 Okay, I'm excited. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow dropshippers and e-commerce store owners, welcome to our 41st live Q&A webinar. Today, we have a very special guest joining us, someone who has been at the forefront of the dropshipping industry for over a decade. He is the CEO of AutoDS, the all-in-one automation software solution that you've grown to know and love. Please give a warm welcome to Lear Posen with over 12 years of experience in the dropshipping industry. Lear has a wealth of knowledge to share with us today. We'll be touching base on the future of e-commerce and dropshipping. AutoDS is amazing roadmap up ahead and we'll also answer your questions live as well as announce one lucky winner for our 30-day free mentorship prize. So be sure to stick with us until the end. I'm super excited to learn from Lear's insights and experience in the world of dropshipping and automation. It's been a while since we've seen you here. Welcome to the show, Lear. How are you doing today? Hey, everyone. I'm so excited to be here. Lear, thanks for having me and for this great idea of making this live together so much time without being on this YouTube channel. So it's exciting to me. Really happy to have you here. Really happy to see this many people joining the live Q&A for just the first couple of minutes in. So let's go ahead and get right to the point. Can you give us an overview of AutoDS and its mission in the e-commerce industry? Sure. So I'll talk now about the general AutoDS vision and what we do now. And I guess later we will talk about more things for the future and our plans. So currently what AutoDS does is an all-in-one e-commerce and dropshipping platform. Our mission is to help any dropshipper to succeed with dropshipping in one place. If it's to find profitable products to sell, to import the products to their stores, to monitor for price or stock changes and manage inventory in the stores, to manage orders automatically and to manage the customer support. Currently, we support dropshipping to different sites like in-base Shopify, Facebook Weeks, or Comhouse, Amazon and Etsy, which is coming soon. Yeah, our vision is to be one place for dropshippers and not just a software, but really an ecosystem, a community, an education place, and really a full automation platform. Okay. What do you believe is the future of dropshipping and how is AutoDS positioning itself in this market? So that's a great question. Let's start from the end of this answer. So first, dropshipping is one of the oldest business models in the world. Always people bought things and sold on other places. Sometimes they really hold the inventory, but in some other cases, they just were middlemen. So dropshipping will stay with us for a lot of time. But what I saw in the last modern world views in this niche is that dropshipping is always evolving and always changing, which is one of the things that I personally really like in this niche, that you always need to involve yourself. It's always interesting and it's always new. And basically, so the future of dropshipping is that if you want to succeed, you always need to stay innovative. You always need to stay with the market. You always need the right tools and the right knowledge. And this is also why I said before that AutoDS isn't just automation, but also an education place. For me, the future of dropshipping is not just taking products from one place and sending it on one specific other selling channel, but really they're very high for many different places. So for example, we see now that more and more Shopify dropshippers are starting to sell on more places like Amazon or eBay, for example, or maybe even Facebook. And the other way around, we also see eBay dropshippers who go for Shopify stores to build their own brand and decrease their risk. And also eBay sellers who sell on eBay.com who go for other eBay marketplaces like eBay UK or eBay Germany, for example. So for me, the future of dropshipping is really to be innovative. It's really to split the store to more places and to build the brand. So if in the past you could just sell products and maybe not give your best customer experience to your buyers, now there are more and more dropshippers and you always need to stay as much on the customer side as possible to help your customers to give them the best experience. And this is something that we see that involving dropshipping more and more that people understand that they understand that they cannot just sell a product and forget about it, but they really need to stay with the customer to answer their questions to give them the best experience. So that's another thing that we see. To me, I think it will just keep involving, keep going more and more into the brand building into the cross channel niches, which is exciting. You can see also how other things in the world affect also the dropshipping niche. So I'll take the example of the GDP that we have now. So AI is came to the world and now more and more dropshippers understand how they can save time using this AI. How can they use the tools that the world offers us to really enjoy it in terms of how we save time, how we improve our stores, how we improve our products and many other innovative ideas. Okay, so first of all, great answer. I agree with you that it's a place where you need to learn to adapt and evolve if you wanna stay here for the long run. And I see that as a really good thing because in my past five, six years of doing dropshipping and still of course doing it to this day and I drop all my knowledge at our blog pages and at our YouTube channel, which I'm sure you guys have noticed, but you need to learn how to adapt, how to change, how to evolve and every time something like this happens when we even reach some, even a certain road bump along the way, we learn how to overcome it and after we learn how to overcome it, we take this road bump, we turn it, we switch it from a problem to an opportunity and after taking advantage of this and really being able to overcome whatever road bump we had, I always find myself growing bigger after these changes occur, after implementing these changes to my business. So I completely agree with you that it's an ever-changing and an ever-adapting business model and the deeper we dig into it, the more methods we find out and the more tools that suddenly become available to us like chat GPTS you mentioned, which I'm using for many, many things, but mainly for optimizing my product descriptions and completely standing out and being 100% unique from the competition, which is something that I've always looked for to do and as well as branding your store, like you mentioned, a lot of people ask how can we brand a dropshipping store because we don't have control over the product, so how can we brand the packaging and how do we actually create a brand around this and if that's a question that you guys were asking, we have the answers to that, of course, on