Although I had not personally designed or hosted this store, some of the theming and integration into the original DJ hub site was custom, and I believe warrants recognition. Built off the Shopify platform, heavy theming, customizations, and domain linking was implemented to make a near seamless integration with the hub to where one would not normally think they were actually switching to a whole new site completely while navigating the hub. With the original DJ site now ported over into this new theme and server, I am hoping to revist the theme options to see if I could get back a near seamless integration again.
The backstory on this:
This store was actually originially created to see if a Dropshipping business was really was that easy to setup. To be honest, it kind of was, but a major overlooked fact is that it really is not that easy (at least without extremely proper planning, knowledge, research, etc.) to get the advertised sales and profits. Sure, 6-figure+ profits could easily be made using this technique/method/system as that is the simple nature of fully online, automated sales. The flaw came down to that you really had to have the right product, and that pay per click on ads were horribly low as an industry standard. Conversion rates are around 2-8% depending on the specific industry, so out of 100 people you put your product in front of, maybe 4% will look into it further, and of those 4%, maybe only 4% of them will actually go through to buy the product. out of 100 people, that’s essentially nothing, and when you are talking about a low profit margin item, you aren’t going to get a solid return without insane volume of initial reach of customers. Again, without having some luck or really strong networking presence, it’s pretty hard to compete with already established stores that likely carry similar products. I maybe saw $50 in gross sales over the course of 2 months or so of running it like this. Which did not recoup the ~$30 a month running costs of the store.
After the dropshipping experiment, the store then later rebranded into my own personal merchandise store for my DJ brand. Saw much better success running the store this way, as I later learned that having a fan base helps before having a product you’re trying to sell. Over the years, apparently have recorded over $1,000 in gross sales since the rebranding.
Some of the key parts that went into, or involved with the hosting of this shop integration:
Some other cool tidbits regarding the store, is that I am able to, and have had other merch partners selling products under my brand directly on the site, as well as an affiliate program for those that have helped support me a lot.
Update 9/2024 – The store site has been in the process of theme update to regain the “seamless” site integration I had before updating and migrating my DJ hub/portfolio site over this this new version.