u/DT_in_the-flesh

Hey all,

I recently launched my first Shopify store, hoping to sell some products that I designed. I decided to stick mainly to Facebook ads because I'm not very sure how to create viral media. Regardless, I am here hoping to get some guidance and fact-checking. Any advice will be appreciated.

First

I first got into this business working on Fiverr. A German person who owned a marketing agency hired me there to help him design products to sell (in Germany). I designed maybe half of the products on his page. Through working for him, I also chatted with him. He told me that he was spending 15 Euros a day on ad spend, getting about 400 sessions on Shopify, and about 18 orders a day. This amounted to around 400 Euros a day in revenue. Since then, I've stepped away from designing to focus on school. But now that I have more free time (senior college), I decided to launch my own store, seeing that my designs were desirable (because he was able to sell my designs). I don't believe him to be a guru or lying to me about his numbers because it doesn't benefit him at all.

So I tried to replicate his strategy as much as I could. I haven't been able to get in contact with him, so I had to stalk the Facebook ads library, Shopify store, etc... The only difference between my products/page and his was that his were more playful, and mine were more aesthetically pleasing. From what I could tell, he had almost no organic growth and relied mostly on ad spend.

I just want to see if you guys thought his spending, conversion rate, and revenue were realistic.

Second

I haven't seen much success with ads. When I first began paying for ads, I used Instagram Boost. I know this may not be the best method, but I wanted to try it out. I spent $200 over 4 days and got 4 sales. I used an image post of a single image. I got about 3108 reaches with 3602 views. 113 link clicks, 112 content views, 13 ATCs, and 6 checkouts initiated. Only 4 purchases. CTR of about 3%. My AOV is relatively low, maybe around $30. After material costs, labor, packaging, and shipping, I lost money. So I decided to go with Facebook Ads or Meta Ads.

Do these numbers look promising?

Third

Currently, I'm on Meta Ads. I decided to set an ad spend budget of around $50 a day, like before on Instagram. My Ad set originally included two ads. One video and one image, the same image as the Instagram post. The video flopped pretty hard and ate up most of the budget. I ran these two ads for about 2 days and stopped. So I disabled it and replaced it with an unboxing video (now it's an image and a video). It's been around 12 hours since I restarted the ads. For the image, I'm getting around 3.66% CTR, $1.20 CPC, and $1.61 Cost per landing page. 17 landing page views. The new video still isn't doing well at all. I also switched from Advantage placement to manual.

I haven't had any sales since I switched over to Meta.

Am I giving it enough time to learn? The Instagram Boost got sales almost right away, so I was thinking there's something wrong with my Meta ads.

What else can I do? Or should I just let it learn?

Thank you for reading, and any advice would be appreciated.

First off, I want to say, I used to absolutely love Waymo. I enjoyed the privacy we got in Waymos and the fact that we could play any music we wanted.

Last night changed my perspective on the company. My girlfriend and I took a Waymo in LA last night, and she forgot her purse in the car. Obviously, this part was our fault, and we don't blame Waymo for it. But we thought Waymo would be more helpful. They weren't at all.

After we realized we had left the purse in the car about 10 minutes after getting out of the car, we contacted them. We told them that we had left a purse in the car and that there was important medicine that she had to take within 2 hours (I don't want to get into the details of the medicine, but if you have taken it before, you know what it is). We couldn't just go home and get another pill because that was her last set of pills, and CVS was closed by then (I know she should probably keep a backup, but she didn't).

Anyways, they told us they would get back to us in 4 hours. We asked them why it would take this long, and they said that they had to bring the car back to the depot before they could give the items back to us. So we asked them if they could at least check some sort of recording or check the camera in the car to see if it was actually there. They said no, they don't keep recordings, and no, they can't check the camera in real time. Which I found very weird because they checked in on us a couple of times when we had our seatbelts on to ask if we were 18. Sure this may be understandable due to customer privacy but they never seemed to care about privacy when it came to us.

Well, they didn't get back to us in 4 hours. We woke up this morning, and no emails or any attempt at contact from them. So we called them. They said they don't have any information about the car or our items. I asked if they've even checked it and they said they didn't have information on that either. Very terrible experience all around. I looked at Google Maps reviews of their depot and others posts and people had terrible experiences. They handled this worse than any other company I’ve ever dealt with.

We aren’t getting our items back are we.

Needless to say, I'm never taking Waymo again.