 always have your nine to five, because that's your security. That's what you're going to be using to invest into your business. But people struggle to find time. So you even have to make time before or you have to make time after your job. And you have to come to an agreement that you have to be strictly a time management. In today's interview, I'm going to be talking with one of the biggest names in the e-commerce game. And I guarantee that the golden nuggets that you are going to learn here, you will not be able to find anywhere else. I'm talking about none other than Ecom King. Whether you've heard about him before or not, he's one of the top Shopify dropshippers out there today. He's got a really successful YouTube channel. He's got so much more going on for him. And if you always wanted to start your own Shopify dropshipping business or dropshipping business, e-commerce business in particular, and you're not really sure where to start, how to get started, and how to really wrap your head around the whole concept, this podcast episode is for you. Ecom King, thank you for joining us today. Please introduce yourself and let us know how you got started in the field of dropshipping on Shopify in the first place. I just wanted to start off by saying thank you so much AutoDS for having me on today. And I hope your audience can learn a lot from my experience with Shopify dropshipping. So my journey started all the way back in 2017. So I had a buying and resiling business doing luxury goods prior to this. And I wanted to find a way to scale this online business. So I did some research online, googled it, and I found a few blog forums saying that dropshipping was a great opportunity to have an online scalable business with a low upfront cost. So that's when I dived into dropshipping. And then around about two years into my journey, that's when I started seeing some serious success. Hit my first seven figures in revenue with around about 15, 20% profit margin. And then that's pretty much history from then. You've seen my journey all documented on this YouTube channel that Ecom King. Right. And we're going to try to dive much deeper into that whole process and everything that happened during those first couple of years until you really started hitting it off. And of course, since I skipped it in the first few seconds of the video, welcome. We're really, really happy to have you here. And let's go ahead and dive into it. So what actually, what made you decide to pursue this business model in the first place? I mean, there's so many things that you could have done and still can do to make money online, right? And it's something that a lot of people are interested in. There's so many ways to do it. Some are better than the others. What made you pursue this business model? And what made you choose Shopify as your selling channel out of all of the options that you have out there? Yes, the reason why I started dropshipping as the business model was because when I looked on that blog forum of other things like affiliate marketing, Amazon FBA, this one sounded more lucrative to me. And in the long term, it sounded like it would pay off more. Some of the other ones sounded better in the short term, but long term, they were restrictive. So I thought more long term about it. And because of my prior business being more restrictive, that was something that I was really keen on making sure I didn't fall into again. And to be honest with you, I don't know if many people know this, but I didn't actually start with Shopify to start with. I actually tried doing dropshipping on Wix, but that was an absolute mess. So I moved to Shopify because of the integrations. They make life so easy as a beginner, even as an advanced e-commerce expert, the integrations, what they offer, the support is just unmatched in the industry. Okay. So some good pointers there. Shopify is a little bit more open, a little bit less strict. We don't have the whole selling limits thing going on. We can list even 1,000 products on day one if we wanted to, and it just makes it much more different than any other selling channel that we know of today, especially Marketplaces. So that's a really good point there. Let's talk a little bit about suppliers. Before we start diving into it some more, usually when we want to start a dropshipping business, we start by looking at what products we can sell and suppliers, it usually starts from there. So when we talk about suppliers, what criteria do you usually consider when selecting what suppliers you want to work with? Yeah. So really the truth is, and I say this to everyone, is unless you're working with a private supplier and buying in minimum order quantities, most of the suppliers are roughly the same because they get in the products from the same place. But a few things that I look into is who is their customer support representatives? Can they speak good fluid English? Is there any language barriers? The other things is how honest and transparent are they being? They're not making things up on the spot. So you have to ask them questions and with those answers, you can work out if they're being honest with you or not. But really, I want to know if the product is in their warehouse ready to ship, because if they have to then go and get it from a different warehouse, that's what makes the process in time between one and 10 days, and you're not going to get it to your customer very quickly, and then you're going to have issues. And then the other problem that I sometimes see is, are the images, is everything really coming from that supplier, or are they just ripping off other suppliers? So it's just about working with a supplier where they've got the product in their warehouse, they're honest, they've got cost, they've got good customer support with good language facilities in terms of people in their company being our speak different types of languages. And then the other thing on top of that is, is there have they got any type of insurance they have any form of liability, if things arrive to the customer broken or damaged and their process? Okay, so it's really understanding the suppliers logistics, if there are just another middleman standing between you and the actual supplier, who can work with you, then you'd rather skip that one out and get straight to the supplier that can work with you directly with, you know, cutting out all the middleman. And also, as you mentioned, the language, we don't want that language barrier, we want those that actually speak really English really well. And it's not just for our communication with them, right? It's also so that we can pass on better policies to our buyers. So whatever we're getting from our suppliers, we can move on to our buyers, which makes us be able to give better customer service. So the better we're getting, the better we're able to pass on to our buyers, you made some really good points there. How do you find these suppliers in the first place, you know, your criteria, but how can you actually find them? Yeah, so there's some household names that are worthy of working with, you know, you got CJ drop shipping, you got Zendrop, you know, you got Hyper SKU, you got we owe, you've got the household names that people use. And then if you want to find a few more private suppliers, and you can Google, so if you want to find like a private dropshipping supplier for, let's say furniture, you could go on to Google and type in furniture drop shipping suppliers, and it's going to come with a massive either blog forum telling you the