 Hello everybody, today we have a super interesting interview with Andy from studying.com who is also a youtuber and e-commerce seller. How are you today, Andy? Pretty good, pretty good. Thank you so much for having me on your channel. Really excited for this interview. Yeah. Great. Okay, so today we'll talk about really general stuff about e-commerce, about Shopify, about dropshipping and about other methods to make money online and in general make profits. So let's start. So first, Andy, can you introduce yourself a little bit more? Who are you? What are you doing right now? Awesome. Yeah. So quick rundown who I am. My name is Andy Mai. I own a company called studying.com. We'll go ahead and help everyday individuals get them into e-commerce. That's sort of what I'm coming doing. On the side and how I got started was I got started personally dropshipping and building e-commerce brands. So I have two brands on the side. One is called Music Chess where we sort of sell these music boxes with different songs from Moana to Frozen to Khalid, Location, Kamiya Kameyo songs. And I have this other tactical brand I work with called Bobman Company where we sort of sell these mini pocket knives and we do a lot of kick starters. And yeah, that's sort of a bit about what I do. I came from a single mother, sort of came up from a low income family, had to find ways to make money. And I was always a hustler when I was young. And that's sort of what ended up me getting to what I am now. Nice. So it just was something that was interesting for you, the entire news, the e-commerce. Exactly. So when I was younger, I was a big fan of how I first started actually was I was playing this game called Maple Story. It was this online RPG and in-game rather than sort of grinding monsters every day, what I would be doing was I'd be learning how to make money in-game. And I could afford to pay for in-game currency. So I'd have to learn other ways to make money in the game. So I'd learn how to merge, how to buy things low, sell it high, how to go around asking people, hey, looking to buy this, how to do quest to get those items, and I'll go ahead and flip it. And it got better, but I was able to really grow my count. I think, you know, most people would have like 100,000 miso's. I was like the in-game currency, but I was able to grow to a point where I had like two billion miso's. And it was like a really fun process. Like sometimes I'd open up a shop, leave my laptop on overnight, don't turn off the laptop, keep my store open, wake up in the morning, see what's sold. You get that money, buy more items and refill my store. And then I use that same mentality and I took it over into this game called Counter Strike Go. When you play Steam in Counter Strike Go, you can have all these skins on your guns. And people would actually pay real money for skins. So I was like, hey, if I did that with MapleStory, why can't I do the exact same thing with Counter Strike Go? So I was able to literally turn like a skin that was worth like $2 and flip my way all the way up to a point where I had like $2,000 worth of skin. I had like knife skins, I had like cool orb skins. I even learned supply and demand. I saw some skins that were no longer available. And I'd spend money buying up those skins and I knew they would appreciate over time. And that's exactly what happened. So I was sort of doing that around the age of 15, 16. And then eventually getting into school when you're like 16, 17, 18, 19, everyone's wearing Nike's. Everyone's having cool Nike jackets. Everyone's having cool backpacks. And I couldn't afford any of that because I just didn't have money. And I was like, how do I go ahead and apply that same concept to clothing? So I did the exact same thing I'd buy like Nike Air Forces, buy a set of North Face jackets, Nike jackets, buy it for $50, sell it for $80, buy it from Gumtree, Craigslist, flip it on eBay. And I was using this accent concept and I was able to sort of flip clothing and build up like $20,000 worth of clothing. Eventually I got into like Yeezy, Supreme, Palace, Bank, Louis Vuitton, all these cool items that I've always dreamed for in my wardrobe. So I no longer like I got bored of it because like I had what I wanted. And then that got easy. And I was like, how do I make money? Like I've sort of hit the limit, I've maxed this out. What do I do to take this to the next level? So I was just on YouTube, I was searching how to make money online, ways to make money online. And there was always these videos are hot at the time. Five ways to make money online when you're under 18. Ten ways to make money on your laptop. And I watched those videos and something kept coming up again and again and again. Dropshipping, dropshipping, dropshipping. And I heard the business model I learned that I was a car. You can make money without any inventory. This sounds pretty interesting. And then that's how I got started into dropshipping. And it was not as easy as I expected. Like MapleStory, it took me one or two months to figure it out. With Steam, it took me two to three months to figure it out. With flipping clothing, you know, after three to four months, I was able to get profitable. If not, I was like sort of, I had inventory that I just needed waited to sell. So all those things, it took a few months to figure out the dropshipping. I was at it day and day for like six months straight and I could not figure it out until the very end. So it was definitely one of