 And we're gonna talk about Q4, all of the special holiday events that we have coming up, some good products that we should be selling, and all of the best advice that we can offer to you. And when I say we, I'm not just talking about myself this time. We have a very special live Q&A. And this time it's also with Daniel from AutoDS, the mentor and the e-commerce store manager. So Daniel, first of all, before we get started, thank you for being here in this live. How are you today? Hello, Lira and hello, everybody. I'm very happy to be here with you. It's not first time we are together on AutoDS channel. So I'm very happy to be here. And today will be very special because we are on the most profitable season of the year. And we have a lot of suggestions and tips to give to everybody are watching us today. Right, right. And the reason that we're doing it is because it's simply the best time of the year to be an e-commerce store owner, to be a drop shipper. And we've got four quarters in a year and this fourth quarter is always the best. So whether you're, if you've been here in the last Q4s, you know exactly what we mean. But if you're new here, then ask us your questions in the live chat. And we will also address you guys when we're nearing the second half of this live Q&A. So as you guys know, it's a tradition. I answer you guys' questions and I help you guys with the best of my ability. And today I've got this special extra bonus for you guys where we have our mentor Daniel joining along. So if you guys always, if you guys have been wondering who the mentor is and what kind of help and advice he can give you, don't miss this live Q&A. So we're happy to be here with you guys. The big topic for today, of course, as I mentioned, is Q4. We've got some holidays already passed us like October. We had, of course, on October 31st, we had Halloween and it was a great, great holiday. Cells were through the roof. We had a really fun time selling all of the Halloween products like costumes and inflatables and party decorations and trick-or-treat bags and all of that. But that's behind us now. And what we have coming up is bigger than Halloween. It's better than Halloween and that, of course, is Christmas in December. So cells are gonna go through the roof and it's gonna be all kinds of products but we're not here just to talk about products. There's a lot to know about your e-commerce store, how to prepare it correctly. Before we jump into it, I wanna show you guys something that's really, really cool. So far, hello to everyone who's joining the live Q&A. I can see all of you guys. So hello, John Reynolds, hello, Sagar, hello, Christina. I know that some of you guys joined a little bit early because of daylight savings time but this is the time right now for the live Q&A. So I'm gonna share my screen because I wanna show you guys something before we actually get started with the good stuff for Q4. But don't waste any time. Ask your questions, let us know what you guys wanna know, where you guys need help in the live chat and we'll get to your questions before everyone else who's gonna ask after you. So don't waste time, ask your questions now and we'll address it first. Okay, guys, what we're looking at right here is the Christmas chart on Google Trends, the Christmas search term, how popular this keyword is. So of course throughout the whole year we've got pretty much nothing. This is going 12 months back, right? So 12 months ago on December 19th, of course Christmas peaked and this is the search in the United States but even if I change it to worldwide you guys are going to see similar figures. So it doesn't matter if you're dropshipping to the US audience or to the worldwide audience because right now you see I just switched to worldwide and the graph looks pretty much the same because Christmas of course is not celebrated only in the United States. So if you're not targeting the US you're still very much in the game. So here's what we got. So last year on November 14th it was already starting to peak. So right now today at this moment we're on November 9th and look what's happening right here. It's on its way up, okay? So if we could go back to November 9th it would have been around the same spot where it's at right now. What's gonna happen is it's gonna keep rising, right? And it's gonna go up to a hundred, have no doubt about that. So if you haven't prepared your stores yet now is the best time and that's it. After watching this live you guys need to go and prepare your stores if you haven't done so yet. How to prepare the right way? That's what we're gonna go over in this live Q&A. Hello to everyone who's joining, hello, Takshila. Yep, I can see your guys questions we're gonna get to all of that once again ask your questions and we're gonna get to all of it. So Daniel before we go to the questions in the live chat while the people are still joining this live Q&A let's start talking about what we need to do to prepare our stores for Q4 the right way. Let's start with the shipping times. So what can you tell us about, what's gonna happen regarding shipping times during Q4 during this busy holiday season? One important things that everybody should do when the season is starting is not just taking care of to increase sales that is of course very important but is also critical to understand that we need to prepare ourselves not just about sales but about everything is around the store. This means customer service, supplier and everything because when we have increase of sales of course whole the part of our job are going to change, are going to increase and we need to be ready for this. One example can be the shipping times. We work whole the year, all the summer because we are coming from summer maybe with very fast shipping times because suppliers like Walmart, Aliexpress are giving us very fast delivery to how hard items and we are giving to customers of course two, three days delivery maybe but this most of the time is not possible under Christmas because suppliers are getting a lot of orders not just from us but from all the sellers, all the customers and this means that they will need more times to process orders. For example, Amazon every year put like Barnard on the website to inform the users that the orders could be late. So as Amazon take care of their customers doing this we should do the same on our stores. So it's very useful to increase our shipping times and our handling time a little bit under the season or before the season to be sure to deliver in time. Also we have on AutoDS platform very useful tool for this, the dynamic policy. So the system can do automatically for us on this. I strongly suggest to use this. Okay, okay. So one of the solutions for the long shipping times which is obvious, right? It makes sense. We've got a holiday coming up. The suppliers are gonna get orders like crazy the manufacturers and they're not they're gonna have a hard time putting up with quick shipping times that we're used to having between Q1 to Q3. So now in Q4 we're preparing for longer shipping times and one of the ways to do it as to your advice is to just update your customers or make sure that they know that during the holidays we have longer shipping times and that is completely fine. It's completely legit. Big companies like you mentioned like Amazon are also doing a similar thing and Amazon is not from China. Amazon is from the US and even in huge countries with huge demand and huge buying power in the United States even they have fulfillment problems during Q4. So it's a worldwide issue and customers around the world know this but we need to make sure that they also know it coming from our stores. So if you guys are having stores if you guys are hosting stores and in websites like Shopify and Wix and WooCommerce then you're gonna have to of course update your policies there you know update your policy pages on eBay you can simply do it on eBay through your business policies on eBay and just update your handling time update your shipping times but don't forget after the holiday to bring it back to what it was before. One tip that I can add here also is once Christmas is over don't stop selling I mean you can stop selling Christmas products because people are not gonna sell them but all the other products that sold well during Christmas that are not Christmas related are still probably gonna continue selling well during the