 Hello everybody here with us today it's Vika Sheffron who is a professional eBay seller in AutoDS and one of our mentors on our free mentorship program in AutoDS. Today we will do a short interview with Vika about how he works, how he can help you, what he does in his business and how he grows his business. So let's start the interview. Vika, how are you? Thank you for being here today with us today. Hey Lior, hi everybody, hope everybody's feeling good. I'm excited to be here and to talk here with Lior about my business and hopefully it will be interested for you and we can hear from you. And basically I'm from Israel, I'm 37 years old, I'm married with two beautiful children which I love and I'm doing dropshipping eBay selling for around three years now. This is my main living and I'm basically selling today mainly on the eBay UK platform and on eBay US. Cool. How did you start the dropshipping? How did you get to this business? Well about three years ago when dropshipping was at, it wasn't so familiar as it is today. I was very interested in knowing how to sell online. I didn't know about eBay. I just knew that selling online can be a good living and it's from your own home and it can benefit you with free time and you don't need to work so hard. So I took a basic course that explained how to open an eBay store and how to list an item. Very basic which took a few months and now if I look it backwards a few months only to know how to open a store and how to list one item it's very slow and today we have so many good information online and mentors and very good successful classes. You can do it in like almost a few hours. So back then three years ago it was a basic class which after I took another class and I learned only about eBay about about six months. It's quite a lot of time but I did very well. I took it very slow but it benefited me with time because I knew how to do the things correctly and to avoid mistakes and today it's a successful business. So at the beginning it was like very helpful and then it took mentors and courses and paid a lot of money to be more successfully drop ship. Right. Yes so I paid I can I can say it's no problem for me. I paid a few thousand dollars for courses and classes and to get the results I get today. I'm very happy that today people can do it almost for free and get all the information that cost me a lot of money a lot of time and today it's very available and very free. So this is great times to be on eBay and great times to be an eBay seller. I think it's really very very important to get the help from other professional sellers which can take it forward and nice. Before we came to Autodesk I think you are with us like I think two years. Yeah almost closing down two years yes yes happy two years. So you use another tools I don't want to say names or something like this but it's not good but what why did you move to Autodesk why did you prefer Autodesk and joined our family. Well I've been in other monitors about almost two years. They were good and good features they were able to fulfill orders and track the prices the repricer but I felt I can get more and until I got to meet the Autodesk and some very special features that I think that make the jump in my in my business for example the 0.99 price that is a very psychological selling price for buyers online when they see the 0.99 it will make them want to buy. The special feature which I so much love and I think it's the best selling one for me now whether it's that we can lift and decrease the price according to the sales of the products and it's all automatically then the automatic messages. It's amazing all messages go directly to the buyers it says that we are with the customers we are all the time telling him how is the product did you get it it's amazing other tools didn't have it oh the the finder finder which finds for me automatically products and saves me a lot of time basically if I can sum it up in one sentence it's saving time automation automation automation this is what I think was the best for me on Autodesk and it's free my time free my time to do the things I love and be with my family and it's it's and also it made my virtual assistance my VAs to save time and also it saves money. Cool so actually what you like is that it's automates your business and it actually saves you time because you pay less to the VAs cool okay great so you're finding the products using the Autodesk finder and I guess you have another way that you can maybe share now a bit not too much because we want to general things I usually use also I use the finder and for special products and I want to find special niches I will I will use the search tools like Zik and I will give to my VAs and they will certain items as a season items some items that might be special for some for some events that are coming holidays and also when I integrate it with Autodesk they can upload it very easily take a schedule upload the items we find on other tools using the schedule uploader so it makes the job very easy and very fast cool so you're using a combine of Autodesk finder manual searching on Amazon and Zik Analytics where you use the API with integration with the Autodesk cool great so I want to share something something around I think one month ago and we have spoke with Zvika about this that I saw his store and he was really really successful and then I thought that maybe we can take this success and copy it and help to other dropshippers and other ebay servers in Autodesk so I spoke with Zvika about maybe we can share this information and maybe Zvika can mentor some people for free for our dropshippers we will just pay him because we want the success of the people so I want to ask Zvika some questions about the mentorship program and about how he will manage the his students and how he will help them to success so Zvika first of all one thing which was very wondering for me and very interesting for me is that I saw that you are very successful and in UK market and in US most of your focus in UK but if you are so successful why did you decide to still help people and still take people forward and teach people but teaching for me is a passion I love to teach I love to see success through teaching someone else where I've been before in the past and someone is now in his present still small seller didn't reach his personal success I didn't tell but I don't mind sharing it in back a few years ago I was a professional Olympic judo player for many many years and I took from from