the hardest things ever. And looking back when you're just like eating into your savings. That was probably one of the toughest things I did. Amazing. I think it's one of the most interesting stories I've held for how someone get into the dropshipping from gaming. Super cool. And so you said that you had also eBay dropshipping store, not only Shopify. Yeah, I actually started with eBay dropshipping. I totally forgot about that. So I learned the model of dropshipping. I was like, hey, instead of spending money on physics ads, can I do this on eBay? I think even before I found out dropshipping, what I'll do on eBay was I'll go to Aliexpress and bought these flip starters. And if they flip starters cost like 20 to 30 cent, buy them in bulk, buy like 20, 30, 100 units and I'll sell it in Australia for $1.50. So I'll turn 30 seconds to $1.50 and I'll sell like one or two every day. So I wasn't making too much money. That's $2 a day max, but that was like, it felt really good. And then I started listing items on eBay. I started listing these anime action figures from Aliexpress on eBay. And I had like 50 listings up and every day I was getting a sale. And each time I would get a sale, I would be selling a sort of action figure for like $40 and get it from Aliexpress for like $20. So the margin was actually really good. And that's actually what I started with before I got into Facebook ads Shopify dropshipping. How long did you do the dropshipping on eBay? I did that before maybe six months. I did that while I was in university and it was like pretty passive. Like I remember I was in like the lecture room fulfilling orders and updating my Excel sheet. Nice. Cool. And so today run two Shopify stores and do you run the stores by yourself or do you have a team who does this for you? Yeah, so my stores I have a few team members. I have someone for customer service, someone for order fulfillment and someone for social media. Those are the three main VA's I have that I hire from Philippines. Nice. So basically they do and then they're the advertising is on you, right? Exactly. So the social media person does advertising. So these stores are pretty much passive. Those three people are able to manage the whole thing. And then obviously my project manager that handles studying calm. She also looks over the music chest side of things and we have managers helping us recruit. So we have members within studying calm that helps music chess like we have all the editing team or the designers. So sometimes they might help music chess or a tick tock team might give advice and right now we're getting onto tick tock by our brands. So initially the tick tock team was just for adding my tick tock, but we've been able to do well grow the adding my tick tock from 0 to 50,000 plus followers. And now one of the tick tock members are starting to grow our music chess tick tock. Wow. Nice. Can you tell us more about the studying calm? You mentioned this project few times. Yeah. So stand.com is sort of like an online portal that I've been building. I used to use click funnels. I tried to jabi to host courses to teach my students, but I always have all these different ideas that these platforms could not offer. So I went ahead and took pages to find the right developer. Now we have our own custom portal. And with the custom portal, it creates this sort of unique sort of community where there's like a news thing. There's a group chat. People gain XP every time you watch videos. There's like a leaderboard of all the different students on who's the highest level every time you talk on the group chat post something on the news feed. There's I've set it up in a way. We're going to four layers because my course is pretty in depth where not only do we have 11 weeks, but within the 11 weeks we have probably like say 10 modules on that topic. And within those 10 modules, there's probably a bunch of sub topics on that one module. And within those sub topics, we have multiple videos. So there's four layers within our program. I call it a multivariate program where, you know, when we saw teacher had to do say Facebook ads, we don't show you just one video on how we do it. We show you like five different videos of me, Sean, five different students all over the world, the same Facebook strategy. So if you watch all five, you're going to be able to relate to one of the five or if you watch all five, that's going to answer every single one of the questions or holes that is missing. So we have a multivariate course and only by developing our own platform study.com have we been able to really give students the best experience possible. And the end goals to not only teach about e-commerce, but be able to teach about sales, eBay job shipping, teach about how to start a YouTube channel, how to grow your TikTok and basically be able to host a bunch of courses. And eventually a long, long term play is creating like a marketplace for educational products where people can actually buy and sell their courses. Like right now when you buy a course, the moment you buy it, it's worth $0. That's sort of the problem at the moment. Whereas if you buy a book for 20, you can still sell that physical book for $5 to a secondhand market. So I think that's something that's missing in the digital sort of education space. I want to sort of attack next and the ideas that came from crypto and NFTs. Nice. How many courses do you have there for now? So right now the main course that I've been focusing on