 What's going on everyone, Mare here with AutoDS and in today's video, we're going to be covering everything you need to know about e-commerce dropshipping. Everything from what it is to fulfilling your first order and everything in between. We're going to be covering everything you need to know about how to get started. So make sure you watch all the way to the end because we're also going to be covering some tips and tricks to help you out along the way. So let's run that intro really quick and let's get started. What's going on everyone, Mare here with AutoDS and if you like informative videos on the dropshipping business and everything you need to be able to get started and scale yours. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button as well as ring that little bell notification so that way you don't miss out on any future videos. Now I'm sure the majority of us already know this but for those of you that are new here, let's cover really quick exactly what is dropshipping. So dropshipping is considered a retail fulfillment business model and pretty much what that means is we don't touch any stock. All we really have to do is fulfill customers orders. In reality, it is a fairly simple business strategy. So pretty much the way it works is let's say you have your online store and you sell shoes. I'm selling a pair of shoes for $150. The customer is going to come to my website, they're going to purchase that same pair of shoes for those $150 and what I'm going to do once I receive that order is I'm going to go on over to my suppliers website and I'm going to place the order for the same pair of shoes except instead of paying $150, I'm going to pay $100. I'm not going to give the supplier my shipping information. I'm actually going to give them my customer shipping information. So ultimately my supplier is going to shift the order directly to my customer and I'm going to update them with the tracking. Now the remaining $50 is our profit. Now before we go on into more detail, I do want everyone to know that I have a summarized version of all of this in the form of a cheat sheet. Now if you want access to that cheat sheet, make sure you leave a comment down below with the hashtag dropship 2023, along with your favorite part about dropshipping. Once I see that comment, I'm going to go ahead and reply it so that way you can gain access. Now cheat sheets are a fantastic resource for quick referencing. But if you want a little bit more detail into anything that I'm going to speak about in this video, then make sure to check out the description down below. I'm going to have a link down there to a relevant article. So when it comes to the e-commerce business, there's two main ways to be able to do these things. You can either have your own inventory and hold everything on site, or you can dropship and not hold any inventory. There are pros and cons to each method. Let's say you're holding inventory for your business. When you're doing this, typically you're going to be holding it on site, whether it be in your house, your warehouse, your garage, wherever it may be that you're running your business out of. When it comes to holding your own inventory, one of the biggest benefits is you have fast order fulfillment. Pretty much whenever your order comes in, you're able to go grab that item, package it and ship it. You also reduce the risk of shortage since you're going to have the items right there. You're going to have all your inventory pretty much right where you can see it, so it's easy to keep track of. If you start running low, then you can easily just order more. And the fact that you're going to be ordering in bulk also gives you some pretty good discounts. You also have fairly good control over your price, since you're going to be able to set it at whatever rate you want as long as you can make a profit. And another pro is it's easier to start branding your own products. When you start branding your own products, you can start packaging them and shipping them out pretty much on your terms and the way you like to do things with your logos, your designs, and your own custom packaging. Now, you know, all that sounds great having your own traditional online store, but there are some potential drawbacks that you should know about. A lot of times people don't really think about some of these things because they're just really set on having their business succeed. Now, while you are able to succeed even with some drawbacks, these are just a few things that it's good to keep in mind so that way you don't get caught by surprise. For example, you could be stuck with outdated product inventory. Let's take my personal example for one. This is an old iPhone case as well as an old Samsung case. I bought these maybe about four or five years ago and I was gonna be selling them but I got stuck with outdated inventory. I bought too many, they didn't sell and the possibility of them selling now is highly unlikely because people just aren't looking for these cases anymore. Everyone's looking for the newer iPhone or the newer Samsung cases. So that's one thing that you should be aware of. You don't wanna get stuck holding a bunch of unwanted inventory. Another thing that can start to creep up on you are storage costs. So if you have a bunch of inventory just sitting in a warehouse and it's not moving, you're pretty much paying to have that inventory there to just be there. You're wasting money on that. And also depending on where you have it stored, you could be paying for a few other things such as security or storage workers. Now, even if you have it sitting in your garage, that particular space could be occupied by an item that's actually selling. Ultimately, all of this can potentially lead to pretty much lower profits and eventually