these professional sports that and the way of life that I did I took the basic principles for success implemented on my on my eBay business and the students that I teach it means to be a professional to focus all the time take yourself very seriously have daily targets weekly targets monthly targets and don't stop until you reach the gold medal the gold medal is where you think you earned enough money that that it's okay for you every month so I it's it's it's a drive it's a passion and I know the the you have you have such a good feeling when you once you reach that goal this is amazing so I took this all those two on the sport and and implement them on my students I I mostly teach how to trade on eBay UK that's the main platform that I work on of course I also teach on the US and I have many students and that are profitable today and making the full living out of it and I think in when we talked about opening a free mentorship plan with me and with you that we will try to implement and give the knowledge and the passion to succeed as I have I think it's sometimes more important than actually explain how to trade but giving the psychological state of mind how to how to how to succeed and how to be a profitable eBay seller so I think on the plan on the mentoring plan we will try to give both to the to our using to our the students I thought it was students okay um this is what I think it's the main idea good so actually you already teach a lot of dropships in the UK and not only in the UK right or only UK the UK and us I I I always say first UK because most people come to me to teach here to be for me to teach them how to sell on UK because the UK it's a it's a great platform it has low competition if we compare to the USA we work with the pound currency which is 30 percent higher than dollar and amazon is the best supplier on all over the world in UK because it it will give great products it ships in 24 hours and many many more advantage that I cannot tell now but trading dropships on Amazon to eBay UK today is the strongest eBay platform profitable using Amazon UK it you cannot compare to yes it's it's it's amazing what happens on the on UK of course I teach a nice trade by myself from the USA and we we have great profits over there uh but guys and people come to me usually because the one first UK and then in the US cool great so I think what one of the most important things which we spoke before that you said that that you like in the case also this is about the store subscription the other one to speak about this a bit yes um it's one of the great features uh that eBay UK is offering sellers is it's an anchor store which is unlimited store what it means that you can list items or fix monthly subscription and you can list up to your limits let's say for example if I have one million items uh on my limits I can list one million items and pay the same price for example an anchor shop cost about 480 pounds and I can list in the same price 10 items 100 items and 1 million items it depends up to my limits so it's great for saving a lot of money which we cannot do on USA when you say once we have passed the 10 000 limits uh items we can we will start we will be charged for over the limit of 10 000 so this is great for the UK and you know there's so many advantages in the UK but I don't think I don't think we have the time for it now but we will talk about everything in the mental group cool I think that we will also do some videos later about the UK so it will be also interesting for people and cool so we have spoke about the mentorship program and I want to be go deeper about this and what are your requirements to the mentorship program to be one of your students I think um because the goal of the mentoring program is to grow we want sellers to grow with us and to succeed then we I think it's the minimum requirement is to have 1000 items already in the store and to have limits no less than 20 000 dollars or pounds and so we can have some room to work with and to grow of course students that will enter the program and we need to increase their limits they can do it by themselves and we can offer them help how to increase the limits but our goal is to grow want to grow and for that we need some minimum requirements I think the 1000 the 20k are the minimum that that we need so actually the let me a bit make it more clear the minimum for the mentorship program and this is because of our checks and what we saw is at least 1000 program products which already active uh in Autodesk and at least 20 000 limits on eBay of products because this is the only way where we can really help you and really help you to grow and one of the main focuses of Totsvika from what I saw that he did with his students is to change the mindset because well when the mindset become that the grow is okay and the grow that is the only way to succeed on eBay so it's much easier and this why we want these limits because without that with 1000 products in in eBay we can't really help you to succeed we will we must have a much bigger accounts and Totsvika will help you to do this on the right way uh so we will not okay so we can't cause any noses to ourselves so I had a problem with the microphone okay cool and so what about VAT on UK in order there is a problem will it help to your students somehow to bypass this problem we we sorry I think people that want to trade in UK who are trading from UK to UK like Amazon to eBay or any other UK based supplier it already didn't register to the VAT and they must they must do that it's to comply with eBay policy and rules and the HMRC which is the tax authority of of the United Kingdom and they must be registered we will explain in the group what is the VAT if they don't know what it is how to do that we will help from A to Z all the way how to do that and explain how to combine it in our trading in the break even how to trade it with how to use the VAT on Amazon on eBay everything that needs to be known and I must say that the VAT I call it my best friend because many many sellers on eBay are afraid of the VAT because you gotta register you're gonna feel you need to add some paperwork send and you gotta pay every quarter and also it's happening in Germany now and it will be on all over Europe it's only a matter of time VAT is a great friend because it's it's causing a lot of sellers to run away from eBay and because they don't want to deal with that but that's the room for the professional if you are professional you will use the VAT and you will