 What's up guys, welcome to a new video. So in this one then I want to talk about the reasons of why I see people failing at drop shipping in 2019. So if you've messaged me on Instagram, you'll know I get back to every single person. I talk to a lot of people interested in drop shipping. I get to know their successes, what their failures are. So in this video then that's the topic I want to address and I want to offer up the solutions then to the common reasons why I see people failing at drop shipping. Before we jump into it then, I just want to quickly mention as always I am giving away a free one to one consultation call with me in this video. So a chance for me and you to speak one to one, you can ask me any questions about your drop shipping business, whether it's Facebook ads related, I can do a store review, look at your products, whatever it is. If that's something that you do want a chance to win or you have to simply do then is simply like the video and leave a comment down below. And if you come to that my previous video then just make sure you stay tuned to the end of this one where the winner will be announced. Now that being said then guys, let's get straight into point number one. So point number one then guys is false expectations. Please forgive me if I keep looking down. I've got like some notes in my notepad here just to make sure I don't leave anything out. I plan out these videos quite thoughtfully. It takes me a lot of time because I want to make sure there's as much information as possible and I want to make sure that I stay on task and I don't just keep waffling on about irrelevant things basically. So number one then is false expectations and I 100% put this purely down to social media because it's so easy for people to create a false representation of their lives or the kind of results they've been able to achieve and it's easy for people to get sucked into that. Create a false kind of expectation in their minds that if they do certain things they'll be able to replicate or produce the same kind of results or live the same kind of lives. So one industry in my opinion where this is really bad is the fitness industry on Instagram. What you don't see then is what goes on behind the scenes. Nobody shows themselves getting up at 5 a.m. doing really boring cardio that they hate doing or cooking for two to three hours a day or struggling to pay their bills each month because they're spending so much money on supplements or on meat or food or whatever it is. All you see then is that one picture that might have taken them half an hour to take but they look really good on it and they've posted that on their Instagram account and what people don't realize is that when they see that picture that there's hundreds if not thousands of hours of behind the scenes work that goes into taking that picture. Like you can't just expect to work out for three months and then look like that Instagram model. For them to get to that level in that stage there's been years of different training plans, diet plans, hours and hours at the gym, hours and hours of cooking but that's what you don't see on social media and that's what it creates that false representation. So when somebody does work out for two months, three months even six months to get to those sorts of levels is years and years. So somebody could even work out for 12 months and they don't get anywhere near to that level of seek that they have in their mind because they have that false expectation and ultimately that will always lead to them giving up and it's the same on Shopify. It's so easy to see somebody go on YouTube and see the kind of results or on Facebook groups and see screenshots and get bought into this false expectation that typical results when it comes to drop shipping is being able to quit your job in three months because you make X amount of money when in reality that just isn't the case. Now, I'm not saying that isn't possible because it is there's always gonna be that minute percentage of people that get lucky essentially and they are able to produce those results but again, typically what you don't see is that when somebody has that level of results then what's gone into that is years of research, years of trial and error, thousands and thousands of pounds spent on Facebook ads, thousands and thousands of pounds down the drain, hundreds of different products probably in some cases before they reach that level of success that you want to achieve. So what I'm trying to say then is that drop shipping is probably a lot more difficult than what you realize it to be because of what you've seen on social media. At the end of the day, drop shipping is a business. You're running your own business and when it comes to running your own business it is a very, very difficult thing to do and it's also a very stressful thing to do as well. I haven't spoken about stress before on my channel but trust me, the stresses that come with running your own business is like nothing I've ever encountered before. There's been nights where I've laid in bed for like seven, eight hours and it's become light again outside just purely because I haven't been able to sleep. I've just been constantly thinking and worrying about certain things that sometimes are out of your control. To give you an example then of just a quick story, I'm going a bit off topic here but the second product that I decided to import in bulk was it just completely flew off the shelves and I couldn't keep up with orders. So what I did then was I kind of took a massive gamble and rather than putting it out of stock on my store I let, I continue to advertise it. I continue to let people buy it on the hopes then on the premise