ones they recommend, or they'll be listed on there, you just want to go on their website and see if there's a drop shipping section or a fulfillment section and see if they have any mentioning of drop shipping on there. Sometimes you have to pay like a license fee. Sometimes you have to register. So those are some things that I personally do. Okay, so you can go with the big name suppliers, like those ones that you mentioned, and you can dive into it a little bit deeper narrow down the suppliers that you can actually work with that maybe not everybody else is working with and that's actually making those Google searches on the niche that you're trying to sell. And that's going to find you and of course, what the word suppliers and that's going to find you all kinds of supplier websites where you can actually just reach out to them and start negotiating from there. Okay, some good points there about suppliers, what criteria to look out for, how to find them, whether the big names, or if we want to start looking for the ones that maybe not so many other drop shippers are working with them, which means that we will inevitably get access to better products, better pricing, hopefully, but it all depends on our experience and our negotiation skills. Suck a little bit of our product research. So we know a little bit about suppliers. Now let's jump into the product. So when you're starting a new store, what are the key factors that you're considering during the product research phase? Yes, something that I like to do more recently is make sure that there's some form of momentum going into that niche show. I won't just go into a niche if there isn't any natural momentum there. And how you find that natural momentum is, are we coming up to a certain event? Are we coming up to a certain holiday period? Is it the summer? Is it the winter? So I like to do more seasonal things now as a drop shipper because you get natural momentum, which makes easier to get sales to see success. So you might want to go, there's a website. If you just type in upcoming holidays, there'll be a website that will list all the upcoming major holidays. You can even go to your Apple calendar, your Google calendar, they'll be written in there. And then also kind of use your brain and think to yourself, are we in the winter? Are we coming into the summer? So think about that and always have a two month lead towards that. You don't want to be just getting straight into it on the day. So let's say, for example, we want to take advantage of Mother's Day. We don't want to do drop shipping on the week of Mother's Day. You want to be leading up to it prior three months. And then that's my personal opinion. You're going to get that good natural momentum. Okay. So getting ready for the seasons up in advance, getting your store ready two, three months in advance with the right products. But how do we actually find those products besides just knowing, okay, now winter's coming up, summer's coming up, how do we dive deep into inside the products and understand which products are actually going to sell well for us and which ones we're probably just going to be wasting our time trying to sell. Yes, a few things that you can do. So I'm going to mention a few free methods that I like to do and then mention a paid method. So the free method that I like to do is by going onto Google and typing in best selling products Mother's Day and then Amazon gives you a list of their best selling products on Mother's Day. There's going to be other websites. You can go to a website called eBay Watch Counter and you can change it by country and you can see which are the highest viewed listings on eBay and most of the listings are dropshipping products. So then you can then look on Aliexpress as a directory to see if the product exists as a dropshipping product, then go to your supplier or you can go on to TikTok and search for Mother's Day fines or Amazon fines and they're going to give you a massive list as well of Amazon great sellers for those events as well. You can then also go onto Google Shopping and just type in Mother's Day gift. You're going to see those are Google Shopping ads. Most of them are dropshipping ads. So then you can look for into those products. Okay, really interesting. So there's more than one place of course that we can go to. It can be social media platforms. It can be websites. It could be searching our suppliers websites. They're bestseller sections or searching for whatever holiday is coming up and seeing their best sellers whether on Amazon or other places. So there's more than enough places for us to find products and then we will actually reach out to the suppliers that we talked about in the previous questions in our previous conversation and actually work and try to work with those suppliers to what products they have with the ones that we actually found during our product research phase. So the places where we find the products that will give us the ideas of what we can sell are not specifically the suppliers that we're actually going to get them from. We're going to get those product ideas and move them on over to our suppliers. So you have some really good tips there regarding our product research. Some of them are actually new to me. So I was really happy to hear it like that eBay watch counter and other ideas that you had. I'm sure that the listeners or the viewers in this podcast episode are also going to get some value from it. So how do you identify, let's say, okay, so you found the products you're able to see some Mother's Day products like let's say you found a hundred Mother's Day products on Amazon. How are you going to narrow that down and actually find the ones that are worth selling, the ones that actually have a better chance of selling rather than the other 99 flowers for mother or as an example? Yeah, so what you can do is you can go onto Google Trends and search and see because you can feel the Google Trends by shopping interest. So that's more than niche down to that kind of emotion. So if you look for the ones that have got the most Google Trends shopping search, that's a great indicator. Then what you can also do is now this is a paid option, but it's really worth the investment. It's not expensive. You can use a tool like Peekster. Peekster has a feature in there where you can actually search for a product name or you can add a Shopify store as long as they're on Shopify, which 90% are and it will tell you how much money they're making with those products that they've got listed and then you can work out which one's making the most money for them and it literally shows you the active sales every day on that. Okay, so this is how you're actually going to narrow it down. So you started off a little bit broad. Let's say summer's coming up. I'm going to look up some summer products. I'll see what some summer products are best selling on Amazon in other places. Get some product ideas. Then I'm going to take those product ideas and I can put them in a tool like Peekster to be able to identify and narrow down the products and see actually which ones are the best sellers inside those specific niches that we found during our more broad search. So that's actually going to help us narrow down some more and it's going to give us all of the winning product analytics on what makes this product special and of course if it's worth selling the benefits and the statistics. So okay, so that's also a really, really good method. Do you have any other strategies that you're doing to differentiate