 How to start an online store without any inventory, a full step-by-step video guide. If you ever wanted to run your own online store, but didn't wanna put up with all of the upfront investments and purchasing all the stock before you even know if these products are going to sell, then in this video, I'm gonna show you a great business model to adopt where you can have your own online store and not pay until you actually get paid from your customers. I'm gonna give you all the tools and knowledge that you need to know so that you can start your own successful business without having to purchase all that inventory upfront. Quick intro and let's go. Welcome back and let's jump straight into the action. How can we have our own online store without purchasing the inventory upfront? So everything that I'm gonna go over in this video, you can also read about it in the blog article which I'll leave a link to right below this video. But do stay tuned because I always throw in extra value into these videos and if you haven't done so yet, do not forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel to always stay updated on all of the latest and all of the hottest topics coming out in the world of dropshipping with so much going on, new features, new content, new case studies, new products that you need to sell and full tutorials just like the one that we're going to go over right now. So how exactly can we have an online store sell products without actually holding them in stock? This way, of course, we can run a low risk and high reward business model that thousands of people have already adopted but of course there's always room for more. This business model, the dropshipping business model has been around for years and those who take action, those who practice are those who succeed at the end of the day. So let's see what we have in store and what exactly are the steps that we need to take in order to run a successful online store without holding any inventory, without purchasing stock, without even needing to reach out and negotiate with suppliers. So let's take it from the top, inventory versus dropshipping, which is better. Now, of course there are advantages and disadvantages to both business models, but the dropshipping business model, meaning having an online store, selling products and only paying for that product once you get paid, that of course is the better business model to start off with because this way you can really test the market. You can test a whole bunch of products, see what sells, see what doesn't sell and continue optimizing from there. We're going to go over all of the bits and bytes in this video, but to talk about some of the advantages and the disadvantages from both business models. So from the inventory model, if you were to hold inventory, then here you have some advantages. For example, you have fast order fulfillment. You don't need to worry about how fast your suppliers can ship out the products if you didn't purchase the inventory upfront because it's your inventory, you have control over it, it's in your warehouse, your logistics team are taking care of the shipping and the handling, that way you're always in control and you know exactly how fast you're going to ship out your items. Second, you also reduce the risk of shortages. Before you run out of stock, you know exactly what's going on with your stock supply. You can see how much you have. So before you run out, you will negotiate really quickly with your supplier and get a new batch coming in before you run out of stock and this way you won't lose any money. The third advantage of the inventory business model is that you can negotiate a better price with your supplier before you purchase a certain item. Because you're about to purchase a large quantity, you can most likely get a better price for each unit in average then from the drop shipping business model where you will be purchasing them one by one only after you make a sale. Now let's talk about some of the disadvantages of the inventory business model. So first of all, you have storage costs. The longer you store products in your warehouse or somebody's warehouse, the more that shelf costs you, that shelf life. And you've also got outdated inventory. What are you going to do once your products are not selling? You need to start reducing the prices. You need to start marketing them more. And in some cases, many businesses find themselves losing money on a product just so that they can finally get it off the shelf. So with the inventory business model, you're actually doing product research with products that you paid for in advance. Whereas in the drop shipping or the non-inventory business model, you can keep testing out different products. And when a category or when some products don't sell, it's really easy to simply remove them from your store and add other products and wait for them to sell and analyze and test the market more and more. This way you're not losing any money. You only lost some time, but you're using that time to upgrade your knowledge and test the market. This is called product research and it's one of the most important parts when running an e-commerce business. The third disadvantage is having a reduced cash flow. And what this means in other words is you have to spend a lot of money purchasing the inventory, purchasing the storage unit or the storage costs and pay a fulfillment team to fulfill those orders for you. And all of this comes at a high running cost. And this ultimately reduces your overall cash flow. So it's much easier to get started with the no inventory business model. In other words, dropshipping. Now let's talk about the pros or the advantages of the dropshipping business model. First, we have a lower startup budget and we already mentioned this because we don't have to purchase the inventory in advance and we can test the products and list them on our stores and pay before we get paid. This of course comes with a much lower startup investment. Then we've also got low risk because we're not risking the items that we're selling. We're not at risk by having a thousand or 2,000 items in our store because we can wipe them all if they're not selling. This of course leads us to the ability to test products without purchasing them in bulk. So