month of January. January usually continues the sales through December. So keep your products active don't close your stores just yet if you're creating quick stores for quick money during Christmas because the sales usually also continue through January. Another advice that I can add here is to also add multiple suppliers because even if you update your shipping times you're gonna have stock shortages and in order to put up with stock shortages one of the ways to put up with that is to work with multiple suppliers and that way if your stock ever runs out from one product and you're making sales off of that one product it's great that you have automation tools like AutoDS that will take that product out of stock but what if you wanted to go back in stock? So go find other suppliers that are selling that product or a similar one to it okay and add that product instead don't just let your best sellers die out when the stock runs out you can always find suppliers other suppliers that can sell that product or a similar one to it and that way you're going to maintain you're gonna keep up with your sales and profits. Daniel, what do you have to say about stock shortages during Q4? This could be a little problematic under Christmas especially for specific categories. For example, let's say toys that of course they are selling like crazy especially on the first two weeks of December and can happen as we know the softwares can the suppliers but there is a kind of limitation of time that is 60 minutes or in general maybe you can get very huge amount of sales I remember that the first year I started to drop ship I got thousands of sales or one specific toy and I was not on the laptop at that moment but I was very excited about the sales but when I got to laptop I saw that was already out of stock after a few hours and this was a big problem so it's very important to have the minimum quantity out of yes we have this option to minimum quantity stock on the supplier and I would also suggest to increase this number for my stores for example I usually use three as numbers during the year or two but under Christmas I will keep at least five and this should give us a little protection and it's also very important because it can happen of course to cancel orders if we get a lot of orders that we need to cancel it's better to split them in few days and not hold together on the store especially if we sell on Facebook or eBay if we sell on Shopify it's a little different we can cancel more orders together but on the platform it is important to not make too many cancellations together this is just a tip because it can happen during the Christmas it's normal, don't panic guys it's totally normal, it's part of the business it's important to handle it communicating with customers, sending message maybe calling customers is totally normal communication is the key on this time of the year I completely agree, communication is key it's always been the key it's one of the biggest reasons why your drop-shipping business or your e-commerce business will stay here for the long run and not just for a few quick sales always letting your customers in the loop letting them know what's going on and of course if there are any problems try to avoid as many order cancellations as possible as Daniel suggested you can look for multiple suppliers you can look for other products that are similar to them and offer them to your customers instead instead of having your finger quick on the trigger and just quick to cancel orders just because that one supplier doesn't have them you're gonna make more sales during the season and you're gonna enjoy those sales and you will have a much better fulfilled feeling when you're actually able to fulfill those orders and not having to cancel them and one of the things that I can also add here is to add order automation so if you're not using systems like platforms like AutoDS to automate your orders as soon as they come in so while you're sleeping at night a customer sends you an order that order gets fulfilled even while you sleep and I think that's just the best way to go around once I entered order automation I couldn't look back and I used to fulfill all of my orders manually one by one and that's another great way to wake up in the morning and see that your orders are already shipped or already ordered instead of just seeing it out of stock because that's just what happens during Christmas okay so we already talked about stock shortages sorry long shipping times I wanna talk about some of the best selling products before that I just wanna say hello to everyone who's joined the live Q&A who joined the live Q&A I see you all hello BJ Schultz I remember you from all the previous live Q&As hello to everyone that I haven't said hello to yet I see all of you I see your questions ask me all of your questions how to make it through Q4 how to maximize your sales profit and potential during this crazy and wonderful holiday season our favorite season of the year to be e-commerce store owners and drop shippers so best sellers best sellers best sellers during the holidays Daniel what would you say are the best categories right now? so whole course as we said toys and Christmas decorations are on the top of this but there are also other options when we talk about toys we are not just talking about toys on itself but as a gift so everything that can be a good gift for example let's say books and of course can be another good options because they are used to be a good gift for Christmas and I saw an increase under this season books as well and toys but also as I said before it's not just about Christmas but about be prepared for all the seasons and the seasons is not ending the Christmas days but it's also January and February usually most of the sellers have a little decrease on January and February but if we are smart we can continue to sell a lot and maybe we can also increase what doesn't mean this month means just following the market and we need to understand that the market is done is made by people so what is happening after the holidays is that people are starting new goals for new year like sport like diet like going to the gym and so it's a good idea to start to sell products around these things around these habits from people so we can start to list the sport items tools for gym integrations for diet and all these products are all of them are selling very well on January and until February I saw always a huge spike on these products so toys the sport items diet integration books all of them are good choice okay that's that's great advice and I want to show you guys some methods of finding products now but yeah that's definitely some good advice when you learn when you're a season seller and you've been here for a while you learn to leverage the market and you learn to leverage the market by simply knowing what direction the market is moving towards and one of the best things that I love about the dropshipping business model is that you can switch a thousand products like this and like that in just a second you don't have to try to sell inventory that you still have on yourself you don't have to get rid of all that money that you spent before you were able to spend new money on new products you can just do it all in a matter of seconds especially with quick product importing right but in any case it's one of the things that I love about the dropshipping business model and when you learn about when you're a beginner right when you're a new dropshipper and you're importing products to your store you're not sure what's going to sell what won't sell you're kind of testing the market you're kind of just shooting arrows in the dark and one of the best things about it is the more you practice at it the better you get at it and suddenly you have sales starting to come in from a specific category at a specific time of the year and then you need to tag those products okay if you're using AutoDS tag those products and know what season it's selling at write down that season so that next year when that season comes you'll be prepared for it before it arrives and you'll know exactly what products to add to your stores now there are four seasons in a year and every season there are new product trends and categories that sold last year during the season are going to peak again during this year and when you learn about those cycles and learn about those