 In today's video, we're going to be breaking it down and discussing how you can actually start your own dropshipping business. Without waiting any longer, let's just go ahead and jump straight into it. Let's run that intro and let's go. What's going on everyone, Mario here with AutoDS. And if you've been wanting to start your own dropshipping business, or if you already started your own business, but you want to learn how to start scaling it, then this channel is just the one that you need. Make sure to hit that subscribe button if dropshipping is something that you're interested in, because on this channel, we cover anything and everything dropshipping and e-commerce related, starting from some of the best products to dropship to some of the best tips and tricks to help you get started and succeed in the game. So if that's something that interests you, just make sure you hit that subscribe button. Now, just so you guys don't think that we're full of ourselves, just check out what all of these people are saying about our videos and all our different tutorials. Also, to go along with this video, I'm going to have an easy to reference cheat sheet to help you get started and up and running. If you want access to that, all you have to do is comment down below. Hashtag actually start dropshipping. And let me know what your takeaway is from this video. What did you learn? Once I see that you went ahead and commented, then I'll go ahead and reply back with a link to the cheat sheet. All right, let's go ahead and get started. So you've been telling yourself that you're going to start your business. You're going to start your dropshipping business, but you just haven't. Well, now is the time that we're actually going to start. And this is how we can get started. Now, a lot of people have questions about how I can get started regarding money. So does it cost a lot to get started? Do I need a budget for my marketing? Do I need a budget for my website? Do I need to hire somebody to make my website? The answer to all of this is pretty much yes and no. It's a little bit of a mix because you can get started for free, but there are also different ways to get started and you are going to have to put up a little bit of money. So one of the first things that you need to address when it comes to starting your actual shop is how do you want to get started selling? Do you want to get started selling on a platform or a marketplace like, let's say Etsy, eBay or Amazon? Or do you want to get started selling on your own website such as Shopify, Wix or WooCommerce? Both of these are going to have different fees associated to them. Now, here's a quick breakdown for the costs to actually get started with your store. So if you decide to start on one of the more popular websites such as Shopify, then you are going to have both transaction fees as well as subscription fees. The prices will vary depending on the plan that you end up getting and whether you decide to pay monthly or whether you decide to pay yearly. But just as a quick example, let's say you're doing monthly and you're doing the basic starter package, you're going to be looking to pay about $39 a month. Then if you decide to go all the way to the highest tier for Shopify, it's going to be about $2,000 a month. But really, strictly speaking, don't even think about that because we're not going to get started with the $2,000 a month plan. We're not going to be selling that much yet to get started on Shopify. The best thing that we can do is use their trial. So their trial pretty much gives you a free three day trial. And then at the end of the trial, you have the ability to choose a plan. Once you choose that plan, then your trial can be extended for up to three months. Now, the great thing about that is the fact that those three months are only going to cost you $1 each month. So if you want to try out Shopify, then you can check out the link down below. There's going to be one down there as well as in the cheat sheet to help you get started with the extended trial. Now, Wixen WooCommerce also do have monthly subscription fees along with transaction fees, but from the three, one of the best choices that you're going to have is going to ultimately be Shopify. At the end of the day, Shopify is going to be the easiest to use and one of the more beginner friendly. Now, if you decide to start selling on a marketplace because you just don't want to create your own website and you don't want to deal with advertisements and stuff like that, which trust me, I get it. Then you can get started on either eBay, Etsy, Amazon or Facebook marketplace. Of course, these are also going to have different types of these. Now, when it comes to eBay, that's probably one of the easiest ways to actually get started 100% free because you don't have to pay to get started selling on eBay. The only time you have to pay on eBay is when you actually make a sale. Once you actually make a sale, then you are going to have to pay a final value fee. Now that fee will vary depending on the category that your item is in. Typically, you can see something maybe along the lines of 13 to 15, 18%, something along those lines. It's pretty hefty, but it's the only fee that you're going to be paying. Then if you decide to sell on a marketplace like Etsy, which is my personal favorite, you are going to have to pay 15 cents each time that you upload a product. Then you're also going to have to pay a transaction fee, along with a fee for the actual sold item. In total, when it comes to Etsy fees, I would estimate at least 10 to 11%. Now you're also able to sell on a platform like Facebook marketplace, which