 So in this video, we're going to be talking the easiest way to find some success when it comes to dropshipping on Shopify. So I've been teaching people now for over two plus years to build businesses, e-commerce businesses on Shopify, not just dropshipping but sourcing in bulk and everything that kind of progresses from dropshipping. So it's safe to say I've seen pretty much every way there is to do it. And in this video, I'm going to boil it down to the two main methods that I see people do. Go through the pros and cons then to help you decide which one is most suitable for you and ultimately give you the best chance of finding that success when it comes to starting a business on Shopify. Now, when it comes to starting a business then that's exactly what it is. It is a business and in my mind, there's no such thing as an easy way to make money. There's no such thing as an easy business. So regardless of which one of these two methods you do pick, ultimately, if you want to be successful it's going to take commitment, it's going to take hard work and it's going to take some form of trial and error as well. So with that being said guys, that's the topic of the video. Thanks for tuning in. I really hope you enjoy it. If you do, please do make sure you hit that like button. Any comments or questions that come from this or anything else, just post them down below. I do reply to every single one. And finally, if you do like my content and want to see more please do hit that subscribe button too. With that being said then, thanks again for tuning in. I hope you enjoy it. Unless you're up straight into strategy number one. So strategy number one that I want to talk about is what I like to call trend hopping. It's the strategy I adopted when I first started shipping four years ago now. So I'm going to take you through the pros and cons to help you decide whether this is sounds like a business or a strategy that you'd like to follow. And then we'll move on to the second strategy that I also see most commonly used. So trend hopping, what this basically is is you pick products depending on what the current trend is and you sell these because they're strong and in demand. They are trends at some points, they spike in popularity and at some points they come down in popularity. To give you an example then here in the UK during winter time it's dark till about seven o'clock in the morning and then it gets dark at about four p.m. So people who work a nine to five job they're forced to commute to work in the dark. They're forced to walk their dogs in the dark because they have to do it before or after work when it's dark. So products such as LED lights, spike in popularity whether it's a dog light or a bike light because there's naturally a higher demand for products like this. Whereas when we move into summertime, when it's light at like six in the morning and it's light till like nine o'clock at night then obviously people can do most things in the light. There's no need for LED lights so those sorts of products would then be at the very bottom of their popularity. And I'll put some screenshots up as I explain this just to kind of illustrate the point I'm trying to make. So if you're looking for the easiest or fastest way possible then to see those initial results then trend hopping is definitely the way to go in my opinion. If there's a natural demand for your particular products there's naturally gonna be more people looking to buy your products and therefore it's gonna be a lot easier to find those people and target those people when it comes to running ads and therefore you've got higher charts and an easier charts of seeing those initial results. Which brings me onto the pros then. We've already actually covered the first pro which is faster results. The second pro I want to mention is a smaller financial commitment. So if you're just gonna be trend hopping not necessarily building a brand then there's a lot less things that you have to worry about or do to a higher standard in order to see them results. If there's loads and loads of people looking for a particular product then you can get away with less quality. You can get away with your products not being branded because there's so much demand for it. And if you don't have to do those things then these are all expenses that you can save on your bottom line. So you can actually adopt the drop shipping model because you don't need to pay for X amount of units to be branded. If you're selling in demand and really popular products, the charters are there's a great supply of them too which means there's lots of different suppliers that sell them which means when it comes to sourcing things like content for your ads or content for your posts then the content is already readily available online which means you don't have to invest in a videographer to video and ad and so on and so forth. As I've mentioned you can adopt the drop shipping module which means it's faster to scale as well. What I mean by that is that if you're drop shipping then your supplier pretty much takes care of the whole keeping the product in stock kind of thing. They have to worry about placing the order or manufacturing them depending on who you're working with. And the only thing you have to focus on is scaling your business. All you have to do is sell them and let your supplier deal and worry about keeping them on their stock so they can supply to you. The worry they will have if you start doing some significant volumes is that if they run out of stock you will move on to a different supplier and they'll lose your business. So that responsibility then becomes on them and it's in their own interest to keep up with your demand and keep the products on their shelves. And the only limiting factor really when it comes to scaling the drop shipping business is how much cash you have and worrying about cash flowing your business. The more money you have to put into more ads and obviously make sure you can fulfill your orders then it pretty much is limitless obviously to some extent. Moving on to the cons then because it's important that you are aware of these before you make the decision to go into trend hopping because why it may sound like the easiest method there's definitely some