 Hello, everyone. My name is Liran from AutoDS. I'm the content manager and today I have a very special interview with a huge drop shipper that I know about. His name is Nick. You guys have so much to learn from this guy, whether you're in the beginning of your journey or you already got started and you're looking for some more pointers. This is the guy that you guys need to learn from. So let's get right to it, guys. One second before that, don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel to always stay updated on all of the latest and all of the hottest topics that we have coming out in the world of drop shipping. That being said, let's get right to the action. Nick, thanks for joining us today. How are you? And please tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, where you're from and how old you are. Yeah, absolutely. My name's Nick. I've been drop shipping now for the past two and a half years and it's been quite a journey but been a lot of fun and just excited every day to wake up and do this for a living. And how did you hear about e-commerce and drop shipping in general? I've been doing this now for over 20 years. I literally started off doing e-commerce back when you would go to like a Walmart and you would pick up products to sell online. I was always intrigued by it. I found eBay as a marketplace to sell on and I really kind of half and look back over the past two and a half years. It's been incredible joining up with AutoDS and being able to use the system that kind of integrates everything. It just really has kind of took off and has been absolutely incredible for not only myself but my family. So... Right, right. Nice. But let's take it back for a sec. You started with Walmart, so how did that go? Did you used to buy the products and then just flip them from your house and ship them or how would that work? Yeah, that's exactly what happened. So I used to go to the store, used to wake up early in the morning, had a few people here that I knew and would pick up different items that were selling well at the time, mainly in like the sporting figures and collectibles as far as sports cars and stuff like that. That's how I started out. Pretty interesting enough. I learned about the dropship and part of it. Actually, just pretty much through watching a bunch of videos of people making money and I was like, how do you go about doing it? And I just kind of picked up on some different things that I heard and we kind of made it our own system and turned it into what it is now between myself and my wife works very avidly at the business. It's been quite a journey but we've picked up a lot of big tips that I think a lot of people need to be doing. If they're not doing it right now, then they really need to start doing them and it's just about being consistent and having your systems in place, really. I know that you also have your own channel called The Dropship Family. We'll get to that soon. I wanted to ask a few more questions before that. I understand that you've been not dropshipping but selling on eBay for about 20 years now, which means you have a very well-seasoned seller account. About two and a half years ago, you started dropshipping on eBay. You were working on one certain strategy, which was buying the products and then listing them and then selling them and shipping them from your home. What actually made you want to make the transition from that to dropshipping? That's a great question. I saw it as an opportunity to not have to hold your own inventory, print your own shipping labels, work towards something that was more in line with something that you can just pick up from anywhere and be able to do. You don't have to worry about your stock prices as far as if something's going to change. Having a system in place that monitors everything is the avenue that I was going towards. I felt like you were really put into a box when you were going to the stores and handling your own inventory. It's endless. When you're dropshipping, you could sell anything that you can possibly think of for a profit as long as you're providing good service. I've been doing for all these 20 years. It's a lot about being responsive to the customers and it works. As long as you're putting the work into it, it definitely works. The big advantage from dropshipping to what you did before is just having a reach to so many more products that you don't have to pay for in advance to sell them and you can actually test the market much better to see what categories you're missing, maybe some things that you haven't heard of before. You can just test them right away, see if it works. If it doesn't delete it, try to sell something else from a different supplier from a different category and just keep going like that without having so much of an investment. I'm glad that you figured that out two and a half years ago. You could have figured it out also 10 years ago and it would have been a much, much different time. It was a huge gold mine. Today, I'm not saying that it's not today, but the way it was back then to how it is today is, of course, it's different. People need to be very cautious today when they're starting their new dropshipping seller accounts and we're always trying to help them with that. But you have so much experience under your belt and the next question I wanted to ask you was, since you're doing it for so long, today, is it a full-time job or is it still a side hustle? We're exactly replacing that today. Yeah, absolutely. It is full-time. The stores that we operate currently just on eBay, we're not doing any Amazon, no Shopify. Although I am looking into getting into Shopify, I know a lot of people are doing that now and are being very successful. That's another project that I'm working on. I feel like us dropshippers work on a lot of different projects where we can pick up on ways to make money. The biggest thing when you're getting started and if you're going to make it a full-time job, you can do it, but there's work that goes into it. You need to stay consistent. You need to stay up to date on policies and procedures through eBay or any marketplace. You've got to make sure you're staying compliant. You've got to make sure you're doing, if someone's sending you a question, you're responsive. You're always there. If you don't know an answer to something that maybe a customer of yours is asking regardless of what channel, you have resources that you can use. That could be reaching out to a rep over the phone and asking them. Pretty much, we've learned everything again through the YouTube videos that we've watched through calling in. It's myself and my wife. I mean, we run this full-time. My wife seems to do the day-to-day business when it comes to checking on the orders, the order status of things. If we have items that need to ship out within 24 hours, we're really responsive to our customers. eBay, in particular, where I'm selling out of, really picks up on that. They like that response time. You have to stay engaged. You have to stay engaged. I think that's definitely important. So staying engaged with your customers, taking responsibility. That's what this is all about. So when a customer is reaching out to you and you don't know the answer, like you said, don't leave them hanging. If you don't have the answer, try to look it up. Try to see if there's a YouTube video, maybe a blog article about it. If you still don't have the right answer, there's forums all around. There's also the AutoDS dropshipping community where we have dropshippers helping out all the time with questions like these. And like you said, if not, you can just give eBay a call. Let them know, hey, I'm trying to manage my business. I'm trying to take care