After a couple of false starts creating a dropshipping store, this episode's guest, Tze Chan, stumbled upon a winning dropshipping product niche and has been riding the wave of success ever since. Tze shares how he sourced his product, how he knew he was on to a winning niche and the step he took to make his store stand out, including writing winning copy and tweaking his product photography.
If you are starting a business or ecommerce store, do you need an email list? How do you go about building a list and what is an email funnel? In this episode of Start Yours, we speak to Andrew Roach who manages Oberlo.com's email communications about email best practices, offers and most importantly ensuring that your email communication with potential customers provides value to their experience and customer journey that makes them want to invest in your product or service. .
There's no denying TikTok has taken over the social media scene (and teenagers' lives) by storm. As an ecommerce business owner, you should already be on the platform and taking advantage of everything it has to offer because, well, tick-tock, time is passing you by and every second you're not on it is wasted potential. But what makes TikTok stand out from other social media sites and how should you market on it? To answer these questions and more, we're joined by Oberlo's very own TikTok master...
Before John Lee Dumas launched Entrepreneurs on Fire, he was… miserable. John had what from the outside looked like a nice shiny job in corporate finance, but on the inside, the whole scene was driving him nuts. He felt trapped, and to break free, he jumped into the deep end and started a business whose sole purpose was helping other people start their business. The first 13 months of this project were pretty underwhelming, as he’ll explain, but he kept at it, kept at it, and eventually… ka-chin...
When Vlad moved from Ukraine to the United States, his end goal was to start a business but the steep learning curve and time-consuming process meant he needed to secure a job to pay the bills while he worked it all out. So he did. He got a job at eBay, one of the biggest tech companies in the world. When he finally had enough money saved up, he quit – a decision that many thought was crazy – and launched his own business. Today, he's the proud owner of a business (not his first) that brought in...
In this episode of Start Yours, the top 10 questions about dropshipping marketing. Questions like, how much money should I spend on marketing? How much does Facebook Ads cost? How many products should I sell? We sourced these questions directly from you. From entrepreneurs, from dropshippers, from people who want to know more about how to market their businesses.
Alex and Andrew, aka The Bizzy Boys, started making cold brew coffee out of true love of the product in their cramped apartment in 2013 after being fed up with paying $5 for a cup from a coffee shop. Like most at-home cold brewers, they started by using what they had on hand, a crummy grinder and some cheap coffee beans. They couldn’t understand why they couldn’t get the same smooth and sweet flavour that they were used to getting from their local coffee shop. With Andrew’s background in R&D...
Today's guest, Chris Wane is proof that persistence pays off. It took him five failed ecommerce stores and hundreds of trialed products before he struck a winning formula. He battled through self-doubt and negativity from others around him, who laughed and dismissed his budding business as a “get rich quick scheme.” He began with rocky financial foundations, and came worryingly close to losing his entire budget. Less than two years later, his dropshipping store Big Red Gadgets has generated over...
Launching a new project or business in the midst of the pandemic isn’t everyone’s idea of fun but serial entrepreneurs Shannah and Jeff Game saw it as their next big challenge, setting out to create the Money Mindset Journal - a journal to help cultivate a healthy money mindset, set intentional goals, and achieve your dreams. In this episode of Start Yours, we speak with Shannah, who is a Certified Financial Planner with an MBA and host of Millenial Money Podcast about launching a Kickstarter ca...
Our guest this episode is British business owner Suhail Nurmohamed who began his e-commerce journey when he was just 16-years-old. A few years later, he’d made over £112,000 ($145,00 USD) in sales on his men’s wear store, AyWear. Suhail was featured recently on the Oberlo.com blog where he shared his top 6 tips that he thinks all aspiring e-commerce and dropshipping business owners should hear. We know that when you’re just getting started in eCommerce, it is not easy to know which steps to take...