we already mentioned this, we went over this and all of that offers us the flexibility and scalability of being able to really expand our business and continue growing exponentially. Here's an image showing you how the dropshipping business model works. So first you have your store, your online store. You have products on your store that you didn't purchase in advance. And when you sell a product, like let's say for example, you sold a product for $150, so this is the first step. A customer places an order on your store for $150. Step number two, you forward the order details to your supplier. We're gonna get to all of this so don't worry if you have no idea what suppliers are, who they are and how all of this works. So step number two after getting the order is you forward the order to your supplier. Your supplier gets the order, the customer pays you and you are now paying your supplier so that your supplier can ship it out to the end customer. So you're not purchasing the products to your house. You're purchasing it from your supplier and you're shipping it directly to the end customer. This means you have no physical contact with your products and you are keeping the profit between the source price, how much you're paying your supplier and the retail price, how much the end customer paid you for that product. The buyer receives a product and you will keep your profit. That is the dropshipping business model. It's been around for years and believe me, by looking at the numbers, it is not going anywhere and it is continuing to grow exponentially every year. Now let's go over some of the cons of dropshipping. So first of all, you will find yourself in a high competition when trying to sell products that have been trending for a while and they're totally saturated and you're trying to sell them to a market that has seen it and bought it plenty of times. In this case, you will face some competition and you will have to learn how to differentiate yourself from the competition, market those products better and even sell them on different selling channels or better yet to different regions around the world. Of course, you can also choose other products and you can choose products that are related to those that are trending high. So there's many things that you can do about the high competition of dropshipping because it is an easy business model to start off with. A lot of dropshippers are taking advantage of this business model and starting their own dropshipping stores. Now, some of them are successful. Some of them don't turn out to be so successful but at the end of the day, the competition is there for the really trendy products. The second kind of dropshipping is that you pretty much have no control over the product's quality, over the stock status and the shipping speed. That all has to do with your supplier, with the suppliers that you are working with. So if you're working with a high quality supplier who has high quality products with product reviews and fast shipping speeds and easy payment options and all of that. And that, of course, you will learn after working with some of these suppliers and seeing which are the best for your business only then can you try to cover up for the no control over stock and shipping. You can't really see what's going on with your supplier stock. You can't always see their stock status and you can't always see how fast they ship out their products. And if you really wanna test out the quality of their products and you don't trust the customer reviews that they have on their website, of course you can order some of the products to your house and check their quality. So that's a little bit about the dropshipping business model versus the inventory business model. Now let's learn how to start an online store with no inventory. In other words, how to start a dropshipping store even if you have no experience if you've never done it before and if you're still just curious on how to go about it. So watch this section and then watch it again, start taking action or use the blog once again linked below this video to go over each step at your own pace. So step number one would be product research. This is the part where you need to find the right products to sell and I will show you some of the best tricks in order to do that and save a lot of time along the process. Step number two is to choose a supplier for your business. So you wanna choose a supplier that's reliable, those that have high quality products, fast shipping times, comfortable payment options and easy return policies and everything else that I will go over with you once we reach that step. Step number three is to choose a selling channel. So now that you found your products, you found suppliers that you can actually source those products from, now you need to choose what selling channel you want to sell these products on. Step number four, business automation and this will help you not only automate your business but really be able to scale it and start profiting in high numbers. Step number five is to actually create your online store. So now that you have everything pretty much set out in front of you, it's time to create your store, start importing those products and of course wait for them to sell. This cannot be complete without marketing your online store which is step number seven. So of course I skipped on number six cause I explained it during step number five. So we're creating our stores, we're importing our products and now it's time to market our stores, market our products so that people will actually know that our stores exist. Then it's inevitably time to start fulfilling orders because once we're done taking all these steps people are going to start ordering products from our stores and now it's time to fulfill our orders which is step number eight. Step number nine is customer service. Taking care of our customers because sooner or later after making many sales some customers will reach out to us and ask us a question. Some may want to process a return and some are not even your customers but they're potential customers who reached out to you and maybe want to ask a very quick question before purchasing from your store so you do not want to miss out on customer service. Then step number 10, how to scale and