Global Selling Beginner's Complete Guide! From 3 Months No Sales to 11K RMB/Week—10 Steps & 15 Pitfalls (Part 1)
From 3 months with no sales to 11,000 RMB in one week—10 steps and 15 pitfalls for global selling beginners to avoid common traps and grow fast.
Global e-commerce, Web3, AIGC—the three major tools for harvesting韭菜 (leeks) among contemporary internet users.
The hardest hit areas for global e-commerce韭菜 harvesting include digital nomads, internet refugees, moms, money-making women, unemployed dads, overseas Chinese, and others. Because these people think they have strong information acquisition abilities, fast learning speeds, and can master information gaps that others can't.
When they see similar information in the following channels:
- Maybe on Xiaohongshu: "Say goodbye to internal friction, girls doing global e-commerce alone is so great."
- "Hit big sales, mom doing global e-commerce alone, no inventory, just one phone"
- Or seeing some出海 companies posting PR articles about how profitable they are
- Or on Bilibili or YouTube with clickbait titles: "I made 100k in one week with AIGC+Dropshipping"
(韭菜 concentration off the charts)
Then you inexplicably think you can do it too.
Like me.
Reality: 3+ Months No Sales After Building Site
In fact, it took me over 5 months to roughly figure out the entire global e-commerce process by myself:
At first, for over 3 months after building the site, not a single order. Anxious and painful, plus the渲染 on social media that everyone can hit big sales, everyone has 40% conversion rate. Felt like a废物.
But in month 3, suddenly got the first organic order, $84. Even made me think it was a scam order. I even searched for this client online, and they actually had a LinkedIn profile—CEO of a tech company.
Made me feel a bit hopeful.
After some preparation, at 4.5 months, officially started running ads. Luckily hit £864 in sales in the first week, with £237 ad spend, ROAS of 3.6.
Now I spend half a day every day summarizing my journey and practices to share for free. Hope to show everyone the real journey of a global e-commerce solopreneur. Relieve anxiety, grow together.
Lvsao's Global Selling Beginner Bible: 10 Steps, 10 Pitfalls
Step 1: Product Selection (Cost: $0)
Three Principles
- Based on your interests or expertise, determine your main category
Never forget: interest is the best teacher. If you can't even distinguish Type-C from Lightning, but follow the crowd to do digital 3C, do you think it's ridiculous that you could make money?
- Find subcategories from main categories (also called long tail keywords or niches)
Never use the lazy and stupid one-stop mindset. One-stop gardening supplies, one-stop pet supplies, one-stop home goods—find a plugin to import hundreds of products from 1688 and dream of hitting big sales?
Stop dreaming. What you need to do is find细分再细分 subcategories within large categories—this is the only survival way for solopreneurs. Remember, the only way.
But beginners may find it hard to find profitable subcategories at first. My suggestion: just do it, find as you go, see what competitors do (can follow), see what foreign small businesses do (avoid).
- Data verification, shipping cost verification
Determine shipping costs for your selected products. If you have some advanced ability, use third-party SEO tools or Google's official keyword planner to roughly check market demand and CPC. (But for beginners, this isn't very meaningful because beginners have no concept of numbers.)
Two Pitfalls
- Having beginners use various tools to look at data, trends, find blue ocean markets—pitfall.
This may go against common sense, but if you really learn from knowledge bloggers to find Top 10 trending categories from those so-called tools, you're basically being harvested.
The reason is simple: data has no concept for beginners, or beginners find it hard to get guiding execution strategies from data. For example, market supply-demand relationships shown in data are ignored by many. When you see a public account article saying xx category sold big in 2022! You think this category market sells so well! Why? Isn't it because supply is also sufficient? Sufficient supply means what? Doesn't it mean many sellers, sellers are competing?
Besides, content published全网 saying xx category is selling big—do you really think this information is valuable?
- Watching various韭菜 videos and doing Dropshipping—pitfall.
Dropshipping is for foreigners to harvest foreigners, understand? A few years ago when Shopify was promoting, a dropshipping歪风 arose abroad, as if all YouTube bloggers said they made big money with dropshipping, but is this really true?
Dropshipping is the same logic as hanging小黄车 on Douyin—you don't handle goods at all, just hang an AliExpress product link, after someone orders, the factory ships directly to the buyer. You earn the difference.
Sounds beautiful? But the problems are:
- Shipping time cannot be guaranteed
- Product quality cannot be controlled
- Terrible customer experience
- High refund rate
Product selection is the first and most important step in global e-commerce. Don't blindly follow trends—choose based on your actual situation and abilities.
Step 2: Site Building (Cost: ~$40)
Shopify is the First Choice
For beginners, Shopify is the most friendly site-building tool. Monthly fee $29, plus some necessary plugins, first month cost around $40.
Pitfall: Don't be cheap with free themes
Free themes work but have limited functionality, and many aren't mobile-responsive. I recommend going directly to paid themes, or using Shopify's official Dawn theme (free but high quality).
Step 3: Domain and Email (Cost: ~$15)
Domain Selection
- Short and memorable
- Include keywords
- Prioritize .com extension
Business Email
- Don't use QQ email, 163 email
- Recommend Google Workspace or Zoho Mail
Step 4: Payment Methods (Cost: $0)
PayPal is Essential
- Personal account can start
- Upgrade to business account later
Credit Card Payments
- Stripe (needs overseas entity)
- 2Checkout
- PingPong and other domestic aggregators
Prepare payment methods early because approval takes time. Recommend opening PayPal first while applying for credit card payment channels.
Step 5: Shipping and Fulfillment (Cost: $0)
Learn First, No Cost Without Orders
Before getting orders, you only need to understand shipping processes and cost calculation methods, no need to actually ship.
Main Shipping Methods
- Postal packets (cheap but slow)
- Commercial express (fast but expensive)
- Special line logistics (balanced choice)
Step 6: Product Listing (Cost: $0)
Product Images
- Supplier-provided images need secondary processing
- Recommend shooting yourself or hiring professional photography
- Image quality directly affects conversion rate
Product Descriptions
- Don't directly copy supplier descriptions
- Use AI tools to rewrite, but manual review needed
- Highlight product selling points and usage scenarios
Step 7: SEO Optimization (Cost: $0)
On-site SEO
- Optimize titles, descriptions, URLs
- Add Alt tags
- Improve site loading speed
Off-site SEO
- Build backlinks
- Social media traffic
- Content marketing
Step 8: Ad Campaigns (Cost: Varies by Budget)
Facebook Ads
- Good for visual products
- Precise audience targeting
- Need to test different creatives
Google Ads
- Good for products with clear search intent
- Shopping Ads work well
- Need to optimize product feed
Ad campaigns burn money. I recommend small budget testing, finding profitable models before scaling. Don't blindly pursue large budgets.
Step 9: Customer Service and After-sales (Cost: $0)
Email Templates
- Prepare reply templates for common questions
- Set up auto-replies
- Reply to customers within 24 hours
Refund Policy
- Clear refund process
- Handle disputes reasonably
- Maintain store ratings
Step 10: Data Analysis and Optimization (Cost: $0)
Key Metrics
- Conversion rate
- Average order value
- Repurchase rate
- ROAS
Optimization Directions
- Product page optimization
- Checkout process optimization
- Ad creative optimization
- Audience targeting optimization
