 Hey, what's up guys, welcome to a new video. So in this one, we're gonna be covering all the dos and don'ts of dropshipping in 2020. So we'll be covering topics like VAT and taxes, everything you need to know about that, shipping times, how to deal with long shipping times, how to improve them, et cetera, setting goals for 2020 and realistic expectations. Expectations are a big one, especially if you're planning on starting dropshipping in 2020 and you're new to the business because a lot of beginners, it's very easy to fall into the trap of watching a couple of videos on YouTube, seeing a couple of screenshots on Facebook and then thinking that dropshipping is easy. It's easy to make money, whereas that just isn't the case. It's a big misconception that dropshipping is an easy way to make money, whereas it's an easy business to start because you don't actually need much money up front to begin, but to actually make money in the longterm and sustain something profitable, then that is where the difficulty lies. So this video then will hopefully clear a few things up, clear a few of those questions up that you're trying to find the answers to and ultimately prepare you to avoid failure and find success in 2020. Before we jump into slide number one then, if you enjoyed the video at any point and you learned something new, make sure you hit that like button for weekly videos on this sort of thing as well, make sure you subscribe. And I do read every single comment too, so if there is a question on anything whatsoever, make sure you post it below and I will answer it. That being said then, let's get into point number one, which I've touched on briefly, which is setting yourself goals. So the best way to think about this then when you're starting a business is that the metaphor that I like to use is that when somebody builds a house, you have to build the foundations first before you build the house on top of that. And if you don't build a house with the correct foundations, then eventually that house is gonna fall over and it's the same with business. If you don't set yourself the correct goals, expectations and do things correctly from the offset, then ultimately you're gonna be setting yourself up for failure. So besides the obvious foundations of any successful job shipping business then, so for example, then a good Shopify store, a good marketing campaign with a good product, then these are the goals in which I recommend you set yourself depending on what journey you're currently at. So if you're a beginner and you're gonna be starting in 2020, then number one, don't set yourself turnover goals because certainly from the people I've spoken to on social media, they'll say right in my second month or even their first month, they'll say I wanna make 10,000 pound, I wanna do 10,000 dollars in sales and if they don't stay on track, so to hit 10K in sales then in a month, you need to do approximately 330 pounds per day. And if they don't stay on track, what they end up doing is throwing even more money into their business into a losing product, a losing asset, a losing campaign, trying to recover that goal so they can reach that benchmark and what ends up happening is they just waste their money. So instead, what you should be doing, number two is focusing on your profitability. And the reason being then is because when it comes to business, then your bottom line is absolutely everything. So how much profit you make, it doesn't matter if you do 10 billion in sales every single year, if you're not making a penny of profit, then you're not making any money. So try not to get wrapped up in all the screenshots and numbers you see on YouTube because what you do in sales is irrelevant if you're not making a good profit margin. Another thing I recommend doing as well because I see so many people fall short of this is they'll do drop shipping for a month, two months. And if they're not doing very well, they'll just quit. And if you could do something, if you could be really successful at something after a couple of months of doing it, then everybody would be doing it and making hundreds of thousands of pounds. So one of your goals and should be on focus on staying in business for the entire year. If you can commit to drop shipping for 12 months and invest, set yourself a budget each month or say 200 pound a month on ads, your chances of success increase the longer you do anything, whether it's riding a bike, learning to drive a car, running a business, the more and longer and the more time you dedicate to doing it, the better chance you have of being a success. So you're much better off if you're a beginner starting in 2020, is focus on staying in business and trying to be profitable from day one. Number two then for everybody else who's a bit more experienced and perhaps been doing drop shipping for a while now and making a bit of money, then these are the kind of rules and goals I recommend you set yourself in 2020. Number one, profitability is king, especially if you're drop shipping in the UK. Once any limited business hits, I believe 85 grand in the 12 month period as I'm recording this, and you have to register as VAT, so 20% goes off your bottom line right away. So rather than focus on trying to do a million pound in sales over 12 months, you're much better off, again, focus on being as profitable as possible because once you hit that VAT threshold, then 20% just wiped out straight away. Number two, outsource as much as possible. You need to be focusing your time on growing your business and doing the thing that's gonna make you money, which is gonna be the product research, which is a skillful task and it's gonna be your marketing. Again, another skillful task. Things like order fulfillment, customer service can be outsourced very quickly, very