By Bernardo Filipe / December 28, 2025
I was talking about writing in general with a friend of mine who is a marketing researcher and he sent me one of his papers so I could check it out. Right in his first paragraph, he was mentioning Google Ads and ecommerce marketing strategies, and I was immediately reminded of my own attempt at starting an ecommerce business, back in late 2020. I found one of those “dropshipping gurus” online and studied his course, after a user I respected from an obscure online forum recommended his videos. He turned out to be an excellent tutor and I learned a lot. Indeed, I learned practically everything there is to know about starting an ecommerce business. With his help, and by following his product selection criteria, I was able to find a cool product that was poorly marketed online, and that I could therefore potentially profit from. His ecommerce strategy was basically to open a single-product store and beat the competition with superior branding and marketing. That’s what it all boiled down to. He helped pick the product, design the website, and do the marketing, among several other things. I went one step ahead and even requested my suppliers to make some modifications to the product, further differentiating myself from the competition. This tutor focused on Facebook Ads and Google Ads, but he recommended at the time doing only Google Ads and forgetting about Facebook Ads because they weren’t as profitable at the time.
My website looked great, the pictures I took from the product were amazing, and I was very excited to start selling my product. I had two massive problems right at the start, though. One was with the suppliers and the other was with Google Merchant. My supplier was from China, and the Chinese Lunar Year coincided roughly with the time I picked my product and placed an order on my first batch. The thing with the Chinese Lunar Year is that, as I found out back then, even though it lasts like two weeks, the preparations for the festivities last three months and most of the production apparatus comes to a halt. Those factories literally stop manufacturing for THREE ENTIRE MONTHS. So I had to wait those three months for the suppliers to ship me the products, even though I already had everything set up (the website and the warehouse). Well, almost everything. Because the COVID lockdowns were still a thing back then, and everyone and their grandmother were opening ecommerce stores, most of which were scams and low quality, which made Google especially restrictive at the time towards the businesses it allowed to enter its Google Merchant and Google Ads services. It took me several months to get my store approved by Google Merchant, and the process was very frustrating because their customer support was atrocious (seriously, it was practically non-existent) and I had to guess by trial-and-error what it was they wanted me to change in my website, week after week. And since Google Ads was vital for my business model, I had no choice but to wait for them to approve my store. Meanwhile, the product I picked became absurdly popular out of the blue, and I was missing a massive opportunity. On one hand it seemed the gods wanted me to succeed, by making my product suddenly popular and out-of-stock everywhere (while I had secured my inventory already), but at the same time they were preventing me from selling it, since Google wouldn’t allow me to use their service! A monumental teasing, that’s what it was.
But I made a couple of mistakes, too. First one was quality control. I should have made sure the modifications I made to my product (which were basically just putting some paint on it lol) were done with high-quality materials (i.e. high-quality paint). And the second was offering the shipping of my product to the entirety of the USA, oblivious to the fact that the USA is practically a continent, and if you have your warehouse in, say, California, and your buyer is in New York, the shipping costs will be absurd, etc. Pretty basic stuff that I hadn’t thought about, and which could be easily resolved, by simply restricting my sales to a single state, or by simply charging for shipping, so nothing too serious. The serious problem was a complaint I got from a buyer who said the paint on my product was still fresh. It could have been bad luck (every batch of every product has a percentage of products with defects), but I was still understandably frustrated with how everything was going, and after selling just two products, I decided the low margins were not worth the trouble and killed the business. Ad spend, fulfillment, and shipping were already eating up my margins, but then the very second product I sell is defective? The buyer is telling me its paint is still fresh? Did these Chinese suppliers scam me? They sent me a perfectly fine prototype when I asked them to, but now I’m getting complaints? The first buyer did not complain, but the whole thing was frustrating me a lot, so I decided to kill the business. I saved all the website content and the amazing pictures I took of the product and thought to myself that, perhaps, I could give this whole business a try again some years later.
Which is why I am making this post. After reading that first paragraph on my friend’s marketing paper, I was reminded of this entire journey, and I kind of want to give it a try again now. But this time I will sell the product in my own country, set up a proper company, and make sure the paint these Chinese suppliers use is high-quality. The color scheme I’m adding to the product is necessary because it looks great and is practically nowhere to be found on the market. And, who knows, maybe even further down the line, if this business succeeds, I might start selling custom color schemes, selected by the buyer. I can pay an artist here in my country to paint my product with whatever color my buyer wants, after all. As long as the buyer is willing to pay premium for this, why not?
Of course, I already looked up my product online here in my country to see the competition, and their marketing and ads are absolutely terrible. So I see a clear opportunity here. With a good enough markup, I could profit a lot, even if I spend 50% of my margins on advertising and fulfillment. I know roughly how much the product costs (the COGS), I see the price at which it sells here, and I see an opportunity. If my current investments turn out well in the next three to six months, then, I might allocate a few thousand dollars to this ecommerce endeavor and give this thing a try one more time. It’s a mix of wanting to make money and stubbornness. But who knows? If I do start this business again and it succeeds, maybe I will be the new “dropshipping guru” selling my courses online to other wannabe entrepreneurs. Maybe in five years, after I’ve sold my business for several million dollars, I will start my ecommerce course with these words:
“I have created a DROPSHIPPING COURSE. I will teach you, step-by-step, how to sell cheap Chinese products directly to middle-class Americans. I know all the tricks: how to ship from China in just TWO DAYS, with custom labels and packaging, so your customer HAS NO IDEA THE PRODUCT IS CHEAP & CHINESE!! I have put my blood, sweat, and tears in this course. I’ve compiled all the knowledge I’ve developed over the last five years, and I’ll guide you through each step, in an “over the shoulder” kind of teaching style, with lots of video content and DETAILED explanations. You heard it right! For just 4997,97 US dollars you, too, can learn how to sell junk online for absurdly high prices!”
And by the way, I am not telling you now which ecommerce course I studied and followed, nor which product I picked. Trade secrets and all. Though… I kind of want to show you the pictures I took of the product… They are so good.
The Stillest 