 What's going on guys, welcome to a new video. So today we're gonna be going through five things you need to do before you start drop shipping. These aren't gonna be the typical topics either that you hear a lot of people talking about. We're gonna be discussing things like taxes, whether you need to register as a business, business addresses, things along those lines. Think of this video as like kind of like building the foundations for your house or for your business. If you don't build a house on the correct foundations and at some point it's gonna fall down. It's the same with any business as well. So make sure you stay tuned for all five things. Get these things in place and set up correctly before you actually start your business. And it's gonna set you up to give you the best chances of success and building something sustainable for many years to come. So thanks for tuning in. Hope you guys enjoyed the video. Hope you learned something new. Let's jump straight into point number one. So point number one is setting up a company or at least by the very minimum a separate bank account. I get asked this question all the time because I'm based in the UK. People aren't sure whether they need to register as a sole trader, register as a limited business. And they're kind of like the two main options here if you're based in the UK. So to give you an example of why it's so important, if we take a look at the screenshots on the right-hand side, the top one is your personal tax allowance so we can see up to 12,570 pounds, you pay zero tax. So essentially everybody can earn up to that amount but not pay a single penny in tax. The screenshot below is corporation tax currently. So as I record this video in April, 2021, corporations, so limited companies regardless of whether they make 10,000 pound profit or 100,000 pound profit, they will pay 19% on that. The reason this is so important and you get it correct from the very beginning, let's say your business in its first year makes 75,000 pounds profit. If it's registered and everything goes through a limited company, you pay 19% on that. Whereas if you're a sole trader, then basically it's all considered as your personal allowance. So you get up to 12,573, then you pay 20% on the next kind of 37 and a half thousand pounds. So you're still paying 1% more than you would as a corporation and then anything over 50,271 pounds, obviously you'll pay 40%. So depending on how you're registered and set up, you could end up paying too much tax. It's really difficult then to give blanket advice which would accommodate everybody because everybody has different jobs, everybody earns different amounts of money. Some people have a mortgage, some don't, some have cars, some don't, for example. So the best advice I can give as a blanket statement to everybody is to speak to an accountant. They will ask you questions like, what is your current earnings? If you have a job, if you have a nine to five, how much do you earn from that? Because that will be considered your personal allowance and then anything your drop shipping business makes on top of that. So let's say for instance, you're already in this higher rate band, anything you earn from your drop shipping business on top of that will be taxed at 40%. Whereas if it was in a limited company, then it would only be 19%. So these are all things and reasons why you actually need to speak to a professional and speak to an accountant. When it comes to finding an accountant then, when I first started, I just kind of rang around a few local ones. I find at the time it was nice to have somebody local because you could go and sit down and meet with them. Some things are a lot easier to discuss and kind of iron out, speaking face to face. So I would definitely recommend that, find people in your local area, ring them up. Someone will even give free advice for like a 30 minute consultation before you have to pay a penny so you can use that time to answer any questions you have. I'll just make sure you put them together beforehand. Or if you would prefer to use somebody online, then my recommended would be e-commerceaccountants.co.uk. I haven't personally used these guys myself, but they do come recommended from a few people they know. They specialize on people in the UK and they're very familiar with the dropship and business model as well. Point number two is to establish the following for your Shopify store. If there's one point in fact that you take away from this video, let it be these three things that you implement into your store because they can make a significant difference. So many people skip these things because of the costs. Many people see them as optional costs. Whereas if you ask me, the return on investment for these far outweighs the costs and they're 100% recommended. Anybody who joins the academy, first thing I would do when I look at their store is look for these three things and that's why there's content involved in kind of building the credibility of your Shopify store. So number one is to get an online phone number depending on who you go with. You can look at these at around about six pound per month so it's not a lot. You haven't got to sit by the phone and answer every single call from every single customer. Just get an answer phone message set up, people send you and leave you messages and then you can get back to them in your own time whether you call them back or send them an email. Number two is a business address. A lot of people are uncomfortable using their personal address which is understandable and there's so many different services online if you just search for business address service they're called virtual offices and again you're looking at about 15 pounds per month and then point number three is a Google workspace account. You don't have to use Google workspace again. There's loads of different services offering the ability to have a custom domain email address. So if your shop is called shop then you can have hello at shop.com rather than an at Gmail or at Hotmail which doesn't look as professional. The total cost of these combined then for every kind of one to three orders these will be paid for so it's not a lot of money to commit to each month and if you ask me 100% worth it and 100% necessary. Point number three is kind of an optional one it's to use a credit card for as much as possible. Now don't take this as going and racking up loads of debt that is not the case. I want to make it clear from the kind of outset that you would only use a credit card as a substitute for cash. If you have a thousand pounds in your bank do not spend more than that in your credit card make