 Hello everybody, I'm so excited to be here today with Baron. Baron is a dropshipping who lives in a country with economic problems and he has some very, very, very interesting thoughts about how it's to have an online business or a dropshipping business in countries like this. He can share his thoughts about this and how he works in this way. So, hey Baron, how are you? Hello, I'm very happy to join you with this video and I am great. This is a great day and this is actually a great era to be in and we'll talk about it later. Thank you for having me on the show. Where do you live? Where are you from? I was born in Ankara, capital of Turkey and I'm 20 years old. I'm in the university right now. Since I study engineering, we have cooperative education program. So, for these last three and a half months, I was able to work on my project full-time. Cool, what is your project? My project is, I actually started with only doing dropshipping myself and then things got expanded from there. If you want me to start telling everything from the beginning, I can do that. Yeah, we're happy to hear how did you get dropshipping? How it started? Okay, so I was 19 when I got my first job as an engineering apprentice in a rocket company in Turkey, actually the only rocket company in Turkey. I was in the work analysis team and I was working full-time at this corporation and I used to get up at 6.30 am, walk for 30 minutes to the bus and then the bus would take me to the company which took about an hour and the same in the evening when I'm going back to my home. So, I just woke up before the sun and then I spent in a total of two to three hours in the trip. So, when you measure it, it's one-eighth of your day, about one-eighth or one-twelfth of your day and this time was mostly wasted because I had to be at a specific location at a specific time and I really started to dislike my job when my boss was being angry at me for stupid reasons and since I was an apprentice I was being paid less than the cleaner in the company but I did more things than most of the engineers there. So, the pay was unequal to me like we got paid under the minimum wage. In Turkey, the government takes extra taxes on students so if you're a student and make an internship from somewhere you get taxed extra. So, I was getting under minimum wage paid and I was doing an engineer level job. So, this whole thing got awakened to the situation and I saw that this is not a good way to live your life. There's much more to life and the youth, the time and your prime years are much more valuable than any money these companies could pay you. So, I started to seek out other ways to pull money from the economy. Like in the start, since I had... I didn't have even a thousand dollars in my bank account since my local currency was very weak at that time because of the political problems, economical problems that were out of my reach. I didn't even have a thousand dollars of purchasing power at that time. And when you're that broke, you can't really think about purpose changing people's lives. That's not the level in the hierarchy, like hierarchy of needs. That's on the top. I was like this level. So, I had to find a way so I could pull money out of the economy in my own terms so I wouldn't have to sell my time to another bus or to my parents. And then I found Rapshi, because that was one of the best businesses you could start with zero money down on the product. And it was also easier to manage than a service-based business. So, I could also provide some service to some people in my own terms, but it's not as easy as doing drop shipping as I started. And by the way, I started with Amazon, not eBay. I started with drop shipping on Amazon. In Turkey, we do things a little bit differently than in the US. We generally drop ship from Amazon US to Amazon Canada or Amazon US to Amazon Mexico. Since there are same sellers in these other platforms, you can just present Amazon.com's products in Amazon.ca or Amazon.mx and then you can make good profit margins with that. We also have some software that makes it very easy to find products on Amazon. And since you just need the async codes to list it on Amazon Canada, because they are all in the same panel. You can control your Canada store, America store and your Mexico store from your same panel. It was very easy to find the products and upload the products. Because of that, I was able to pull money out of the economy without having much of the high income skills, rather than engineering, of course. Cool. So, I actually came to drop shipping because they wanted to... not to sell your time and they want to really maximize the profits which you can do with your time. Nice. And how did you get to drop shipping on eBay after this? So, when I first started selling on Amazon, I purchased an educational program in Turkey. But at the time, that educational program wasn't up the park with industries. So, there were a lot of knowledge gaps in my knowledge. So, I decided to also get mentorship from some guy who knew Amazon much better. So, I started getting mentoring from that guy who is now my friend. And in one of our mentoring course, we were talking about... he was talking about setting up a new online education company. And he said, he needed people who knew good English, who