 Hello, everyone. I'm Liran, the content manager here at AutoDS. And today I have a special interview with Daniel. He is our e-commerce manager. I'm not sure if you guys have heard of him, but you definitely should. You have a lot to learn from this specific individual. So let's go ahead and get started. Hello, Daniel. Please give us a little bit of information about yourself, who you are, where you're from. Hello, Liran. Hello, guys. Thank you for having me today here. It's a pleasure. I'm Daniela, and I'm from Italy, and I'm a full-time dropshipper and e-commerce manager for AutoDS. And that's me. Some of you may be already spoke with me on AutoDS for different reasons. And basically I'm dropshipping full-time for over five years. And I'm managing multiple stores, more than 20 stores on eBay and more than four stores on Facebook. And AutoDS platform as well, like Amazon. Right. And that was a part of my next question, which is your dropshipping experience. How long you've been doing it for? How many stores you have? What is your average revenue? If you can crunch that down to an average number. I would also like to ask you a little bit about the suppliers that you're working with. And if there are any specific strategies that you're implementing that helped you get to where you are today. Sure. So basically I'm dropshipping now for five years, almost five years. And I started some 2017, I think. When I started dropshipping was a little different today. And this is why we are here, especially today, to speak about new strategies on 2021 and 2022. And yes, as told, I started with eBay. And now I'm managing for Facebook and Amazon as well. For eBay, I have more than 20 stores on multiple countries, basically worldwide. USA, Australia, Italy, and Germany as well. And I'm selling for over 1.5 million every year on income from eBay. And I'm using a lot of suppliers on my stores. The big one, the biggest one is Amazon. That is also my favorite. I started using Amazon when I started to automate my business. Actually, when I started, I was using a random supplier from my country that was selling clues. But I started just, I think like many people just trying around manually downloading the images, the station, and after I discovered the automation and software like Autodesk that can grow your business and automate your business. And then I started to use Amazon. So now it's four years that I'm using Amazon. But also I'm using the Costway, Boundhood, and AliExpress. But personally, I prefer the fast shipping. I prefer to sell like higher price on my stores. But giving the better shipping and better customer experience in my stores. So I can get positive feedbacks. I can get good metrics. This is my personal opinion. But you can work with a lot of suppliers and also from China as well. Yes, basically a strategy. Today I won't work with my favorite strategy. That is the big number rule that I'm using. I think I always use it. When I started as before, I started manually. So I was going, I think like any people start to do searching like the good products to sell, searching the trend products. But soon I understood the basic rule that if you have one store with two products that maybe can sell good products, you can sell a lot of products. But you are very limited because you have just one, two, three products. So even if they have trend products, you can make 100 of sales. Yes, maybe sometimes you can do. But anyway, the trend will hover very soon and you need to search new products. So I got that if I put multiple products, if I use 100 products and I have a lot of things to offer to the buyers, I don't need to stay just with one single product and research a lot. Because instead of being a little shop, I can be a big mall. It's very easy online, especially with eBay when you can list for free or on Facebook that you don't have selling limits or Amazon as well. And I started to change my strategy in big numbers rule. Now I have, I think, more than 200,000 listings in my stores. And it's easier than have very small amount of listings because we don't need to research the good products every time. We just list as many as possible. Of course, we select the determinate categories. We try to list from trend categories. But we don't focus on the single products at least until he'll sell. After the product sell, we are going to change the images. We are going to put our brand there to change the title, to change the description. And we are, because we are already sure that it's sold, we made the right profit. So it's worth for us to improve the listings for selling. Okay, makes sense. So basically, you have a lot of stores. You're making a lot of revenue. That is for sure. And before I get on to my next question, I just want to make some things clear here. So you using Amazon as your main supplier is good. It's great. I can also say that it is my main supplier for my stores too. I don't have as many stores as you, but I'm definitely also using them as my main supplier. Now, a lot of people have some things to say about that because they see them as a big retail online marketplace and they know that they don't support reselling their products and other websites and things like that. I just want to clear the air really quick over here. The fact that they may or may not like or support it is the same, might be for the same reasons that eBay might also not support it, but does it mean that it doesn't work? No, it still works. And if you know how to work the right way, you can definitely work dropshipping from Amazon to eBay or from Amazon to Shopify or to Facebook Marketplace or anywhere else for that matter. As long as you know how to