is actually free to list as well. Now, when you do make a sale, then you are going to get charged a 5% fee from all of the different options that we have. Facebook marketplace is probably one of the ones with the lowest fees that you're going to have to pay. Then if you decide to sell on Amazon, you can list for free on your individual plan, and then you're going to have about a dollar fee per transaction, plus a couple of extra fees. Right. So now you know the different marketplaces where you can actually get started dropshipping and set up your shop. Now, the next thing that we need to do is find a product to sell. And when it comes to product research, there are quite a few ways that are very effective and very easy. Check this out. So the first thing that we have is hashtag TikTok, made me buy it for this. What we have to do is go on to our favorite social media platform, TikTok and look up the hashtag. TikTok made me buy it. Once you do that, then you're going to have quite a few different products here. As you can see, there's a lot. Now, all of these products are being dropshipped, whether it be by a user, a brand, a company, whatever it may be. But at the end of the day, these products are going straight to a consumer from a supplier. So pretty much any product that you find here is going to be dropshipped. Now, how do we use this for our own benefit and learn what products to sell? Well, we're going to start looking for videos that have pretty high views, high engagement, and are recent. So I like to look for videos that are at least one to two months old. If it is an older video, let's say two months, I like to check out the comments and make sure that it has recent comments. If it has recent comments, that means it's still trending, but you don't want to go too much more than that because after a few months, the hype around the product can start to die and you could be stuck with some products that are just not going to move. So let's take, for example, this one right here. It has 51 million views. That's insane. And it was uploaded on July 24th. Today is August 23rd. So it's just under a month that it was uploaded. So let's go ahead and check this out. Oh, and this is actually the top 15 products. Actually, that's not bad at all. This is even better. So here you can see all of the different products that are being advertised. And if you scroll down, let's go ahead and check out the comments. No one's going to talk about Lexi Hensler. I don't know what that is. Me watching the inside of my Amazon bed tent already, I guess they already have one. So let's check out, for example, this printer right here. I've actually seen this everywhere. I've seen it on my Tik Tok feed. As soon as I search up Tik Tok, maybe buy it. This is, as you can see, the third one that comes up. I've also seen it on my Instagram feed and Facebook. So this is currently trending, even though as you can see the videos a few months old, it was released on 522, which is May 22nd. And right now we're in August 23rd. But it has 277 million views. That's insane. Let's go ahead and open this up in a new tab. And this is the video, as you can see, has 15.8 million likes. That's insane. 70,000 comments, 3 million saves and 328,000 shares. So this is definitely a viral product. Now, since this video is over two months old, let's check out the comments. So you have some from June. If you keep going down, you have some from July, some from six days ago, five days ago, five days ago, need this, need it. I definitely need one of these. We need this for grade nine, four days ago. You tell me this after I graduate. That's funny. Oh, but that's an older one, six, three. So the video is still getting traction. As we can see, the video is still providing some social proof. So with that, we can see that this could potentially be a product that we want to dropship. Now, this is going to lead me to our second method for product research. And that's going to be searching with Google images. Now, what that's going to be used for is actually locating the supplier for this particular product. So for this, what we're going to do is we're going to click on the profile. We're going to get on there. Then we're going to check out the link in the bio. We're going to click on that open anyway. And here we have the print more pocket printer 2.0. They're selling it for $49.99. So now what we need to do is actually locate the supplier for this product. And in order to do that, all we have to do is simply just right click and then search images with Google. That's it. It's going to ask us to select what we want if it doesn't automatically do it. And I'm just going to select the printer. Then as you can see on the right hand side, a little box opens up, which is going to give us a few different images that are related to the one that we searched up. So we have some on Amazon selling for $28, some on pocket prints, which is going to be $32. Right here, we can actually get it from Amazon and source it directly from Amazon. We're going to be paying $28.69 and we can easily charge $49.99. But we could probably find it cheaper. So let's go ahead and keep scrolling. Well, they're actually selling it on Etsy for $60. All right, here it is. So now I found it on Aliexpress portable thermal printer. Let's go ahead and click on that. We can get rid of this for now. And here we have the same exact printer for a fraction of the price, $21.19. We have a few different options, blue, white, green and pink. And it has free shipping delivers on September 13th. So I would say that's about two to three weeks for shipping. It's not too bad. So as you can see