our blog page, on our YouTube channel, just search for branding and you'll read the content on that and let's move on because we're about to dig much, much deeper and get a little bit more hardcore with the questions and answers and I see a lot of people here really happy to see this amount of people in the live session and I'm sure that you're about to enjoy the value that's about to come to you. So to my next question, can you speak Lior about the importance of cross-channel strategies, which you touched up on in e-commerce and how AutoDS supports these cross-channel strategies? Yeah, sure. I also want to add one more thing to what you just said about consistency. It's also something that we see because it's always involving, we know that people who stay consistent with learning and even if something changes, they keep running the business, these are the people who ask for a lot of time and for the term. So it's really interesting to see that. Yeah, sorry. Let's talk about the, you know what, let's take it back. I want to ask a more important question then we're going to get to that one. This is going to be a build-up question to the next one. So a lot of people are just, I just know that a lot of people are waiting for this question. Please tell us about any new features that AutoDS is planning to roll out in the near future. Oh, that's a great question. Great question. I don't have basically the chance to talk to people about it, which is exciting to me also about this slide. So first, we saw the need of people to understand what to sell if it's on Shopify or eBay or Amazon. It doesn't matter. And what we're focusing on now is to help people. And this is one of the things that we just released and we're releasing and improving it more and more is how we find people, we help people to find profitable products to sell. So we just released the winning products section inside our marketplace. We will keep focusing on improving this marketplace, which means more products, more analyzed products and more tools that will help people to find the right products to sell for any marketplace and for any type of dropshifter. If it's for bulk sellers on eBay who import tens of thousands of products, which is one of our upcoming releases where they will be able to import from the marketplace in bulk or for dropshippers who focus on finding products one by one, where we will also help them and we're already helping them with the winning products section on Autodesk. So this is one thing that we are focusing on, which is the products finding. The other thing is education. So you're doing an amazing job as content teammate and leader in Autodesk. And we will keep giving the access to people to this amazing knowledge and we'll keep focusing as a company on how we make it more accessible, how we make this knowledge more visible to the users. So they will have it inside the system, which is also one of our upcoming releases. We made our eBay course to be free. So now the dropshippers can enjoy it and really succeed more and get more knowledge from us. So this is another focus of us as a company on going deeper into the education, help more and more dropshippers in this niche. Mari also joined us now to the YouTube channel, which is also one of the things to achieve that. The other thing is that we are releasing soon and dropshipping to Etsy. We are helping people now also to understand how to advertise the products with the winning products section and not just to see the products, but also to get deeper analysis of the product. Another thing is that we are working now and this will be released probably in the next quarter or maximum is sourcing from China. We will help the dropshippers to find the product that they want to sell in China and then we will brand the package for them. We will ship it with faster shipping to any place in the world. We will give the quote for the dropshipper and then this is one of the other things that will help our members to build their brand and to keep our customers happy. If you remember, I just said that it's important now the long-term relationship with the customers. So that's another thing that we are going to release. AI, we are working on implementing AI like charge GPT inside our system to save time for our members to help improving the products. Branding options, we will help dropshippers to brand their products inside the system if it's with a sourcing from China or with partnerships that we have with more and more suppliers inside Autodesk that will help to brand the packages before sending it to the end consumer. And the last one here is print on demand which is an underage that we are going to develop inside Autodesk in this year. So that's the general idea. Also a lot of focus on the marketplace and more products, more features, better sourcing, better understanding of what to sell, improving our algorithms that show with big data what are the right products right now, where are the trends. Yeah, so that's our main things for the upcoming few quarters. Wow, so that was a lot to take in. For those of you who have just joined us right now, welcome. I have a really special event right now with Lior Posen, the CEO of Autodesk and we're talking about the future of dropshipping and what's gonna happen with Autodesk in the coming year and more. And yeah, we just went over some of the most important stuff that you guys just don't know about. I mean, there's the things that you do know about. You know about our new winning product system. It's already embedded inside. It's already inside the system. The last QA session was all about that. So you guys know how that works. You guys know all about our education, about our blog page, our YouTube channel which is updating two to three times a week with fresh new content, new products to sell, new marketplaces, new case studies, new dropshipping tips and strategies and it's always gonna keep going. So you guys know that knowledge and as Lior explained also customer service and I've been stressing this for years now that it's all about first of all knowledge because you don't wanna jump in without knowing what you're doing and of course customer service which goes a long, long, long way. We're here for the long term. We're not here to make one time sales. We're here for years and years and for that to happen we need branding, we need customer service both of which are in the AutoDS roadmap this year as well as artificial intelligence which is just completely crazy. So chat GPT, we're working on embedding that inside the system so that your product pages will automatically be 100% unique and you will completely stand out from the competition and that's really, really important especially today where we have so many bad looking product pages and I show that to you in our monthly product videos and what you can do to do a better job. Now that's pretty much gonna be 100% completely automated for you and of course our marketplace and