 Hello everybody. Today we have a super interesting interview with Rafael who is a big YouTuber and Shopify seller. How are you today, Rafael? I'm great man. It's a great experience to be here and I'm happy to share my experience, share some tips for people that are doing dropshipping, Shopify all over the world. Cool. So first, thanks for coming. I'm listening to your videos and there is a lot of really high value and information which is very interesting. Can you tell us a little bit firstly about yourself? For sure. So I basically started around four years ago or so. I was traveling around the world a little bit trying to earn some money online, basically find something that I could do and then the first thing that I ever did was work for a Shopify store. So the first kind of job that I ever had was just working for a Shopify store and they were making about four million dollars a month, like crazy money. So I thought, why don't I just start a Shopify store like this and do it by myself? And back then, 2016, 17, there wasn't really any videos about Shopify, not that much content. So I just learned from doing it for that company. Like my job was kind of like my mentoring. The boss told me what to do. I learned Facebook ads on Shopify. And then I quit that job, did it for myself. And because I had all that background, all that good information from the job, then I did it really well by myself. I ran a few stores, then I got a partner in Hungary in Europe. We ran some really good stores again. And then a lot of people were asking me for advice, like, hey, how do you make money on Shopify? Because I started posting my screenshots, like 5k per day, 10k per day, people asking me for help, mentoring courses, something like that. And then I just started putting free videos on YouTube. And it started skyrocketing. People loved them. And that's how I started. So that's, that's how I'm here. And you came to this job without any previous knowledge? Yeah. So what I did know how to do was just set up a Facebook ad, like I learned for free different videos, how to make a Facebook ad, how to run some Facebook ads, spend some money on Facebook. And I did it by myself a little bit. Actually, I tried so many things. It's kind of funny. I tried selling ebooks. I tried like selling a website. I tried like so many different things. And one of the things that I learned through that process was like Facebook, Facebook ads, Facebook advertising. And that was the main role of that job. And then they taught me everything else about Shopify, about the backend, all that. And it was like pure dropshipping store? Yeah. It was pure dropshipping. It was like straight from Aliexpress, straight from like suppliers. It was called Shaper Mint. They still have a website, actually. If you check it out, they're making like, I think a million a month or something. So it's still a real website that makes money. So. Wow. That's cool. Right now, do you run any Shopify stores for yourself? Except the region? Yeah. I do have one Shopify store for myself. It's in the kid's niche. Like now we're selling a lot of kids toys and going through the holidays, Christmas. I am a little bit more focused on my client stores, like helping students. There's a few students that we have, a few clients that we have making 100, 200 K a month. So I, before I was doing like 95% my own stores, 5% helping people. Now I'm doing kind of like 50, 50. It's a lot of time just to help people with their Shopify stores. And that's how I'm making money with my own store as well as helping other people with their stores. That's cool. So you found that you're more passionate about like running the stores for other people. It's a lot more, I guess it's a challenge. I mean, once you get to a point where you can do it yourself, it gets pretty boring and you don't want to continue the path. You either like create a brand, like a real company, a real brand. I'm more of trying to help other people get to that point as well because it's harsh out there. Like, you know about drop shipping, you know about software, like the courses, the mentoring's out there are pretty rough. It's hard for somebody to learn, especially in the beginning. So I want to provide that mentoring, that help that, you know, nobody provided it to me. I got it through that job, but I want to give it to people and just help them. So that's how I do a lot of the YouTube, a lot of our trainings and so on. What are you doing in your training? It's like one-on-one or official before the course? No. So what we do is we do a free, like a live event before we're doing it monthly. Now I think we're going to do it every three months because it's a lot of effort more than I thought it would be. And now we're going to do it every three months. It's like a week live training all for free. And then if people want to work with me, working with me basically means like it's one-on-one, but also group mentoring. My team does a lot of the work for them. It's like a hybrid program between me helping them directly and also my team doing a lot of the work for them. Awesome. Sounds cool. And with which suppliers do you work on your Shopify stores? That's a good question. So the main one that we use right now is called Sourcing Box. Sourcing Box is a company in China. It's just a fulfillment company that basically takes care of all my