It’s been a spell since I had the chance to place a post, but the dropshipping business has taken up some of the spare time I used for my Blog. The thing is that it is not all spent on products or processing, I have been having issues with Facebook and Alidropship that have made this side business not so easy to get off the ground. I wanted to take a bit of your time and share my experience, of course, that is what my blog is about right, anyhow here it goes.
Facebook as with many businesses is suffering a shortage of employees and of course that increases their time to review ads, and business accounts, etc. Now they do have an algorithm that looks through the ads that individuals place, but they have a tendency to be a lot tougher than a human, and a lot of the time an ad you may place gets rejected, and in some cases, your Facebook business accounts get restricted. Here is where the shortage of employees comes in which means you cannot advertise, and in turn means fewer visitors to your site and of course less or no sales. If you ask for a review of an ad or why your account was restricted, it takes 72 hours or more according to the pop-up message you get when you submit for review. The thing is, that is money you are losing and in my experienced it has taken nearly a week before anything happens. That happened to me and I was out for 6 days, and when I logged back into my Facebook business account it was unrestricted, but I was never told why I was restricted in the first place. Of course, with all the information out on the web, I decided to search it up and found several blogs or articles explaining the do’s and don’ts as to Facebook ads and I was able to make edits to the ads I was writing or in this case the posts I was boosting. So, in fair warning, and maybe you already know, but Facebook business is taking a lot longer to review any restricted accounts, so count on at least a week for you to get any kind of response. Also, please watch the content of your ads, and what you say; the ads should be in general and not directed at anyone and pictures or videos need to be kept plain, with barely any text on them.
As for Alidropship, this is going to sting a little and I am sure I am not the only one that feels this way about the company. Other similar companies offer the same type of service and this could be happening with them as well. I am taking this as a learning experience and this post isn’t about me giving up on this business – I am not! I know that there is no such thing as an overnight rich scheme, so I will keep moving forward, but I wanted to share this.
The first thing; I order an exact copy of a successful site, which I received within 4 business days. From there I had to set up the social media accounts and make adjustments to the site. This brings me to my first thing, the site they provide is not at all user friendly, now wait, of course, if you know a lot about website building/coding, then maybe you can, but many individuals that look at this opportunity are more than likely not knowledgeable on HTML or website coding. Let me give you an example, there is a section for your products and they have filters that allow you to locate products or categories, but in my case one of the important filters only allows me to filter by Sellvia products, but I cannot filter by AliExpress products or other suppliers, which makes this a pain to locate products from other suppliers other than Sellvia. They do have an export function to Excel, but so far it has been useless, I am still trying to figure that out. Now I know you are asking why do I not reach out to Alidropship support, well let me tell you. You get assigned a Project Manager, which they are very nice while they are building the site, but once they deliver – good luck. I have had to go to their site and send a message through their Contact Us function, which in some cases I was directed to an article or they did try to assist, but I guess on my third or fourth email they referred me back to my Project Manager, which happen to be out from 11/11 through 11/29, remember I got the site back on 11/4. The customer service is, well not that good.
The second thing: I wanted to point this out, if Alidropship sells the exact copy of the site to say 1000 individuals, there are 1000 sites out there exactly the same and more than likely with the same products when it first starts. The reason I bring this up is that they literally gave me a copy of a site, which of course it should be right, with the exact same products, but the only difference being the logo, well not necessarily the logo, just the name because the logo looks the same. Now multiply this with 1000 exact sites, but wait, say the individuals bought the marketing package as well. Now you have 1000 individuals with the exact same marketing material, and maybe this is not a big deal, but if one of the individuals’ Facebook business sites gets flagged for one of the marketing ads, you and possibly everyone else will get flagged as well. Remember Facebook uses an algorithm at first to do most of the review work, and it is very generic, so it will more than likely flag your ad along with the other 1000 individuals. Of course, as each person, including myself, works on their own site and they begin to add their own products, maybe a specific niche, the exact site becomes unique – at some point. The thing I am trying to say here is, Alidropship along with maybe Shopify and other similar companies are providing a tool, sort of speaking, that allows you to sell products online as a drop shipper, but the site itself is not user friendly at all – once again unless you are a web designer and maybe you can hackle with the code. Maybe if I would have simply had someone create an eCommerce site that was more user friendly where I can make edits myself, and then locate the suppliers to import my products, but it is tough to know at this point, because I am knee-deep into this business and I have to keep pushing forward.
I am definitely not giving up, and luckily, I was finally able to start advertising on Facebook, along with Google ads. I am also posting carefully on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter each day to build brand awareness and products. The thing is I am going to look at this as a long-term investment, and maybe by the time I retire the site will generate say an extra $1000 a month or more hopefully.
Alrighty then, once again thanks for stopping by, I hope everyone is having a wonderful Thanksgiving week. I leave you with this thought, “The road to a business might not be the road someone tells you it is, but that doesn’t mean you can’t travel on whatever road you were giving, because you can – keep moving forward.”