Table of Contents

Ippei Review – My Experience with eCom Dropshipping

September 1, 2019

The year was 2017.

Not quite peddlin’ auto-parts anymore.

Had moved out of my old 1 bedroom apartment where I had been since 2012 after graduating college.

Hard to even have the thought of wanting to move to a nicer place when you’re making $35K per year. (After taxes that’s $2200 per month)

The job had anchored me in that small town of Wixom, MI like a heavy anvil on my back for nearly 4 years.

I watched the years go by seeing nothing change. Same beat-up car Red Acura 1996, same colleagues, same meals, same commute, same town.

It was in 2014 everything began to change. I found an online biz model in lead generation that actually worked.

Was able to walk away from my job 7 months after joining this program.

By 2017 I was a full-fledge entrepreneur, around $25K per month with my lead gen biz.

My consciousness became full of all things entrepreneurship.

My YouTube homepage video recommendations were Grant Cardone, Gary Vaynerchuk, Jordan Belfort, you name it… every famous entrepreneur under the sun, I was devouring their content.

By this time Pride & Ambition have taken root in my mind, heart & soul. My identity has shifted from the average 9 to 5 guy waiting for the weekend to come to grinding through the weekend building my business and loving it.

I had caught the entrepreneurial bug.

And unlike a video game addiction *flash back to the WoW days of high school*, at least this new addiction was fattening my bank account and actually taking me somewhere in life.

For the first time in my life I understood what it meant to have purpose & direction.

$25K per month of passive income?

Ya if ya would’ve told me that when I was younger, I would’ve envision myself on the beach somewhere in Cabo or chasing women in nightclubs.

But I found myself obsessed with the process of growth and progress.

If I could get to this level in just 2.5 years where I’m making almost as much in a month as I did a whole year of working at my previous job…

Then what’s stopping me from getting to $100K per month.

And because lead gen is truly passive income especially after you hire VA (Virtual Assistants) that handle all the menial tasks for you, I now had the extra time to plot my next conquest like Julius Caesar looking over Egypt.

Where is the next best thing? Where is that Cleopatra of internet business that’ll take me to $100K per month even faster than the current trajectory I was on?

I started lookin.

Like a pilot on an F-35 fighter jet armed with ballistic missiles, I looked over the landscape for my next target.

At that time, the eCom Dropshipping biz was catching a lot of momentum.

I didn’t care for selling physical products of any kind but what caught my attention was this prospect of being able to leverage the attention that FB holds on the masses and being able to scale an ad to reach millions of people out there that I was not reaching currently with my local lead gen sites.

I thought, there must be massive untapped potential on Facebook.

I’ve been using it everyday since 2009 after all.

Armed with solid Benjamins at my disposal from my lead gen income, I was ready to make some big moves and invest in a secondary biz to add more zeros to my monthly income.

My ambition always gets the best of me.

I started by investing in numerous dropshipping courses, dead set on mastering this game of eCommerce and Facebook ads.

Many of those courses I have reviewed on this site.

In this article, I’ll go over what I learned through my experience with drop shipping.

My journey into the world of e-commerce.

I did make money with it.

But I’ll get into why after 1.5 years I decided to quit dropshipping and decided to double down on my lead generation business.

Why in 2023 I believe building sites that generate free, organic traffic is the best online business to be in.

First Lesson: Go After Passionate Fans

First thing I learned in dropshipping, target specific niches, niches that have a lot of passion because passionate fans will click on the ad and purchase.

We are after impulsive purchases with FB ads after all.

Made sense.

Here are some examples of products that coaches & other students were picking

Owl pendants (yes there are die-hard owl fans out there, personally I think they’re a lil creepy)

Avengers Bracelet, especially right after Infinity War came out (u like it?)

Kawhi Leonard ‘KLAW’ LA Hoodie (poor Drake, just make sure to deselect Toronto for FB ad targeting or actually all of Canada lol!)

Targetting people that are into running! With this bad boy

Or festival goers?

Ya see passion sells. Pleasure or pain. Incite ppl’s emotions and watch your FB ad CTR (clickthrough rate) soar and swim in that ROI heavenly ocean! Sup Mark.

Or something seasonal!

Hey look! a cool Halloween mask!

Are we getting emotional yet?

What did I pick? Poodle Necklace lol

Why? Well there was one crazy neighbor I use to have when I was a kid…

3 poodles.

Poodle hoodies, poodle T-shirts, poodle ornaments on her front gate (no joke)

Yup the whole nine yards.

you get the idea…

IDK what it is about that dog but ppl that are into ‘em are crazyyyyy into ‘em.

Well I guess you have to be in a way to maintain that crazy hair style on those dogs, I’m sure its hella lot of work.

With My FB ad campaign.

I targeted people that are liking jewelry type of pages and people that have liked poodles pages.

And guess what.

My ad campaign def caught some steam.

Some days I made some money, some days I broke even, some days lost some money

Bunch of heart emojis in the comments.

Still came out ahead my first 2 months and made some money, couple grand.

But the biz never *felt* solid to me like the lead gen biz. It was in a constant state of flux.

These necklaces were $38!

I sourced the necklaces for $13! (shipping included! Straight from the supplier)

$25 profit?

But waittttt

FB ad costs were around $15 per sale!