orders, also the orders of my clients and my students. Now it's not the only company that I would recommend people because people that are watching this, like they might just Google like, oh, what is Sourcing Box? That's not the only company that you should use. There's a lot of them. What I recommend, it highly depends by product. Like every supplier will have their specific product category that they focus on. Like CJ dropshipping, for example, which is a pretty famous one. If you're selling sort of general trendy products, really dropshippy, it's really good for that. But if you're selling more of the branded side, let's say you're selling apparel, clothing, then you have to go more for like a company, let's say S Pocket, or somebody that has warehouses in the U.S., something like that. So the one that I use Sourcing Box, there's also another one called HyperSKU and a lot of private suppliers that we give to our students. But when it comes to a private supplier, it gets easier once you have more sales. So if you get to the point of making 50, 100 sales per day, you can pretty much guarantee that you'll find a pretty good agent. If you're making two sales per day, then you have to just use one of the companies that are out there. Yeah, good. And do you start your research? Like for a beginner who just started, would you go for AliExpress, for example, or would you jump directly to these suppliers even before the research? For the research process, AliExpress is good because it tells you how many orders something is getting, how much money it's made. It gives you kind of a sense of the market, how the market is doing for that product. Now, when it comes to ordering, if you have one order every week or two orders, three orders, sure, you can use AliExpress. The problem is it gets very addictive. If you use AliExpress for your first five, you think, wow, this is so easy. It's so fast. And then you get like a hundred orders and then you use AliExpress for all of those and you get a thousand and then the supplier just disappears. And now you have a thousand orders that you're struggling to find who's going to send them for you. So that's why I recommend people, sure, a few orders use AliExpress, but after you're getting consistency, two to three per day or more, you have to find a good supplier. Okay. That's an interesting approach. Okay. And do you work like the shipping time from China is fine for your customers? So do you use US warehouses? US warehouses, yeah. There's a lot of orders that are getting in like seven, 10 days, but they're still because of the lockdowns, all these problems, there's still issues. So if you do, if you are getting like a bunch of orders, like a thousand a week or more, you should get a bulk order from AliExpress or from, sorry, Alibaba or from any supplier, store them in the US and then ship them from US to US. I would not really, like if somebody's making more than 20, 30 K a month, you shouldn't really rely on China only. You should have some stock in the US or wherever you're shipping to. Cool. I agree with that by the way, because I think that to build a real brand, the shipping time is critical. That's why we also push always to the US suppliers and not something else. What is a good optioning product for you? Like we talked about the suppliers, but what about the product itself? Can you mention the criteria that you use to choose a hot selling product? The main ones that I sell or I try to sell, depending what time of the year it is, because right now it's the holidays, it's Christmas, you can get away with selling toys and a lot of decorations. But regular time of the year, I look for problem solving products. And if a product doesn't really solve a problem, then it's probably I'm not going to sell it because it has to solve some sort of problem that a customer struggles with. Then after you have that one, it's also a problem. Then you want to look for a product that has already made at least $5,000 to $10,000 on Aliexpress or at least has made 500 orders or so. You're not going to find the next fidget spinner if you're a beginner. Like a lot of people think, oh, let me just sell this product that has no orders because it looks cool. I'm going to be a millionaire. It's probably not going to happen. So you want to look for something that's already selling. And then you want to find some stores that are selling it. If there's a lot of stores that are running ads for it, selling it, that's a great indication. And then the last thing would be that it's not copyrighted, patented, not a product that is going to get you in trouble with any legal issues. I think those would be the main criteria. Okay. I agree by the way about the legal part. How do you do this research? How do you check if product is not copyrighted? You go to USPTO.gov. It's the US Patent and Trademark Office. There you'll probably find everything, whether it's a patent, patent pending, copyright, trademarks, all that. And it depends because if you're in, like I have some students that are, for example, in Israel or in Greece that if they get into trouble with the US, there's, you're not really going to get into trouble unless you're based in the US, then you can have some problems. But I would still be careful because Shopify can ban your store, they can ban your payment methods, PayPal can ban you. I was selling, I