 Dropshipping has been around for quite some time and in the past few years, a lot of people have been making some pretty good money with it. But going into 2023, that starts to raise the question, is it still worth it? Is there still money in dropshipping? Honestly, dropshipping can be a great way to get started in the e-commerce game without having to put down a lot of money up front. And right now there's a lot of entrepreneurs that are actually starting their own dropshipping stores in hopes of establishing their own successful online business. Today we're going to talk about what makes dropshipping profitable and how you can maximize your profits in your online store. But first, let's run that quick intro and let's get started. What's going on, everyone? My name is Mario with AutoDS. And if you like informative videos on the dropshipping business, or if you like tips and tricks on how to potentially maximize your profits, please make sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button. Let's get started. First off, what exactly is dropshipping and how does it work? Dropshipping is a fulfillment method where the retailer, in this case yourself, doesn't really carry any of the inventory, meaning you're not carrying any physical stock. You're not taking up any room in your house, in your office, in your warehouse with a bunch of different stock. Now, let's take, for example, somebody places an order on my store for a hundred dollar pair of shoes. Once I receive that order, I'm going to go to my distributors website, place that same order using my credit card details. But instead of paying a hundred dollars, I'm going to be paying seventy dollars. Now they're going to go ahead and ship that directly to the customer. And the remaining thirty dollars are my profit. Having the right products in your store will help you bring in more customers, but then fulfilling all those orders on time will help you bring in some more customers. Word of mouth goes a long way when your customers could be at the gym when they listen to some music and their workout partner asks them, hey, where'd you get those headphones? And they're going to be like, oh, I got it from this website and they're going to refer them to your website. Now, remember that the only way that they're going to be referred to your website is if you do provide good customer service and fast shipping. So is it actually worth it to start a dropshipping business in 2023? Well, if you take a look at this graph that we have right here, the global dropshipping market is actually expected to almost double in size by 2025 from what it was last year in 2022. So if you ask me, yes, it's definitely profitable and worth it to start a dropshipping business in 2023 and beyond. The global retail and dropshipping industry is actually supposed to hit over five hundred billion dollars by the end of 2025 with an expected growth rate of about 8 percent per year. Now, with all that being said, let's talk a little bit about the benefits of dropshipping. Dropshipping has little to almost no startup costs. So you really don't have to spend much to be able to just get started with selling. Also, it's a very low risk and high reward business model. So you really don't have much to lose, but you have a huge potential to gain. Also, scalability. It's fairly simple with a little bit of work to be able to start scaling up your business and making some more money. If you want to learn a bit more on how to scale your business, please make sure to hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out. Now, dropshipping is super easy to start. And the fact that you don't have any up front costs or any overhead costs makes it a great way to make some extra income. And as stated before, start up with minimal costs. Now, as you start to scale your business, you're going to notice that a few parts of it start to get a bit tedious. For example, placing an order with your suppliers as you're getting the orders from your customers. That's fine when you're doing one or two orders. But once you're starting to receive 20, 30, 40, 50 orders, that can take a lot of time. At that point, it's best to use something like AutoDS to just automate the entire process. So when a customer places an order, AutoDS will automate the entire thing and take care of it for you so that way you can get some more time back. Now, how do you start your own money making dropshipping business? Well, it's fairly easy as long as you follow the seven steps. Now, if you want a little bit more detail into these steps, I'm going to go ahead and have the links to the blog posts down below in the description. First, we need to find our best sellers. So we need to do some product research. Now, there's a bunch of different ways to do this. One way is to use the AutoDS product research tool where you have a bunch of products that are proven best sellers. Another way is you're actually able to just spine your competition. Take a look at their stores, see what they're selling. You can go to your suppliers and you can ask them or you can look on their websites and see what their best sellers are. You're also able to check out Google Trends, which tells you what's trending at the moment as well as Google Lens. Social media is great to find trending products, especially apps like TikTok. On TikTok, all you have to do is search hashtag TikTok made by it and you're going to see a ton of trending products that people are going crazy for. And finally, you have dropshipping ads like the ads that you see on Facebook or Instagram. Just make sure that the ones that you're looking at have high engagement rates, lots of comments, lots of likes, stuff like that. Now, out of all the methods that I just