 So today I'm going to show you what a typical research day looks like for me or just kind of like a snippet of what a research day looked like for me. And the focus of this video is going to be the exchange marketplace.com. This is essentially where people come to sell their Shopify stores. People can list their store privately so you can't find out much information about them. But then some people list them publicly, which means you can see their website. And once you found somebody's website in the name of that business, then you can find out a lot more about them. So this is something I like to do quite a lot. Well, I'd say quite a lot actually, probably once a fortnight. I like to look at people who are doing things more successfully than me and see what I can learn from them and implement into my own stores. So if we click the video off then, I'm on the exchange marketplace.com using the website, it's pretty self-explanatory. So I'm not going to bore you on how to do that. But basically what I do is I search for all stores. I'll sort by revenue, high to low over here. And then rather than see, so these are all private so you can't see anything, rather than see like a snippet of their homepage what I'll do is I'll click this button here so I can see exactly how much money they've made basically. And then it's just a case of scrolling through, looking for ones which aren't listed as private because the public ones are ones that we can actually open up and find out a lot more information about. Preferably I'm looking for drop shipping stores as well because they're a lot more easier to take things from especially the products. If you're watching this video and you're looking for a certain niche or a certain product range to go into, then I 100% recommend this strategy because within the space of a few minutes, hopefully after watching this video, you will have discovered like a multi-million pound or multi-million dollar product. So I'm just going to scroll through these. I already have Lenny Lemons up. That's going to be the store which I'm going through in this video. But just to kind of show you what the process looks like really, I'm just looking for different websites which are public, which I can kind of take some information which are actually valuable to me as a drop shipper. I'm probably going to stay away from smart UV actually. I can see that they've not done much recent revenue and they did loads in the past. So what I'm guessing is that these guys started up during COVID when people were a lot more germ conscious and kind of capitalized on the UV market. So this is the store I'm looking at Lenny Lemons. So let's open it up. The exchange marketplace gives you kind of like a summary. Like I said, you can learn so much about business. It gives you kind of like a summary and you can learn so much about the business. So it's called Lenny Lemons. It's fashion and apparel. It's established business. It is actually a drop shipping business as well. And they are asking $20,000 for this business. And I think if I'm not mistaken, it's turned over nearly $9 million. So to me, that sounds pretty cheap to be fair. I've had some of my stores valued in the past and I mean, this was a couple of years ago actually and they seemed heavily overvalued. So for these guys to only be asking for $20,000 is pretty good on the surface. Obviously I have to dig a lot deeper before I can give them more accurate judgment. So we'll take a look at some of these images. They have a 15% return in customer rate once this opens up, which is brilliant. One of the hardest things to do as a drop shipper, purely down to kind of the logistics of it and how well or how high quality your products are and how quickly you can get them to your customers as well. Unless you can do both of those things really well then it can be difficult to have a high customer and return in rate. But these guys do, which is brilliant. It really helps with the sustainability of your business. It's back in 2018, did nearly $6 million. We can see their sales by social source are predominantly Facebook and Instagram. So from that, we can learn quite a lot. We can obviously see once we've seen the products in the niche that the types of people who are buying these products are on Facebook and on Instagram. So if you want to take inspiration from this and replicate it in your own way, then you know exactly where your customers are. So if we work our way down, it's always interesting or at least to me, maybe I'm a bit of a geek. I like to know why people are selling businesses. Is it because the trend has just completely passed in which case there's nothing that I can learn from it and I'll just move on to the next one. This guy says or person says he's working on things that he's more excited about, time is limited. What's involved in running the business? He has a customer service person. That's one of the first things that I outsourced was customer service because it's just an absolute pain and it's so, so time consuming. It's so, so time consuming. So I don't blame them, especially a store of this size to be doing that sooner rather than later. Time to run this business two hours per week, which is probably a little bit on, or maybe at the moment, if it's not very active, I was gonna say I spend a lot more than two hours a week on my business. So I would struggle to see how it could be this little unless it is inactive, which I think it is, judging by these revenue numbers at the moment. They're in the baby and children's space. I did recently just put out a video stating this is one of my favorite niches. They have a strong social media following which is awesome, 400,000 different followers, which is huge. That alone is probably worth the $20,000 in itself. It says here, our goal is to build Lenny Lemons up to its dominant brand and resource in the baby space. I think we can easily be a 50 million year company, a 50 million dollar a year company with the