think two years ago, like a copyrighted product from a big brand. And I thought I could get away with it. I just, ah, whatever. And it was selling so easily. I would run ads and started selling like crazy. And then PayPal and Shopify both send me an email like, hey, please stop selling this product or we will shut you down and we'll put you on a blacklist. And I'm like, okay. And like two minutes later, I removed that I stopped all my ads. So be careful, yeah. Yeah, it's always better to go on the safe side than not trying to. It's something that a lot of dropshippers are also trying to do in the beginning, like to trick the system and do some kind of things like this. But I agree with you, it's very better to go in a safe way. And when you search for a product, what would be the average price that you recommend for a beginner's? Around 10 to 25 cost, like the actual cost of the product. I wouldn't sell something that's like 10 cents or 20 cents, unless there's a strategy behind that or a reason behind it. Like if the product is 10 cents, but people buy 20 of them at the same time, or the product is like a dollar, but for example, as a set of products, like a set of 12 or a set of 16, that's great. But 10 to 25 would be the cost. Then you need to add shipping to that. And then you would sell it for around 50 to around 100. So that's a sweet spot. That's where you want to be. So you put how much percent of profit do you put on each product? I always take product cost and shipping cost together, multiply it by either two or 2.5. So cost is 10. Shipping is eight or for easy, let's say it's five. So that's 15 times 2.5 times two is 30. And times 2.5 is like 38 something. So just price it at 40. Then you write on your site, the product is free shipping or you add also shipping? No, free shipping. There's people that charge for shipping. I like charging for, I like putting free shipping and then putting insured shipping or shipping with insurance or shipping with, there's people that do shipping with tracking, shipping with no tracking. I probably wouldn't recommend that because people want to track their products, especially now. So you would do free shipping and then free shipping with insurance or 100% refund or something like that. And then charge for that one. Okay. That's interesting strategy. And how do you advertise the products after you found them? Mainly Facebook. Now, Facebook is having a lot of issues. So I'm going the route of Google, YouTube ads. Instagram, I don't dabble in it too much. I used to before, but I haven't really found like a new traffic method. I'm doing TikTok ads and beating everyone. It's the classic Facebook and Google. I think those two are the biggest, most powerful, most scalable platforms. Yes, Facebook has some issues, but it's still a great platform and very profitable. Yeah. I tried creating a WordPress WooCommerce store. Never actually ran any traffic to it. I tried creating a Squarespace website. Didn't really like the layout of it. And that would be all. I was tempted to do Weeks because I saw so many ads for it. But I think Shopify is the best for, like Shopify specifically for people that want to sell products. So if you go to like Wix or Squarespace or WooCommerce, yeah, they're for people to sell, but it's more, it's kind of like a general website builder. Shopify is more of, hey, we're going to help people sell products. And they help you do that with all their apps and their plugins. And the code is very easily written. You can edit it. You can add people to the website and kind of replicate the work. So we have a team of like 16 people that fix Shopify stores. They do Shopify work. And it's very easy to find new people that do Shopify. It's hard to find people that do WooCommerce or Wix or something. So that's why I love it. Yeah, I need to have much higher technical skills for WooCommerce. And about the products, can you explain a little bit how do you find these products? I use a lot of spy tools. What I like to do is look at Facebook ads, spy tools, like there's, there's a lot of them, drop point, dropy spy, ad spy. And then you find the product that, for example, is running on an ad has like 100,000 views or 50,000 views. Then you go to the store and you check either the best sellers or the recently added products for that store. You check how much money that store is making, analyze it really well, and then you find products inside of that store that are selling. You can also kind of double check it with AliExpress, see if that product is selling on AliExpress, not just on that store. I like spy tools. I know the owner of Ecom Hunt, he's great. I know the owner of a few other spy tools that are really good. I just wouldn't tell people that spy tools are like the ultimate cure. If you're going to use a spy tool, don't expect to find your next seven figure product. There's a lot of things that go behind that. So spy tools are the best way for a beginner that doesn't want to work too hard to find a product. Everything is kind of done for you. Like on Ecom Hunt, you have your targeting, you have your video, you have your ad copy done for you. Like literally everything. So you can just go and plug it in. There's a few other ones like knee scraper, sell the trend is pretty good. Those, I would definitely use them. My strategy is like reverse Facebook. That's