Store Income January 2023
This blog post will cover an update about our store income at the end of January 2023.
The matching YouTube to this blog post was uploaded on 02/02/23.
If you read the previous post to this one, you’ll remember December didn’t really go according to plan. 😭
However, January did way better than I expected it to, especially after what happened leading up to Christmas.
Almost £188k.
Really not bad at all for the start of Q1 – typically a low income month in the ecommerce calendar.
January Bits & Bobs..
As you can see the month started off strong but then dipped a few days in as we ran out of our winning product AGAIN.
There was a delivery of 25k more units on the way but they were coming via sea, not air.
Deliveries via sea take way longer than air but work out a lot cheaper.
At this point we were still messing around with logistics and this time the dates didn’t match up. 🤔
We had to sit around on our hands pretty much waiting for stock to arrive from China…
…which was made worse by watching how cheap cpc was around this time – sub 20p per click!
Yet again it felt like a missed opportunity as we could have really scaled our winner hard during this time.
Finally, on the 17th we got a re-stock.
Cpc was still low so we scaled that puppy back up hard. 💪🏻
We were soon back up to about £8k a day
But towards the end of the month cpc was beginning to rise again due to incoming Valentines Day.
The Print on Demand market goes mad around this time of year with everyone pushing jewellery and the like.
So naturally cost per click tends to increase.
Always keep an eye on that calendar guys!
From product testing we had already by mid month found another potential two winning products.
We got a sample pack of each, about 200 units, and they flew out.
So 500 more of each are now on their way from China to see if we can scale these numbers up some more.
Quick Facebook Ads Screenshot
Some people were asking in the comments of previous YouTubes to see our Facebook Ads.
I’ve had to blur out some campaign names to protect our winners, but here’s January stats:
You can see here £70k spend for £120k income with 1.7 ish ROAS.
Not brilliant but it was January and 1.7 is way above our break even point.
Also check those cheap clicks – they won’t be happening again for a while.
Sorry there isn’t a clearer look at ads but big screenshots don’t show too well on WordPress.
Plus there’s those campaign names I’ve had to block out – my apologies.
We also run Google Ads and some others, so this isn’t the full picture for our store income January 2023.
It’s just Facebook Ads.
Moving into New Premises!
I’ve been talking about it for months, but in January 2023 we finally started moving premises.
New office and new fulfilment warehouse – with kitchen, toilets, the lot! 🤗
Pictures below are of the fulfilment room as it got built….
And our new office, before and kind of after…. Mine and Jess’s desks at least. 😀
Then it got trashed a bit while things were being moved in… 😭
Klaviyo coming into its own
I always talk about pushing email marketing hard if you are doing Shopify, and here’s proof of just that:
Almost hit that £15,000 mark in January (from emailing alone!)
And nigh on £11.5k of all that money was generated entirely from autopilot email flows.
The remaining £3.4k or so was made thru one off email campaigns, advertising new products, Happy New Year mails, etc.
Another Klaviyo screenshot of our stats since we started the store (about 9 months ish)
A comfortable £73,000+ made through emailing alone…
… I’ll take this thing thru 6 figures before our first year of business is up.
Bet your boots on that!
As I talk about in the YouTube related to this blog post, I’ve been working with Klaviyo for about 10 years now.
But not until this last year have I had chance to run it on a store with a super high ad budget.
With higher ad spend comes more customers thru the door which equals more subscribers on your email list(s).
Once that’s in place, you really can push Klaviyo hard and use it to make a LOT of extra money.
Sidenote : I have a new course being released quite soon on how to blow up your Klaviyo, and it’s a monster!
I’ve been working on it for over a year so watch this space – it’s coming real soon.
Working More With Branded Products in 2023
As we move into 2023 we are expanding our range of branded products.
We already have a few that are doing real well.
Adding your ‘brand’ or mark (usually just our store logo) on to a product really helps separate it from others on the market.
Our OG winner, the evergreen product that continues to rip out numbers, is now branded moving into this new year.
Product development, even on a small scale has been a new thing for me, but it’s really fun.
Me and another guy who works here have been liaising with a great designer making packaging these last few months.
It’s great – taking a generic product, putting your stamp on it, then bringing it to market.
Not something I’ve done much of before but I enjoy the process a whole lot.
What’s been interesting to me is seeing that in a lot of cases it doesn’t even cost you anything extra.
Most of the time, it’s just designing a box
A lot of products come in a box anyway.
With product development, in many cases all you’re doing is putting your brand and/or images on said box.
So, for the Chinese to print something on that box instead of it being just plain cardboard…
….and especially if you’re ordering 25 or 50 thousand of those items at once….
…they don’t even charge you extra money for branding the boxes!
So it’s been win-win for us over here in the UK. 🇬🇧
Other misc news from January
Never stop testing products.
This is as true now as it was when we opened the store.
We are constantly testing new product on the store and via email marketing.
More samples are on their way right now.
We order them most weeks from China…
…and as we are ordering such high volume from over there they often send free samples over randomly for us to look at.
Short form ads performing better
We’ve seen this happening over probably the last 4-5 months.
When we started this store in 2022 our product ads were 25-30 seconds long, and up.
The pace and editing was slower, and these longer ads converted great.
Fast forward just a few months and with Tik Tok coming up fast – plus YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels…
Let’s just say people’s attention spans have dropped lol.
What we’ve noticed for a while now is snappier, shorter ads are performing way better.
So that’s the direction we’re moving into for 2023.
Ads, what works best, and how well creatives convert changes all the time.
You need to stay on your toes and keep up with the trend(s).
Launching first product on Amazon
Due to us having a lot of stock left over from Christmas we are seeing if we can move some units via Amazon.
I’m not organising this so don’t have too many details.
What I do know is that you can link Amazon Affiliates direct to your Shopify store.
This way when an order comes in via Amazon, it gets processed and fulfilled via Shopify, same as normal.
The more selling channels we have the better is my opinion.
We had to apply for a trademark too, as the product in question is branded with our logo.
Ok, that’s it for this update on our Shopify store income January 2023.
Other parts from this series are available here:
part 1 – part 2 – part 3– part 4 – part 5 – part 6
part 7 – part 8 – part 9 – part 10 – part 11
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.
This is unfortunately going to be the last part in this series.
Onto more, different blog posts very soon.
See you in the next one!