cheaply, and they're time consuming tasks too, so they'll free up a lot of time for you to dedicate to growing and making your business more profitable. Number three is focusing on acquiring as many customers as possible at break-even or better. The reason being then is because certainly as a beginner standpoint, then most people tend to focus on front end sales, so spending 10 pound on Facebook to make 20 pound back, whereas every time you acquire a customer an email address, a physical address, a telephone number, then each one of those can be used as a potential opportunity to bring that customer back onto your store. I've seen stores before be run at a loss for nine months of the year, banking on the fact that the more customers that they acquire, the more money they're gonna be making in the last three months of the year coming up to Christmas, and that'll be enough to essentially make them enough money to make it worthwhile. So essentially what they're doing, which is number four, is building a cash pot for Q4 to capitalize on the period we've just gone through where most people are spending money. Moving on to point number two then, which is don't worry about delivery times. One of the biggest kind of hesitations beginners have when it comes to satan drop shipping and for the following reasons really then. Purely because delivery is not as big a deal as most people think. A lot of people say customers will definitely not wait that long, but the truth of the matter is that they do. Just to show you a screenshot then, I've put a link there so you can go and check this out. It's from the E-Packet Express website, and this is what they quote as the average E-Packet shipping times. So unless you're drop shipping to any of these countries then all other support countries, that includes America, UK. Then you're looking at seven to 10 business days, which actually isn't that bad. The reason being then, so many people ask me, well, why does it say 20 to 40 days or 20 to 35 days on AliExpress? And it's because when a product doesn't arrive within that time period, you can open a case and you can claim your money back. And if the supplier can't prove of delivery, then essentially they have to refund you. So what they do is they over quote the delivery times making sure it will arrive in time so they have less refunds. So even though it quotes that in realistic terms, on average it actually arrives a lot quicker than that. If you're still not happy with that, then there are some ways in which you can actually reduce the shipping times. Number one is just make sure you choose E-Packet when drop shipping from AliExpress. Certainly shipping to the UK and US is by far the quickest method I've seen that you can get from AliExpress and usually one of the cheapest too. Number two is you can use, not many people know can do this by the way, is use the shipping from tab on AliExpress to find local supplies. So to give you a quick demonstration of this then, I've searched for home camera Wi-Fi, so particular product. And what you wanna do is if you see this check box here, you can click on that and depending on what product you search for, you'll be able to find what countries you can actually source that product from. So if we go ship from United States, we'll go for orders as well. So we're dealing with a decent supplier. And if we just open this up, doesn't matter what sensor size we go from, you can see here we can ship from US with a US plug and free shipping to the United States in four to seven days. So you don't always have to wait that one to two weeks. If you're shipping from the US to the US, you can get it in under a week. If you're shipping to the UK, look for supplies in Spain or France or Germany because they can usually get it to the UK in under a week as well. The other thing you can do as well is progress into using an agent. I recommend going to China Brands to find agents on there. They seem to be the best place to find the most trustworthy and reliable ones. Just make sure you vet them out, et cetera. Number four is you can actually progress from drop shipping once you've found a profitable product. So what you can do then is use the drop shipping business model to test the products for really cheap. And then if you've found one that you can drop ship profitably, then you can always buy a bulk order or say two, 300 units. You don't have to spend that much money to begin with. Send it to a fulfillment center in your local country that you're marketing to and then just get them to ship it to their customers. And again, you'll be able to get it to your customers in one to three days. And the profit margins are significantly better when you're buying, say, two or 300 of a product rather than one at a time. The final point then to finish off this one is just be careful where you get your advice from. For example, then don't listen to anyone who hasn't ran a drop shipping business before. Don't go through the comments and listen to people in there because you don't know what their experience is. For example, that's like taking fitness advice from somebody out of shape. If you wanted to lose weight and get in shape, then you wouldn't listen to someone who wasn't in shape. It just doesn't make sense. So just be careful where you get your advice from. Number three is do not rush things. It's great to be motivated and eager to get started and wanna start making some money. It's awesome, but just make sure that you don't rush things because if you over rush, it leads to skipping corners and poor quality of work. So for example, if you have a poor, either one of these things. So if you have a poor store or a poor Facebook ad campaign or a poor product, you will not succeed. You're much better off taking your time, making sure everything's right