multiply your profits. This is of course one of my favorite sections but we need to take it from the top. If it was so easy and so too good to be true everyone would be on it but you need to learn how to do it the right way and what better way to learn than from those with actual experience who are still doing it up until this day. I'm talking about no one other than myself in this example. So let's go ahead and get started. Step number one, product research finding products to sell. No matter what suppliers you're thinking about using no matter what niches, what categories you have in your mind that you're thinking about selling wipe all of that out, start from scratch and this is how to do it. Now there are many methods for finding the right products to sell on your store but you have to start from somewhere and no matter what selling channels you're thinking of using once again no matter what suppliers you're thinking of using you can always start from the same basic steps. The first one is the AliExpress drop shipping center. Now this is a free tool that AliExpress is offering to all sellers around the world. You have a link to it in the blog article below this video and that will take you directly to the AliExpress drop shipping center where you can find hundreds and even thousands of product ideas to resell on your drop shipping stores. Now AliExpress may change the link to the drop shipping center from time to time. So if the link stopped working in our blog article simply head over to your AliExpress account go to your my order section and on the left menu you should see the DS center or the drop shipping center towards the bottom of the menu. So here you can choose different categories different ship from locations and you have all kinds of other filters like products with free shipping, products that have videos inside, price ranges, search for a specific product and even search by an image of a product from another website. You can sort it of course by recommended by prices, by ratings, by sales and if I just hover over every product you can see what's happening here. Besides just seeing how many times this product sold like this bling watch over here you can also see a sales chart here showing you how well this product has been performing. You've also got the products rating and of course if I click on it I will be able to see the product listing but I can also analyze it if I hover over and I click on go to analyze. AliExpress will take you to another dashboard that will show you the sales trends for this product and more in-depth information as well as other products similar to this one that are also trending really well. So here you're definitely gonna get a lot of product ideas that are selling right now really well and you can simply import those products to your stores really quick and also search for other products that are similar to the ones that are trending. This way you're going to start your own trend, your own sales and also search for other products that are similar to those that are trending so that you can start your own winning streak. Next you can start doing some supplier product research. So simply head over to suppliers websites and even retail marketplaces like Amazon just to see what is selling well there. You can use them as your supplier but you can also use them simply to find products to sell. Now some do not want to use Amazon as a supplier since they are a retail marketplace and many dropshippers like to dropship from wholesale dropshipping suppliers. That is simply because there are much more dropshipping friendly and they will not lock your accounts if you start to dropship from them one too many times but there are ways to overcome everything but now we're simply talking about product research. So here I simply went over to the best seller section on Amazon and then I started to dive deep into one of their categories. Now there are a lot of categories. Some are not dropshipping friendly and some are. Like for example, patio lawn and garden is a dropshipping friendly category. Here we're going to go for example to gardening and let's go to outdoor carts. Okay, so I really dove in and here you have a whole bunch of products that you can simply resell. Just stay away from big known brands, stay away from copyrighted brands, trademarked, patented items and so forth but as long as you stay clear from them you will be safe and you can sell these items. Now there are of course tens of millions of products for you to resell and some that you cannot resell but if you use a dropshipping tool which we will talk about soon like AutoDS and you're trying to import a product to your store that you're not allowed to resell then you will get a warning message saying hey this product is vero, it's trademarked or the manufacturer is not allowed to resell it are you sure that you want to continue with the import process and then you can choose if you want to continue or not. So the dropshipping center and supplier product research go to your suppliers websites go to the best sellers section see what is selling hot right now and add those products to your store or of course products that are similar to them. Another tip from Amazon's best sellers section is that they also have another column inside there called Movers and Shakers and this will show you the most trending items in the last 24 hours. So this one is updating constantly and there are many items for you to resell here especially the ones the cables that we're seeing here in shakers and electronics and also of course the fashion niche, cameras, photos so lots of these products are very relevant to the dropshipping business model and this is another great way to find wonderful products that you can resell in your stores that are trending that do have lots of demand that you can simply sell yourself. So go to your suppliers websites see what's trending there and test them out also on the market. Method number three is competitor product research. So this actually means instead of going to suppliers websites to see what's trending there you can also spy on your competition and see what your competitors are doing what's working well for them and imitate the same practices to be able to find the same success on your stores. Now this depends on