Rocky Road To A Successful Ecommerce Business: Zbigniew’s Experience

What does it take to build a successful eCommerce business? Can you handle it if you run several ventures at once? Today, we ask Zbigniew to share his personal insights on being an AliDropship affiliate AND a dropshipping store owner at the same time!

Disclaimer: all the success stories published in AliDropship blog are the results of interviews conducted in the written form. Even though the editors may make some minor changes to the grammar, spelling, and/or punctuation, the respondents’ writing styles, views, opinions, stores screenshots and personal photos are left unchanged.

Hi, please introduce yourself!

Hello, my name is Zbigniew, I’m 29 year old event manager from Poland. I live in Gdańsk, which is a part of the well known Tricity (a metropolitan area in Poland, consisting of three cities in Pomerania: Gdańsk, Gdynia and Sopot).

My journey with Internet websites started when I was 15. I always liked computers and everything related to them. I have registered company here in Poland especially for a dropshipping business.

Did you already have any successful eCommerce business before you started working with AliDropship?

Well, I’ve been creating websites since 2005, so I started when I was 15. Most of my friends were playing games like Counter Strike, Quake at this age. I played them too for a short while, but after some time, I realized that this is not for me. I decided to learn about hardware and software. That was something which got me in.

At the age of 15, I bought two books about programming in Turbo Pascal and PHP. I have developed my first website with my friend just to learn and do something to our portfolio. Our project paid off and we had from 50k to 100k visits a day after two months of working. After our success I stopped programming and gave all programming tasks to my friend. Working as a programmer, I was kind of anxious and worried all the time. Especially when something wasn’t working like it should. And besides, my friend anyway was way better than me 🙂

Our website was the biggest in Poland in this niche. We lost our battle due to competitors and decided to close website after 5 years. I was doing absolutely nothing on the Internet for about 2,5 years till I found Aliexpress.com.

And at that moment, I didn’t even have any experience in eCommerce or affiliate marketing.

How did you understand that you can build a successful eCommerce business with dropshipping and affiliate models?

When I realized that Aliexpress products are really cheap, I started to think of importing some goods from there and sell here in Poland.

Before I placed my first order, I found Yaroslav Nevsky (AliDropship Founder) thread on Warrior Forum about his AliExpress dropshipping journey. That was the first time when I heard about dropshipping business.

I followed Yaros’ thread from the start to the end, and he motivated me a lot. I had a really tough time in my life and dropshipping was a chance for me because I could start without investing big money. It was the time when AliDropship was still under developing and testing process, it wasn’t available for purchase yet.

I contacted Yaros via Skype and asked him about AliDropship and other things related to dropshipping. He was very friendly and helpful and answered every question I asked him. I bet he was talking with a lot of people that time and I am very thankful to him that he found some for me. I can say that I wouldn’t be here where I am today without his help.

How did you start using and promoting AliDropship solutions?

AliDropship was ready and released a few weeks after I talked to Yaros on Skype, so I collected money for a ready custom store and bought it. My first store was ready in two weeks. I was asked by AliDropship team about my requirements so they could start working on my project. This is how it all began.  Once my store has been delivered, I have started Facebook and Instagram Ads and I have received my first sale in first week of running my store. I was really lucky because my niche was very popular then.

I have also met Martin from the Netherlands – he has shared his success story in this blog, too! We were sharing our dropshipping ideas and strategies with each other. I helped Martin with some tasks related to php, mysql, websites transferring, and Martin has helped me with marketing – he’s a real specialist in it.  Thank you, Martin 🙂

If we talk about affiliate marketing, I started it in a few years after I discovered dropshipping. My first affiliate program was AliDropship Affiliate. The only thing which made me promote AliDropship solutions was that I just knew that this is really working. I tested it by myself, I earned money with it. If I could make money without any eCommerce knowledge, then everyone can! I would not promote anything If I knew it’s not working. I am just telling people the truth based on my own experiences. I’m not learning about affiliate, I am just sharing my knowledge with people who are related to my affiliate product.

How many stores do you have now?

Now, I run only two dropshipping stores. I had 6 stores since the day I started, but decided to sell 4 of them on Flippa and via Escrow. I will show you performance of my best store.

My best months were November and December, 2018:

And this is how my best store performs in 2019:

There is a huge difference between last year and this year. Unfortunately, I found some more competitors in my niche. By the way, I have stopped my ads at the end of January and the beginning of February due to Chinese Holidays. I am creating two more new stores at the moment, so hopefully, the total revenue will be better than how it looks now.

What about your affiliate activities?

Here’s my 1,5 year AliDropship affiliate revenue:

I’m currently promoting three different products through affiliate marketing. There are many ways to do it. I use YouTube, Blog posts, Facebook Groups, and some other places where I can leave a mark behind. I started my affiliate journey using Facebook Groups related to products which I promote. I talked to people who were looking for solutions for their problems, I was giving them advantages of using tool which I promote.

How do you promote your dropshipping stores?

Mostly, I use Facebook & Instagram Ads and Google Text Ads. I am also posting to Facebook groups about my products. This is very good way to get free strongly targeted traffic. I am using automatic tools so I can schedule posting there. Some of my products are pretty high in many search engines so I am also getting organic traffic.

How much time does it take you every day to manage your stores and affiliate resources?

Every day I spend about 4-5 hour managing my stores, optimising ads, answering emails, refunds and stuff related to affiliate marketing.

How do you deal with difficult customers (if you have any)?

In my opinion, the biggest problem in dropshipping are suppliers, not clients. Especially when the store is full of products imported from many suppliers. They sometimes generate tracking numbers and forget to ship the items. Situations like this always end with refund to the client and receiving angry emails about the situation. Customers sometimes wants to exchange the item for a bigger/smaller. I usually give a big discount to order the second product to stop the client from shipping back to China. These situations are just a small percent of all sales, but sometimes happen.

How has your life changed?

My life has changed a lot especially when it comes to home budget. I think my family finally feel relieved after some tough years. I am still working as an event manager, but I can’t wait for the day when I will be able to leave the job and use this time to expand and create more stores. My family always keep fingers crossed for me – they are my biggest supporters.

What are your plans for the future?

I will definitely create more stores based on AliDropship Original Plugin (I am creating two at the moment). I really like it because this is the fastest way to set up and customize a store. Setting up all marketing takes even more time than this. I also plan to open a professional YouTube channel and record some good reviews of products which I sell. I am still fighting my shyness 🙂 YouTube has an incredible potential and can be used in dropshipping and affiliate marketing as well.

What can you advise our readers – those who already have some sort of a successful eCommerce business and those who didn’t start it yet?

Several years ago, when I started, I was exactly in the same place as you are now. I was asking myself many questions like: Is it worth it ? Will I be able to sell anything ? How much money do I need ? How and where I should advertise ?

And believe me – I am still asking them every time when I create a new store.
I am asking myself what is going on when one day is much worse than the previous one. There will always be many questions in this business.

AliDropship Plugin costs only $89 which is nothing compared to competitors prices. This is a very low investment with absolutely no risk. There are so many ways of advertising (paid and free ones). All you need is your own engagement with a little bit of luck. I personally read AliDropship Marketing tips which are very useful for me and my business. I recommend everyone to read them.

We are sure: with such a determined attitude, Zbigniew’s successful eCommerce business will soon be famous all over the globe! We thank him for inspiring our readers by his extraordinary example, and wish him the best of luck with his ventures!