Shopify Workshop for Women at She Commerce Asia the First of It’s Kind


Shopify Workshop for Women at She Commerce Asia the First of It’s Kind

Working from Bangkok, Thailand, last month, I got to attend and speak at Affiliate World Asia about International Affiliate Growth Trends going into 2018. As a pre-conference workshop, SheCommerce (created by Shopify and Women in AdTech), celebrated a day where female ecommerce leaders and entrepreneurs could set up, create and design their first ever ecommerce store. The room was a fabulous mix of successful affiliates and new to market female powerhouses learning and driving business growth together.

The content from the day focused on the strategy, scalability and fulfillment of business tasks, such as distribution drop shipped products,

  • Physical owned products
  • White labeled products
  • Digital goods
  • Tickets
  • Time
  • Charity
  • Rental products
  • Experiences (such as travel or entertainment related products)

Shopify worked to inspire women to:

  1. Create a business that matters
  2. Earn money from a side hustle or launch their first full time business
  3. Monetize their passions
  4. Be their own boss
  5. Become industry leaders

We learned what the biggest challenges that business owners / ecommerce leaders face?

  1. New business owners report that their biggest challenge is advertising, marketing and reach.
  2. Driving traffic
  3. Acquiring new customers
  4. Leveraging their social channels/followers to drive sales

If you’d like to learn more about about how to set up your first ecommerce site, or learn how to drive more traffic to your existing Shopify or ecommerce store, you can click here.

One example of a female entrepreneur (and speaker) was Anindya Lestari (@anindyalestari), who launched her Shopify store two years ago at 19 years old, and used only Facebook to drive $12,000,000 in online sales. She spent $1.8 Million in Facebook Ads, as her one and only traffic source. Her entire business was created as a storefront, with a brand she made up, with her Facebook page and traffic source, and hired a company in Indonesia to do the drop-shipping for her. With this model she did not need inventory – a team – nothing.

Teesly was her brand, – she used Facebook and performance marketing skills, plus her drop shipping relationships to market Teelsy to the EU market, and sold $12,000,000 in apparel to the European market within those two years.

Where did she learn how to do this? (between the ages of 18-21 years old)

  • Online Courses
  • Online Forums
  • Blogs
  • Facebook Groups
  • Shopify Community
  • Networking
  • Partnerships
  • Asking a LOT of questions and learning from the people who have done it successfully before her

She wrapped up with three steps to her success (to $12,000,000):

  1. Research
    1. Have the right mindset
    2. Find what’s trending
    3. Know your competitive advantage
  2. Test
    1. Gather data
    2. Know your risk appetite
    3. leverage and test technology(ies)
  3. Review
    1. Analyze
    2. Hypothesize
    3. Back to research

I’ve personally met with the Shopify and SheCommerce / Women in AdTech team team leaders multiple times now and they are AWESOME. Innovative, grounded, intelligent, collaborative and genuinely interested in making a positive difference in people’s lives buy helping them build ecommerce empires in their own right, it was fun and a privilege to get to know them.

Tell me, if you have an ecommerce or drop-shipping business, what do you find works best for you in learning, scaling and growing?