of my customers, give them good service. There's this one customer that's telling me XYZ, how should I approach this? And eBay will appreciate you reaching out to them to help make things work out with the buyer because eBay's product, your products as a seller are the ones that you're selling in your store. But eBay's product is the customer. It's the one who's taking out his credit card and buying. So eBay wants to take care of their product. And their product is the buyer. If you're not taking care of their product, eBay doesn't want you. So if you're here for the long-term, you want long-term survivability in this business, it's all about taking care of your buyers. Make sure that you don't have any open cases. As soon as a buyer opens a case, don't wait until the last day to give them a return label or to give them the refund. Take care of your cases right away. Answer all of your buyer's messages. And that said, if you're here for the long-term, if you're here for the short-term and you just want to make a quick buck, this is definitely not the place for you. This is a serious business just like any other, just like starting a brick and motor store. And that's the way that you guys should treat it. So good tips that you just gave them right there. Okay. So we talked about part-time, full-time. Is there a certain book that inspired you any time along the way? Anything that you read that you want to point out? Yeah. Yeah. So, oh gosh, I mean, years ago, I've done so many different businesses, not only this and customer service, really. I've been doing customer service for the past 25 years. And I picked up on a book, and I don't know if you called a business book or not, but it's called The Secret. And basically, if you've read it or you've even watched the video, it's basically just talking about sending positivity out in the world. And what you put out in the world is what you kind of receive back. My wife and I are a very firm believer of that. I feel like what you put in, regardless of sometimes if it doesn't feel like it's going to come back to you today, it does. It definitely does come back. We throw good vibes out in the world, and we get them back. And we've been very blessed exponentially with this business, but we have to work at it. And it's like you said. Like you said, you have to be responsive. You have to make sure you're responding to the customers. That's one thing. eBay doesn't play any games. If you want to stay in this business for a short term, you can definitely do that. And you'll be gone very quickly. There's a lot of, and that's a big thing too, I wanted to touch on. There's a lot of people out there trying to do this business. And the thing is, is that it can be done, but you need to make sure from day one, when you get off on track that you have your right systems in place, if you have inventory management such as AutoDS, which is great for us, has worked really well. We've been successful, but as good as any software is, is as good as you are, and as good as what you're able to do and what work you're going to put into it. So you have to press through it. I mean, you have to press through it. There's ups and downs. There's lows where some days you may not be making the sales that you think that you should be making. But remember, we're in a very seasonal business too. You have your highs and your lows. If you can stay kind of even kale in between those times when it's a little bit slower, you can remain successful, constantly monitoring your inventory, changing your inventory out for the trends. There's so many things that we do, but it's such a vested interest that we have in doing it. And that's what's kept us going and being successful. So the secret is the book that I wouldn't say brought you to your success, but it definitely helped you out and brought you to a certain mindset to help you get to where you are today. And how many e-commerce stores do you have overall? Which is eBay, right? We're talking only about eBay. Yeah, just on eBay, we run a few successful stores. So we have a few eBay stores right now. We do plan on adding on more. There's a science to doing that. It's not like a lot of people think you're just going to go ahead and throw stores up. It doesn't work that way. eBay is really looking at the fact that you're a seasoned seller, you know what you're doing and that you got control over your inventory. So currently we're operating two stores right now. They're both very successful. We do very well on both. And as I told you at the beginning, I said we're looking towards doing also Shopify, which is something I know Autodesk does fulfill or have the platform to be able to do that as well. So we're looking to take advantage of that coming up at the end of this year. So quarter four into the beginning of the year. Okay, sounds great. And good luck with that. We also have a lot of content on that. Also videos in a free course. I don't know if you've taken any, but it's completely free. There's about 40 videos there that I recorded from A to Z. So if you're looking for some help, you or you guys, you viewers who are listening, you can just head over to Autodesk.com slash courses. And you got a free A to Z Shopify course right there. If you want to get started. Yeah, we've got pretty much everything there. Price and stock monitoring, quick product importing, automatic order fulfillment, automatic returns and so forth. So it's definitely a good venue to try and tackle. So you were talking about two eBay stores and they're big. I mean, it's like they're not small stores. You're not like opening 30 stores and then just playing small in each field. You're maximizing each one and really playing it to its full potential. So if you wouldn't mind or if you would, what's your average revenue or profit every month? You can talk about whatever you want. Yeah, absolutely. That's fine. So another big thing that you're hitting on. I watch all the videos out there just like maybe you have in your past. And I see a lot of things that I don't know really what to believe if there's any validity on it whatsoever about what they're actually doing or not doing. They're not really sharing their screen to tell us to be able to show proof on it. But basically right now we're doing anywhere between 1.5 to 2 million in sales between our two stores, which was absolutely huge. Oh, monthly? Yeah, monthly. Well, we raised our profits. To be honest with you, we raised our profits up. I think service is a big thing. A lot of people think that you got to undercut everyone to be able to sell anything. That's not the truth. Once you build some traction on your stores, once you get maybe some smaller items that you're starting to build up to get those to sell 10, 20 times, what have you, you're able to really kind of work through and expand your business. And at which point you're able to kind of dictate the profits you want to sell at, it really doesn't mean, I'm a firm believer of it, it really doesn't mean that just because you're undercutting prices and whatnot on there that you're going to sell your items, really doesn't mean that. It's about the quality, the quality of service really that you're providing these customers. Think about it this way, and people are going to pay more money for something if it's good quality. And I feel you can really separate yourself. Do you want to be a fly by night seller or do you want to be someone who's in the game long term? Because we have built up our feedback to the point to where it is now, buyers that are going on the page where they may be searching for best price, if they're not doing it that way by best price, because we may not be the ones that are there. But if they're going through