we'll be able to source products for you so when you find those winning products we'll source it for you, we'll find cheaper prices, we'll ship it faster, your customers will be happier and you will be able to grow your store easier and print on demand which is another service that we're working on integrating in the AutoDS system. So Lior explained everything so for those of you who have missed it, welcome we still have so much more to cover we still have to ask, I still have more important questions to ask and I still have the mentorship program I wanna give one lucky winner 30 days of free mentorship and you all of you who will stay with us to the end of this live event you'll all be eligible well you'll have to do something and I'll tell you what it is it's really quick and you'll all be eligible to enter the next 30 day free mentorship program so do stay with us till the end I'm sure that you will appreciate it and let me just bring it on to my next question. So Lior can you speak about the importance of cross channel strategies? So you talked a little bit about cross channel and a lot of people usually start their dropshipping businesses usually from AliExpress to eBay or Amazon to eBay or AliExpress to Shopify you know just single channel stuff so let me know now how AutoDS support or will support cross channel strategies? That's the question. Great, so yeah before I answer this question I would like to see a bit more likes to this video so everyone click the like button on this video right now so more people will see what's involving in AutoDS and where the dropshipping niche is going now about the cross channel so first it will decrease your risk so if I'm sending only on eBay or only on a Facebook and let's say that something happened to my store it can be anything it can be just the traffic decreased a lot of competition or the general market place just decreased in its traffic and now I want to decrease my risk from this killing my business it's my main job or my side job anyway I don't want to lose money if something like that happens and this is the first reason of why to go for more than one channel the second thing is why not? You already found the products why not to just push it to more channel it's very easy to do it's not a big process to create it's not a long process to create an account on any marketplace even on Amazon which is the more complicated one it's still not a big deal to do that so why not? You already found what to sell you're already spending your time just push it to one more place and decrease your risk it's more traffic some people are buying on eBay some people just got to your store on Facebook and some people like to buy on Shopify and they found your store from advertising on Google, TikTok or Facebook so that's the other way and it's really the cheapest way to expand to more selling channels to expand your brand we talked about brand building mostly brands will appear on multiple channels not just in one place so you want that if someone is searching for your store name on other selling channel because they forgot that they bought it on eBay you want to appear there also so that's the main points for me for cross channel that's where I see the world is going and also one more important thing remember always to sell the things that are right for the specific marketplace so for example, I will not sell electronics or electronic products on Etsy I will go for handmade so that's also something that we need to keep in mind when we do the cross channel selling okay, great tips, great insights I want to circle back to what you said about not just, I mean, it's easy to just take your listings take your best sellers add more marketplaces to add more selling channels to AutoDS and just list those products there it's easy because you do it in a couple of clicks and everything is already done for you but it's also important and we spoke about the importance of knowledge and knowing what you're doing and not just kind of shooting arrows in the dark the fact that you have these resources and tools today I think is completely amazing but knowing how to use those tools and resources the right way so that when you start your Etsy store you won't get a suspension right away because like you mentioned, you listed electronics which doesn't have to do with Etsy's selling policies they're looking for arts and crafts they're looking for DIY, do it yourself projects they're looking for anything in those specific niches they also support things like party supplies and party favors and things like that but you really have to be careful when you're starting a new marketplace make sure that you have the knowledge and for that, of course you have our blog page, our YouTube channel I already spoke about that so I'm not gonna keep repeating that but you have all of the knowledge there so make sure that you do know what you're doing but once you do start cross-channel strategies cross-channel selling then like you mentioned, Leo, you guys will notice that you're gonna have I mean, it's inevitable you're gonna get more traffic you're gonna get more sales because not everyone who goes to eBay also goes to Facebook Marketplace or Etsy or Amazon we haven't touched up on that but you guys know that today we also support Amazon as a selling channel we just released them in the previous week so make sure that you know what you're doing in your selling channels before you actually start selling there first rack up your knowledge take it easy but do cross-channel strategies because that will give you much more sales much more profits and again, as long as you have the basic knowledge and tools you're gonna head in the right direction and you're gonna enjoy those extra numbers especially when today you can just take all of them and do it all in one place one dashboard, one product screen one order screen one product importer screen to all of your stores and all of your selling channels so it's completely amazing let me move on to my next question and this one is important because I mean, things will not always go the way that we plan especially when we're starting a new business and we're not here to tell everyone hey guys just start a business and you'll be successful and you'll make so much profits there are road bumps and this leads me to my next question so what would you say, Lior or some of the biggest challenges facing the drop shipping industry today and how is Autodesk addressing them? Oh, so it's a great question let's start with shipping times so one of the things that changed in the world also during the COVID is the shipping times so sometimes there are for example now in January we had the old China in holidays long shipping time so what we do for these cases is that we just offer more suppliers and now we're also working on the sourcing project from China which also will decrease the shipping time but the customers want to get the products fast and this why we have a lot of domestic