there, we have two different ways to locate products. So we can use social media. We can use something like TikTok and look up hashtag TikTok, maybe buy it. And then to find actual suppliers for products, we can use Google Lens. Now, another option that we have for product research and finding some trending products is AutoDS. So for this, what we can do is simply log into our account over at AutoDS.com. And if you don't have one, you can currently sign up for just one dollar for the trial. And then you simply just navigate over to the winning product section. Here, you can find products that are currently trending and have a proven track record of actually selling. Not only that, but let's say you click into one of them, like let's say this watch band right here, you get a few more analytics and a few suggestions on how to actually sell and market it. So check this out. Just go ahead and scroll down. You get a profit analysis, which shows you how much you can potentially make per sale. So as you can see, it's being sourced for about $13.44. And it's being sold for about $69.90. That gives you a potential profit of about $56.45. Then if you want to advertise this on Facebook ads, but you're not entirely sure how you don't know how to structure your ad or you don't know what audience to target, then don't worry, we also got you. If you scroll down a little bit more, you have an actual Facebook ad that you can mimic. So this ad is currently running actually promoting this product. As you can see, it's actually working. It has 2.2 thousand likes and loves and it has 248 comments with almost 200 shares. Not bad. Then we also have a target audience section. Here, you can see all of the different information that could have potentially been used for that Facebook ad. So the target audience in this case would be for both males and females between the ages of 20 and 45, both single and married with interests in fashion, technology, music and fitness. Then you also have a little bonus for occupation. You can offer this to students, creative individuals, tech enthusiasts, fitness enthusiasts and musicians. Then scrolling down just a little bit more, you also get a little bit extra and you get to learn how to structure your website. So if you're selling this on Shopify, you can use this right here. There's even a link to the website itself. So you can see how the website is structured to see if you like it and maybe it could fit your style. You can use it as inspiration to make your own. Now, if you do actually want to go out there and search up different suppliers to be able to find some different products, maybe you can find some products that aren't out there just yet. Here's a few things to keep in mind. For one, make sure that the products that you're choosing provide a well factor. They have to provide a well factor. They have to make the user or the person that sees the ad just go, whoa, I need this right now. One of the primary reasons for that is because we're not targeting people that are looking for a product and looking for a good deal on it. We're trying to target impulse buyers and an impulse buyer, somebody that sees something and something just triggers in them and tells them I need to buy this right now. A lot of the times what helps in this is having a well factor and providing value to somebody's life. So make sure that whatever product you choose on top of having a well factor actually provides some sort of value. Don't let it be something that somebody purchases and can just leave there without even thinking about it. Now, if you do want to go that route, then these are some suppliers that you can use to start looking up for different products. So the first one that we're going to cover is going to be the auto DS private suppliers and warehouse. Now, in this case, what you're going to do is since you're already logged into your account over at autoDS.com, simply click on Marketplace and over here on the supplier section, switch it over to auto DS suppliers. Here, once you scroll down, you're going to see quite a few different products and you're going to see some pretty fast shipping times. This is the best part about this. Most of these products have a shipping time of about two to four or maybe two to eight business days. And that's not the time for the supplier to actually ship out the item. That's the time for your customer to receive the item. That's some pretty quick shipping. Now, aside from that, you also have quite a few different categories to choose from. And you also have the option to brand some of these items. So if you see that it says customizable branding, then that means whenever somebody purchases this item from your store, they can receive it with a custom thank you card. Now, that thank you card will be pre written, but you can add your logo to it, along with your brand colors. Now, a few other suppliers that you also have available to you are going to be AliExpress. AliExpress has tons of different products and they do ship worldwide. You also have CJ drop shipping, which has a massive amount of niches and products within them. And if you decide to niche down on a particular niche, like let's say home goods, you can go with a company like Wayfair. Or if you want to sell a little bit of everything, you can also go with Walmart. There's tons of different suppliers out there that you can choose. Now, let's say I do want to niche down to home goods and I start looking through Wayfair and I find this memory foam mattress topper that I want to add to my drop shipping store. Now, there's a few different ways I can do this. I can either import this product