losing some money. And I'm not saying that these are things that are definitely gonna happen but these are some things that you should be keeping in mind so that way they don't catch you by surprise if they do. Okay, so those were some of the pros and cons to holding your own inventory. Now let's talk a little bit about dropshipping and just not having to hold any inventory and pretty much just fulfilling customer orders. Now, one of the biggest benefits to dropshipping is the fact that it's a low risk and low investment business model. You really don't have a lot to lose and there aren't a lot of upfront fees. You don't have to buy a lot of inventory to hold. You don't have to pay for the storage. It really is a low cost way of doing business online. You're also easily able to test the profitability of products. So if something's not selling, all you really have to do is just take it off of your store or you can even just leave it on there and there really won't be much of an issue. Remember that you're not paying to have these items stored anywhere. Whenever a customer places an order, that's when you're gonna place the order for that same item and send it directly to them. So the people that are holding the items are your suppliers and they're not gonna be charging you for that because they're gonna be holding them regardless. So if an item isn't selling in your store, you can easily just swap it out for another one and start testing that one to see if it sells. Now, as business owners, as online business owners, one of the biggest things that we want for our business is to be able to grow it and scale it. Luckily with dropshipping, that's actually fairly easy. The more trending and relevant items that you're able to start adding to your store, the easier it's gonna be for you to start growing it and making more profits and scaling. Pretty much just about anybody can do this. There's a very low barrier to be able to start dropshipping and getting into the e-commerce business overall. All it takes is a little bit of research and a little bit of work and you'll be up and running in no time. Now, remember that if you ever get stuck with anything, if you're ever stuck in any part of the process, don't know what items to sell or what items are trending, over at Out of the S, we have a bunch of different resources to be able to help you succeed. For one, we have our blog section over at outofds.com slash blog that has a ton of different articles that can help you succeed with finding the right strategies to dropship and the right items. There's also a ton of different tips and tricks on there that you can really find useful. And as you know, since you're watching this video, we also have our YouTube channel with over 60,000 subscribers that are learning new tips and strategies every day. Now, let's talk about some of the downsides to dropshipping. Like for one, it's got a lot of competition. Having such low startup costs and low barriers to entry really does mean that there's gonna be a lot of people trying to get in and get a piece of the action. But realistically speaking, nowadays, pretty much any business that you start is gonna have a fairly high amount of competition. Anything that you need to learn for pretty much anything, you can find resources online, whether it be on YouTube or blog posts. Now, even though there is a lot of competition, that doesn't mean it's impossible to succeed. You can still very well make a lot of money and succeed in dropshipping. Ultimately, what it boils down to is making sure you have the right items to sell and you're marketing them the right way. Now, another thing to keep in mind is you don't really have control over stock, shipping, or quality. Since you're not holding any physical inventory, you're pretty much at the mercy of your supplier when it comes to how much stock they have and how quickly they ship out the orders. Now, that's actually something that we can fairly easily counter. We can have multiple suppliers so that way we can make sure that we never run out. So if one supplier runs out, we still have a few others to choose from, make sure that they do have local warehouses in the area that you're gonna be shipping to so that way you can guarantee pretty quick shipping. And overall, always make sure that the suppliers that you're going with and the ones that you're choosing to work with, make sure that they have a good amount of positive reviews showing that people are happy using them. With the product reviews, you can also check the quality of their products. Just read through the reviews and make sure that people are happy with the products that they're buying from the suppliers. Now, another thing that you can potentially find challenging is the ability to start and build your own brand. Since you're gonna be dropshipping, you're not really gonna be having control over any of the items or the packaging. Now, there are some suppliers that do allow you to do this and help you with branding, but that's something that you're gonna have to look into and research when you're looking for your suppliers. Now, some of these issues that I just talked about, they're fairly easy to overcome, but if you wanna make it even easier, you can always partner up with a dropshipping supplier. Now, dropshipping agents are an entire topic on their own, so if you want any more details on that, I'm gonna have a link to an article down in the description below. Now, how much does it actually cost to be able to start and run an e-commerce dropshipping business? There's a few fees that you always need to keep in mind. Now, costs and fees are gonna vary depending on the platform that you decide to sell on. On platforms such as Shopify, Wix, and WooCommerce, for the most part, you're gonna be