suppliers also like Amazon, Wafel and many other suppliers and the other thing is scanning we saw during all the time in this niche that it's not very hard to succeed in drop shipping but it's hard to stay stable on scale and let's talk about few different topics here so the first thing is the inventory if you have multiple stores or multiple selling channels it's very tricky to manage all this inventory and start jumping between different selling channels and this why on Autodesk we allow to manage the inventory in one place we released around a bit more than a year ago the Autodesk around two years ago Autodesk V2 which focused on how you view how you see all your stores from one place you can see the dashboard you can see the products, the orders, the messages everything in one place for all your orders and all your selling channels so that's one thing that came to be there when you do the scaling so we don't need to remember or no I didn't check this and that store I just know that everything is here and I just go to Autodesk and I can take all my data from there the other thing is the support system so it also help to scale to manage all the customer service in one place we know that on eBay people usually manage more than one store so this is why the system is there orders fulfillment at scale we created a service called FulfillBurterDS it's very hard for people to manage let's say even more than 10 orders a day it becomes a work it becomes something that needs your attention you cannot go to holidays you need always to remember that you need to process these orders at time and that's why we created the FulfillBurterDS which now supports all Chinese and all US suppliers inside the system so basically it helps people to scale without thinking about this that if they have too many orders they need to remember to process all these orders which are good problems but it's still something that needs to be done also for beginners even if you work with let's say AliExpress after some time AliExpress will require you to verify your credit card or basically most of suppliers do that and this is why we are there with accounts that already established the trust with any supplier and we help you to overcome any of these challenges talking about the scale a bit more something that the workshopper is struggling with in many cases is building the team so first it's something that I want to talk more about it so it's really critical to build the team that goes with you and helps you to scale you see that you're already making profit you want to make this a business and not just one store you want to go for more stores more products, more scale and this is why we created the user's system inside AutoDS again on the new system it helps you to give specific permission for specific user to specific store so for example I can give to one employee and access only for the option of orders fulfillment and only for these three specific stores so that's another challenge that dropshippers had how can they use more employees and more team to manage their stores and now we can with this solution to help with this problem we also know that on Shopify people work with agencies so they can also give access to them to their accounts so I think that these are the main challenges the scaling which again I will remind here customer support don't forget about it when you work on scaling it's critical thing we see people who scale too fast forget about the support forget about fulfilling all those on time and then for example eBay can suspend their account and people come to our support and say hey I don't know why they suspended my account and it's pretty clear for us and we see that from our data that it happens when people don't work in the right way when people don't give the support that they would like to get as customers so that these are the main things that currently we see in dropshipping and we are always there to educate as I said before and to help with the tools and automations to do that if it's orders fulfillment or multi store management from one place and even the education all right so some real golden nuggets here so when we're talking about customer service we can't stress that enough how important it is and scale with tact when you'll get to that success to that store success where you actually start to make sales and you start to scale your business it's a great feeling it's a wonderful feeling it's even addicting it gets your dopamine going and you just keep thinking about bigger numbers okay I made it this far now I want to make it this far okay I made it this far now I want to make it this far and at this point many people tend to jump above their bellies and dive head first into unknown territory and this is where they usually face new challenges and sometimes the challenges can be fatal and this is where of course you need to come in with the knowledge with how to do it correctly and don't neglect your customers because you have orders to fulfill it's more important to get to your customers and of course you also need to fulfill your orders because that also has to do with customer service if they're not gonna get the orders on time they're not gonna be happy and then you're gonna go into a snowball an avalanche of just trying to chase after your own tell making sure that your business stays afloat and for that I highly recommend to use the Fulfilled by AutoDS service so true story before the or started the Fulfilled by AutoDS service I was having a lot of trouble with my eBay accounts it was I think it was anywhere between two to three years ago and back then I was working only with Amazon today thank God I'm working with multiple suppliers so I have a lot more balance into my business but back then I was working only with Amazon Amazon to eBay I was fulfilling all the orders by myself all from one Amazon account back then Amazon didn't used to cause any trouble at all you could fulfill even a hundred orders from one account to multiple addresses and they really wouldn't care and then at some point they just dropped the hammer and said okay that's it no more no more shipping to ten different places under one account we know that you're drop shipping and we don't support that because we're retail so what happened here was Lior came up with a strategy for the Fulfilled by AutoDS service which means you don't need any more buyer accounts not at Amazon not at other places like Walmart, Home Depot, AliExpress we'll take care of all your order fulfillment for you we'll use our buyer account so you don't ever have to worry about account locks, account suspensions and I must admit throughout the last few years when the service was just getting started was just starting to roll I was there since day one since even before day one and that was before I started even working at AutoDS myself and took on the content here so what happened back then was I got in touch with Lior it was easy because he used to be at the