How to Scale Up a Drop Shipping Business Horizontally

In this article I’ll discuss how to scale up a drop shipping business horizontally.

This can be applied to most e-commerce businesses.

But it works particularly well if you own a drop shipping store and hold no inventory. Aliexpress drop shipping offers the lowest barrier when it comes to scaling up an e-commerce business.

Before I show you how to scale up a drop shipping business horizontally, I want to explain a few different methods of scaling up a business. Contrary to what most people believe, there are actually a lot of ways to scale up a business. And I’ll talk about some of them today.

Different Ways to Scale Up a Business

These days a lot of people assume scaling up a business is only possible with Facebook ads.

Luckily that’s not the case.

There are tons of ways you can scale up a business. And the more scaling strategies you have in your “marketing toolbox”, the better the odds that you’ll succeed at scaling your business.

Here are just a few ways to scale a business:

• Sales teams (cold emailing and cold calling in B2B)
• Facebook lookalike audiences
• Google similar audiences
• Expanding to new advertising platforms
• Recruiting a team of affiliates that promote for you
• Working with big influencers on a regular basis
• Increasing the ad spend for a winning ad campaign in small increments
• Duplicating winning ad sets and targeting the same audience
• Duplicating winning ad sets and targeting a new audience
• Franchising or creating duplicates of your store in different places or countries

All these different methods have one thing in common: The aim is to get you more customers and sales in a predictable way that has no upper ceiling. This way you can take a small business and double, triple, quadruple and sometimes even 100X your revenue and profit.

How Do you Scale Horizontally?

Scaling up a business horizontally means going wide instead of deep.

Let’s say you’re spending $5 per day on a Facebook and and your ad set is going well.

One way of scaling the ad set is to increase the daily budget in small increments. So rather than finding a new audience, you’re just adding more money to a well performing ad set.

In other words, you’re scaling vertically.

But you could also duplicate the ad set ten times. Or you could create twenty similar ads and target new Facebook pages and interests that you haven’t tapped into yet. What you’re doing here is going wide. Rather than scaling vertically you’re focussing on width versus depth.

Get the idea?

So let’s talk about how to scale up a drop shipping business horizontally.

How to Scale Up a Drop Shipping Business Horizontally with the “Franchising” Method

A great way to scale up a drop shipping business is by something I call franchising.

I’m not talking about McDonalds and Starbucks here, but you can use a similar approach to scale an existing drop shipping business. Instead of expanding your customer base in a given country, you simply duplicate your entire store and target customers in the new country.

For example:

The first drop shipping store I even built targeted Germany.

Within a few days of running Facebook ads I was making $200-$300 per day of which a big part was profit. After this initial success I decided to duplicate my store in Spain.

My wife speaks Spanish, French, Portuguese and English which I took advantage of.

I asked her to translate my German store and all of my ads into Spanish. I let her do the customer support and shared 50% of the profits with her. Within a few days I had a duplicate of my store up and running and the store started generating around $200-$300 per day.

What I did here is go wide and scale horizontally.

I later on did the same with a store in Portuguese targeting Portugal and Brazil.

Now what if you don’t have a multi-lingual wife like I do?

What if you only speak English?

Then simply team up with someone who speaks another language. Create a new online store with the exact same design, products and layout. Get the person to translate everything. And then share 50% of the profit with them. This is a win-win situation for both of you.

If you have no friends and don’t know how to network then simply hire someone.

You can keep them for customer support.

Let’s talk about how to scale up a drop shipping business horizontally with just one store.

Can You Keep Your Drop Shipping Store English and Just Target Worldwide?

Absolutely.

This is another way to scale up your drop shipping business.

But it’s less effective than duplicating and translating your store and streamlining everything. The more your store, Facebook ads and marketing are tailored to the audience you’re trying to reach, the higher your conversion rates will usually be. For example, people in Germany or Spain or France like to shop in their native language and in Euros.

If you have a global store in English and your currency is USD you’ll still get customers.

But anyone who doesn’t speak English, doesn’t like to pay in USD or is suspicious about buying from a foreign store, will drop out of your audience. And that’s a  lot of people.

Personally, I’ve done both.

Like everyone I get lazy at times.

So for some other drop shipping ventures I simply created a global store and targeted Europe, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom and the United States. It still worked, but I’m 100% sure I would have gotten more sales and lower advertising costs had I duplicated the store.

So which strategy should you use to scale globally? I’d say it depends on how many countries you’re planning to target. If you have a successful store in one language, and speak the language of another country, it might be a good idea to duplicate your store.

But since duplication is a lot of work, the number of countries you can target is low.

You can get higher conversion rates but the potential to scale is more limited.

On the other hand, if you have a general store, you can duplicate your winning ad sets and target different countries. Although your conversion rates will likely be lower, it’s a lot less work and you can scale wider. Rather than just targeting one or two additional countries, you can target as many countries as you want to. Most people choose this method.

Still wondering how to scale up a drop shipping business horizontally? Remember these are just two methods.. You’ll get the best results by testing different strategies. Now that you understand the basics of scaling up a business horizontally and vertically, the sky is the limit.