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.

I Tried Dropshipping With $100 (Realistic Results)

the past few years i've managed to make over seven figures drop shipping. but then i thought to myself, what if i lost it all, all the money, all the knowledge, all the connections, and i would have to start all over again with only 100 to my name? well, lucky for you guys, in this video i'm gonna go over exactly what i would do if i were to just start with 100 and potentially just maybe cut myself a lambo at the end of this video. so i am starting with 100 to my name. but wait, there's more. there are a few guidelines set in place, some terms and conditions. perhaps that will make this challenge a little bit harder. rule number one is i can't use my past connections, old influencers, past suppliers that have given me winning products and just overall, anything that i know of that can help influence this challenge to make it easier for me. rule number two is i have to start a brand new shopify store, meaning i also have to start with a brand new product that i've never tested before, just so that it's fair and it's as if i started from complete scratch. rule number three is i can't use my personal brand to gain anything out of this challenge, meaning shout it out on my instagram or just do anything to influence it in that sort of way. and last but not least, as you guys already know is i only have a set budget of 100. so now that you guys understand the rules, let's let the games begin. so the first step in the process is to actually find a winning product. now, since we only do have a budget of 100, i'm gonna be going the tiktok organic route, meaning posting content on tik tok and hope one of them blow up so that we can get a lot of visitors to our site for virtually free. now, personally, if you're on a budget, i think this is the best method because you don't have to spend any money on advertising and, in the case that a tiktok does blow up, you can get a lot of sales. so the way i'm actually gonna find a winning product is scroll through my tiktok feed. for a while here i'm gonna sit here, chill, scroll and since my tiktok feed is optimized to finding winning products- since i just like a bunch of drop shipping ads and drop shipping pages- we might come across something that may be interesting. so i'm gonna go ahead and do that now and get back to you guys once i think i found something pretty interesting or worthy of selling demon. this is the reality. sitting there, there's some on the radio back and forth, just had a heart attack and i heard the little one who's climate change. so you have 300. so a lot of people think. so a lot of people think that i'm faking these videos, but i'm going to show you guys once. i don't know, i think i may have just found a product that may be worthwhile testing. okay, so pretty much what this is is a speaker and you guys can pretty much see you connect your phone to this bluetooth metal thing and once you place that object on any surface, like something metal or glass, it pretty much amplifies the sound. so i'm gonna go ahead and follow this page and you guys can pretty much see that they're posting videos consistently, honestly, and it looks like they're getting consistent likes and comments on every single video that they post. so let's go ahead and check out their store and it looks like it's a general store that they turned into a one product store from the name of it. they're selling it for forty dollars and they have some pretty nice images here, some gifs and description, the size- overall really nice, and they have some reviews, so this might be a potential product, and i'm actually really excited to test this product out. the views are outrageous and they post really consistently and it looks like it's not too old. so you guys can see, their first video was on the 19th, which is insane. so this is a product that could potentially get us our lambo, okay. so right away i went ahead and searched the product on amazon, hoping i could find it- it was the fourth option- and went ahead and purchased it for 38. and then i also went on aliexpress to see how much i could source this product for, which came to be around 21, and i could always get this lower once i start getting more orders. but since we're selling it for 40 dollars and we're getting it for 21, we have a profit margin of 19.. so out of our 100 budget, we spent 38 of that to order the product, which leaves us with a total of 62 left to spend. but anyway, now that we have to wait for the product to arrive, i'm going to go ahead and use this time to actually create the store for this product. porta speaker: a speaker that is portable and you could pretty much stik anywhere and amplify the noise. well, hey, i think we got ourselves a brand name. porta speaker sounds pretty nice and pretty easy to remember. now, since we are on a budget of 100, i'm gonna be going ahead and making the logo myself. i'm gonna be using a 30 day shopify free trial, which, if you guys want to do the same, you can use the link below. so we're pretty much not gonna have to pay for shopify for the first 30 days. so i'm gonna get to work, create the store and then hopefully we get the amazon product so that we can start filming some content, posting the tik toks and just start driving traffic to the store to see if anyone would actually buy from this store. but anyway, let's go ahead and start the store build. okay, so our dropify shoplifting store is finally