overcome some small bumps in the road that you might get along the way, which is made mostly to filter beginners that really don't know what they're doing, to filter them out of the system and keep only the ones who do have experience who do know what they're doing and actually treat this thing like a real business. So at the end of the day, you can dropship from anywhere to anywhere and you are a great example for that, Daniel. So I just wanted to make that point clear. And on top of that, if you do not feel comfortable working with suppliers like Amazon, which I think is a mistake, but if you feel like it is not the right move for you, you can still work with over 25 suppliers if you're working with us with AutoDS, with full automation. Or if you're not working with AutoDS, you can work with every supplier that exists. But if you ask me, 25 is more than enough to get a reach to tens of millions of products from different regions and different suppliers around the world. So it doesn't matter if you're working with Amazon or with other suppliers, as long as you're doing the right amount of research for each supplier. And you know what they can do and what they cannot do. You know their product line. And you can test at the end of the day, you're going to test and see what works for you, just like you did when you began with Italian suppliers, you did in the beginning and you did everything manually. You started selling clothes, like you mentioned. And then you started figuring out about automation and how it helps you scale. But it's all about product testing. And I want to say one thing, one quick thing about what you said about having two products in your store or going with the big numbers rule, as you mentioned, and only optimizing your products after they sell. I actually think it's a pretty good strategy because you can spend so much time on product research, which is one of the most important tasks if you ask me, product research. But you can spend days and days and days on product research at the end to only find one or two potential products, add them to your store, and maybe they will sell. Maybe they will sell great, like you said. But you will be limited to the season. You will be limited to other competitors coming in and taking that product from you. You're going to limit yourself from so many things. So if you have a quick peak, it's going to actually fall pretty quick because you don't have anything else to back you up with more sales. So then you're adding the big numbers rule and it doesn't matter which marketplace you're dropping to be on. If you have an eBay account and you have lots of limits, then go crazy. Start listing. And like you said, don't just list any random product, but you should know what fits the drop shipping category. So some categories are fit for the drop shipping business model and some are not. For example, we don't want to sell firearms or tobacco or hazardous materials or choking hazard for babies and things like that. But if we take a look at what we can sell, we'll just see millions and millions of products that are fit. So go with the big numbers, add products from drop shipping categories that sell. You can see from your suppliers, best sellers and see what's going well for others and try to copy the same business practices. And once you start getting sales, then go in and start optimizing because you know that that product is worth the time. You know that it's worth the effort because it already proved to you because it already sold. Then you're going to start optimizing to get more sales. And one of my strategies is to also take that product and add more products similar to that one to continue multiplying my sales and finding more trends. Okay, so I just wanted to say a couple of words there even though it was more than just a couple. Okay, let's move on to the next question. So how did you actually become, how did you transition from becoming a drop shipper with having so many stores to actually becoming an e-commerce manager in AutoDS? And soon we're going to talk about what that means, but let's talk about how you moved from one thing to another, how that actually happened. Yeah, so basically as being a little random things, when I become AutoDS a com manager, because AutoDS was looking for this position, was looking for someone with good experience in drop shipping and hoping this new department. And I knew I had the opportunity to have a meeting with Leo and other people inside the AutoDS and they just told me, okay, we have this position open and we need someone that is drop shipping experience that have a lot of experience for a long time because we need to build this department and we need to start to do drop shipping for ourselves for understand better the market and the things like that. And yes, I joined for AutoDS because I think because I really liked the brand, I really liked the software before to work with AutoDS. I honestly, you said in the past, I think hold the software around there for drop shipping on eBay. But when I dropped on AutoDS years ago was something different because I saw I can see the difference on the brand and I wanted to be part of that and to help to grow the brand, to grow the company. And also it's something that I already do for myself. I thought, okay, I can do more of this and I can do for someone else and help someone else to do that. That's all I become AutoDS icon manager. Okay, great. And one of the things that I would like to point out here is that we have some similarities because I was also a customer of AutoDS, I still am a customer of AutoDS. But before I joined the system, before I joined the company, I was also a