Why sell fitness trackers online

Fitness trackers (sometimes called smartwatches) are electronic accessories that work in tandem with smartphone apps to monitor a range of wellness data such as calories burned, daily steps and more. They’re popular among more active and health conscious consumers, allowing users to stay in-shape in a fun and interesting way by tracking their fitness activity.

Most come equipped with a pedometer function that allows users to track their step-count - ensuring they get enough exercise. Advanced trackers can offer additional features like heart-rate monitoring, sleep analysis and workout-routine management - allowing users to train more efficiently and monitor their well-being during high-intensity workouts.

Smartwatch sales are expected to reach $5 billion by 2019. While Fitbit still owns nearly a quarter of the market share, this amount has decreased from about 33% in 2015 - meaning that space has opened up for newer brands. Fortunately, you don’t need to design your own trackers to sell them. Instead, you can dropship them.

Finding a dropshipper

Dropshipping allows you to purchase a product after a customer has ordered from your store. The means the product is shipped directly from your dropshipper to your customer. If you want to lower your cost of goods, you can order fitness trackers in bulk via Alibaba. Alternatively, you can buy them one-by-one on Aliexpress.

The Xiaomi Mi Band 2 is one of the most popular fitness trackers on AliExpress. This budget band has an OLED display, touch button, and an improved pedometer algorithm. Xiaomi has also created their own smartphone app that displays all the Mi Band’s stats, but users can also opt to sync it with Google Fit (Android) or Apple Health (iPhone) instead.

If you want to increase your average order value, you can also sell interchangeable smartwatch bands in fun colors such as neon pink or green. Offering these bands as an upsell to your customers is a great way to help increase overall sales.

How to Build a Fitness Brand from Scratch

Starting a fitness brand can be daunting, but there are a couple of things you can keep in mind to make the process fun and easy. When you decide to start your brand - the first thing you want to think about is your target audience. Who do you want to sell to? Are you comfortable marketing to that audience with blog posts, social media, and ads?

Who you choose to sell to is a huge part of dictating how you’ll be branding your product. For example - targeting your branding towards time-crunched professionals or seniors looking to monitor their health is very different from selling to career athletes or fitness junkies.

You’ll want to create a brand name that’ll resonate with your target audience. You can use Shopify’s free Business Name Generator for available domain names. Next, you’ll want to build your online store using imagery, copy and a site layout that resonates with your target audience.

While building out your website, you’ll want to also be be working on growing your audience via social media. This will help to give your business social clout so that when you first run ads - they don’t lead to empty social media accounts.

How to find followers and convert them to customers

Your next focus will be on finding customers to buy your fitness trackers. The best way to do this is to start by contacting relevant blogs and publications to feature your products. For example, if you’re targeting stay-at-home moms - it would be a great idea to get in touch with blogs targeted towards new parents.

You can also offer to provide a free sample to be featured in one of their posts. A benefit of this strategy is that the blogger will be able to provide an authentic testimonial, so that the readers who click your link are more likely to be interested in your product and more likely to buy it.

Don’t forget to create content for your social media platforms that’s relevant and interesting for your followers. Choose the social media channels that best leverage your strongest skills and are most popular among your audience. Maybe you want to publish home workout videos on YouTube to help differentiate your brand. You might want to use Instagram to share inspiring and motivational posts. Having pages on Pinterest and Facebook can also help to build your audience and prove valuable when you begin running ads.

It’s best to begin with ads once you’ve built-up a social media following. Ads typically result in higher revenue than free marketing efforts. Facebook ads are a very popular advertising method that’s both inexpensive and effective - targeting niche audiences and reaching ideal customers. Google Shopping and AdWords also work well for unique products and brands.

Business Model

Whether you buy in bulk or dropship fitness trackers, remember to price the products competitively while also ensuring you have a sustainable margin. For example, if you buy a Xiaomi Mi Band 2 for $21 - you can charge up to $70 for it. If you price it too low (such as $25), you won’t be able to afford to run ads, pay influencers, pay freelancers, or cover any other marketing costs. In addition, people may not buy from you if the product is too inexpensive because the may believe it’s a lower-quality product.

Want to start a fitness business and sell something else? You can still download our free photo set and select which of the stunning, high quality images are applicable to your brand.

Dropshipping tips

If you decide to dropship through AliExpress, here are a few tips to set yourself up for success.

Free shipping can be exceptionally slow on AliExpress, and the express options are often prohibitively expensive. Try to find sellers that offer epacket shipping; it's an affordable alternative that allows trackable and quick shipping from China to most developed countries including USA, Canada, and some of the United Kingdom.
AliExpress can sometimes seem overwhelming because there are so many products. If you don’t know where to start when it comes to product selection, sort your search results by “Most Ordered”. This will put the best sellers at the top of the list and give you a general idea of what’s selling and what’s popular. You can also use Oberlo to drop-ship products directly from suppliers.
To get a better idea of what the cases look like in real life, check out the Reviews tab for product listings and view “Reviews with Photos.” Be sure to read the reviews as well, to see what others are saying about the product. Also, you’ll want to check out the “Transactions” tab within the product listing on AliExpress. If you see several purchases from one person, it’s likely they’re dropshipping the item. This tells you it’s likely a good item to sell.
Even though you might be paying next to nothing on AliExpress, don't under-price your products. You’ll want to leave enough margin for marketing, so try to sell products for three or four times your cost.
Try bundling your items into themed sets, or offering complementary products. Check out what the competition is selling to get a better idea of what product categories might be particularly relevant to your audience.
Platforms like Facebook allow you to target very specific attributes or behaviours. For example, if you use Facebook ads to drive traffic to a cell phone store, you can target iPhone 6 users for iPhone 6 phone cases and target LG V10 phone users for LG V10 phone cases. These device-specific options can be found in the ‘Behaviour Targeting’ section of your Facebook ad manager. Hyper-targeting can be applied to a wide range of behaviors and demographics.

Start your own fitness tracker store!

With smart-watch sales expected to grow over the next couple of years - there's never been a better time to start your own fitness tracker business. Download our Business Starter Kit for free and start selling today!