Product saturation is a huge concern that most beginners have when it comes to dropshipping. Many are under the impression that it’s impossible to sell a product that has been sold at scale in the past, or is currently being sold by many advertisers. That simply isn’t true — and we’ve got proof!
We went ahead and ran perhaps the most iconic product out there: the posture brace. Made popular by YouTuber Gabriel St. Germain, this brace has been repeatedly ran & tested by hundreds (if not thousands) of people who have purchased his course, or have been made aware of the product in his public Facebook group.
In this article, we’re going to reveal exactly how we managed to scale the posture brace to $528,000 in sales over the course of just two months. We’ll cover everything from finding the winning products, making high converting stores, to the Facebook ad setup.
So, let’s get to it!
How we found the posture brace
Like many of the other products we sell, we became interested in the posture brace after seeing it in multiple Facebook advertisements. We were already aware of Gabriel having run this product in the past, and that he discontinued it at some point in time for whatever reason. While you may think that this means the product is oversaturated, that’s not actually true. If anything, the past history of people running it successfully indicates to us that the product has potential, and can more than likely be revived.
So why does the posture brace still work?
Products like the posture brace are what is known as ‘evergreen products’. These are simply products that have a long lifespan in the market. If you use Google Trends and look up ‘posture brace’, you’ll find that the search traffic has been relatively stable when looking at a five-year window:
If you really think about it, this actually makes sense. The posture brace is a device that was created to correct poor posture, which will likely be a problem that people will face for years to come. Unless there is some medical revolution that completely eliminates poor posture, the posture brace will continue to sell.
But What About Saturation?
Well, it doesn’t really exist — not in the way that most people think of saturation, anyway. We like to use the following definition:
Saturation is essentially the amount of time and budget that you need to sell a product to an audience.
With evergreen products, it is extremely hard to saturate them because they have such a large potential audience. In reality, the only time you will really observe true saturation for a particular product is when there are one or more large brands dominating the market.
A good example that illustrates this concept is the UV teeth whitening devices that you see plastered all over social media.
Two notable brands in this space are Snow and Hismile, which are responsible for selling a majority of these devices.
In cases like this, it becomes difficult for small-time advertisers or new brands to come in and compete; these brands have a huge amount of reach and utilize tools like influencers to make their brand stand out.
So, what about the posture brace?
If we look at all the big brands selling posture braces… well, we won’t see anything, because they don’t exist. There isn’t a well-known brand that is dominating this market.
It’s actually just a bunch of drop shippers that are replicating each other’s stores, copy, and creative. If you were to take a look at the Amazon listings for a ‘posture brace’ you’ll find a million different sellers offering the same product, trying to beat each other by undercutting their prices.
That being said, you need to stop being afraid of ‘popular’ products! We can almost guarantee you that most products have been sold by multiple people at one point or another. You can definitely come in and compete!
Finding A Product
There are a variety of different methods you can utilize to find fantastic products, both paid and free. Keep in mind, its not necessary at all to spend money in order to find winning products.
We personally like using Turbo Ad Finder. This is a free tool that allows you to filter out your Facebook newsfeed so that you only see advertisements. Not only are you exposed to the products themselves, but you also get an idea of who else is running them, and what types of creative strategy they are using.
You might find that at first, Facebook won’t be serving you many advertisements with ecommerce products. The types of ads you see will vary based on the types of sites you browse, what posts you interact with on Facebook, etc.
To start getting more relevant ads, go into the search bar on Facebook, and type in ‘Free worldwide shipping’ and interact with some of the posts. What this tells Facebook is, “Hey, I like these ads – serve me more like them!’.
Brownie points are given out if you click on the ad and navigate to the site, as well as add to cart. By doing so, Facebook will categorize you under users with high intent to purchase, which should provide you with even higher quality ecommerce ads.
Once you start getting served ecommerce ads, you’ll want to scroll around and look for evergreen products that appeal to large audience sizes, and have high margins.
When you find a product you like, do a little research and check out your competitors. Think about ways you can improve on their marketing and website.
Building A Successful Shopify Store
The importance of a great Shopify store cannot be understated; while winning products can generally sell even with a mediocre store and product page, you will see greatly improved results if you put some time into making an attractive store.
To understand what your store needs in order to succeed, you’ll have to do a bit of research. We’ve broken it down into a simple, three-step process:
Phase 1: Research The Potential Audience
You need to have some idea of what your potential audience looks like. Learn what their language is like; you need to gain the ability to empathize with their problems, so you can determine how to best advertise your product to them. The goal is to have your audience feel like you truly understand them, and have experienced their pain.
