 With the e-commerce business as big as it's ever been, everyone's trying to get online, sell some stuff and take home some profits. Whether you're trying to start an online business to bring in some extra profits or just completely leave the nine to five, one thing is pretty clear and that's there's definitely money to be made in the online retail world. Now, speaking and thinking about online retails, there's usually one thing that comes to mind and that's dropshipping. Is there still money in dropshipping? Is it worth it still in 2023? What are the advantages and what are the disadvantages to starting a dropshipping store? Well, in this video, we're gonna go ahead and answer all of those questions and more. So make sure you stick around all the way to the end. Let's go ahead and roll out intro and let's get to it. What's going on everyone, Mar here without a DS and if you like informative videos in the dropshipping business and make sure you hit that subscribe button as well as ring that little bell notification so you don't miss out on any future videos. If you want some more detail into anything that I'm gonna be covering in this video, whether it be the advantages, disadvantages or how to scale your business, make sure to check out the description down below. I'm gonna have a link to the relevant article down there. So before we start getting into the spicy part of the video and talking about the advantages as well as the disadvantages of dropshipping, let's go ahead and quickly go over what exactly is dropshipping. So we got a better understanding. So to put it plain and simple, dropshipping is a business model that focuses around retail fulfillment. So what exactly does that mean? It simply means that pretty much all we have to worry about is just fulfilling orders. We still have to take care of things like marketing and customer service, but that's the main part of dropshipping, fulfilling orders. That's why it's considered a retail fulfillment method. So for example, let's say that you have an online store that sells chairs, like the one that I'm sitting on right now. On your website, you sell this same chair for $250. So let's say I decide to go to your website and I place an order for the chair and I pay you $250. Now what you're gonna do as soon as you receive the order is you're gonna go on over to your supplier's website. You're gonna place the order for the same exact chair, but instead of having it shipped to you, you're gonna have it shipped directly to me. You're never gonna touch any inventory. You're never gonna ship anything. You're never gonna touch any products. All you have to do is place the order and update your customer, in this case me, with a tracking number. Now while I, the customer paid $250 for the chair, you're only paying about $100 for the chair. So that leaves you with a profit of $150. As a drop shipper, you're never gonna be holding any inventory and you're never gonna be shipping any items. All of that stuff is gonna be taken care of by your suppliers. The biggest thing that you're gonna be worrying about as a drop shipper is gonna be marketing your store and getting traffic to your online store, finding more products to sell, providing excellent customer service and growing your business. Those are primarily the main things that you're gonna have to be taken care of. Now as you can see, it is a fairly simple business model and a lot of people are trying to get in on it. And that begs the question, is it still worth it and is it still worth to start a drop shipping store in the year 2023 or 2024? And the answer is quite simply yes. Even though a lot of people are trying to get in on it and trying to make a quick buck using drop shipping, they're not exactly doing it right. A lot of people are just doing whatever comes to mind or whatever they think is best, which a lot of the times isn't necessarily the best way to go about it. When it comes to drop shipping, you can't just go based off of gut feeling. You need to look at the data, you need to look at trends and you need to see what products are actually selling and trending. Now product research can be kind of time consuming and if you don't really know what you're looking for, it could be pretty tough. Now thankfully, that's not something that you have to worry too much about because over at Out of DS, we're here to help you succeed. We're here to help you out in every step of the way. So if you ever come across any issues, if you don't know what products to sell, just take a look at our YouTube channel. We have tons of different playlists to help you in pretty much any aspect of drop shipping. Not only that, but on our website, we also have tons of resources, including blogs, mentorship programs, eBooks, and a Facebook community that you can join with over 27,000 active members, all helping each other out. If you want all of this information in a quick and easy to reference cheat sheet with all the links, make sure to go ahead and comment down below, hashtag dropship 2023 along with your takeaway from this video and I'll reply back with a link to the cheat sheet. All right, so that's enough talking. Let's go ahead and get started with the advantages of drop shipping. And the first one we're gonna talk about is the fact that it has a low startup cost. Since we are drop shipping, there's really not much that we have to pay up front. Our main costs are gonna include our website, our domain, and really our marketing costs. Aside from that, we are gonna be paying for products as we get orders coming in, but we're never gonna be paying for products up front because we're never gonna be holding any physical inventory. That in itself is gonna save us a ton of money. One of the things that people pay pretty much the most for when starting their businesses is inventory. Now, that in itself brings me to my second point and that's you don't have to hold any inventory. Not only are we gonna be saving money on upfront costs, we're also gonna be saving money on storage and overhead fees. Another huge advantage to drop shipping is the fact that it has such a low entry barrier. It's super easy to get started in the business. The first thing that you need to do is decide where you wanna