Creating a Shopify store is a fundamental matter. Ricky Hayes is an expert on building up a high conversion store. CJ Dropshipping had a video call with Ricky, who will share his valuable online store building insights. We discuss eight common questions in store building that dropshipping beginners mostly concerned about.
D: Demi, Youtuber from CJ Dropshipping
R: Ricky Hayes
Interview Content
D: Hi Ricky, I'm so happy to have you here with us. And could you please say hello to our audiences out there and give them a short introduction of yourself.
R: Hey everyone, my name is Ricky Hayes. I'm a Youtuber. It's a pleasure to be on the channel, absolutely honour. I have known CJ Dropshipping for a long time, so I'm a seven-figure dropshipper entrepreneur. I've been doing e-commerce now for about three years. So started from like most people from nothing, pretty much I was in a completely different industry, that's pretty much where I learnt marketing e-commerce from. Since then, I've done over eight million dollars in sales and I teach people on Youtube how to build e-commerce stores and I am the co-founder of a company called Debutify.
D: I know that you are a professor at Shopify store building and so today we are going to focus on the questions about store building. So I think there are many viewers out there who are interested in setting up a dropshipping business but have no idea how to start. So well, the first practical step is to create an online store and mostly a Shopify dropshipping store. So my first question is before we set about building a store, what preparations should we do?
R: Building the store really takes the least amount of time from my experience. Personally, I recommend doing a lot of research on your products and audience. So what I always say to people is understand that dropshipping is predominantly towards women- the main buyers. And also the niches being you know are clothes, jewelry, cats, dogs or pets I should say, also baby staff and kitchen and homewares. So I always recommend to people to sort of start there to get an idea. Personally, I just recommend that they just jump on Youtube and watch a number of videos on how to do product researches and learn how to market them successfully. So that's where I generally recommend starting.
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D: Okay yeah, I know that there are lots of free courses on how to build a Shopify store and step by step from scratch. And you also released such courses, right? So, could you share with us the major steps of building a Shopify dropshipping store?
R: Yeah, so the major steps are definitely you need to know where you're gonna market to and your logistics. Because that's very important, if you can't send the items to your customer, you're gonna have some issues. That's for sure. You need to have a good supplier; obviously, a great one is CJ Dropshipping in itself. So you need to find the products first that you want to market, doing various product researches like there's plenty of free courses to watch on that or across Youtube. Market Them, generally using most people start with Facebook ads. Build an understanding that you can build a store that doesn't have to be a perfect store. It takes time like anything, and then I start marking them. So that's sort of generally how on a basic view, how I sort of recommend to start to get the foundations underway.
D: Yeah, so these are the major steps to build up a store with fundamental functions. And how much time do people usually need to set a store?
R: Actually make the store itself, probably takes one to two hours if I'm honest. I guess for people starting out, it will be longer than that naturally. Generally, once you get the hang of it, it takes an hour to two hours. Yeah, only one to two hours.
D: Yeah, only one to two hours? But I think I may need at least one day and a likely one to two days to set up a store. And so it's one or two hours for those people with experience.
R: Yeah, sorry, for beginners, it would be at least a day to two days. Because you've got to learn how the tool works and the back end of it, so depending on where you're at in your journey, it would take at least a day or two days just to learn how the tool works.
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D: So preparation for it first.
R: Correct.
D: As much as you can, that will save a lot of time.
R: Right.
D: And my next question is that are there any Shopify apps that you would like to recommend will help to make a better conversion rate?
R: Yeah, so personally, I can't help with that. But obviously, I have to recommend Debutify. Just because it's a free theme, pretty much install it saves you a heap of time. That's where I would start there. In terms of other apps, I would also recommend SMS Bump. Basically, it's for abandoned cart recovery, which is really really powerful. And also, some email recovery, so there's a number of different apps there to help with conversion rates. But between those three, you're pretty much off to a good start. Obviously, then using the app of CJ Dropshipping for the logistics.
D: You know, we are often asked to recommend shipping checking apps, so the customers can check their orders more conveniently. Do you have any recommendations?
R: Yeah, what type of app, sorry?
D: Like order auto-tracking, shipping checking.
R: Oh, pardon me, sorry. For that, I personally just use Aftership. There's a few out there. Now, I've personally just stuck to Aftership. And I find that works well. As I said, they're all very similar. But what I like about Aftership is that it can you can customize it based on your store. So it's got a lot of control because it's purely designed for order tracking via email and SMS. So that's generally what I use.