So even in my best months I was $10 profit per sale (26% profit margin which a lot of ecom peeps will tell you is good!)

Many of the ecom groups I was in were reporting 10-20% profit margin.

I spent 2 hrs each day watching over the ad performance, making new ads (to combat ad exhaustion), creating new campaigns, creating & trying out different landing pages…

When its all said and done, I was making about $1-$2K per month in profits!

After 2 months, the ad stopped performing because I guess I had dried up the audience. Ad exhaustion is a real bitch!

Back to square one: sourcing, going through the painful process once again of finding a Chinese supplier and ordering samples, waiting 2-3 months to get here. geez

I already had my lead gen biz going at the time, and I realized my $$$ per hour was far superior building lead gen sites that make passive income that’s longterm.

Did I give up with ecom dropshipping? I can’t say that I wasn’t close to, but not yet, I have dogged perseverance and the will of a Rocky Balboa.

I heard from some other courses the idea of selling High Ticket Items with dropshipping.

Made sense.

Instead of $10 per sale, what if I could do a $100 ?

Enter High Ticket Dropshipping

The product of choice?

Well this was a bit painful process of testing because with high ticket items the cost per click is much higher.

Lost couple grand each time I tested a product.

I tested…

Electric bicycles
A Segway type of skateboard (knockoff brand)
A wood cutting tool (for those into woodworking)

I was pretty close to givin’ up.

But then I found a winner.

Dimmable light up mirrors!

& You bet your ass I targeted ppl into fashion! (It’s a big market)

The price? $480

By this time I had taken numerous drop shipping course already.

Learned some ninja tricks a long the way, such as creating an upsell at checkout!

Once they are ready to hit purchase.

Hit ’em with a bundle offer of 3! & 5! at discount!

That’s right! Get your whole house done with these lit mirrors girl!

Always make sure your makeup is on point before you leave for the clubs!

How did it go?

So here’s the thing, an ad needs some social credibility to perform well when your dealing with higher ticket items. Needs those likes & comments.

And with these higher ticket items, the higher cost per click meant that I spent around $6K before my ad was seasoned enough and I became profitable.

And guess what! About 2.5 months into the campaign… some competing dropship douchebag came in and ripped all my ads, my shopify store and landing pages.

And just like that I watch as my cost per click doubled in 5 days and tripled after 2 weeks.

My ads started bleeding out cash fast! Like a drunk dude at a strip club.

A sinking ship.

Shut that shit off and my drop ship biz was back to zero literally overnight.

That’s when I realized.

I’m never entering a biz that’s not

Long-term
Cannot be easily duplicated by competitors
A traffic source that I have more control over

I spent some big mullah on FB, some campaign lost me money, some made profits but it was never consistent & longterm.

Also started dealing with issues of FB ad accounts getting shut down, nightmare.

At this point, I’m bit jaded about using FB ads for my online businesses.

Especially after getting my main ad account shut down where I spent well over $100K on. Like seriously?

And their support team was quite useless. To say the least…

Realizing that in Life New Doesn’t Always Mean Better…

Meanwhile my lead gen sites from 2014 that I haven’t touched since are dropping $500, $750, $1500, $2000 straight into my bank account each & every month.

This the danger of having shiny object syndrome. I flirted around but in life new doesn’t always mean better.

I realized my first love, the lead generation biz although appearing bit simple at times had the most profound qualities that I didn’t find anywhere else (I’ve done Amazon FBA also)

Passive income streams of these simple sites that rank at the top of Google for “towing troy mi” is so loyal like bees to their queen.

When I look back… my flirting ways costed me a lot!

To me the dropship model is the proverbial stripper with big tits. Sure they’re nice to look at and they promise some instant gratifications but do you really want to engage in anything serious with them long-term?

Be wary of anything in life that promises instant gratification.

All great things take time to build.

Because if it didn’t, you’re dealing with something that anyone can go into and compete with you.

A dog eat dog world.

There was no shortcut to MJ, Kobe or Lebron’s success.

Countless hours in the gym to achieve world-class skills.

That’s the biggest issue with dropshipping, there’s no real skill involved. Its all about duplicating other people’s success (which they teach in many of the courses)

In our lead gen program you’re actually honing and building your skills overtime: ranking sites, sales aspect, prospecting, branding yourself, use of different tools/softwares & many other skills that separate us from the tens of thousands of digital marketers out there.

Today I’ll run circles around 99% of internet marketers out there. And this is what gives me real financial confidence.

2017-2018, It was a year & a half of tryin’ the ecom thing.

I thought I was building a solid foundation for new income streams but the foundation was built on sand! The FB ad

Google traffic however is solid like the Egyptian pyramids.

Takes some time to build but god damn once they’re up it withstands through all the harsh ever-changing weather of modern Internet biz world.

Historically speaking, Google has remained the most solid out of any other traffic source on the internet

If only I had kept loyally building more lead gen sites in that year

I would’ve been much further ahead in my income today.

So I’m from the future like Doc from Back to the Future

To prevent the plutonium from gettin’ in the wrong hands.

I had the lead gen income to sustain the damages. But for a beginner that’s tight on cash…? Relying on paid traffic for your livelihood could be catastrophic!

Let me show u what 5 years of straight hustling online taught me. Stick around and I’ll show ya all the possible future timelines of the hottest laptop biz of today.