paying credit card fees and a monthly subscription. Then for platforms like eBay or Amazon, you can pay either a monthly subscription or you can pay listing fees. It really all depends on the type of platform that you're selling on and the type of account that you have. Aside from that, another cost that we should keep in mind are marketing costs. Marketing costs can include things like Facebook advertising, influencer marketing, and you also have things like eBay promoted listing standard and advanced. Again, marketing costs will vary depending on the platform that you choose to sell on. Now, there is an endless supply of products to be able to start selling on your dropshipping store, but some of the more proven niches that actually sell can include jewelry and accessories, home improvement items, consumer electronics and office supplies, men's fashion, as well as women's fashion. These are all niches that have proven best selling items. Now, if you want a little bit more information on the items to sell within these niches, just check out the link to the article down below. All the information will be there. Okay, so now that we know about the niches that we wanna sell, as well as the products that we wanna start including in our business, now we have to start finding out where we're gonna buy all these products and who's gonna be our suppliers. Now, the same way that we have a ton of different niches and products to sell, we also have a bunch of different suppliers that we can go through. For one, we have CJ dropshipping. CJ dropshipping is mainly a Chinese supplier with warehouses pretty much all around the world. The offer services like print on demand, where you can have your own custom printed products, such as t-shirts, mugs, tumblers, mouse pads, almost anything you can think of, and they also offer white label products which makes it easy to start growing your brand. On top of that, CJ dropshipping has absolutely amazing quality control and pretty good customer service. Now, everyone knows about AliExpress, but they're a fantastic option. So that's why they made this list. So next up, we have AliExpress. AliExpress has a bunch of different benefits, one of them being the dropship center. At the dropship center, it makes it easy to find new and trending products. Alongside that, they have an extensive product catalog and some pretty low-cost items. From personal experience, they do have some pretty good customer service and you really can't go wrong with them. Next up, we have the ever popular Amazon. And yes, you can actually use Amazon as a dropshipping supplier. Amazon has pretty much some of the fastest shipping ever. They have international warehouses that really make this a possibility. So shipping with Amazon is never a problem. And alongside to compliment that, they also have a really good return policy. So if you ever have any issues with any products, just contact Amazon customer support and they'll take care of you. Banggood is another major Chinese supplier. They have some really low-cost items, an extensive product catalog, and they also have a dropship center so that way you can source new products fairly easily. On top of that, they're a certified dropshipping website, which means you can drop contracts to work with them. Next up, we have eBay. Now, the cool thing about eBay is you don't only have the option to dropship on their platform. You can also use them as a supplier. eBay has a built-in protection policy that really helps out the sellers as well as the buyers. So if there's any ever dispute, eBay will take care of it. eBay also makes it fairly easy to be able to spy on the competition by just looking at other people's listings and seeing what's selling and what's not. Now, on top of everything, eBay has some pretty good customer support so if there's ever any issues, you can reach out to them and they'll take care of you. Next up, we have Etsy, which is actually a very niche-oriented website. Aside from that, they have some pretty unique products and a lot of handmade items, which you can actually sell for a pretty high profit. People love handmade and are always willing to pay extra. Another really good option to have as your dropshipping supplier is Overstock. Overstock has a pretty good return policy. They have an awesome price match guarantee and they have a pretty good reward system with their ClubO. The ClubO program allows you to get 5% cashback as well as free shipping. Now, last but certainly not least on our list of suppliers to be able to dropship from is Target and we all know that everyone loves Target. Target has fantastic customer service, a really good return policy and they have different categories for different holidays. So they're gonna have unique items based on whatever holiday's coming up. Target also has the red card membership which offers free two-day shipping and 5% cashback on select products. Okay, so by now, we pretty much know everything that we need to know about how to get started, what we need to get started, our suppliers, our products and the pros and cons. So let's go into a bit more detail on actually getting started. So the first thing that we actually need to do is let's do some product research. Now, when it comes to product research, there's a few methods that we can utilize to be able to start properly analyzing competitor's products and knowing what to sell. For one, we can actually start searching on our suppliers' websites. Let's say we're using Amazon, we can check out their best sellers and see what's the top trending on their website. We can see what's selling the best on a bunch of different categories. Now, another thing that you can actually do is just start spying on your competition. Now, that may sound a bit sneaky, but trust me, it's