before you do actually start. So to give you an example, then here's a drop shipping story found. And I put just like a red mark through all the things that I would change if it was me. And these would be potential things that would hinder you from making sales. So number one is they've got a Chinese brand name up there. There's no other mention of that brand name on this page. So why is it up there? Number two is the product name. They've named it like a pretty just generic product name. It doesn't really make sense. So if anybody wanted to find this product elsewhere, they could do very quickly. If they named it something unique, for example, a name that if somebody then went on to Google to search for, they wouldn't find anything else. Then again, that's like a little technique you can use to keep people onto your store and buying from you. Number three is they've still got the tax included note there. It's just when it comes to building a product page, then if there's information on that page that just is gonna detract away from a customer buying from you, then I'll just remove it. If it's included, they don't need to know that. So just remove it. The next thing is the radical burn is the default color. It needs to be a unique color on the screen so it pops and stands out. As stupid as it sounds, it makes quite a big difference. It's all about percentages. If you can get an extra, say, 2% of people to click that add to account button, that's gonna make a difference to your bottom line. The next point is they've used like a unique font for item description. They haven't used that font anywhere else, so it doesn't just flow nicely. It doesn't look universal. It doesn't look in form, if that makes sense. And then when you look at the layout of the features, they've used features in red and red is kind of like a hesitant color. When you look at the psychology of colors, it's like a hesitant color. And features is meant to be like a good thing, a beneficial thing. So using registers doesn't make sense. Then they've used default font and kind of like a bland kind of generic color. Again, it doesn't really stand out. They haven't bullet-pointed it reading through this. Some of them don't even make sense. So just all in all, you're much better off just taking your time and being professional, making sure everything's right before you get started. So a common example of this then is if you've been getting hundreds of visitors or thousand of visitors to your store but you've been making no sales, then this is usually because of a poor store that has been rushed. So if that is the case for you, just make sure you take a look at your store, get some feedback on it and make the necessary changes. And just to finish off then, it doesn't matter how much money you spend on Facebook ads, if you have poor quality, anything, then you won't be successful. People are gonna be hesitant of new businesses. You need to tick all the right boxes to make sure that they feel safe and sound, spending their money with you. So some recommendations at number one, don't be lazy or impatient. For example, order samples of your products and film your own ads if you have to or pay an influencer so you have a decent product, something really professional, looking at a professional piece of content to market it with and write product descriptions and make sure you use decent fonts and colors. If you're not sure what a good font is, just Google it. When I first started, I Googled what are good colors to make people buy things and there's a whole psychology, a whole different chart of different colors and it's quite interesting in fact. I mean, I won't bore you now in the video of why banks use certain colors, why investment firms use certain colors, why all sales signs in red, for example, and it's the same with descriptions and text. Just Google what is a good product description, how to write a good product description, how to get people to buy after reading something and the things you can learn that will make all the difference. Trust me, it'll be worth it. Number two then is get honest feedback on everything. Don't just go to your mom and say, check out the new website I made. Do you think it's good? Because your mom's always gonna say it's really good. Go on Facebook groups, you can join my one, post your URL in there, you'll get some good honest feedback in there. And then number three to finish this one off is have pride in what you do because if you're proud of what you're creating and what you're about to do, then you're gonna be more interested in it, you're gonna be more positive, you're gonna have a positive outlook and overall it's just gonna make you perform better and be more motivated, which is huge, especially in the beginning. Moving on to number four then, so this is the UK import taxes. I get hounded every single day about questions on this. So if you wanna satisfy yourself and go and read the correct information from the official gov.uk website, I've put the link here. But the two things you have to worry about then which I've taken a screenshot for you just to go through quickly. Number one is VAT and number two is customs duty. So VAT wise then, any goods under the cost of 15 pounds that includes shipping absolutely everything all in. So if you're buying something from AliExpress, include an e-packet as long as it's under 15 pounds you won't pay any VAT. Number two is the customs duty, anything under 135 pounds. Again, that includes delivery, insurance is absolutely everything. As long as it's under 135 pounds, there'll be no charge. So as long as the product you're drop shipping is under 15 pounds, there'll be absolutely no extra fees to pay. The chat is our two is working with a lot of supplies on AliExpress. They know what drop shipping is. They