what selling channels you are selling on so that you can see what your competitors are doing on those selling channels. For example, if you want to sell on eBay then having a competitor research on eBay is quite easy simply search for the product that you want to sell and then on the left side you can click on sold items you can see from this screenshot right here I can also show you a live example but this screenshot shows it pretty well so you click on the left side on sold items and in the item location you want to make sure that only your audience is selected so here for example if you want to sell to the US audience you're going to choose US only. So US only see only items that's sold and then in the search results you'll only see products that actually have a selling history and that way you can check if this product has any demand and you will also be able to find other products similar to that one so if that one isn't selling you will see what is selling and learn from that. Once you see what products are selling go to your suppliers websites search for those products and see that you can get a good price on those or similar products. Now if you're dropshipping on other places like Shopify and Wix that's not like eBay where you can simply search for something and see Shopify and Wix stores you have great extensions like the Koala Inspector link in the blog article link below this video where you can easily spy on the competition see what products other Shopify stores are selling see what apps they are using what strategies they are implementing what upselling and cross-selling techniques they have all of that can be revealed inside this cute little extension so check that out and that will help you understand what stores are Shopify and Wix stores and what's going well for them. Now if you're searching on other places like Facebook Marketplace or Facebook Shops then there's really not much competitor research you can do there because not a lot of people have implemented that dropshipping business model yet and that is one of the best places to start a dropshipping business today especially if you live in the United States so that you will meet all of Facebook's requirements and it'll be easy for you to dropship there. If you want to do product research simply go to your supplier's websites check out their best sellers import them to your Facebook Marketplace store and that is that don't check out the competition because there isn't any and enjoy those sales and profits. Come back later and in the comments below tell me if that helped you. Now another way to conduct product research is using AutoDS's integrated product research tool so if you're a member of AutoDS simply head over to the platform and on the left side you want to switch it from platform to product research and here you also have a long list of items that are updating every day all the time with the hottest trends. So here for example you have all products you have popular products so you can see a nice variety of products here and you can easily import them to your store by hovering over and clicking the import product like this card reader right here that costs anywhere between 30 to 37 dollars ships in just one business day and if you click on these products and of course you'll have more detailed information for example the product's description the specifications the return policies customer reviews and more. So it's really easy to import them to your store in just a click of a button and this is really product research at its most simplest form. So you can click on new products to see new products that just got added to the database, holiday products to prepare you for the upcoming holidays US suppliers, China suppliers and a messages system that we just added to the product research tool and we have so much more things coming up here like private suppliers that only you will be able to work with once they sign up to the system once we have that feature rolling and so much more that we have going on but that is just for product research you can easily do it with the auto DS system and on top of that you can also use the finder so the finder is simply going to go and find trending products automatically and add them to your store and this is another great way to mix in automated product research while also adding in your own product research methods so what you're gonna do here is head over back to the platform and then you're gonna click on add products auto DS finder and here you can choose what type of product you wanna go with those that sold three times in the last month five times in the last month eight times in the last month or those with a high chance of having a discount coupon so the only thing you need to do here is select the amount of products that you wanna upload from each category select the supplier that you wanna grab these products from and the region and then click on add as a draft and then all of those products will be imported to the draft section of your store where you can optimize them before you move them over to the product section where they will be live and anyone will be able to see them and purchase them so that's the auto DS product research tool and the product finder both of which can help you find great products that will sell in your drop shipping stores now of course not every product that you research and import is going to sell but the more you test the more results will follow and then you will be able to multiply your success by continuing to add more products similar to those that are selling for you while on the other hand continuing to always test the market for more products more niches, more categories this is one of the best ways to learn how to conduct product research and grow along with your success okay so let's move on to step number two now we need to choose a supplier that ships out without MOQ MOQ stands for minimum order quantity because we are having an online store we're creating an online store where we don't need to have any inventory where we don't need to pay for that upfront so now we need to choose a supplier better yet a drop shipping supplier with lots of products that we can resell that also don't like I said have a minimum order quantity those that have great prices for their