Episode Transcript
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What's up everybody? Anton Craley here from
dropshiplifestyle.com. And today I want to talk about
multi store networks, specifically multi store
networks of high ticket drop shipping stores.
So I haven't really talked aboutthis before.
So this video might be a bit long, but we're going to get
into a lot of the details. Like first of all, what is a
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multi store network? What are the benefits of
building 1? What are some of the technical
things to consider should you decide to go this route?
And hopefully this video can serve as a resource for you if
you want to start with building one of these networks for
yourself today or in the future.Because there are definitely
benefits to going this route either from day one or taking
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what you've already built if youalready run a drop shipping
store and turning that into a multi store network.
Now, First off, the reason that I wanted to cover this today is
because recently I've been thinking a lot about like my
initial journey into drop shipping.
And for those of you that don't know, I started actually with
traditional ecommerce. First I was selling cookies from
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a bakery in Brooklyn. After that, within a few months,
I realized they need to sell more expensive products.
So I was importing containers from China all across to the
different parts of the US to NewJersey, some to California, and
I was shipping the products direct to customers.
After maybe a year or so of that, I discovered drop
shipping. And since then it's been on
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building more and more stores, building more and more networks.
And what I realized is from yearone to year 3, in my high ticket
drop shipping journey, what really took me from a few
$100,000 in sales to a few $1,000,000 in sales every year
was building a network of stores.
So definitely think it's worth sharing and I do think that this
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episode will definitely be worthyour time.
Hopefully they all are. But with that being said, let me
switch greens here, pull up my iPad and let me first talk about
why we build niche specific stores to begin with.
Because you might be thinking, why would I need a network of
stores? Why can't I just have one
superstore that I put everythingon?
Well, really quickly, the main reason that we build niche
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stores, I'll just call this Niche Store 1, is because we
want to become the authority in whatever niche we're selling in.
And a big reason we want to do that is to have the highest
conversion rates possible. What is a conversion rate?
It is the percentage of people that buy versus the percentage
of people that visit your store.And by building niche specific
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stores and obviously doing a lotof other things, right, What our
goal is, is for every 100 website visitors to get 2.5
sales, what does that come out to?
It is a 2.5 conversion rate, 2.5%.
So I'll put CR for conversion rate.
This is our goal from targeted traffic.
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This doesn't mean, you know, if we just buy 1000 bot visitors
that we're going to have a two 21/2% conversion rate.
This is from our targeted traffic campaign, like I teach
in Module 6 of the blueprints. But this is our target.
And what I realized early on is one of the easiest ways, again,
to have a very high conversion rate is by building niche
specific stores, showing people exactly what they're searching
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for and becoming the authority in a given niche, right?
So that's why we're not going tojust start adding on more and
more niches to call it store #1 because if we did that, then
what's going to happen is our conversion rate is going to go
down and down and down. We're going to see less return
on ad spend, meaning and we're going to get less money back for
every dollar we spend on ads andthat is the opposite of what we
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want. So this is how originally again
back in probably 2008, 2009, somewhere in between then I
decided I was going to start building networks of stores.
So what is a network of stores? Let me just first explain that
to you and then we'll get into again, like, you know, the
technical parts of doing this. But let's just say that first
store that you built, maybe you own this store now is a bounce
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house store, right? Nice high ticket niche.
You are selling bounce houses. The site is positioned as the
the authority in the bounce house space.
This is its own Shopify store. That's what we use for our
e-commerce platform. You build the store, you're
selling bounce houses. Let's just say it's called
bouncehousesplus.com. You're getting traffic, you're
authorized to sell for the best brands in the bounce house
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niche. It's doing great.
Now, when you turn this into a network of stores is when you
can find other related niches where the customers from called
store number one would also be interested in those products.
So I brainstormed a few ideas before I started recording this
for you. And let's just say that that
second niche was trampolines. OK, So what do we do?
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We build another store. So this is going to be
trampolines. And again, this is a new Shopify
account. It's a new URL.
Maybe this is trampolinesplus.com and again,
the reason we're not putting these trampolines on the bounce
house store is because if we do that, we're going to see a lower
conversion rate. Again, the opposite of what we
want. So we are going to build a
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second store that sells trampolines and don't worry, I'm
going to get into, you know, traffic and things like that
later on. So we're getting there.
But let's just say as you were doing your research and you
know, looking into what else your customers might be
interested in, you figured out that outdoor swing sets would be
something else that work great for them.
