William Rivera was working at LA Fitness four years ago. Making eight bucks an hour. After seeing a YouTube ad for dropshipping, he became interested in learning more about it. He started going to networking events in the Atlanta area where he lived, and met a guy who was killing it in the ecommerce space. Boom. Proof of concept. The ad he had seen became real, it wasn’t just hype. If other people were doing it, why not him? Read on for my Ecom Degree University review.
“I started going hard at dropshipping,” William says. “Just watching hella YouTube videos, taking hella courses, and just dumping every single check I got from LA Fitness into Facebook ads. Just testing different types of products, right? And then one day I was scrolling through my Instagram feed and I saw this bracelet. It’s known as a distance bracelet. So it’s a white beaded bracelet with one black bead on it, and then there’s a black beaded bracelet with one white bead on it; so it’s a couples product.”
William liked the ad and commented on it, telling Instagram he wouldn’t mind seeing more ads like that. Same thing with Facebook. Basically, he turned his social media accounts into one big product research machine. (If someone’s paying for lots of ads, they’re probably making lots of sales, right?) Anyway, the ad for the couples bracelet kept popping up, so William went on AliExpress, did a search, and found it there for like a dollar a unit. Sick. The dropshipper on IG was selling it for twenty-eight bucks.
“So the margins were crazy,” William continues. “And the fist thing I thought to myself was, ‘Wow, I can create a website and just sell it way cheaper than I know the competition is selling it for, because I honestly feel like these guys are taxin’ and I honestly think I can make a better site.’ So that’s exactly what I did. I made a website with Shopify, put that product on the website, and then I started running Facebook ads for my bracelet. Instagram Story ads to be exact.”
“And to this day,” William adds, “I tell everyone that I coach with ecommerce that Instagram Story ads are the best type of ads to run, and they’ve converted for me the most outta any type of ad, right? So I made an Instagram Story ad using Canva, which is a free website that lets you create nice graphics. And then I just added a picture that I found on Google of a couple wearing it, and then added some sauce [headline, body copy], and then I just said, ‘Swipe up.’”
“And literally that one ad took me from zero to forty-five thousand dollars in sales in a couple months, selling that one product. And keep in mind, this was four years ago. So at the time, I didn’t really know what I was doing with Facebook ads. I was really just experimenting, you know, I just had confidence in the dropshipping business model because I knew people that were successful in it. And I was learning and making mistakes as I go. And I was still able to make forty-five grand, even with what little knowledge I had in the ecommerce space.”
More recently, William’s been focusing more on wholesaling brand name products on Amazon. He claims he makes more than a hundred K a month doing so. Everything he’s learned over the years is taught inside his Ecom Degree University program. You can buy individual crash courses for as little as fifty bucks or get the complete curriculum for a one-time fee of nine hundred and ninety-seven dollars. I liked William and his story and I think he knows his stuff. But is he spreading himself too thin by dabbling in NFTs and investing and digital real estate?
