New Store Update #4 - Losing Hope with Only Nine Days to Go! + LLC Approved!

We were doing sooo well, and then the holidays came, we stuffed ourselves with Turkey, and all of the sudden, an entire week passed us by without any progress with our store. Obviously businesses were closed during Thanksgiving, and then it was the Black Friday and Cyber Monday rush, so we thought it would be best to wait a few days to start calling potential suppliers again.

But then, we lost steam. We started putting it off more and more, and when we did call and didn't hear back we got a bit discouraged. I never mentioned it out loud to Larissa, but I started doubting myself and our niche thinking we'll never get approved and that we chose the wrong niche.

Then it came the Hunger Games...we planned to go watch Mocking Jay then go back and call suppliers. But we didn't. The time difference sucks. If only we were in the US on the same time zone then we would call.  I thought, maybe I should wait until we go to South Africa to call as we'll only be 5 hours in time difference instead of a crazy 18 hour difference. Excuses, excuses.

Then I sucked it up. I said, F-this, let's stop putting it off and just do it. Larissa made us some tea, and we stayed up calling suppliers in our underwear until past midnight, saying "hi good morning" as it was 8am in California.

7am in Thailand is 4pm in California

The good news is our LLC had come through with My USA Corporation, we had all of our paperwork ready to go, and I just spend $250 on setting up my company so I was invested and ready to get approved so I could start selling. I went down the list of potential suppliers that Larissa had made in a google spreadsheet using the methods she learned from watching the videos in Anton's dropshipping course and just started dialing down the list.

It was definitely helpful and sped up the process of calling suppliers by having Larissa's help in doing the research. It's something that I'd encourage you to do on your own to learn the process but you could eventually just outsource the process to a VA (virtual assistant) or to your significant other. But the actual calling, even though it's uncomfortable and kind of sucks, you should do on your own, especially if you want to build long term relationships with your vendors.

Using Anton's script, I started calling manufactures that potentially would drop ship products and asked to apply as a dealer. They all wanted to see my website, which is why Anton recommends setting up a fully functional demo store before you start calling and thankfully ours looked awesome from first glance so we got our foot in the door.

Then success!

We got our second supplier! Then bam! More success! We called, followed up by email, and called again the next day, and now we're approved by FIVE manufacturers and are ready to start uploading live products!

Larissa is sitting next to me uploading products, and I just updated our returns policies so we can get approved by google to start running ads and hopefully in the next update we'll start having some traffic and potential customers!

We've come so far in less than 3 weeks but there's still so much to do, here our list:

• Finish uploading products from suppliers (Larissa)
• Rewrite all of the product descriptions so they are unique to our store (Larissa)
• Optimize all products with categories and reviews (Larissa)
• Get our google ads approved (Johnny)
• Install Inspectlet so we can track visitors (Johnny)
• Follow up on suppliers and fill out new dealer paperwork (Johnny)
• Get our Wyoming Resellers Certificate (Johnny)

Resources Mentioned in this post: 

Use coupon code JOHNNYFD0924 for $25

Follow along and start your own dropshipping store

Keep in touch, and stay updated!


NEXT: Update #5: 30 Day Challenge


Johnny
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