products those that have many niches that we can specialize in and test those that have low drop shipping fees or no drop shipping fees whatsoever those that have fast shipping and delivery times suppliers that use reliable shipping carriers that we can track the shipping events and see where the package is along the way until it reaches its final destination so if our buyers say that the item didn't reach the end location they didn't receive the product you can always open up the tracking details and check the whereabouts of the package and be able of course to give them an answer besides that we want suppliers with comfortable payment methods so if we wanna pay with credit card we wanna have that ability if we wanna pay with PayPal or Payoneer or any other payment service it will be to your best advantage if your suppliers support the payment options that you are looking for and of course you wanna look for suppliers that have a comfortable return policy the better terms you can get from your suppliers the better terms you'll be able to offer to your buyers and that way we can keep a high level of service so how do we find all of these suppliers that live up to all of these requirements my solution is to head over to Autodesk.com and simply click on suppliers right here on the top here you have a list of about 25 dropshipping suppliers all that you can start dropshipping from today with thousands better yet with millions of products that you can resell now of course some of these suppliers are retail suppliers like I mentioned earlier in this video and some are wholesale dropshipping suppliers if you wanna learn more in depth about each and every one of these suppliers and which ones can better suit your dropshipping business simply head over to our blog page hover on resources click on dropshipping blog and here you can simply search for the word suppliers and now you're going to be greeted with all of the best articles that we have on dropshipping suppliers some are niche specific like suppliers for medical products print on demand suppliers and some are simply going to go in depth into those suppliers like this one 25 free dropshipping suppliers to help scale your business so be sure to head over to our blog page and also learn from there you also have the same amount of information on our YouTube channel so if you're the type that likes to watch you can watch if you're the type that likes to read go ahead and read just do not forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel to always learn about the newest dropshipping topics the newest features coming out and the best ways for you to really scale and succeed with your business go learn about the suppliers and choose the best ones for your business but not before doing the product research phase so just stick to the steps as shown in this video and let's continue before we finish up with the suppliers do not forget that it's always best to work with multiple dropshipping suppliers and not just one because we don't wanna put all of our eggs in one basket if one supplier ever fails us for example, if a product runs out of stock and we were selling that product and they don't have any more of that we could have found that product with other suppliers and if you're working with a Chinese supplier and now there's some kind of Chinese holiday which happens a few times a year now no Chinese suppliers are gonna talk to you for the next couple of weeks and you have orders you need to fulfill them so you can only rely on that so you always wanna work with multiple dropshipping suppliers for those reasons and more now let's talk about selling channels where should you actually sell these products? You already did your product research you found suppliers where you can sell those products that you researched now you need somewhere to sell these products on some selling channel I'm gonna talk about eBay, Shopify, Facebook and Wix but of course there are more selling channels that you can sell your products on like WooCommerce, Amazon and so much more those of which we will also support very soon but for now let's talk about these four so we've got marketplaces like eBay and Facebook and then we've got online platforms online hosts that will let you create a fully customizable online store like Shopify, Wix and WooCommerce now all of these places simply let you host online stores and they can all start with pretty much no expenses whatsoever and then some like Shopify will charge you after you passed your 14 day trial and others like eBay and Wix and Facebook like Facebook Marketplace and Facebook Shops allows you to host your own online stores without paying any membership subscription up front some places like eBay will charge you for an eBay store but that's only after you wanna import a few hundred listings to your store but before that eBay will give you at least a hundred listings they change that from time to time but at least a hundred listings to list for free test out the market without paying anything up front so let's go over these selling channels really quick and their differences let's start with Wix Wix is a fully customizable platform that allows you to host your online website and Wix and Shopify are pretty much the same so everything that I'm talking about the same also goes for Shopify it is a fully customizable platform with an easy to use interface so even if you've never hosted an online store before you have no technical skills you have no user experience skills no coding skills that really does not matter these are online platforms that make it really easy for you to start an online store and if you still have zero experience on where to start I suggest heading back to Autodesk.com hover over resources and click on drop shipping courses here you have a Shopify course with about 40 lessons step by step how to start from zero how to create a successful Shopify store going over all of the steps and you can implement the same steps or at least the same strategies when creating a Wix or WooCommerce store and this goes through everything product research, audience research setting up your store step by step connecting your domains your store policies, legal pages, importing products marketing methods, Facebook ads how to launch them from A to Z order