 how to start a UK Shopify dropshipping business step by step. Shopify is one of the best e-commerce platforms to host our dropshipping business on and the UK is a great market to target. We're going to go over all of that in this video and how to do it the right way step by step to create a successful and high selling dropshipping store on Shopify UK. Quick intro and let's go. Welcome back to learning how to create a successful dropshipping store on Shopify UK. I'm Liran the content manager here at AutoDS and if you haven't done so yet subscribe to our YouTube channel to always stay updated on all of the latest and all of the hottest topics coming out in the world of dropshipping. That being said, let's go ahead and jump straight into the action. Shopify UK dropshipping. For those of you who have no idea what these terms mean or if you do have an idea but you don't know how to get started, do not go anywhere. Everything that I'm going over in this video, we also have a blog article about it which I'll leave a link to right below this video in the description, but do stay tuned here because I always like to throw in lots more bonus content into these videos. So how do we actually start dropshipping on Shopify UK whether you know what it means or not? Let's go ahead. First of all, I want you to take a look at this graph showing UK's e-commerce industry how many sales the UK market is closing in every year. So as you see here, the numbers are growing and what we're seeing here is in the billions and the biggest jump came from 2016 and moving forward from there. As you can see, UK's e-commerce market sold almost $510 billion, one year later $582 billion and the next year $677.8 billion. Just look at that leap and 2019 $693 billion. And of course we're missing a couple years of data, but this is just this graph. You can of course research your own graph on Google and get a more recent one, but that just shows you a small indication of how the e-commerce market is rising year by year in every market that I have checked worldwide, the ones that we dropship on to and from, but UK specifically as you can see. So what is Shopify dropshipping and how does it work in the UK? There are so many questions that people are asking like how does it work with tax and VAT and what are my obligations and do I need to register a business and how do I start? This is exactly what we are going to go over. So what is Shopify dropshipping and how does it work in the UK? For those of you who have no idea what it is. So dropshipping is a business model that simply allows you to have an online store and sell products without actually holding them in stock. You are listing products that you have on your dropshipping suppliers websites. You simply import them to your own dropshipping stores. And when a customer buys a product from your store, you go to the suppliers website, you purchase that product and you ship it directly to the end customer. This is a very basic example of how the dropshipping business model works. And that is why it comes with a low investment and high reward business model. This is why a lot of people try to acquire this business model. But on the other hand, many don't know how to start, they don't have the right knowledge and tools, and they find themselves in a downward spiral to failure because running a business, even if it's a low risk and high reward business model, it is still a business and you still need to know how to do it the right way. So now that we have a basic overview of how the dropshipping business model works, you can dropship from anywhere to anywhere, no matter where you live. So even if, for example, you live in Australia and you want to dropship to the UK market, you can definitely do that. And you can do it from once again anywhere around the world from and to anywhere. So that is one thing that we love about the dropshipping business model. Of course, you can do it from anywhere around the world and you are not restricted to a certain location, not for running your stores and not from where you choose to work. UK dropshipping tax obligations is the first issue that we're going to tackle here because this is one of the most important questions that people have a lot of hard time getting to understand how this actually works. So there are three tax obligations that you need to be aware of. The first is income tax. The second is VAT. And the third is customs duty. Let's go over them. First, you've got income tax. Now, income tax is something that you have to pay no matter where you live around the world. I mean, there are some countries that don't require you to pay income tax, but those are very, very specific countries. Most governments around the world want to collect money every time you make an income. And in the UK, your income tax can range from anywhere between 0% to 45% depending on how much money you are making every month from your stores. So of course, there's a certain limit for that 0%. And then it starts climbing up and up. The more you make, the more the government's going to take from you. And because I don't know where you live, this is where you need to speak with a local accountant to understand what income tax you're going to pay if you make this much, if you make this much, and if you make this much, know your income tax. This will help you get a good understanding of how much you're actually profiting at the end of the month. Now, besides that, we also have that. And this is something that you need to know when you want to dropship to the UK. Now, once again, if you want to dropship to the UK or to any other market around the world, it doesn't matter where you live, but you still need to be aware with how that works and how customs duties works because that applies to the UK audience that applies to anyone who wants to sell to the UK market. So in terms of that, the usual charge is around 20% of the customer's purchase price. So for example, if you're dropshipping on other platforms like eBay, eBay automatically charges the customer for that tax, which gets paid to you as the seller, and then eBay deducted it from you as the seller. So it's completely automated, and you don't have to worry about it. But when you're dropshipping in other places like Shopify, you will have to collect that tax, and you'll need to pay it to the UK government. Now, the way that that works, you have all the information on the UK government's website, but that is basically how it works. And that is what you need to know. And when you're dropshipping on Shopify, you can also automatically collect sales tax when you are dropshipping to places like UK, you have that option on the Shopify dashboard inside your store's settings. But we're not going to get into that now. You can see the screenshot right here of my Shopify dashboard. This is actually the products page. And we're going to get to all of that soon. Next in line is customs duties. For more information on how that works, when to collect it, and how to register for that in the UK, I'm going to drop a link to the UK government's website to a webpage showing you all the information that you need to know about that, as you can see right here. So the link will be right below this video. So go ahead and read that, get a good understanding of your vet obligations after my general explanation, which would give you a good idea of how that works. Now let's talk about customs duties. Now this is relevant to you when you are importing goods from outside the UK into the UK. Now if these products cost more than 135 pounds, now remember