dropshipping should be illegal

Published on: February 7 2023 by pipiads

How To Not Get Sued When Drop Shipping!

sup guys. Anton here from dropship lifestyle calm, and you may or may not know this, but about every two weeks I typically do a different training webinar and these webinars are live. I do them either from my office here in Austin or in my home office or wherever I am in the world. we get about a thousand people from all around the world to hop on these calls and I usually teach for about sixty minutes and then I end it with a 30-minute question-and-answer session. so during this Q&A I literally open it up and whatever people want to ask they could ask, and until my voice goes out I continue to answer questions. so what I realized over these past few webinars that I've done? so? over the past- I guess a couple months or so- a lot of the same questions have been coming up and a lot of the questions are like: well, Anton, you know, I really want to do this, I'm interested, but what if I get sued? or aren't suppliers gonna sue me, or isn't this illegal? and it's weird like that. that's where the conversation is kind of shifting, like it's coming up a lot more than it ever did before, and while that's a totally valid question and something that I think should be addressed. it's something I've never really spoke about in different youtube videos or blog posts or podcasts or anywhere I've been, because, honestly, it hasn't been an issue. but I do think, now that that kind of you know conversation is picking up steam, this is the perfect time to bring it up, to discuss it, to share my saw thoughts. so that's exactly what we're gonna do in this week's episode of dropship weekly [Music]. okay, so I think the first thing that I should tok about is being sued for selling specific types of products, because that seems to be the major concern. now I want to be clear. you can get sued, you know, by anyone at any time, for pretty much anything, especially in America, which is where I'm based. in the States, you can always get sued, but the people that you're probably hearing these stories about that are getting sued, that are getting cease and desist letters, that are getting their stores shut down, that are losing their PayPal accounts- they're stripe accounts, they're Shopify payments accounts- the reason they are doing that on the product level is when they are selling, almost always either copyrighted or trademarked products or brands. so if you're brand new to e-commerce, you might not know, you might think, hey, it's totally fine to sell. I'm wearing a shinola watch. you might think it's totally fine if I could find shinola watches from China and sell them online. now, this watch from shinola is made from, you know, a factory in Detroit, so I don't know. I haven't searched for this, but if you go on Alibaba or if you go on Aliexpress, it's possible that you'll find shinola watches right that look very similar to this. now, this is a smaller brand, so maybe not. but if you wanted to sell something like, you know, Game of Thrones hoodies, right, or Game of Thrones pillows, which I saw on someone's store that wanted me to review it, which I probably still will- if you find those products from China and you build a website that's called Game of Thrones, merch calm, or even if it's called, you know, Anton's, merch calm, and it's selling all gameofthrones products with their characters, right, their intellectual property on these things, well, at the very least, if you start to get traction, you're going to get a cease and desist letter, which means basically, the company's lawyer that owns the rights to that, that property, that IP, that intellectual property. they're gonna say: listen, cease and desist. all right, don't do this anymore. and if you don't comply, then it usually says what the next step is and that next step is usually a lawsuit. and, by the way, if you're moving enough volume, if you're infringing enough on you know certain brands products, they'll go ahead and just go straight to a lawsuit sometimes. so you know it is very serious. so you should never do that. the only way you should