and they're going to be doing their searches, if you think about it, they're going to be looking also at that feedback that you're providing. And that's going to make the difference between them either buying from you or buying from someone else. So with that being said, though, to answer your question, I mean, we were doing anywhere between $100,000 a month in sales on our stores. And then that's dipped down, but it's basically worked smarter, not harder. And that's what we've kind of done now. Again, doing this for two and a half years, we're at that place where we can do it. But we started the same place as anyone new to the game that's going out of DS and saying, hey, I heard about your software, let me sign up. What can you do with it? So yeah, I mean, that's what we've done and it's made a difference. Very nice. Very nice. That's a lot of money. So it's also, by the way, showing your level of success. And you don't have any virtual assistants running your stores because it's just you and your wife if I understood it correctly, right? Yeah. We understand, I think at one point, we want to figure out how we're able to scale the business and still be able to manage it to have a work-life balance because that's very important too. I think everyone understands you included if you have any children and you're running them around and you have sports and different things they're doing, that's the flexibility that drop shipping gives you. It gives you that ability to be able to work anywhere you want to. If you're on vacation, you can work a few hours in the morning, a few hours in the evening if you want to, or quite frankly, you don't have to work at all because it's your business, which is exciting. But we're working every day. My wife and I kind of turn and we go, when was the last time we took a day off? It doesn't seem like almost never, but it's fun though. Doing this is fun. You're enjoying it, right? You're enjoying the journey. You're not doing some office nine to five and just waiting, watching the clock and waiting for it to, you're actually enjoying what you're doing and you're making some nice profit along the way and you also have time. Like you said, it's all about, scaling is great, it's great, but manageable. You need to scale to whatever you can manage to a level that you can manage to the maximum level that you can manage and also manage your time correctly. Yeah, and I definitely agree with that. I have a daughter. I have another one coming up this month, I think. Congrats. And there's always the balance between, well, for myself, I'm also a drop shipper. I'm also working at AutoDS and I also have other things going on. And I mix all of that also with my real life and it's always trying to balance it out and find the time for everything and make sure that you're doing everything to the max because if you're not, no one else is going to do it for you. So you guys need to know how to manage your time, how to take full advantage of your time and know exactly what your limits are, how high I can scale, while also keeping a good balance of your real life, your personal life. So, but it's great. It's nice to hear that you and your wife are running your business and that you guys are making enough or more than enough to maintain your day to day. And there's food on the table, no complaints. And you can just keep managing it from here, keep scaling it from here. It's all under your control and you don't really have anyone telling you what to do. Of course, like we said, it is not an easy business. We need to know how to run it. We need to know how to manage it. We need to know, well, this pretty much brings me to my next question. So let me just ask it. In your opinion, what are the main steps, let's say three to five steps to becoming a successful drop shipper? We pretty much answered all of those questions, but let's organize them. Okay. Yeah. So kind of put me on the spot there, right? But no, it's, you know, number one is, you know, have just like any other job, you have a routine, okay? You have a routine in place. Now, if you're used to doing your nine to five job, you know, you know what those tasks are that you have to do by your supervisor, whatever the case may be. We manage it the same way like we did when we were doing nine to five jobs. So we have a routine. We start off in the morning with kind of, you know, taking a look at the store. Like you mentioned, if we have open cases, returns, items that have to be shipped out. When you're starting out, obviously, you know, you're just going to be, you know, working towards, you know, making those sales and building the business up. So you're going to be kind of starting, you know, slower, you know, than where I'm at. And it's more than achievable to get to where, you know, my wife and I are. But the big thing is, is that, you know, start off at a place that you feel comfortable with where you can control everything, you know, and, you know, with the task and different things that you have, we really utilize the seller hub, you know, through eBay. That's our gauge of what our things are that we have to get done starting off from the morning. If we have questions from customers, that's the first thing that we do before we even get on the seller hub. We're answering those questions. When you're trying to build up, you're trying to obviously figure out, well, which direction and what do I sell? When we started out, I had a little bit higher limits than what a lot of people will have when they start out on eBay. If you're starting off as a business, if you're starting off as just a single individual who's wanting to go on there and turn their, you know, flipping of odds and ends at a flea market into a full time. But you need to remember that wherever that is that you start, that you have your systems in place, you have your tasks that you know that you need to have completed. And you're responsive to whatever those questions are from the customers. With scaling, like as far as how we were able to scale the business though, it was really the case of when we were using our limits up, and I'm going to go back to something that I learned when I first started with AutoDS was the fact that, you know, you have to list, if you are thinking about a particular category, for instance, if it's, you know, seasonal, and you're looking for Christmas stuff that you're going to, you know, put up to sell, you have to make sure that, you know, you're doing at least 20 of each item, you know, that you're going to list on the store. That way you can see what's going to sell. Good. Now, you can, you know, you can go a different method where you can, you know, try to find someone who's dropshipping just like you are, and you're trying to take what they're selling and you're trying to undercut the prices. I've tried that personally. It did not work. It was something to where we pretty much became pretty savvy based on that time of year that's selling, you know, quarter four is huge, but there's also opportunity throughout the whole year. But when you're doing it, you know, remember, you know, it's not a lot of people want instant gratification. That's a world that we're brought up in because everything is so at your reach. It is possible. But remember, you know, you're putting the work into it, you know, when you're listing items, you're throwing 20 items up, you know, if one of those sell, okay, cool, you found a winner maybe. But you're also asking for those increases. Increases mean a lot to your store. You need to show eBay or any platform that you're on that you're able to manage what you have. If you're not able to manage what you have, how could you possibly ask eBay to do anything for you to