categories that are selling well during those seasons that is when you're going to leverage the market the best way and every year it just keeps getting better and better because you're learning from experience and that's one of the best parts about this model that I really really love about it before we move on talking about Q4 Daniel I just want to show a quick way that I like to find products okay especially for Christmas I'm going to show two methods okay I'm going to start with our new marketplace okay it's in beta right now but it's right here on AutoDS you guys can see it as soon as you log in and you can just simply find the hot products right here right away you don't have to do anything just it'll automatically go to the marketplace and you can hover over the products seeing hot products right here right we can keep scrolling to the right to see more and you can even import them in just one click right right here just click on upload draft upload draft shipping time one to four days two to ten days now the thing is you guys are seeing Amazon right now as a supplier you'll see Amazon and AliExpress soon you're going to have private suppliers here and only you the AutoDS member only you are going to have exclusive access to these products that these private wholesale suppliers are allowing you to resell so if you want to open up a new ebay store you can go ahead and do that and not have to worry about getting any temporary suspensions because they see that you're starting retail drop shipping right away or any other or for any other reason but having exclusive access to a private supplier is going to differentiate you from the competition in the best way that I can think of this is what you want as a drop shipper so you have all the categories here we got home and garden we got home improvement in tools and once again the importing process is really quick of course you can also click on the product to get more information like specifications shipping and return policies product reviews where it ships from all the variations and so forth and once again importing just one click so all of that is easy another tool that I really like to use is the new and improved and revised AliExpress drop shipping center if you guys didn't know about it AliExpress had a drop shipping center last year and I think also two years ago it had a lot of bugs it wasn't always working so well it wasn't always updated and then AliExpress simply shut it down and then everybody started asking what happened to the AliExpress drop shipping center well now it's back it's new and improved and revised so if you guys want to get to the AliExpress drop shipping center just go to your AliExpress account okay login to your account hover over the account right here on the top right and click on my orders and then here on the left side you're going to see DS center that's a drop shipping center now if you guys I'm going to zoom in because I don't know if you guys can see it so it's right here on the left side DS center and all you have to do of course is click on it but if you guys don't see the DS center then simply buy a few products on AliExpress because you probably haven't bought from them before and if you have bought a few products reach out to their support let them know that you're a drop shipper and that you would like access to their drop shipping center and they will activate it for you now what you can do here in the drop shipping center is simply amazing okay right now I'm just on fine products you also have top selection but fine products also shows you products that are trending right now and what I like about the AliExpress drop shipping center is you can simply hover over a product and see its sales history chart so you can see that the product is trending right now like these espresso cups have a 34.5% growth rate in the last seven days so the difference between using the drop shipping center so you would say why do I need the drop shipping center I could just search for espresso cups and you know get to the listing from here so why do I need the drop shipping center because here you have products that may have trended two years ago and three years ago you don't see the sales history you don't see if it's been trending in the last week or two but that is what you are getting from the AliExpress drop shipping center and you also have these items as described ratings communications shipping speed all from one screen all you have to do is hover over the product so this is one of the things that I love about the AliExpress drop shipping so you can simply find the best product ideas to sell right now the products that are trending now not products that trended six months ago or one year ago and of course you got the product rating how much it sold if you click on it you'll go to the product listing okay and you can also copy the URL okay I'm just going to copy it right here and then I can click right here I can go back to the drop shipping center and click on go to analyze I'm not going to do it on this Pikachu because we can't really sell Pikachu but let's go to this humidifier right here okay so I'm going to click on it I'm going to copy the URL and then I'm going to go back to the drop shipping center I'm going to click on go to analyze it's the same thing as clicking on product analysis up here okay so I'm going to click on go to analyze and then I'm going to put the URL right here and what it does is well since I clicked on go to analyze it already did it but if you can put another URL for another product there so what it's doing is it's finding other products that are similar to that one so now if this product was interesting to you you don't just want to try and sell that you want to test the market for this niche right for this humidifier so what you're going to do is you're going to add all these products to your store and see which one is going to sell well and in order to do that you can also use the auto DS extension okay just click on the extension right here on the chrome extension click on extract and now all of these 15 products got extracted into my extension I can click on export a CSV now a CSV file will be downloaded onto my computer okay and then in the auto DS system I have it open here somewhere I can click on add products I can click here on add products multiple products and here I can go to upload CSV and drag and drop that CSV file or open your browser okay and do it right here file is uploaded add it as a draft and that's it all those products were added to my store now I can test this niche in just one minute just like that okay so use the AliExpress dropshipping center guys this is going to help you out a lot especially if you want to know what to sell for Christmas okay so you can just search here for Christmas or you can choose whatever category you want you can choose your ship from so if you guys want to have fast shipping times for example if you're dropshipping to the UK then you want to find Christmas products that can ship from the UK since AliExpress has warehouses all around the world okay so right now I'm going to ship from UK search for Christmas I guess they have no Christmas products coming from the UK but that's that's how you're going to do it if of course they had products in the in a UK warehouse you can search by image you can search for products with free shipping products that have videos I'm way too much zoomed in so anyways use the AliExpress dropshipping center but also do use the marketplace in AutoDS where not only can you of course search for the products here but you can also but you can also soon have access to the private suppliers okay guys so take advantage of what you have here this is huge product data this is great products great trending products that are going to sell well during this Christmas and this is the best advice that I can give you for quickly finding product trends to sell okay so I'm going to stop sharing now hello by the way to everyone who joined the live Q&A I see you all I see you Mujir hello Angela hello to everyone that I haven't said hello to yet we're going to answer you guys questions soon we still have a few more things to talk about but if we haven't talked about something that you are interested in knowing okay and especially if it has to do with Q4 and end of the year sales ask them now while you still have a chance while we still have time to answer your