cons you need to be aware of. So number one is it's less sustainable. Obviously if you're selling trending products at some point they're going to come down in popularity and what that means is going to be less people after less people looking for less people buying your products. So unless you have a product to actually replace those sales then your business could pretty much go to zero in the space of a couple of months. So if you're a complete beginner and you haven't sold for full 365 days in a year and you don't necessarily know what products sell and when then just something to keep in mind that just make sure you make the most of milk that product as much as possible because when the next season comes along or whatever it is then your business might not be doing or making as much money as you hoped it would. The next kind I want to cover is they're less profitable to some extent. It's kind of double edged it depends on how you set your business up. So if you are going to be trend hopping then obviously it's going to be really difficult to kind of build a brand around a business that sells lots of different types of products because at one point of year you're going to be marketing to say cyclists at the next point in the year you're going to be marketing to say dog owners and then gardeners and so on and so forth. So it's really hard to build up a different it's really hard to build up a solid kind of and loyal customer base and following on social media versus somebody who builds a brand from the very beginning and all of their followers everybody on that email marketing list is all going to be interested in the same products whereas if you're going to be trend hopping the chances are those products will vary from niche to niche which means the only traffic you'll get to the site or at least the majority of the traffic you get to your site will always come from running ads, paid ads. And obviously as long as you're paying for ads then that's going to affect your bottom line and therefore it's going to be less profitable. If we burst this against the second method which is brand building there will come a point in time where you have so many followers across all of your socials and you'll have such a huge email marketing list that all you have to do is simply put out an email or put out a text or put out a post on your socials and you'll bring on such a significant drive and amount in traffic that you'll be able to sell out in a certain collection or certain products range or whatever it is. The flip side of this then like I mentioned it's kind of like a double edged answer is that if you progress from drop shipping into sourcing bulk and then of course this is going to make your profit margins a lot more healthier but if you do then you're the headache you have to be aware of because this is something that I suffered when I was new to it is that when you're selling trending products and you have them on a shelf somewhere physically whether that's in your garage or a fulfillment center as a product comes out of trend if you still have a thousand units left or something and it's six pallets worth then that's essentially six pallets worth of space that you need to have for the foreseeable until that product comes into trend again. Obviously if you're using a fulfillment center there usually gonna charge you per pallet per week or you have to rent a unit or space to keep them in and then you have to pay transportation costs as well if you don't have the means to do it yourself. Moving on to strategy number two we're gonna be talking about brand building and what this is essentially is regardless of what time of year it is whether it's light outside, dark outside then pretty much what people tend to do is they pick a niche they have a keen interest in themselves which then gives them many advantages. So the first couple of advantages when it comes to producing things like content when it comes to finding and sourcing products you know what a good product is you know what good quality is you know what's expected it comes easy writing captions on Instagram posts you know what people will find funny within a certain space. Let's give an example then I'm a keen golfer somebody could give me a golfing product and I could probably tell you within 60 seconds of handling it whether somebody could make a business out of it or not or I could give them a pretty good idea at least because I know golf, I know golfers I play a lot, I know the market relatively well quite naturally because of the amount of time and money I invest into it because I enjoy it. Moving into other pros then when it comes to building a brand from day one the first one I wanna talk about is being really profitable in the long run or they have the potential to be I touched on it slightly earlier on in the video that if you wanna start a golfing brand for example on selling golfing products and you spend the first two years that might sound quite extensive but if you spend the first two years building your socials and you can get to the point where you have five million followers across all platforms not only is that a significant amount of traffic you can drive to your site to drive sales but it's a significant amount of information too that you can get on your site for free you can use your pixel to kind of optimize and let Facebook learn pretty quickly or over time without having to spend money on ads testing who your ideal customer is who the people are buying you can then use that information to target a lot higher quality audiences and capitalize on that so in the long run typically they'll be more profitable because you have to pay for less ads because you'll build up a significant following plus the ads that you do run will be a higher quality they have a higher hit rate and therefore they'll be more profitable point number two is it's a lot more sustainable for the reasons I pretty much mentioned number three is lifestyle too if you build a brand in a particular space that you naturally have an interest in I think you'll find it, well you will find it a lot more enjoyable and it will also open up the door to a lot more opportunities there's so many people that I follow on Instagram or YouTube or whatever it is and