embrace it for yourself because VAT drives out competition and it lives for us the market very free and we can profit for it so the VAT is great and we will explain everything how to handle it use it pay it report it everything so don't be if you heard something about VAT problem issues forget about it it's the best thing that could happen on the on the eBay on the european eBay platforms so you mean that even with the VAT it's still worth it to work with the UK because it decrease all the unprofessional sellers and now only the professional sellers in the UK and it worth it yeah yes totally totally you can you can see a giant leave of sellers especially on UK hundreds have left eBay eBay UK and left the platform not empty because the professionals still are in and they're paying VAT and everything works great but the VAT is it's super and it's everything is by the book on eBay on Amazon and with us and it's great it isn't a problem it's a great advantage cool understand nice so one second let me check what I wrote before I wanted to ask you I asked you something about one of the about what you will require from your students and you said that you had in the past students which were not with the open mind and it was very hard for you to work with them so can explain a bit about the open mind and why it's so important and how how it really worked with it okay so in the past I've worked I've worked I'm working with students and trying to get them to achieve their goals the thing is with sometimes we get a mental block we're afraid to grow maybe we will not be able to handle all of this a huge quantity of items if you have today 1,000 and you're afraid to get to 10,000 you're afraid you will not be able to handle it so it's a block or how can I handle all the customer service how will I will be able to handle all the surprises the daily surprise they will have maybe items out of stock maybe I sent the wrong item things like this we do not need to be afraid of especially when you have someone that takes you and teaches you and once you will be with 5,000 items you will see that 10,000 is not that much when you have 10 to 10 of thousand of items you will think that 20,000 is not that much the thing is I say when you want to grow you got to grow not too slow not too fast but you got to grow when you grow the numbers play the game on ebay if we have big quantity in our stores or items the percentage they will sell is higher we have more opportunity to sell if we have more relevant items on ebay then we will sell more if we have good pricing we sell more so we do not have to be afraid don't block your mind I'm afraid to be big the professional are big sellers they have huge quantities of items and they sell very good you got to you got to think big if you want to make a full living out of it you got to think big so in the mentorship program we will always talk about it let's grow let's see how we can enlarge a little bit more our store using the automation tools that Autodesk will give us so when you have when you have the the highest level of automation in the store then it's easier to grow when you don't have high automation it's hard to grow okay so this is the important thing they have a you need to have a good monitor like we have and when you have big automation it's not a hard to grow so we got to send the negative thoughts about it's hard to grow it will damage me to grow it doesn't exist we got to grow cool and you will help them to the students to understand how to handle all this grow and how to do it smart so because a lot of people sometimes grow and then they lose money so you will help them to do it right on the right way right yeah of course we we don't want to grow without knowing what we are doing you got to grow knowing what we are doing so we are we're going to want to talk about which items we want to list what is the correct time to list the items and how to clean the store from unselling items how to clean the store out of a out of stock items and eBay doesn't like it doesn't like you having you many items that don't sell so we might need to clean the store and load it with new items we got to grow get a clean and grow clean and grow and think all the time how do we want to grow what even we will set up a plan we set a plan how we want to grow if our plan is to go 10 000 in one month then we'll decide how we are doing it every week number of some quantity we want to do it even and not to do it very fast so we will set up goals with the student before on the first meeting or how how will you do it when when do we set these goals of how it will work I believe that like we can do a first first private lesson and talking about the goals we want to reach talking how we are going to reach it I think we should have and we will do it we'll set every student will give us a VA access to his monitor so only to see only to view the dashboard so I can see the progress of the students and how is growing and after about two weeks three weeks we'll do a larger session private session and to see what went good what didn't went good how to improve the obstacles the students has reached and how we can overcome them and of course we will have a WhatsApp group closed WhatsApp group only for the mentorship program that you and I will be available there and to answer to answer questions and to give them support of course I don't know or think that we will be able to be available all the time but we will set some time in the day to be available and to help the guys to grow so actually they will not live without answers maximum they will ask the question and they will get the answer after some time but any question will be answered so they will not be just in the water and of course we will not let traders in the program and let them handle by themselves we are there for we are there for them and we want their success we want their stores to grow and be more profitable and successful and it might take sometimes maybe you cannot answer immediately but we will make sure that every question is answered during the day course so actually we will do one lesson on the start of the mentorship program when you got the student you will set the goals you will go over the account over the settings set everything to be right write down the notes write down your VA access account so you can follow up and then we just schedule the next meeting where you can really check that the student does everything and then answer the questions on the next lesson also if he has something