questions okay so what are we going to talk about next we talked about what products to sell as you said Daniel toys are going to sell really well just guys try to stay away from products that you're not allowed to resell so stay away from big brands stay away from Pokemon like you saw on AliExpress even drop shipping friendly suppliers like AliExpress can sometimes offer products that you're not really allowed to resell so watch out for that and if you're using AutoDS you don't have to worry much because we do have a varro detector if you try to import a product that you're not allowed to you will get a warning message with the reason why you're not allowed to import or sell that product and then you can decide it's your responsibility if you still want to sell it but from toys stay away from big brands from all categories but especially from toys electronics right we talked about it sports after the holidays Daniels Daniel as you said getting back in shape and right so we talked about long shipping times right but customers are still expecting fast deliveries before the holidays right before Christmas but they also want to have all their products on time during Christmas so we already said to increase your handling time is there any other advice that we can do to make sure that our products arrive on time to message the buyers before to process the orders we need to understand that the world of buyers is very colorful there are a lot of kind of people and there is a part of the job and there are people ordering the 22 December for Christmas and expecting maybe the gift for Christmas even our policy since two weeks because most of the people just don't look so it is useless to get upset for this but we need just to understand that it's part of the job and as we said before communicating with buyers so if we see something that can be a gift or can be important for some buyer we can just contacting them and explaining that we require some time giving them realistic day of delivery for the package and not hide not going around because there is no point to hide of going around with customers because you will get negative feedback you will get low metrics just be honest open and call the customers explain the situation and if you see that the situation is just not possible to go under the situations do you see too many orders just increase the shipping time or just stop the week of Christmas to sell put on holidays enjoy the holidays this is important to make profit but we need to understand that we need to be also safe on business we need to be safe on our store on our metrics and everything because sometimes it's better to stay three or four days of Christmas on holidays on the store and don't risk the metrics so we can just enjoy time at home this is also part of the job to understand how to work okay okay yep it all makes sense again your guys are want to be here for the long game you want to be here for the long run I've been doing this for over five years now still doing it to this day and I can gladly say or I can say with full confidence that one of the reasons one of the biggest things that I've been doing to keep my store alive so long is keeping up with customer service now don't think that customer service is going to take up 50% of your time it's not even going to take up 10% of your time but that 2% that 5% that whatever percent that you need to give in order to provide good customer service is going to take you a really long way down the road and it just comes to show I mean I mean there's so many examples to give like for example if you're selling on eBay so customers will some customers let's let's divide them into what they are some cut into their category some customers are going to reach out to you if they have a problem they're going to send you a message and you know they're going to reach out if you're on eBay they're going to send you a message on eBay if you have a website like on Shopify Wix will commerce your own hosting service they're going to send you you know through the contact us form in any case they're going to reach out first okay and in places where where in marketplaces like eBay it's more important because after they reach out to you and you don't answer them they're going to open up a case they're going to open up an item not receive case they're going to open up item is damaged case or anything that will put you now put the spotlight on you and you're going to have to take care of that and that's also going to bring your metrics down and you don't want that in marketplaces like eBay so when customers reach out to you make sure that you reach out to them back reply to them and help them with their problem just a couple days ago I had someone one of one of my customers reached out to me and she said that she simply didn't receive the product now I checked the tracking information and I saw that it did get delivered to her address this happens sometimes and it's okay it's all a part of the business but if I wouldn't have replied to her she would have really quickly opened up a case but what I did say was that I can see that the that the shipping carrier did deliver the product but I will check with them and see if there were if there were any problems here during that time I ask you the customer to check your surroundings ask your neighbors ask anyone who lives with you your friends or relatives if they may have accepted the package for you and I did that and she said that she'll check while I check and in the next day she sent me a message saying hey I'm sorry I found the package it was just on the side of the porch and I didn't look there and uh and yeah I was happy to I was happy to see that instead of seeing it turn into you know an item not received case but in other cases where you know I slept on the customer I skipped out on him even I and I on accident you can be sure that they're either gonna open up a case on eBay or if you're on a hosting platform they're gonna open up a charge back with the credit card company or on PayPal they're gonna open up a case and you're gonna have you know you're gonna have to deal with that you're gonna have to put up with that and your sell-in metrics are gonna go down too and that customer is more most likely not gonna reach out to you again okay they're not gonna buy from you again but those ones that you do give them good customer service they will remember you for that and there's a very high chance that they're going to return to purchase from your store again so be in touch with your customers don't get mad every time a customer complains that is a part of the business you cannot run any business without going through customer complaints but once again that's going to be the small percentage of the things that you will have to put up with in terms of customer service that is the smallest part of your business but one of the most important okay I think I would like to add that another good idea is to maybe make some kind of budget for yourself and you can create some coupon like just five dollars if all this is late and or any problem with customers that as we say it can happen during these seasons you can just send a little coupon five dollars as courtesy most of the customers will be happy so with very small amount that sometimes is just you profit from this specific order so you maybe don't do profit on the order but you keep customers happy with a coupon that can buy again from you and this is a very good strategy to avoid negative feedback complaints and making customers very happy and look back to your store and that's a good tip for the next topic that I wanted to talk to you about which is increase in customer service right it's inevitable it's inevitable the more sales we're going to have the more customers we're going to have to deal with later on and the increase in customer service means that we're going to have to be out there more for our customers and one of the ways to do that as you just mentioned is to really offer them a coupon especially if they had a negative time on your store if they had a negative experience when purchasing from your store and most of the time you the seller it's not going to be your fault but you're still going to have to deal with it especially now when you're making more sales you're enjoying that profit right but now you also need to take care of these buyers so if you offer them these discounts you're not