One of the best ways to do this is by using Google search recommendations.
As an example, when we figured out that the audience for a posture brace was those people with posture problems, we went ahead and googled “posture problems”.
Google will then serve you up a list of websites that are most viewed by people who are searching this term.
We then went ahead and took a look at the first few articles, and analyzed them to see what they have in common.
All the articles mentioned poor posture as a result of people using their phones and computers. All articles seem to address the fact that solutions take time and effort – meaning a lot of people are actually looking for a quick fix.
Using these findings, we determined that we must include answers to these questions somewhere on the site. Right away, we noted that we should address the fact that they are probably spending a lot of time in front of a screen, which is causing their posture issues.
Similarly, to emphasize the notion that the posture brace provides an effortless fix for these issues, we decided to mention that the posture brace can be used anywhere.
Nearly everything that we included on the product page was inspired by the content that was written for the target audience.
Another great way to use Google Search to your advantage is to search for a list of similar terms that people are also searching for; to do so, you can simply start typing in the phrase, and look at the suggested options.
Most commonly, terms such as “What are the symptoms of poor posture” and “which are the most common posture problems” were being served.
So, we went ahead and made sure to address these questions on our product page as well.
We essentially rinse and repeat this process with various keywords until we have a comprehensive list of options to work with. At this point, it’s time to go ahead and move on to the second phase!
Phase 2: Researching Competitors In The Niche
In this part of the process, we’re going to investigate other businesses in the niche to get a feel for their websites, check and see what types of colors they use,
Ideally, we want to take a look at big, reputable brands in the same niche — not drop shippers selling the same product. In the case of the posture brace, we looked around for brands that are well known in the health & fitness space.
We determined that a store like Vitamin World was an acceptable starting point. Analyzing their site, we can see that they have a premium, medical vibe going on, likely stemming from their choice of colors. They use that classic teal color that you might immediately associate with professional medical care (think of hospital colors).
Note: If you’re wondering whether or not this actually matters, consider big brands in other spaces, such as Cabela’s and BassProShop. Their color schemes are very similar, and they make sense given they are in the outdoor and hunting niche.
So, we went ahead and mirrored this color pallete, making sure that all the graphic elements on our website included the teal color. This immediately gave that same ‘professional’ and coherent look-and-feel.
At this point, we also felt that the professional look and feel of the site will allow us to price the posture brace at $40, which is around 40% higher than our competitors.
Now that we’ve completed the basic Shopify setup, it’s time to move on to the next phase, which is researching our product.
Phase 3: Researching Your Product
In our last phase of research, the objective is to acquire a deep understanding of our product.
We want to have an understanding of all the main features of the product, as well as any potential caveats or cons. We also want to start gathering potential media that we can utilize in our video advertisements.
Aliexpress Listings
Starting with the various Aliexpress listings, we try and understand exactly how the posture brace works, and what features it has.
The reason we like to use Aliexpress listings is that they tend to have different pieces of creative on different listings, which gives us more to work with when it’s time to put together the video.
Not only that, but any media that you find on Aliexpress is generally available for use in your Facebook ads.
To download a video, simply hit the play button, and select the three-dot dropdown, which will then reveal an option for you to download it.
While Aliexpress listings are a great way to get some initial understanding of product features and acquire some creative, we still need to understand customer concerns and complaints about our product. The best way to do this, hands down, is by looking at Amazon listings of the same, or similar products.
Amazon Listings
To get started, we go ahead and find the largest sellers of the posture brace. We inspect their landing pages to see what features and copy they use, and do our best to include these on the product page.
We also go ahead and start looking at the customer reviews for the product. This allows us to understand what people like about the product, as well as potential issues or questions customers have that may prevent them from purchasing the posture brace on our store.
We noticed that a lot of people were asking whether or not the posture brace can be worn over a shirt, or at the gym. As such, we took these and placed them at the very top of the product page, where customers can easily see them.
This way, as soon as the customer arrives on the product page, their biggest reservations are addressed, and they should at this point feel better about making a purchase.
Note: One thing you don’t want to necessarily dwell on too much is the Amazon pricing. Don’t try and match or beat the pricing there; you won’t be able to stay profitable considering the cost of Facebook Ads.
To maintain a higher price point, you should instead focus on making your site as professional as possible. So, you should make sure that your policies are solid, and that your customer support is on point.
We included a 100% money-back guarantee in multiple sections of the store, as well as a variety of customer testimonials, reviews, FAQ’s, and easy customer support. If you decide to offer this guarantee, be sure to actually adhere to it!