sell gameofthrones products. I don't know who owns that, that IP, but let's just say it's HBO. it's when HBO says, yes, you could sell our stuff. same thing. you know people always want to sell different, like sports team apparel, and I get it. you know sports are multi-billion dollar industry. but you can't just go and start selling you know New York Jets hoodies because you want to. you need to actually get approved and authorized to be a partner with the NFL and sell the type of products. so the first reason that I think people are asking about this is: you know, totally- again, totally valid- like there's a lot of products that if you just want to sell without any authorization, if you just find them on, you know over low or on Aliexpress or on Alibaba, and you list them, yeah, there's a good chance you can get sued. so totally valid claim. now let me just make a distinction here. that again, if you've been following me for a while, if you've been following dropship lifestyle, you already know this. but the types of products we sell, we actually do get approved before we sell them. now we're not going after brands like shinola or like the NFL or, you know, like any like major TV production, but the brands were going after our companies that make legitimate products, right, like the company that makes these, these chairs. now we wouldn't- just again, let me see what name is on it- okay, the company Howarth. I've never even we bought these when I when I bought this office. but if we just wanted to sell those chairs, I would contact that company howarth and I would get approved to sell their products. so I would be a retailer for them. same thing with the other 500 chair manufacturers in the states, right, or that source products in the states. so if you do things the right way with drop shipping and you sell products that you're authorized to sell, you don't- you know- again, I'm not a lawyer, like things could probably come up somehow, but you definitely don't have to. if you do everything right, you don't have to worry about the brands you're selling for suing you. okay, that's not an issue. you're not, you know, you know stepping on anyone's like intellectual property because you're authorized to sell their products. they said, yes, please sell our products. we want you to bring us more sales. you're not trying to be sneaky and sell things that are that are cashing in on someone else's hard work. okay, so that's the first thing that I think should be covered. now the second thing that is important to tok about again. I don't know how it is in other parts of the world, but in the states where I'm from and I live, anyone could sue anyone at any time. so you know, let's just say I don't know you, you, you give a customer places a $20,000 order with you, right? let's say you sell these chairs and you someone order. maybe they're 500 bucks each, I have no idea- but you sell 20 of them and someone buys them and you know, whatever they all go to your customer and maybe the shipment gets lost somewhere, or maybe the customer is not happy with them, or maybe you know, you, just I don't know, maybe you're a bad person and you've never shipped the order and you try to steal the customers money, right, all these scenarios could happen. and if the customer is mad enough and they're not being satisfied by your customer support and basically your company, then let's say they sue you. okay, again, that could happen and even could sue anyone. now here's where things I think are pretty important, based on where you are in your business. and again, not a lawyer, not legal advice, but this is just kind of common knowledge. when you're structuring your business, your business entity, you have a few different options, and the first, which is how I started, is just to be a sole proprietor, and that means doing business as yourself. right. and if you want to start a business today, as whatever your name is, boom, you could do it. you're a sole proprietor, it's under your name. good to go now that, when you're a sole proprietor, right if I sold these chairs to someone as a sole proprietor. and again, let's just say