complete and now it's time to review it. ladies and gentlemen, i present to you porta speakerus- what, okay? so here is the product page where pretty much all of our customers are going to be redirected to. you guys can see we have a few images right here so you can just scroll through. we have the name of the product with a few reviews under it and you can see we have free shipping and 50 off, right under the price, and then, going into the description, we have a headline with a description under it, along with a few gifs. i'm going to be changing these gifs once i actually get the product and i'm going to pretty much record custom gifs so that they're a little more personalized and people who come to our site get a more personalized experience, but for now i just have these temporary gifs that i have just as a placeholder. we have another headline and description, another gif, another headline description and a gif, and then we have a faq section for customers who have any questions or doubts about the product, and you can see how this works. it's pretty much a drop down menu scrolling down into the reviews. we have all these reviews. reviews are very important and you could pretty much just take these from the supplier that you're sourcing the product from, because it's pretty much the same exact product. and that concludes our presentation for the porta speaker website. so we found the winning product. we have our site built out. now the last step is actually to get the product and create a tiktok page for it and then just start posting loads of custom content for the products that we can potentially get on the for you page of different potential customers that will potentially be the holder of the one and only porta speaker [Music]. okay, so the product has finally arrived from bezos's hands into my possession and now we're gonna go ahead and unbox this right in front of you guys. so let's go ahead and see what we got. i present to you the porta speaker. wow, it honestly looks pretty solid. okay, so i'm gonna go ahead and set this up and see what we can actually do with this thing and if it actually even works as expected. all right, so i just set it up. so i'm gonna go ahead and play some non-copyrighted music so that susan doesn't cut my paycheck for the month, but i'm gonna go ahead and show you guys how this works. it's honestly pretty cool. all right, so i have my music ready to go. i'm gonna move my mic actually, so you guys can pretty much hear everything that's happening, and i'm gonna go ahead and click play without this on the table and watch what happens once i actually put it on the table. [Music]. that actually works, believe it or not. we're actually almost pr.

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Exposing The Truth About Shopify Dropshipping..

i'm gonna be honest with you: drop shipping is not as great as people make it out to be. now don't get me wrong. hit is a great way to start making money online and it has changed my life in so many ways, but the business model is just not sustainable in the long term. but by approaching this business in a slightly different way, in the last few years i've generated multiple seven figures and, as you can see, this year i'm on track to do over two million dollars in sales without drop shipping. so in this video i'm gonna be exposing the raw truth about drop shipping and why i moved on my exact approach that's generating me over a hundred thousand dollars a month consistently, and we're even going to be toking to one of my friends who has built an empire on shopify with multiple brands worth over 250 million dollars, to get his opinion on this. so let's break down the three biggest problems with traditional drop shipping. this first problem is the main reason why drop shipping stores don't succeed in the long term. most traditional drop shipping stores provide a terrible customer experience. we do not care when you're drop shipping directly from aliexpress. you have next to no quality control over your products. you have zero control over the shipping lines your supplier is using, which causes your customers to have to wait an extremely long time for a product that might not even be that good. it's not all bad, though. there's still a decent amount of good suppliers on aliexpress- though it's the lack of control that's the issue and almost always leads to a poor customer experience. i want to take a look at one of the biggest aliexpress drop shipping stores of all time. this store actually shut down a couple months ago because of this exact reason. so if we take a look at the reviews of this store seconds, you can see that they have a ton of reviews. they have over a thousand reviews- and this single-handedly killed their business. people are complaining about the exact things that i just mentioned. they're complaining about slow delivery times, low quality products, six weeks to arrive. these are the exact issues that you're gonna run into when drop shipping from aliexpress. if this store made this small change that we're gonna tok about later in this video, they would still be thriving and making sales to this day, but, as you can see, the poor customer experience pretty much just killed the opportunity. let's tok about the second biggest problem. it is extremely easy for somebody to come and steal your winning product. as long as they come in and apply the same tweak that i'm using, they're gonna be able to kick you out of the marketplace and outscale you