fulfillment customer service and more this course is 100% for free you do not need to pay to learn so go check it out if you haven't ever started an online store before with that you're also going to get advanced integrated e-commerce tools like the Shopify app store the Wix app store that will simply help you sell your products, promote your products get those buyers back those that abandoned your cart that added products and then just simply abandoned without purchasing and so much more upselling cross-selling techniques and more and more and more so the Shopify app store the Wix app store those are great marketplaces to help you get even more apps and increase your store's sell conversion rate now some of the cons of Wix and Shopify besides allowing you to have your own fully customized store your own domain name your own storefront your own logos, banners and all of that of course not everything is too good to be true and some of the disadvantages is that you are not going to get any free organic traffic so no matter how hard you worked on creating your store no matter how hard you worked on product research no matter how hard you worked on everything all of the hours that you put in nobody will know that your store exists you need to market your store you need to get it in front of your audience you need to raise awareness so that people will know that your store exists and of course you want to target the right audiences that will click on your product links that will add it to cart and that will fulfill the checkout process so no organic traffic and you also have marketing costs and most of them can come at a high cost especially if you have no idea what you're doing and you just started collecting data that is one reason why you want to take that free Shopify course and learn how to do it the right way but marketing does come at a cost and it's not only Facebook ads you also have influencer marketing you have email marketing and of course you have PPC paper click ads like Facebook ads, YouTube ads and so forth another con that I would add to Shopify is that they charge a $29 basic plan after you finish your 14 day trial so if you're thinking about starting with Shopify do not start your 14 day trial until you finish with your product research you know what suppliers you're gonna use and you're ready to start creating your store many people sign up for their 14 day trial and then they start with product research they spend all of their time on that and by the time they're ready to start importing products to their stores they need to pay for a store subscription before they even created it so that's a little bit annoying and it's important to know the step before starting your trial on Shopify some of the advantages of dropshipping on eBay first you have a very easy to use interface so everything is pretty much built from the ground up you simply need to import products to your store and create good looking product pages you don't need to worry about your homepage you don't need to worry about your storefront you do have these things but they are not very important most people are going into eBay to search for something that they want they don't go to seller storefronts they only see their product pages decide if they wanna buy it and if not they'll go back to the search engine back to eBay and search for something else so very easy to use interface low setup costs meaning zero setup costs it doesn't cost any money to register it doesn't cost money to create a seller account it doesn't cost money to import your first 100 items or maybe even more today so all of this comes absolutely free you can remove the items that are not selling well replace them with other items that you're testing until you start to find products that are selling and only once you start to make sales and profit only then can you invest that profit into an eBay store subscription where you can have a thousand item listings and even more and here is where you're actually gonna start making some substantial profits another thing that I love about eBay is that they also offer free organic traffic so you do not need to worry about marketing now this does not mean that marketing options do not exist on eBay you have promoted listings standard you have promoted listings advance we have all of the information on that of course on our YouTube channel, on our blog page while you do have ways to market your store on eBay you really do not need to because if you did your product research and you imported products that people are looking to sell then people will buy them you do not need to sell at a very low profit percentage rate you can even start a 20, 30% profit and you will see that you're still going to make sales then you can up it to 40%, 50% but we're not talking about profit percentages right now that is how we work on eBay free organic traffic no need to market and easy ways to promote your products if you decided to promote them anyway and what I like about the regular promoted service the promoted listing standard is that you don't need to pay eBay anything only after you make a sale after they promoted your product so if they sponsor your product someone clicks on it and purchases only then will you have to pay eBay a fee for that ad and that is configured by you it can be 2%, 3%, 5% however much you want to give them from the transaction the more you give them the more they'll promote the product and then of course there's promoted listings advance which is their PPC feature which is relatively new now some of the disadvantages of selling on eBay is the selling limits so when you start a new eBay store they'll only allow you to import about 10 products and then you'll have to call them get them on the phone and tell them hey eBay I need you to upgrade my limits because I have so many products to sell and this is not nearly enough and you're gonna have to do that a few times until you have lots of limits and many times eBay also suspend new seller accounts not permanently but just to get to know the seller better there are some things that you may do during the sign up process during when importing your first product something that raise a red flag that will make eBay temporarily suspend your store get you on the phone try to learn who you