your Shopify stores from competitors since at the end of the day whether we're using free tools or paid tools and I'm sure that paid tools like the one you mentioned Peekster is going to help us get, it's just going to help us save time and it's going to, it's not as time consuming as trying to find all the statistics by yourself which can also work but it will take more time and you will just find less products in more time this way. So what strategies do you employ to differentiate your Shopify stores from your competitors when you're most likely selling maybe not the same exact products but similar products from the same niches. Well even if you was to sell the same products in the same niche, it's literally the same one, it comes down to two very simple things. What is the author, what is the angle and what is the branding. Now the easiest one to do is make your brand look a little bit more professional, really invest into the color scheme, the logo, the way your website comes across but that isn't the most powerful way but that's one of the good ways. The next thing is what offer are you putting into the marketplace to get somebody to buy your product. Now most dropshippers I'll try them the same offer, buy my product at a 20% discount that's it, try and offer them a free ebook, offer them a free product on top of the one they're buying, it might only cost you 50 cents or one dollar to get it but then that might be the differentiator of them coming to you because imagine you buying a pair of shoes, would you rather buy a pair of shoes from some that's just giving you the shoes or some that's giving you the shoes and maybe some shoes sprayed to keep them nice and clean for the next one year. You're going to go with a person that gives you the extra spray for free so that's one good way and then what angle in which emotions are you trying to target. Most people go with the most common ones which is you know feel of lost in terms of they feel like they're missing out then they're going for some of the emotions maybe some of the ones that I say and wow if you don't do this then you might regret it. So think of other ways you can try and make an offer or an angle to get somebody to come to your website and buy what it is that you're trying to sell them. Okay I really like that I really like that so there's a few methods that you can really differentiate yourself from the competition like you said you can offer something that other dropshippers are simply not offering and it's not just that price slasher 10% lower or 20% lower than the original price which we inflated anyway and to begin with to get to the price that we want to get to anyway it's actually making a better offer sending perhaps sending some kind of an item a gift that goes along with that that could only set us back 50 cents a dollar even two dollars I mean we're talking about big profits here in dropshipping anyway we're not working with like 10% profit margins and so this means that of course we have more room to add more things and that could also help us differentiate and make even more sales this way and also trying to talk to the customer emotionally trying to tap into their emotions and better marketing angles okay I really like all of that let's talk about something that's been really trending recently and there are ways to also use its benefits in our dropshipping businesses too and I'm talking about artificial intelligence so it's a new kid on the block it's been around for less than a year now you know with the mass adoption globally people have been doing some pretty amazing things with with AI not just creating e-commerce stores and helping you with with some things that you can there too but do you use AI for your Shopify stores and if so how yeah so we use AI for our dropshipping stores not crazy amounts though because I feel like AI is not quite where it needs to be yet but we use it for example like creating product descriptions maybe creating some FAQs enhancing our images so if our images are poor quality we put them through renders where it makes a really good quality even video renders you can do now we also do for ad descriptions so like Facebook ad copies Google ad copies so more the copyright insider things and the visual things we use it for you can use it for product research as well by using chat gbt to go out there and do you know with chat gbt for now it does actual analysis based on data so you can ask you know chat gbt what's the best selling product for Christmas last year it'll tie the information give you some really good information and we've also integrated especially with the product research sort of things and like the copyright and sort of things you've integrated a lot of AI into peaks so you can now get your product descriptions made FAQs made etc to basically speed up the process quite nice so another thing that peaks that can offer us here during our product research we want to shortcut and get more product ideas and in less time using peaks that we can also it also has integration with with AI to create better product titles better product description which is great and yeah personally I'm doing the same on my stores you can't run your whole you can't run everything on AI at least not yet we still have to we still have to review its work and see what it's doing but and if you want to you know do it for the short things like the for the small things like rewriting product descriptions rewriting product titles it does so much much better than than what you're going to get from your suppliers so definitely highly recommend also doing that glad to hear that you're that you're on it too so let's go over some some better some tips for beginners talk about Shopify apps so are there any Shopify apps that you really recommend for drop shipping and of so of course which ones and why I'm mentioned I'm talking about the Shopify apps that you can of course download and install from the app store some are free some are paid let me know what are some of your favorites and why yeah of course the first one's got to be auto DS you know of course makes life very easy there's a lot of things that auto DS does make your life very easy and then the ones on top of that is always have things like bundle there you know bundle your products up to trying to get your AOV up the the ones that are just unnecessary you cannot even question is clavio email marketing SMS bump which is text message market and the amount of people that speak to that are saying econking I've run ads spent $300 I've got loads of ads carts why are they not converted and then I say to them do you have email market set up to recover the carts do you have SMS report no we don't have it set up so you've just spent the thing you've got to understand is if you're spending money on ads or any form of marketing and you haven't got any cart recovery system set up you're literally flushing money down the toilet because you've got to understand that you have to recover them and that's something that you're investing in the data which is their emails you then need to have something set up to then recapture them then the next one is TDO live chat I love that you know that the live chat system is unmatched in my opinion they offer some really good features in there to help with customer support giving them offers keeping them up to date with AI in terms of where is that order they can literally put in the chat where is my order if you set it up correctly it will then tell them then you've got other apps like your tracking apps