12 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started AliExpress Dropshipping

Oh, how I wish I had known these things when I first started AliExpress dropshipping. It's amazing how much you learn from experience. It takes time to get it right, but one day you'll look back at the mistakes and realize how far you've come. The little lessons you've learned along the way will provide you with practical knowledge and help you understand what works... and what doesn't. Below are some lessons I've learned over the last six years so that you can get ahead of the game.

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12 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Dropshipping

1. Content Marketing is Essential

When I first launched my yoga store, I created yoga-related posts. I tagged the influencers mentioned in the articles on Twitter, and they shared the article with their followers. I was able to benefit from free qualified traffic from my website, which converted into sales.

But actually, this section isn’t about that. After we made a few initial sales from these articles, we stopped creating content for my blog. This was a big mistake because, about a year later, when the store shut down, we didn't have a backup plan to rely on.

Content marketing is one of the most powerful ways to grow and sustain your business. The one thing I wish I had done is turn my blog into an affiliate site until the next winning product appeared in my niche market. Since 99% of our sales came from one product, I was risking it all, but after this trend faded away, I didn’t have a broader audience to promote other products to.

2. Don’t Change Suppliers to Save Money

Although the trend for mandala rugs disappeared when our business failed, that wasn't the reason our business failed. I saw our ad costs rising, so I wanted to save money on the product. I found a supplier that sold the same product at a lower price. Unfortunately, I didn't read reviews or check the supplier's ratings. This decision cost me more than I could have imagined.

Let's just say the new supplier wasn't great. This mistake cost me tens of thousands of dollars. I eventually got a product cost refund, and the supplier was immediately removed from the platform. However, the biggest loss was the cost of our Facebook ads, which remained at an all-time high. Facebook won’t refund you for choosing the wrong dropshipping supplier.

So when you read one of my posts, “Read supplier reviews, check customer photos, review supplier ratings, and order product samples,” don't just think, “Yes, yes, I know." You really need to do it. As we mentioned in the dropshipping tips, the cost of not doing this could be far greater than the $11.99 product sample you need to order.

3. Sell Globally Immediately

Most people's ads focus on selling to US audiences. When it comes to "international," they expand to Australia, the UK, and Canada. But the reality is, you can sell products to the other 191 countries as well. If you’ve always secretly wanted to “take over the world,” dropshipping is the perfect business model to make that happen. Over the years, as the ePacket delivery routes have expanded, building an international brand has become easier than ever.

Unfortunately, I learned this lesson a bit too late. It wasn't until we experienced rapid growth from a small country we had never heard of, Jersey, that we began experimenting with other countries. By that time, many other sellers were already selling the same products as me. If you start international marketing early, you can find countries that no one else is selling to. The reality is that outside of the big four countries, there are far fewer sellers, making it a huge opportunity for dropshippers.

4. Embrace Product Weaknesses and Highlight Them

When you first receive a negative review about your product, you can’t help but think, “Oh no, I chose a low-quality product.” When I got the first few negative emails, I panicked and kept apologizing. I worried about how many people would complain.

The truth is, all I needed to do was be honest about the product. For example, one of the biggest complaints about the beach towels I sold was that the material was too thin. So, what did I do? On the product page, I added a bullet point that said, "Thin material, easy to fold, helps you feel the texture of the beach sand." In this way, I set realistic expectations for the product and also showed why the negative aspect was actually a good thing. This helped significantly reduce complaints. Find the negative aspects of a product and show the potential benefits.

5. You Learn From All the Failures

Try. Fail. Try. Fail. Try. Fail. Fail. Fail. Win. This is essentially the secret to earning passive income. If you view every dropshipping failure as a business lesson, you'll grow into a successful entrepreneur. Sometimes the lessons are painful or costly, but your ability to overcome these challenges will determine your success or failure. The best success stories always start with failure stories. Don't dwell on how far you are from your goal right now. Don't question your ability to achieve your ultimate goal because you’ve encountered some challenging obstacles. It doesn't matter how many times you fail, what matters is how you overcome those failures and succeed in the end.

6. The Best Way to Find Winning Products is to Look at Ads

Winning dropshipping often comes from the success of a breakout product. The benefit is that you only need to find one product to make it big. The downside is that it takes some effort to find a product that will be widely popular. In fact, I found the best product of my eCommerce career from a successful Facebook ad. The ad had tons of comments, friend tags, and likes. I then searched for the same product on AliExpress, and the rest is history.