Table of Contents About dropshipping should be illegal

Is Drop Shipping Legal? | Drop Shipping in 2022 (Here Are the Facts)
Dropshipping To $1,000,000 ILLEGALLY
Is Dropshipping Legal?
7 Dropshipping Mistakes That'll Get You BANNED!
How To Not Be SUED When Shopify Dropshipping (Legal Issues)
The UGLY Truth About Dropshipping That No Guru Will Tell You

Is Drop Shipping Legal? | Drop Shipping in 2022 (Here Are the Facts)

is dropshipping legal? if you are considering starting an online store? this question has already probably crossed your mind, and I am NOT a judge, but I will be playing one in this video. so here are the facts. [Music]: yes, dropshipping is legal. put it as simply as possible, drop shipping is simply a method of fulfillment where we are the retailers and we handle the sales, where the supplier handles the shipping. that is completely legal- case closed. now let's get into where you can actually find yourself in trouble if you do drop shipping the wrong way. the first thing is selling products that you are not authorized to sell- illegal. what I mean by that is if you see a brand out there that makes great standup desks and you make a website and put all their standup desks on them and start collecting money and then trying to find somebody to fulfill the orders. you're not allowed to do that without authorization from the supplier. do not do that. it can and will get you in trouble. the second thing that's illegal and can get people in trouble is not paying taxes- case closed. obviously, with drop shipping, just like anything else, you're building a real business, you need to keep track of money coming in and money going out, and, just like any business, if you're profitable, you need to pay taxes. don't think: just because you're running an online business, you can avoid this. the third thing that can get you in trouble, and that is definitely illegal, is selling knock-offs. what do I mean by that? well, if you want to sell proud of eggs and you meet some guy downtown in New York City that says, hey, I have these Prada bags for $100 each and you built a Prada bag store, guess what? you're not gonna have a good time. that is illegal, should be obvious, but don't do that. and finally, the last thing that is illegal and can definitely get you in trouble if you're not set up properly, is selling prohibited or restrictive products. what do I mean by that? well, things like supplements, things that have any type of claims behind them- yes, you're allowed to sell them, but make sure you're going through the proper steps. make sure you have the right auto is a shion's. make sure whatever is necessary for that industry is something that you're doing and you're not just winging it and hope things work out. so to wrap this up, guys, dropshipping is completely legal for once and for all. it's very simple: we sell products, we have supplier ship products. there's nothing wrong with that. but remember, this is a real business. treat it like one. work with real brands or you are authorized to sell their products. get great at paid traffic and you can build a very real, very profitable business. if you want to learn more, go over to dropship webinar, comm and get my full free training on how we build highly profitable, semi automated online stores. hey, what's up guys? anton, here again, and i hope you got some real value out of that video you just watched. if you did, you should definitely check out this one or this video right here. i do two new ones every week. you'll see a subscribe button right here, and if you want my free training- and that is two and a half hours long- a value with 237 niches- click this button right down here. it'll take you to where you need to go.