help you out if you can't manage what you currently have? So you're managing what you're currently having, you ask for those limiting increases, you know, if it's every month, when we started out, I mean, it was at the very beginning, we would call in sometimes every week saying, hey, look, I have more inventory. I need the list. And, you know, we're doing well with what we have, metrics, keeping your seller metrics is something huge. Not a lot of people talk about that, but you've got to make sure you're keeping your seller metrics in line. And when I say seller metrics, that means tracking uploaded on time. That means cases closed without, you know, without eBay stepping in. That means that, you know, you're obviously shipping out your items on time. It pretty much means you have full control over your inventory, which is where Autodesk comes into play because they do all that for you, which was awesome. I remember, you know, oh gosh, two and a half years ago, like I said, I'm throwing inventory up. I'm like, oh, geez, you know, it's like nothing selling. All of a sudden you get that one, you know, that one item that's selling and you start getting in that traction. And that's really what it is. It's that one item that sells, you get that traction going. And by utilizing with our mindset that we built up over the years and the service and everything and scaling by asking for those increases, because we showed eBay that we can manage it, we've been able to be successful. And without a shadow of a doubt, it was hard work. And we turn, my wife and I turn to each other sometimes and we go, all we do is work. But we're having fun doing it too. Definitely. You know, my wife likes picking the items, you know, out that we're going to sell. She's turned a big liking into it. So she's doing the product research then. Yeah, you know what? Yeah, she is. She's great at it. I'm the type of person who barely likes to go to a grocery store and shop. But she's doing the product research. She's picked up on what sells. And another tip I have when you have something that's selling, find something similar that's selling too. There's not just one particular item because you're selling up, you know, you're throwing up Christmas lights. There's Christmas trees too and those will sell as well. So you gotta be savvy. Great tips, by the way. Great tips. Many of the tips that you're giving, like when you're going to a category and you want to list something from there, then list 20 items is something that I keep stressing over and over and over in our blogs, in our videos. And also when you find something that sells out of those 20 products, let's say one product out of 20 sold and there you found something that sells. So check out what features it has, check out what benefits it has, and try to look for more products that are similar to it, maybe in different dimensions, maybe in different colors, different variations. But try to always look for something similar to what's selling while also testing the market more. So don't just stop on that one product and only, you know, go for one niche or one category, but keep multiplying your success by adding more products that are similar to the ones that are selling for you, while also testing out more categories, more niches that you haven't been in before, and see what's going to work over there. And at the end of the day, you'll just have a big mix of general products that are selling really, really well for you. And if you have a category that's really selling, well, let's say all year long, then you can definitely up that and make that about maybe 70% of your store and another 30% for testing. But it really depends on, you know, how much sales you're getting from it. And if it's really profitable, you know, to a point where you can put 70% of your store or 80% or depends on how much you're selling. But once again, so always keep a good balance of products that are selling well, selling more products that are like it, while also continuing to test the market, because if once you stop testing, you'll stop finding new categories and new things that you probably didn't think of before, that could bring you a lot of profit. So we went over more than three to five steps to becoming a successful drop shipper. So we're not going to go over them again. But let's just say mainly it's keeping up with your seller metrics, like you said, uploading your tracking on time, have no cases closed against you, don't let eBay step in. If eBay steps into your favorites, okay, but let's try to not get to that point where they need to step in. Let's always try to work it out with our buyers before eBay needs to step in and right, ship our items out on time, upload tracking numbers on time and the tracking numbers need to be readable by eBay. If it's not readable by eBay, like UPS, UPS, FedEx and so forth, eBay won't be able to track it. And sometimes when a buyer opens an item, not receive case on a tracking that's not supported by eBay, you're going to have a harder time as a seller convincing eBay that the package did reach its destination. So those are some of the small tips, but right, there's many more, right? Like product research and upping your limits. Like you said, it's one of the most important things because at the end of the day, you have to do a good job of product research, but the more products that you have and that's logic, the more you're going to sell. So definitely up your limits as much as you can. Okay, let's move on to the next question. I think you pretty much went over it, or maybe you didn't, but what were the first steps that you took when you started drop shipping? Let's say not 20 years ago, but two and a half years ago when you started drop shipping, not e-commerce sales in general. Do you remember the first steps that you took? Like you said, okay, I'm going to start drop shipping. I'm going to watch some videos. I'm going to read some tutorials. And then what were the first steps that you remember taking? Okay, yeah. So because I heard about drop shipping, like you said, 10 years ago, I don't know if it was China, Asian or something like that online that I started using, wasn't very successful with it, to be honest with you. I'm doing it, but like you said, so the different videos that I watched and then I was also hearing a lot of with different individuals that I watched closely, them talking about different softwares that they're using. And I was trying to figure out, well, what does that mean to trying to scale a drop ship in business? And it really does mean a lot. So I made sure that I had my systems in place, my software, that I knew that I was needing the use to manage first of all, what I had. Because I figured, when you're drop shipping, you don't really have, you have control over it as much as you work towards having control over anything. And with your business, you need to make sure that you have that software in place. So number one was having the software. I worked on other platforms before I went to AutoDS, but I found that AutoDS has the best tools in place for my business. That's the truth. I mean, you guys really do have the best software. Yeah, you do. They're constantly evolving with every day, with the changes in the marketplace. And there's a lot of them. So number one was software. So you're already thinking ahead. You're already thinking, okay, I'm going to get started. I'm not going to take it step by step, list my first item, then it sells, then I'll figure out what I'm going to do with that sale. You actually had a plan going forward because I do see quite a few people asking in our forums too, hey guys, I just listed my first product. I got my first sale two days later. What should