which is 17 tracking I believe that we use and then you've got other ones like I said the bundle ones you've got LA reviews the live reviews I think it's called that's just a review app it's for free you don't have to pay for it you can import reviews into your store from AliExpress you've got loads of the ones you've got your currency converters that are good you've got your language you know language changes that are good but the email marketing ones in my opinion are the ones that you really need to have and you'll recover recover those are the ones that at the end of the day are going to bring you another conversion right because they're going to go and get them and so correct me if I'm wrong but all of the apps that you mentioned the SMS bomb the the TDO live chat and the emails Clavio they all have free plans if I'm not mistaken yeah so if you're a beginner if you're a beginner which most people are you have free plans for all of them and not to like promote my own stuff or anything but if because I've got an exclusive deal with SMS where if you use my link you get a thousand texts for free which normally costs around about $10 so you're well $5 so you're getting it completely free so there's no there's no reason why you're not doing it okay cool let's drop the link below this video so if anyone's watching this video on our on our social media channels on YouTube you'll find the link below if you're hearing this podcast episode on our Apple Apple podcast or Spotify you're going to have to go to our YouTube channel and check out the link but all right cool 1000 free emails was it that's pretty good okay so those are that's a little bit about Shopify apps there are some really good apps that you mentioned there I know of all of them and there's really no reason not to have each and every one of them whether it's a live chat to keep up with your customer service and to see but make sure that customers will really like love buying from you because you actually were able to answer their questions after they purchase from you instead of just you know kind of ignoring them and whatever they'll never come back and they'll never recommend anyone to buy from you again and all the other apps I'm not gonna dive deeper but really good apps that you recommended there okay so it's a little bit about Shopify apps how about some tips on best practices for optimizing the shop your Shopify store performance and increasing conversions let me just kind of reword that for for the beginners here so let's get some tips on things that we should do to make our store look better perform better so that at the end of the day we'll get more conversions which means more sales yeah so there's a few things that you want to do you want to simplify your store don't go crazy with anything so if we work from the home page now remember you're going to be driving most of your traffic to your product pages or your collection pages so make the home page simple and clean don't bloat where your your store out with loads of apps that you don't need because then you add in code to it which will slow it down then on the product page this is where things need to be done properly so with your product page you want to keep it simple and short so you want at least five to ten images in the image section of the product page and then in terms of the description this is what I personally do you don't have to do it I write a one paragraph description and then if they want to read the rest it's in a drop down menu because most people don't like reading anymore and then where I make up for the actual written format that they might not see I have a video on my product page explaining the product so it's an unboxing video it's an explaining video and a showcase video so you can either add them separately or add them in one video and then I also have customer reviews not just imported from AliExpress but if I really want to take things to the next level I will pay somebody to pretend that they're making a review of the product and then have a UGC video of it on the product page and then I'll also have the features like go inside the side with image with text what is this feature what does it do but the most important thing is imagery is very key now if you have just a simple image of your product it's boring but if you have an image where you've got like arrows pointing to certain points of the product in really nice graphics that's going to do really well so instead of people reading the product description they like to look at an image with graphs and text and then it helps them that's what I like to do and then have a one checkout system don't over over complicate the checkout make it super simple for them have all the different options like amazon pay apple pay google pay setup and you're good to go okay so the main takeaway here is keep it simple guys keep it simple don't try to over complicate things not too many pop-ups not too much upsells and cross-sells you can have some but don't put it all on one page the customers will run away pretty quickly and of course showcase what the product is solving what problem the product is helping them solve make sure that they see it right away that they can even see it from the first image or from the first video as soon as they load up your product page make sure that it's clear keep it simple the product page and the checkout process of course I've seen some sellers using that sticky add to cart on the bottom I don't know if you're also implementing that but I think that's it's also a nice way to like keep the keep the shopper you know engage with your with your product page and and not forget to check out I mean if you were if you want to check out he probably you know do so anyway but it's just another thing that you can probably throw on there that I've seen a lot of sellers do I've also noticed that you've been helping people review their dropshipping stores on on your YouTube channel which I think is is a nice thing they just throw their website in the on the chat and then you just open up their website and also give them like a little review there so you know those who are not making enough sales or making some cells but are still but are trying to scale it up I think it's really nice that you're also doing that because you're giving out some really good tips there too so if you guys want of course you can check out his YouTube channel and see everything that Ecom King is doing there or you'll find a link of course right below this video let's continue so we talked about how to optimize our product pages some really good tips there what marketing strategies have worked for you when you're promoting your stores and this is a pain point for many people who are thinking about starting to drop ship on Shopify and that's simply because they understand that at the end it requires a budget and meaning many people who want to start want to start with no money they want to start with zero dollars or five dollars or ten dollars and they want to make you know they want to make it with that and this is a pain point so let's talk a little bit about that what marketing strategies have worked well for you when you're promoting your stores or your products inside your stores yeah so you have to understand how traffic works you got cold traffic and warm traffic and different platforms work for different ones the way we do it if we were to launch a new drop ship product this is how we do things we look we run Facebook ads that's cold traffic that generates us cold traffic we also