on your own product. i've seen this happen time and time again and i've done this to drop shipping stores using my method. competition is okay and it's actually really healthy, but you have to build a business that makes it difficult for people to come in and compete with you. think of it as if you were building a castle and trying to keep people out. the best structures always have a gate, a bridge and a moat, making it extremely complicated for somebody to break in. you need to approach building your business in the same way, and we'll tok about how to do that very shortly. and the last problem, which gets super annoying when you're scaling, is that everybody wants to shut you down. paypal and shopify payments do not like it when you dropship at a high level because, since people have to wait a really long time for their product, a lot of times they will do a chargeback, which really hurts their reputation with the banks, which makes shopify and paypal look at you as an unsatisfactory client, which usually will end up with them holding a portion of your money or even shutting you down entirely. so for these three reasons, i'm out, but there actually is a way to use drop shipping to build a long-term business. it all comes down to using it for the right reasons. drop shipping is extremely good for one thing, finding your first winning product, since you don't have to order inventory. it's pretty simple to try out a bunch of products until you find one that's selling consistently. and once you find that product, you should transition as soon as possible to this. this is exactly what the top 100 companies on shopify are doing. let me explain. instead of focusing on making as much money as possible with drop shipping, my goal is to build a long term brand with real value. i simply use drop shipping as a means to an end. once i had a product that was selling consistently and had potential to grow, i decided to build a brand around that product immediately. by the way, if you need help with that testing process, i made a detailed video on how to get started, so make sure to check that out. but for making this simple change, i immediately saw a higher conversion rate, much cheaper ad costs. people were spending more money on my store and the word started to spread, which brought in more repeat customers. this simple change took my business to the next level. if we look at the graph from day one of starting this business, you can see exactly what i'm toking about. so in the first month of testing products, i made around seven thousand dollars in sales. in the following month, i made around sixteen thousand dollars, and this is when i found that winning product and i transitioned it into a brand. at the end of this month- and you can see the following month- i almost 5xed my revenue just for making that simple change, and by the end of the year i had surpassed over a hundred thousand dollars a month in sales, and have done that every month ever since. so now i'm going to share with you three simple steps to transition your drop shipping store into a brand. the first thing i did was completely redesign my store to focus entirely on this product. now there's two ways to do this. the first way would be to fill your store up with a bunch of products that are similar and go hand in hand with your winning product. so this store actually started by scaling this product and since then they expanded by adding a ton of other products and selling those to their list. as you can see, this brand is bringing in over 500 000 monthly visitors, and they're absolutely crushing it. the other way is to build out a store entirely for that product itself and build out a suite of products that you can use alongside it. so, as you can see, with one of the biggest shopify stores, snow teeth whitening, they have the teeth whitening kit, whitening wands, serum, toothpaste and floss. it's all really solving the same problem and they go hand in hand together, and this store is making millions of dollars a month, and they even made it on ellen the other day, which is really cool. the second step is to work with an agent in china to brand your product, order inventory and provide faster shipping for your customers. now, i've made a whole dedicated video on this topic, so if you want to check that, i'm going to put it in the card up above. once you have a winning product, this process is extremely simple. these companies are excited to work with you and they're going to do what they can to get you the best price and the best experience for your customers. though, be careful, because there are some untrustworthy agents out there. though, i can recommend you a good one in the description down below. and the third step, which literally cut my advertising cost in half, was taking that new branded product and making custom content with it. so instead of using ads with footage i found online, i shot my own ads with my iphone and some friends, and this literally sliced my cost per purchase in half. i also took nice and clean photos with our branded product, which really helped with our conversion rate. these three changes alone will allow you to take that leap from running a drop shipping store to building your own brand. of course, there's a lot more that goes into it, but these changes alone will set you apart from 99 of people that are trying to sell the same product, which will all

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The Truth About Dropshipping In 2023...