right strategies. I started the company initially by myself, all self-funded out of my mother-in-law's house. So it just goes to show building things to this size can be done by anybody. All you need is a computer and access to the internet and just one person, that's all you really need to start a drop shipping business of this significance. We have drop shipped the most of it and recently launched our first private label products, which is great to see. So anybody who is watching this and maybe a little bit established already with drop shipping is something that I've done as well is naturally have progressed the products which have established themselves and got some traction and proved to be profitable of private labeled them as well because as you can imagine, instead of buying one unit at a time and drop shipping if you buy and say 5,000 units and put in your own logo on it, the profit margins are significantly higher, significantly higher quality too because it can be quality inspected a lot easier. You can establish terms with your supplier so on and so forth, but the biggest advantage is being able to offer that faster delivery customers are much more likely to come back obviously after waiting one to two days for their products rather than maybe one to two weeks. Overall, the baby slash toddler niche is an amazing space to be in. Moms are willing to pay for their little ones all day long. Completely agree with this. On top of that, I would add, as so our grandparents, it'd be interesting to know the profile of these guys, kind of like average customer. I'd be surprised if it isn't actually grandparents mostly or majority are buying these products for their grand children. Just something else to touch on which might be useful to somebody watching this video says here conversion rate can probably be improved, easily be improved with better email campaigns and follow-up flows. So it sounds like they've been neglecting these somewhat. These are a huge part to any e-commerce business. A lot of people will expect to, say, spend 10 pound on Facebook or whatever advertising platform and see 20 pounds back whilst that is possible by introducing or having the addition of email campaigns, follow-up flows, automated sequences, that sort of thing that can significantly help support those marketing campaigns that you're using and increase the profitability of your business overall, which makes it a lot more sustainable or easier to sustain, I should say. It also says here, and add international marketplace for larger reach. So by the sounds of it, they've just been focusing on one particular country. This is another big topic when it comes to dropship and a lot of people see it as saturated and you can't make money. That's not the case. What you can do though is take a proven concept, proven niche, a proven range of products and just simply bring it to a different country. Another interesting thing is we spent over $1 million on advertising through Facebook and Google when we could have spent a fraction on that on influencers and affiliates and got even better results. There are many incredible mum bloggers, influencers, so on and so forth. Completely agree with that. So whilst I would still consider or plan or strategize to have Facebook or Google as kind of like your main advertising budget, introducing the strategy of having influencers and affiliates on board is an awesome way to kind of build your business for very little effort. There are apps and softwares that you can introduce into your site. So it would literally be a case of any influencer, blogger, so on and so forth, coming onto your site and getting set up automatically. And if you can keep enough of these people on the books, so to speak, you can grow your business very profitably and very rapidly too. Two of my favorite companies that have kind of used and adopted this strategy to become very successful are Gymshark. I believe they kind of dominated the YouTube influencer space when it come to fitness clothing and also my protein too. They did a similar thing and made use of influencers to kind of grow their brand. Just something else I want to point out which I found quite interesting. This person says I've been to China twice to visit factories and the Canton Fair. I did the Canton Fair in April 2017. If you ever want to go somewhere and just be completely overwhelmed by the sheer size of it, go to the Canton Fair. If I remember correctly, it's 10 kilometers by 10 kilometers by 10 kilometers by 10 kilometers. Everybody drives around on golf buggies because it really is that big. I think we did two days there or three days and we didn't even scratch the surface of what we wanted to see. Back in the time, I had a heavy focus on pet products so I remember walking into the pet product area and it was the size of the NEC at Birmingham times five. It was just massive and it was just full of supplies selling pet products basically and at that point, I thought I was doing pretty well in terms of what my numbers and what my figures were but everybody I spoke to didn't want to talk to me because I weren't big enough basically unless I was ordering minimum a container load of something, then they wouldn't even give me the time of day so it's a great place to go where it really does put things into perspective of how much opportunity is out there and it's also a great place to go and meet people as well. Just to quickly go over the revenue then before we take a look at the store, we can see that they went from nothing to something very big, very, very quickly and then since then it's kind of dipped up and down. It kind of looks like they made a bit of money and then neglected it and then wanted to make a bit more money so they kind of ramped it back up again and now they've kind of neglected it. Maybe because their heart wasn't in it, it's very difficult regardless of how much money you're making at least from personal experience unless your heart is actually