#113 John Burgess: Start Dropshipping With $0
Everyone thinks it takes a LOT to start your own eCommerce business. And it does take a lot, a lot of effort, creativity, patience, and perseverance! But thanks to dropshipping and businesses like Shine On, what it doesn't take is a lot of money to get started!
John Burgess, the head of global accounts at Shine On, joins our podcast host and CEO, Daniel Budai, in an interesting conversation about starting your eCommerce journey through dropshipping.
Shine On is a dropshipping store that specializes in producing personalized viral accessories. They empower new businesses across the globe with their easy-to-sell platform that allows individuals to start selling with zero upfront payments.
Tune in to this episode to learn more about:
✔️ John's Background With Dropshipping.
✔️ How Shine On Empowers Businesses
✔️ Scaling A Dropshipping Business
✔️ Expanding Your E-Commerce Store With Dropshipping.
John's Background With Dropshipping
John Burgess heads the global accounts team at Shine, a leading dropshipping business that enables thousands of sellers across the globe with their personalized viral line of products and easy-to-use platform.
But his journey didn't start there! In fact, his story begins in early 2006. Right out of college, and having learned textile design and merchandising, John decided to take a leap and pursue his interest in the internet to see how he could make a career out of it. John combined his knowledge of merchandising with his self-taught skills of C plus to start his own consulting/print shop business.
John basically helped businesses build their own e-commerce stores using the platform BigCartel, and also doubled up his services by providing them with in-house print-on-demand service to create graphic tee shirts.
Unfortunately, due to the market crash, John was forced to sell his business. He then got into digital marketing and learned the ropes of paid advertising, social media marketing, and building e-commerce stores and apps using platforms like Magento. This experience gave John the exposure to working with brands of different sizes, which helped fine-tune his knowledge of the eCommerce industry.
John eventually got an offer to join Shine On and decided to jump ship after seeing the potential in dropshipping. When John joined Shine On, they were fairly new and operating with a small team of only five employees. They've now grown and have a team of over 130 employees, with factories in both the USA and Europe.
How Shine On Empowers Businesses
Shine On is a dropshipping platform that removes the biggest barrier to entering e-commerce: dealing with products! Sellers can simply create an account, connect it to their own website, or sell using the Shine On the marketplace and start selling in under thirty minutes.
The idea behind Shine On is that there are zero upfront costs. With Shine On, you can start taking orders and pay only once it's time to fulfill them. Basically, Shine On takes care of the manufacturing and supply chain so that you can focus on brand building and selling.
Shine On attracts two kinds of customers. The first are new customers that need help starting from scratch. The second is existing eCommerce businesses that want to expand their product line or sales revenue. Since Shine On offers personalized accessories, brands can customize items based on their niche and still cater to a whole new audience with virtually no upfront costs for testing a new market.
Shine On has over 10,000 active sellers in the US market alone, and they've also expanded with a new factory in Europe. Shine On caters to sellers across the globe and has helped generate over $152,500,914 worth of products to date.
Scaling A Dropshipping Business
There are a lot of people that say that dropshipping is a dead end. However, the truth is far from it! Dropshipping is simply a choice of how you choose to handle your logistics as a business. How well your e-commerce store does still lies in your hand and on how well you treat your customers.
Dropshipping is a very viable and profitable business model for those that focus on brand building. A big part of this involves picking the right kind of suppliers/platforms to help you dropship. You need to move away from Chinese suppliers like Alibaba and find localized platforms that offer reliable and timely fulfillment and quality of products.
Another important thing is to establish your own USP through your service by doing all the things that a brand does to be successful. This involves building lifetime value and brand loyalty.
Advertising platforms like Google, Tik-Tok, and Facebook all have advanced algorithms that see how legitimate your business is, which is why it's crucial for dropshippers to focus on brand building.
Another good way of scaling your dropshipping business is through a horizontal approach. You've got the products and the content ready. Research how local markets in different countries operate and expand your reach to other countries with similar audiences. You might have to modify your strategy in terms of language and pricing, but expanding your store to different regions opens you up to a wider market. Dropshipping makes testing and expanding to a global market easy since there are no upfront inventory or product development costs.
Expanding Your E-Commerce Store With Dropshipping
A lot of eCommerce stores that are doing well and have their own products also often have a giant email list. And just like every store out there, they might have times where they don't have products to offer during specific occasions like Mother's Day, for example.
Here's an example that John shared with us in this episode:
"One of our clients runs a golf shop, and he's got a huge database of emails, but he had nothing to offer them for Mother's Day. So, we spoke to him and convinced him to run an experiment by adding a personalized gift from our dropshipping collection at Shine On. All he had to do was send out one promotional email. He sent out that email and made over $10,000 in revenue. Just like that, he was able to create a bump in his sales on a promotional day that otherwise didn't exist for his store."
The beauty of this is that it requires very little effort for existing eCommerce brands because all they have to do is sign up on an app, add the product to their store, and run ads. Dropshipping allows existing eCommerce stores to tap into the seasonal market and widen their pool with minimal effort. It also makes it easier for existing e-commerce stores to test out new products.
And with platforms like Shine On, e-commerce stores have the freedom and creativity to customize the product to fit their brand's aesthetic. Check out their website to learn more about dropshipping and the services that Shine On offers.
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