mentioned, one of the more helpful ones that you can use is the AutoDS product research tool. As mentioned before, you have access to tons of trending products, but to make it even easier, you have things like one click import where you're able to just click on the item, import it to your store and have it lied within seconds. Now, after you have a solid list of products that you do want to sell, you want to narrow them down to make sure that you're selling products that actually have the potential to sell. For that, you can use the product research dropshipping spreadsheet. If you want access to that, I'm going to go ahead and have that link down in the description as well. Now that we have our products chosen, we want to go ahead and select a reliable supplier or suppliers. You want to work with multiple reliable suppliers so that when your customer places an order, they can get quality items on time. Working with multiple suppliers also gets you access to a larger inventory of products. When looking for your dropshipping suppliers, here's a few things that you want to keep in mind. First, you want to make sure that they have international warehouses so they can ship from any part of the world. You want them to have a wide product range so that way you can have access to a bunch of different items that you can sell and offer. You want practical returns with shipping and payment policies, affordable and quality products. You don't want to overpay for a product, make less profit or charge more for the products to your customer. You want them to have positive reviews. You need to know that they are doing a good job and they have quality materials. And you also want to make sure that they have excellent customer service. As long as the supplier that you've chosen checks off all those boxes, you can rest assured that you're going to be getting quality products from a trustworthy source. Next, we need to set up the store and select the selling channel. When it comes to the selling channels, you're generally going to have two different kinds. You're going to have the customizable e-commerce platform and you're going to have the marketplaces. An e-commerce platform such as Shopify allows you to customize practically everything of your store as well as give you different interfaces, templates and designs. On the other hand, e-commerce marketplaces like eBay don't give you that amount of customization but they have ready available traffic. A few different customizable platforms are Shopify, Wix and WooCommerce. And then the e-commerce marketplaces are going to include places like eBay, Facebook Marketplace and Facebook Shops. Now all the channels that I just mentioned are easily synchronized without ODS, which means that you can actually use ODS's Rich Text Editor and Advanced Image Editor to be able to create and optimize your product pages. On top of that, there's also ready-made templates that you can use to easily enhance your customer's experience. Now that you have your products chosen as well as the channel that you want to sell on, now it's time to bring in those products and import them into your store. Now there's basically two ways to do this. You can either manually import everything or you can automate it. When you manually import your products, you have to copy everything by yourself. So you're going to have to copy and paste the title, the description, the images, the variations and as you can see with one or two products, it's okay, but as you start to add more and more products, it starts to become very time consuming. Now you can automate the entire process and save a lot of time and effort. ODS's product importing tool actually features four different ways that you're able to do this. You have the one-click importer, the single product importer, the multiple product importer and you can also bulk upload using a CSV file. Let's go ahead and check out one of these options. Now let's say we want to import this blender from Walmart into our Shopify store. The first thing we're going to do is go ahead and copy the link. Then we're going to go over to our dashboard on AutoDS and we're going to choose the store that we want to sell it on. In my case right now, I'm going to go ahead and leave it under my e-commerce store. Then we're going to go to add products and you're going to choose which method you want to use. I'm going to go ahead and use the single product importer. That brings up this window asking for the URL. Now we're going to go ahead and paste our URL on there. You're going to notice that the supplier source changed to Walmart and it's shipping from United States. Now here we have two different options. You have the option to edit it now or to publish it directly to your store. I suggest going to edit now so that way you can optimize the title, the description and a few other things. Once you hit the edit now button, you're going to see that now we have the option to change and optimize the title, add it to a collection considering the fact that we're putting this into a Shopify store. You have the options for collections. Tags are automatically filled out. You have the shipping method, the country that it's shipping from, the city that it's shipping from and the brand of the item itself. From here you can either save it and keep it as a draft or you can save an import and it'll be automatically published to your store. Now what good is it to have a bunch of trending products in your store if nobody knows her there? Now it's time to start marketing your store. You need to start marketing your store so you can increase brand awareness, traffic to your store and a higher possibility to convert those visits into sales. For places like Shopify, Wix and