okay. so I'm not like some type of Genius- shocking right- and neither are most entrepreneurs. so why do you fail with dropshipping? you think you'll be rich overnight, so you give up just after a couple of months? if that so, here are the changes you need to make so you can become successful with Drop Shipping. stop choosing products that everyone else is selling if you're looking to start a long-term dropshipping business. so, instead of going for the viral products and viral niches, look where no one else is looking. why are you trying to sell in the beauty Niche when you don't have the money to compete? you need to sell in the bowling Niche. like seriously, though. no one else is selling in the bowling Niche, so when you run ads in a niche like that, you'll be surprised what can actually happen. popula is not always good, especially if you're looking to make long-term money with Drop Shipping. if you're looking for a quick Buck, then go for the viral products, go for the saturated products that everyone else is selling, but if you want to make real money- the bowling Niche- next thing you need to do is get a part-time job or do freelance work. I know you don't want to do no work. You Want To Be Your Own Boss. blah, blah, blah. but I get it. you want to go viral on tiktok and make money without spending any money and all that stuff, and that's a beautiful thing to do, but the reality of that is that the chances of you actually going viral are so damn slim. it's ridiculous. it's not impossible and people do it all the time, but the chances are so slim. so, yeah, you can get rich without spending any money on ads, but just know that it would take much longer and the only way to speed up your success is to run paid ads, because you can literally know if something is going to work within three days, unlike running free traffic, where it's like you have to post three times a day for months to see if something would even get traction. if you're lucky, within a week, you can make a lot. but this, like I said, it's slim. so stop being lazy and only trying free traffic methods. those are great methods and I stand by them 100. but I also love, love people that try both. I get people all the time to sit down and be like: okay, while I'm doing this with paid ads, I'm also going to try free chat with tiktoks, and those people end up making it faster than anyone else, because they're literally doing both. this next mistake that you need to change is one that can actually solve the whole problem with having website visitors but no one buying, which makes you a failure with your Drop Shipping business. right before I get into that, if you don't know, I'm giving away ten thousand dollars to ten lucky subscribers if I can hit 100 000 subscribers by December of this year. so if you're new here, hit the Subscribe button because I'm dropping value and gems for completely free and, um, you might actually win ten thousand dollars. so why not? but yeah, next, your website design actually sucks. think about it. everyone that visits your website has never, ever heard of your website before, so you actually need to impress them. if you think you can just make the basic white background with black text websites and get sales and be rich, you're absolutely wrong. now, of course, take that with a grain of salt, as there's some products that you know. the perfect design for that website to match that product is the white background with black text. but, for example, if you're selling a beauty product, how about you just make your website background pink and the buttons baby blue? that alone will literally make you stand out from all the other dropshipping and e-commerce stores out there, because literally 99 of stores that you've been onto like literally go on any website right now. I can almost guarantee you the colors are just white with black text and like buttons, like literally. so you need to stand out now. watch this video to see the best Shopify apps for your Drop Shipping Store. watch it now. peace, get out of here.

Exposing The Truth About Shopify Dropshipping..

i never thought i'd be making this video, but in this one i'm going to be exposing the real truth about shopify drop shipping. there's three primary things that i'm going to tok about in this video. number one is customer support and actually the customer experience. number two is going to be shipping suppliers and probably the most common thing toked about with drop shipping, which is how do you get good shipping times. and then number three is going to be actually about building a real brand and not just having some general store, like people used to do. all the time. i'm going to teach you guys how to actually build a real brand. the main reason i want to make this video for you guys is because i see a lot of beginners do these same things wrong and i don't want you guys to have to make the same mistakes that i see a lot of beginners make and the same mistakes that i made when i first started drop shipping, because it not only cost me thousands of dollars, but also cost me a lot of products that could have been winners that ended up not working simply because i wasn't able to do these things. so anytime you're selling something online or selling something to customers in general and selling something at a high volume. customer experience is something that's going to depict the overall success of your business in a very direct way. what customer experience is is basically the experience that the customer gets exactly what it sounds like when they actually enter your store or on your website or end up shopping with you. that's basically the overall customer experiences. you know, how did they like it? how fast was the shipping? was your customer service good? did you guys give them a good product? was it what they expected? did they actually get the product that they bought right? and with drop shipping, this is something that a lot of people tend to forget. there's so many shopify stores with bad customer service, bad quality products, bad shipping times. i just want to quickly scroll through some reviews. so i'm on trustpilotcom, so i searched up a drop shipping product that i know is killing it and kind of looked up some reviews on it and, as you guys can see, people are toking about bad customer service: not receiving their product, not getting what they ordered, not liking it, not being able to contact support. all these things play into your customer experience and you guys need to be fixing all of these problems within your business in