are also smart and hardworking. So, then I said, I might be able to do that job. I might be able to learn new business models fast and try it myself, then tell it to people. And the eBay came into place when the other mentoring students, the other consultation students in our group started to get suspended because of the trademark issues with the brands. So, when you drop ship from Amazon to Amazon, you have to be very careful about trademark problems because you work with thousands of brands. So, even two or three of them might be upset about what you are doing. So, if they claim trademark violations against you, there is not that much you could do. So, we were searching about a new business method which allowed you to sell most brands without getting into trouble. Because of that, we found eBay dropshipping. Cool. Nice. So, this is how you get to eBay dropshipping. And now, what are you doing with the dropshipping? You're a seller by yourself, and you also teach paper? Yeah. Actually, I was the first one to figure out a way to sell on eBay from Turkey without having any relatives or close friends in the other countries because there's no paper in Turkey. And in order to sell on eBay, you have to have a PayPal account. I tried to set up a PayPal account in the UK, in the US, but they didn't work because I didn't know what I was doing. And then I started to research about it. Then I learned about Steatechance accounts. Then I tried to work with a lot of Steatechance providers, which most of them were scammers. And eventually, after many months of trial and error, I have found a site that is reliable. Then I talked to him, and then we made an agreement. After that, I got my account, and then I was able to get consistent sales with that account, and then I prepared an educational program. And now it is the only and most detailed eBay course in Turkey. It has more than 15 hours of content and minimal extra bonuses. Nice. I saw that there are not a lot of dropshippers from Turkey. It's very, very not common there. But the number will rise up in the next few months, I hope. Nice. When we talked with you on Skype, you explained something which was very interesting for me. This way I also wanted to make this interview because it's something which was very amazing. You explained me about the currency, because you are making money by dollars, so it's much better for you because you live in Turkey and it's much cheaper there. Can you explain a bit about this? Sure. The Turkish lira was given more than 50% in the last two years. So at this moment, one US dollar is equivalent to 5.62 Turkish lira. So when you earn dollars and spend Turkish lira, there is a huge leverage between the currency. So even if you just profit $1,000 from eBay or Amazon, it is equivalent to a good starting engineering salary in Turkey. So even if you get $1,000 of passive income per month on your own terms, if you are by yourself, if you don't have a huge family, you can be financially free with that money. And it is not very hard to get there. Even $1,000, it's what engineering in Turkey gets. In general, starting salary of most engineers is a good profession in Turkey. It is considered to be a good profession. You might start with $3,000 or $4,000 Turkish lira, which is not even $1,000. If you can earn $1,000, which is $5,000 and $600 Turkish lira roughly, it is considered to be a very good salary for a young engineer. So if you can profit $1,000, then you can be financially free right now in Turkey. Nice. Cool. And how fast do I think people can get to this amount, for example, from your students or people who you teach? Do you have any estimation? Yeah. Let's talk with numbers. I log each of the sales I get from my stores, like from Canada, Mexico, and US eBay. And my average profit is about $7 to $8 per item. So if you profit $7 to $8 per item on each transaction, you have to make, let me do the calculation from my phone. $1,000 divided by $7.5, you have to get 135 sales to be financially free, divided by 30 since your store works 30 days a month. If you get 45 sales a day with your store, you can be financially free in Turkey. And there are many more countries whose currency is weaker than Turkish lira. So for some of the countries, if you can profit $1,000 a month, it is like mid-level manager's salary in some countries, $1,000. And you only have to get 45 sales, 6 sales at most a day. And it is not weird how to do it. It takes, if you are hardworking, it takes at most 3 to 4 months to get there. And you are financially free like that. That's huge. That's amazing. Cool. I know that I think that there is, you also said something about this. There are problems with PayPal on Turkey also with eBay, or there are no problem to open eBay accounts. So here's the situation. There's no PayPal in Turkey. So you have to use US PayPal or UK PayPal to sell on eBay. And since your PayPal account and your eBay account is linked, you have to log into them from the same country's IP. So there is no limitation for you to go and set up an eBay account with your Turkish IP or from Turkey. But if you want to sell on it, you have to connect the PayPal account to it. And if you want to connect the PayPal account to it, then you have to use US or UK PayPal. Because of that, you are unable to