Four Months In…
From start we are now four months in building this new UK fulfilment Shopify store.
In this post I’ll talk about what’s been going on in the first half of August as a group of us run a UK fulfilment Shopify store. 😊
After a fair few problems the team are getting on with things, putting out fires and doing their best to push numbers up again.
As per my previous post, I only have access to screenshots from my YouTube case study for Shopify stats from this period.
Please do accept my apologies for the quality of screenshots in this post.
First half of August 2022 Shopify stats – £29.1k:
August Progress 1st-14th
– New banking sorted
- At last! All banking is now sorted out, incorporated in the US and ready to rock.
- This was needed in order to get both Stripe and Paypal accounts abroad.
- Speaking of which…
– New payment processors finally warmed up
- Both Stripe and Paypal are past their initial checks (from opening new accounts) so we now get funds released to us quicker.
- This in turn means we can up ad-spend and generally scale the business at a faster rate.
- Remember ‘money loops’ that I’ve mentioned in previous YouTube videos.
- The bigger these are and the quicker you can turn them around, the harder and faster you can scale your store.
– Started to scale 2 other products
- On top of our winner we have found another 2 items that we’re sure can be scaled up.
- Just got 1000 units of each delivered from China.
- About to start upping ad-spend on campaigns for both of them.
Our Main Winner Continues To Perform
– Found top quality supplier of winning product
- After moving over 13,000 units of our original winning product…
- We have finally found a top quality supplier who has the absolute best version of what we need.
– Branding of winning product
- They can brand the product for us at no extra charge!
- So we’re definitely about to make that happen as well.
Miscellaneous
– 100 sample orders of Q4 products on the way
- Over the last few weeks we have been hard at work sourcing what we think will do well in Q4.
- We picked a handful of products we think may do well, and…
- Have ordered 100 units of each, to set up test ad campaigns and get better feel of product(s) when they are in hand/selling.
– Still some teething problems being ironed out
- Still working out a few processes we need to fine tune running the business.
- We hit the ground running fast right from the start and are honestly just trying to keep up.
- Lots going on and lots of potential problems/pitfalls coming up constantly.
- We will get there for sure! But it won’t happen overnight.
– Small Facebook Ads Manager update
- Ads seemed to ‘hiccup’ a little around August 10th.
- Reduced adspend for a couple of days as ROAS dropped, and CPC increased.
- This was most likely due to a small Facebook Ads manager update.
- Once numbers stabilise we can increase adspend again.
Four months In – Store Income
Shopify totals screenshot shown here since we started trading on April 12th, to August 12th.
Four months in exactly. £215,186.21
From the above screenshot you can see that we scaled up pretty quickly to around £4k+ per day.
Then the drop happens over July as we scramble to move banking around and encounter other problems….
Next, as we get these sorted we are moving up again in the right direction towards the second half of August 🤗
Over the next couple of months the plan is to increase adspend and take us up to £10k a day.
I think this can be easily done, but we do need to have all our ducks in a row.
Facebook Ads Manager Problems
In the YouTube that matches up with this blog post, I next go on to talk about Facebook Ads and the discrepancy in numbers now that we no longer get iOS data.
Our ‘Purchases Conversion Value’ column only shows £13.8k income in sales compared to £15k ad-spend.
Yet obviously if you look at the August Shopify screenshot earlier in this post you can see sales are actually at £29.1k.
For once, this wasn’t Facebook’s fault, lol.
Apple rolled out a new feature on its devices that started alerting people when Facebook was trying to “track activity across other companies’ apps and websites.”
iOS users now have the options to “Ask App not to Track”, which in essence means a huge amount of them can no longer be tracked by Facebook ads.
We are hard at work trying to find a fix for this or a workaround so we get better ads reporting.
With things the way they are now, it’s much harder to get an angle on what’s working (or not) with our ads.
Facebook Lookalike Audiences
Now that we have a LOT of customer data from our main winner, I have started
- Creating lookalike audiences inside Facebook Ads and running campaigns.
- Upping spend on retargeting campaigns.
- Trying out alternative kinds of retargeting campaigns.
Another Week Spent Up In Liverpool!
I went up to Liverpool again for a week to work with everyone and had an awesome time as always.
After having mostly been in Bristol for the last 19 years, it’s been great to see more of Liverpool.
The people are cool, the city seems to have a real buzz about it, and I enjoyed the hell out of myself.
It’s feeling more and more exciting in the warehouse; there’s more going on every time I visit.
We are currently waiting to move from where we are now into a larger unit, and it cannot happen soon enough!
At this point boxes of product were stacked up all over the place in separate rooms, offices, and little units.
Business was getting bigger, and we really needed to move everything into one central space.
More Miscellaneous
– Found a brilliant video editor/shooter
- After literally months of trying out video editors from all over the internet…
- We found one, who lives locally, who is head and shoulders above the competition!
- Her approach is different to anything else out there and we can’t wait to start with these new ads.
– Waiting for new products to come in to add to Klaviyo flows.
- Have recently built a ton of new Klaviyo email templates and flows.
- Waiting for new products to come in so I can expand emailing even further.
- Email marketing will make a lot of money come Q4….
- …which at this point is just 6 weeks away.
- As ecom store operators you cannot afford to be caught lagging!
- Best to start preparing all this as early as you can.
Ok people that’s it for this blog post.
Other parts from this series are available here part 1 – part 2 – part 3– part 4 – part 5 – part 6 – part 7
The corresponding YouTube to this blog post can be found here.
I put all the YouTubes about this store in a playlist. Click here to watch it.
Part 8 coming soon… please keep checking back for more updates.