losing money you're gaining these customers back and even if two out of three don't come back or one out or yeah two out of three don't come back or four out of five or even nine out of ten don't come back to purchase from you that one out of ten that will come back could come back again and again and not just that also refer their friends and their family and that will simply make it all worth it again so it's definitely definitely a good idea do you have any other advice for the increase in customer service that we're going to have to put up with during Q4 during Christmas yes is very critical for any marketplace Facebook, eBay, Facebook shop even if you run a website on Shopify it's very important to keep very fast time to elsewhere to the customers especially on test times as we said the customers are very colorful and most of them are they don't have just patience to wait and also the platforms like eBay they have internal metrics for sellers and one of the popular metrics is that they check how long you take to ask for to a customer and usually good seller should ask for within 24 hours my suggestion is not to to consider 24 hours but consider 12 hours on this way you can ask for to the customers very quickly two times per day and solve the issue very quick for example I check message on stores or main VA checks for me two times so when the shift start on the morning and when the shift hand on the afternoon because when they ask for the money and they do all the tasks like orders for five minutes and everything and they finish on the afternoon the customers that they ask for the money we come back on the afternoon and then we see very fast communication and this is good for platforms for customers and to avoid any kind of issue of course you can also use templates for your as well if you have common questions you can save your as well on your notes or on other DS if you are using Hitbay there is customer portal that you can use to ask for a message all of these can improve your fast and your way to the customer service okay okay all good advice 100% but even the increase in customer service that we're getting during Christmas usually also leads to high return rates after Christmas because you know more sales more customer service and also more returns now of course we're still going to have a fat profit if we did our jobs correctly but what would you say about you know putting up with the high return rates that we have in Christmas before you answer that I just want to say hello to everyone who joined the live Q&A I see all of your guys questions we still haven't gotten to the questions yet but we will very very soon so hello to everyone who just joined the Zonac Mojir versus Bentley Mohammed Andre Angela I can see all you guys we're going to answer you guys soon if you guys haven't asked your questions yet you still have a few minutes to go before we start answering the questions so Daniel what about the high return rates after Christmas these can be very problematic for older sellers and usually during the year we have I mean our free seller should have around one 1.5% of returns of total orders this means that everyone under the orders you could get between one of the patterns on Christmas this can be a lot higher can be like five six seven percent is totally normal and as we said like before it's part of the business so you need to be sure to select the suppliers that they will allow you to return high terms especially if you are using for example Aliexpress from China this can be more problematic than using local suppliers like Walmart or Costway or Wifi because usually from China you don't return high terms so it's important to have plan for this for example if you adopt shipping from China I suggest you to take all the returns to your home and you can result the high terms by yourself if you can send back to China but never never decline the returns to customers if you are using eBay any way you can't so it's useless to try this will just impact you metrics on eBay and Facebook they can always return and on Shopify it doesn't make sense because it's just investment on your brand just let them return they will be happy they see that they are safe with you and this investment for a long time they will come back to buy so this is my suggestion okay I have a little bonus for you guys everyone in this live Q&A small bonus but it just has to go with what Daniel just explained so the returns and the seller metrics these are all very important I'm going to share with you guys my screen right now I'm going to show you my eBay account and I want to show you where I stand with all of this and I want you guys to all know I've been doing this for over five years I'm a dropshipper just like everyone else nothing special here except my experience and my hard work so what I'm going to do now is share my screen okay and you guys can see right here that my seller level is above standard it's not going to go above that but it's always been above standard for as long as I can remember transaction defect rate 0.00% out of 940 transactions I've never had a defect in my life because I always took care of all of my cases of all of my customers I never lost money even if I had to lose a case I always got back up from the supplier there was never a case where I had to lose money and I didn't get reimbursed from the supplier I have 0% transaction defect rates this is very very important if you have transaction defect rates that means that for example you let the buyer win the cases you didn't answer to the cases more reasons why they could why why it could be a defect rate right if you cancel orders because you ran out of stock there's going to be many reasons but you need to know how to work well and move around that and never get defects on your accounts this will keep you here for a long time and transaction defect rates you want to avoid them offer good customer service late shipment rate 8 out of 933 transactions that's 0.86% that's great if you ask me cases closed without seller resolution this is customer service if you're able to close cases without having ebay step in and more importantly not having ebay step in you or the buyer having ebay step into the case because you or the buyer cannot solve this issue then ebay will step in and in this case if they say that you the seller are wrong they're going to refund the buyer the money and you're also going to get cases closed without seller resolution and you're also going to get a defect rate so as you see I'm on zero I've never had a case closed without seller resolution I've never had a transaction defect rate because I know how to offer customer service tracking uploaded on time and validated 89% I'm still trying to work that up I used to be like 98 97% but still 89% is good the customers are not complaining they're receiving their packages there's no problems with that and even if a buyer opens up an item not receive case and you didn't upload tracking information or at least not tracking information that's trackable you can still win those cases but I don't even remember the last time I had that issue then you've got your transaction and sales so I had 940 transaction $42,000 in sales it's actually a small decline but I need to just simply put more time on it the return rate which is what we're talking about so check this out I told you guys that this is going to be about 2-5% of your business I'm not sure exactly what products you're selling and you know what the return rates there are but I'm at 1.81% returns out of 940 transactions 17% of them got returned okay so that's 1.8% and if you give good customer service if you're selling high quality products you won't have to deal with returns at least not more than 2% and that simply puts up this much of your business spend the rest of your time researching more products learning what to sell learning how to leverage the market as I talked about in the beginning of this life and I hope that this is going to help you guys understand how important customer service is for the long run for the long run for the long-term survivability of your business okay we need to get to the question soon so that we'll have time for it but let's see if there's anything else that we need to talk about so we talked about high return rates for Christmas and increasing our return windows right oh no we didn't talk about that yet what about the return windows