 In today's video, we're going to be talking about hybrid drop shipping. What is it? How does it work? Is it right for you? And why does it sound so cool? That sounds really cool. I'm just joking about that last one, but seriously, whenever I see the word hybrid in something, I always think that sounds pretty cool, except for the Toyota Prius. Who drives the Prius? Now, just so you know, I am going to have a relevant article down in the description below that talks a little bit more about the stuff that I'm going to go into in this video regarding hybrid drop shipping. So if you're interested to learn a little bit more, just go ahead and check out the link in the description. So hybrid drop shipping. What is it? Sounds pretty cool, right? Well, this is exactly what it is. When it comes to drop shipping, you know how it works. You receive an order. You reroute that to your supplier. Your supplier takes care of the fulfillment and you rake in the profits. Now, how does hybrid drop shipping work into the picture? Simply put, hybrid drop shipping is a mix of traditional drop shipping and keeping inventory. That's why it's a hybrid. It's a mix of the two. So with hybrid drop shipping, you are going to have some sort of stock that you're going to keep. And whenever you receive an order for, let's say, a particular item that you're keeping stock of, then you're going to fulfill it yourself. So take, for example, you have a hybrid drop shipping store of handmade items and you sell certain items that you make yourself and you sell other handmade items that a supplier makes. So in this case, your hybrid drop shipping and you are a hybrid drop shipper because of the fact that for one, you're fulfilling orders using your supplier. And second, you're fulfilling orders yourself. So whenever you receive an order for a particular item, you're going to make it and ship it out yourself. And then when you receive orders for a different type of item, you're going to contact your supplier and have them take care of it. Pretty simple, right? Now, what are the advantages and the disadvantages of hybrid drop shipping? Well, there's a little bit of both. So for one, let's go ahead and cover the advantages first. And to start, you have flexibility more than you would with a traditional drop shipping store. Why? Because of a number of reasons. For one, depending on the types of items that you're selling, you can fulfill certain orders faster. So instead of waiting for your supplier to ship out an item and have them send it from, I don't know, China, you can ship it out yourself and have it to your customer a lot quicker. And that leads me into our second advantage, which is speedy fulfillment. As we all know with our drop shipping suppliers, sometimes shipping can be an issue depending on your supplier, depending on the product, depending on how much stock they have and depending on where it's located. So hybrid drop shipping gives you the advantage of replacing items that take too long to ship with items that you have in stock and shipping them out yourself. Also, a lot of the times whenever you're selling these items yourself and packaging and shipping yourself on top of the order being fulfilled quicker, the shipping is also more than likely going to be a lot quicker because chances are you're going to be closer to your customer than your suppliers. So the transit time is going to be cut down drastically. And third of all, you can easily brand your products. So if you have your own stock and if you have your own inventory, one thing that you can do or another reason for actually getting into hybrid drop shipping is simply to start building your brand. So you can have a bunch of inventory with branded products. You can have your products with your brand on the box, on the product itself, custom packaging, whatever it is that you're using to be able to build that brand. You can do that yourself and ship that out while still drop shipping traditionally with more common and more practical products. Now, those are just a few of the advantages. But what about the disadvantages? Well, for one, it can get pretty complicated keeping track of your own inventory. If you're not organized, can really start to become somewhat of a mess, especially again, if you're not organized, if you're not keeping track of all of your sales, if you're not keeping track of all of your inventory, there's a really strong possibility that you can run out of stock and not even notice. Also, the products that you're shipping out yourself, you can guarantee quality on those. Sometimes when you have your suppliers fulfill orders, there's always the small possibility of one of them not being up to par or the quality just not being 100 percent there, in which case, if you're sending out some awesome products that you're doing yourself or you're branding yourself or that you're just simply shipping out yourself, you can sometimes have a mix in quality, which your customers really aren't going to like because that's going to cause an inconsistency. Sometimes they might receive some quality products. Sometimes they might receive something that aren't as good. But really, strictly speaking, overall, if you choose the right suppliers, if you're going with quality suppliers that have a proven track record of quality items, fast shipping and happy customers, then you should be fine. Just make sure you check out the reviews for the seller themselves and the reviews for the products themselves. Now, one really big thing that you need to take into consideration when you're considering actually starting a hybrid dropshipping store is the fact that you're going to need somewhere to put all that inventory, especially if you have multiple products that you're trying to sell and ship yourself. This, depending on your living situation, can potentially be pretty complicated and even pretty costly. So take, for example, if you're living in a studio or a one bedroom apartment with not too much space, you're not going to have a lot of places to be able to store all of the inventory that you're going to keep on hand. So because of that, you're going to have to rent out a space to be able to keep everything in and that's just going to add to your monthly expenses. Now, of course, if you have a big house and you have a garage that's