guys, these numbers may change from time to time. But while I'm recording this video, this is the number. So if your goods do not exceed 135 pounds that you are importing into the UK, you don't have to worry about customs duties. But if they are over 135 pounds, then you will have to pay the delivery service, the customs duties taxes as soon as the product lands in the UK. Now this can be paid for either by the seller or the buyer. So it's up to you to decide who is going to pay customs duties, and that is going to be written in your policy page on top of your website, or on the footer part of your website, wherever you want it, as long as it's written so that the buyer won't miss it, and that you will of course back yourself up in case there is a misunderstanding. Of course buyers would prefer that you the seller will pay for customs duties. So know what products you have listed in your store that are going to exceed 135 pounds that you are importing from outside the UK into the UK, and then decide who's going to pay for the customs duties and make sure your buyers know that through your legal pages. Now do you need to start a company in the UK? This is the next question that many people ask. Now of course I'm going through all of the hard questions first, and then I'll show you guys how you can create your own Shopify store in the UK, and we're going to go over everything, audience targeting, product research, how to start your store, how to create it, how to go about it, and all of the steps that have to go with it, along with marketing, and all of the tools that you will need. So do you need to start a company in the UK? The answer to that is yes, if you live inside the UK, and if you don't live in the UK, then once again, you want to speak to a local accountant and ask them how it works for you in the country that you reside in if you want to sell goods to the UK. But once again, if you live in the UK, or if you live pretty much anywhere around the world, you do have to register for a business once you start making income. Now in the UK, you have three options. If you reside there, you can start as a sole trader, which is what most shopkeepers do in the beginning, and you've also got the option to be a limited company, which gives you a better tax relief. But this is good once you already have lots of sales when your stores are already up and running, and when you're making sales, you're making profit and you're ready to pay less taxes. Of course, more information on that on the UK Gov website is Shopify dropshipping profitable in the UK. Before people start something, they usually want to know if it's profitable, if it's worth their time in the first place. And from our experience, the United Kingdom is a huge market with so much potential. Now, of course, we're also dropshipping to the UK and not just there. And it is definitely a market that has low competition, at least low compared to other places like the United States. And we've also got lots of high demands on UK. So the UK is a buyer's market, and it's growing year by year. More people are spending money, and more people are spending money online. You've also got a lot of domestic suppliers inside the UK. And what that means is you'll be able to ship products from and to the UK, meaning your shipping and delivery times are going to be extremely low, which means more happy customers, more returning customers, and a good and healthy business. Let's go over the pros and cons of dropshipping on Shopify. Starting with the pros, you have full customization options for your website, you can create everything from the ground up and really build your brand around your store. So get your brand known and have a good professional online store. Now, for those of you who are thinking, how can I brand my store with a dropshipping business model? Of course, you can. By the way that your store looks, your product doesn't have to be branded. The product's packaging doesn't have to be branded. But as long as you have a branded store with, of course, a brand theme and a design and a good layout, all of that will feed into the customer's brain and get them to identify with your brand, meaning they will have more confidence to go ahead with the checkout process and purchase from your store. So it's a fully customizable platform where you can host your online website where you can create it from the ground up with even having your own domain name. So you're going to have your own www.yourstorename.com and you're going to dropship from and to the UK on this fully customized website. Even if you have no coding skills and you haven't done anything like this before, you really don't have to. That is why you have Shopify that gives you a very friendly user interface that you can use to create your store from the ground up. So fully customizable website is one of the biggest pros that we have on Shopify. Next, you have no selling limits. So when you compare that to other marketplaces, for example, eBay, there when you start a new seller account, they'll allow you to list anywhere between three to 10 items in the beginning, which simply isn't enough to get your business running from the ground up. Now, of course, you can succeed in other places like eBay, but there you're going to have to start really really slow. Whereas on Shopify, you can import 100 or even 1000 products on your first day and start selling. Nobody's telling you how much you can list and nobody's limiting you to how much you can sell. The third pro on Shopify is that you can collect all of your customers data. Now, this is really really important in a huge advantage when you compare to other marketplaces like eBay, Facebook marketplace and so forth, because when customers want to give you their email addresses, they can't really do it in those platforms. Only those companies receive the customer's email addresses. So Facebook will acquire their email addresses, eBay will acquire your buyer's email addresses, but you're not going to have them. Now, in other places like Shopify, you will collect their email addresses, meaning the customer is now yours. If you have someone who was interested in your website, or even better someone who purchased from your website, they also leave you with their email address and you can use that email address to send email marketing promotions later on. Now, of course, this is effective once you have a huge database of emails, it can be anywhere from 500 to a couple thousand and up. It really depends on how engaged they are with your company. But at the end of the day, this is a great way to send email marketing promotions and not have to pay other service providers to bring traffic to your website. Now, in an optimal situation, you want to have a little bit of everything you want to go with email marketing, you want to run PPC ads, you want to go with influencer marketing, you want to have a mix of sources that can bring traffic to your website. And email is one of the best ways because once you have an email database list, you don't have to pay anyone to send out emails and promotions to your customers, and you'll get more sales to your store without having to spend a dime more. Some of the cons of dropshipping on Shopify, you have no organic traffic. Now, this means that once your store is up and running, nobody knows that it exists. So no matter how hard you worked on product research, no matter how hard you worked on getting your store looking really good, really professional, it won't matter much if nobody actually knows that it exists. And that is why you