Dropshipping To $1,000,000 ILLEGALLY

if there's anything i've learned from the internet in the past few years is that with every new opportunity to make money, there are countless of other opportunities to make more money illegally, and in this video i'm going to be exploring one of those things. i'm going to be showing you a drop shipping store that is clearing over a million dollars a month selling illegal products. so if that sounds interesting, then consider subscribing. we do these kinds of videos every single week and i would love to have you be a part of our little community here now. drop shipping is nothing really new. honestly, it's not a new opportunity. it's been around for a very long time. in fact, you could argue that drop shipping as a business model is potentially even centuries old. what drop shipping really is is when somebody buys something from you and you deliver the product directly to the person that bought it without you having to physically touch or ship out the product yourself. so when you put it in those terms, drop shipping isn't really that big of a deal. it's kind of just a seamless way to deliver products in removing a step in the supply chain, basically. but unfortunately, in the last few years, drop shipping has gained kind of a bad rep. it's gotten a lot of negative publicity and the main reason why is through facebook scams. that's what most people refer to them as. so they'll create a shopify website, which is super easy to do: find a product from china, through aliexpress, for example, listed on their site, start running advertisements to that website and not deliver the product that they actually say they're selling. so there's a pretty distinct line between what's legal and what's illegal when it comes to selling products online and unfortunately, this store right here falls under the illegal side. now the store is called anime weeb city, so right away, i mean, if you know me, this store speaks directly to me. i do love anime and i always have since i was little, and i will say this website looks pretty nice. i mean, it looks very congruent. the branding style is pretty fun and appealing to the people that would be buying these sorts of products. so they've done a really great job. at the very least, these people are building tangible skills for website building and branding. i'll give them that. but unfortunately, these products are illegal to sell. i mean, i don't know exactly how it works around the world, but i know in the us, if you sell licensed products without a license, you're breaking the law. so, by definition, if you're selling anime products without the actual license from the production company that creates these shows, it is unfortunately illegal in the eyes of the law to sell these products. so, as most brands do, they are running ads, and what's kind of surprising to me is that facebook hasn't banned them or anything, which leads me to think that it's really not that big of a deal to sell these sorts of products, and i actually know that from experience. to be honest, one of my first stores was selling anime and movie related products, but i quickly realized that it wasn't going to be sustainable, because facebook actually did ban me and shopify payments banned me for selling licensed products, and this is actually kind of what gave me the idea of this video. but just as you see here they are running at, and i'm guessing this is how they are getting most of their traffic. so, as always, facebook is just a hack for growing your business. i think this is what's allowed them to generate over a million dollars in a single month, and i gotta say i wish they did have a license to sell these products, because these are pretty dope. i would buy some of this stuff and, as you can see, i'm guessing they are running mainly instagram placement when it comes to their ads, because on facebook they only have 97 likes, whereas on instagram they have over 10 000 followers, and that's one of the great things about running ads is that, even though you're spending money to drive traffic, you're also getting a lot of followers, a lot of exposure for your brand through simply spending money on ads. so it makes it an even more worthwhile investment if you actually take care of your community and you actually try to, you know, grow an audience on instagram, for example, which is perfect for a fashion brand like this. and what i think is kind of funny here and wholesome about this thing is that people genuinely do love this store, as you can see on their instagram post right here, like they posted these air jordan like replicas that they're selling, which are obviously illegal, and people are like: oh man, this is super cool, and this guy even said: love these kicks. but the only thing i would change is the design on the flames, because you don't want people to go thinking that this is some nike copy. so even their fans are looking out for them and trying to get them to do things the legit way, which is kind of funny, i mean. i think that's pretty cool that they actually have a fan base of people that genuinely care about their business. and, surprisingly, this store is driving over a million monthly visitors to their website. i got this little sneaky spy tool that i found called sales source. that shows me a bunch of different shopify hosted websites and how much traffic they're driving. honestly, i'm not gonna lie. i only really have this tool for the purpose of these videos. otherwise i wouldn't be paying for this, but 1.1 million monthly visitors definitely means they are not messing around when it comes to getting to the bag. they are making a ridiculous amount of money, and if this was a legit brand, they would be valued at at least 5 to 10 million. so, on the bright side, whoever made this store, whoever owns it, hopefully, is making enough money to cover the legal trouble that they're going to be in. and not just that, but the skills that they've developed through building this business i'm sure will pay off handsomely someday. once they get a get out of jail free card, they'll be able to put those skills to use. by the way, i'm obviously joking. i don't know if you can go to jail for this sort of stuff. but the whole point of this video is really just to show you that, while it may be tempting to have a business like this, it's not a good long-term move by any means and chances are you are going to get in trouble, especially now that e-commerce is actually pretty big and the laws and regulations are starting to get more clear. now i took the liberty to go ahead and do a little bit of digging for you guys, just in case any of you are still tempted to make a store like this. and, as you can see, someone has asked basically what we're all thinking about. is it actually illegal to do this? can you sell anime apparel? and on the shopify community forums we can find the answer pretty easily. so this is basically what happened to me a long time ago. they basically said: hey, so you do need a license to sell the intellectual property of another person, and if you don't have a license, your store will be removed and it will be subject to dmca takedowns. however, this is the glimmer of hope here. there are wholesalers who sell licensed products, which would mean you would be a licensed reseller. so, for example, if it's official merch from the anime, that's totally fine. you're basically just reselling the merch from the production company. the problem is just when it's unofficial merged from like aliexpress, for example. that's where it becomes illegal, because it's not actual merge from the show, it's unofficial merge which makes it illegal and it makes it a copyright issue. but if you are able to find a wholesaler that does sell legit merch, then you're good to go. you can just resell it and you'll be fine. but nevertheless, this is a really interesting thing to look at and i am really surprised that how much money they are making from this, considering that even though their branding is decent, it's not like the craziest thing ever and it's still super, super simple. so i don't know. what do you think about this store?