I do now? And this is exactly why you should always, always, always plan ahead and know what you're going to do. Okay, go ahead. Yeah, yeah. Of course. Yeah, of course. Yeah. So that was number one. Number two was, well, what exactly am I going to sell? So AutoDS does have a feature which is called the AutoDS Finder, which is really awesome. It goes over different things related to if an item has coupons, if you're selling off of Amazon, onto eBay, it has different coupons. You can find top sellers, different things like that. So I tried that out as well. I used that tool when I was first getting started to try to figure out what sells, what sells, what doesn't sell. The third thing, the third thing that I did was just, I thought of the season, I thought of the time of the year that we're in. I thought like it really kind of like a department store. What does the department store put out in the front of the store, right? Well, if you think about it, those are the things that sell online too. So I started thinking about the seasonality and not just quarter four because quarter four is huge. So that went into product research, whether that be home decor. And when you think about it, like you mentioned, you've got to think about things that sell year round. If it's 70% of your business is stuff that's selling year round. So I had that. I was like, okay, well, I figured out that it's a seasonal business. Well, what to list up? Gain some traction. Start listing the first product, gain off of that. So if I have a product in a certain niche, like you say, I know you say it a lot, if you have a product in a certain niche, well, there's other products in that niche that sell too, right? So if you're throwing 20 items up, you find maybe two winners out of that and you expand from there. And there's ways to do research online. You'll be able to see if you're doing Amazon, if you're doing Walmart, you'll see certain items that they'll say relate to that particular item that you're listing. And sometimes that works out great where you're just picking those other items off. Especially on your winner, right? Open up your winner and see other products that customers are buying when they're searching that, when they're on that product. And then those products are probably going to be winners too, definitely. Yep. So you have that part of it. The other part of it is just basically, okay, so I found, I found my winners. Well, let me expand from there. I'm going to find other winners. And how do I do that? Well, I'm getting into other niches. We don't stick at a particular niche. So when I started out, I was like, well, and I did it before where it didn't work. I was like, okay, I threw up items. It felt like nothing was selling. But then as I started to find, going through those 20 items at a time, I started to find one or two winners in there. And then it just progressed from there. And it scaled up to where now all of a sudden, instead of having one or two items, you have 100 or 200 items that now are selling consistently. And you got to keep those items up. The biggest tip which moves on and it kind of gears into it is the management of your inventory that you have. That's a big thing for us. It was trying to figure out a way to manage, maximize our limits that we had, but managing the limits that we had and making sure that we were always able to scale from not just the one niche, we were able to go into different categories. Now remember, eBay is going to be really specific. And I talk about this quite a bit when someone's asking me who's like, well, what do you do for a living? And how were you able to get to that? Because people are really a lot of times shocked. Like, well, what did you do? And I tell them, well, realistically, what you have to do is you have to figure out, okay, well, here's what's selling on a store. You have the opportunity to be able to take this anywhere you want to go, go in and expand out to multiple niches, find different items. eBay is very particular with the categories, like particular categories. They may promote you higher in certain categories. So what we did is instead of just being defined to one particular niche by spreading out our niches and finding winning products in home decor, in home decor, home and garden, what have you, by doing that, we didn't just take our business and say, okay, we're just stuck at doing these one niches. Now we're expanded. Now, not only are we promoted by the eBay algorithm or Cassini on the one particular niche, we have four, five, 10 different niches that we're in where we're ranking high because we didn't say, I'm just making the store all about one particular item. And if you want to have a niche store, that's why, and I said at the beginning, you can go into Shopify and you can really make a brand. But eBay's about having multiple items up in different niches and finding the winners that you can to be able to succeed and then scale from there. And if you have your systems in place, a good software like AutoDS, and you have everything work in the way that it should be, there's no reason why what I'm doing can't be what you're doing. Exactly. Right. Okay, so the first steps in the beginning was to, in your case, was looking forward and saying, okay, I need, I want to start with some kind of software that's going to help me scale from day one or from week one and not take it step by step and see what's going to happen later and take it step by step, but actually thinking ahead. So first, I'm going to get my software. I know that I'll have my stock and my price monitored and I'll be able to import products really quickly and I won't have to refresh my suppliers page every day to see if the price changed or if the stock changed and you know, how much can we grow when we're spending most of our days just refreshing our suppliers pages to see if something changed. So that's the first step that you took and then you jump straight into product research, which of course is important because in the beginning you guys need to start selling. And this is one of the hardest points where a lot of people have a breaking point. And I taught a few students in the past year and they all pretty much came to the same point in the beginning, all of them in the beginning where they spent so much hours on product research and they worked so hard on that part and I told them that this is one of the most important parts when you're starting because you want to start selling, you got to get that ball rolling. And they all came to a breaking point where they said, listen, I've been doing it for a couple of weeks now. I spent so much time on product research. I got, I don't know, 20 or 30 items in my store, which is nothing, right? But to them, it's a lot. They spend time researching those products and I'm not getting any sales. I think maybe this isn't right for me. And for each and every one of them, I told them, hang on, keep doing what you're doing, keep putting your butt on product research, add more products to your store, up your limits, you'll start seeing those sales soon. If you keep to this process, you will make it. And lo and behold, none of them quit. And all of them are doing it till this day. And, you know, they're actually profiting quite nicely. So I'm happy to see that, like I'm happy to see that people are not quitting. A lot of people are quitting, right? But the ones who don't quit, especially when they feel like, you know, it's not going well and maybe it's going to work for others. But for me, it's not working. That's just you telling yourself that story. Because if you keep putting up with it and you stay consistent, you are going to make it. There is absolutely no reason for you not