need to market your store. And I just talked about this. So you have email marketing campaigns, PPC ads, meaning pay per click ads, like you can run PPC ads on Facebook, YouTube, Google, and so forth. And you've also got influencer marketing. These are the top three marketing solutions that you have available today. But those are definitely my top three marketing strategies. The second con is that there are subscription fees after your free trial. So when you just had your 14 day free trial, you didn't have enough time to create your store because you simply signed up to Shopify way too early before you even began product research and audience research and all of that, you sign up to Shopify, you didn't do nothing with your store, or you did a little bit 14 days later, your trial is now over and you can't even continue customizing your store. Even if it's not even open to the public, you cannot log into your store after 14 days. Now this is a con because many people sign up to Shopify's 14 day trial. And like I mentioned, they don't start working on their store, at least not for a few days or a week. And then they simply do not have enough time to create their store the right way before having to pay Shopify a monthly subscription starting at $29 per month before their store is even created before anyone even knows that their store exists. This is not practical for many people who want to start with a low budget, low investment, high reward business model. And that is why you need to sign up only after you did your product research, only after you did your audience research, only after you know how you want your store to look. And once you're actually ready to create it and start importing products to it and don't sign up for your trial way way before that because simply once again, you will not have time to work on your store and you'll have to pay Shopify a monthly subscription before you're even half ready. The third con is that there are transaction costs, there are transaction fees and this is right in every selling platform. When you make a sale on a platform that's allowing you to host their e-commerce platform on there, they're also going to want a little bit from your profits. So this is right for any other selling platform like eBay, Wix, WooCommerce, Amazon, anywhere else that you want to sell you will have to pay transaction fees and that of course applies also to Shopify. So there are transaction fees, they differ, it can go from 11%, sometimes even 15%, sometimes a little bit less but those are the transaction fees that you need to be aware of before you learn how to price your products, you need to know what your break even is. So now that we know a little bit about the legal issues about running a Shopify store, what your obligations are and we answered some of the toughest questions that people ask before or while they're interested in creating a dropshipping business or an e-commerce business in the United Kingdom. Now let's talk about the best Shopify suppliers inside the United Kingdom and once again the reason that I am focusing on inside the United Kingdom is because I want you to ship your products quickly to your buyers. I don't want you to shop from AliExpress and ship products from China to the UK. I'm not saying it doesn't work but most buyers today do not have the patience to wait two, three, four weeks to receive their item and we don't want the headache of returns, items not received cases and customers who simply have no patience whatsoever to wait more than a few days. We want happy customers, we want satisfied customers, that is going to bring them to purchase from our stores again and not only that but they'll also refer their friends and their family to purchase from your store. This is something that we want, that is why we want to have very fast shipping times and that is why we're going to focus on suppliers who are inside the United Kingdom. So we ship from into the UK and we have satisfied customers, more sales, more profits who are some of the best Shopify UK suppliers. For that we also have an article on dropshipping suppliers inside the UK and some of the best from this list and before I started keep in mind some of them are retail dropshipping suppliers and other are wholesale dropshipping suppliers. For those of you who want to understand the difference, retail dropshipping suppliers like AliExpress might not always support the dropshipping business model. Now they do support dropshipping but not from one marketplace to another. Does that mean that it's impossible to do it? No, but there are restrictions that come along with it and you'll have to know how to have some by your account so that if one gets locked you'll still have the others to rely on. So there are things that you need to know before starting with retail suppliers. Once again it doesn't mean that it's impossible but you do need to know your way around. Here are some of the best dropshipping suppliers in the UK. Amazon, AliExpress, Banggood, Wayfair, Costway, VidaExcel, CJDropshipping, eBay, GoDropship, AWDropship and Princeify. Now the last three, GoDropship, AWDropship and Princeify have warehouses in the UK but we do not support them here at AutoDS but the rest are supported in AutoDS and of course there are much more UK suppliers than this but if you want to be able to scale your business with dropshipping automation this is really the only way to really be able to scale and make it to high profits at the end of the day, week, month and year is to automate your business. That way you can get price monitoring, stock monitoring so if the prices or the stock ever changes on your suppliers websites it'll also change accordingly in your store so this way if you have thousands of products in your store you won't have to go to all of your suppliers websites every day and see if there's any changes on the products there. So price and stock monitoring done automatically and quick product importing. You can import one, tens, hundreds or even thousands of products from your dropshipping suppliers to your Shopify UK dropshipping stores all in a matter of seconds, not minutes, not hours and definitely not days and weeks that will take you when you're doing it manually. So AutoDS supports all of the suppliers that you see up here and these suppliers all have warehouses inside the United Kingdom and that is the important thing here. So let's say you don't want to go with a retail supplier because you don't have any experience with it yet you want to go for a wholesale supplier so you'll go with someone like Banggood or CJ Dropshipping. So CJ Dropshipping have warehouses inside the United Kingdom. So here I am on CJ Dropshipping's website. All I'm going to do now is hover over warehouses here on the top and scroll down to Britain Warehouse. Now I'm seeing all of the products being stored inside warehouses in Britain meaning it's going to ship really quickly to the United Kingdom. Let's just take this laptop stand right here for as an example so I'm going to click on it enter the product listing and let's see how fast this product can ship out to customers in the United Kingdom. So as we can see here this great looking adjustable stand costs $22 you can sell this anywhere around $39, $49 it really depends on the quality of the product but that is how to drop ship these items. Of course you want to conduct your product research we're going to talk about that soon. But anyway this product cost $22 it comes with free shipping let's see how fast it ships out. Here on the right side on the shipping from