All this taken into consideration, it becomes less of a mystery as to how we were able to beat other drop-shippers with a significantly higher price point for the same product. The more professional look and feel of the store made it a lot easier to justify this purchase
That about wraps the product research & store set up — now it’s time to get to our final competitive edge, which is the Facebook ads strategy.
Facebook Ads Strategy
Our ad strategy is broken down into five phases that you can apply to any 1-product store. As a bonus, we’ll also go over how to get around Facebook disabling ad accounts, as that has happened multiple times with our store.
Before we get into the five phases of the ad strategy, let’s briefly go over the creative and video ads we used.
The Creative
Our winning ad creative reached over 28 million people. It had a basic format that is as follows:
- A clip of Sammy (John’s brother) wearing the posture brace, spinning around. We included a side-by-side comparison of him also spinning around, but not wearing the posture brace.
- We then included a rendered animation of how the posture brace addresses the posture problem, showing the anatomy of the spine and how it straightens out with the use of the brace
- Lastly, we included a series of clips that showed the features of the posture brace, with accompanying text explaining them
When making the creative, you don’t need to have professional-quality footage; we are by no means, professional cinematographers, and used a regular smartphone to record the clip of Sammy spinning around with the posture brace.
Luckily, amateur footage like this does surprisingly well — sometimes, it outperforms footage that seems overly done.
Once you find that a product has traction, we recommend that you try and take your own shots if possible.
Another way to get original content without shooting it is by paying people to model your product on Fiverr. You can get a variety of different actors and clips to test out in your ad. If you aren’t exactly sure what to have the actors do, you can look around newsfeed and see what types of clips do well for products in general, as well as for your specific product (if available).
Once you have your creative ready, you can head on over to Phase 1 of the Facebook Ads Strategy.
General Campaign Structure
The campaign and adset structures you see in this phase are going to be similar to those in other phases.
The settings are as follows:
CBO: Toggled On
Optimization: Purchase
Start: The next day
Location: ePacket list
Age, Gender: Automatic
Language: English (All)
Exclude: Dropshipping
Placement: Auto
Optimization: Conversions
Conversion Window: 7D click, 1D view
The type of targeting and the daily budget will depend on which phase you’re in.
So, now let’s take a look at the phases!
Phase 1: Interest Testing
For Phase 1, we went ahead and used the above settings, setting the daily CBO budget to $200. We then went ahead and inserted 10 different adsets targeting the following posture-related interests: We also went ahead and set the minimum daily spend for each adset to $10 — this way, half of the total daily budget goes towards testing each interest, and then the rest is allocated to those that Facebook believes will get you the best results.
- Vertebral Column
- Shoulder
- Neck
- Spinal Cord
- Poor Posture
- Cervical Vertebrae
- Lumbar Vertebrae
- Aging
- Massage
- Old Age
If you’re wondering where we got all of these target interests — we used the suggestions feature that is within the Suggestions section of the interest targeting.
We simply selected ‘poor posture’ as the target interest, and hit the ‘Suggestions’ button, which provided us with a bunch of different options.
When going through the suggestions, you should make sure that a majority of your audiences have at least 5 million people in them. Some of the interests we use in our stores have over one-hundred million.
Why Broad Interests?
The benefit of starting with these broader interests is that they will give you much cheaper impressions, allowing you to scale anything that’s profitable without worrying too much about burning out your audience.
Phase 2:
The goal of this phase is to gather more data using your best-performing adsets and creatives from Phase 1, and then transition into using lookalike audiences.
We will be using another $200 CBO, with 10 adsets total, and a minimum spend of $10 once more.
If you had an even number of winning interests, you simply duplicate them enough times so that you have 10 total adsets. If you have an odd number of interests, that’s fine — just duplicate them so you’re around 10.
So, for example, if you found that you had 3 winning interests, you can just go ahead and duplicate them three times.
You will also want to duplicate the creative within each adset 3 times; this has to do with Facebook AI and differences in starting optimization for each adset. The specifics of how this works will be discussed in a future article, as it is a long discussion.
In our case, we found that we had two winning interests, so we 5 duplicates of each within the new CBO campaign for a total of 10 adsets.
After you set the campaign up, let it run for a day before you make evaluations.
The Results
In our case, we found that the results were underwhelming to say the least. This new CBO actually ended up doing worse than the original test CBO we ran. But that’s okay — that’s just how Facebook is sometimes.
In any case, whether or not your CBO does amazing isn’t really the biggest concern; you’re just gathering data so you can jump into lookalikes, which should give you much better performance.
Just keep in gathering data until you have around 50,000 video views before moving on to the next phase.
Phase 3
This phase will entail the testing of various lookalike audiences, and introduce a retargeting campaign.