order to actually do something long term. so, as far as customer experience goes, making your website look good, making your website look professional, are all things that really play into, you know, the overall customer experience. but on top of that, on an even deeper level, the actual customer experience lies after the customer spends money on your store, and this is what a lot of drop shippers and beginners traditionally forget about, and this is a thing that causes their business not to be able to scale to the numbers that they actually want to reach, that you actually want to achieve. drop shipping can't be achieved if, after the customer purchases from your store, they, you know, hate the experience and don't like the experience shopping with you because your customer service is bad, your shipping times are long, you don't have logos on your product, it's not looking custom, it doesn't look trustworthy. these are all things that make customers not want to spend time on your store or ever come back, and if a customer won't shop with you again, there's really no point in drop shipping or building a brand to begin with, because if you can't get customer lifetime value and get people to repeatedly shop with you guys, you're missing out on so much money doing things like, once you have so many emails you can't reply to them anymore. you get a va on fiverr and you basically have them, you know, reply to customer emails for you. they're people that cost you know five, six, seven dollars an hour, that literally just do your va work for you and they'll probably only work for an hour a day and at scale they can handle all your customer service problems for you. so obviously in the beginning of your drop shipping journey you're probably going to be using aliexpress or something like zen drop or something like cj drop shipping, and there's nothing wrong with using aliexpress initially. but as you go to scale your company, the aliexpress shipping time simply just won't work and you guys should only be using aliexpress directly on your drop shipping stores in the initial testing phases, because it's not yet worth getting a private supplier if you don't know if the product's gonna even sell in the first place. so that's why you want to wait until after you're making sales to actually get a private sourcing agent and work with a private supplier. what a private source. a supplier that can get you fast shipping and the product custom made with your logo, with your branding on it, and ship to the us as quick as possible for the best price. there is alternative apps and things that you could use in order to get around this long shipping times, like xendrop, like cj drop shipping and like cell via, which is actually a software that i made a video on. or, if you guys want the connection to a private sourcing agent, go ahead and join my free discord and hit me up and i'll give you the details on how you could actually possibly get started with my academy so you'd be able to actually work with a private sourcing agent as soon as you start making sales. you guys could also look for one online on fiverr or upwork, and you'll see a lot of people who are private sourcing agents advertising their services. if you guys have long shipping times, your whole entire drop shipping journey is going to be ruined, because you guys are gonna have a store run up for one month and it's gonna do good, and then it's gonna have so many bad reviews and so many people are gonna be angry with your service that your social media comments are gonna look like trash. people are gonna be reporting your account and it's not gonna be good for you and your business is not gonna last long term. in this video. we toked about some crazy, crazy stuff that i haven't toked about in depth before on this channel. so definitely, if you guys got some value from that video, go ahead and drop a sub and a like and a comment on this video. also, you guys, if you are interested in possibly getting your business or your music, or if you're just a young creator, business owner, entrepreneur, artist out there looking to get featured, looking to get exposure, you guys can have the chance to actually get featured on my channel. in my next video, every single video, i feature a new small content creator and basically allow them to get the chance to get more exposure by being featured in a short clip at the end of my videos. this is something that i'm going to start doing as of next video. since you stayed until the end of the video, you obviously get a free premium shopify theme. so if you want to claim that premium shopify theme for free, go down to the link in the description where it says claim your free premium shopify theme and claim that for your guys yourselves. have fun using that on your store. thank you so much for watching this video. i appreciate all of you. i hope you got some value from this one like comment sub. you know the drill and i'll see you guys in the next upload. [Music] you.

I Tried Dropshipping for 2 Months - Here's the TRUTH

hi guys, it's mark. so a couple of months ago, i started my own shopify drop shipping store from scratch, and i've had lots of messages from you guys asking for an update. therefore, i thought it was about time i told you the truth. drop shipping is often said to be one of the best ways to make passive income. you can theoretikally be anywhere in the world with an internet connection and be making money from your laptop. if you haven't seen my last video, here's a quick recap. basically, i made a website called cozycomfortcom, and when someone purchased an item, i would then order these oversized blanket hoodies from aliexpress and get them delivered straight to my customer's door without even touching the item myself, although they're so fluffy. we actually sold 12 items, which meant we paid for the building of the website and all the adverts. after uploading that video, i was looking forward to pushing it forward even more, making some more sweet profit. it looked like i was onto a winner, because i was even getting offers to buy my website. however, it wouldn't be right of me to pretend everything has been going smoothly. i'm honest about everything on this channel, so we need to discuss what's really been going on so that you can avoid these issues in the future. honestly, i can see why drop shipping is so popular. my aim isn't to bash it. i just want to share some of the problems i faced and also, in my opinion, a much better way of doing it. by the way, if you like these kinds of videos, then make sure