so we talked about high return rates after Christmas can we offer higher return windows for our buyers because you know our suppliers are also going to have to be able to give us higher return windows if we're going to offer it to our buyers so how exactly does that work when you sell usually we sell a 30 days little window especially on ebay and facebook this is the minimum for selling so 30 days but most of suppliers could offer for example amazon offer 90 days and if we are using suppliers that are offering more return windows we can also increase the reason to increase is to have more traffic for our stores because the window is one important metric that marketplace like ebay and facebook select to show your store to the customer so when you increase and you have the same price or maybe is more expensive than another seller but you have the return window that is more than another seller ebay or facebook could select use your item to shop with the customer but we need to be sure that actually we cannot return this items but in general is very difficult that the customer will decide to return an item after 30 days anyway because I mean it's not so common to keep a heightened for two months and decide to return it if someone's one of the tunes usually isn't the first weeks okay so make sure your suppliers can offer a higher return rate a higher return windows and then you offer it to your buyers too of course that is always a good idea and last but not least before we get to the questions vero items so don't sell products that you're not allowed to sell I already mentioned that and this is a huge month sales especially if you're doing the product research right if you're selling the right amount of products and the right products then of course you're going to make those sales make sure you're not selling anything that you're not allowed to with auto this is vero detector you will be able to avoid that issue okay now I'm going to get to the questions for the with the time that we have left before I get to the questions in this live chat which is just in one minute we always I always go to the facebook community to see if you guys ask questions there first so I'm going to go to the facebook community which is right here and I see that we have one comment so I'm going to reply to you first Ahmed before going to the live chat so how to use a 50% coupon promotion for Black Friday if the selling price in the retailer site does not have a discount and not offering a 50% discount okay so yeah I will answer you there if your supplier is not offering a discount you will also not be able to offer that discount but that is another reason why you want to work with more than one dropshipping supplier and if you're wondering what supplier to work with just head over to autobs.com slash suppliers here you have about 25 dropshipping suppliers with tens of millions of products that you can resell so your question the answer to your question is right here okay you can also filter by regions and just look for another supplier who sells that product who can offer a discount a coupon and then you can also offer the same okay I'm going to start with the questions here here we go okay sorry my window disappeared am I on the right time I saw wait one second disappeared I cannot find it one sec yeah I just froze on my side one sec Daniel if you can see you can answer it for now because my window just closed and I'm trying to find it okay the first question from Cristina on the right time yes Cristina you were on the right time I suppose that you're on the right house so it's not relevant any more this question we will change very soon yeah just give me a sec guys my macbook pro is acting up just about now I'm trying to open it in another window it's really annoying what this happens but it's a part of the business here we go okay okay guys next question ask your questions now and now is the time when I dropped you from AliExpress can I use dynamic shipping can I use dynamic policy of auto DS if I use dynamic policy of auto DS then what is the return policy in your dynamic policy because return policy is dangerous in AliExpress Daniel you want to take this one yes of course you can you can use that you can use dynamic policy for all the suppliers on auto DS about the returns usually the return window is 30 days because this is the minimum you need to sell so what I suggest to you is to check with your the suppliers that you are using on AliExpress that he can give you at least 30 days because if you don't have at least 30 days returns is useless to use these suppliers or maybe you can use but don't expect that you can return the items so you need to cover the money yeah that's a good point okay I'm going to move on to the next question what is black friday what is selling black friday and how can I set offer a particular product in ebay like price 140% off but now at $60 I'll take this one just to help you out really quick let me share my screen so first of all what is black friday and how to sell in black friday now is the time to do that if you haven't done so yet because it's at the end of the month just go to autoDS.com slash blog or autoDS.com hover over resources and click on dropshipping blog type black friday in the search field and here you have black friday dropshipping top products and tips to multiply your profits this is a new article that we just published in the previous month and I'm just going to leave a link to it in the chat okay so you can read this article it's going to help you get started for black friday regarding it's also you know how to prepare for it what products are selling really really well during this holiday and best tips for you know how to make it especially with your stores you know offering the discounts how to do it and you also have regarding your next question on ebay you can create coupons on ebay I don't have enough time to show it now but you can create coupons on ebay and offer 50 percent 60 percent off a fixed dollar price off whatever you want just go to ebay go to the marketing and promotion section and you will have an option to create a coupon for your buyers okay do that offer it to your buyers and one thing that I like about it is ebay allows you to retarget your customers with this coupon so customers who would you viewed your products or customers who bought from you in the past you can retarget and send them a message automated through ebay and offer them a coupon to come back and repurchase from your store okay so hopefully that answers you there we have a lot of questions so I'm going to try to move a little bit faster now okay I figured it was a wrong time yeah Daniel answered your first question if it was the right time that happened at the last live queue and I attended by the way we're going to we have a timer on the website we're going to switch the timer also because our timer was also one hour before the timer for the live all because we set the time back in hours you all in 45 minutes okay thanks Christina if I dropped you from AliExpress and I use your dynamic policy then how can I change that we did we answer this one yes anyway if you use the dynamic policy I won't just add something quickly you can and you are selling on ebay or facebook or Shopify you can always go to your settings on the marketplace where you are selling and change manually to the policy okay okay what's the best level of auto DS for a beginner hey John by level do you mean what's the best subscription it depends on what store what selling channel you want to use and how many products you want to import don't start with the biggest package I mean it would be nice but you know it would be a waste if you don't have that many products to sell but if you already know that you have a thousand products to list two thousand products to list then don't start with the 100 package start with the one or two thousand depending on how many products you want but if you already have a goal of where you want to be two weeks or one month from now use that package instead of you know upgrading your package every day or two my biggest problem this thing hi again Christina now we can answer your question my biggest problem listing is that I don't feel right marking up my products to make a big profit how do I choose products that I find products that are low price that I can sell for a huge profit wait hold on you don't feel right