sure you can pay it off in full and do not get into debt for money that you cannot afford. So the advantages then of using a credit card for things like order fulfilment, marketing costs, expenses and paying off in full if you have a rewards one depending on what the reward is you can build things up pretty quickly and then you can obviously redeem those rewards for depending on what kind of account or set up you have. So the one I use is an Avios rewards credit card with Lloyds and every time I spend money I get points back it's about one point is equivalent to a pound and then once you've built up some points you can redeem them for things like flights or meals at certain restaurants or things like that. So 55,000 Avios points is about the equivalent or I believe about a return trip to kind of America and back. So as you can see if you're constantly kind of paying off and for redeeming these points this is going to be money you'll be spending. Anyway, you can soon rack it up and at the end of every year you can treat yourself to a nice holiday or a nice meal in a restaurant. Just to reiterate then I am not encouraging anybody to get into debt. Only use it for what you can afford to pay off every month. Point number four then is to create an impression of an established business. Again, so many people forget to do this and when people and people will naturally when they come across you on your site they'll check you out, they might Google you they'll go to your social pages, look for reviews, things like that and the more information they can kind of gather to kind of put together put forward a case to themselves that you're an established business the more likely they have to trust you 100%. So there's a little screenshot here just showing the importance of certain things having on your website. So 34% which is significant because that's what about one every three people who visit your store will look for customer reviews product reviews. So if you don't have these you're going to be losing out and your conversion rate is definitely going to be suffering. 11% nearly for easy to contact the company this is why point two was so important. So that's nearly 50% of all people who visit your site are going to be looking for things like that contact information and the reviews. Number two then is a valuable social media posts. Five on Facebook has a minimum 10 on Instagram. So what I mean by this is when somebody goes onto your Facebook page if your last post, your last kind of update is so and so change their profile picture doesn't look professional get at least five posts on Facebook and make sure they're valuable social media posts. If you can give somebody value for free they're much more likely to trust you they're much more likely to kind of hit that like button stick around and follow you and your brand. Same for Instagram. If you get 10 posts then you pretty much cover a full page a full screen on somebody's mobile phone device and it just gives off that impression of a more established business. And an optional point but it comes recommended if you have the budget to do so and run engagement ads to build social proof. So if you take a look at this screenshot on the top right hand side you can see you build up engagements for as little as two P I believe this was to the UK as well so that's still expensive you can get engagements a lot cheaper than that but if you look at all the comments and all the reactions if somebody comes onto your page and sees that instantly it proves that you're an established business and it makes people trust you that much more. Same if we take a look at this Facebook ad here we can see 443,000 sorry engagements, reactions and 10,000 comments. If somebody was to see that they wouldn't see it as a scam because to get that sort of engagement you have to be doing something right. To do this then there's two types of campaigns in which you can run. One is called a page likes campaign. This is purely and solely to build up the likes on your Facebook page. You can build these up super cheap and get to 1,000 likes pretty quickly. And then point number two is engagement posts. Engagement sorry adds for your posts. And again, if you take a look at this screenshot for as little as two P per engagement so you can soon and very quickly get to like 1,000 engagements and 100 comments. Number five is store feedback, a really simple one but as it says there in the brackets, do not skip this. This is super, super, super important. It doesn't matter what you're selling you could be selling gold for 10 P to the pound but if you do not have a trustworthy website nobody's going to trust it. Nobody's going to trust you enough to hand over their payment information and actually buy from you. So a professional Shopify store is 100% critical to your success. Speak to friends and family and ask for honest feedback. It's really important that you get honest feedback. If I was to create on purpose the most rubbish Shopify store I've ever made in my life and send it to my mum for feedback she'd still come back and say it was really good. So if you can try not to tell them it's your website try and go to people who you know will give you constructive criticism. Join Facebook groups. There's a link in the description which takes you to mine which is like a Shoe K based Shopify group. I allow people all their time to post their stores in there and get some feedback. There's like 14,000 members. So if you post your group you usually get a good kind of at least a dozen people giving you some genuine feedback. If you take a look at the two screenshots on the right hand side then out in your opinion, leave a comment down below which one do you think looks more professional and which one do you think is going to have a higher conversion rate? With that being said then, thanks for watching guys. I really do appreciate all the support and everything on the channel. Any comments, questions, anything you want to ask me it's all posted down below. I do read them so I will respond to you. And one final thing then before you go if you are looking for a course by myself comes with my full support and guidance as well as all the content and kind of support networks to back it up. Make sure you check out my eCom Academy. There's some background information on screen now. There is a callback service too so if you want to hop on the phone with me all calls are with me one on one and just go through any questions and things like that you have about joining we can do that no problem at all. Just check out the first link in the description below. Thanks again for watching and I'll see you in the next one.