is just the dropshipping course, which includes dropshipping, Facebook ads. It includes a bit of eBay dropshipping. We teach a bit of that. It includes like automation, hiring VA's, mindset. So we have like a massive dropshipping course that covers nearly everything, not only dropshipping. It's insane. With which suppliers do you work on your stalls? What products do you use? What type of products? So when we first start testing, all our students start on AliExpress for the testing phase. Once you find a winner, you can transition to something that is better and pretty easy to use such as CJ dropshipping. And then eventually, once you really find a winner and you've made at least $10,000 from that product, then we go ahead and recommend you find an agent. We give you contacts to contact agents to go ahead and have them personally fulfill and buy your product in bulk. So those are the three phases. So that's a very interesting and important point that I would like to stack with a little bit and talk a little bit more about it. So what I see that the dropshipping goes in, the direction that the dropshipping goes right now is really to make a testing from any side, dropshipping side and then go and import something to your warehouses or use a supplier. So when is the right time, in your opinion, to take the product and get it into your warehouses? How do you know that you're already there and now it's the time to do it? Got it. So around the $10,000 mark, that's probably when you have enough sort of confidence in that product to not order straight to your warehouse, but use a Chinese agent and probably order, you know, $1,000 worth at a time and ship it to your agent's warehouse. Now, when you start making maybe $100,000 plus, that's when it's worth to look into white labeling, branding, building a one product store, shipping it to like a U.S. fulfillment center. That is probably, you want to wait until you've made at least $100,000 and your loss is still insanely profitable. Cool. And what are the benefits of sending it to your agent on China? So the benefits of phase three, sending it to an agent compared to CJ dropshipping is one, your cost of goods is going to be cheaper. Two, you're going to be able to get faster shipping times because you don't have like an agency fulfillment. You have like a personal agent inventing fulfilling your items. Three, you have the flexibility to pick your packaging, pick what is in the packaging, ask if you want to stick in any coupons, and even pick the different shipping options you want. As you probably people don't know, ePacket is the most popular shipping option, but there's many different levels of ePacket. So you can get really high quality level of ePacket where your shipping time is seven to 10 days rather than 10 to 21 days. So that's the advantage of having an agent versus AliExpress or CJ dropshipping. How fast can it be to use this method? This method would be seven to 10 days versus 10 to 21 days or 14 to 21 days. So technically it would be roughly a whole week faster. And obviously if you do AliExpress shipping sometimes it's six to eight weeks. So in that case it's five weeks faster. Nice. We are talking about shipping to the US or to which countries? Worldwide. It will be actually faster to ship it to Europe, Asia, and Australia. You can ship to those countries like you can ship to Asia probably in four days, Europe four to six days, US seven to 10 days. Nice. And the shipping price will be similar? Very similar. Probably around the one to two dollar mark. Let's talk a little bit about the products that you would recommend to beginners to sell. So first what would be the product price and type that you would recommend to someone who just started the Shopify store to sell? Got it. So when it comes to the product type and price, that's not something we look into too much. What we try to look is a lot of people what they teach is if you go on YouTube, they just sort of teach you how to find other winners or spy sites or find something that works and copy it. But the problem with that in today's page in 2021 plus is that when you copy a winning product by the time you have it set up, that product has already been scaled to the moon and Facebook has given the majority of the customers to that person because Facebook is that smart. So by the time you jump on that product, you're going to get little to no crops at all. So what we sort of teach is we sort of teach you to find new products. So in order to find new products, what we do is we go through Aliexpress, we sort by newest uploaded products. We go through the home page and we look for unique products that are basically, wow, something you cannot get, something that solves a problem. And obviously the best way to learn that is either you can, you know, in our course, we have like, I think 50 episodes of me rating a thousand products. And you can sort of see the products that I rate seven plus out of 10. Or another thing I recommend you to do is study all the old winners. Look at all the products that's gotten one million plus views on Facebook. Study them, look at them, try to figure out why they work. Now go to Aliexpress and try to find similar products that has not been tested on Facebook. Now that is something that is probably a better rule. They're giving you a set price range or a set niche because I found winners from the baby niche to the kitchen niche to the cleaning your feet niche to the headphone niche. Everything