run TikTok ads we find TikTok ads is cheaper to get people to your website not always the best but I'd advise if you have an advertising budget chop it in half put it between the two and see how it goes now if I've seen success with the product with those two platforms then I'll then try Google Google's a really good platform to get really high quality cold traffic the only downside to Google is the the retarget inside of things is terrible so then put the retarget in back into Facebook retarget in on TikTok isn't great in my opinion for cold traffic is amazing but retargeting if you want lots of money you need to put the retarget in into Facebook okay retarget for those of you who are for those of you who are new of course means how do I target the customers again with the ads those who will either engage with my ad engage with my product add it to cart or did some kind of an event which is one of those things like even viewing a product page or clicking on the link or whatever you want to retarget them and try to grab them again try to offer them some kind of a deal and get them back to your store to to purchase and check out with the product so you're saying that with Google it's a little bit more difficult a little bit easier with Facebook and TikTok which is why it's better to start marketing on with Facebook ads TikTok ads maybe split your budget between them because there are both good sources of traffic bringers to your stores and from there you can even expand it to Google as you as you mentioned and do you have any tips on on what they can do like about marketing the product itself? So let's say okay I'm going to run my ad on TikTok I'm going to run my ad on Facebook any tips on what we should do there to make sure that our ads actually run well and and convert now I know marketing and running ads it's it's it's a whole A to Z full tutorial but if we could just like summarize some main points on how to do it the right way yeah so I'll give you my overall opinion because like you said it can be a whole tutorial so one keep the audience broad so when you set up your target and always start abroad never start niche always start as broad as you can focus on a group of countries so if you want to do like the top tier ones you do us UK you know in the in the same ones you don't you can't try them on their own but groupings always great great to see which ones do better than fill them down later so basically what I'm trying to say is start with the best and then filter down later on once you get the information based on what's working well creative sort of things if it's fashion related or jewelry related then I find image ads work amazing carousel ads work really really well in terms of videos you know for Facebook it's more of those professional light hard videos that do really well in the aspect ratio being one to one with TikTok it's obviously nine to 16 with TikTok try different formats unboxing videos how-to videos trial videos with TikTok there's different types of angles that that work instead of on Facebook because Facebook videos are very different to TikTok videos so you have to use your offer you basically have to put your offer into a format on what works better on natural content for those platforms so really think about don't repurpose TikTok for Facebook it can work but I don't recommend it and vice versa we do the way around as well okay some really really good golden nuggets here I'm sure that you guys are listening I'm sure that you're appreciating it so thank you of course for that let's talk a little bit about once we have I mean we talked a little about suppliers and finding the products and why we're going with Shopify and strategies for product research and methods for for marketing and other tips that we went through so now that we kind of have a clear picture of what we can do and what are what opportunities lay ahead of us once we actually create our stores we start adding products they're at some point right inevitably we're going to start making sales and once that happens we're going to want a scale so that we can make more more sales and more profits and as we scale we encounter all kinds of difficulties just like any other business and what we and one of the solutions here is when you want to scale correctly is automation automation is not nothing it's nothing that's new in this world it's nothing that's new in this industry but without it let's let's let's go ahead and ask you what methods do you use to grow your business once your store is up and running you want to add more products you want to make more sales you want to start automating it what do we have yeah so the things that I work on is what automations can I do through software which then gets rid of the problem me high MVAs to do the work so for example auto DS gives you auto fulfillment so they will fulfill the orders for you that's a great way to save time and then how can I automate you know tracking numbers so my customers receive tracking numbers and then they get updated and then they're not reaching out to me how can I create emails that automate so if somebody sends me a keyword that contains where is my order it automates and responds back with the relevant information and then in terms of product research you can if you really want to use paid tools like Peekster to then find them quicker or you can hire VAs to go out there and find them quicker and then when it comes to content creation you can hire you know companies to go out there and create the videos for you hire freelancers to go out there and make your UGC video speeds test with these are things that I really like to do to to save time but this there's one thing that I never automate and that is my marketing because I feel like there's not many people out there that can do it as well as me I find that's the hardest part of automating any business is firing good fight finding good media buyers to run the ads for you in terms of content creation website design those ones can be outsourced fairly easily yeah so I want to touch I want to circle back to a couple of things that you that you mentioned there so in terms of marketing I completely agree I I don't know how possible it is to automate marketing today and I doubt that the results are going to be anywhere near as good as what we could do manually this is really a spot where we have to continue working as humans because when we see an ad I think it's pretty obvious to know if if a human made it or if just some bot made it and we want to be able to connect we want to be able to resonate and with that we're going to have to have human created marketing ads and strategies so I completely agree with you there Autodesk so thank you for that you can use that for automating your products for importing your products automatically managing your prices in stock automatically so as you mentioned instead of getting a virtual assistant to do all of this for you which is what we used to do when we used to do everything manually we would even have to have back like about seven eight years ago when we were scaling it was all about having a team of virtual assistance one is uploading products all day one is issuing out my orders one is talking to customers to customers doing the customer service one is going through my inventory the dropshipping inventory right and like deleting products that are not performing well and and helping with product research to add new products so we'd have to have one for everything and today we can just have a system do it all for us