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Is Dropshipping Legal?

is dropshipping legal? we're gonna find out in this video. today's question comes from one of my students. he asked me: Paul, is dropshipping illegal? I heard that it's not allowed on amazoncom. this is a great question because it allows me to not only answer whether or not drop shipping is legal or not, which is a question I get quite a lot, but also to explain the difference between whether something is the legal or legal and, if it is legal, whether it's allowed, and there is a big difference there. so if you guys don't know who I am, my name is Paul. I run a million dollar ebay drop shipping business. I also drop ship on to Amazon and by day I'm a lawyer now because of that, I do have to say that the information in this video is not legal advice. it's just general information for entertainment purposes only. now that we got that out of the way, let's begin to answer this question. I'll break it down for you guys. is it illegal now? in order for something to be illegal, generally speaking, there has to be a federal, state or local law declaring it to be unlawful, and I've done a lot of research on this and I can say without a doubt that drop shipping is not illegal. now, if you think about it, there are big websites like wayfaircom, for instance, and their primary business model is drop shipping. so if drop shipping was forbidden or wasn't allowed, surely a huge company like Wayfarer would have been shut down a long time ago. but it hasn't been shut down because it's perfectly legitimate business model that's been around for a long time and is legal now. that's only part of the story here, because whether or not is legal is irrelevant in some circumstances, because the real question is whether is allowed. you see where drop shipping on to websites like eBay, Shopify or Amazon. they are allowed to set up their own Terms of Service, create their own rules for their platform. they're allowed to decide whether they want to allow drop shipping or not. so, for instance, if we look at Shopify is very clear that drop shipping is allowed. they in fact encourage it quite a bit. they always have webinars about how to set up drop shipping stores on Shopify. they have plenty of artikles all about how to set up a Shopify drop shipping business. on eBay as well, we know that it is allowed. if you go into their Terms of Service and their common questions and just general information on ebaycom, you'll find artikles explaining that you are allowed to dropship so long as you are providing good customer service. check out this artikle that explains all about it, which sounds pretty good to me. so I'm gonna give this artikle it thumbs up, and if you like this video, make sure to give the video a thumbs up as well. and then we have amazoncom. now Amazon's a little different, because Amazon does allow drop shipping, but only if you have a relationship or an agreement with a manufacturer directly. now what's not allowed is retail drop shipping, so that's when you get items from Walmart and ship them directly to customers on Amazon. that is not allowed. however, that doesn't answer the third question. the third question is: if it's legal and even if it's not allowed, do you still want to do it? and with amazon drop shipping? for myself and for many others, the answer is yes. we've been doing it, we've had success doing it, so we're gonna keep doing it. and the reason it still works, even though amazon doesn't allow it, is because they kind of turn a blind eye to this- as long as you are providing great customer service- and that means uploading tracking numbers, answering customer questions, making sure to respond to all the disputes that are opened up just providing the level of customer service that buyers expect when they come on to amazon. now it is very difficult on Amazon, so I wouldn't suggest you just jump into this without some sort of training. but just know that you can do it, even though it's not allowed, because it is legal, and the worst that can happen is that they tell you you can't do it anymore. keep that in mind too, because drop shipping is not illegal. if Amazon finds out you're doing it, you're not going to go to jail, you're not going to get arrested. the most that could happen is that they can tell you you're not allowed to do it anymore. so the second part of this that I want to discuss is: okay, we know we can drop ship on to these websites, but where can we drop ship from? and again, this is up to the different retailers. so, for instance, overstokcom is totally fine with you drop shipping from them. Walmart is also fine with it. however, if you go into their terms of service, they do state that they reserve the right to prohibit sales to resellers, but in my experience, they never enforce that same thing with Home Depot and with Amazon. they again do not allow you to dropship from them, but people do it anyway because Amazon doesn't ban you if you do it- and my thought is is because Amazon sees that you're getting a lot of sales for them, so why are they gonna complain about it, right? so we know that drop shipping is legal, we know that we're allowed to do it onto ebay, onto Shopify, and that you can do it onto Amazon as long as you know what you're doing. and we know that there's a bunch of different online retailers that you can drop ship from. so I hope this answers your question about whether drop shipping is legal or not, what the difference is between being legal and whether it's allowed. so if you do like this video, make sure to give it a thumbs up and make sure to subscribe to the channel, because I always make a lot of videos about eBay and Amazon. so if you don't want to miss those, make sure to subscribe to the channel. thanks so much for watching, guys, and I'll see you in the next video. [Music]- you [Music].