not that bad. You can use something like the Koala Inspector to be able to start gaining different insights on your competitor's Shopify stores. Now, another fantastic option that you have when it comes to product research is our product research tool over at AutoDS. Using this, you can find a bunch of different products that are proven hot sellers. Now, if you find a product that you like or that matches your store, then you can go ahead and click on it. And once it loads up, you can see all of the detail of the product itself and some product analysis. So for one, under product info, you have the supplier's description. Here you can see what it would look like pretty much directly on the supplier itself. In this case, this product is coming from AliExpress. So this is what their description would look like. Now, we can go over the specifications and see all the specifics on the product itself. We can click on policy and see what the return policy is. Next up, we can check out the reviews and see what people are saying about it. And most importantly, we have the product analysis tab. When we're in the product analysis tab, we have an insane amount of information that we can use to our advantage. For one, we have the potential profit. On top of that, we have the target audience that sellers targeting on their Facebook ads. Then we can actually see an example of a Facebook ad in action and how all it's doing. As you can see here, this one has over 700 likes, 17 comments, and over 102,000 people have seen it. And then you have some AutoDS insights with a bit more information. And on top of that, as another extra added resource, as I mentioned earlier, you also have the AutoDS blogs and YouTube playlists. More specifically, on the YouTube playlist, you have the sell these now playlists. There we have all our updated videos with top trending products. The second step is to choose a supplier. Now, earlier, we did go over a few suppliers, but there's a plethora of different suppliers out there that you can choose from. Ultimately, when choosing your supplier, one of the biggest things to keep in mind is that they have clear business policies, a vast product catalog, excellent customer reviews, and most importantly of all, excellent customer service. Because ultimately, the customer service that they provide you is what you're gonna be providing to your customers. The third step is to ultimately choose your platform that you're gonna be selling on. Make sure that you go with whatever feels right for you and what's gonna work best for your business, whether it be your own website on something like Shopify, WooCommerce, or Wix, or using a different platform like Amazon, eBay, or Facebook Marketplace. Remember that when you're creating your own website, ultimately you have control over just about everything from the looks to all the products that you're gonna be selling. Now, the only thing about that is you're not gonna be getting organic or directed traffic. You're gonna have to find different ways to market your website to be able to start bringing in traffic. On the other hand, if you're using something like Amazon, eBay, or Facebook Marketplace, platforms like those in particular, you're pretty much on there and you're going by their rules. So just make sure you know how they work, what they don't like on their platforms, what is acceptable, and always remember there's gonna be different fees associated to each platform that you're gonna be using. Okay, so next up, we need to start importing our products to our store. Having a store means nothing if there's no products. Now to import products into the store, there's a few different ways we can do this. For one, you can start uploading everything manually, which means you're gonna have to start saving all of the different images, copying and optimizing all the titles, descriptions, and making sure you have all the right variations. Now it's perfectly fine when you're only working with one or two products or when you're first starting out. As you start to add more products or you start to get in products with a lot more variations, it's gonna start to get really time consuming. At that point, it's best to actually start automating the entire process and for that, you can use something like a product importer over at Out of the S. Using the product uploader is actually super simple. You can either upload one product or you can bulk upload and upload a ton of different products. To quickly show you how it works, let's go on over to the Add Products tab right here and then we're gonna be prompted with a few different options. You have the option to upload a single product or multiple products. Let's just do a single product for now. So I'm gonna click on that and now it's super simple. All we have to do is either input the product ID or our URL. In this case, I'm just gonna add the URL. Now take note where it says supplier source. It shows AliExpress and the region China. Once I paste in my URL, you can see that it changes and the supplier is now Amazon and it's shipping from the United States. From here, I can either click Edit Now and edit all the details on the product so I can optimize the titles, the descriptions or the variations or I can publish it directly to my store as is. My personal recommendation, always go to Edit Now. Always edit the product descriptions as well as the titles because a lot of the times when you import the products, they're not very user friendly. They don't read very well and ultimately they're not really optimized. Okay, so now we have our products loaded onto our store but they're not selling and that's because we're not marketing them. We're not getting those products in front of the eyes of potential customers. So let's go ahead and talk about