wanna look good to the people buying their products. So even if you are ordering a product like 20, 30 pounds I've seen quite a few supplies undervalued the product on the invoice on the actual packaging just to make sure it goes through a bit more smoothly. And so there are no import taxes to pay, et cetera. If there is VAT or customs duty to pay, it's not the end of the world. So typically it'll in the UK anyway, it'll be Royal Mail and parcel force that do the UK stint of the delivery process. And what will usually happen then is they'll put an invoice through the door of the customer and they can go online and pay it or they can go to the local post office and pay it and then they'll get given the order. It's not a big deal, don't worry about it. I certainly wouldn't let it put you off just starting and getting started right away and just deal, you can deal with things like this as you come across them. Moving on to the next point then is test as much as possible. The amount of people I speak to, they've tested one product, one ad, one store and they've had no success. So they go online and say drop shipping to scam and it doesn't work. Not everything you do will work nor will everything you expect to work will work. So just make sure you test as much as possible and trial and error to some degree is going to be inevitable. So as you develop the skill of picking products and marketing then your success rate is gonna be higher but in the beginning it's gonna be low so some trial and error will be necessary. In terms of how to test efficiently then here's some points to consider next time you're running ads, next time you're picking products. Number one, just make sure you run fair tests. It's not fair to spend 100 pound of one product and 10 pound on the next product. It's not gonna be accurate. It's not gonna be fair to test audience sizes of 10 million people against 100,000 people. The same for placements and devices. If you're only testing a desktop audience then it's not an accurate test. It's not a fair test. You don't even know if mobile works or not. So make sure you test both. And then same for demographics as well. Don't just focus on one gender. Make sure you test absolutely everything and then when you find what works and you've tested it fairly then you can start to narrow down and hone in on that more specific and higher value audience. Number two is test multiple products. Again, the amount of people I see it just frustrates me. They'll test one product, maybe two products. It's rare in fact that I've actually spoken to somebody who's tested more than three products and because they've found no success then they just write drop shipping and Facebook ads off all together and just say Facebook ads don't work. You need to test multiple products. When I first started it took me six products before I found one that made a single sale. Just one sale. Before I made one single sale it took me six different products. And then number three then is data as king. The more data you have the more accurate representation you have of whether a product works or not. Give you an example then of why this is true. Let's say for example you want to sell a dog product and you go to a local dog show that has a thousand dog owners in one single room. You go up to the first dog owner and ask them whether they like the product and whether they would buy it or not. And they say yes. So instead of asking everybody else you leave thinking that you've got a really good product and that every single dog owner wants to buy it. Whereas you might ask the other 999 dog owners in that room and they will say no. So the more people you ask the better mean, the better average you're gonna get of whether people actually like that product or not. Number four then to give you an idea of kind of like the success rate in which I've been working on. So for the past 160 ad sets that I've ran 35 out of that 160 have ran at 1.7 ROAS or better. So take that, keep it in mind do with it what you will but just what I guess what I mean by that is don't expect every single ad set to be a winner. Moving on to the sixth and final point then is be positive. Now as cliche as this sounds is 100% true the amount of people I speak to who want to get involved in drop shipping and I'll answer their question and then they have a negative response to it. It's like if you're going into anything with a negative mindset and a negative outlook then you're gonna set yourself up for failure. You need to be positive through the tough times through the good times because at the end of the day drop shipping works, it's a fact but the harsh truth is that only a small percentage of people will actually succeed at it. Trust the process works smart and 2020 will be a great year and again you don't have to take my word from it. Here's just a few screenshots from some of the members of my Ecom Academy and you can see on now the kind of results that these guys have achieved. And with that being said then one final thing which is thank you very much for watching. I hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, please do make sure you hit the like button. Please make sure you subscribe. Any questions you want to ask me I will answer them so just comment them down below. For more content on Shopify and drop shipping and just to kind of follow my daily life I guess make sure you follow me on Instagram. Check out my free e-books in the description below and finally if you want to join a proven step-by-step course that comes with my support you've seen the results then check out my Ecom Academy the link will be in the video description below or if you download this keynote simply click on this and it will take you right to it. With that being said guys, thanks again and I'll see you in the next one.