So what are you going to do? You are going to build a third
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store and that is going to be a swing set store.
All of these stores are independent of one another.
All of these stores on their own.
If you only built, you know, store number 1, you would could
be very profitable. If you only built store number
2, you could be very profitable.If you only built store number
3, you could be very profitable.But when we build stores in a
network, the goal is that we canbe able to cross promote our
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stores to customer segments fromthe others.
So people that visit and buy from our bounce house store, we
can direct them to our trampoline store.
People that buy from our trampoline store, we could send
to our swing set store. People that buy from our swing
set store, we could send to our bounce house store.
And obviously vice versa. This works in all directions.
And what it creates is a flywheel of customers that
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you're basically acquiring for free on your additional stores
without ever harming your conversion rates.
You're keeping your super high conversion rates.
You're basically running 3 profitable businesses, but each
of those businesses is now even more profitable because they're
getting extra visitors and extrasales for free from cross
promotions. OK, so that's why we don't put
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everything on one site. And again, this is how we
brainstorm things that would fall into our store network.
Now let's just say you had another idea and you were like,
OK, these stores are all doing great.
I want to build a fourth store and that store is going to sell
horse saddles. OK, maybe that is a great niche,
but guess what? It's not related to anything
that would go in someone's backyard that has young kids.
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So if you did want to build a horse saddle store, this would
be technically store #1 again, either as a stand alone or
possibly in a new network of horse type products, right?
So keep that in mind. And for now, what I'll do for
anybody watching the video version of this is just cross
out the horse saddle one becausethat obviously would not fit
into our network the way that wedetermine.
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Is this part of a network or is it something separate is would
our customers from one of these stores also be interested in
purchasing from one of the others?
So hopefully you could see how these three all meet that
criteria. And the fourth one I just put up
here, it does not. Now let's talk about some of the
technical things here and then talk about traffic.
Now one of the beautiful things about building a network is you
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don't need to establish multiplebusiness entities because they
are all related. This is how I do it.
So you could technically establish different business
entities, but the way that I do it is if we're building stores
that are part of a network, theyall go under 1 entity.
What is an entity? Could be an LLC, could even be a
sole proprietorship, could be anS corporation.
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Typically what we do is form LLC's and then elect to have
them taxes as corporations. It's a little bit technical
here. If you're part of drop ship
lifestyle, just go to module zero of the blueprint.
I cover this all in detail, but let's just say I was building
this network. I might call it something like
AK Stores LLC and AK Stores LLC LLC would own all of these
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businesses. They would all be under this one
business entity, meaning that when we're filing taxes,
everything's combined, meaning with our business checking
accounts, everything is under that.
They're all part of this business entity.
And the reason I do this is because let's just say three
years from now, I did build thisand I wanted to sell my Bounce
House store because the Bounce House store would be part of
this network. If I wanted to sell that, I
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would be selling a network of stores.
I would be selling every asset that in this case AK Stores LLC
owns. So the buyer would be buying the
business, the network of three stores.
So makes it a little bit easier when it comes to accounting as
well. Now next thing I want to cover
is traffic because I did talk about this a little bit earlier
as one of the benefits and one of the things that took me from
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about like $340,000 a year in sales to $3.2 million a year in
sales within a three-year time period.
It was building this network while growing all of these
stores independently. But one of the big things that
helped with again like free traffic basically to each store
was my traffic strategies when building a network.
So I want to cover two differentthings that are both probably
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the the, the biggest impact things that you could do that
again, I do myself. So if you're familiar with
Shopify, which I'm assuming you are, if you're in e-commerce
already, if you're not, again, that is the e-commerce platform
that I use and that I recommend.But they give you e-mail
templates that you can edit thatare sent to people once they
place an order. So let's just say you ordered
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from my hypothetical bounce house store here, you would
receive an order confirmation e-mail just letting you know
what you ordered, how much you paid, confirming your shipping
address, where it's shipping to.And again, in Shopify, you can
edit these e-mail templates. So what we do is, again, let's
say somebody bought from our bounce house store in their
order confirmation e-mail. Go all the way over here for it.
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I'll just write confirmation e-mail.
We edit that template and add a note that lets people know, you
know, thank you for your order. Did you know that we also own
and operate trampolinesplus.com and Swing Sets plus.com?