to. Okay, especially if you're taking the right steps, you got the right knowledge. And, you know, you're not trying to fool anyone. You're not trying to make a million dollars in a day. And you're not trying to be rich by next week. You put in the right amount of work, you're definitely going to make it here. Okay, what's the next question that I want to ask? I asked you about your first steps. So you're selling channels. I know that right now you're selling on eBay. You want to start Shopify soon. So let's talk a little bit about suppliers. How many suppliers do you work with today, give or take? Well, right now, we do really, I mean, there's so many different suppliers that you guys have access to. I haven't even been able to dive into all of them, to be honest with you. I don't think it's possible to dive into all of them. You have to just cherry pick a few and see how that goes. If one isn't good, replace it with another. Yeah, I mean, realistically, two to three suppliers that I'm doing on a regular basis, two to three, one in particular that we use a lot more than others, which I would say is probably Amazon. And just for the sheer fact that there's so much, it's a quick shipping. And there's no, what works for me doesn't mean that it's going to be the same thing for you and the same outcome, because like I said, you guys have 25 suppliers. Yeah. So I'm using Amazon, Walmart. I was doing cost wave for quite a bit that you guys have as well. I've integrated it. I've done Home Depot. Amazon for me has been the most consistent, but that's also has to do with going back to the whole metrics. You're getting items two to three days to your door. No problem with returns. Yeah. If you have a record, no questions asked, which has been really great. That's obviously helped us and keep our metrics in line. But again, don't define. I think because I do watch your videos as well. So I think what you've talked about quite a bit is make sure you're not just focusing on one supplier, because there's multiple suppliers out there that way. Because not every place out there has the same products. You may find something different somewhere else that's going to be a seller as well. So it's being diversified. And I see a lot of dropshippers making the same mistakes, starting off with AliExpress, which is fine, no problem, but you need to have more than AliExpress. Even if you're only getting started, even if it's your first day of dropshipping and you want to start adding products or start doing product research, first of all, you guys can use AliExpress's dropshipping center. It's absolutely free. They give it to anyone who wants it and you can completely analyze what products are selling, what products are trending in the last 30 days or whatever filter have you. And it makes your whole job a lot easier. But that doesn't mean that you guys need to stick and import products only from AliExpress, especially because you're depending on the Chinese, which on one hand, it's fine. You can make a lot of profit from Chinese products, but you should definitely try to go domestic. So for example, if you're selling to the US audience, if you're selling on eBay US, try to find a US supplier that ships much, much quicker to the US audience. And Americans and not just Americans would rather pay much more, they'd rather pay more for their product and get it quicker than get it in three to four weeks time. Nobody wants that, even if it's cheaper. So a lot of people would rather pay more and get their products on time, get it quicker. And of course, a higher quality product, which they would assume would come from a US warehouse rather than a Chinese warehouse, even though I don't know if it's not a secret that most products from Amazon are from not most, but many, a big majority of Amazon sellers. If you guys will click on the seller on Amazon, you'll see that he's based in China. He's just importing the goods to Amazon and he's selling it from Amazon. You'll see that the sellers from China is business name and addresses from China. So that gets you to understand that most products are coming from China anyway, but you want to have fast shipping. And it's not just that. Sometimes the Chinese can go on a holiday and they could be missing for two to three weeks and then no one's going to ship your orders. And then I see dropshippers saying, okay, guys, I got so many sales, now what am I going to do? I can't ship them. My Chinese supplier isn't answering me. AliExpress is not shipping the items. So this is where you would want a backup, another supplier that can help you with those goods, like Amazon for example. And yeah, to tell you the truth, I'm using Amazon a lot and I'm always telling people to work with multiple suppliers about two to three. And for those exact reasons, so glad to see that you're doing it too. They're using Amazon as your main supplier, even though I got to tell you I also am. So we talked about most of the things that I want to talk about. One thing that's, I think that it's pretty important. What troubles, what difficulties did you have along the way? Because right now, we talked about a lot of positive things and making money and how to do it. We said that it's not easy, that it's a real business. You have to take responsibility. You have to answer your customers and all that. But what are some of the difficulties that you had along the way? And what did you do to overcome them? Okay, yeah. So when you're a new seller, when you're a new seller, there's a thing out there, a word that we like to use. And you hear a lot about it. It's called MC011, right? Yeah, Google it. Yeah. When you hear you almost cringey, you think, okay, I'm done. Well, that really at the very beginning, excuse me, at the very beginning, when we were starting out, that was one of the infamous messages that we got was basically, they want to take a look at what you're doing. Because we were growing fast. We were growing really fast, probably almost too fast, to be honest with you. Yeah, that's a good reason for the MC. That's a good reason for the MC011. Oh, yeah. So we started off with that. And pretty much that's really eBay saying to you, hey, look, what are you doing? Where are you getting your product from? And give us a reason why you should keep on selling on this platform. And big thing is, is a lot of people will get that message, and they're just going to go ahead and throw the towel in it. And they're not going to do anything about it. Well, remember, there's live people, regardless of what marketplace it is that you in particular sell on, there's humans that you can talk to over the phone. And let them know, hey, here's what I'm doing. And supply, if they're asking you for receipts, because they'll ask you, hey, where are you getting your inventory from? To be honest with you, when we first started selling, I provided the receipts directly from Amazon to them, believe it or not. And believe it or not, it did. It removed the restriction of the account. Yeah, I removed the restriction. We've had three of those. We've had three MC011s over the course of the two and a half years that we've been doing this, and we've overcome every one of them. And you think that all three of them was because you were growing fast? It was. They say that they're checking in on you. They're going to pause where you're at to make sure you can control. So that's where the seller metrics really come into hand. You need to make sure you have control. Remember, you are at the mercy of the platform you're selling on. So if you're doing things the right way, you will succeed, but you need to make sure that you are. If you're not, you're going to be in it for the short term. And then your account's going