that my supplier would be able to manufacture them and get basically a new batch of products delivered to me in time. Now fair play to them, they actually got them manufactured really quickly. They sent me the tracking code, they went to UPS and I pay for a really expensive delivery service through UPS but it's two to three working days from Ninghai in China delivered to my door in two to three days and it cost me something like three, $400 but trust me, it was worth it because the rate at which these products were selling and 100% then it was cost effective to do so. So anyway, I kept selling out these products and it takes about three weeks from me placing an order for them to be delivered to my door and over the course of about two weeks in which the manufacturer was making them I sold about 30 grand of stock so they were 30 grand of orders in which I had no stock to fulfill. Now I don't recommend anybody do this it was a massive, massive risk that I took purely because I was making so much money I wanted to capitalize and the idea of switching off my ads and not selling that product and losing out on like thousands of pounds worth of orders was just something I didn't want to do. But anyway, the supplier got them shipped in pretty good time. I had the tracking code, I was watching them day by day coming to my door and I thought all was good, nothing to worry about but then disaster struck so they were coming in five boxes total and I think it was two or three boxes arrived first so all five should arrive together but only two or three arrived. I'll try and dig out the pictures actually and put them on screen now so you can see. So over two or three boxes arrived and they had rips in so massive rips you'll see in the pictures and they were like half full so half the stock was missing to begin with so you can imagine at this point I was pretty stressed and with Chinese suppliers I didn't have a phone number so it was just trying to message them on WeChat and at the end of the day it wasn't really their fault, it was UPS in fact it wasn't UPS sorry it was TNT it was at the time TNT got hacked and they were having huge problems with their computer systems because when I rang them up to find out where the other two boxes were they couldn't tell me that they literally had no idea because their computer systems were in such trouble so that day I was shipping out the orders that I had the stock that I had I kept a tally of what was missing and then I just had to wait around for these other two boxes which had something like three or four thousand units in each one so at this point I was thinking like so yeah I was pretty worried at that point there was all kind of thoughts going through my mind at that point as well I had two VA's to deal with all customer service and they couldn't keep up with the inquiries and the emails just probably because there were so many customers questioning where their orders were and I didn't know what to do and at that point I started thinking like the worst things about shutting the business down and just going back to a normal nine to five where there were no stresses where at least I could sleep at night but anyway to fast forward it was two or three days later and the other two boxes showed up along with three bin bags like huge bin bags full of the products from the first three boxes luckily somebody had gone out of their way and seen all these different products that are littered throughout the back of this Arctic and actually picked them all up one by one, put them into a bag and because they'd seen the boxes in which they'd come from they were kind enough to bag them up and make sure that they got delivered with the other two boxes which the person on the phone told me like it was pretty much a miracle because usually when stuff like that spills out obviously there's no paperwork with it so there's no trace of where it come from no trace of where it's going to so what they tend to do is actually destroy it so the fact that it actually managed to show up I was, you can imagine I was really, really grateful for that all the orders were able to get fulfilled and I actually ended up placing another order so before these ones even arrived I was placing another order just because I'd sold so many so to kind of finish the story off I've gone way off track here I've been talking way too long but hopefully you enjoyed the story then expect things to go wrong at some point and it's all gonna lie on your shoulders if there's any problems you're the one that's gonna have to sort it out so any stresses, anything like that it's gonna be on your shoulders so to run your own business then you have to have broad shoulders don't expect it to be all just like sunshine and rainbows and living on cloud nine and tons and tons of money all the time because that's just not the case it's probably gonna be one of the hardest things that you ever do so a good metaphor then to kind of finish off this point is that dropshipping is really difficult but you want it to be difficult because otherwise everybody would be doing it so if you compare it to say learning to drive a car the average person takes 20 to 40 hours of lessons before they pass their test so 20 to 40 hours to commit to something is not a long amount of time therefore there's millions and millions of people that drive a car if it was, if say for example on average you took a thousand hours to be able to learn to drive a car safely then there would be less people that drive cars probably because of the expense of paying for lessons and because there's more hours, more and more people the longer it takes to do something then the more people that drop out and quit because