very trending topic now a days i guess 😀 also how you build customer trust if you are outside seller and shipping other countries .
Thanks

Martin 6 years ago

I’m using Stripe & Paypal what is pretty straight forward. Many ask for cash on delivery on Western Union but mostly from countries which are not into online shopping. I have high social media signals so they can see the pages with many comments. Also the reviews ofcourse on the product pages helps alot.

Partho Ghosh 6 years ago

Hey Martin! Really appreciate your tips. & Wish you best of luck for your next project.
Can you please give me some tips about “how you change the product description?” It’s time consuming. Is there any efficient way to change product description?
Thank you

Martin 6 years ago

Hi! Thanks. Yes I make the product description keyword rich. So think about the product, what is it and what are the main features. It’s time consuming but it will pay back in months resulting in organic traffic.

Sandeep Panchal 5 years ago

Hi Partho Ghosh,
Nice to see you here. I have just created my AliDropship account and moving slowly to my web store . Would you help me on some topics related to setting up the web stores?

Ray 6 years ago

Great story…

I am a user that uses several accounts with Alidropship theme but it seems not working for me 🙁

I have 2 niche websites that must be working good following the rates, but till now nothing and then I mean nothing happens.

I get visitors but none of them are buying something. Is that not a little strange?
At the websites you can pay with paypal and stripe…

So Martin if you read this take a moment to email me and let me know what you did to make it happen!
(I’m also from the Netherlands)

Martin 6 years ago

Hi there! Filtering the traffic is also another task. However if you got traffic from the Netherlands itself, then 75% don’t wanna wait the shipping time.

Paul 6 years ago

Martin. – 75% do not want to wait shipping time – Do you mean it is no use to open a dropshipping store in The Netherlands?

Martin 6 years ago

Yes it’s possible with a good chosen niche and hard to find products with a descent pricing.

Paul 6 years ago

Thanks Martin.

Martin 6 years ago

You can contact me on the forum if you want. I’m active there as well.

Paul 6 years ago

Maybe you can help us with marketing Martin :-). We are also a dropshipper in The Netherlands but use the woo plugin instead of the complete system. We also want to open more dropshipping platforms so maybe you can give advise on niches for the Dutch market.

didy 6 years ago

Hi Paul. 🙂 can you teach me how to build a platform? ireally want to learn it.

Paul 6 years ago

Sorry Didy. I’m not technical so i cannot teach you how to build a platform. You should consider let team Yaros build it for you https://alidropship.com/start-new-business/

Daniel 6 years ago

I can help you didy 🙂

Martin 6 years ago

Hi, that’s a great idea. However a shop dedicated to The Netherlands can be hard but worth a try of course. But best is to translate everything into Dutch. And have other payment gateway’s like Ideal and afterpay.

Phronesis 6 years ago

Great one. Can you tell u on the payment gateway you are using. This has been a roadblock for me. From Africa

Martin 6 years ago

I’m using Paypal and Stripe without any problem. In Africa it can be hard with those methods. Not sure what they use as payment method but I guess cash on delivery or Western Union.

Chanda Mwansa 5 years ago

I am in Africa, Zambia in particular. i use 2checkout as the payment gateway

Alhassan umar 4 years ago

Please am in Ghana,can you help introduce me to dropshiping

Olga L. 4 years ago

Hi, thank you for your interest!
To begin with, kindly read this free guide: https://alidropship.com/guide/ it explains the basics of dropshipping.
Then, to start your business, choose the option that you like the most here: https://alidropship.com/stores-comparison/ – there, you can also ask a free consultation if you need it.

Andy 6 years ago

You make a very good point about the customers that spend the least require the most support, that has been my experience also so now I don’t sell anything for less than $15. Many sellers on Aliexpress take a week or more to actually ship goods, so now I never use a seller unless I make a test order first, that slows things down but works really well.
My stores are dropship hybrid stores where I ship some products myself and dropship others, that seems to work best for me.

Martin 6 years ago

Yes and sometimes it’s getting frustrated. There are bad buyers out there who want to squeeze you out.
Even the sellers indeed, only a handfull are good to deal with. Some stores indeed take 10 days to ship out. And they say yes its shipped out and I’m waiting for the tracking code and then after 4 days they still didn’t update the order. Also sometimes I cancel the order right after purchase due some reasons, then they said sorry we can’t accept your cancellation as we already shipped it. In that case I will leave negative feedback. Not a good foundation for doing businesses with them.

Erik 6 years ago

Hi. Trying to decide between the Shopify-Oberlo and Alidropship plugin on my shopify store. Which one is better and why? Thanks.

Yash 6 years ago

Love the story…I’m now even more motivated to continue this dropshipping business hoping to generate sales in the coming days.

Hanna 6 years ago

Hi! What about the currency converter? Is it available in the webstore they are selling? I want to buy the ready made webstore. And this is one of my concern. Thank you.

Dylan 6 years ago

Hi Martin,

Nice story!
Ben trouwens ook een Nederlander haha.

But i’ve decided to start a dropship journey as well.
My questions to you is, how do you handle tax?
Do you ship worldwide or only in Europe?

Alvast bedankt!

Johmee 6 years ago

Hey Martin,
It’s good to see a Dutch here running this kind of business. I just recently purchased the plug-in. I am wondering about the legalities of registering my upcoming webstore. Must I register it as soon as possible even though it’s not yet starting and not yet earning? And I am not also going to sell within the country or EU.
I am from Philippines, recently moved here few months ago. I couldn’t speak the language good yet so I am bothered with the registration.
I would really appreciate if you can advise me on this matter.
Thank you and Success!

gio 6 years ago

Hi Martin,

which forum who mean you are active?

Yaroslav Nevsky 6 years ago
Lloyd 4 years ago

Before I even consider quoting a rate, I must ask my client a few questions.
mortgage broker coquitlam As many have stated, it’s not really a pure mathematical exercise of just assuming people
would behave the same way they did in 2017.v

Giouxel Kasaika 3 years ago

Hello Martin, how i can contact with you?

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