to get shut down. And yeah, there's certain avenues to be able to open up new accounts, but not as when you've built up so much traction. When you have 15, 16,000, 20,000 feedback on a store, it's not like you're going to open up a new store tomorrow and start off where you are. You're starting from scratch. So you need these things sustainable. So there's that part. And there's other various different things that you can find yourself in a pickle with if you don't have the knowledge. And how I gain the knowledge with any type of restrictions or anything that we have when you're talking about struggle starting off. That was the biggest thing for us is pretty much understanding, well, what things do you need to be doing? So through Autodesk, there's software out there to monitor for vero violations. So that's another big one, right? We have vero violations. And what is that? That's brands out there that are on a list that eBay has set up going over what it is you can or can't sell, what is allowed, right? When you're thinking about Chinese suppliers, if you are using Chinese suppliers to add on to what you were saying, some of these items are items that are counterfeits. I mean, they're counterfeit items. You don't want to fall on that and that whole, I mean, don't get me wrong, you can and you may get away with it, but it's going to be a short term that you're going to get away with it, right? We want long standing. We want longevity in this business. And I know I don't want to wake up tomorrow and have my account shut down. I know that. So I realized that as the times are changing, you're staying up on the business policies that are out there. Again, regardless of the marketplace or if you're doing Shopify, you still have to be compliant. So, you know, compliant was the huge thing for us at the very beginning. We had the struggles we overcame. And then from there, it was obviously safely monitoring the inventory that we had, utilizing your software where we're kind of checking off the spot. Now, we started off on version one with Autodesk. Now we're in the V2 and it has a lot more features on there, such as the Vero checker where you can pretty much, you have your inventory monitored, you can look at if it's critical, if it's just something that's kind of throwing a flag up based on like the word needle or something like that. So, you know what I mean? So it could be kind of tricky with it, but you kind of have to navigate and understand, okay, if I've built up an inventory and like you said, 70% of your inventory is something you're going to keep up year-round. The other 30%, you're going to kind of cycle out, right? So, you're going to cycle that inventory out, but you're constantly monitoring, you're adding keywords when you're getting these brands who are saying, hey, don't sell my item. The feature on there with Autodesk is you can add keywords onto your Vero. So, if you're getting a violation that Autodesk hasn't already picked up on, because as you know, as well as I do, there's a lot of them that are going to come your way, but then you could also be responsive to these, I guess, I don't know if I would call it allegations, but that you're doing something that you're not supposed to be doing. You can reach out to these different brand names and you can say, hey, look, this is your item that I'm selling. A lot of times you'll get things that are really not in line or not true when we're talking about counterfeits. These are just bots that are on the internet that are scrolling your images and trying to come up with the fact that, oh, you're doing something that you shouldn't be doing. Well, call eBay. Tell them, hey, you know what? You can do it. This is an item that I'm able to sell. And you can also communicate with the brand itself and send them an email. And I think I've been able to- Sometimes they could be wrong, definitely. Yeah, sometimes they can be wrong and you can overcome that. So those are the struggles at the beginning. We were able to go through getting started being taken down as long as a month at one point in time. And then we were able to overcome those two more times. And yeah, we've stayed consistent now for this time. And each of our stores keep on growing because we're doing the right thing. Speaking of Vero, which is a very important subject that we didn't talk about. So of course, you have the Vero checker on AutoDS. And if you're adding a product that you're not allowed to, then the AutoDS database will pick up on that and it'll let you know, hey, this product, the manufacturer, the brand, it's Vero. Now if it's a manufacturer or a brand, then you should probably stay away from it. But if it's somewhere, maybe in the title or something or a keyword that's in the product description or something like that. Or for example, if it's telling you that Apple is a Vero product because you're selling a case for the iPhone, but the manufacturer is not Apple. It's some Chinese seller who has no problem with you drop shipping his product. It's definitely fine. Just make sure that you're not writing in your title. Make sure that you're not writing Apple iPhone case. Write down case for Apple iPhone and then eBay would have no problem with it and you won't get the Vero violation. And when eBay does drop the hammer, if they drop the hammer with MC011, don't panic guys. No heart attacks. eBay wants you as a seller. eBay needs to make money. They make money by us, the sellers, providing products to the buyers. Then the buyers purchase the product. That's what eBay wants and they want the buyers of course to be fully satisfied. But at the end of the day, eBay wants to make money and that's their cycle. That's how they make their money. So they want you as the seller. They just want to make sure that you know what you're doing and that you are complying with their policies. And for those of you who are wondering how you can drop ship from Amazon, even though eBay, you know that eBay kind of frowns upon it on their policies. They say, don't drop ship from retailers. But things like this you can do and you will be fine if you take care of all of the other things. But if eBay does give you the MC011, you can simply give them a call and work things out with them. Whatever they ask for, documentation, verification, give them whatever they're asking for and do not lie. If they see that and they see that you care about your business and you're here for the buyers and you know exactly what you are doing all the way around, you will have no problem also upgrading your limits and keeping your account intact. The next question that I wanted to ask you, Nick, is how do you find drop shipping products that will sell that you pretty much answer that when you said that you started with a combination of using the AutoDS Finder which uses its own database of adding products to your store and also a combination of okay, thinking what's going to sell well right now. So what season are we on? Okay, we got Christmas coming up so let's add Christmas products. But of course, don't add 100% Christmas products because once the season ends, you'll stop selling. So always have a good balance of everything that you're doing, especially when it comes to product research and not just. And the last question I wanted to ask was when your store started to sell well, how were you able to scale it successfully? Would you also pretty much answered here unless you have something to add? No, I mean, I really don't. It's just proper management of the inventory that you have, staying up to date on the time of season that it is and just asking for those limited increases. Like you said, eBay wants you to make money, no doubt about it. They want you to make money because