are what your business model is and only then will they uplift the suspension and this is only things that happen in the beginning when creating new eBay seller accounts if you have an age seller account you most likely have nothing to worry about but if it is a new account you will have to take it slower on eBay because you will not be able to list a thousand listings on day one like you could on Shopify and Wix now let's talk about Facebook marketplace and Facebook shops the biggest pros that we have there is that there is low to no competition there not many people are using that as a dropshipping business platform but it works well as one so there is pretty much no competition and like I mentioned earlier in the product research section of this video you can simply import products from your suppliers websites the best selling products and they will most likely sell on the Facebook marketplace or in your Facebook shop store so there is low competition free organic traffic just like eBay you don't have to worry about traffic because if someone is searching for a product to buy on Facebook or on eBay they'll use the platform search engine and when they use that they can get to your listing 100% organically now on Facebook you can also post your items you can also share them in Facebook groups in relevant groups of course that allow you to share things to sell but you can find many groups like that in your niche where you can simply post that product in those groups and that's another way to get free organic traffic because you didn't need to pay anyone to bring that traffic to your store you've also got relatively low selling fees on Facebook so it's about 5% of the transaction price which is the cheapest that I've seen from any other selling platform Facebook is relatively new to the e-commerce scene but they're very excited about it and they're starting up with very low fees just to get lots of sellers on board so now is the best time to join especially if you want to make significant profits now to sell on Facebook you do have to reside in the US you do need to have a social security number for verification after you reach $599 in sales but in any case, if you have that if you are a US citizen if you reside in the US if you have a US bank account then you have pretty much nothing to worry about and Facebook is an excellent place to host your online business to top that off Facebook has no selling limits so you can list as many products as you want from day one unlike eBay which gives you only about 10 products some of the cons of the Facebook marketplace and the Facebook shops is that you don't really have a dedicated page to show your brand image well, granted on shops you have it even better but on the Facebook marketplace you don't really have that and you are limited to being a US citizen and those are for the reasons that I explained just about a minute ago so if you don't have those prerequisites you will not really be able to drop ship or profit from drop shipping on the Facebook marketplace or on Facebook shops okay, so those are some of the selling channels make your decision think about it of course and then move forward from there step number four is business automation this is the part where you need to understand that without business automation none of this is flexible and none of this is scalable because with business automation without ODS you're going to enjoy price and stock monitoring meaning every time the prices change on one of my suppliers websites it'll also change on my store and every time the stock changes on one of my suppliers websites the stock will also change accordingly on my store automatically and of course quick product importing you can import a product to your store within seconds, within a click I showed you from the product research tool how you can do it in just one click but there are many ways to do it you can just go to your supplier's website and search for something that you're looking for and import everything that you see on that page using the auto DS helper extension we have all of the explanations on that how all of that is done of course on our YouTube channel on our blog page on our help channel there are many ways where you can learn all of the great automation features that you have with auto DS but once again price and stock monitoring quick product importing price automation features where you can tell the system hey, if a product is not selling well then I want you to decrease the price down to a certain limit so that we can have a higher chance of selling that product and products that are selling for me I want you to up the price by this much up to this certain limit so that I can profit more and more on every product that I sell okay so this is a great way to really find the sweet spot where you can make the most amount of profit while still continuing to sell consistently and to have a higher chance of selling products that aren't performing too well on your store besides that you have many more things like the customer support where on eBay you can handle all of your customer support messages all under one place and many, many more things on top of that so if you want to learn all about it all of its features go to the blog article linked right below this video head over to autoDS.com and learn why you need business automation to be able to scale your stores to be able to save hours and weeks of work and put that all down to just a couple of minutes just a couple of hours to really be able to build a complete business and import even thousands of products to your store in just a matter of seconds without automation none of this will be possible so go to autoDS.com see what we have to offer and then make your decision if drop shipping automation is something that you need for your business to be able to scale it and really start hitting the high numbers now here's a quick explanation of how you can start your own store on all of the selling channels that we talked about so if you want to create an on eBay or Facebook marketplace simply go to eBay.com or go to Facebook go to the marketplace section and register for your free account if you haven't already done that and then simply start importing your products it's really easy click on add product and start