front line with his customers in the customer service channels and he used to just enter customers one by one so I was like okay I have his phone number send him a few messages okay so Lior yeah I'm having some trouble I'm thinking about I don't know maybe stopping this maybe going somewhere else I'm not sure but my Amazon account is like in jeopardy right now and he's like just wait because in a couple days I got this new system and I was like okay I'm gonna be one of the guinea pigs to the system and I was glad I did it because we've had some ups and downs since then but today I can gladly say that the system was working flawlessly and it really saved my business once I started to automate my orders I never looked back and I'm sure that I never will so that's for the fulfilled by AutoDS service and of course the importance of customer service and how the combination of them two can really bring your business up okay my next question Lior can you share some insights into AutoDS's roadmap we touched up on a few things but some insights into AutoDS's roadmap and where the company sees itself in five years okay so where do we see us in five years it's a great question as the domain changes so fast it's always hard to think about it but it's an exciting challenge that we're always facing how we adapt and how we look that forward because that's the only way that we can really change the world of dropshipping and really effect for the long term so first we keep focusing on the we will keep focusing on the only one so this is part of our vision we want to be there everywhere all that's finding print on demand sourcing from China dropshipping to multiple channels it's all things that we will keep doing and keep going deeper and deeper to involve AutoDS to more channels to more places and to improve all our services together this that we are one place for everything helps us to connect all the dots and to understand where the dropshipper needs needs our help during their way and then we will be there for each point in their journey so that's another thing that that we want to just focus we want to keep doing it it's something that we believe in and that's why we are doing that because when I started I didn't have any software I had to go manually take it here put it here then we saw some software that do a specific thing for products finding and another thing another software that also does products finding but for bulk for example so this one does only for manual import and this one only for multiple products import so and then they became one software so we want to be one software that develop all the different things in during the journey of the dropshipper and the second thing is keep educating our members if it's improving our mentorship program that we do the lives that you do and our YouTube channel that gives a lot of insights from dropshipping using our data using our knowledge using our experience what we hear and seeing the market so we want to keep focusing on that more and more for again for anything that we do as an all-in-one we also need to provide the right content so we will support and the dropshipper not just with the software but also with education I think that it should come together always for us we plan in the in the upcoming few years to go deeper into our data to understand how we actually have dropshippers to succeed not just by more tools but also maybe we can help at dropshippers to optimize their products automatically maybe we can use our data and our knowledge to to improve the listings on eBay or any other marketplace to adopt it more for the marketplace so that's the long-term vision we want to look deeper how we can do more and more for the dropshipper in terms of us as a company as us as a technology to help them to succeed for the long term and more focus on the cross-emming so as we discussed in the beginning we see the importance of that and we want to push our members to do that so if we see that someone sends on eBay we will have to copy the products to Amazon or to any other marketplace maybe also to help you to be in your own Shopify or other channel like Oconos store from your products and that also connects me to visit we want to focus more on the branding so we believe as I said before that dropshippers need to go for cross-channel for larger stores for larger brands if not necessary in terms of amount of products but in general as a brand and in the branding so we want to be there for all this process from finding the right products for your brand to sourcing it to shipping it to manage your orders to manage your support and to brand the product of course from the beginning so that's our long-term vision we want to be there another layer that we want to go is not just dropshipping but also help our dropshippers our sellers to manage their stores not just for dropshipping because we see people who are doing dropshipping in addition to this that they're also selling on their store their own products so dropshipping became not just a side business or a full-time business where people doing only dropshipping we see that people who already have stocks already have their own warehouse want to expand with dropshipping and we want to be there for these people also so that's for me the vision for the upcoming five years technology education and going for only one as deep as possible amazing amazing the hybrid dropshipping business model I think is one of the greater ideas that I've heard about in the previous year so this is a model as Leo started to explain where you can you're dropshipping you're already dropshipping you're already selling inventory without investing in it so it's easy to get started and the entry barrier is really really low of course knowledge I talked about it customer service I talked about it but to get started it's really easy and you don't have to put any money up front so you're listing a whole bunch of items that you don't actually hold in stock and when some of them start to sell and you find a really good best seller from your products because it's easy to test the market it's easy to remove them it's easy to add new ones it's easy to analyze it's easy to continue testing the market with the dropshipping business model and then what you do is once you find a winner there what you would do is you would start to negotiate with suppliers especially in Alibaba and soon of course AutoDS will also help you source products and will be more than happy to help you there but until that happens you know you're going to go to Alibaba you're going to search for manufacturers you're going to start to negotiate you're going to order some samples and then you actually order to your house or to some warehouse to a local warehouse or to a warehouse in the US if you're dropshipping there and or to whatever region you're dropshipping to and what you're doing here is you're getting better control over your product you're getting a better price for it you're