 Creating a general online store is a perfect way to get started with your e-commerce empire. And that is because with a general store you can explore an endless selection of niches while earning massive sales. So that is why in this video I'm going to give you 10 different examples of successful general online stores. But before getting started, I want to explain to you what is a general store. In order for you to understand what is a general store, I need to explain to you what is a niche store. A niche store is a store that focuses on selling products from a specific category. For example, a store in the pet niche will only sell products that are related to pets. A store in the kitchen niche will only sell products that are related to kitchen. On the other hand side, a general store is exactly the opposite of that. It doesn't focus on one single niche, but on multiple niches. That is where the name comes from. You can basically sell any kind of product that you want in a general store. And that is why I always recommend beginners to open up a general store before opening up a niche store. You see a lot of people are passionate about certain niches and they will open up a store in that niche, but they are losing a lot in this process and they are leaving a lot of money on the table because by opening up a general store, you will have more freedom to test different products. This is why I would advise you to take advantage of this flexibility and open up a general store. And once you find a really good product, you can open up a niche store for that product. Now that we got this out of the way, let's get this video started. The first store from our list is called Inspire Uplift. They have a diverse product selection including home clothing, beauty and electronics. This store is very big. They literally have millions of customers all around the globe. And if you keep an eye on them, you have a pretty good chance to score really good products at discounted prices. Following up on our list comes Seconds, which is spelled five at cons.net. This store is a one stop shop for all of the customer needs and they usually have big discounts going on at all times. They also have a wide area of product categories such as consumer electronics, home goods and jewelry. One of the best things about this website is the fact that they are offering free shipping to more than 200 countries and they are also offering free returns. And on top of that, their online tracking feature lets you track your package wherever it might be in the world. Next up we have this store that's called Best Choice Products. These guys gained a massive following and they owe that to three different pillars and those are products, customers and value. The best thing about the store is the fact that all of their products are actually made by them and all of their products have a unique blog as a product page from which you can find a lot of information about those products. The second best thing about this store is the fact that they are offering 60 day return periods. A big majority of online stores only have 30 days and if your products do not qualify for this return period, you can still get a warranty. You can still enjoy a warranty period and customer service. These guys are putting a pretty big accent on customer support. That is why you can do live chat, you can call them on the phone, you can open up a ticket, you can email them, all of these methods ensuring that you'll get the best customer support possible. Next up on our list we have Trendy Goods Market. This is one of the top general online stores where you can find high quality products at very good prices. They are putting a lot of effort on security, this is why they are showing you that you can pay with anything and that you will be secured whatever you're doing on the website. They are standing out because they are offering 60 day money back guarantee, no questions asked. This is pretty rare amongst online stores so when you see something like that you better take a look and this website is also offering free shipping to more than 200 countries. Next up on our list we have Buy It Carl. If you're a customer to this website, the first thing that you will notice is the fact that you can access best sellers and new arrivals. Interestingly enough, this website has a pretty small product selection, only about 50 products at any given time. But don't be scared by that, because of the fact that they have numerous positive reviews, we can put them up there because their products are amazing. Additionally, they have partnered up with Visa, Mastercard and PayPal and these three payment methods are one of the top in the world. Oh and I forgot, they are offering worldwide shipping and if you're buying from the United States, they are offering one to three days shipping time. Just a reminder guys, if you're enjoying this video so far, drop a like because it would greatly help us with the YouTube algorithm and subscribe to our channel. At number six, we have Genie Mania. The first thing that you see when you visit this website is the fact that they're offering free shipping on orders that are more than $40, which is actually a very good thing, because they have a lot of products that are pretty cheap, so $40 is not that much and you will get free shipping. Also, they have a pretty wide array of products to choose from, such as beauty, health, kitchen, dining, etc. On top of that, on their homepage, you can actually see what products are discounted and what was the original price. A pretty interesting thing about this website, I never seen this anywhere else, is the fact that they are shipping their orders after the 24 hour mark and that is why this situation gives you the option to change your order in the lifespan of 24 hours. For number seven, we have this website that has a huge product catalog that's called Material, just to name a few of their categories, office, home, kitchen, outdoor, bedroom, hygiene, beauty, etc. They have a dedicated selection for bestsellers and trending products and they also have a selection for products that are discounted. They are one of the few stores in this list that also offer bundle discounts, meaning that if you buy two pieces, you'll get 10% off. If you buy three pieces, you get 20% off, so on and so forth, depending on the product. These guys are offering free shipping for orders that are more than $60 as opposed to $40 the last website and they are offering very flexible payment methods such as American Express, Google Pay and Apple Pay. At number eight, we have Until Gone. These guys are masters when it comes to free shipping because the first thing that you see when you're entering is a category of products that offer free shipping for orders more than $25. A very interesting fact about this specific website is the fact that they are offering financing, meaning that you can buy now and pay 30 days later. Moreover, they also have