customer of AutoDS just like you and I was just astounded by the way that I'm, that we can really have full automation here that everything is working well and my orders are being processed and I got the price and stock monitoring and I'm importing products in just a couple of seconds. It was great. And when I was showing this to other people, it seemed like too good to be true to have such a software that's able to do these things. And when I began with AutoDS, there weren't, I think there was maybe only one competitor today. He doesn't even exist today. There are more competitors, but I know that AutoDS stands at a very, very high position. But that's not the point. What I'm trying to get to is I was also a customer of AutoDS before I joined the system and today, even after I joined the system, I'm still doing it. I'm still dropshipping. I still got my stores just like you also have your stores and this is a big difference between what's going on here to when you compare it to other places where you have mentors and you have courses that you need to pay money for and the people who are teaching these courses or the people who are running that certain types of dropshipping software or other things related to dropshipping, they're not doing it themselves. So they're not doing it from real experience. They're not teaching from real experience. Maybe it's from some past experience, something that maybe is not so relevant that isn't working so well anymore. But the biggest difference here is that we are still doing it while we are teaching it. So I think that that's a big difference when you compare it with others. And that's also something that I wanted to point out here because real experience is real value at the end of the day. Okay, so we talked about how you joined AutoDS as an e-commerce manager. Now I'd like to talk a little bit about why we have this department in the first place. Why do we need an e-commerce manager? So the reason that we added that here, which you also mentioned, is to be able to test more markets. If you look at AutoDS one year ago or one and a half years ago to how it is today, you'll notice that there are lots of new changes. We're not just a tool dropshipping from 25 suppliers to eBay, but you can also dropship today from 25 suppliers to Shopify, from 25 suppliers to Facebook marketplace. And in 2022, we've got more surprises like dropshipping on Amazon, dropshipping on Wix. And I don't know if I can say more at this point, so I'm going to stop here. But we've got many more surprises and all of this is coming from all of the testing that's going on, from the testing, especially that you are doing in all of the marketplaces and all of the different suppliers. The reason that we have this department, the reason that we have you as an e-commerce manager is to actually be able to test all of these markets and see what works well. And when we see something that's working really well, then we have the developers work on it to have that feature available for everyone. So that is why that's one of the reasons why today AutoDS is able to dropship too many more platforms and we're always adding more suppliers. So that's the main reason why we have this. Of course, we're making some profits on the side. The AutoDS is making some profits from the sales and all of that, but that is not the reason why we have this department in the first place. We're learning so much about the market from these tests, from these strategies, and we're definitely looking forward to continuing working with you as an e-commerce manager. Now I'd like to talk a little bit about the webinar that we have coming up on November 16th, which is just a few days away. That's actually the reason why I wanted to have this interview with you. So we have this huge, huge webinar, Q4 webinar, and a lot of things are going to go down in that webinar. The person who's going to lead that webinar, who's going to create that webinar for us is Lior. He's the founder of AutoDS. He's going to lead the webinar and talk about something really, really big that I cannot say what it is, but I can say that it has to do with finding and adding trending products to your store. And I'm not talking about the AutoDS Finder. It's a new feature that we have been working on for the last couple of years and it's finally, finally, finally about to come out. This is something that the market is really, really hungry and thirsty for. And I'm very, very proud that we are offering a solution to this, that we're offering a feature for this. So it's something to do with finding the best products for you guys to add to your stores. And they will sell for you. You will have a much higher success rate over there than I'm sure that you have anywhere else. So wait for that. That's one of the things that he's going to go over. Another thing that Lior is going to go over is what are the best products to sell this Q4? Because right now we're in the middle, we're nearing the end of Q4 and it's the highest, highest, highest point of the year when it comes to sales and online sales. So he's also going to go over the best, most recommended products that we need to sell in the Q4. And more than that, you're also going to be the surprise guest for the webinar. So I just mentioned that. So it's not a surprise anymore, but it was until now. So you're going to be the surprise guest in this webinar. Lior is going to talk to you a little bit. We're going to talk a little bit about the mentorship program and a special deal that we have going on there. And when I mean mentorship program, that's another great position that you have here at ODS as our main mentor. So the mentorship program, it's