to subscribe to the channel for new uploads every monday and wednesday. the thing that makes dropshipping so appealing in the first place is you don't have to handle the product yourself. however, this also means you might unknowingly be sacrificing the quality of your products that you're selling. this makes sense, as, in order for the supplier to stand out, then they need to be able to offer really low prices. this is because drop shippers need to be able to charge more for the item so they can make a profit themselves. as there are so many suppliers competing, they often choose to take shortcuts in the manufacturing process or lower the quality of the material so they can drive down the price. quality control was definitely an issue for me, as i did get a few complaints about the hoodies. some said they were made from a much thinner material than expected, and others found it was missing the cozy lining on the flip side, you'll never get a customer complaining: your quality is too good. of course, my customers were angry at me, as all they knew was that they had ordered a product from my website and it didn't meet their expectations. they were completely unaware. the issue was to do with the manufacturer and not me. at the end of the day, i know from running multiple businesses that it's my responsibility to provide my customers with the best quality experience, so i just refunded anyone who wasn't 100 satisfied with the product and i took the here. another thing to consider is the shipping times. as most suppliers are based in china, this can mean up to a 90-day weight for your customers. now, i admit this is a little on the high side, and you can get products delivered closer to 15 days, but, as you can probably imagine, with a world that is used at amazon prime next day delivery, this just isn't good enough. i got emails every week from people asking me where their hoodies were, and all i could do was email them back with their tracking number and reassure them that they were on their way. it's a bit like waiting for christmas presents as a kid. it feels like christmas day takes forever to arrive and when it finally does, the presents are never really that great. thanks, mum and dad. i know i was joking there, but the reality is, the longer you have to wait for something, the more antikipation you have, for when the item arrives, the higher the standards it has to live up to, and a lot of the time this is bound to lead to disappointment. the slow shipping times were probably a lot to do with the size of the hoodies, as small items are often shipped much faster. i really understood the complaints i received because when i was waiting for the sample hoodie, i was emailing the split almost every day to address this issue. i did adapt my website to include the exact shipping estimates so that it wasn't just left as a bit of a mystery. now it's important to note: your biggest advantage over normal businesses is also your biggest problem: your suppliers. i say this as one of the issues i had was when the item completely ran out of stok. this led me to have to refund orders and all the money i'd spent on advertising effectively going down the drain. most people buy items from drop shipping stores on the spur of the moment. it's an impulse buy. if you're unable to take that order, then it's a lost sell, as they're probably not going to be coming running back anytime soon. the moment will have passed and they will be on their way to the next new shiny thing on top of this. these items are only relevant for a brief period of time, as they're driven by hype, which means that every day you're unable to take orders, it's a precious day wasted, my precious mind. it can be really frustrating when you have your website and your adverts working really well and then you're forced to stop trading until you can find another supplier with a suitable item in stok. i personally ended up spending much longer than i should have trying to find a new supplier. i eventually found one, but it was more expensive per unit, so i could either choose to pass that cost on to my customer or take the loss myself. i decided on a latter as i didn't want to negatively impact my sales. as you can imagine, because of these first three issues, chargebacks can be a huge problem. the customer could demand their money back if they don't think the item is of a high enough quality, is taking too long to arrive, or they could be just trying to scam you, as they might know that you're just a small business and you probably don't have a plan to fight back against fraud. the real issue here isn't necessarily the customer wanting their money back. that can certainly be frustrating, but most of the time their concerns are legitimate. it's more that every time a chargeback occurs, the payment provider charges you an additional fee, as if they aren't making enough anyway. this means you don't just lose the sale, but you also have to pay more money on top, which can really start to impact your profits. if this happens more than one percent of the time, you can be fined even more. luckily, i only experienced one charge back for my hoodies, as whenever possible, i would always choose to give the customer a full refund, as it was much cheaper for me to do that than deal with any other extra fees. the final problem i often hear people tok about is that drop shipping is too saturated, but i don't agree with this. drop shipping is just another method of selling a product. saying it's saturated is a lot like saying everyone has purchased everything they're ever going to want. at the end of the day, the whole aim of dropshipping store is to look the same as any other online retailer and for the method of sending the products directly from the manufacturer to the customer to be kept a secret. the problem is that a lot of people use the same photos and videos, which means you have to be constantly adapting if you want your adverts to be successful. it's a bit like when i always tell you about the free stoks available from free trade and public, so i won't mention them in this video. i'll just leave the links in the description below. after posting my youtube video, i notiked a lot more people trying to sell the same hoodies as me with a very similar brand name. this made it much harder for me to secure sales, as my ideal target market was seeing the same product absolutely everywhere. a big part of drop shipping is to shock your customers with a product they never knew existed, but they always wanted. this surprise just isn't possible with a saturated