All of our return customers can save X percents, you know, 5
percent, 10%, whatever you want to do for the next 7 days with
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discount code gratitude at checkout.
So I'm just going to put discount code and this is added
again to all of the order confirmation emails that people
receive from all of these stores.
So what we're doing here, again,by not like showing people all
these things upfront is maintaining our authority in
each independent niche for each store.
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But we're getting that benefit of cross promotion by sending
these order confirmation emails,which have basically 100% open
rate, giving people a discount code and letting them know, hey,
if you also want a swing set, ifyou also want a trampoline, go
to our stores. You could save again X percent
off for the next 7 days with this discount code.
This is a great way to again getinstant sales for zero extra
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dollars cost of acquisition. So the next thing that I think
is probably most important when it comes to cross promotion is
monthly promotions. Now this is something that I
also do cover in Module 6 of thedrop ship blueprint.
So if you remember, I believe it's less than 6.9 again in
Module 6. But one of the things that we do
for all of our stores is run monthly promotions.
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So let's just say again, let's say for your trampoline store
now you were running a three daypromotion for the 4th of July,
right? So you have a 4th of July promo
and in that promo you're offering whatever it is.
You know, I give you lots of ways to brainstorm ideas for
promotions. But maybe for the trampoline
store, if the customer spends over $1000, you're giving them a
free safety net for their trampoline, right?
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That's your 4th of July promo. OK, great.
On your swing set store, that's going to have its own 4th of
July promo as well. Your bounce house store that's
going to have its own 4th of July promo as well.
But what we do and that I something I recommend you do is
that when it comes to remarketing ads, I'm just going
to put RM for short. You are using your audiences on
Google and on Facebook. I'll just put Meta because
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obviously this is Instagram as well.
And when you are running your remarketing ads to show off
these monthly promotions, you'renot only showing the trampoline
promotion to the trampoline website visitors, you're also
showing it to people that have visited your swing set site.
You're also showing it to peoplethat have visited your bounce
house site. And again, during your bounce
house promo, you're also showingthose ads to people that have
visited your trampoline site andpeople that have visited your
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swing set site. And these are some of the
highest return on ad spend campaigns.
And you basically have extra audiences of targeted people
that you can run small budget campaigns to again, every single
month like clockwork to make youmore money.
Now, the example I just gave wasa 4th of July promo, but let's
just say in August you're not running a specific, a holiday
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specific promotion, I should say, right?
Let's just say for store number 1, you have a promo that is, let
me change the color here. You have a promo that is for the
first week. So I'll put week 1, let's just
say this is August. So week 1 you have a bounce
house promo, Week 2 you have a trampoline promo, and week 3 you
have a swing set promo. Well, what you can and should do
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is also e-mail again Week 1, your bounce house promo, send
out the e-mail promotions to thebounce house e-mail segment on
your store, but also e-mail thatout to the trampoline people
that have opted in there, letting them know, hey, this is
Anton from Trampolines Plus. Did you know we also offer
bounce houses on our partner store, bouncehousesplus.com if
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you're interested This week, if you buy a bounce house from us,
we're going to give you a free 100 foot extension cord so you
can put the thing far away from your house, right?
Whatever it is, and again you dothis with every different store
and it's increasing your pool ofpeople you're marketing to, it's
getting you more traffic, it's getting you more sales for zero
extra dollars of acquisition andit's doing it while maintaining
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a super high conversion rate that keeps your return on ad
spend as high as possible. Now again, this is something
that I have been doing since probably my second year in this
business. It's not something that
everybody has to do at all because again, you know, you can
have just any one of these stores be extremely profitable.
And I don't, I'm not making any income claims here, but you
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could have any of these stores. There's people out there, I
should say that have stores in these niches that are making
more than full time incomes. But if you want to get to that
next level, my advice is at least consider building a multi
store network. It is extremely beneficial.
I just went through a bunch of different ways.
Use the techniques I gave you here.
And as always, if you have any questions on this, just let me
know, leave a comment below. And if you want to know more
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about, you know, how we pick niches, what our market research
looks like, how we build stores,how we get traffic, be sure to
go to Drop Ship webinar.com as well.
I'll link that up in the description there.
I have about a two hour brand new free training that takes you
through a whole lot more than wejust covered here.
So again, that is Drop Ship webinar.com.
So as always, thank you. I appreciate you and I'll talk
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to you in the next episode here at Drop Ship Lifestyle.