I have an ecom store.. Now what?

[jb1]

Hey all, first post but of course have been a big follower. I made my dropshipping ecom store last year in hopes to make it big!

Right now, I average anywhere between $200-$2000 a month net profit depending on the season. These are soccer goals and relatively high ticket items. On a goal I can make $200-600 each goal. My question is, what is the best way to scale it? I do have the lowest prices from my competitors, and to be fair my site looks the most "up to date" compared to them, but what is next? If I can sell just 10 goals a month, that could be 2k-6k net profit per month. Believe it or not, goals are in demand, I used to work in the business.

Most of my traffic is organic, but would you recommend google ads? Compiling a list of the 1000's of soccer clubs in the USA and emailing them?

Any advice is appreciated.

Also, I used to work for this manufacturer, so I know there is a demand for soccer goals believe it or not. The company was selling 2 million worth of goals annually.

http://yoursoccerstore.com

^^ I read the rules and saw not to spam. Hopefully this is allowed.

[oldmannickels]

I would do other kinds of netted goals like lacrosse goals or complementary products like field liners and corner poles.

[jb1]

I would do other kinds of netted goals like lacrosse goals or complementary products like field liners and corner poles.

I personally want to stick to the soccer side. But i do like the corner flag part of it!

[Michael in ABQ]

I'd second adding any other products necessary for a soccer field - such as corner flags.

You could also look at adding training aids for soccer coaches. Maybe that's a pack of 10-20 plastic cones.

Paid ads are definitely worth it if you've got high-priced items with a good margin. If it costs you $100 to get a sale that nets you $200 that's a no-brainer. That might mean paying $5 per click with a 4% conversion rate from paid traffic, or $10 per click with a 10% conversion rate because you're targeting keywords with buyer intent. "Soccer goals" is ok, but "best soccer goal" or "where to buy soccer goals" will probably convert much better because those people searching with that term are looking to buy.

I would also try to add some content - even just a few good articles - that might help you rank better for organic traffic.

[jb1]

I'd second adding any other products necessary for a soccer field - such as corner flags.

You could also look at adding training aids for soccer coaches. Maybe that's a pack of 10-20 plastic cones.

Paid ads are definitely worth it if you've got high-priced items with a good margin. If it costs you $100 to get a sale that nets you $200 that's a no-brainer. That might mean paying $5 per click with a 4% conversion rate from paid traffic, or $10 per click with a 10% conversion rate because you're targeting keywords with buyer intent. "Soccer goals" is ok, but "best soccer goal" or "where to buy soccer goals" will probably convert much better because those people searching with that term are looking to buy.

I would also try to add some content - even just a few good articles - that might help you rank better for organic traffic.

Thank you both for the response back.

I did just make a "Coaches Corner" page on my site. My goal is to have weekly posts of exercises by age group (I also coach soccer), posts on everyday matches, fitness/nutrition. Would be cool if I could have a subscription to coaches maybe $5 a month where the subscriber gets weekly sessions from me.

[Smokystache]

It takes a long, long time to build an audience big enough to generate significant sales - especially when your product is more than $5-10. You're making a good margin on this (you say $200-600 per goal), why not give some  of that to someone else who already has a big audience?? You don't hvae to tell them your margins or anything - just say, if I sell Goal A you get $X, if I sell Goal B you get $Y. This means they will be invested in mentioning the goals and selling them.

They (without any extra work for them) will get an additional source of revenue from their audience and you get access to a huge audience. I can't stress enough how difficult it is to build an audience. Otherwise how are you going to break through all the noise that's out there already? Google says there are almost 26 million returns for "soccer drills" and 1.5 million for "soccer goals". If you want to go beyond your local market, you'll need to find a way to get attention through all that noise.

Best of luck!!

[AnnaGrowsAMustache]

So how many of these large ticket items can you sell? And how many repeat sales would you get? And over what time frame would those repeat sales be - one year, ten years, because how long does a goal last??

I would personally either branch out into similar products as others have suggested with lacrosse nets etc OR branch out into less high ticket goals, for example good quality, smaller scale home goals. Whatever you do, it's about increasing your potential customer base.

[goldenace1982]

Perhaps complimentary products, such as soccer apparel branded for the team... work with a local silk screening business to see if they can add the extra value to your products... the logistics would be a little bit hard with drop ship since you may have to hold inventory...

[Luap595]

Do you know how you're getting traffic to the site now? Looking at your site with Ahrefs (popular SEO tool if you're not familiar) it doesn't seem to get much traffic from Google search.

If you are making your sales from Google search only right now, seems like you'd have some easy wins improving site SEO.

Also, you're dropshipping these right? Is there any reason you're only marketing Pevo products? Why not add a few more brand choices? You could have cheap, middle, high end for each product and capture more sales.

[hodedofome]

You should be selling these on other marketplaces like Amazon, eBay and Walmart. It will increase your chances of more sales by allowing people who ONLY shop on those sites, to find your product. Lots of people are skipping going to Google and opening up their Amazon app and searching for the product there. If you're not on Amazon, you won't get their money.