automatically so if the prices change if the stock changes on our suppliers websites the changes will get updated automatically on our stores we can import products single products multiple products in a click and automating our orders which is a huge huge huge time saver especially once you're going to get 15 20 30 plus orders per day you're going to spend all day just it's just processing out your orders making sure that you're not I just made a mistake last week so half of my orders are being processed automatically and half are done manually and of course it's a true story and I sent out the wrong product to to the customer and it's an international order so it's much harder now to get him to return it to the to the warehouse and send out another one and the product cost me over a hundred dollars so I'm usually around the medium to high ticket products and I let the customer know I said to him like hey listen you're going to get the wrong product please return it and he's like yeah okay but what about the the real product like did you send it out and I wanted to wait for him to return it before I have to send out the new product again but since he asked and I don't want him to you know get mad or anything I sent out the the the real product too and I'm just kind of sitting back and hoping that he's going to send that one back so what I'm trying to say here is we're still human and we still make human mistakes and if we don't have automation we're probably going to continue making human mistakes and that's not the only disadvantage that we have from processing everything manually you don't want to sit down all day and process everything and and just do one thing which is today I'm only going to process out my orders why not continue growing your business why not open up another store so why not put everything on automation and continue enhancing and growing your business so that's a little bit about automation and for product research as you mentioned there are ways to do it manually so it's the same thing guys do you want to do things manually it's fine that's also a way to do it it's just going to take you more time and the results will come in slower but it'll still happen or you can just draw in some automation for product research using pizza to really be able to narrow down the hot selling niches and not stay on a broad level of product research and just testing out hundreds or even thousands of products until you finally start to find some some winners so that's also for product research and of course the rest as you mentioned okay let's move on to the next one but guys do not take this one lightly if you want to scale you want to succeed you will not be able to do so without automation which automation tools you're going to choose you can go with the ones that we recommended but make sure that you have automation if you really want to be able to grow and scale customer service not everybody wants to talk about this not everybody wants to handle customer service no not everybody wants to open up there is start their day to see mad customers wondering where their packages are or why the item arrived broken let's talk a little bit about that because it's still a part of our business even if it's just one to two percent of your business it's a part of it and we have to learn to put up with it and do it the right way so what strategies do you have for us to ensure a positive customer experience and maintain customer satisfaction in our stores yeah so it all starts from out of the door so the customer experience starts on your website so as long as you can give them valid accurate information from the start because if you go I've seen people do it and it's just the wrong way to do it they put on their website that they're going to receive the order in three days they're obviously not going to do it you've already started it really bad so just be honest and transparent from the start before they even buy the product on what the expectations are because if their expectations are up here but your service to the return here there's going to be a big problem straight away right then we move on to when they buy the or sorry when they buy the product so make sure you've got a custom email sent out and you can go into pardon me Shopify's email editor and customize the checkout order received email so when they receive an order sorry when they place an order they get an email straight away saying thank you your order confirmation customize it and have on there everything in terms of expectations average delivery time email to get to phone number if you've got one and in that way you're going to help somebody feel a little bit more comfortable with what they've bought then you want to follow them up as much as you can telling them look guys your orders being shipped on this day expect on this day and then just save them if there's any issues when you receive your order just take a photo send us an email we can we can look after you no problems you know because most people when they buy something they panic because they're like cool who is the person that's going to help me in this journey so as long as you show them straight away that you're there then they're going to feel more relaxed I really like that so guys you can do what every other dropshipper is doing which is anyway I mean Shopify is set to send an automatic message once your customer places an order or once the order has been shipped or maybe even once the order has been received you can even set something for that but what you're going to do is you're going to have the same message that the customer is going to get if they buy from your competitor so what's so special about that and what you can do here and this is what this is why I also like the way that you are tutoring is because there is teaching what every other dropshipper does it'll still work but it's what everybody else does and here's how you can do it differently and make it even better so it's setting customer expectations in that email and letting the customer know what's going on with their package what to expect from it of course what to expect when to expect it leaving a link to an email to or a phone number to get back to you and every time your customers reach out to you you can also learn from that so see what they're reaching out to you for why they're reaching out to you what the reasons are and if you could save it if you could do something so that next time they could get the answer before they even have to reach out to you that way you can really minimize it and again I really like the tips that you're giving here have you ever encountered something like really specific for one of your customers like I don't know some really weird experience that you had to overcome yeah so with our fashion company we get a lot of them I don't know if many people know about fashion but it can be a headache we've had it where the biggest one we get honestly right now is the one where people are saying that they're not receiving the order but they clearly are receiving the order but they're trying to get charge back they're trying to get the place to be the product for free obviously they're just doing credit card scams and stuff like that which is really annoying it's very hard to outcome because the payment gateways the banks favor with the customer not the actual business so it's very hard to deal with it's a lot of stress for the business and I know people go through these and that's why I want to move on to do do check your customers you know payment