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D: Yeah, do you recommend beginners to install some apps to import reviews from Aliexpress and like to build a chest between your store and the customers?
R: Yeah, that's probably one of the apps that I forgot to mention. Sorry, I don't know why. Definitely, using an app to pull Aliexpress reviews is a very good one generally, which is what a lot of people use. There's a number out there. Personally, I use Judge.me, it has a function where you can explicitly pulling Aliexpress reviews and then actually have it on your product page, which builds trust and rapport, and generally also helps to contribute to more sales on your store.
D: Well cool, my next question. It is a very important question that people will learn a lot from this. And so what difficulties people will meet/ mistakes people make when building a store? How to solve it?
R: What are the common mistakes? Well, if I'm honest, my biggest mistake that I made when I built my first stores is that I spent too much time on it. I spent three months. So I always say to people, don't worry about building the perfect store. It doesn't exist. It takes time. Everyone's time is very valuable. To the fact that people just see a product and they want to market it. Where is I personally recommend that you do more research on learning how to market it successfully. In relation to the store itself, as well, people don't connect all their payment gateways. For instance, I see a lot of people don't connect to Paypal. You should always have Paypal that people very much like that as well. Those would be sort of the main ones that I sort of seeing. And additionally, I would always say to people that to be prepared that. You're gonna need a little bit of money. Personally, I recommend at least five hundred dollars to start successfully- getting the product out there.
D: Many viewers out there may have no experience of building a store. And they would probably go to find someone who does it for them. And do you think it is a good idea to find someone on Fiverr or anywhere else to build a store for you? And as I checked, it will take like 40 bucks to 1000 bucks.
R: I personally have seen a lot of people do these Fiverr stores, and my personal recommendation is not to use Fiverr or other outsources. That is a very important skill for you to learn how to build a store. Because you're going to have issues with your store, so I always recommend learning. And as I said earlier, just using a free theme, for instance like Debutify, does 90% of the work, which allows you to focus more on marketing than building the store. And also, the other reason that I recommend not using Fiverr is that it's better to put that money towards testing the product through paid ads in my experience.
D: Yeah okay, so you know that there are groups or dropshipping tutors that offer dropshipping courses. Is it worth paying for dropshipping courses, or learn by oneself is totally enough?
R: I guess that's always a very subjective question, isn't it? But as someone that sells courses- like me, I think courses in retrospect are a great thing. It's just a matter of unfortunately who you choose. There's such an abundance and that's sort of the problem. I personally recommend to most people to actually just go on Youtube and look at there's hundreds of thousands of channels. And they have heaps of free courses, including for instance my own and just start there. You're better off saving your money and putting it towards your store and some ads. So you can learn how to do it yourself because that's generally where you learn the most.
D: Super, I know that you've made many videos of how to spot a fake guru. And could you talk something about this, so our audiences how they could learn real practical knowledge of dropshipping from the right tutor?
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R: I get that question asked a lot now. But personally to me, just from my experience is that I can't lie business is hard. You know, this is hard. And it's rewarding, but it's also difficult. And personally, the easiest way for me to spot someone that I don't believe is someone trustworthy that says business is easy. That shows the lavish lifestyle. For instance, a sports car, the beach, women, mansions, whatever it may be. Because they're usually just trying to hide you from the reality that business is quite hard. I've been doing this for three years, and I still find it very challenging every day. So I always just recommend looking out for channels on Youtube or various areas like Facebook and stuff where people are giving you wrong information on how to do things, rather than just saying business is easy. This is very simple that you can become very wealthy, very quickly, that never really happens in retrospect. So that's generally how I approach.
D: Super, and you're very very insightful. So that may be of all the questions I prepared for today's meeting. So do you have any final words that you want to say to our audiences?
R: Well again, thank you for letting me on the show. It was a real surprise if I'm honest. An honor, of course. I've known about CJ Dropshipping for a long time, so it's a real privilege to me. I don't have a huge amount to say other than, you know, I love what you guys are doing for the community. It's you guys who provide such a great service. I really really love that and I just wanted to say thank you for taking the time to interview me today.
If you want to share your success story with us or you have great insights about dropshipping or ECommerce to share, just send an email to demi@cjdropshipping.com, you will get a 100% response.