instead of the US warehouse we're going to change that to Britain Warehouse. Now I can see that they have 500 pieces inside their inventory and the shipping too I'm also going to change that to the United Kingdom. And as you can see here we've got three different shipping methods all of them have free shipping and as you can see they will all arrive to your buyers within one to three days. This is what your UK buyers are looking for and this is how you're going to get them to be super satisfied with their purchases. So you suppliers that are from the United Kingdom and we also have a drop shipping suppliers as I mentioned a drop shipping UK suppliers article which I will leave a link to right below this video so that you'll have a much more in-depth review of who are the best suppliers to use for your UK drop shipping store. Now before choosing what suppliers to work with make sure that they have warehouses inside the United Kingdom I went over that enough and that they have fast shipping times it usually should come together UK warehouses should come with fast shipping you want suppliers that have a wide product catalog the more products you have a reach to the higher chance you'll have of making more sales and you want to go with suppliers that give outstanding customer service that way you can give the same amount of outstanding customer service to your own buyers if your UK supplier allows you to return your items within 30 days no questions ask like Amazon for example you can offer the same terms and services to your buyers so you will also give your buyers a 30 day no questions asked return window and last but not least you want to have clear business policies you want to make sure that you know exactly what happens if your customer has a problem with the product you want to know what your supplier can offer you here for example we just talked about 30 days no questions ask returns that is a great option to have on your stores you also want to look for suppliers like we said that have fast shipping times and that will also go inside their business policies what about their terms of payment is it comfortable working with a supplier do they have multiple payment options or can you only pay them by credit card which for some people it's not very very practical so make sure that your supplier is practical and has clear business policies now let's get to the good stuff how do we start a Shopify business in the United Kingdom now first things first you'd want to think first I need to register to Shopify but that is not the first step and I already spoke about it in this video you don't want to start your trial just yet first you want to get your audience and your product research down before you can even think about registering to Shopify because you're not even sure what you're going to do with your store yet so the first step is to find your niche we're going to go over all of these steps the second one is to set up your Shopify UK store so actually setting up your store the third step is choosing your UK Shopify drop shipping supplier the suppliers that we just spoke about for example the fourth step is to import your products because you're done researching your products you know what you want to sell you know which suppliers you want to sell them from you want to get those items and sell them on your store now it's time to import those products to your store step number five is to market your store now that you imported them to your store like I mentioned before nobody knows that your store exists now it's time to get your store your brand your products in front of their faces so that they can go ahead and buy and you will make your profit as a drop shipper step number six is to fulfill your orders now that you're making sales you need to fulfill those orders and make sure that those packages reach your customers as fast as possible step number seven customer success once you make sales products start getting sent out to your buyers some of them will have something to say when their products arrive some will have something good to say about it and the few one to three percent may even want to return the product and we'll also need to deal with them we want to offer the best customer service that we can to our buyers it's more important than making another sale and it's more important than making another profit instead of losing just a small bit of profit every now and then so that we can have more happy customers more returning customers and more customers referring our store to their friends and families now I'm not saying start losing profits but sometimes now and then in extreme cases it's better to go in that direction than to fight our customers and give them bad customer service whether they are right or wrong in that situation if you want to make it in the long term and if you want your business to survive in the long run you want to offer the best customer service that you can listen to your customers read their messages reply and resolve all of your open cases step number eight scale your success your drop streaming business is now running it's thriving you're making sales it's time to learn how to scale it because once you learn to make one dollar or once you learn how to make five or ten dollars the next step is for you to scale that success scale the right way and of course we're going to go over all of those steps so let's begin step number one find your niche my recommendation is to go for a niche that you actually have a passion for so you want to start off by thinking about things that you actually can connect with if you have no idea go to drop shipping suppliers websites open up their categories filter by results with the highest reviews see what products are best selling see what products customers have positive things to say about them and slowly and surely you will find a niche that you like you will find a category that you actually connect with now don't go for something that you don't like don't go for something that bores you because you want to stay focused you want to stay in the game and you want to be able to sell those products at the end of the day so go to suppliers website check out their best sellers check out new releases check out what's trending right now a great way to do that by the way is to head over to the Ali Express drop shipping center which is free for all drop shippers or simply by heading over to amazon.com clicking on best sellers or movies and shakers and see what's trending right now look for something that actually looks pretty interesting to you and if you are an autodesk member you can also use our internal product research tool to simply get product ideas and once you go through an idea that actually looks pretty good to you what you want to do next is add it to the product research drop shipping spreadsheet this is what the spreadsheet looks like and what you want to do here is add those products that you have a connection with that you like that you wouldn't mind having a store filled only with these products and you will be successful in selling them because you actually have your own interest in them so what you want to do here is fill in the product's name fill in the source url and then answer these questions are you passionate about this product is it hard to find in stores is it hard to guess the price of this product is it safe to sell can it be bought without the customer doing much research does the product solve a problem or stand out does it cost less than 30 and does it comply with facebook's ad policies even if you don't