sell. You're gonna be selling on your own website or are you gonna be selling on a marketplace? If you decide to sell on your website, you're gonna be looking to sell either on Wix, Shopify, or WooCommerce. And if you decide to go with a marketplace, you're gonna be looking at something like Amazon, eBay, or Etsy. There's also different fees associated with either your own website or a marketplace. If you decide to open up your own website, you're typically gonna be looking at monthly fees for the service that you're using. Whereas with a marketplace, you're gonna be looking at fees that get charged as you make a sale. But typically both fees, regardless of whether you have your own website or you're selling on a marketplace, the fees tend to be fairly low and pretty manageable. Now, once you have your drop shipping store in place, you have your store up and running and you have some products that you wanna sell, it's pretty easy to start scaling your business. One of the reasons that drop shipping is so popular is quite frankly, because of the scalability. As a drop shipper, once your store's up and running, you can really start selling to pretty much the entire world or whatever regions you wanna target, such as the US, UK, Canada, Australia. As long as your suppliers ship to that particular region, then you're pretty much good to go. Now, if you really wanna start going global, then you can check us out over at alumds.com and see all the different suppliers that we work with. We work with over 25 of the largest suppliers that ship worldwide, have a proven track record and have great quality items. So the next big advantage to drop shipping is the fact that you can easily test and replace products that just aren't selling. Now, there's a few different ways you can test products and one of the ways is by simply ordering it yourself, testing out the quality and seeing if you like it, see if it's got an overall good build and good quality. In this case, you're gonna be testing the quality of the product itself. You can also test how a product sells. So if you notice that a product is selling constantly, whether it be on your own website or on a marketplace, if you notice that the product is selling and you're getting good reviews, then it's worth keeping that product on there and potentially even raising the price to make a bit extra profit. Now, on the opposite side, if you notice that a product isn't selling, then you can start to change a few things around. Maybe you can change the different tags if you're selling on a website like Etsy or Amazon or you can try switching up the pictures or if you're selling on your website, maybe try a different ad. Ultimately, if you notice that a product isn't selling, whether it be because just nobody's buying it or it doesn't have good quality, then all you have to do is take down the listing and replace it with another one. That's pretty much all there is to it. You don't have anything to lose because, again, you're not holding any inventory. Now, the fact that you don't have much to lose actually brings me to my next point and the next advantage in dropshipping and that's that it's a low-risk business model. You really don't have much to lose. Remember with dropshipping, you're working on a per-order basis, meaning you're placing the orders for your products the moment that you're receiving the orders. So you're not holding any inventory so you're not paying anything upfront or any products. So let's say a product doesn't sell. If you were to pay for products upfront and have a ton of inventory, you'd be stuck with products just sitting there for days, weeks, months, or even years. Aside from that, you're also not paying for any storage for products or any overhead costs. And the only thing you're really gonna be paying, as I mentioned earlier, is gonna be your website costs and your marketing costs. The next huge advantage to dropshipping is gonna be easy order fulfillment. Once again, you're not doing any of that. All you have to do is place the order with your supplier and your supplier's gonna be fulfilling the entire order. The only thing you're gonna have to do is update your customer with your tracking number once you receive it from your supplier. Now, if you're serious about dropshipping and you really wanna get started in it and really take your business to the next level, then you're not even gonna have to worry about fulfilling orders by updating your customers with tracking numbers. If you're really serious about your dropshipping business, then you're most likely gonna start using automation. Something like AutoDS. In which case, AutoDS is gonna be doing all of that for you. The moment that your supplier ships out the order and provides a tracking number, AutoDS will take that tracking number and send an email to your customer. You also wouldn't even have to worry about placing the order with your supplier. AutoDS will take care of that entire thing for you as well. That would leave you with tons of free time to just focus on growing and scaling your business. Now, the last advantage that I wanna talk about when it comes to dropshipping is gonna be the freedom that you have as a dropshipper. The biggest advantage to dropshipping has to be the freedom. You can pretty much do this from anywhere in the world. You can do this either from your living room or you can do this from the coffee shop down the street. Especially if you start to automate your store using something like AutoDS. Using something like AutoDS to automate your dropshipping business can really be what you need to take your business to the next level. AutoDS takes the already quick process of dropshipping and just makes it that much quicker. You can automate your product imports. You can import either a single product or multiple products in just a few clicks. For example, let's say I wanna import a product from one of my suppliers, AliExpress. I'm just gonna go on over to single product. All I have to do here is just go ahead and paste the link to the product that I wanna import and I can either publish it directly to my store or I can edit now and make a few edits to the title, descriptions, images, and everything else. Aside from that, AutoDS