marking up your products to make a big profit so how do you find low products that you can sell for a huge profit so you're going back to what you want to do you want to mark up and sell products at an expensive price I'm doing that I'm like you know purchasing for ten dollars selling for 25 purchasing for 30 selling for about 55 that's usually how I do it about almost two times the the source price I don't care what product I'm selling I don't care what category it's from as long as it's selling and you know making my profit I you know the customer's happy he purchased a product he expected to receive it he received it he's not going to do anything more than that he's not going to go to all of the websites in the world and see where he could buy it where he could find it at a cheaper price customers don't do that you don't do that after you purchase a product so uh mark up your don't worry about making a profit Christina don't be afraid of making a profit once you know you'll start to do it you'll also start to get addicted to it and you won't want to go back hey takshila lately it's been difficult to using suppliers such as Amazon and Costco I agree Amazon because they close Amazon buyer accounts that's correct Costco for canceling orders this has been a problem for an issue Amazon used to close buyer accounts who used to abuse gift cards today they're even closing buyer accounts who are even using credit cards with the prime with the prime issue Daniel how would you want to tackle this and we have very few solution these guys so first is just fight on that with the system I personally use still Amazon but they use our solar suppliers but for Amazon hybrid system this means to have a lot of accounts to work for split the orders routing them on the account so don't stop this means of course more investment because maybe you need the softwares like multi-logging like proxies to keep them separate so you need to spend money and requires times organization but today we need to just change our business and understand that is always working or you can use new suppliers auto suppliers for example Walmart is good alternative to Amazon has very good shipping time very good products and you can use the marketplace of auto DS to find new products soon you will have new suppliers so don't stook just on old ways and but you need just adapt to your business or you can also discover new ways and sometimes new ways means also more profit more more business models to understand so it's always good to try I completely agree with you there the harder way to do it is to open up multiple accounts and try to work with the whole you know proxies and all of that it's still possible but much more difficult you'll still have to go through account verifications and you know find other people's use other people's information and it just gets kind of messy the better way to go around it is to just look for others don't look for other suppliers because they're already there just start working with more suppliers and like Daniel mentioned once you start this and you see that it starts to work you'll think to yourself why didn't I do this a while back because this is pretty good I mean it's profitable and making sales why was I stuck doing only one thing up until now which suppliers applicable to use for dropshipping so yeah so like the examples Daniel just gave you I also highly advice Dakshila to go to autods.com slash suppliers you'll get your answer there also when using Walmart Sam's Club of Suppliers and ordering using Autodesk fulfilled by Autodesk feature does use tax exemption for those suppliers things it doesn't use tax exemption but Dakshila raise your prices a little bit more and get a tax back into your profit don't worry about it when I have a low price when I have a low buying price less than $10 and it's marked for 30% profit I'm only making about $2 yeah 30% profit is too low Christina I work with higher profit margins in that but it really depends I mean everybody works differently Daniel I know that you are working more in bulk ways so your profit margin is actually lower than this right I'm not sure I don't know exactly what your profit margin is but in my store it's no less than 50-50% lower price items I even make more than that 70-80% and yeah I take everything into consideration there and I see that the sales are still pouring in so you know it's a good profit margin for me Daniel could you share a little bit about the profit margin that you're used to working with yes I would like to share two things the first is that for low orders like under $10 as Christina is asking it's always good to use the future to fixed profit this means that if you use for example you want at least four dollars profit you can put four isn't the same settings on auto DS settings pricing you find profit on percent and profit on dollars and the dollars means that will be fixed so if you put zero percent on four dollars you will have four dollars for each order on profit or you can just mix them percent and dollars and another things that I would like to share is to not talk just about the price because when we sell on marketplace like eBay we need to understand that they have have 25 million sellers and more than 200 million customers this means that before to be a marketplace they have search engines like Google and like Bing what do I mean? I mean that they take care of a lot of information to show products to the customers it's not just about price it's about title images about seller metrics about demand about routing to sellers and a lot more so don't talk just about price try to understand all marketplace works and all you can sell and if depend also on strategies and also I would like to share to everybody if you need help with pricing we are offering 14 days trial or mentorship so you can join and you can talk directly to me and I would be happy to help you with price so any dropshipping strategy question you have yes this is a great time to talk about that guys there's a mentorship program everything that Daniel is saying is just the tip of the iceberg you have 14 day free trial on the mentorship program so with nothing to lose and everything to gain I highly suggest for all you guys who need extra help whether it's profitability getting started to sell on new marketplaces that you have no experience with what suppliers to use how to automate your business the right way how to find the products how to scale your business how to fulfill your orders how to take care of your customers everything through the mentorship program with 14 days absolutely free trial try before you buy again nothing to lose everything to gain we got less than five minutes left so we're going to have to zip through this I was only selling one or two items a day on Amazon but they sent me a warning to stop reselling which supplier would you suggest we already answered that one just watch the live again if you missed it what is the ideal shipping time I have to select when I dropship from AliExpress Sagar I would just answer it really quickly because we're really out of time use whatever shipping time AliExpress that AliExpress seller can offer so if you see that the seller on AliExpress has good has fast shipping time in his ratings he's got like 4.7 and up then you know that he ships out on time see what his shipping methods are how fast he ships and that should be your answer right there okay when you try to order the product click on the shipping times and you'll have the answer there do you have an update on Facebook Marketplace being fully automated with AutoDS no but I know that it's currently it's I'm not sure exactly how much it's done but it's in process it's in advanced stages when will the limits are fulfilled about AutoDS by Amazon Thakshila I have no idea I'm also using fulfilled by AutoDS but you can also fulfill the orders by yourself I'm doing some by myself and some through FBA the website of Aquiline is down excuse me is this the one that works with AliExpress orders yes I just got a new sale I need to convert the tracking number so that I don't breach eBay's dropshipping policies Angela if you're using automated orders on AutoDS you can just use BlueCare and BlueCare it's not working for AliExpress yeah does BlueCare work with AliExpress though it should or it's only with TBA actually no no BlueCare doesn't work yeah the best advice here I don't have this issue