going to profit more because you manufactured it it's going to be easier to brand it it's going to be easier to ship it out quickly because you know exactly how much inventory you have you have someone who's working on shipping out the products for you and if you try it the other way around it's most likely not going to work I'm not going to speak for 100% of the cases but in most cases it's not going to work especially for beginners because if you're just getting started you have no idea what to sell you think you may have a hunch but you have no idea what to sell and if you try purchasing inventory first and testing what's going to work for all those products that are not going to work for you that's a waste of money you have to get them off the shelf so that you'll have more money to invest in more stock to test it's really really difficult to start off with that model so the hybrid drop shipping business model says test your products with drop shipping sell them enjoy the profits and you know slowly start to bring into inventory your best sellers so that you can make more sales and more profit but continue the hybrid model where you can easily test the products with drop shipping and make more sales with your best sellers through your inventory so that's a really really important thing and I think it's a very valuable thing that I just learned in the previous year and I think that everyone needs to also consider this hello to all of the 85 plus people that are in this live Q&A if you just joined I already asked Lior the CEO of AutoDS really important questions about AutoDS where we stand today what we have up ahead for drop shippers for e-commerce store owners for entrepreneurs for AutoDS in general and we're not done yet I still have more important questions to ask him we're still going to announce a winner from our previous live Q&A the mentorship he's going to who's going to get 30 days of free mentorship and stay here till the end because I'm also going to announce the next winner sorry I'm going to start the next contest so that you will also have a chance to win 30 days of free mentorship and if you haven't done so yet and you appreciate the value that you're getting in this live session do like this video that is all that we ask to see your appreciation so that more people can have the chance to learn about the wonderful technologies and all of the amazing things that we have coming up ahead so you guys know about all of the knowledge that we are putting out and it's all 100% for free even the eBay course as Lior mentioned used to be $97 for a long time and now it's completely free so just go to autoDS.com slash courses or autoDS.com and hover over resources and drop shipping courses on the top and you're going to see three courses there an eBay drop shipping course a Shopify drop shipping course and a Facebook marketplace drop shipping course all completely for free on our YouTube channel we also have a full Facebook marketplace case study so if you live in the US I highly suggest trying this out and yeah you can just see what I did with you know our drop shipping Facebook account in two weeks of sales everything is 100% transparent so you have all of the knowledge there but what if you need more knowledge what if it's not enough what if you need someone to make a structure for you that's customized to your needs that's customized to your knowledge to your capabilities that is why we have a mentorship program and that's the next question that I want to ask Lior so Lior what can you say about the mentorship program and how it benefits entrepreneurs in the e-commerce space it's amazing just kidding so next question the mentorship program is a program that we created from understanding that we always take take mentors like I always had personal mentors during all my way or not with yes and before that yes our managers have mentors and we always trying to learn as much as possible so we understood that as we discussed enough I think in this session knowledge is critical for the rope shippers but the public knowledge is good we do our best to give as much knowledge as possible but when you come for the place where you want to ask someone a question you need a mentor and this is why we created our mentorship program a program that helps rope shippers to get access to one of the most amazing rope shippers I ever met who is Daniel he's our mentor he also basically manages our fulfillment service and basically our e-commerce stores so it's not just someone who they are for some time and just started rope shipping but the manager of this department is actually someone who sells by himself daily with hundreds of thousands of products in many different channels and we wanted to get someone in this quality to answer our rope shippers who need help people who struggle with any question about rope shipping can just go to this chat ask the question they want then we get they will get the reply as soon as possible it's always pretty fast dynamic there daily and yes this is something that we saw that helps the rope shippers to stay with us for the long term and this is the most important part for us to see basically we want to see people succeed people who make profits and this why we created this program we monitor it daily on the success of people on how people keep asking questions and get answers on time and how it helps them to take their businesses for the next level so yeah that's my insights about this program I'm a big believer of that that everyone needs a mentor yeah I agree I completely agree guys I'm going to do you all a favor and I'm going to stop emphasizing on Lior's answers because we are starting to run out of time I have four questions to ask him I want him to answer them and I still want to answer some of your questions I won't be able to answer all of them in this live session like I usually do in the previous ones but I will we will choose some questions and answer you guys live and then of course stay till the end because I want you all to win our 30 day mentorship program okay so we'll be on to my next question we're filling up a few classrooms here with about 90 people can you tell us about the success story or notable accomplishments that AutoDS has achieved in its journey so far oh wow yes so first we saw first we passed the 100 people in the company probably we are the largest dropshipping brand or one of the largest dropshipping brands but the largest at least from what I know we helped over 100,000 dropshippers to make living from dropshipping in the last year which is a big success for us and one of our most important KPIs that we check we won the competition of Pioneer as the e-commerce business of the year in 2022 and which was also a great success for us to see that another big company basically public company that sees a lot of e-commerce sales and a lot of e-commerce companies that announce something like that about AutoDS and basically it also gives us the understanding