About a year ago in the summer, I joined Shopify and started my first eCommerce store. I basically self taught myself how to set up my own store by reading and watching youtube videos.
There are tons of in depth tutorials on the internet about Shopify and they were very useful. I actually loved using Shopify and I would highly recommend it, the site is very user friendly and
easy to navigate.

I decided that I wanted to sell women’s fashion apparel and jewelry, so basically I would dropship from a wholesale website like Alixpress. Drop shipping means that I do not have the products on hand, but when a buyer buys an item from me I then buy it from Alixpress and have them ship it to the customer. And that is something that I really did not like, sure many people like the idea of dropshipping because you don’t have to spend your own money, but I just don’t believe that it is a good business module. First of all I do not like that I cannot see myself what type of items I am selling, secondly the packaging will not be your own brand, and last but not least customer complaints and you have to be the middle man trying to resolve customer concerns over something that you have no control over.

So lets say you have this beautiful new store online, but you will not get any sales if you do not have traffic, I would say that finding products to sell is one thing but getting traffic to your site to actually make money is not that easy. First of all you need to learn SEO, then create social media pages like Instagram and Facebook to brand your self and it all takes time.
Even if you have a decent social media following its not that simple to sell especially if you are new to selling. So I started to promote myself thru facebook and instagram ads, and that did get more traffic to my website and certain promotions did get some sales, but you have to spend some money first yourself like in any other business.

At the end I decided that this is not working for me, I was spending too much of my own money to barely make it even. There is a monthly shopify fee plus the money I spend on ads for items that I did not physically have is not the way I wanted to do business.

If I would to start selling thru Shopify again, I would first research the product that I am passionate about, and find a product in the USA for fast shipping. I would also buy the products myself and be in charge of labeling, branding and shipping products myself. I still think that having your own eccomere store is a great business idea and great way to make money, but you have to be willing to sacrifice and invest your time and money.

Hope this helps anyone who is curious about staring a shopify store.

Happy Job Hunting