When it comes to running their dropshipping business, Yuliya Chernykhovskaya and Mike Pavlou are committed to doing things differently. This entrepreneurial couple from New Jersey are the owners of an accessories ecommerce store, built using the dropshipping business model. While building their business, they’ve made a point to ignore much of the traditional advice for dropshippers. And the results so far? Pretty exceptional. They’re only a year in, but so far they’ve had over 10,000 orders and ...
This episode's guest is hoping to graduate with his engineering degree in the near future, but study isn’t the only thing taking up 22-year-old, Cole's time. He’s also managing an ecommerce store that’s made over two million dollars in sales since March 2019. After hearing about ecommerce and dropshipping when he was just 18, Cole quickly became obsessed with learning how to sell online. But his multi million dollar store was no overnight success, it came after some big failures and lessons lear...
There probably aren’t many people in the world who have devoted more thought to dropshipping than this episode's guest, Mordechai Arba. In addition to running founding Ecomhunt.com, he is a serial store launcher, and he’s the first to admit that they’re not all home runs. Mordechai shares what makes his successful stores successful, and what makes his less successful stores, well... less successful. We also dig into what running Ecomhunt.com has taught him about finding winning products, how to ...
This episode of Start Yours, we are bringing you the ultimate tale of bartering and exchange. Our guest is Demi Skipper from the @trademeproject. Demi started her quest to exchange a bobby pin for a house (!) in May and very quickly dominated TikTok and Instagram with her regular updates on some of the crazy exchanges that she has been making to reach her house goal. This is an evolving story that we look forward to following but as of the episodes air date in August 2020, Demi has made 16 trade...
When Emma Reid first got into ecommerce, it reminded her of one of her favorite pastimes – video games. It was addictive, exciting, competitive, and tons of fun. Especially the money: One of her stores generated $500,000 in revenue in just 1 year. But then things fell apart. Emma’s supplier botched hundreds of orders, she was slammed with angry emails, and over the course of a month she lost $10,000. After that she was fried, burnt-out, game over. She shut down the store and hit pause on the who...
In this episode of Start Yours, David Vranicar looks at how to keep the momentum going when building on your goals and hustling, without feeling the pressure to get sucked into the world of fake gurus and get rich quick schemes that often over promise and under deliver. Our guest is Mario Nawfal who’s Instagram bio sums up his career in one sentence… ‘He has made and lost millions many times over’. Mario started his first e-commerce business when he was a finance student with $300 in his pocket ...
This episode of Start Yours features two friends from Vancouver, Rodney and Kory, who were initially embarrassed to be launching their own business. So much so, before they found success, they were tiptoeing around the topic with family and friends. They’d politely decline offers to hit the bars and instead spend their nights lurking on Reddit and consuming hours upon hours of YouTube tutorials learning all about how to start their own business. But now after launching their fantasy games store ...
How do you feel about risk? Are you a leap taker or do you teeter on the edge? And as you will hear on this week's episode of Start Yours, when you’ve started over 20 businesses, most of which have been profitable, you’ve probably got a bit to say about risk. Our guest is Noah Kagan, Co-Founder/Chief Sumo at Sumo.com and appsumo.com where he helps entrepreneurs kick more ass! Noah shares his idea development strategies and some great tips about how to overcome hesitation that can often cloud ini...
A pair of dropshippers from Utah, Mandie and Aubrey, joined us to explain how they’ve made six figures of revenue without spending a dime on advertising. The secret? Their Facebook group, which they’ve used to launch not one, but two successful businesses. They talk about how they keep their ad budget at $0, and how they get customers to keep coming back – even the ones who know their products are coming out of China. You can read more about Mandie and Aubrey on the Oberlo blog: http://bit.ly/2k...
If there's one thing many entrepreneurs don't consider when building their business is the importance of failing faster. It may sound counterproductive, but as you'll find out in our latest podcast episode of Start Yours, it's anything but. It's the mentality that's propelled dropshipping mega couple, Shishir and Namrata, to creating a successful $800k business... while balancing a full-time job. In this podcast episode, they take us behind the scenes of their inspirational dropshipping success,...