set up your own eBay account without a legal entity. One more choice is actually setting up an LLC in the United States and then you can get yourself an individual taxpayer identification number, set up your PayPal business account, and then set up an eBay business account, purchase an anchor store. So you start with high limits and verify PayPal right away. But that is very costly, since you are spending dollars and in your country, you are probably earning Turkish liras if you haven't started the ropes you can get. So like 99% of my students are not able to afford setting up an LLC right away. So we had to come up with an alternative solution which cost less. And I came up with a stealth account. And they work right now. Cool. So you are working with a stealth account to be able to really make the op-shipping money to okay. Yeah. Without stealth accounts and residential private proxies, it is almost impossible to do the op-shipping from Turkey without a legal entity. Like you get banned right away, you get banned in a week. Yeah. Good. It's very important for people to know that it's very important to work with private proxies and not shared proxies because shared proxies will burn and close your account. Yeah, you get banned at most amounts. Like I give you at most one month. And proxies are not that expensive. They only cost around $10. And also in Turkey even purchasing the proxies is a pain in the... I don't want to curse. Even purchasing a private proxies is harder than Turkey. Like you have to set up another PayPal account just to put your credit card into it. You make the purchase, you get the private proxy, and then you send the bank transfer to your staff guide. Staff guide gives you your stealth account. And then you use your proxy to log on to your stealth account. And you have to make sales in your first month so you can keep paying your proxy. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, but at least it worth it. Do you have any other tips which you want to give to people who want to start purchasing in countries like Turkey, countries where the PayPal and eBay blocked, or any other countries which have the financial problems? Yeah. I can set up a roadmap to people who wish to start purchasing in an underdeveloped country. And it is first you need to learn how to do the job, because if you try to figure out everything yourself, you end up paying more than education costs, and you spend more time to learn it. So I had to learn doing eBay dropshipping by myself because there were no other courses to teach me how to do this from Turkey. So I spent months, and I spent hundreds of dollars for it. But if you were to purchase an educational program, it would cost you less, and also it would take less of your time. In order to afford the educational program, you might have to work on a site project with minimum wage. That's how I did. In my apprenticeship, I was earning less than minimum wage, and I haven't spent any money from my first two salaries because I used them to learn about the job. I learned about how to do Amazon dropshipping. Then I started. And if you want to be successful in dropshipping, you have to find products that are already in demand. You don't want to guess the demand. You want to enter a market if there is demand for it, and if you can't compete on it. So if you can't compete with your competitors, but there is demand, don't enter that market. You want to enter only if there is demand, and you can do something better than your competition. For example, you might be able to drop the price for like three cents. You might be able to create a better copy for your eBay listing. You might be able to make it more visually pleasing so that it catches the customer's eye. You can add trust badges to your item pictures so that it is more noticeable to your customers. And Autodesk does it really good. You use HTML-based scripts so that your listings look professional. Some people just copy and paste everything from the suppliers website and do not touch any of it. And if you find good items with really bad descriptions, then you can improve the listing and then you can sell the item rather than your competition. So the number one skill for new dropshippers is to understand if there is demand for the product I want to sell and if I can compete on it. Cool. Great. Thank you. When I release your course, so people know and then we can also put it under the video. Okay, so we are planning to open the course for public in this month. Before that, we only had 25 people in our test group so we wanted to see people bring good with the program and a few of our first students started to sell on eBay and then we saw that it worked so the course will be open for public in this month in April. Cool. Yes, thank you. So I'll put the link when you give me the video. Great. Thank you very much, Merlin. It was very, very nice to do this interview for you. I'm sure that it will be interesting for people. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me in your channel. I'm really pleased to talk to you about the subject and if any of those followers have any questions, they can ask me their questions on Instagram. You can also tag my Instagram. It is the best way to reach me. Cool. Thank you very much. Bye-bye. Have a good day.