completely empty, you can use that space to be able to store all of your items. But then again, you're also going to be taking up space in your house. That really depends on you and it depends if you're comfortable with doing that or if you can afford a storage to be able to store all of your items. Really, this goes on a case by case basis. Some people might be OK with keeping inventory in-house, while others prefer not to just because, again, it takes up space. And if you're keeping it in a warehouse, then it's going to end up costing you money in the long run. Me personally, I don't really like keeping inventory on hand anymore. I like to outsource as much as I can just because it just makes it so much simpler. It makes everything a lot easier to manage and it makes things a bit more predictable. Now, what I mean by a bit more predictable is the fact that I can predict whether or not a supplier could potentially run out of a particular item. And there's tons of different tools that can actually help you achieve this. So that way you never run out of inventory. Let's say a particular supplier runs out of a particular product, then you can always go to a second supplier and order that same product. But how can you get that done without focusing too much on the supplier and constantly checking their orders or constantly checking their inventory? Well, you can use something like AutoDS. With AutoDS, you have price and stock monitoring. With price and stock monitoring, you never have to worry about your suppliers running out of inventory or a price change that could potentially cause you to lose money. What ends up happening is AutoDS will monitor your suppliers' prices along with their inventory. So if there's ever a change, AutoDS will make the necessary adjustments on your store. This can help you save money and never lose sales. So let's say, for example, this phone holder goes up maybe five dollars and your profit right now is already only four dollars. If that goes through and a customer makes a purchase as is, then chances are you're going to end up losing money. So what happens in this case is AutoDS will recognize that that price change happened and in turn, it'll increase the price in your store or in your inventory. OK, now that's pretty cool. So that way you're never going to be losing money. Same thing goes for items that are out of stock. If a supplier goes out of stock of a particular item and somebody places the order in your dropshipping store and you don't have automation set up, then you're going to have a few different options. One, you can cancel the order. Two, reach out to the customer, see if they want to wait a little bit longer until the restock comes. Or three, you can frantically start looking for another product from another supplier. Using AutoDS completely eliminates this. So whenever a supplier does run out of a particular item, AutoDS will just make that necessary adjustment on your store. So that way it saves you a huge headache. Now, isn't it a good idea to start a hybrid dropshipping store? Really, that's going to depend. It all depends on you and what you're comfortable with doing and how much space you have and how much money you have to spend. So again, remember that you have to think about the storage costs whenever you do decide to keep inventory on hand. Also, you have to take into consideration how long it's going to take for you to ship out all of these different items. Whenever you start packing up items, it can start to get pretty time consuming. Remember, you're going to have to build a box, package the item, make sure it's protected, purchase the shipping, and then go drop it off. That in itself starts to take some time. Now, imagine having to do that for multiple orders a day. There can be days where you have a ton of orders and you're going to be spending literally an entire day just packing and shipping orders. Now, compare that to the traditional dropshipping method. You don't have to worry about any of that stuff. You don't even have to worry about the cost for your shipping supplies, which is another thing that you need to take into consideration. When you're selling items that you're holding on hand, you have to purchase shipping supplies. You have to purchase boxes. You have to purchase labels. You have to purchase packaging. So the costs can start to add up. It's not simply just taking into consideration the cost of storage. There's a lot more that goes into it. So at the end of the day, when it comes to hybrid dropshipping versus traditional dropshipping, hybrid dropshipping is going to have a higher cost to actually get started. Whereas your traditional dropshipping, you can get started practically for free in most cases. Now, when do you know when you can actually start or rather when you should start hybrid dropshipping? Well, obviously, this is going to depend from person to person, but here's just a few tips that you should take into consideration. So for one, when you want to start building a brand, but you need to make sure that you know what products are working and how do you do this by using the traditional dropshipping method? So you can go ahead and start using the traditional dropshipping method, dropship a few different products that are relevant to your niche or your brand and see what works, see which products sell and which ones actually start to make you some pretty good money and which ones are in higher demand. Then you can start picking and choosing which ones you want to keep on hand. At that point is when you can start branding your items and you can start customizing the packaging and the item itself. Because generally speaking, whenever you do want to start your own brand or you want to sell branded products, you're not always going to have the option to purchase just one. You're going to have to purchase these items in bulk because your supplier is not going to want to have a bunch of inventory with your brand name on it that could potentially not sell. If that was the case, suppliers would be stuck with tons of inventory that's already branded that they can't resell. So that's actually one of the biggest reasons why when you're starting up your own brand, it can cost a little bit more because you need to purchase these products in bulk and have them branded. Now, piggybacking