By paying more attention to other brands’ strong performances, you can gain a competitive edge relative to other competitors and store owners. It helps you catch trends before they explode. So don’t be afraid to browse the best-seller lists and scroll through social media feeds. But more importantly, don't forget to take action quickly in the next few hours. The earlier you jump into a trend, the better your position will be.

7. Test Everything

That said, you always want to do a lot of testing early on. However, as we mentioned earlier, focus is key. For example, let’s say you choose Pinterest as a free marketing channel, you may try different photos, keywords, and landing pages (product pages, blog posts).

Another example of experimenting could be product ideas. You don't need to test 20 products from different niches, but choose one niche and pick products within it. When it comes to Facebook ads, you might create one ad and test it in multiple countries.

So, when experimenting, make sure to focus deeply rather than broadly.

8. Focus on Retention-Focused Niches

Retention-focused niches are the ones you can own for the next several years and retarget your customer list. For example, yoga is a great niche because you can retain your audience, as it’s a niche that people tend to stick with long-term, just like fashion, beauty, and certain niche hobbies for both women and men.

Acquisition-focused niches are ones where you constantly need to acquire new customers because customers will move away from the niche. For example, wedding, children’s clothing, maternity wear.

Acquisition-focused niches don’t mean you can’t succeed, but it usually means it involves more upfront work (creating blog content multiple times a week) or more money (paid ads).

9. You Don’t Need Flashy Stuff

One of the reasons people give up dropshipping is because they go all in. They install tons of apps, buy the most expensive theme, and spend $1,000 on the first ad. Weeks later, when their sales are zero, they panic about how much they’ve spent. They blame everyone except themselves. Don’t worry, I did this a lot when I first started too.

Your first store may be terrible. That’s totally fine. When I first started my business, I made an animation video for a wedding store. It was literally the worst animation video in the world. It was tacky, low quality, and totally off-brand. But I proudly showed it to everyone I knew. That store only made about $30. So, it basically made my first and last sale.

But as you gain experience, you’ll actually start to do less and use fewer tools. These days, the only apps I use are dropshipping and print-on-demand apps, along with bundle/upsell apps. If I really want to add a special feature to my site, I usually just pay a one-time fee to a Shopify expert to add it so I don’t get stuck in a monthly plan for something small but influential.

10. Pick One Paid and One Free Marketing Channel to Focus On

When you first start, you get excited and want to try everything. This plan will blow up in your face. Instead, focus on two channels: one paid and one free. For example, your two channels could be Facebook ads and Instagram, or Google Shopping ads and Pinterest.

This works because focusing allows you to become a master. Plus, the high advertising costs will eat into your profits. So, if you promote daily on free channels, over time, you’ll get sales without spending on ads. Paid focus is mainly to help you in the short term. But if you focus on long-term growth, you’ll want to minimize marketing costs as much as possible.

11. You Can Still Leverage Your Audience After Your Store Closes

After my yoga store closed, I just let it sit there for years. We didn’t post on social media, didn’t promote any products in our large email list, and just killed it off. But this was actually the complete opposite of what we should have done.

The reality is, we still had over 50,000 Facebook fans and over 10,000 email subscribers. Our website still showed up on search engines, and people still visited it even though it had no products. This made me realize how much of a wasted opportunity that was.

If your bestseller loses momentum, you don’t have to give up the store. Instead, you can continue building your audience while trying new products. By continuing to grow your audience, you provide yourself with the best opportunity for success when you hit gold again. Plus, the marketing cost will be lower this time because you can retarget an already established audience.

12. Things Will Go Wrong

You may worry about what will go wrong, but you can never be fully prepared for what happens. It’s almost always the least expected thing.

For example, when I hired my first social media freelancer, he had great reviews and I knew he was really good at building an audience. I thought he didn’t need any training, and he seemed confident in his abilities.

Unfortunately, one of his first posts was him shaming obese people wearing yoga pants. My jaw literally dropped. At the time, we already had quite a few followers, so I immediately deleted the post without thinking. He never posted anything like it again.

However, it was my responsibility to set guidelines and tone for how I wanted him to portray the brand.

Even so, when things go wrong, all you can do is take action immediately to fix it. You don’t need to blow it up. Just admit the mistake and solve it.