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7 Dropshipping Mistakes That'll Get You BANNED!

if you are trying to succeed with Drop Shipping, make sure to avoid these seven new mistakes, or else you could lose it all. so the first mistake is copying a competitor's website word for word, and if you've seen my other videos, you would know that I actually recommend the copy paste method when first testing products. so a quick recap is here's the competitor: cloudy sharks. they're selling these shark slides, but they're lined with fleece, so they're perfect for the winter. so again, this is the competitor and this is my version of this site. so wherever they had a gift, for example, well, I was basically copying that same GIF onto mine. so this is a copy pasted website. everything on the competitor store is also on my store, and I know I just said that copying and pasting can get you banned. so you're probably like: okay, Anthony, then why are you telling us to do it then? isn't that a little bit counter intuitive? and the exact answer is yes. so when I first test products, what I'll do is I'll copy and paste from a variety of different websites and then throw it all onto my product page. that way, one, it isn't an exact copy paste, but then, two, it also just saves me time from having to manually write it myself, so I recommend doing that for the image and the text. now, of course, if you start getting sales in your profitable, then I would go back and make it all 100 personalized. but when you're first testing a product, there's a huge chance that it's not going to be profitable. so don't spend 200 million hours trying to make it perfect. instead, use what resources are available and Implement that into your product page. and remember if you're copy and pasting at all. yes, there's always a risk and something can go bad, which is why, once I start getting sales and unprofitable, I always go back to the drawing board and personalize it out, but for testing purposes. again, not every product is a winner, so I just want to make it easy on myself to save some time. mistake number two is actually copy and pasting competitors ads for your tiktoks. again, if you've watched my videos, you've seen me tok about using your competitors ads and uploading them into tiktok. when you're testing a product, so when you're using other people's content for ads, there's always going to be a risk that your posts can get flagged by the Creator. so when I'm just testing a product, a lot of times I'll just download existing tiktoks so that way I can test to see if the product is profitable in the first place. then if you're profitable with a product, it makes sense to get your own custom videos made. so that way, as you begin raising your budgets and scaling, you're scaling with your own videos and you're not going to have any issues. but if you were to begin scaling with somebody else's ad creative such as these, and they were to come across your tiktok, well then they could report you and you could get flagged. so if you're just testing, your budget is going to be so low that the odds of the owner actually seeing it is very, very slim to none. so if you're testing again, you want your life to be easy and you want to test products fast. but once you start getting momentum similar to the product pages, I would make it more personal. so that way you're not going to have any issues. real quick, make sure you join my Discord group, The Ecom Mafia. it's a hundred percent free to join and we also have our store checklist in there. so that way you know if your store is a winner or a loser and if you're trying to take it to the next step. we recently launched Ecom Mafia premium. inside we have three courses and all these are jam-packed. I'm just showing you some of these lessons now so you know it's not any BS and that this course is actually damn legit. so if you guys are looking to get access to it, join the econ Mafia. the link is in the description below and premium access is only 35 dollars. so it's a no-brainer and I hope to see you guys in there now. mistake number three is to prevent testing a patented product, and I'm gonna give you 2, two real life examples here, one that happened to me and one that happened to a friend of mine. so the first is this product: Jaws or size. they sell this little ball that you put in your mouth, you chew on and it's supposed to give you a good jawline. I'm sure you guys have seen some sort of product like this before. so I ordered this product off Amazon to test it and right when I was about to start uploading I realized this is actually a patented product and only Jaws or size can sell this ball version of it. so I got lucky and nothing happened to me because I never started selling it. but you can literally see right here: last purchased February 24th, uh in. the second example is with this little back shaver. I know some guy who is getting into Drop Shipping and he was testing this product on Facebook ads and he actually got sued by this company for ten thousand dollars because, again, they own the patent on this product. so when it comes to patent checking products, I can't go into too much detail now, but if that's something you'd like me to go over, we can always save that for another video. mistake number four is missing essential pages on your Shopify store. so, looking at my footer, these are the six pages I would have on every single Shopify store and I always put them in my footer in this order. so we have a track order page, a contact us page, our refund policy, shipping policy, privacy policy and then our terms of service, so you can generate most of these policies in your setting. for the refund policy, there's literally a replace with template button and there's also that same exact button for the privacy policy and the terms of service. so you literally just come here, hit replace with template and it auto populates it for you. now for the shipping policy. this is blank by default, so you have to manually enter this in for yourself and then for contact information. I always leave this one blank as well- and then we also have our track order page where they can just enter their order number and hit track. and then we also have a contact us page, which again they can enter their name, email and leave any question or concern, and then we can hit them back later. mistake number five is not actually tracking your profits. so this app right here, true profit, has been my best friend over these last few years. so it takes your overall orders in revenue and tells you how much you've generated as a whole, but then it also gives you the total cost to fulfill all that. so that means how much it costs to ship your orders out, how much money you spent on ads, how much money you paid in transaction fees, and it's gonna spit out your overall net profit in your net profit margin. this is super important because transaction fees add up a lot over time and if you're not properly tracking your ad spend, then it can be really easy to lose track of how much profit you've actually earned. additionally, even true profit won't be 100 accurate because on Shopify we have our cost per item set at a fixed price. however, every customer is gonna live in a slightly different location. therefore, the shipping on every single order we're sending out is gonna vary by a few cents or maybe even a full dollar. so, with that being said, true profit is still a great way to figure out where your net profit is generally, but when you actually break down the numbers, it is going to be off by a little bit mistake. number six is having a terrible customer experience. right now we're on my Shopify orders page and these are all customers who have purchased from my store, and the first mistake a lot of drop shippers mess up is with order tracking. it's really important that each customer is being notified with their track order links. that's one reason why I always use CJ Drop Shipping. they automatikally add the tracking links for me, which just saves me a ton of Hassle. and, on top of a track order link, make sure the customers are actually receiving the products, because if a customer never gets their order, they can file a c.