in it, it could be really difficult to get yourself out of bed in the morning and put those kind of hours into something with everything you do or at least from my experience there's going to be those jobs which you just hate doing and you can't outsource so by the looks of it to me if I had to guess then they got into this to try and make a bit of money they did that and when they did they kind of neglected things a little bit but then they needed some more money so then they ramped it up again and so on and so forth but by the looks of it, their heart's probably not in it anymore and they just want to sell it. So let's take a look at the actual Shopify store itself. First thing that kind of springs to my mind is they've done, it was at $9 million in turnover and it doesn't look anything special. This looks very similar to some of the free default themes that you get on Shopify. So nothing really that amazing to point out here if we take a look at their FAQ pages there's no kind of custom layouts here these are just word documents pasted in we can see their shipping takes two to seven days to process sometimes another 20 days for delivery which just kind of confirms that they IMD drop shipping they have a track your order page which is exactly what it is fairly standard very straightforward and easy to integrate and then they also have a contact page they have an email, they have a chat, they have a call us and they have social media as well as a physical address so there's no qualms or queries about how legit this particular store is to anybody having to look from the outside. The next thing I'd always look for is you can hide it stores can hide it but unless they've actually put that piece of code in in their theme then you can't actually see what their best selling products are which is this best friends jacket. So this is something I'll always have a look at on stores as well as their product page and the layout see what kind of things I can implement into my own stores. What I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna drag this all the way across a little bit just to give me of what like a mobile view will look like. I don't think I've ever come across a Shopify store where their customers have been predominantly on a desktop so mobile layout is always what I'm focusing on. These guys are quite interesting so it doesn't follow the stereotypical layout for Shopify store actually has a bit of description has shop pay as well which is interesting they have these custom variant buttons which looks nice it just doesn't at this stage in this view it doesn't look like your stereotypical Shopify store so it differentiates itself from anybody else selling these same products which is good. Moving down they have kind of like these four icons which offer a summary of all the most important things which a customer is probably gonna be considering and then what's interesting is below all of that is when they actually have the description they have some information on the shipping which is really good actually because a lot of stores don't actually do this they don't actually mention here they don't, they don't actually mention how long shipping is gonna take but just by having shipping information here like that helps customers feel that the items are actually gonna be shipped out especially if you advertise on a social media platform unfortunately people do have kind of like a negative connotation towards ads and social platforms because there are a lot of dodgy businesses and scammers out there so just by offering information like that and just reassuring them can make a really big difference. Besides that though there's nothing really that kind of sticks out to me and there's no customer reviews for this product as well which is interesting and really interesting in fact but what I'm gonna do now just to confirm it to myself and you guys watching the video is just make sure these guys are indeed drop shipping so with my Koala inspector, go to products go to bestsellers and see if we can find any of these so this looks like a pretty generic product which would be able to find so I'm gonna kick it with mom let's get rid of these, see if we can find it I think I'm gonna kick it with mom today so straight away it took two seconds to find one of their best selling products of a eight, nine million dollar store is in fact available in AliExpress so it's tried and tested, it's proven, we know it works so if you're watching this not sure quite what product to sell then I definitely would recommend trying this one we'll try this, the best friends jacket their very best selling products is on AliExpress as well so it just confirms it again another proven multi-million dollar product and again, if you're looking for a product or a niche to go in, I'd definitely recommend checking out these guys doing your own research and using it as inspiration in terms of the color schemes, fonts, that sort of thing and these could even be your two go to products so most people who watch my videos tend to be in the UK and this has been tried, tested, proven in the US so definitely an opportunity and definitely a market for here in the UK as well and so with that being said just a quick recap then, we've discovered a multi-million dollar Shopify store which does indeed drop ship products from AliExpress advertises on Google and Facebook so they use the stereotypical drop shipping business model so it just goes to show it does still work there's plenty of opportunity there if you discover stores like that take their tried and tested concept and then just introduce it somewhere else in a slightly different way so instead of in America we can do it here in the UK so if you're watching this video and you're looking for a direction to try just to dip your toes in and try and see how things work more than anything definitely recommend checking out those guys and seeing what you can learn from them thanks for watching the video