see the risk level if it's low risk then you know you should be fine but if it's medium I know people that see medium they don't panic they just send it out that's a bad thing to do although it's class is medium you still need to check what are the problems if their card doesn't match their address that is my red flag that is when I'm not sending the product out unless they update it because they're going to charge back and get all their money back so you need to really take these seriously again great tips so check out the customer's payment details you'll get them on Shopify and they'll either be green what is it orange or red and that way you'll also get the reason why that is and if as you mentioned if the address is different they're probably going to get a charge back on that and the payment institutions are going to favor the buyers and this is going to be a problem so make sure that you're checking out your customers before you ship out the products to them okay so that's actually that actually answers my next question and we're about to wrap up but we still have some golden nuggets by the way I did ask some surprise questions in here that e-comking was not ready for so I'm glad that you were also able to answer them to the best of your ability I really love your tips I love your answers we still have some really good ones to go over so we talked a little bit about some trouble some troubles and overcoming challenges are there any specific hurdles or difficulties that new drop shippers should be aware of because you know new drop shippers are probably not going to have hundreds or thousands of orders with I don't know 10% or 5% charge back so like anything from the beginners that difficulties that they're going to encounter and how they should be addressed I think the one that is the obvious one for me when I see people it's time management they work a nine to five which is great always have your nine to five because that's your security that's what you're going to be using to invest into your business but people struggle to find time so you're either going to have to make time before or you're going to have to make time after your job and you have to come to an agreement that you have to be strict for your time management then there's the other side which is skill barrier now drop shipping is nowhere near as simple as it was back in the olden days things are a little bit more enhanced and that isn't just drop shipping that's every other business you know you've got these big giants that have had to adapt now to how things are and so do you so there is a skill barrier that you need to adjust to so you're not going to be great at everything I was terrible to start with at creating video content and editing the footage making the footage I was terrible at it it took me time website design was the easy part for me I enjoyed it I like doing it so you have to understand that there's going to be a skill barrier you're not going to be great at everything you are going to lose money and if somebody tells you you're not then that's wrong always come into this with the mindset of you're going to lose money because you naturally are going to lose money and as long as you've got those things and then it's the emotional control your emotions when you get into this and don't get angry and you have to just understand that the biggest one that I see is people also get attached to their product if my verdict is if I've spent $250 to $300 between Facebook and TikTok and I'm not seeing the data that I need to see I'm cut and get I'm moving on you know it's like you go on a date with a woman if you see in red flags throughout the dates you need to cut out you know it's a I don't know if it's a crazy analogy but it's a good analogy these are things you have to you have to do okay there's some really good ones there I'm just going to touch on time management but everything you said also the skills just talk a little bit about time management because this is going to be one of your biggest issues when you when you guys are starting off and I had the same thing and you know the things that you talked about I kind of thought back into my first days and it was like wow he's like spot on time management is one of those things so it's not even a nine to five where I'm from it's actually nine to six and then you come home and then if you've got a wife and kids you got to also take care of that and then you got to find that little small whatever time you have left you have to make up that you have to make that time you don't need to watch Netflix from nine to 10 you don't have to do those things I'm sure that you feel less productive at this point and that's why you're also taking an interest into more things this is the perfect time to sit down with a laptop on your lap or whatever in your desk in your home office and start something new not only are you going to learn something but you're actually going to start taking action and at some point you're actually even going to start seeing results don't worry about burning the first $100 the first $200 until you start seeing a stats coming in from your ads knowing exactly when to turn them when to turn them off so as you mentioned if you see that it's not performing after three $400 ad spend don't try your luck and try to and put it now on a thousand or 2000 limit kill it right there something there is not working right I don't know what it is because I haven't seen your ad yet but you have to do the analytics yourself but also know when to stop that budget and to move on to the next thing and even as you mentioned when one product does sell well for you and pretty sure everybody remembers their first product their first sell don't get attached to your products this is this is a this is something this is something that happens actually quite easily to drop shippers don't get attached you're going to move on to the next product sooner or later so you might as well get attached you might as well get used to the feelings and emotions that you have and control them especially once you really start to scale and see numbers coming in you you're going to want that to continue and you're going to want to keep scaling that talk a little bit about your future plans what are your future plans or goals in the field of drop shipping on Shopify yeah so to be honest with you guys I still run loads of drop shipping stores now because they're a great way in e-commerce believe it or not as a beginning you might not understand this but drop shipping is a great way to create lots of cash flow as an as a very easy way in the e-commerce world I'm on about e-commerce because remember drop shipping is a part of e-commerce now I have a lot of brands clothing brands you know are my biggest catalog of brands that are not drop shipping they're still e-commerce but they require a lot of money to to keep going so I use my drop shipping stores to create cash to then pump into these brands or convert them into brands because where you make the biggest money in this is when you sell your brands you know some of the biggest names in YouTube you know I'm not going to name them but there's quite some big content creators out there in space that you might know of that have sold their drop shipping stores and made six figures seven figures so you make really the most money when you sell your brands so that's the point that you should all be worth so even when you start a drop shipping store you should start it in the minds of what will my exit be out of this you want to