what I like. And hiring people. So we have a full time product researcher on our team. All she does is literally just find products all day. And you can find somebody like that. It's hard, but you can find someone like that on Upwork that can find a bunch of products for you every single day. That's cool. So basically you use spying tools. So basically you recommend beginners using the spy tools and also the brain to analyze it in the right way. Okay, that's cool. What do you think about the future of dropshipping? Few years from now, five years from now, how do you think it will look like? I think since so many people are doing it and it's now especially like the more I don't live in the U.S. anymore, but when I live there, buying online is so easy. Like for example, I was walking down the street in New York and I ordered a suitcase for a trip that I had like in two minutes from my phone. And I thought after I bought it, I thought, damn, that was so easy to buy a suitcase. And now even more, like people are stuck at home. There's more lockdowns like California just locked down for another month. People are forced to shop from home. And I think e-commerce is going to be the thing that people do. Like a lot of brands are just going straight into e-commerce. They're not even bothering and opening a shop. So for dropshipping, I would say China is going to get better and better. At shipping is going to get faster. Like before you just had AliExpress with e-packet. e-packet was kind of slow, kind of messed up. Now you have these like 30 different shipping methods. Like I made a video today on the shipping methods that are available. I had a list of like 18 that were below two week shipping. So they're going to get better. They're going to have more companies, more teams doing this, a lot of more connections, more technology. And I think shipping from China is never going to actually die. You just have to not always rely on China. You need to get stock into the US. You need to get your private packaging, branding really good. And stores that are just a general store selling whatever kind of product, selling a very weird product page that looks kind of scammy, that doesn't work anymore. You know, like, oh, 10 people are buying this product, only two left. Get it now before we run out. That doesn't work anymore. So what really works right now is like a branded store, really high quality, having products to solve a problem. And then just building an overall niche brand. You can't just like one guy showed me his store. He was selling like a fitness product. And then he had like a car repair product, you know, like a baby bag. That doesn't work. What really works is like make a niche store, branding it properly, getting a team together to help you and then scaling a real company. So I just thought even as a beginner, you wouldn't do a general store. I mean, I do recommend some beginners to do general stores. Like, for example, one guy, he came to us and he, he's a banker, like basically works in a bank, does a lot of money, but just wants to sell online. Like him and his wife, they just want to sell something online. And I told them, okay, well, what exactly, what are you passionate about, what do you like? And the guy's like, well, I don't know. I just want to sell something. And for a person like that, that doesn't really know what to sell. They don't really want to think about it. It's better to do a general store, test a couple of products and then find your way through the products and then eventually find what you want to sell. That in that case, sure. And for people that have no idea about Shopify, like if you're an engineer and you want to start selling online and you don't know what to sell, you don't know what sells, you're not really passionate about any type of product, a general store does work. I just don't want people to like think that they can make a general store, a million dollar store. For some stores, it works, but you, it's like hitting a lottery. It's like, oh, you know, out of a hundred products, out of a hundred products, one is going to win. But a niche store, you have a lot better probability. Okay. So if I don't know, if I don't have any idea about what I would like to sell, I would go first for a general store and then find my niche and go down to the niche. Correct. Yeah. And what about one product stores versus multiple products? What is your opinion about this one? Multiple products to start. One product is more for when you really want to scale something. So the one product source that I've done, it's been like two or three in the past. They've all been from a multiple product store that is doing very well. That product is the main seller. Then that one, we put it into a one product store and scale it. That's when I recommend people to do it. Because you see a lot of people that are, they start one product store and then they're beginners and then they go and they take like, you know, the posture corrector or the bendable sunglasses that you can put here, like everybody's selling that or they take like a version of a fidget spinner. And they think that that's going to work because it's a one product store, because it's guaranteed to work. If you're a beginner, you probably don't know what sells. You probably don't know how to sell it. So you need to first test it on a multiple product