they've built businesses from their passions and what leads to them then is if that just makes sense is so many different doors and opportunities open for them within the space that they certainly enjoy so for example there's this YouTube channel I watched pretty much from the very beginning they started called GM Golf they made really fun golfing videos that are really addictive they put out trip shots on Instagram and their social following grew really quickly and within 18 months of essentially I think they were working in a coffee shop or something just crazy like that within 18 months they were making videos with some of the world number one golfers like Broson to Shambo and putting out videos with them in a space of 18 months so by starting a brand in a space that you have a super and had a true passion for naturally you're gonna work harder on it you're gonna put more effort into it because you find the work interesting and enjoyable and plus the opportunities and doors that will open for you as well I think will pay dividends Moving on to the concept of actually building a brand because from what I've just been through with it being more profitable and having kind of life changing opportunities it can sound quite attractive but it's important that you have realistic expectations when it gets into actually building a brand and the biggest one which I think that people will probably struggle with is the time it takes you cannot build a brand overnight unless you have serious cash and when I say serious cash I mean the means to pay an influencer to promote you or shout you out so for example if you're starting a cosmetics brand and you have the means to pay Kim Kardashian to shout out your brand and essentially she's built your brand overnight off the back of the following which she has built through Instagram and other other channels and if you don't have the means to do this then unfortunately you have to do it the organic way which is just being consistent with the content you put out across social medias becoming a strategist when it comes to things like the right hashtags the types of content and being really tuned in to what is the most effective way and the more effective you can be in the content you put out then the faster you will build your following and just build it up and up and up over time and eventually it'll be like a domino effect and you'll get to the point where you have such a large following and such a big community that you only have to post or mention a particular product and you'll naturally get traffic to your site to your store and because of it try and put a timescale on it then it's really difficult to do because social media can be really weird and wonderful so some videos I put out for example on YouTube will just kind of go dead and get hardly any views some will get more views than I ever imagined so it's really impossible just it can be luck to some extent but if you do decide to go down this method then I wouldn't expect to make a penny at least for the first 12 months just spend those 12 months doing everything prim and proper to the highest quality that you possibly can always building your socials in the background so when you do say what you can also do is actually use that time to save up a bit of money to invest into marketing to speed the process up because ultimately brands are built by people knowing about you and to do that you have to put your brand in front of as many people as possible and you can do that organically by constantly posting and building it up that way or of course you can run ads to put your brand in front of people as well the second biggest con as well when it comes to brand building is they're more expensive if you want to build a proper brand then your products have to be labeled this introduces the added expense of designers introduces the added expense of manufacturing and sampling and things like that that also then brings on the added time required versus just drop shipping of products that's already on a shelf somewhere in China when it comes to things like creating content if you again if you wanna build a professional and proper brand you can be reposting content from other brands all the time you need to invest in your own content creators or do it yourself, invest in really good kind of video editing software or photo editing software what leads to more time invested into learning how to use them or paying somebody to do it for you so when it comes to building a brand there's more time involved and there's more money involved and when it comes to creating content for your ad then again you have to pay an influencer to do it it just has to be original content you can only get so far by reposting and using other people's content if you wanna build a proper substantial brand that's sustainable and can provide you a wealth for many years to come then you have to do it professionally and to do things professionally takes time and it takes money and with that being said then guys I'm gonna wrap the video up there I could talk about this for hours and hours and hours I've considered creating a podcast for those people who like to listen for longer where I can perhaps delve a bit deeper into questions like this people can submit their questions and I'll get different people on just to kind of discuss them just an idea and play with it anyway again I'm rambling on but thanks for watching I really do hope you enjoyed the video don't forget to comment, like and subscribe and one final thing then before you go if you're looking to kind of take the headache out of creating an e-commerce business and you wanna learn from somebody with experience and get access to that person to ask some questions check out my E-Com Academy it comes with all of those things everything directly is from me so if you enjoy my content then I'm sure you'll enjoy the E-Com Academy too there'll be a link down in the video description for you to check out the information there's a callback service too so you can speak to me directly ask me any questions you have about joining before you make that decision before you make that investment so thanks again for watching like I said I really hope you enjoy these videos and I'll see you in the next one