they're too lazy to commit to something to do it and dropshipping is the same you have to buy things with time so if you have a vision of where you wanna be with dropshipping that's gonna cost you X amount of hours and it might cost somebody say 500 hours but it might cost you a thousand hours it costs everybody different everybody learns to drive in a different amount of hours some people 20 sometimes, some people 40 and dropshipping is the same except it takes a lot more hours and that's why there's less people that do it because there's more hours required another point as well in fact that I want to mention that's related to false expectations is that never ever ever compare yourself to somebody else so where it might take somebody 500 hours to get to the point where they're making profit and it might take you a thousand hours don't ever compare yourself to anybody else don't compare your chapter one against somebody's chapter 20 because that is what's gonna demotivate you so much and again just lead to you giving up just stay in your lane stay focused on what you're doing and more importantly just enjoy the journey moving on to point number two then guys I've got four points in total however these next three then won't take as long as the first one so please bear with me and number two then the mistake I see people making is they rush in too much so people are in too much of a rush to make money it's a good thing to want to make money in a hurry but if you do it too quickly then you end up skipping corners so I'm gonna put some screenshots up on the screen now I did a bit of research into this topic of like how long does it take on average for a startup company to start producing a profit now depending on who you ask, who you speak to then the kind of general consensus or average number in which I found was two years so if you haven't been dropshipping for two years yet then and you've given up then you might be given up too early now this isn't me saying that you have to be in dropshipping for two years before you make any money because that's just not the case because dropshipping is so easy to start and get into then it's possible and probably a lot easier to make money straight away than other business models but that's not to be mistaken with that dropshipping is an easy business model because that's just not the case so the main thing to consider then if you're in a rush or if you're going too quickly is just take a step back and make sure that you're ready before you start making money on ads like by far the biggest expense in your business is going to be Facebook ads so just make sure that everything you've got everything ready before you start spending money on it so number one then is that get feedback on your Shopify store, on your dropshipping store before you start spending money on Facebook ads because it doesn't matter how much money you spend on ads if you've got a poor store, nobody will buy from you so just make sure you get some feedback from it whether it's your friends and family try and get somebody outside of your friendship group or outside of your family to give you feedback because ultimately you want honest feedback like I could paint the worst picture in the world and show my mum it and she'll probably turn around and say that's really good so she's gonna give me a false feedback or not a true, she's not gonna give me true helpful criticism because I'm her son so try and get somebody who will speak honestly to you next thing then is that make sure you're ready in terms of when you go to Facebook ads so if you're running short on budget and you think right damn I need to start running Facebook ads so I can bring some money in the door then what I recommend you do is actually not run Facebook ads, try and save up a bit more money and actually spend money that's gonna make it easier for you to make money so if you haven't already then spend that $100 on a really professional Facebook ad like buy the products that you're selling get it shipped to a videographer who can make you a really nice ad on Fiverr and use that as your ad because that will make a huge, huge difference another thing I want you guys to do before you start spending money on Facebook ads is that put some content on your social media pages the other day I looked at somebody's store and then spent something like $6,700 on Facebook ads but then I went on their Facebook page and the last post on their Facebook page was it was the page name and then changed their profile picture and the post was literally them updating their profile picture and to somebody coming onto that page like it just, it doesn't look very professional it doesn't give the impression of an established business and it's gonna put people off so just make sure that you've got some decent content on your page like everything is filled out like the info, the website link, the contact details who you are, what you're selling and then just put say half a dozen posts won't take long to create them but just offer up some value to people who come onto your page because that will speak volumes for you and your brand and ultimately then guys just create something that looks professional like a proper business and stands out from any other e-commerce store any other drop shipping or Shopify store drop shipping is getting more and more competitive if you have to step up your game if you're gonna be successful at this if you are doing the bare minimum putting the bare minimum hours in and the bare minimum time, the bare minimum money then you can only expect to produce like results in terms of the bottom of the pile it ultimately comes down to who's doing it better so unless you are putting