store and then sell it on a one product store. What about the Facebook campaigns? Do you push people to a specific product page or to decide itself? A specific product page is always better. Or if you have a lot of products that are very similar to each other, then a collection page. Like a carousel on the Facebook campaign? Ah, a collection on a Shopify. A collection on your Shopify store. Yeah. Yeah. And on Facebook, do you use the collection or? No, I don't, I don't like carousel ads. I like just image or video, video mainly. Video is so good because like you can create local likes out of your video views. You can retarget video views. You can create a lot of audiences based on that. So. And you create the videos by yourself or will you use any service for that? We're using now a new service. I don't want to like say their name and then people, oh, this sucks. So I'm not going to say them, but it's a service that you can basically buy like three videos at a time for about $60. So they end up being like 20 bucks per video, which is pretty cheap. There's other big companies that do videos like e-convids. Those ones are custom made. Like you send them the product, they do it for you, but minimum is like $3,000, $5,000 for a video. So if you want to start, you should get a $25, $50 video, really good quality and then run ads with that. Later on, you can do custom ones. Yeah. After we see that the product proven in itself, right? Exactly. Okay. That's interesting. Anything else that you would like to say to beginners or someone who wants to start a Shopify business? I would say just start because I've been working with a lot of people and a lot of people they, there's so many steps to this process. Like there's, and you first need to create the shop, you need to find the products, you need to do the ads, you need to scale the ads. What if you get banned and then you're going to do Google? And then what if Google doesn't allow you to sell some products? And then how do you scale Google? There's so many steps and so many problems. And I think especially beginners, they think, you know, how am I even going to get started? Is it too hard? Is like it's drop shipping dead? Just start, just step by step. And also for people that are thinking like, oh, does drop shipping work or not? Drop shipping isn't this like magical thing that makes money. It's just a business model. It's just a way of shipping your products. So just think about it like you're doing e-commerce, you're selling products online, your drop shipping is just a model that you're using. And then another advice would be just don't try to sell something because it looks cool. Think about it as, you know, you're looking like, let's say when you learn math in high school, you don't just randomly find out the result, you go through a long step by step process of, oh, okay, and this is the result. And then your teacher asks you like, oh, how did you get to that point? And then you need to show her how you got to that point like, oh, this and this and this. And then I did the step. The same thing is with when you're running a product. Like it's not just, oh, I'm going to run it because it looks cool. It's because it has order volume. This other store is selling it. It's running on a Facebook ad. So always kind of thing that you need to show yourself the proof that that product is going to sell. That helped me a lot in the beginning. So just do it. Yeah, just do it because it's overwhelming. It's really hard. So just do one step by step. What is the budget that you would say to people to like put in the side for the option in business and say to themselves, okay, this is my budget to stop? There's a lot of videos out there on how to start dropshipping from zero, how to do dropshipping for free. And they get a lot of views. A lot of people watching because it's, you know, how to start dropshipping for free. And I've been tempted to do a video like that. But the reality is you can't start with zero. Like if you start with zero, it's going to take you a long time to do it. So minimum, if you want to take it seriously, you want to be a real business owner, I would say like $1,000, $2,000, like to really build something good. If you're on a tight budget, you can't put too much, $500 would be good. And the reality is like, even if you live like in a third world country, $1,000 might be a ton of money for you. But I think if you save up, you work for a long time and you actually want to take it seriously, $500 is a minimum I would go for. If you're in the U.S. and you have a regular job, you know, you're a nine to five or something and you don't have a thousand bucks, you're not $2,000, it's because you don't care about it enough. You're not planning enough. You're not like, oh, you're going to a restaurant instead of staying at home. So I think anybody, at least in the developed countries like U.S., Canada, Australia, you can come up with $1,000 to invest in your business or $2,000. And that would be perfect for starting. Yeah, I agree. Everything is basically the prioritized that you're doing for yourself. Yeah. Cool. So thank you for the great interview. It was super interesting. And I will touch the link to Rafael's YouTube channel below this video so you can watch on the podcast also. And thanks again. It was a great interview. Awesome, Lior. Thank you. Bye.