a stress-free return guarantee and also cashback rewards. But wait, I'm not done. These guys are going crazy. They have a refer a friend program, meaning that any time you refer a friend and they buy something from this store, you can earn something. At number nine in our list, we have Common Lee. They have a very good product research team and you will always see new products on their website. They are allowing you to filter products by discounts. They have the best payment solutions integrated on their website such as Stripe and PayPal. And finally, they have a 30 day replacement warranty for all of their products. The last store on our list is Super Shop. They provide everyday deals on all of the niches that you can imagine such as fashion, furniture, electronics. They have a pretty helpful filter in which you can search for products based on the price, on their name, on their category. Moreover, this website has rewards, cashbacks and discounts. And besides that, they are shipping your order 24 hours after you place it. So that's a very good thing about it. And finally, they have a 30 day return policy. So guys, now that you have an overview of the best general stores out there, let's build up our general dropshipping business. So here are some steps that will get you started with an online general store. First of all, of course, obviously finding products to sell and you don't want to sell any kinds of products. You want to sell products that are on the wave right now products that people are looking after in order to find these products. We're calling them winning products. You can do the following things. Number one, make a list of competitors and spy on them. For this, you can use the tools such as Koala Inspector tool. You can install it in your Google Chrome and you will be able to spy on all of the stores that are using Shopify. Next up, we have the auto DS winning products hub. This is a hub that gives you access to the best winning products out there. It is made by our team that's doing 24 seven research and they're always searching for the best products to sell online. Other than that, you can also go to our suppliers one by one and check out what are their best sellers. And finally, you have Google Trends. This tool allows you to see what is trending and what are people looking after. Once you did this, you need to find a general dropshipping supplier. Remember, when running a general dropshipping store, you will need a supplier that has a general area of products. You cannot choose a supplier that only has products in one single niche. When looking for the best supplier that you want to work with, you need to look after these things. Number one, international warehouses. You need to be able to ship your products as soon as possible to your customers. Number two, you need to have really practical return policies and shipping policy. Number three, very affordable and quality products. Number four, positive reviews. So make sure to ask for those. And finally, excellent customer service. The next step is to find a dropshipping selling channel. So now that you've done everything that I told you in this video, you have a list of competitors, you've picked your suppliers, you know what products you want to sell. The last thing that you need to do is to find a place where to sell those products, right, such as a marketplace. Now, here's a list of all of the top notch marketplaces that you can sell your products on. By the way, Autodesk synchronizes with all of the following platforms that I'm going to mention, and it's going to make your dropshipping life a lot easier. So we have Shopify, we have Wix, we have eBay, and finally we have Facebook Marketplace and Facebook shops. Now, if this video is going to reach 100 likes, I'm going to make a video about the Facebook Marketplace because it's a pretty good one and it has a lot of potential. So make sure to drop a like to this video. After that, you need to import the product that you've decided on on the platform that you want to sell it on. For this, we have two ways. First of all, we have the manual way in which you need to just go there and copy and paste everything that you want on your website. And it's basically a hassle, you need to create a title, you need to create a product description, you need to manually save, download and upload all of the pictures of the product until you create a very nice product page. Or you can just use Autodesk and its automatic product importer, you only need to click one time and the product will be on your website with all of the descriptions and photos that you need. So now that we have the products in our store, next up, we need to market them, right? People will not just come to our store and they will buy our products. We need to show the products to the interested people. Now, inevitably, when you're running a general drop shipping store, there will be lots of other stores that are going to sell the same products that you are selling. This is why you need to stand out. So you need to learn how to do email marketing, content marketing, influencer marketing, Facebook ads, TikTok ads, there are countless ways out there in which you can market your product. So now you have some traffic going on, I'm really proud of you. The next thing for you would be to get some orders. Those orders need to be fulfilled, meaning that we need to send those products to our customers, put in the address for your customer, pay for the items and let the suppliers ship the products to your clients, or you can fulfill all of these orders with the help of Autodesk and you can just sit back and relax. Undeniably, automatic fulfillment by Autodesk can save you a lot of hassle. I'm going to leave some information about that in the description of this video, so make sure to check it out. So now that we have some orders going in, we will have some other problems such as communicating with the customers after they bought, meaning customer service. There are some proven ways to cater to customers such as live chat, frequently asked questions page, ticket submission and phone number. And finally, we have the automation and scaling step. Now, I know it's pretty nice to see one, two, three, five sales every single day rolling up, but wait until we get 50, 100 orders every single day and they are going to pile up. This is why we need to automate this because we cannot work 24 seven. And once again, with Autodesk, we can enjoy all of the automation perks. Here are some of the automation features that Autodesk is offering price and stock monitoring, automatic price optimization, tracking updates, customer management tools, advanced image editor and much more. When automating your business, you can make sure that you will get much better results with the same effort input. If you're new to dropshipping and this video has helped you, please drop a like and subscribe to our channel. Thank you for watching. Until next time.