in price points from $2 on Aliexpress, all the way to sourcing items that cost $35, $50 from Aliexpress and selling it for 80. Yes, I wouldn't recommend setting a price range or setting a type. How do you, but you also wouldn't go for two expensive products, right? Because of the risk. I agree. I know people actually that drop ship high end products or high ticket products. I know that exists. People who drop ship furniture on Facebook ads actually, but I personally have not been able to do. I haven't tested it. I haven't given a solid shot. But I usually stick in the zero to maybe a hundred to $200 range. And how do you know that the product actually a new product and nobody already took the product and use the potential of this product? Awesome. So in the program, we teach three strategies. Strategy one is you can look at the ratio of orders to reviews. So if you have a thousand orders and you have one review, that product is most likely being drop shipped. But if you have a thousand orders and 500 reviews, that's probably a product that only people on Aliexpress know about. So that's strategy one. Strategy two is you search up that product on Aliexpress and you see the amount of listings on it. So if you search up blackhead remover, you're going to see 50 pages of that same product. Maybe search something unique such as say, I don't know, like pen that has a light that shows you like the map. There might only be like half a page of that same product. So the amount of listings on Aliexpress will tell you how saturated that product is. And strategy three is simply by going face full and searching LED pan right and seeing if there's any other videos on the competitors that tested your products. So those are three strategies to find if your product is saturated or not. Nice. Interesting. I really like the method that you said about the reviews versus amount of orders. I also wrote it for myself because I never thought about it and it only makes sense. And so super cool. How do you advertise your products right now? Just Facebook or do you use anything else? So right now the main thing we do is Facebook ads. I found Google shopping to be very powerful, but Google shopping is a completely different approach. But Facebook by far is probably the bread and butter. Does Google shopping work for your also drop shipping products? Yes. At Google shopping we go bottom. Like at a store, we had two VAs uploading 25 products each a day. Every day, 50 new products being uploaded. And that store we're able to scale it to like 200K in a few months. And it was really high margins, high profit margin, high price. But since we're just spamming products, we just copy and pasting descriptions, copy and pasting photos. We got three listings out of like a thousand products that got taken down because we used other people's photos. So if I were to restart that store, I'll probably make sure that if we do copy everything, we try to change it up. When we do use photos, try to use photos from iExpress, not from the other Shopify store to prevent that same dilemma. We talked about the suppliers and you said that after you worked with iExpress ago for CJ drop shipping, can you explain a little bit more about the process with CJ, what are the benefits of them and how they work with them? Yeah. So CJ drop shipping seems to be the most beginner friendly website that basically is highly expressed, but cheaper, faster shipping time and more friendly. So that's what we find a lot of students sort of work with. We do have like an affiliate link for our students that use our students discounts when they order things from CJ drop shipping. But the main benefits are faster shipping time, cheaper items and better customer service compared to iExpress. Those are the main things. I think CJ drop shipping is just like the biggest one. They're sort of the mainstream corporate. They're like the overload of order fulfillment. Okay, great. So it was an amazing interview. I want to ask you one last question that I ask on any interview. And that's what would be the last thing that you would like to say to a beginner drop ship or something that you think that the most important thing for them to know. So the last thing I would say is when I was in your shoes as a beginner, every single day I wanted to give up every single day was tough. And I just don't think that kept me going is I told myself, if I just keep at this, I would eventually figure it out. Like every single day, every time I tested five products and it didn't work. That was actually a step forward, not a step back. And if you just keep at it, you will eventually figure it out. Now, obviously you want to be learning every day. You want to be improving every day. If you do the exact same thing day in, day out, you're not learning from your mistakes, then you'll probably never figure it out. So try to learn a bit every day. Try to improve and just not give up until yourself. If I don't give up, this will eventually work. Amazing. I think that that's the main thing that if someone is really following us, he will see that always what the experienced drop ship will say is that never give up and just be consistent. So thanks for your amazing notes and for your great information that you shared with us. And we really appreciate that you came to our YouTube channel. And thanks again. Thank you very much, Leo. I really appreciate the interview. I love the question. And thank you so much for having me. Bye. Peace, guys.