on that, you want to make sure that you're in the right niche and you're selling the right products. That's why starting off with a traditional dropshipping store is your best option because you're not going to lose money if certain items don't sell. If you choose a few different items to sell in your store and they're not selling, they're not moving and they're just sitting there, at the end of the day, that's all that's happening. They're just sitting there taking up some digital space. You're not spending money by having those items on there. This in turn can actually help you test a ton of different products. Again, so that way you can see what works, what sells and what works best for your brand. Now, whenever your company or your brand does start to get some traction and you start to get a ton of different orders, like I said earlier, it can take you a lot of time to actually ship out the different items yourself. That coupled with your traditional dropshipping store where you're going to be getting more orders of a bunch of different items and then you're going to have to fulfill all of those manually by going onto your supplier's website, placing the order, putting in your customer's information and then waiting for all of those orders to be fulfilled and then updating your customers with their tracking number, along with the tracking numbers from the items that you shipped, as you can tell, it starts to get super overwhelming and super crazy. So what can you do to be able to simplify this process? Well, of course, when it comes to the hybrid dropshipping scene, your items are going to have to be shipped by you. So you don't really have much of an option on that part unless you hire somebody to come in and actually start shipping out these items for you. But then you're wasting money, money that you can be keeping to reinvest into your business to keep scaling. So what do you do? Well, the easiest thing that you can do is implement automation for the items that you're traditionally dropshipping. Now, how can this help? Well, for one, it's going to save you a ton of time with actually fulfilling orders, at least in the traditional dropshipping side. So for this, you're going to need an account with AutoDS. And if you don't have an account currently with AutoDS, you can sign up right now for the trial period for just $1. Now, once you have your account set up and your store connected to it, this is what happens. So first, you get an order from your customer, whether that be on your Shopify store, your Amazon store, your eBay store, whatever selling platform that you're selling on. First, you get your order. Then AutoDS is going to take that order and reroute it to your supplier. So that right there saves you time in actually having to go to your supplier's website and placing the order and putting your customer's details. Then once that order is fulfilled, AutoDS is going to go ahead and take that tracking number that your supplier is going to provide you with and it's going to update your customer and the platform that you're dropshipping on with it. There you can see the second part that it completely takes off your hands and that's the actual fulfillment of the order and updating your customers with any necessary information like the tracking number. This will essentially make the traditional dropshipping side of your business fully automated and hands off. So that way you can focus on actually building your brand with the products that are successful. One last thing that automation can really help you out with when it comes to your brand is by helping you find products that are actually trending. So if you go on autoDS.com and you click on over to the winning products section, here you have tons of different products that are actually currently trending. These items are backed by years of data and are proven to sell. These products have been trending in the last few months and are on a upward trajectory and are constantly selling and being purchased and being searched for. As you can see, there's a little bit of everything. There's stuff from pet supplies, kids toys, stuff for the kitchen, stuff for content creators like this little tripod right here. Here you can find pretty much anything for any niche. So if you're trying to build your brand, this is the one place that you need to check out to find some of the best selling products. Now, one last tip that I am going to leave you with is don't jump ship to hybrid drop shipping too early. Make sure that you know the products that you're selling are actually going to keep selling. Make sure that you have data that backs up the fact that your products are going to keep selling and are trending. And most importantly, make sure you actually have the sales. Don't just assume that an item is going to sell because that doesn't work. Before you decide to make a huge purchase of bulk items, so that way you can start your brand or you can start shipping them yourself. Make sure that those are items that are going to keep trending. Don't purchase something like, let's say, phone cases that are only trending for a year. And then a new model comes out and then those old phone cases are useless. Now, you need to trust me on this one because I'm talking from experience. These are like five or six years old. These aren't going anywhere. I'm stuck with a ton of different phone cases that are never going to sell, even if I sell them at wholesale prices or if I sell them for pennies. Nobody has these phones anymore. And that, at the end of the day, is a total waste and loss of money. And that just about wraps it up for today's video, guys. Thank you so much for watching and watching all the way to the end. If you found this video helpful, if you found it informational, please, as always, make sure you hit that subscribe button and you ring that little bell notification so you don't miss out on any future videos. While you're there, make sure to smash that like button. Also, if you want more information on hybrid dropshipping, how it works, and if it's right for you, go ahead and check out the link down below in the description. There's going to be a link there to a relevant article. Once again, huge thank you to everyone for watching. My name is Mario with Out of the S. Catch you all next time.