Table of contents

01 Can an independent station do it?

02 Prepare funds

03 Select store type

04 Selection

05 In-depth research on the market

06 Find a source

07 Choose how to build a website

08 Promotion and drainage

09 Summary

foreword

In February 2022, Ms. Peng chose to cooperate with Shopify to establish an independent station. In just 2 months from March 2022 to May 2022, Ms. Peng's store has earned $15,838 in revenue, with an average of more than 20 new orders per day.

"Can I make money as an independent website?", "Can an individual be an independent website?", "How much does it cost to be an independent website?" This is what many cross-border beginners will consider before they consider entering a cross-border independent website. question. Today, I am honored to invite a successful cross-border e-commerce entrepreneur, Ms. Peng. Ms. Peng has just been involved in cross-border e-commerce for less than a year, and can be regarded as a "novice" in this field, but the sales performance obtained by Ms. Peng's independent website is really the envy of many people.

Entering June 2022, Ms. Peng's independent station orders are growing steadily. At present, the independent station has up to 36 new orders in a single day, and Ms. Peng's average daily income is as high as 200-300 US dollars. Overall, the monthly revenue of Ms. Peng's independent station easily exceeded 50,000 yuan. Here's what Ms. Peng shared.

1. Can an independent station do it?

If you ask me, is it difficult to run an independent station store alone?

Disaster!

If you ask me, in 2022, can you still be an independent station?

It works! Why is it not feasible?

I believe that everyone has the potential to become a successful cross-border e-commerce merchant, as long as you keep working hard, keep learning, and don't give up when you encounter difficulties!

Today, I'm going to share with you my little bit of experience building an independent website with Shopify.

2. Preparing funds

I'm pretty sure that any so-called "e-commerce expert" who says it's possible to start a successful business at zero cost is a big liar. How can you gain without giving? But the point is, how much are you going to pay?

According to my own experience in building a website, if you choose to be an independent website, you should prepare at least $5,000 to start a business. It's possible that it won't cost that much, but you also need to be mentally and financially prepared for anything or setbacks that may occur along the way.

Where will the money be spent? When you build an independent station, the two main expenses you need to pay first are the cost of building the station and the cost of attracting traffic to the independent station. You can refer to the various website building platforms on the market to find one for yourself at a price that suits your budget, but at the same time it also has a variety of useful apps and plugins to simplify the work of running a store. I finally comprehensively compared various website building platforms, and finally chose Shopify, the reasons are not listed first.

To open a stand-alone store, you don't have to pay for things like purchasing and inventory. This advantage makes creating and operating stand-alone sites considered low-cost, but not completely zero-cost!

3. Select the store type

Once you have identified and prepared the funds needed to start your store, the next step will be to figure out what type of store you are and what kind of products you want to sell.

When I was just starting out, I found that there are 4 main modes to choose from:

Print-on-Demand: is an e-commerce model that allows you to sell personalized products (such as clothes, mugs, bags, etc.) by printing custom designs. Products are only printed when someone orders them, so you won't need to store any products or worry about inventory-related issues. All you need to do is choose a POD platform to help you with the entire process from print to fulfillment (PrintBase, Printify, etc.).

Dropshipping (dropshipping/drop shipping): According to Wikipedia, Dropshipping is a method in supply chain management. Instead of stocking the merchandise, the retailer sends the customer order and shipping details to the supplier, who ships the goods directly to the end customer. And retailers earn the difference between wholesale and retail prices.

White Label: White label products are sold by private label retailers, but the products are manufactured by a third party.

Manufacture/Private Label: A private label product is produced by one company and sold under another company's brand.

My store belongs to "Dropshipping" (dropshipping/drop shipping), which is also the most common store type for Chinese merchants. The reason why I choose this model is because there is not much capital at the beginning and there are many domestic manufacturers who support drop shipping.

4. Selection

Simply put, it's about determining what product you're going to sell. This is a very important step, so you need to think carefully and do market research before making a decision. Determine where your main market is, what language they speak, etc.

When it comes to finding a niche, the first piece of advice I would give is to list your favorite product categories first. Well, yes, you should think about "what do I want to sell" before thinking about "what the customer wants to buy". why? If you pick a niche that you know nothing about, do you think you'll do well?

At the time I made a list of my three favorite categories:

1. Household products

2. Pet related products

3. Clothing

At the beginning of business, it is best to choose a single category to open the market. So I choose 1 of the above 3 categories. How can I choose then? By feeling? Of course not! Here I would like to recommend a super easy to use free tool Google Trends (Google Trends), you can see the global market trend data of various categories of cross-border e-commerce on it. Borrowing Google Trends quickly helped me identify my first category of indie sites. (After the independent station volume stabilized, I expanded the category appropriately)

5. In-depth market research

The next step is to delve into the category market, I usually do the following steps:

1. Use Google tools (eg: Google Search Console, Google Trends,…) to find the main keywords and see the big companies that sell the category

2. See how their traffic is

3. Check the annual revenue of the category

4. Check the profitability of the category market

Enter the communities your customers use to see what's trending in their shopping at that time. For example, I would look for some facebook groups, TikTok hashtags, Instagram posts, etc, because this is a popular social media worldwide.