want to sell on facebook or if you don't want to run facebook ads for your products you still want to learn about their policies because they are very relevant for what you can and cannot do when you are trying to market your stores now once you fill in this whole list with product sources and you answer all of the questions the ones that have yes to all of them are the product with the highest potential to sell on your stores and this will help you narrow down the right product for your stores so once again this product research drop shipping spreadsheet will be linked right below this video and all that you need to do is click on file make a copy and start working on your own copy do your product research narrow them down and find your best sellers now besides checking out places like the autodesk product research tool or the Ali express drop shipping center or amazon uk's movers and shakers by the way links to all of them right below this video you also have cool extensions like the koala inspector that easily allows you to track other Shopify websites and see what they are doing what they are selling what apps they are using when they added their products what selling world for them learn from the best practices of your competitors and implement similar business practices in your own website now once again it is not a copy and paste game if you copy and paste what other people are doing you will have less success than the ones who did it before you but if you run your own game and you do it your own way with your own unique style with products that are similar to them but not exactly the same or exactly the same but a different funnel strategy a different target audience and many other ways to differentiate yourself from the competition you definitely can get a lot of insights from extensions like koala inspector which is free to try out and once again here's just a screenshot of the autodesk product research tool where you can find many many examples of products that can sell well for your store you also have product reviews you can click on the product to get more information about it and the best part is you can import them to your store by simply hovering over the product and clicking on import to store so it can make everything much much easier for you but we're going to talk about autodesk and automation soon now that you are done with product research you can move on to step number two setting up your Shopify store here are the steps that come along with it create a Shopify account generating a good business name connecting your domain and by the way guys this is the same order that you have to do it in to keep a healthy and good structure for your store after you connect your own domain name you're going to design a Shopify store logo to start with the branding process then you're going to get a Shopify store template to continue building your store and keeping it around your brand then you're going to optimize your product pages and that of course is after you import your products from your suppliers to your stores i'm going to show you all of these things i'm just summarizing it really quick then you're going to set up a professional Shopify homepage because after the buyer sees your product page because you targeted your ad to the product page they're probably going to also click on your homepage and see what else you have to sell then you want to create your store policies and legal pages so what are your shipping terms what are your payment terms what are your return policies what are your terms of service you can even add a frequently asked questions page and more so the store policies and legal pages may be a little bit boring but it's something that you have to get done then you want to add the Shopify navigation menu you want to make sure that you have links linking to your pages linking to your legal pages linking to your product pages in your navigation menu up top on the side on the bottom wherever you want it just make sure that the links are visible to your buyers then you want to select the Shopify store currency and payment provider so you want your buyers to see in this example the great britain pound currency on your Shopify UK website and you want them to have a reliable payment provider and more specifically go for a payment provider that provides a large number of payment options the more you have the better because this way you'll be able to make more sales from UK customers looking for a specific payment method that they like to use and last but not least you're going to configure the Shopify checkout settings and shipping zones so of course how you're going to pay Shopify for all the subscriptions and all of that the checkout settings is what the customer has to go through when they're trying to check out on your website for example do they have to create a full account or can they just check out as a guest and more options similar to that and you've got your shipping zones so who can actually check out on my website people who live where so in this example we're going to create a shipping zone in the United Kingdom meaning anyone in that location will have the option to check out on our website but if you have someone for example from New Zealand going to your Shopify UK website and you don't want to ship to them so you didn't create a shipping zone to them they can still view your website but they will not be able to check out so that is what the shipping zones is let's take it from the top step number one create a Shopify account for that start your 14 day free trial you also have a link to it in the blog article below this video and simply remember do not do this until you are done with product research until this form is filled out with all of the products that you want to sell and you know which suppliers you're going to use which we also talked about and you're going to grab those products from those suppliers once you have all of that done you're going to sign up for your 14 day free trial the next step is to generate your business name now we have a free business name generator once again linked in the article below this video that you can use that will help you generate a good business name here's what it looks like and all you have to do is think about what you want to sell so for example if you decided that you want to go for the pets niche then you're going to go with a name like pet shop click on get started and see what types of ideas and what types of names you can generate with that so here you've got examples like advanced pet rough pet lavish pet ideal pet secure pet nifty pet and so much more and what's more is that it's also going to check for domain name availability so it's going to check if you can have your own www that the name that we thought for you dot com for example let's go with waggly pet right here so i'm going to click on that and let's see where we have a domain name so we already have someone who created a waggly pet dot com but we don't really care because in this case we can create a dot uk website a dot co dot uk so you've got this one right here for example that's available to register as a domain name waggly pet dot co that can also work so that's a good example of how to think of a good name for your business how to generate it and then connect it to a domain and that brings you to your third step connect your domain once you have your business name you know what your domain is going to be and on Shopify it's very simple to connect your domain to your you have a screenshot right here that I took from my Shopify dashboard