WooCommerce, you can use PPC ads, which are pay-per-click ads, influencer marketing, content marketing like blogs, social media posts and email marketing. Now when it comes to marketplaces like eBay, you can do promoted listing standard, promoted listings advanced, volume pricing as well as order discounts. Now for Facebook marketplace and Facebook shops, you're able to use Facebook and Instagram promotions as well as buy and sell groups. Now once again, if you wanna dive deeper or learn a little bit more about these techniques, you can go ahead and check the description down below. All the links to the blog posts will be down there. Now we have our store fully set up, running and you have traffic being driven to there using your marketing. Now you get your first order, now it's time to start fulfilling. Fulfilling your customer's orders on time and accurately is a must. When it comes to fulfilling the customer orders, we have three different ways that you can do this. You can do it manually, you can do automatic orders and you can do fulfilled by AutoDS. When you're doing it manually, you're heading over to your supplier's website and placing the order yourself. So you're gonna go in there, add it to your cart, put in all your credit card information, the shipping information and do it that way. Alternatively, you have automated orders which fulfills all of your customer's orders by using your buyer accounts. So you sign on to your supplier account using AutoDS and when you get an order, AutoDS will log on to the supplier account and purchase the order for you. Alternatively, you can use fulfilled by AutoDS where AutoDS uses its personal buyer accounts to be able to purchase the products from the supplier's website. In both automatic methods, tracking information is automatically sent to the customer and both methods show order statuses. Now the last step is to provide exceptional customer service. You always wanna give the best possible customer service to your customers so they can have good word of mouth and they can keep coming back. If you don't have this good customer service, your business could potentially suffer with low conversion rates, unhappy customers and a lot of lost customers. In order to combat unhappy customers, you should always handle customer queries and complaints instantly. So as soon as you get any issue from a customer, try to take care of it immediately. If you accept returns, make sure to process the returns and issue the refund promptly. Send personalized messages. That actually goes a long way. Customers really love it when you send them a personalized message after they received their order, either thanking them or asking them what they think of it. Customers love it when they can quickly look up the questions that they need to ask without having to wait for a reply from customer service. And you can also use a customer service management software. With implementing all these techniques, you can ensure that you're gonna have happy and loyal customers that are gonna spread the word and bring in more. To help you out along the way, some of the more profitable and trending products to sell in your drop shipping store can include toys, health and fitness products, pet products, home decor and home improvement products, jewelry, automotive accessories like car seats and stuff like that, patio, lawn and garden equipment. If you wanna learn more about how to find the right products to sell for your drop shipping business, down below in the description, I'm gonna have a link to a blog post that can help you out with that. Now, what's a good profit margin to aim for when drop shipping? A general formula to know is profit margin equals your revenue minus your cost divided by your revenue times 100. Basically, it's the amount of money that you have left after you subtract your expenses from your business revenues. Some examples of expenses can include your subscription fees, marketing fees, channel fees, stuff like that. Since drop shipping doesn't really have any overhead costs, you're gonna see a higher profit margin than your typical mon pot shop out in the street. When starting off, you generally wanna aim for a lower profit margin, let's say starting around 15% so that way you can gain some brand awareness, get a few more orders in and get some good reviews. As you start to gain social proof, then you're able to start increasing your profit margins all the way up to maybe even 60%. Now, you're also able to boost your drop shipping profits using something like automation. When you start using tools like AutoDS to automate the process, you're gonna notice that you're gonna start to have more time to be able to start scaling up your business. When we start scaling up a business, that means more profits. Also, automation helps you reduce your errors while importing your products and filling in your shipping details so you don't have the wrong product sent to the wrong person. A few of the things that AutoDS can help you automate is quick and easy product imports, complete order fulfillment, price and stock monitoring, automatic price optimization, inventory management, and the list goes on and on. Overall, all of these features can help you automate the extremely tiresome and tedious process of manually drop shipping. While at the same time it helps you focus on other vital tasks such as growing your business or spending some more time with your family. If you found this video helpful and informational in the drop shipping business, please make sure to hit that subscribe button as well as smash that like button. Once again, my name is Mario with AutoDS. I wish you all nothing but success in your drop shipping business and catch you all in the next video.