personal right this is exactly we about two personal lessons and setting goals check up and what are you available and that's a very very huge I think and going hand by hand with students on the mentorship program I think that we hope guys want to come in and to become professional to be and to be open minded and come grow this is what we want students in the program okay don't come to the program if you're not learning to grow and succeed we want only people who want to come they want to succeed want to be number one for themselves maybe amazing let me check we miss something do you want to add anything else maybe you can give from our small tip to people maybe how to manage which products they should remove from their store maybe something like this so people will get a bit of what you are doing for one good tip that saves a lot of money is if you if you don't have an anchor shop yet or an anchor store US or UK once you reach the limit of your subscription you're paying for items that are more than the plans plan and you are listening also and you're listening by now 1005 and 10 20 you're paying for each one over the 1000 make sure to delete items that are about to be and that we can see clearly on the on the monitor yes we have the time clock of number of days left since the item was uploaded the 30 days and delete them if they are out of stock they're not selling at least two months then delete them it's money thrown into the to the trash so it's a small thing but it saves a lot of money a lot of money so make sure it's a it's a very very money worth tip after how many days of out of stock will you remove a product if it didn't sell if it didn't sell at all I go 60 days it should not be on the store for 60 days if it sold five plus times in 60 days and it's now out of stock I will give it maybe a chance of 30 days more maybe it will get in stock and it will continue to sell but if it didn't sell 60 days and even if it has no views no watchers I go 30 days as well but you gotta feel the the item if it's a seasonal item if it's past the season for now if I have it Christmas tree now that I forgot to delete and it's almost one month after then I don't have anything to do to do with it because even if it sold for me 100 times nobody would buy now Christmas tree because we have 30 days after the holiday so you gotta delete it so you gotta feel the item you gotta feel what it did for you cool great I think really that you can take a little forward and really excited to see how will it work with more students because we already did the test on some students and some of the clients actually and I want to talk a bit from our side how will it work so actually we will have a form which you can feel you just need to request from the support the form for the mentorship program they will check that you fit all the requirements which is at least 1000 products you know to this and at least 20,000 limits on ebay and if your fit they will give you the form after you fill the form we will contact you and contact you with swicker so or any other mentor which is available if swicker will not be available so when we have a free spot we will contact with you because every mentor can do get like thousands of clients he can just get some so when the mentor will be available he will contact you and we start working with you so you just need to request from the support the form and they will check with you and fit the standards and then the mentor will contact you the mentorship program is completely free and we just pay to the mentors so they can help you because we understand is that one of the most important things for your success is for your success is your knowledge and someone who can take you and mentor you one of the things with things which i like with swicker is that he is also a mental trainer because he came from the judo and he has a lot of experience so this is the good things with swicker just ask swicker as a mentor in the support when you contact and also fill it in the in the form i think that we went over most of the things swicker do have something that you want to add because we are non-accept traders from all over the world the time difference from israel and other places in the world is different naturally but i will do private talks and lessons with the students in the program but they will have to adjust themselves to our israeli morning times so if you're in the united states it's gonna be for you late night if you're somewhere in the in europe it will be maybe early morning or something like this you gotta adjust yourself to our mentors hours because for us to be in the most in the best time of our day to help you for us to get 100 percent for the students to give 100 percent for the students it would be we need to be in our our time so gotta take it in mind i think that this is also what will show that the students is a really serious because if he able to wake up in the night or wake up early in the morning it means that he really want to succeed but i don't that way yeah i think except this it's not also not a very big problem because it's just few lessons which are private and after that you're just helping them in the whatsapp groups so it also will be fine and i think that we will do also follow the people in the mentorship program we will do some live q and a's but we will send the messages about this on the whatsapp groups cool anything else that you want to add i want to wish all the best for the future students in the mentorship that will come and to be very successful and to love and and enjoy what you are doing we live in amazing times and we can work from home we can make a full living we can have free time to the judo to teach judo to teach people to have free time with our friends with our family with our children so if you see this is this is a big big opportunity for you not just to earn good money and you can also have a better quality of life so if you're going in with us you're going in all the way if you're going all the way to be very big and successful so no other thoughts are acceptable in our mentorship group cool amazing thank you very much for your willing to help the students and really share from your knowledge and for being here with us today and really really really exciting excited to start and see how the things are going on and showed it will be really really really amazing thank you for the great opportunity to be part of this and i wish us all the best and we'll see you on the other side thank you bye bye bye