build your drop shipping store in a way that you can exit it when you sell it and that's really really important because that's what you make the life changing money that is the honest truth that not many people are going to tell you so at the moment for me I'm just building this many drop shipping stores that I can manage with my team to invest the money into my brands because my brands are the ones that are going to eventually sell for 20 million dollars 30 million dollars 40 million dollars so that's my plan that's amazing that's amazing I'm not sure if many of the listeners here I've even thought about that direction it's just pretty much just starting a store and starting to make an extra income every month but once you are able to actually make an exit from your from your e-commerce store drop shipping store that's when you'll really start to see the big numbers that's when you can reinvest these numbers into opening more and continuing to sell them continuing to make a profit and yeah I think that's a great great great strategy and a nice future plan and goal to have in mind okay so closing off is there any other advice or key takeaway that you would like to share with aspiring drop shipping entrepreneurs who are listening to us now yeah I think the most important one for me because I've been in the game for so long now guys well I started in 2017 so how long is that three six it's coming up to seven years now yes but again you got to remember I've been into you know my online business since 2015 although it wasn't drop shipping I was selling things on Instagram which is a form of e-commerce so I started in 2015 so I've started doing this since I was a 15 year old kid I'm now a 23 year old so I've been in the game for a very long time I've seen a lot of things change and my honest truth is keep your mindset strong because you're going to hear people tell you when I started drop shipping in 2017 sorry people were telling me that drop shipping was dead and I was going on Reddit I was going on Quora and I kept seeing people back then people were saying it and since then I've done eight figures in revenue combined with all of my stores so if I listened to those people I would have probably still been at my nine to five I would have still been desperate for making money so what I'm trying to tell you guys is you're going to still hear these people every single day saying this and the reason why they're saying it is because they've tried it they quit and the truth is now they hate now they just want to bring with the people down because they feel miserable so you have to learn to not listen to these people because they're toxic and they will ruin it for you so just stay strong ignore these people if you've got family members that are a little bit like not supportive like mine were amazing at the start then you have to understand that they're not going to understand until they see you succeed and the truth is the winners what makes a winner from a loser is the one that's willing to carry on and not quit the only difference between me and the people that don't see success is I didn't quit I carried on that is just it guys this is not a fairytale this is all from actual personal and professional experience and I'm really really glad to to not only hear it but being able to actually conversate with someone who has real experience in the field that's been doing it for for seven years now who came with nothing people trying to bring you down people trying to tell you that it's not going to work and this is what came out of it right you could have listened and I'm glad that you didn't I'm sure that you're glad also so you for me are a walking talking breathing role model for everything that has to do with e-commerce dropshipping and creating your own you know being an entrepreneur taking on the world you know on your shoulders not being afraid not being apologetic and just taking action which I think is one of the most important things here that many people progress procrastinate on which is the part where you actually have to take action okay I can learn I can learn for one year I can learn for three years I can learn for four years whether here in college but at some point you're going to have to start taking action once that happens that's when you're going to actually start seeing the results especially if you don't give up after your first one five or ten failures because that's actually when you're actually going to that's when you're going to start seeing success ecom king thank you very much so many golden nuggets in this podcast so that I hope that all of you guys enjoyed it as much as I did and yeah before we last thing where else can people find more information about you and your work so on a software saying an massive thank you for your kind words as well and for having me on the platform and sharing my wisdom and if people want to stay up to date with me I don't force people you can just simply go on to YouTube and type in the ecom king you can follow me on Instagram I'm not too active on Instagram but I'm there YouTube's where I give out everything like I literally pour my heart into YouTube I don't hold back although I have people you know I've got this is for another thing but you know I've got a lot I've had a lot of stick and basically bad I had a lot of negativity from other creators in the space because of how much I give away for free and how it damages their business because they make money off it so I've gone through a lot of bad stuff in my YouTube career since 2018-19 when I started it just to give the people all the information for free and not hold back and you guys can just you know although it's for free you might not value it the same as something that's paid but true the God's honest truth is everything there can change your business life if you take it serious and even when they came up to you and they said hey listen you're kind of killing us here you're kind of like taking our audiences and whatever we're charging for money you're giving it to them for free you continued of course with your own with your teaching for free and you continued with the content you didn't like let that slow you down or stop you really glad I'm really glad about that too so right so a lot of lots of information there on his YouTube channel of course I'm going to leave a link to Ecom King's YouTube channel right below this video in the description so if you're listening and you're not watching go to our YouTube channel youtube.com slash auto DS be sure to subscribe of course if you love content like this and check out his YouTube channel what tool did we say that we're leaving a link to for 1000 was it emails or was it SMS SMS so not emails right so for so I'm going to also leave a link for that SMS bump app you guys will be able to send 1000 free SMS to your customers instead of of course paying for it so the link for that will be below and yeah anything else what about the product research tool pizza I will also leave that below this video so that you guys will simply have a shortcut to everything that you need all of the valuable resources that we talked about in this episode but of course there's more things that we talked about that you will simply have to go to Google and find it yourself thank you once again Ecom King for being here today I was really glad to do it and guys let me know in the comments what you thought below should we have an episode too let me know in the comments below thank you for watching thank you for listening and thank you Ecom King