that really quick. So there's gonna be different marketing strategies that you're gonna use based on the platforms that you're gonna be selling on. The way that you market on Shopify is not gonna be the same that you're gonna be marketing on eBay. When it comes to platforms like Shopify, Wix and WooCommerce, you have a few different options. You can go with things like Facebook ads, email marketing or influencer marketing. Now when it comes to a platform like eBay, you're gonna have promoted listings standard as well as promoted listings advanced. If you want a bit more information on those and a bit more detail, then just go ahead and check out the description down below. The link to the article will have all the information you need. Now going on to Facebook marketplace, you also have things like buy and sell groups as well as Facebook promotions. One of the awesome things about Facebook is the fact that it's absolutely enormous. There's so many people on there that regardless of how you're gonna be marketing, you're gonna be getting some organic traffic going your way. So you've got everything set up and you're finally getting your products in front of the eyes of potential customers. Now somebody just made an order. Now it's time to fulfill that order. When it comes to order fulfillment, there are a few different ways you can do this. You can manually fulfill orders by going to your supplier's website, placing the order yourself and having them ship the order to your customer. And all you have to do after that is just update your customer with the proper tracking number. It's extremely important and crucial that you start fulfilling orders almost immediately. So if you can place the order with your supplier the moment that you receive your order, that's the best thing that you can do because as we all know, customers don't like waiting. They don't like waiting to receive their order and they don't like waiting for their orders to ship. Now on top of being able to manually fulfill your orders, you also have the option to speed it up a lot more by automatically fulfilling them using automation. Over at AutoDS, we do have some really efficient options to be able to start automating your orders. We actually have two different options. We have the automatic orders and we have fulfilled by AutoDS. Automatic orders are done by linking your buyer accounts from your supplier's websites to your AutoDS account. Then what happens whenever an order is placed is AutoDS will use your buyer account to place the order on your behalf with your supplier. Now the other option is fulfilled by AutoDS. Fulfilled by AutoDS works fairly similar to automatic orders except instead of using your buyer account, AutoDS will use its own buyer account to purchase your products using a preloaded balance that you'll be adding on the platform. Regardless of whichever automation method you decide to go with, remember that regardless of anything, it's always gonna save you a ton of time. So orders are fulfilled. Last thing you need to do is provide constant great customer service. Whether it be during the sale or post sale, always provide excellent customer service so your customers are more likely to come back and place another order or refer a friend. Always make sure you answer to customer emails in a timely manner. And if you're using Shopify, you always have the option for the Shopify inbox, which is actually a really handy app that lets you live chat with your customers. And if for whatever reason you're not available to live chat, whatever chats that your customers send you will be sent to you through email. Also, if you're using eBay as your platform, you have the option to use the eBay customer management tool. This is a unique feature in AutoDS that allows you to consolidate all of your EV messages in one screen. Now, it doesn't matter if you have just one eBay store or 10, all of your messages will be going there and you can answer all of them through that same screen. Now, after that, you're pretty much done. The only thing left to do now is to just continue scaling your business and adding more products. Now, luckily, AutoDS has a ton of different features that can make this a lot easier for you. It can really streamline the entire process. Remember that at AutoDS, we do have a bunch of different things that can really help you start streamlining your business. We have some really cool features such as price and stock monitoring, business policy templates, price optimization, easy inventory management, image editors, and a lot more. Implementing automation into your dropshipping business can really help you save a ton of time and money. Now, all this extra time and money can be reinvested into your business to help you keep scaling it or you can opt out of scaling your business just for a little bit and enjoy some extra time with your family and just enjoy the little things in life. Ultimately, how you decide to reinvest your time and money is really up to you. Just remember that over at AutoDS, we're gonna be there to help you succeed every step of the way. Now, if you enjoyed this video and wanna keep learning more about the dropshipping business and how to be able to scale it, make sure to leave a like and don't forget to subscribe. Also remember that if you want the cheat sheet with a more summarized version of everything that I spoke about in this video, make sure you leave a comment down below with the hashtag dropshipping 2023 along with your favorite thing about dropshipping and I'll leave you a link to access the cheat sheet. Once again, my name is Mario with AutoDS. Thank you all so much for watching and being here with me today. I wish you all nothing but success in your dropshipping journey and catch you all in the next video.