so I connected doggydogclub.com inside Shopify under the domains option to get there on your Shopify dashboard simply click on settings below and then hover over domains and here's what you saw from that screenshot so the name of the store when I registered it was pet shop discounts dot my Shopify.com and then I used the business name generator to get to doggydogclub.com I bought that domain and that is my store's name now of course you have all the information how to do that in the blog article I'm simply jumping through it in this video to give you a more visualized explanation of how to get things done but much more information in the blog article below this video the next step is to design a Shopify store logo and for that you have a great website called Hatchful which is a part of Shopify and here you can create a very good looking logo for your store in a matter of minutes I won't show you the example now but it's very easy to get started simply go to their website linked once again in the blog article below this video click on get started start filling in the information and they will generate a fast and good-looking logo for you that you can also use as your header image as your favicon image as a logo and so much more they're simply going to send you a folder of your logo and it's uniquely made just for you and it's simply one of the best places to create a logo absolutely for free and absolutely unique you will have a logo that not anyone else has of course after you customize it a little bit through their website then you want to optimize your product pages now of course this comes after you import your products to your store so let me show you actually how that works what you want to do first is finding a product to sell so in this example i'm just going to jump to a quick product i'm going to search for dog bowl and don't mind me being at amazon.com you can be at amazon.co.uk of course but because my store is currently in the us you're going to see the same options the same menus just pretend that it is in the uk okay otherwise besides that it's exactly the same Shopify's menu is also almost 100 identical between the us and the uk domain so don't worry about any of that so let's say this dog bowl right here 25.99 let's say we did some product research and this is a product that we want to sell on our store now there are a few ways to import it to my store first of all you want to sign up at autodes.com and this is where the automation comes in once you sign up for autodes.com for just one dollar start your trial check it out see that you like it your first step will be to connect your Shopify store so on the left side you're going to click on your stores you're going to click on add store you're going to click on Shopify store and continue with the onboarding process so enter your store's url i'm not going to enter mine because it's already connected and the connection process is actually very simple and straightforward then you're going to click on add products now there are a few options here we can go with a single product importer and we can go with multiple products from multiple stores by entering all of the products urls and ids right here i'm just sending an example with a line break between each one or upload a csv file that you can easily import and export using the autodes helper chrome extension which is absolutely free to use when you're on the products page searching for a niche that you want to add to your store like let's say all these products i want to add them to my store i'm simply going to click on the extension click on extract then all the 52 products on this page just got extracted into the extension i'm going to click on export a csv a csv file was downloaded onto my computer now i'm simply going to head back to autodes and drop that csv file right here then it's going to add them all to the draft section of my store so that's another way to add multiple products and this way you can really add thousands of products at once and just a click of a button in this case let's go with the single product importer just to demonstrate the basics let's go back to that dog bowl and say i want to add only this dog bowl so i'm just going to copy the url up here then head back to the platform once again add products single product published to the right store so instead of ebay right now i'm on Shopify and paste that url right here make sure that the supplier source and region is correct then click on edit now quick now in just less than a second it grabbed all of the product's information from amazon and here i have it on the draft section of my store this is where i can optimize the product's title the collections the tags which was pretty much optimized for me what's shipping methods i want to use the items location stock monitoring price monitoring and more the product's description where i can add more details add images and completely optimize it to make it look better than whatever the supplier wrote on their website and the variations so all the variations that i had here these three variations we got black blue and brown we can see them right here black blue and brown each one with their own setting so i can click to edit one of the variants and then i've got the break even how much i'm profiting the source price my selling price and more product information and specifications then you've got the product's images which once again got imported all automatically from the supplier's website and item specifications some are automated and you can continue adding on more this is just some of the customization and optimization options that you have on your products where you can easily automate it from auto ts to your store when you're done simply click on save and import and it will import from the draft section to the product section of your store meaning now it is live in your store and anyone can go and purchase it so these are all the products that i have live in this Shopify store and right now it's working on importing that one product as you can see right here and that took even less than that it now is imported into the product section of my store and once i close that menu you can see it right here now just imagine how fast that is and how much time you can save when compared to going to Shopify's dashboard clicking on products and then clicking on add product and of course this is a way to just do it one by one i even showed you a bulk method where you can import even thousands of products within a couple of clicks and just one minute but here you're going to have to copy all of the product's information so i'm going to have to download all of these images one by one and upload it to Shopify copy the title go back paste it right here copy the description paste and just a whole lot of copying and pasting a whole lot of options to go through for just one product that is a waste of time and that is why i advise using dropshipping automation to import products to your store and save a lot of time doing so okay so we went a lot into the product importing and optimizing your product page your next step is to set up a professional Shopify homepage now for those of you who are saying that i'm running too fast i'm trying to keep this video under one hour which i think i failed to do but what i do suggest at this point is to head over not not at this point but after this video after you get a brief overview of how everything works it's time to start taking action and now you want to start taking all of the steps that i showed you but actually learn and take action