How To Not Be SUED When Shopify Dropshipping (Legal Issues)

alright, what's going on y'all? I've got a very important video for y'all today and that's actually dealing with the legal side of Shopify dropshipping- everyone. so I get someone that comes and asks me how to avoid getting sued when to form their business, and these are actually very, very important questions that a lot of beginners skip over, and there's been people- and I know of some people personally- that have been sued doing Shopify dropshipping. there's some things you definitely need to avoid. so that's what we're gonna cover today. I'm first gonna go ahead and cover the question having to deal with forming your business, getting your business legally set up, so with the LLC d/b/a, all of that. we'll go ahead and cover that, and then I'm gonna tell you about something you absolutely need to avoid: to avoid being sued, like some other people. but before you get into, if you guys could please do me a huge favor, smash that like button down below, hit subscribe. if you haven't already leave a comment, I'd love to go in connectors. you guys answer any questions you might have, alright? so the first question that we're gonna cover is when to actually form your business and how should you go about forming your business. this is a question I get asked, probably about once a week. it's a very, very good and a very, very important question. so what I recommend to beginners is that you actually start with a sole proprietorship. once you actually become profitable and you might have a little bit of consistency with profitability, that's when you should then go ahead and form your LLC. once you then form your LLC, you're going to get better tax benefits. it's gonna give you an extra added layer of protection in case of a lawsuit or any any problem that comes up. in that sense, it's going to give me an extra layer of barrier. so there's there's definitely a lot of benefits to forming an LLC. so now I also get the question: if you want to have multiple dropshipping businesses. let's say you've got a general store and then you want to have a mid-level niche store, you get a mid-level in each store and you want to have several specific niche stores, but they're all tiknically different businesses. how should you form that? so what I typically recommend is that you go ahead and you have an umbrella LLC or holding LLC and then you can go ahead and set DBAs up underneath that parent LLC, and that that's the way a lot of people go ahead and set it up now everything I'm toking about today. I'm not an attorney and I'm not an accountant, I'm not a CPA, so everything that I'm recommending to you is what's been recommended to me by my CPA, my legal counsel, everything like that, and it's been what I've been doing for the last couple years and what a lot of other people in ecommerce are doing as well. so that's what I suggest: go ahead, get profitability, then go ahead and form your LLC and then, when you want to have multiple dropshipping businesses, have a holding or a parent company set over top of that. now, this is obviously very specific to the United States. I don't know the exact specifics of every single country out there and I get questions all the time. I've many students in the dropship fortune program in Australia and Canada and United Kingdom, Netherlands, all over Europe, and obviously I can't speak to every single country's legalities regarding businesses, but that's something that you can easily go ahead and look into and check with an accountant or attorney, and it is very straightforward. guys, dropshipping, the business model can seem a little bit different than everything else, but it is very, very straightforward when it comes to actually forming your business. I then also get asked a question: how do you go about forming an LLC or forming a DBA. so there's a couple options you can do. if you want to go ahead and save money, you can go ahead and do this yourself and you'll need to go through your state's process. typically, they'll have you full it fill out forms. you need to run back and forward to a couple places. this is going to save you money, but it is going to take more work and it's going to take more time. if you want to save your time and your work and not to spend that- but you're gonna spend a little bit more- you can have a company like Legal Zoom legalisms, who I use. you can have Legal Zoom go ahead and form your LLC or your DBA for you and they'll go ahead and cover absolutely everything. takes, you know, about fifteen to thirty days. you'll have everything sent back to you. you'll get your full G I n- everything that you need for tax identification purposes and is very, very simple and straightforward. all right. so now let's cover a very, very important question, and that's why certain people have been sued doing Shopify dropshipping, and I actually know of someone in person- I know them- that have actually been sued because of Shopify drop shipping and many other people have at least been threatened to be sued over this. so one thing: a lot of beginners do that I see. so go ahead and just grab any image offline to use on the store, use with their products, using their advertising. you guys can't do that. you have to make sure that it's copyright free. so there's three methods that I suggest using when you go about this. so the very first one is: if you want to go ahead and use Google images, you need to go ahead and search by available for reuse. you need to look for a reuse license. this means that you are allowed to reuse this picture on your store for advertising, whatever you want, and this has been a mistake a lot of beginners have made. they think they can just come in and do this, and many people have actually been sued because they use just a regular Google image that's actually copyrighted and then they get sued for it. and the scary part is there's actually people that their entire job, the way they make money, is, they'll post a picture to Google Images or a certain site, and they'll then go ahead and scan the internet. they'll use different tools to scan the internet to see if anybody else is using their image and then, when they do, that's when they go ahead and sue them and that's their whole business models. it's very, very shady and actually kind of scary that people do stuff like that. but people go ahead and essentially throw an image out there, copyright it and then scan for it to try to go ahead and sue someone for money. so you definitely want to protect yourself, now that the ways I like to protect myself as actually using high quality, royalty-free image sites, and these sites have been using for years now and I've actually been toking about them for you and there several out there. two of them - the biggest ones that I like to use are pixels, calm and stok snap. I Oh. both of these are great and the beautiful thing about these is they're high-quality images. now you can also go ahead and pay for images on something like Shutterstok. that's also protecting you. but if you want to go the free route, you can go ahead and look on a site like pixels or stok snap and it's going to give you that high quality image. now, pro tip: once you go ahead and download one of these images, run it through a free online compressor. this will go ahead and protect your site speed with your e-commerce site, so you're not actually losing loading speed with one of these good images on your stuff, but this is gonna help your branding go even further. you, you wouldn't believe how many times I see when I go on people's Shopify store and the very first thing I see is their header photo and it's not compressed. their site loads really slow and it's not a high quality image. it looks really grainy and just not good and you want to go ahead and have that good branding guys. so that's the big tip. so those are the things I wanted to go and cover today. these are questions I get all the time: forming your business and then not getting sued by using copyright images- now, both of these topics that can go in great detail. on each one, there's a lot of specifics, especially with the the legality of