because I always have I always choose tracking with information orders with tracking information available I never send out orders that don't have tracking and tracking should mostly be supported by eBay I haven't had many cases where it's not but you can always prove even if you don't have reliable tracking information oh that just reminded me that we added a new shipping company new tracking converter today that works with all of your orders I don't remember their names but keep just stay tuned guys because we're going to talk about that soon any advice already got it I'm using AutoDS is there any option to reduce photo quality import from Amazon no but why do you want to reduce the photo quality on first of all your metadata is being cleared from your images and not only that it's not reducing your page load speed time you don't really have to worry about that okay next I'm using AutoDS is there any option to yeah we already talked about that how do you run I'm on the plan that has a max of 100 products hello Angela will the extraction via the extension work yeah definitely but as soon as you try to import more than 100 products you'll have to upgrade your package here to continue I want to try Costway UK as a supplier but I see even lower prices that Costway has on the same products how can I compete with these sellers if you're using Costway UK but you see Costway US selling cheaper it's not really relevant because you're selling to the UK audience and they have to deal with UK's prices okay so that shouldn't really be an issue there guys we're just out of time so I'm gonna do it really quick I have an order of products that's out of stock on the supplier's website I sent five messages in the last few days to customer about no response do you advise me to ship or cancel if it's out of stock how can you ship you can what you should do Mohammed if he's not answering and your shipping time is over already you should have already shipped it out already what you should have done was look for other suppliers for the same product we talked about in this life when the product runs out of stock and it's going to happen to you during Christmas you need more suppliers to look for a similar product okay and if you haven't done that yet and the customer is not responding you can you can cancel the order send him a refund and just tell him that that the product was on its way and the shipping company may have lost the package and you will send a new one out as soon as it comes out I have a couple more reasons but I have to zip through this can we listen eBay small branded products without brand owners permission it's not vero it's most likely vero if they trademarked or patented their products you will get a vero message on eBay my first Q4 what top tip can get green everyone okay Versace we gave all the best tips in this live just watch it again okay and let me know in the next live if you still need help because we'll still be before Christmas I'm an international seller from Sri Lanka who is selling on US using US location I'm looking to expand to UK market as well is it safe to use two locations from my current eBay accounts so you want to sell to two different locations on an eBay account there's no problem with that just make sure that your item location policy is correct if you're shipping from the UK let me know that you're shipping from the UK same from the US same from China but remember that in UK you need to register your company to UK government because they introduced new law last year so they will have the 20% on top of your listings for that right yeah yeah that's a good tip guys I have to end it do you accept offers for buyers who have his low to zero feedback yeah sure why not if they pay and you know they if they pay eBay and eBay pays you and then they get a charge back eBay is not going to take the money from you you don't have to worry I recently got a dispute open for the reason the buyer did not recognize the transaction this was open on November 6 suddenly all sales stopped what should I do the sales didn't stop because of that takshila you can be 100% sure of that unless your account got suspended for any reason but if they didn't recognize the transaction let eBay take care of that and if you have a good seller history they're not going to deduct those funds from you it happened to me only a couple times I never got the money deducted from me I challenged at this period and provided tracking information great so you're not going to lose it which I got from auto DS aquiline that's fine it seems to be invalid please help me what do you mean it seems to be invalid I use blue care and aquiline in these cases and it worked one customer give me negative feedback buyer put on feedback seller send from amazon product can I appeal to remove yeah you can try eBay is most likely going to remove that because they don't like seeing the words amazon on their platform they don't care if you did it or not buyers are scamming these days they're opening new eBay accounts and blackmail saying they will put negative feedback if not refund and things like that I've never had that in my five years of dropshipping but a buyer cannot open a new account and leave a negative feedback they're going to have to actually purchase the product and leave a feedback under that account anyway this is a blackmailing down the eBay will remove this that's right yeah sorry Daniel I'm just trying to move really quickly I'm not giving you a chance but that's good advice when do I mark my items that shipped on eBay or does this happen automatically it happens automatically if you're using order automation on auto-DS auto-DS will just update the tracking information in the system and also on your stores as soon as tracking is available from your suppliers so you don't have to worry about it but if you're doing it by yourself then you will have to move the order to tract input provide tracking information and then the buyer will know about it if I choose cheapest with tracking in auto-DS and there are two options AliExpress with free shipping there's cheapest with tracking and then there is fastest doesn't matter the price and something else I don't really remember but I usually go with cheapest with tracking what is the free shipping with 30 days and second one is free shipping with 15 days and what auto-DS will choose in what order the shortest one yeah because you went with the fastest if I want to automate the whole process on auto-DS without interfering to any issues such as refunds customer issues or opening tickets on auto-DS what VA's do you guys suggest to use there's a huge post that we have in our community just look for auto-DS VA Facebook on Google and you should find that post right away right there there's a huge post with hundreds of comments of VA's looking for jobs and people dropshippers looking for VA's to hire them okay I don't have time to put the link here I have just a couple comments left and we are done how do you deal with shipments that are delayed that exceed standard shipping five to eight business days we talked about it in this live up your handling time especially now during the Q4 holiday season and after the holiday season of course bring it back as soon as you see that the suppliers are starting to calm down again how many sales does an item need per month for you to drop ship I've even found products with zero reviews I just know that they're trending and it's a new arrival so I'm still going to sell it on my story even if it doesn't have any any reviews but or any sales but that's if you have experience if you don't have experience start with those that have good reviews doesn't matter how much you can also go to the reviews to see that they're recent that their reviews not from a year ago if it's only five reviews but it's from the last month it's a good product how many so yeah we talked about this one how can I communicate with an agent with AutoDS open up a support ticket and that is it okay guys thank you for joining this live Q&A section section session I hope that we helped you Daniel thank you very much for joining us guys I wish you the best of luck with your Christmas sales with your Q4 sales again we're here every two weeks with these live Q&As to help you out with any part and every part of your dropshipping and e-commerce business thank you for joining and Daniel once again thanks for being here today