First, we recommend you start testing out your 75% video-viewers. You will want to make 10 different audience percentiles here; 0-1%, 0-2%, 0-3%, … 0-10%. When doing so, also be sure to select the “Worldwide” option for your target country.
Additionally, you will want to create lookalikes for PageView, ViewContent, Add To Cart, Initiate Checkout, Top 25% Time On-Site, 95% Video Views, and FB Engagement. You may not use these immediately, but they will come in handy down the road.
To run your tests, follow the general campaign structure, with a $200 daily budget. Start off with 75% VV and see how those perform after 1-2 days. If you find that they aren’t doing that well, also test out 95% VV, and ViewContent/PageView if you have enough data to do so.
Once you find some well-performing lookalikes, move on to Phase 4. If you are unable to find any good lookalikes, try mixing up your creative — and if that doesn’t work, go back and start testing new interests.
Phase 4
The goal here is to scale lookalikes that are working well, delivering consistent results.
In our case, we found that 1% VV 75 lookalike was performing well over the course of several days.
We went ahead and created a new CBO with the same basic campaign structure, save for the number of adsets; this time around, we only duplicated the audience 5 times.
We recommend that when you do this, you let the CBO run for two days to account for any fluctuations in Facebook performance.
Phase 5
This fifth and final phase is what we call the endgame. What we’re going to do is scale with broad targeting.
Broad targeting is when you essentially allow Facebook to pick whoever they believe will convert, only specifying the CBO budget and ad creative.
You don’t specify any targeting — you simply leave the custom audience and interest targeting fields blank.
In our broad targeting campaigns, for Mr. Posture, we only had three adsets. One targeted USA, another targeted Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and the last targeted the entire world, excluding only a few third-world countries.
We set the budget to $500, and let Facebook figure out everything else. The only thing you will have to do throughout the lifespan of this campaign is modify the budget.
Before making evaluations, you should let this campaign run for two days, at which point you will do one of two things; if the campaign is yielding profitable results, go ahead and double the budget. If the campaign is not profitable, turn it off and go back to phase 4 so you can gather more data, before trying again.
Why Broad Targeting?
Simply put, broad targeting is superior to all other forms of scaling for a few reasons:
- It requires hardly any work to maintain. You don’t have to constantly go and find more working interests. Your potential audience is essentially the entire world.
- It is easy to scale because the audience size is massive, meaning your scale potential is almost unlimited.
- You usually don’t have to refresh creatives, because the potential audience is so massive.
- The CBO optimizes over time, becoming better and better without any modifications on your end. All you have to do at any point is crank up the budget, and let it optimize at the new spend. You can continue doing this until performance declines, or to the point where your cash flow simply can’t keep up.
How Well Did Broad Targeting Work?
We were able to scale up to $10,000 a day and let it coast. The ad account spent around $150,000 before we started having problems with Facebook.
Facebook’s AI flagging system was going haywire, and started to ban random ad accounts for no reason. This didn’t apply to only dropshippers; ad accounts with years of history from a variety of industries were also being hit with bans.
We found ourselves appealing the account successfully, only to have Facebook shut things down a day or two later.
If you find yourself in a similar situation, make a new business manager and ad account. You should be able to use your original page and website without worrying about getting banned.
We were lucky enough to have been able to share the pixel with this new ad account, and so were able to go ahead and share our pixel with a new business manager.
With our fresh ad account, we went ahead and used broad targeting right off the bat. Unfortunately, this ad account also was flagged some days later. At this point in time, we could have kept creating new ad accounts, but decided to let it go, as we did have several other stores that were on their way to make 7-figures.
The Final Results
All things considered, we were pretty happy with the outcome, given that the entire store almost ran on autopilot.
The final stats are:
$528,000 in sales, returns included
$300,000 in ad spend between the two ad accounts
$79,000 in COGS
This left us with roughly $149,000 in profit, with 28% profit margins. Pretty great results!
What We Would Do Differently
If we were to do things over again, there are a few things we could have done better:
- Ask Facebook to increase the spending limit on the backup ad account the moment we see the first ad account doing well
- Have several ad accounts ready in case the second one gets disabled
- Incorporate several other products into the store that are related to posture correction
- Test more ad strategies like manual bidding
Wrap Up & Takeaways
Overall, we were happy with the results of the store. We also learned a ton about how saturation works in dropshipping, giving us the confidence to pursue other products with even more competitors, and a history of performance.
If you’ve made it to the end of this guide, you should have a good understanding of what it takes to make a successful one-product store for products that are ‘saturated’ (but not really).
If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the comments section below, or post on our Facebook group, VerumEcom.