The UGLY Truth About Dropshipping That No Guru Will Tell You

in this video, i'm going to answer the most commonly asked questions about drop shipping, including the questions that most people won't give you a straight answer on. so here's the ugly truth about drop shipping. now, drop shipping has a reputation for being a get rich quick scheme because it sounds way too easy: you don't need to store inventory, you don't need to ship or fulfill orders, you don't need much money to get started and you can run a dropship store from anywhere in the world. now, while all these statements are tiknically true, a common misconception is that running a successful dropship store is easy. but in reality, success with drop shipping has many pros and cons and isn't as straightforward as you are led to believe. so in this video, i answer all the in-depth questions related to drop shipping to provide you with a complete view of what it takes to run a profitable dropship store. now, what is drop shipping? drop shipping is an ecommerce business model where an online store does not carry inventory for the products it sells. when an order is made, the online store purchases the products from a wholesale supplier, who then ships the order directly to the end customer. so, as a result, the online store owner does not have to deal with physical inventory or perform any shipping and handling. there are no upfront inventory cost because all products are purchased on demand. now is drop shipping legal and legit? it is 100 legal as long as you use legitimate dropship suppliers. so, for example, if you sell disney merchandise on your online store and your supplier dropship's fake disney merchandise on your behalf, you could be liable for fraud. as long as you're careful about who you work with and only use officially licensed distributors for the brands you carry, drop shipping is legit and safe. now, does it require a seller's permit and a business license? well, in the us, you absolutely need a seller's permit in order to legally sell online. now, most states require you to charge sales tax to customers where you have economic nexus, and drop shipping is no exception. if your locality requires a business license, then you must get a business license as well. remember, drop shipping is simply a method of order fulfillment. your drop shipping business is a real business and must be registered as such. now, how profitable is drop shipping? well, because your supplier is doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to fulfillment and inventory. the margins for drop shipping are much less than other e-commerce business models, so typical margins for drop shipping are between 10 and 30 percent, compared to 50 to 66 percent for private label and traditional wholesale, which makes drop shipping far less profitable. now, the best products of drop ship are higher tiket items that yield more revenue per sale. now is drop shipping worth it? well, despite the low margins, drop shipping can be a great way to get started selling online. for less than three bucks, you can start a fully featured ecommerce business that carries hundreds of products, and drop shipping is worth it for product research as well. without any upfront risk, you can list many products online just to see what sells and then, based on your own sales data, you can private label or carry inventory for your best selling products and keep more of the profit. now the best part is that drop shipping can be automated, except for the customer service. now, most established drop shipping suppliers support edi, which stands for electronic data interchange. edi is an electronic system that allows your website and your suppliers website inventory to automatikally stay in sync. so, for example, if your supplier runs out of stok on a partikular product, your website's inventory will automatikally be adjusted. in addition, all orders placed on your website are automatikally transmitted to your drop shipper for fulfillment. however, even though order fulfillment is automated, you are still responsible for answering questions and performing customer service. now here's how drop shipping from your own website works. now, if you use a well-supported e-commerce platform like shopify, bigcommerce or woocommerce, setting up drive shipping is a straightforward process. here's exactly how you drop ship from your own website and how it works. a customer places an order on your site and you accept payment. the customer's order is electronically transmitted to your drop chip supplier, where you are charged the agreed upon wholesale price for your goods. your drop ship supply then ships the order to the end customer and you pocket the difference in cost as profit. now you don't have to drop ship on your website. you can also drop ship on amazon, and here's how amazon drop shipping works. you list your products or sell on amazon as a merchant fulfilled seller, and then, when an order is placed on amazon, you electronically send the order to your drop ship supplier, who then ships the products to the end customer. now, overall, amazon drop shipping is a much riskier business model than drop shipping from your own site, because you have to follow amazon's terms of service to the letter. first off, you must source your products from a legit wholesaler. you are not allowed to drop ship your products from another marketplace like aliexpress, ebay or walmart, otherwise you're going to get banned as a result. aliexpress drop shipping on amazon is expressly prohibited. amazon also imposes very strict requirements for shipping and fulfillment that must be met. if you have a series of late shipments or inventory mishaps, your account's going to get banned. but outside of following amazon's terms of service, drop shipping on amazon works much the same as drop shipping on your own website. you can also drop ship on ebay. you simply list your products for sale as an auction or store listing and then, when an order is placed, you electronically notify your supplier who fills the order and similar to amazon. you must source your products from legit dropship suppliers and not marketplaces like amazon or walmart, otherwise you're going to get banned. so, as a result, get rich quick. schemes like buying products from amazon and drop shipping them on ebay at higher prices is prohibited. now you're probably wondering how drop ship payments work. well, when you sign up with a drop shipping supplier, you'll be asked for a form of payment and typically you can pay by credit card. your supplier keeps your credit card on file and simply charges your card when an order is placed. you can also use ach or direct transfer. this is where your supplier keeps your bank information and automatikally places a transaction at the end of the day, week or month for all products purchased. the best way to pay a drop ship supplier is through payment terms. some suppliers will offer you payment terms, which means that you don't have to pay for your products until 30 or 60 days later. now, whenever an order is placed on your website, two payment transactions occur in the background. the first transaction takes place when you accept payment from your customer and deposit the money into your own bank account. the second transaction takes place when you pay your supplier for the raw cost of goods and any related drop ship fees. now where do you find drop shipping suppliers? there are four main ways to find suppliers. depending on your budget and the types of products that you want to sell, and by paying a fee, you can perform a search and instantly have access to hundreds of pre-vetted suppliers. you can also use a drop shipping company. a drop ship company acts as a middleman who automatikally connects you to a dropship supplier. you simply list the products that the dropship company offers and they handle the entire fulfillment process. as a result, you do not have to find or interact with any suppliers. you can also go to a drop shipping trade show. by attending local wholesale and drop shipping trade shows, you can form drop shipping arrangements face to face. you can also use a print-on-demand com.