all about giving one-on-one support to all of our users, to anyone who wants it, who joins the mentorship program. You are getting one-on-one support from Daniel, from yours truly, and he's helping you guys. It doesn't matter what level you're on. It doesn't matter if you haven't started yet or if you have started, didn't make any sales or maybe you made a few sales and you want to learn how to make more. You want to learn how to scale your business. You want to learn how to succeed more than you're succeeding today. That is what the mentorship program is here to help you with. And it's also going to help you avoid making so many beginner mistakes that beginners usually make when they're starting out, who don't have someone one-on-one to help them out with their stores and with their business. So having someone with real value with true experience, we're still doing it today. That is definitely something that I recommend if you're starting out and you really want to take your business seriously and succeed at it. Not just make a few sales and just make a few bucks of profit, but really take this a long way and reach substantial profits. So that is why we have the mentorship program and we're going to talk a little bit about that more on the webinar in just a few days from now. And if you guys will look at my screen right here, so we've got the page for the mentorship program just to give you guys a little bit more information about what the mentorship program is and what it's all about. And if you guys would like to join the mentorship program, then the first thing that I would advise you to do is wait a few days because on the webinar that we just spoke about, that Lior will conduct in a couple of days from now, you're going to get a really, really good deal on our mentorship program. So wait for that. But if you want to get started, if you want to join, all you have to do on the Autodesk system is click on Settings, then we'll click on Plans and Add-ons and we'll scroll down to the Get Help and Guide with our professional mentors starting at $40 a month. But once again, wait for the webinar, get your special deal. All right, so we went over the mentorship program. We talked about the webinar that's going to be live in a couple of days. Nobody wants to miss this webinar, so guys join it now. On top of that, there is one thing that I usually like to do when I speak with professionals like you with people who are doing this for so long for a new dropshipper that just entered the scene right now and they have so many questions and so much going on in their minds. And I remember the first steps that I took. I remember how many questions, how many challenges I also faced because I personally wasn't getting any professional help in the beginning. So as a beginner dropshipper, what is the number one tip that you can give them so that they can succeed, they can take this tip and it will help them succeed, not just to get a few sales, but to really make it in the long term, which is what we should all be here to do. So, Leon, I actually want to give two tips now, not just one. The first one and the main one is to start because many people just won't start, they maybe look around, but they never start. And this is, I mean, looks very basic, looks very, you know, but it's the first thing that I see. Also in the mentorship, I get a lot of people that still is not dropshipping, is still starting and they start to look. And the first thing is start. Until you start, you can know what it's doing and you can learn. Actually, so you need first start. Start means also study, also looking at stores and starting to learn everything. So this is my first tip for you. The second tip is, yes, this is the main important, if you already started, is to take the dropshipping seriously as every business. Because the dropshipping, I mean, it's a good way, it's an easy way to start making money online. It's a good way to start to maybe making a lot of money, but this doesn't mean that they have free money or is like magic money that you get for free. You need to be serious on the business and this means to invest in yourself, to invest in customer experience, in customer service. It's like if you invest money and open a store in your street, there is no difference. The only difference is that that is in the street, this is online. But the professional that you need to be is the same. So investing yourself, investing customer service, don't be scared maybe to lose once you dollar sometimes in some sales because I see a lot of people that maybe are writing how-to-day metrics for not losing five dollars, three dollars. And this is crazy because we are talking about business and if you don't understand, if you don't change your mindset in this way, it will be very, very hard to survive long term. And this is also the main reasons I see in the mentorship program as well from people that are not going to have a success in this business because they are not working seriously. In this kind of business, you can enjoy the freedom, it's true. You can enjoy passive income, it's true. But this doesn't mean that it's from the first day. You need to work the first. Weeks, the first months, the first year. And also you can work in automated business and after you can enjoy all your freedom. But always you need to be focused on the business. So this is what I want to really share and this is something that I learned in my experience burning a lot of money because I lost a lot of money on my first, I think two years because this, if I had someone explaining this to me, I would be much richer today than I have. So yes, this is... You would have avoided a lot of