that dropshipping is there and only growing when a company like that also supports us so and that's another big accomplish that we saw yeah some other things that also important to us and I can add here is that we see the improvement on the support on AutoDS we see the improvement in the feedbacks that we get from our users for the lecture that we are always trying to keep open as much as possible and we see the success of the users from the mentorship that we just discussed which are also big achievements for us it's hard to measure but we see always the ratings going higher and higher and that's the critical thing for us okay great and how about 60,000 youtube subscribers which we just which we just reached which I'm also very proud of and yeah definitely okay so I'm not going to emphasize next question are you still dropshipping Lior and if so I think a lot of people would want to know this what selling channels and suppliers are you actually working with today I agree about the 60,000 and this why people need to click the like button to push this video up so more and more people will see this video and also get us to 100,000 subscribers we are doing our best Iran is giving everything to to make this happen so click the like button they deserve to get that value just like you we I personally we had the first one or two years and after this where I was overloaded and then I one day I said wait we cannot not do dropshipping it's something that is critical for us to stay connected to the market that's the only way how we can test our own tools and this is why the answer is yes I still do dropshipping not by myself not by going into the channels but I always monitor that the way how I manage it and how I do that is that we have our e-commerce department which also I said before Dan and is managing it and we have our own stores there and most of the stores are for purposes of research so even if we see something that works really well for us we mostly will not mostly always we publish it in our channels and explain other people how to make profit from that and continue to the next thing for the next research for the next channel and the next strategy so that's our only way to stay connected with the market and I think this is one of our biggest differences between any other competitor because we are there we are in this market I am there for more than 12 years and we will still stay there for as much as this company runs because we want to stay connected to the market so yes we do the rop shipping we do that successfully we have tens of different stores yeah if you want to scale virtual assistance is definitely a good option and you all have that option in the auto tier system where you can simply add a virtual assistant give them delegation to whatever privileges you want them to have him or her to have on the system and that way as you slowly build trust delegate more privileges to them and help them help you automate your business and easily open up more and more and scale at ease so guys we're not done yet stay right where you are because in a few minutes when we finish this live Q&A you are all going to be eligible to enter our 30 day free mentorship live live price so we're going to do that in a few minutes and in the last few minutes that we have left before I announce the winner and before we start the next session and just in case if you guys just joined right now first of all hello this was a really really special session with Autodesk's CEO Lior Pozin we talked about the future of Autodesk we talked about the future of entrepreneurship e-commerce store owners and dropshippers alike and Autodesk's roadmap and all kinds of insights how it all started where we stand today how we see the future and all kinds of things and features that will come out in the system that we haven't spoken about before so stay where you are because we're about to start the competition and now we're going to move over to the chat section and answer some of your questions with those few minutes that we have left okay so first of all I want to say thank you for everyone who joined I also noticed that some of you are helping each other out in the chat box some of you are asking questions some of you are helping each other answer helping answer each other's questions so I really appreciate to see that and let's get started let's answer a few questions we've got about a hundred people here so yeah let's go ahead I'm going to go over to the chat section right now and I'm going to look for a question just remember guys if it is a technical question you should open up a chat support ticket for that I haven't seen any yet but I'm just doing a quick filter just to find you guys questions we had a lot of hellos so let me just finish all the hellos that we had in the beginning of the session and let's start with one of the questions that I see here why do you not add an auction format for Autodesk I'll give my answer here unless your answer will be differently or but I honestly never use the auctions I don't like the fact that I need to pay one dollar in order to list a product for an auction and then if it doesn't sell the night also a dollar I'd rather list a product for zero without an auction let it sell if not now than in one month and I'll still be happy about it but let me know if there's a different answer to this yeah okay let's move on so we had hello we had lots of hellos what do you recommend I do for including sales tax into my pricing from US based products I buy on Amazon for example considering sales tax are indifferent in each state so Stephanie I'll tell you what I do with my stores what I do is I know what my source price is I know my break even is according to my selling channel and also according to the supplier that I'm using but it's most of the expenses are going to come from your selling channel and your supplier you just have a source price there so whatever you need to pay for the product that's going to be your price and what I usually do is I add another 10% to the source price okay so I usually add that to my profit so for example I have a 15% break even and instead of 40% profit on top of my break even I add 50% and then in case I don't get charged tax I'm just going to earn all that 50% into my profit and if I did pay tax and it's going to be around 40 or 42 or 38 depending on how much the tax was on the source price okay so what that's one of the ways to do it you can also add a certain price in fixed dollar amount on top of your profits you can say okay I want to make 50% profit plus another two dollars in fixed price so you can also do that but in any case you just need to take that into into account add it to your break even or add it to your profit and that's how you can easily overcome the sales tax and still make your profit on top of that will there be updates to Facebook Marketplace and AutoDS's features for supporting it Leo I think this one is good for you yes we just see that currently