We're sharing some of our favorite episodes from the Start Yours back catalog. A few years ago, Ryan Carroll was unemployed and living at home. Not ideal for an ambitious 20-year-old. But after a few fails, including an Amazon refund fiasco, Ryan stumbled across dropshipping – the first step toward launching a swimwear store that generated $300,000 in revenue. In this episode, Ryan talks with us about his dropshipping journey, including where he found the courage to ignore conventional wisdom – ...
On this episode of Start Yours, we delve into the ins and outs of print on demand, from production to product sourcing, customer service to making sure that your products arrive on time to your customer. Done right, print on demand can be a great way to run an e-commerce business without having stock on hand. Today I am speaking to Sarah Chrisp the founder of the very popular Youtube channel, Wholesale Ted. Her content focuses on case studies on successful eCommerce stores, tutorials, product so...
Start Yours is a podcast about what it’s like to start your own thing. Whether that's a side-hustle, an ecommerce store, a blog, or walking away from your day job! You'll hear from people who have done it themselves, and learn what to expect (and what to avoid) when you start yours.
You've probably heard the saying, "If at first, you don't succeed, try, try again." Well, William Edward Hickson wasn't talking about e-commerce or drop-shipping when he coined that expression, but it definitely still applies. As you'll hear in this week's episode of Start Yours, with each experience, or in this case, with each fail, your knowledge and understanding of what works and what doesn't work grows and grows each time. Our guest is Ahmed Hadi, who we have featured on the oberlo.com blog...
With over 320 million monthly active users, Pinterest has the potential for helping both local and global companies build a big audience and get the clicks to make a sale. The problem for most business owners is that they just don’t have enough time to manage one more aspect of a business and yet another social media platform. Our guest in this episode of Start Yours is Pinterest expert and podcaster, Kate Ahl who has been helping small business owners grow their business using Pinterest. She te...
In this week's episode of Start Yours we bring you an amazing story of a couple who used their creativity and strength to launch two print on demand side-hustles in the hight of the COVID pandemic and also during an incredibly challenging time in their personal lives. Laura and Albert have 3 kids and 11 animals. In early 2020, just before the lockdown was declared, massage therapist Laura suffered a severe seizure, fell and broke her neck and back and had to be hospitalized. The family received ...
Creating memorable products and an impactful brand will not only keep your business top of mind for your customers but as you will hear in this episode of Start Yours it can change lives. Today’s guest, Yelitsa Jean-Charles, created Healthy Roots Dolls, a start-up toy company that was founded with a goal to make a new, positive beauty standard for young girls – especially for those with curly hair. A recent tweet that featured Yelitsa and an image of her Zoe doll went viral with over 900K likes!...
As an entrepreneur, podcasts can be a powerful medium to reach new listeners and customers, share stories and get your message to a wider audience. How hard is to start a podcast for your business and will it bring a return on investment? What gear do you need to host a podcast or be a guest on a podcast and what are some creative ways to market your product or brand via popular podcasts? Our guest this episode is Rachel Corbett, who was the Head of Podcasts for Mamamia, the largest women's podc...
As a business owner, how do you decide when it is time to consider outsourcing tasks in your business or upping your skills and doing it yourself? In this episode of Start Yours, we share the best tips and advice from merchants, Shopify and Oberlo team members about taking the leap and investing in hiring experts that will help to increase sales and productivity and decrease stress. From social media to video content, our best practices for learning to value your time vs investing in freelancers...
Starting a dropshipping business with a friend during a pandemic is a challenge that many new entrepreneurs may avoid, but Australian teenager dropshippers, Lachie and Taylor, saw a chance to run a month-long dropshipping experiment during COVID lockdown. They chose to launch a store selling non-medical items that would be helpful to families during the lockdown and while doing so, use the time to test ad audiences, customer service techniques, as well as hitting their goals and embracing their ...