manually. In this case, what I'm going to have to do is log into my account wherever it is that I'm selling, whether it be Etsy, eBay, Shopify, whatever it is, and go to start to create a new listing from here. I'm going to have to go ahead and copy over the title. Then once I paste that into my shop, I'm going to copy over the description, paste it into my shop, maybe make a few adjustments. Then I'm going to have to go to each one of these different images and safe image as next one, safe image as next one, safe image as then you're also going to have to go through all of the different tabs here. So you want to make sure you have all the dimensions, any item specifics that you want to add. As you can see, it could take a few minutes. If you're doing one or two different items, it's OK. But if you really want to scale and you really want to start making money, then you want to start adding as many products as you can, especially if you're niche down. In this case, your best bet is going to be to use automation. If you keep doing this manually, if you want to add maybe 20 or 30 different products in one day, you're going to be spending quite a few hours just doing that. And I can get really boring, really fast. And honestly, it just takes up a lot of time that you could be using to just look up more products. So in order to automate the entire process, you can simply go back to AutoDS and click on Add Products. Here right now, we're only going to add one. But if you want to add multiple, you also have the option to do so. So you can either do a single or multiple products. Like I said, we're going with single right now. And all you have to do is go back to your product page, click on the link, cut or copy it over. And here, take note of where it says AliExpress in China. You're going to paste it and you're going to see that the supplier source changes to Wayfair and the U.S. From here, we have two different options. We can either publish it directly to our store so it can go live ready to get started selling or my suggestion, go to Edit Now and edit some of the specifics. When you click on Edit Now, it's going to take it to your draft section and it's going to save it on there. So that way, when you're ready to make the listing go live, you can do so. All right. So now the listing has been added to my draft section. It's only been a few seconds. Here we can edit anything that we need. If we're selling on Shopify, we can add it to any collections that we want to track some of the analytics within the AutoDS system. We can add any tags if we need to. We can change the shipping methods, which my personal recommendation is always go with cheapest with tracking, because then you're going to pay the lowest amount for shipping. But you're also going to be guaranteed a tracking number, which is pretty much what every single customer needs. Aside from that, you have some more information. So you have the country location. So the item is located in the US. The brand is Wayfair. You got a few more tabs. So you have the description that you can go ahead and change or optimize. We also have the option to be able to optimize your titles and descriptions with AI. So if you click on this, you can go ahead and optimize your title and your description and give it a different tone, make it sound a little bit different, make it sound better, make it sound a bit more fun, make it sound more sellable or more professional. As you can see, there's a few different options here. So you have the funny, soluble, best for social networks, professional, and you have two more. The detailed description with comparison along with usage examples. What that'll do is on the description itself, it will compare this item to something similar. Then if you choose usage examples, it'll give you a few examples on what this item can be used for. It's pretty cool. Aside from that, you have the variants. So you have the different sizes here, which this tab is actually very important because you can go ahead and select everything and click on edit. And then you can edit the price based on a few different factors. So you can edit it based on a few percentage or you can change the default quantity that there is for each one, which I don't think you should touch this because you want to keep this synchronized with your supplier. So when they run out, you run out, then you have the profit dollar amount, which here, if you decide to put $10, $10 will be added to the final sale, which here, for example, let's say you put $10, $10 will be added to the price of each one of your variants. Same thing goes for profit. And if you decide to change the sell price, whatever you put here will be the same price for all of your different variants. Then you have the images along with the image specifications. And if you need to edit anything on the images, you can do so here as well, you can go ahead and delete or you can actually edit and write on some of these different pictures. So as you can see, automation and automating your product importing can save you tons of time. It saves you time with optimizing. It saves you time with copying and pasting. It pretty much just saves time overall that you can be taking and reinvesting back into your business to be able to start doing more product research or optimizing your actual website. Now that you have all the products imported into your store, it's time to start marketing them and letting people know that they're there in your store if you're using your own website. So if you have your website like Shopify, then people aren't going to know that your store is there. They're not going to know that it even