it's making them money. Yeah, eBay wants to make money. Yeah. And that's what I was saying too. A lot of times when you're thinking about what's going to sell and what's not going to sell, it's not always about the price. People will buy from you as long as you're providing them service. Be responsive. If someone's asking you a question about a product and when we first started out, I didn't care in my time where I'm located at here in the US pretty much it was responsive, 10, 11 o'clock at night. If someone was messaging me because, well, let's say it's in California and it's at three hours behind where I am, I'm responding to the question. I'm making that sale where someone else is not responsive. I don't know how many times I heard from buyers that basically said, hey, I can't believe it that you responded that quick. They almost think it's a robot. We have access to our phone, so I can bring my phone anywhere and I'm answering messages and it takes a couple seconds. If you don't know your products that you have up because if you're like us and you're having thousands of products on a store, well, there's research that you can do. You can go into that particular Amazon Walmart Home Depot and you can find the answers. They have Q&As. Be responsive back. Proper management again over the inventory. Finally, just be responsive. Understand that eBay, I can speak for eBay is which I sell on, but they want you to respond back within 24 hours. You got to handle those messages and treat them like they're gold. Look at it like a lead. We pay a lot of money. If you're a real estate agent, in any line where you're doing sales, they have lead generation systems. Well, if you have these products up, look at it as a lead. It's me casting my pullout and I'm trying to reel in and I'm trying to make that sale. People like I said, instant gratification, if you're able to provide it to them and you're able to give them the question, answer the question, they may buy for you even if $10 more than the other person who's selling it for less. Customer service is worth more money and the buyers, our viewers know to appreciate that and they will pay more for it. One of the things that I keep forgetting to reply to and you've mentioned it over and over in this article is do not sell for cheap. Don't try to undercut the competition. Even if it makes you more sales, even if you get some more sales, you're not going to start a huge trend now when you become, I don't know, a millionaire or a thousand or even a hundred there. I know there's no such word, but you get what I'm saying. You're not going to make any substantial profits this way and you'll just be making sales. You have the responsibility of the tracking and customer service, but there's no real profit at the end of the day and at the end of the week and at the end of the month. More than that, you'll be shocked to see how many products you can sell from 30 to 50% profit margins and maybe even more. I haven't tried that, but that's my range. From 30 to 50%, I don't sell below 30. I don't sell above 50. That is my range and I sell it pretty well. Even if there's other sellers selling the same products as mine, you optimize the titles a little bit. The product images, the descriptions, make them a little bit unique, make them stand out more and that's what eBay is all about. It's about what the customer is searching on eBay search engine. Your title is pretty much the SEO. It's Google's search engine optimization. The better your title, the viewer is going to get to your product. If you typed it out, pretty much the same way that he's typing it out. Use really good keywords on your eBay titles. We haven't spoken about that much, but that's definitely something that's important here. It helps you stand out more. I know that a lot of people don't optimize their product. They just add a whole bunch of listings. There's some people who work bulk, so they add 1,000 listings, let's say. Only when they start to make sales, they start to optimize only those products that actually sold because they don't want to waste their time optimizing the products that are not selling. They're just keeping the title the same as how they're seeing it on Amazon, for example, where you can see the seller's name and who's selling it. We all have our own strategies. I'm definitely one for optimizing the products. Before I start in the drafts page, I optimize them and then I move them to the products. I make them go live after we work on everything. That's another reason why I think I can raise my prices to 30% to 50% profit margin and still make those sales. Don't sell cheap. Don't sell 10%, 15%. That's really low. There's many fees. There's subscriptions. You guys are going to get eaten up in your fees and you're not going to pull much profits, withdraw much profits to your bank account. Once again, don't sell for cheap, sell for a profit. Nick, that pretty much wraps it up. I don't have any more questions for you. I got to admit, this interview was a little bit longer than I expected, but you're a very interesting individual to talk to and I always appreciate conversations like these. One more very important thing, the dropship family. I almost forgot. Please give us a little bit of info about your YouTube channel, the dropship family. By the way, guys, I'm going to leave a link to it right below this video. Go check it out if you would like to continue learning from Nick. Give us a little bit of info about your channel. Yeah. It is what it is. We have our kids, when we first started selling here in the Cha-Chings on eBay, and we're probably going to throw in some different things where my kids are even giving some tips on there about different items to sell, depending on the time of the year. It's going to be real. It's going to be us talking about our story, how we got started, and you're going to gain a lot of knowledge because, again, it's real information. It's stuff that we picked up through trial and error. I think if you want to be successful and you want to know how we went about doing it, we're going to be breaking it down into multiple videos as we go along the way. We look forward to it. Absolutely. Please feel free. Please take a look at it. We would absolutely love that. I think you'll get some great knowledge from it. Great. Nice. The Dropship family is your actual family. This channel is to help people along their way, whether they're beginners, and I'm sure that intermediate, more advanced, even expert dropshippers, because you have your store, you have so much experience. I'm sure that you can give valuable knowledge to every type of difficulty. I will leave a link once again right below this video to his channel. By the way, guys, if you guys want to ask Nick anything, you can leave your comments below this video. You can also draw by to his channel once again, link below the video, and you can also ask the questions there. Definitely subscribe to his YouTube channel if you guys want to learn more about this very interesting individual. Once again, guys, Nick, first of all, thank you very much for being here. I definitely appreciate it. I gained some valuable insight. I'm sure that our viewers do too, did too. Once again, thank you very much for being here, guys. If you haven't done so yet, subscribe to our YouTube channel. Get to Nick's YouTube channel once again, the Dropship family. Go learn more from his channel, and if you guys have any questions for me, for him, right below this video, or in the Dropship family's channel. Thank you once again, Nick. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Yeah, it was a pleasure as well, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. You too. Bye-bye. Thanks.