6. Find the source of supply

There are thousands of videos and articles online explaining how to make selections, recommending resources, and more. The products in my store are mainly imported from the domestic 1688 website. At the beginning, I didn't know where there are good sources other than 1688, so I chose to use 1688 first (now I also use AliExpress to select products). You only need to enter "cross-border + product name" to find a large number of product sources.

Of course, I know a lot of sellers who say they feel the quality of the items on 1688 is so poor that they don't use the site for selection anymore. But I don't think the problem is entirely with the 1688, it's the way they selected items on the 1688. Sellers usually choose the cheapest products on 1688 because they want to maximize profits. How many cheap things are good things?

I'm not saying that you should choose the most expensive product, but that besides focusing on the price of the product, you need to pay attention to two other important factors: sales volume and product reviews. I usually choose products based on the number of orders and their ratings.

Checking product reviews is a very important step. I will take the time to read the reviews of a product, the more reviews the better, look at the actual pictures sent by customers, and confirm that the product is the same as the picture. This step may be time-consuming for some people, but if you ignore it and choose a bad product, it will directly affect the credibility of your independent website and brand.

The final step in ensuring product quality is ordering the product for testing. You also know that the nature of drop shipping is that the product is shipped directly from the supplier to the user, so sometimes you don't know the quality of the product. At that time, I selected 10 multifunctional brooms with good reviews and a large number of orders, bought them back and tried them out, and then chose 1-2 stores for long-term cooperation. (A little tip: place an order as a regular shopper, not say you are a seller who wants to work with them and needs samples to test the quality, so it is possible to ship your product to your regular customer products are not equivalent)

7. Choose how to build a website

At present, there are many website building platforms on the market, each with its own advantages, but I recommend that you do not choose a large platform with your eyes closed, but first understand the functions and forms of each platform to find the most suitable platform for you.

After looking at many platforms, I chose Shopify, and I chose Shopify's partner in China. What impressed me was the cost-effective personalized website construction + drainage marketing services they provided , which allowed me not only to participate in the entire process of independent website construction , put my ideas into practice, and helped a lot in terms of drainage, promotion and sales after the completion of the website.

Briefly talk about the advantages of choosing their home website:

1. Personalized website building : In fact, at the beginning, I wanted to use Shopify to build my own independent website by myself, but after I saw the independent website built by my friend, the website interface was really ugly (I realized later that There are many tools and plug-ins that we newbies do not understand), I decisively gave up the idea of ​​building an independent website by myself.

The site builder initially provided several template styles for independent sites based on my category, then had an in-depth discussion with me, and finally chose a solution that I recognized. Of course, during the decoration process of the independent station store, it is inevitable to temporarily add some inspiration of your own. Just like the decoration of the house, it is inevitable to modify it. During this process, I was impressed by their 24/7 service attitude and professionalism.

2. Smart customer service: I used to hear that in foreign trade, I often have to squat beside the computer, reply to various emails, and answer customer questions. I often work until midnight. In the beginning, I hesitated for a while before doing an independent station. But after my website was built, I found that these concerns were superfluous, because a smart customer service was embedded in my store, which could help me answer some questions of customers in a timely manner, which saved me a lot of time, and this Timely response can also improve customer satisfaction. If there is a problem that cannot be solved, I can also enter the live chat tool and solve the problem myself.

3. Multilingual interface: My store can freely switch to 9 languages ​​including English, French, German, and Russian. This can basically cover the mainstream markets in Europe and the United States, and increase my customer base.

8. Promotion and drainage

After completing all the above steps and successfully building a complete independent website, it is time to formulate your promotion and marketing strategy. Of course, traffic doesn't fall from the sky inexplicably.

I really didn't understand the promotion and drainage at first, but I was a senior advertising specialist who took me step by step to master the way. My three main channels for marketing are: Facebook, Google, and TikTok Influencer Marketing. Of these, most of the traffic and orders I get are attributed to Facebook. Here are a few things to keep in mind when advertising:

1. Identify the right target customer group.

2. Pay attention to product quality and customer evaluations to ensure that the products advertised are of good quality and are products that can attract users.

3. If the advertised product fails to bring the expected results, quickly replace it with a new advertising plan instead of standing still and waiting for a miracle to happen.

4. Try multiple scenarios. You can run 4-5 ads for different customer groups at the same time to test the effect.

Soon after, my FB page got more than 30,000 followers, which means that the advertising effect is also quite good. However, in recent days, we have been experiencing issues with Facebook ads and Google ads, such as ban warnings. Like all sellers, this has had a huge impact on my business. Me and I are also actively looking for a solution.

9. Summary

As a novice, you will inevitably encounter difficulties and obstacles when you enter the field of independent stations for the first time. After all, you have no relevant experience. Therefore, if you want to develop well in this industry, before choosing a suitable partner line is crucial.

The suggestions I gave are just to help you better understand the basic steps of the independent website construction and promotion process. You also need to be patient and not forget your original intention, not only to make quick money, but also to think long-term, how to continuously make money. Therefore, you must have a clear and well-defined operating plan to maintain a steady growth trend.

I used to be like any newbie: I made countless mistakes along the way, admitted them, and worked hard to correct them, gain experience, and keep improving!

I want to tell you here that anyone can build a successful cross-border independent website with Shopify. If I can do it, so can you!

Finally, thank you for the invitation, giving me an opportunity to share with you.