exists. So it's going to be up to you to be able to bring in traffic. Now, if you're selling on a platform like Etsy or eBay, then your product will be there and you are going to be getting organic traffic because people that go to those websites are ready to make a purchase. They're actually looking for a particular product. Of course, that doesn't always guarantee that your item is actually going to be put in front of the eyes of the end consumer, but it's definitely a lot more helpful than just having it on a Shopify store where nobody's ever going to find it unless you're actually running ads or you have your SEO on that page optimized to perfection. So in this case, if you're running your own Shopify store, here's a few different ways you can market your product. So for one, you can run pay per click ads or Facebook ads. If you want more information on that, just go ahead and check out the cheat sheet. There's going to be a link to an e-book there. That's going to tell you everything that you need to know on how to get started and succeed with Facebook ads. You also have the option for influencer marketing. So you can find somebody that's in your niche, somebody that has a lot of followers on Instagram, TikTok or YouTube and maybe send them a free product, negotiate the terms with them for that free product. So tell them maybe they can get their free product if they make a video for you or if they advertise it on their channel or their page, whatever it may be. Now also, if you do want more information on influencer marketing, check out the cheat sheet. Once again, there's going to be a link to a relevant article on that there. And then your other option is making your own content. So for this, your best bet is going to be to order a sample product and start making videos for Instagram reels, YouTube shorts and most importantly, TikTok. That's all going to be organic traffic because you're going to be making the videos yourself and you don't have to pay to post the videos or anything. You're just going to post them, keep making posting with the hopes of a few of them getting a bit of traction and starting to your website. Now, if you're selling on a marketplace, then you can also do things like promoted listings. eBay is going to have their own version of promoted listings, which is going to be the promoted listings advanced and standard. And Etsy is going to have their own version of promoted listings as well. It's all going to vary depending on the platform that you're selling on. Now that you have your marketing in order and you're actually getting some sales, now it's time to fulfill your orders. And just like when you import your products, you have two ways to do this. The manual way along with the automatic way. And of course, the automatic way is going to save you a ton of time. But let me just give you an example. So you're going to receive an order from let's say your Shopify store. You see that Jondo ordered a charger. What you have to do now is take Jondo's information, go to your supplier, whether that be AliExpress, CJ drop shipping, Walmart, whatever it may be, sign on, place the order and then put your customer's information. Once that item ships, you're going to have to take that tracking number and you're going to have to update your customer and the platform that you're selling on with it. Then from there, that's pretty much it. Now, again, that's perfectly fine if you're doing a couple of orders. But if you're starting to fulfill 30 or 40 orders a day, then that's when it's going to start to get extremely time consuming, in which case, automatic orders is what you need. So as you see here, all of these orders have been fulfilled through automatic orders. So you have all of these that have been delivered. And if you click on this, you can see the different statuses. You can see that they can be pending, ordered, shipped, delivered or canceled. Whenever somebody places an order wherever it is that you're selling, it's going to come up here. Now what's going to end up happening is AutoDS is going to log into your account using your account details and it's going to place the order on your behalf using your payment details. Then once the order ships, it's automatically going to take that tracking number and update the platform along with your customer with it. Then you also have another option, which is called fulfilled by AutoDS, which works similar to automatic orders, except instead of using your own buyer accounts and your credit card or your banking details, AutoDS is going to log in using its own AutoDS account and it's going to place the order using a balance that you top up. It's pretty simple, right? The entire process of actually starting a drop shipping store isn't that complicated if you take it step by step. And if you want that step by step in written format to make it even easier for you, make sure you get the cheat sheet and to get that you just have to comment down below hashtag actually start drop shipping and let me know what your takeaway was from this video. And that's pretty much everything that you need to know in order to actually start drop shipping and start making some money. If you found this video informational, if you found it helpful, if you found it useful, if you liked it, please make sure you hit that like button. And while you're there, also make sure you hit that subscribe button and ring that little bell notification so you don't miss out on any future videos. Thank you to everyone for watching, especially if you made it all the way to the end really means a lot. Once again, my name is Mario with AutoDS and catch y'all next time.