in more hours than everyone else and more money than everyone else how can you expect to achieve better results so that's basically just summarizing number two is that treat your luck of business and be professional about what you're doing number three then is budgeting so again another huge mistake I see people making is that when typical businesses get started they'll get started with X amount of money and then that's how much money they'll have before they have to reinvest more or before they start seeing a return but basically they have a budget to work to and it's really important that you do this because when it comes to marketing as well especially if you don't have a budget then it's really easy to be three months down the line two grand in ad spend and see nothing in return whereas if from the very beginning you'd set yourself say a budget of $500 then it will force you to budget and spend that money more wisely and if you run out of money then it gives you like a checkpoint it gives you a reason to stop advertising take a step back look at where things have gone wrong do a bit more research before you go again so it's a quick short shout point but trust me it will end up saving you a lot of money and it will produce better results in the long term and number three then is have a budget the fourth and final point then guys is have a vision and I made this mistake when I first started because I didn't have a clue where I wanted the business to be in 12 months time let alone 24 months or 36 months or now nearly four years down the line and because I kind of naturally progressed into sourcing products in bulk then the business for me soon turned into something that I didn't want it to be so the reason I got involved in drop shipping then is I love the idea of running a business from a computer and an internet connection and not needing anything else however because I got greedy and I wanted to make more money and I wanted to capitalize on Christmas time then I started to import products in bulk and all of a sudden then I've got like five to 10,000 units of product in and around my house and if I wanted to say go away for a weekend go away for a week then I had to put things in place to make sure the orders still went out because I couldn't just leave my business alone and I couldn't fulfill orders if I was in a different country so it kind of grounded me and the business turned into something quite quickly that I didn't want it to be and because I didn't have that vision and I didn't plan out where I wanted the business to go it turned into something that I no longer was enjoying anymore so it kind of forced me to spend more money than I would have had to so I had to put temporary measures into place until I could come up with some sort of plan whereas if I'd seen this coming then I had the vision and I knew where the business was going I could have spent a lot more time say looking for a fulfillment center and working with different Chinese suppliers and prototyping different samples I could have spent a lot more time looking for different staff and perhaps got better staff at a cheaper price cheaper fulfillment centers whereas because everything kind of happened so quickly then it kind of forced me to just put temporary measures into place which worked out more expensive it meant I weren't enjoying the business and work as much either because that's not why I got into it in the first place so what I'm basically trying to say then is that just make sure you have a vision of what you're doing what you're trying to achieve and ultimately what you want it to do for you and the way I like to think of things then is what kind of lifestyle do you want to live and will this business produce the kind of lifestyle that you want and that's how I'm going to finish off the video because I feel like that's quite a nice way to end the video then or at least it's a good vision or outlook to have in that in your mind then create a vision of the kind of lifestyle you want to live and then is drop shipping going to provide that lifestyle for you if it is then commit everything in your power and in your being to achieve in it because trust me guys it doesn't matter how many thousands of pounds you spend how many sleepless nights you have it will 100% be worth it and with that being said then guys I'm going to wrap the video up there thank you very much for watching I apologize for how long I've been talking for but hopefully you guys enjoyed it if you did all I asked then is that you simply leave a like on this video and if you want to be entered for that chance to win a one-to-one call with me make sure you leave a comment down below as well and with that being said then let's get into announcing the winner of the previous video here we are then guys on my previous video so if you are getting hundreds of visitors but no sales then please do make sure you go check this video out I really do think it will help you out but anyway we're not here for that I'm just going to take you around the top left head over to our random comment picker get YouTube comments 33 unique comments which is really good so thank you very much guys for all the support it really does mean a lot so please do keep it coming and the winner of the previous video then is Sammy B so thank you very much for your comment make sure you reach out on Instagram we can get that call arranged and guys if you want to just get straight down to business and book a call right away you can actually do so just make sure you check out the video links in the description down below and with that being said then guys thanks for tuning in I hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next one