we support most of the things that are needed there the only thing that we are still missing is automated orders for Facebook Marketplace and that's something that is in problemless right it's in progress and you guys can all learn about it if you go to the AutoDS platform you'll have that circle on the top right and if you click on that circle you'll be able to enter our internal upvoting system where you can see where you can first of all create a vote for a feature that you want to see in the system as well as upvote other people's feature requests and that was one of the feature requests that people voted for so the developers are working on it as we speak I think we have time for one more and then I'm going to announce the winner and start the next and start the next contest for the 30 days of mentorship so I'm just going to look for something one more one more one more let's look at this one is there a way to make products arrive at similar times like what if someone orders more than one product and the products are from AliExpress can you cover this so I will cover this when I have an order from one customer and he buys a couple of things from my store and the couple of things are from different sellers but from the same supplier like it could be on AliExpress on Walmart on Amazon whatever so you have different sellers there but it's from the same supplier most likely the product is not going to arrive at the same time even if you process the order manually so whether you process it manually or automatically you're most likely going to get two different tracking information but that's not the case for that's not always the case I've had situations where I ordered products from AliExpress to the same address but from different sellers and AliExpress would combine them into one package and ship it with just one tracking number on that one package that has all of the products inside from different sellers so I've had situations like that I've also had that on Amazon Amazon on Walmart but it's not guaranteed so you know it's either going to be a yes or a no but in any case your customer won't really care as long as they're going to get what they paid for and they got it on time according to your policies it should all be fine and to the last question is it possible to make $2,000 a month on eBay for me it's a big big yes I'm sure that it is for Lior too and you guys should take into consideration that we're still dropshipping we're not just talking about it we're still doing it I show it in my live videos I show it in the YouTube videos and in our blog articles I try to show as much as I can from my personal account to show you guys that it's very very possible and not only is it possible but it's being done like you can't really you can hide from it but it's still gonna it's still there it's being done by many many dropshippers and that's pretty much the time that we have for the questions I really apologize for those that I couldn't get to I can see all of your guys' questions I really hope that you guys will join the next live but stay don't go because we're about to announce the 30-day mentorship winner right now and as soon as I do it I'm now going to announce the winner from the previous live session and as soon as I finish that we're gonna start the next contest so stay where you are so that you will be eligible to enter the next contest now this is going to be a recorded session on our YouTube channel so if you just joined right now first of all hello and welcome you just missed a really really important session but in just a few minutes it's gonna be uploaded to our YouTube channel so just refresh our YouTube channel go to the live section and you'll see this video in a few minutes and when you see this video that is where you are going to enter our mentorship contest I'm gonna give you the details on that and what you need to do in order to enter the contest but now I'm going to share my screen and we're going to announce the winner from the previous live and then give you room to enter the next contest okay so let's go ahead and get this started this is the previous live session right here okay we had the 40th live Q&A right now we're on the 40 we're on the 41 so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to copy the link and we're going to go to the YouTube comment picker now what you had to do here was comment hashtag automate and your top takeaway from that live session and you're also going to do the same to enter the next one but we're going to get to that let's finish up with the mentorship winner so I'm going to paste the URL sorry looks like it's the wrong link let's copy this one okay so this is the previous live session I'm going to load the comments and I'm only going to announce the winner who actually played by the rules which the rule was to use hashtag automate as well as your top takeaway from that live video so let's see who the winner is can we get a drum roll please and the winner is Ernest 887 Automate I'm starting to use AutoDS for my eBay journey thank you so much for the great content thank you Ernest for taking interest welcome to our 30 day free mentorship program I hope that this will help you start and scale your business the right way and quite frankly I can't wait to hear about your success story so welcome enjoy it we are going to send you a message on the previous live we're going to comment on your comment and we're also going to comment on this session to make sure that you know that you are the winner and we're going to give you the details on what you need to do to reach out to us and start your 30 days of free mentorship so again Ernest 887 welcome I'm glad that you are our next winner thank you for being in that live session and for all of you who are still here for all of you 100 who are here you are now going to enter our next competition so what you need to do is I'm going to end this live session in a minute and when I do that go to our youtube channel youtube.com slash autods or autods.com slash youtube if you confuse it you're still going to make it to the same place and what you need to do is go to the comment section not the live chat box not this one go to our comment section in the video and do the same thing as the last live session and be a winner like Ernest 887 comment hashtag automate in the comment section let me know what is your top takeaway from this live session and in our in our 42nd live session two weeks from today you're going to find out if you are the winner guys thank you for joining this live session don't forget to like share and subscribe so that other dropshippers will also have the chance to see this amazing live session and of course learn about autods automation and how to start your e-commerce business the right way thank you for joining and Lior I had a great time a big thank you to you too thanks thank you for having me here and I wish everyone a lot of success with the dropshipping and thanks again