learn take action learn take action and keep doing that until you start succeeding what you need to do is head over to auto DS's website hover over resources click on dropshipping courses this is a free course do not worry you have a Shopify course there and over there you have almost 40 videos on how to start a Shopify dropshipping store everything that i'm going over in this video so you have a basic explanation of dropshipping and then how to find the best products to sell starting with the six criteria for choosing a good product how to spy unsuccessful Shopify stores how to pick the best suppliers secret methods to finding the best dropshipping products narrowing down your winning products and then Shopify creating your account naming your business connecting your domain creating a store logo selecting a theme connecting with auto DS to start automation importing products optimizing your product page to convert create a professional homepage store policies and legal pages setting up the navigation menu store currency payment provider checkout settings shipping zones going live and then one of the most interesting parts if you ask me is online marketing and in this course you're going to learn from a to z how to create successful Facebook ads for your store now even if you have no online marketing experience yet and you don't have so much of a budget i even show you a five dollar a day ad strategy that won't take much from your pocket but will give you a lot of analytics and a b testing to see what ads are working and start to scale your way up from there there is no way to do it without starting by testing in the beginning and here you're going to learn how to set up your Facebook page create a Facebook ads account install the Facebook pixel conduct audience research to know who to target and that is where this spreadsheet is going to come in very very handy where you simply have to answer questions that have to do with the products that you chose that have to do with the audience that you're trying to reach and when you answer these questions you'll have answers to what types of audience you should be targeting on Facebook ads and that's another thing that you're going to learn from this free course after audience research you're going to learn how to create a video for your ad so if your supplier has a video that's great you can use that video but you can also edit that video and if they don't have a video then you can still create one and this course is going to teach you how to do that then you're going to learn how to set your campaign goals and how to set your ad sets how to launch your ad once everything is ready and how to analyze it after you launched it and scale your success you're also going to learn how to fulfill your orders now that they're going to start coming in how to manage your returns and refunds and a small 10 minute bonus lesson in the end you can practice all of these strategies manually or you can practice them automatically and really enjoy the benefits of scaling but either way all the information is here for you to use and for you to learn now back to our structure after you optimize your product pages of course after you import your products it's time to set up a professional homepage this is a very small example that took me only a few minutes to whip up but in that Shopify course that I just mentioned you're going to learn how to do it on your very own store and then you're going to learn how to include your store policies and legal pages which I just talked about now Shopify already has a template for that so it's easier to get started but the best part here is we have ready-made templates that you can use automatically for your store policies and legal pages all you have to do is click on the links in the blog article below this video right here you have about us FAQ shipping policy returns and refunds privacy policy and terms of service which is everything that you'll need for your legal pages for example the shipping policy let's just click on that you can simply copy this information and paste it on your Shopify pages and add that to your navigation menu all you need to do is change whatever is in the bracket with your own information because that is going to be unique like your website address or business name and so forth now do go over what it says they are usually not too long then you've got the checkout settings and shipping zones so like I talked about here is where you can tell Shopify what you want the customer to go through in the checkout process and my tip here is keep it simple don't make the buyer do more things that they than they actually have to because people want the checkout process to be smooth and quick and besides that you can also upload your own logo change colors fonts and more from the checkout style from how the visualization effect is going to look when they are checking out on your store and you've also got customer accounts so here you can decide if you want the customer to create an account and my advice here is to go with accounts or optional customers can create accounts or even check out as guests that's completely fine but don't make it required unless it's really important for you because some people simply do not want to create a full account right now they want to check out they want to give their credit card information and that's it they want to get an email confirmation that their order is on the way and of course tracking information once it's available so that they'll be able to track the progress of their shipments and send less messages to your inbox now remember one of the most important things to learn here is how to market your products once they're ready and I went over the marketing methods we talked about Facebook ads and you're going to learn how to do it step by step and see even the ads that I ran on my stores email marketing that I already talked about by gaining email subscriptions so use Shopify apps that will help you get your customers email addresses even if they don't buy anything from your website and these apps can offer promotions or anything else to get the customer to send you their email address and once you have a large database of email addresses you can start sending email promotion campaigns and not pay anyone for it because you can do it yourself and promote yourself for free once you worked hard to acquire that email subscription list then you've got influencer marketing and for more information on that we have an article on influencer marketing platforms here you're going to learn about platforms that simply have all of their influencers informations what audience they are targeting so you can check to see if the audience that you're looking for is the audience that they have as followers and of course more information like people who hire these influencers and left reviews to say if this influencer actually worked for them and more so for that simply head over to the blog page at autods.com slash blog or autods.com hover over resources and click on drop shipping blog and here you want to search for influencer then you have this article 10 influencer marketing platforms for finding and partnering with internet influencers you also have an embedded video inside and start reading on how you can find these influencers negotiate with them and hire them to create a shout out for your product or your brand and get it seen in front of your relevant target audience besides that you also have content marketing so here on Shopify you can also create a blog page and Shopify has this built-in