also helps you find winning products really quick and easy. All you have to do is click on over on the winning product section over on the left-hand side and you're gonna be prompted with tons of best-selling products that have proven to sell in the past and are currently trending. Not only that, but if you decide to click on one of these like let's say this microphone, you're gonna get tons of insight on the product itself. So as you can see here, this product actually costs about $6.56 to source. Then you can sell it for about $35.58. And then that gives you a potential profit of about $29. Not only that, but you also get an example of a Facebook ad so you can try to replicate it and you also have the demographic that's used for that Facebook ad. Now in this case, it targets males and females between the ages of 18 and 40 that are single and married and are interested in video recording and microphones. Now you can always switch these options around so you can test different demographics and different audiences. And on top of that, you also have some extra AutoDS Insights where we talk a little bit about the product and we also give you an example website that you can click on so you can see how other sellers are structuring their product page. All these different tools really give you everything that you need to really start growing your business and focusing on both scaling your business as well as taking some time for yourself and just relaxing or kicking it back with family. All right, so I know you all have been waiting for this part in particular because this is the more juicy part of the video and that's the disadvantages to dropshipping. So let's go ahead and start with the first one and that's gonna be, there's a lot of competition because it does have such a low entry barrier. A lot of people are trying to get into it and make a quick buck. But as I mentioned earlier, most of those people aren't necessarily doing it the right way. Sometimes they're just going based off of cut feeling and cut instincts, which isn't necessarily the proper way to do it. You, on the other hand, are gonna be doing it the correct way and that's by doing proper product research and marketing the right way. You can use all of the resources that we have available to you so you can find the best products to sell as well as market and price them correctly. Another thing that can really help you stand up above the competition is provide excellent customer service. Whenever you get a question, whenever you get an email regarding an order or product, try to answer that as quick as possible in the most efficient way possible. That shows a customer that not only do you want their business, but you also care about them as a customer and you wanna make sure that everything is good for them and they receive the proper attention. The next disadvantage that I wanna quickly cover is the fact that there is not much quality control. When you're placing your orders with your suppliers, a lot of the times the suppliers are just gonna grab the product and ship it. You're never gonna get a hold of it so you're never gonna really get to see what the product is, how it feels, how durable it is or how it works. The only way that you can do that is by ordering a sample so you can test for yourself. Now, that's a perfect way to start testing products and checking out their quality to make sure that they're good for your customers. That's good if you have maybe a handful of products, maybe 10 or 15 even, but if you start selling multiple products, let's say you start selling 50, 60, 70 products or even more, it's gonna start to get extremely time consuming and pretty expensive ordering the products to test. In this case, the best thing that you can do is make sure that the suppliers that you decide to work with have quality control. Finding quality suppliers is essential in achieving success for your dropshipping business. One awesome example of a quality supplier with quality products and quality control is CJ dropshipping. Not only does CJ dropshipping have quality control on all of their products, they also have tons of items to choose from. Next up, we have no control over stock and shipping times. Unfortunately, as a dropshipper, a lot of the suppliers that we're gonna be sourcing from are primarily gonna be located in China. When they're located in China, a lot of the times what that's gonna mean are long shipping times. Now, there are a few different ways that you can go around this. For one, you can source from multiple suppliers to make sure you never run out of a particular item. So if one supplier goes zero on stock, then you always have a few backups. You also wanna make sure that the multiple suppliers that you have have warehouses in multiple region. So you wanna make sure that they have warehouses in the US, UK, China, Australia and wherever else you wanna be shipping to. This will ensure quick shipping and delivery for your products and customers. Now, if that's something that you don't even wanna worry or think about, then you can use the price and stock monitoring feature on AutoDS. What this feature does is it keeps track of all of your suppliers' stock and inventory. So if there's ever a shortage from your supplier, let's say an item reaches a stock number of zero, then AutoDS will automatically change the inventory amount on your dropshipping store. So it'll reflect the same as your supplier. Now, if you have multiple suppliers, then it'll just source a product from one of the other suppliers whenever you receive an order. The same goes for price changes. Let's say a supplier changes the price of one of their items and you didn't notice. So you didn't make the necessary changes on your website. Then a customer goes to your website and places the order. Now you could potentially be looking at profit loss. If your supplier raised their price by too much, then you could be sourcing it at a higher price digging into your profits. Once again, this is where the price and stock monitoring tool can come in to help you. If AutoDS detects that there's any price changes in your suppliers, it'll make the necessary adjustments on your store. So that way you're never losing any money and