mistakes. So those are great tips. One thing that I want to leave you guys off with is that you're of course using virtual assistants to run your businesses, to run your stores because you won't have enough time in the day. And that is something that we did not talk about. So virtual assistants are definitely needed for running the amount of drop shipping stores that you have and managing the amount of items that you have cannot be done without a virtual assistant. Unless of course you're sitting down all day and that's what you're doing, that is fine if that's how you want to pass your time. But I would definitely recommend you guys to first start off. Of course, you guys do everything by yourselves. Run your business, know all of the ins and outs. Know every little aspect of your business before passing it on to a virtual assistant. Also make sure that you have profit so that you'll be able to pay that virtual assistant without losing money. But I want to now get back to... But that's definitely needed if you guys want to scale and make it the way that Daniel did and many others too. But what I want to go over really quick is those two tips that you gave. So the first tip is to take action and I cannot agree more. I was thinking about drop shipping two years before I started. And I keep kicking myself in the butt for not starting when I was first interested in it. I only started two years later when I finally had the guts to start to take action. But if I would have started when I first learned about it, when I was first interested about it, I would have made a lot more. So once you take action is once you will start seeing results. I know that you have a lot of questions. I know that you beginners don't know where to start and if now is the good time to start or maybe you should wait until you acquire some more information, some more knowledge. You need to take it step by step but the first step is to take action. There is a limit to how much you can learn without taking action in order to start seeing results. So take action, that's the first step. Create your store today. Find what selling channel you want to drop ship on today. Find what suppliers you want to start working with today. And tomorrow add your first product. In two days from now add five more products. Take action on what you're going to do every single day and do it. And going with your second tip to treat it like a real business is absolutely definitely true. Just like you mentioned like your example it doesn't matter if you're starting a brick and mortar inventory store here across the street, a physical store or if you want to start an online store the professionalism needs to be the same for your buyers. It is a real business. You're taking money from someone. You're giving them something in return. That is a real business and it doesn't matter if you're doing it online or physically you need to treat it like that. If you want it to survive in the long term and really profit from this business and one last thing that you talked about which is also very, very important is the fact that it doesn't matter if you make mistakes in the beginning. It's okay to make mistakes in the beginning and it's needed to make mistakes in the beginning. Now we can minimize those mistakes if you're getting the mentorship. If you know who you're working with you know what you're working on you know what you're doing and you're not guessing and doing things out of the blue and randomly. But it's okay to make mistakes in the beginning. Nobody you shouldn't be making big mistakes that should cost you hundreds of dollars. But like you said if you lose $5 in an order because you didn't price it correctly because you didn't take into consideration the right break even. I see things like that happening a lot with beginners and a lot of times they would say okay this isn't right or I waited two weeks to get one sell on a small item and maybe this isn't right. Maybe this isn't right for me. It's not the right business model and then they leave. So imagine if you would have done the same when you would have started a big business. You wouldn't have left so easily because you invested so much money and you have expenses and you need to make it work. So what are you going to do? You're going to make it work. So the same thing should be for your online business just because you didn't have an initial investment does not make it a real does not make it a not real business. It's still a real business treated that way and you will make it in the long term. It's okay to make mistakes but you will be able to minimize them when you are getting professional mentorship. So those are mainly the things that I wanted to talk about Daniel. I want to thank you for making it to this interview. Guys don't miss the webinar in a few days. I'm going to leave a link below this video so you guys can sign up and save your seat but definitely save it because we cannot we have a limited amount of users of people that can join this webinar. So go ahead and save your spot right now. And if you guys don't know, we've got a huge blog channel updating with new articles coming out at least twice a week. We've got our YouTube channel with at least two videos coming out every week even though I think we're up to like three or four now but we've got so much more content coming up so much new features so much more to talk about and so much more to work with you guys. So subscribe to our YouTube channel go check out our blog page join the webinar once again you will have the link right below this video thank you guys for watching and Daniel once again thank you for joining me today. Thank you Lira, thank you guys.