tool that will allow you to run your own blog and what you want to do here is upload content write articles or hire a virtual assistant to do it for you or search for freelance writers on fiverr.com or upwork.com and get them to write content that's relevant to your niche so if you have a pet store for example then you can start writing articles and have it on your blog page on your store simply write blog articles about pets how to take care of them what's good for them what's healthy for them maybe pet food pet supplies and many other things what's going to happen here is when customers search for those things on google they're going to also see your blog of course if the content that you created is great and if the value there is good then it's going to rank well on google the better your content is the higher it's going to rank and people are going to get to your website organically this is another great marketing tool that doesn't cost a lot of money because you're not paying anyone for your blog page it's already on your website and people are getting to it automatically from google just like email marketing after they left you their email address doesn't cost money to send them an email so that's different from ppc ads or influencer marketing where you have to pay upfront to see results so content marketing through a blog page is another great tip to have to use on your Shopify dropshipping store and your next step is to start processing your orders now on autodesk it's going to be very very easy simply click on orders and all of the orders that you'll get on your Shopify store you'll also be able to see them here and here all that you need to do is click on the supplier's link so that you'll know what product you need to purchase purchase that product add it to your cart and in the checkout settings simply ship it to your end customer so you'll have your customers information on the orders details fill in their information exactly the same way that you have it coming in add that to your checkout settings just like you see it right here in the order details this is the shipping details on your supplier's website so of course you're not going to ship the products to your place you're going to ship it directly to your end customers with the information provided in the order details check out ship it to them and if you're using suppliers like aliexpress you can send a seller a message and ask him not to include any logos or branding on it or any receipts because it is a dropshipping order if you're dropshipping on amazon you have the gift option and you have similar options with other suppliers if you're using a supplier that you haven't used before you can simply send them a message and ask them if they can send out the package without any branding maybe a gift option like you have on amazon or many other options so negotiate with your suppliers contact them get to know them and this will give you another indication if that is a good supplier to use for your uk business once you order the product on auto ds switch the status from pending to ordered and here you can simply put the order id enter the buy order id that you're getting from your supplier and once it's shipped you can switch the status to ship now you can also enjoy automatic orders on auto ds meaning as soon as an order comes in you can have it processed and sent out automatically even while you're traveling even while you're sleeping even while you're vacationing everything can be automated for you so what you want to do in the settings in the plans and add-ons make sure that you have the orders processor enabled and then under buyer accounts you want to add your buyer account so click on add account in this example let's say you have an aliexpress buyer account fill in all of your aliexpress credentials right here and auto ds will log into your account every time you have an order automatically log into your account purchase the product using your payment methods that you have on aliexpress and it will simply purchase that product and change the order status accordingly so once it's ordered you'll see it in the ordered status it'll be shipped once you have tracking information available from your supplier auto ds will grab it automatically and add it to your Shopify store and the auto ds orders page and delivered once it's delivered to your customer so this will make your job much easier and much more scalable because you won't have to deal with the burden of checking out one by one for each and every order that you have another option to go about this is simply to hire a virtual assistant and virtual assistants can simply take care of your daily tasks whatever you want to delegate to them so once again in the settings in the plans and add-ons make sure that you have va users enabled once you do that add a user account for them under users here for example i have a va called frank and these are the privileges that he has let me open up the editor to make it more user friendly for your eyes so you have the va's name their email address the password that you created for them and privilege on all of your stores or a selected store or some selected stores and then what access you want to give them what privileges you want to give them for example do you want them to view your dashboard do you want them to be able to view and edit your products delete drafts view your orders and edit them what about on track listings can they list new products can they end your active products and view and edit and change your settings so if you don't know your va and you want to get to know them give them a few privileges at first and slowly loosen up that trust rope as you go along but before hiring a virtual assistant make sure that you know how your business works you cannot teach someone how to run your business or how to help run your business if you haven't done so yourself first and your last step is to scale your success with the help of dropshipping automation that is easily possible from what i already explained in this video price monitoring stock monitoring quick product importing and automatic orders goes a long way to helping you automate your business and only invest your time in not adding products and not editing your products and not taking care of customer service because you have virtual assistance for that you have automation for that but rather searching for new products to sell even though for that you also have automation but it's good to add in your own manual product research too and growing and scaling your business open up another store research another niche another category try another market try adding more products to the current market try adding more products to other markets there are many many things that you can do to scale your business it is never the end and what you have now is not as high as you can go i hope that this video helped you get a good understanding of how to run a Shopify business in the united kingdom with all of its advantages and just a few small disadvantages like any other market would have the uk is a great market to target today because of the low competition and the huge demands that we see in the united kingdom year by year which is growing and growing and growing exponentially thank you for watching this video do not forget to subscribe to our youtube channel to always learn about what to do with your dropshipping business how to scale how to succeed how to automate and how to do everything that comes along with it good luck with your Shopify UK business and thank you for watching