your prices are always updated and optimized. Now, another thing to keep in mind is wherever you decide to host your drop shipping store on or wherever you decide to sell your products, there's typically gonna be a set of rules that you have to abide by. Those are usually set by the marketplace themselves or just general overall rules that you should be following for best practices. For example, on eBay, you have to abide by the veralist. And the veralist protects against intellectual property infringement. It's pretty much saying that you can't sell any knockoff items. Also, if you're a new eBay seller, you're most likely gonna be starting off with seller limits. So until you start getting more and more sales coming in and eBay notices that you're a trustworthy seller, you're gonna be limited to the limits that they set for you. So let's say in one month, you can be limited to a certain number of products that they allow you to sell. Once you reach that limit, then you're not gonna be able to sell anymore until the next month or you can potentially reach out to eBay and have them lift those restrictions. Aside from that, Facebook also has their Facebook commerce policies. And when you have your own website, such as Shopify, Wix or WooCommerce, you also don't wanna be selling copyright items or knockoff items. Now, if you wanna build your own brand and not have a generic store with a bunch of generic products, then that can also start to be a challenge. Most dropshipping suppliers that you're gonna encounter are just gonna be selling generic products that are either unbranded or are their own brand. So if your main goal is to start your own brand, then you're gonna wanna look for suppliers that offer either print on demand or private labeling services. Now to clarify, private labeling and print on demand are two totally different things. When you use a print on demand service, you're gonna be printing your own designs on certain merchandise. So you can print a t-shirt with your own design on it or maybe a mug, towel, a blanket, things like that. Whereas private label products are gonna be products with your brand name on them, your customization on them and even your packaging with your own logo or brand. Now, even though I did mention that there are low startup costs and you don't really have to pay for products upfront, you still have to pay for products as the orders come in. So in this case, what happens is you're gonna be paying for products as your orders come in. So you're gonna be placing the orders, let's say today, but you're not gonna be getting paid for these products for another couple of days. So essentially what you're gonna be doing is you're gonna be paying for these products upfront, either with your own debit card or your credit card. So let's say today a post went viral and you made 100 sales. Now you have to place 100 orders using your own money, whether that be your debit card or your credit card. Now a lot of the times this could pose as a challenge because some people might not have enough funds in their debit or bank accounts or they might not have enough credit on their credit cards. In which case, you can maybe wait a day or two to get paid for the items and then place the orders for the items but you really don't wanna keep your customers waiting. A lot of the times that's gonna cause them to be unhappy and either cancel their orders or not come back. Now the other option you have to combat this is using fulfilled by Autodesk. As I mentioned earlier, Autodesk will fulfill your orders for you and it does this in two different ways. It can either do this using automatic orders which uses your buyer accounts on your supplier websites. So Autodesk will log into your supplier's website on your behalf and use your credit or your debit card details to place the order. The other option is gonna be using fulfilled by Autodesk. In this case, Autodesk uses its own buyer accounts so it's never gonna touch yours and instead of using your credit or your debit card, it's gonna use a balance that you load up. Now the last disadvantage to dropshipping is the fact that customer service is gonna be 100% on you. So this will take some time in answering questions, answering any questions regarding products, any customer concerns. This is all gonna take a bit of time on your end to provide the best possible customer service so you can have happy customers that continue returning and placing orders. Now, there's a way that you can go around this by hiring a virtual assistant. You can use a virtual assistant to be able to take care of all of the customer service for you. Remember that dropshipping is an extremely lucrative business and there's definitely money to be made, especially if you do things the right way. As you start growing your business, you're gonna be noticing that certain tasks start to take longer and longer because you're gonna have to be focusing more time on doing the same thing over and over with multiple customers. So for example, placing orders for multiple customers, updating them with their tracking number, finding new products and then importing them to your store, all of these things are fairly easy to do manually if you have a low number of orders or a low number of products. But as you start growing, it's really gonna start to get very time consuming. So automating your business is really gonna be your best bet when you really start scaling and growing. A few things that you're gonna be able to automate with AutoDS are gonna include price and stock monitoring, price optimization, inventory management, automatic tracking updates, order fulfillments, and you also get some extra resources such as the eBay fees calculator and some pre-made business policy templates. Huge thank you for sticking around all the way to the end. Once again, my name is Mario with AutoDS bringing you all of the latest information in the dropshipping business as well as some of the best and hottest products to sell and tons of tips and tricks. Please make sure to hit that subscribe button as well as ring that little bell notification if you enjoyed this video and leave a like. Once again, my name is Mario with AutoDS and I'll catch you all in the next video.