You can sell on Amazon and ship it yourself and Amazon/eBay/Walmart will charge you ~15% fees for this. If you don't like that, just increase your price on those platforms. It'll be cheaper on your site, more expensive on Amazon. If your competitors on Amazon are cheaper (or shipped Prime), then you'll have to deal with that. Either lower your price and accept a lower margin, or stay higher and hope the quality of your product is better.

[carbonfiber]

Try facebook ads, social media, instagram, pinterest. It won't happen overnight, but if you're consistent and put the effort in (of what yo know you should do) you'll get there soon.

[carbonfiber]

Looks like a decent niche!

[belly05]

Nice this sounds like you found a solid niche!  As someone who has been a part of helping to grow several websites you’re getting ready for the fun part of leveling up your site!  I’ll list a few things that have worked very well for me in the past, I have written a few of these in other threads on this forum as well:

1.)   Conversion Rate.  Using google analytics figure out what the conversion rate is on your website, a good conversion rate will typically be in 1 - 2% range (if you'r site has less than that it will be worth spending time to improve your conversion rate).  Conversion rate optimization is really a fascinating topic.  You can get far down the rabbit hole and run conversion rate experiments using all kinds of different tools.  Optimizley is a great (paid) tool.  You can also set up A/B tests for free with google analytics.  Looking at your website briefly I noticed it was in Shopify so here is a link explaining how you can set up a split tests on your Shopify site, which will help you test conversion rate improvements. (https://www.shopify.com/partners/blog/how-to-split-test-in-shopify-to-increase-revenue)

2.) In the same vein of conversion rate optimization, one of the best things you can do to improve conversions is to improve website load times or site speed. You can test your site speed with lots of free tools, two great free options are Google Page Speed Tool (https://developers.google.com/speed/) and Pingdom page speed Tool (https://tools.pingdom.com/).  Load your URL in both of those and they will spit out recommendations for you on how you can increase site speed. Every 1 second you shave off of load times will improve your conversion rate by 7% Source; https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/

3.) SEO Figure out what you want your website to rank for, and then tune it to rank for those terms!  SEO is obviously a huge topic, and it quickly gets into the snake oil salesmen types but there are several very easy things you can do to help figure out what your site can/should rank for.  The first step is to identify profitable keywords that your site can realistically rank for.  You can do this by opening up the Google Adwords Keyword Planner and typing a huge list of search terms into it (everything you can think of for your site).  The tool will process this list and spit out how much traffic each term gets, and how competitive (think how hard to rank for) each term is. From there you can load that list into a tool like the keyword difficulty planner from Moz (https://moz.com/).  Once you widdle the terms down to the highest traffic and least competitive you can try them out on your site, keeping track of your traffic as you slowly optimize over a few months.  One quick tip, it takes a while for Google to register changes to your site, don't expect to update your site and come back in one day to see a difference.  Give each change you make a minimum of 2 weeks.  And create annotations in google analytics each time you make an update.

*It would also be a great idea for you to read the beginners guide to SEO: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

4.) If you have not already, claim your Google webmaster tools account and link it to your google analytics account.  Webmaster tools shows you if your site has any crawl errors (which will hurt your rankings) and it will also show you how your site is performing organically.

*You can claim your Webmaster tools account here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/
*You can create your google analytics account here: https://analytics.google.com/

5.) Paid advertising. I noticed others mentioned running Facebook ads.  Personally, I've never had much success with standard Facebook ads.  Loading Custom Audiences to Facebook does work very well if you have a customer list.  But seeing as how you just launched the website you probably don't have a big customer list yet.  The advertising that has the most bank for the buck that I always advise people to start with is re-marketing.  A good re-marketing campaign will run right around 300% ROI.  The reason being is these customers are already farther down in the buying cycle compared to visitors from other paid verticals. Two great company’s you can setup re-marketing through are Critio (https://www.criteo.com/). and Adroll (https://www.adroll.com/).  Both are great options but Critio typically outperforms Adroll.

After dynamic remarketing we usually have the next best ROI from a standard Google Adwords campaign.  There is definitely a science to setting these campaigns up, but if you do it correctly you should see around 150 - 200% ROI.  If you are the DIY type you can learn how to properly setup and run a campaign at the Google Academy (https://skillshop.withgoogle.com/).  This is something that takes some time to learn, its very typical for a DIY store owner to get close to 0% or event a negative ROI while running their own campaigns so this is an area where finding and hiring a Google certified company or freelance can be very profitable.

To me the biggest thing is to just enjoy the process of leveling your site up and don't get discouraged.  I've found its a lot like working out, just keep trying to make marginal gains every week and eventually you will turn around and your website will have traffic coming in from many sources, both paid and organic, and the site will feel like a snowball rolling down hill!

[trygeek]

Hey just wondering how the sales are going for you and if you have implemented any of the ideas some of the people above have given you?