copying all of the products information from your supplier's website to autoDS and Facebook now of course if you're using autoDS you don't need to copy all the information and move them over one by one and just waste a whole bunch of time doing that simply use our quick importer tool to do it quickly and easily in just a matter of seconds we have tons of explanations but I want to keep this video not as long as it has been already so it's free to create your stores there import your products and people will be able to buy them as soon as you list them here you have full guides on how to start on those selling channels so how to drop ship on eBay a full guide and how to drop ship on Facebook marketplace now if you're on Shopify or on Wix then you're going to have to register of course for your Shopify or for your Wix account for Shopify remember you have a 14 day trial so only do it after you know what products you're going to add to your Shopify store so the next step of course would be to import your products then you're going to have to customize your homepage you're going to have to optimize your product pages your themes your logos and everything before you launch your business to the public and start marketing your store so that people will know that they exist of course you're going to have full explanations on that too so the ultimate guide to starting a Shopify drop shipping business and Wix drop shipping a full guide to starting your e-commerce business all of these are full step-by-step guides on how to create successful stores on those selling channels so after you created those selling channels it's time to import your products and this of course once again is where Autodesk should come in to save you the most amount of time this is an image of how the product importer works I'm not going to demonstrate it in this video because I realized how long this video has been running so far and you're doing a great job by the way the fact that you're still here listening curious about your e-commerce business taking notes and of course you will have to take action otherwise learning is not enough it's only half the battle so learn, take action, learn, take action it's the only way to proceed but here you have a few product import methods inside the system the one click importer where you can simply see a product you'll have an import button once you have the extension installed a quick importer button where you can just click on it and quickly import it to your store within a click the single product importer where you can copy the products URL so let's go inside this product copy the URL go to Autodesk click on add products single product add the URL click on edit now quick and in just a couple of seconds while I'm saying the sentence you can see that it already grabbed all of the products information from the suppliers section from the suppliers page and added it to the draft section of our stores so you saw how quick that was for grabbing all of the information from here all of the images all the specifications and simply adding it here so that now we can start optimizing this product the title, the collections, the tags descriptions, the variations, the images the item specifications all of that 100% automated and once you're done you're simply gonna click on save and import and it'll import to your store so importing one product is as fast as importing hundreds and even thousands of products to your store when using the multiple product uploader and the bulk importer so that is with a CSV file that the Autodesk extension will be able to export for you I will not demonstrate in this video sorry, taking way too long but you have all of the explanations on your YouTube channel let me know in the comments below if you cannot find it and I will send you the direct link to learn about anything that I talked about in this video but was not able to demonstrate so use those product import features save a huge amount of time doing it and invest that time in growing your business instead of being stuck on the same daily tasks every day that are not allowing you to expand your business step number seven is to market your store now that you finally imported them to your store it's time to let the world know that your store exists that your products exist and of course this differs depending on what marketplace you chose so for eBay you have the promoted listing standard and the eBay PPC the promoted listings advanced you can learn about those using the links in the article below this video also got Shopify and Wix marketing so the eight steps to run Facebook ads for your e-commerce business this is an e-book that we created from A to Z how to run Facebook ads you can also learn about it of course from the free Shopify course or you can simply learn from this e-book but you also have the e-book here so you're simply gonna hover over resources of course on autoDS.com and click on e-books and here you've got this e-book eight steps to run Facebook ads for e-commerce stores in eight simple steps 100% for free of course simply click on unlock your e-book leave your name and your email address and that is pretty much it you'll get a free copy a free PDF and learn step by step how to create a successful ad or successful ads at that for your e-commerce stores so this really will provide a full tutorial on how to do that starting from how to create your Facebook page to how to start creating your Facebook ads and place them in that Facebook page under your business manager create the right videos for your ads and much, much, much more so you can see it's a very, very long e-book showing you every step of the way how to do it the right way how to A, B test how to analyze the ones that went well even if you're on a budget you're gonna learn how to run ads at $5 a day with low budgets and still be able to succeed so even if you have no marketing experience whatsoever this is the best place to start off now for Facebook marketplace and Facebook shops marketing as I mentioned you can post your products on Facebook groups and get people to click on your Facebook item listing in the marketplace or in Facebook shops and you can also use Facebook promotions which is a built-in tool so inside Facebook you have a tool inside your marketplace inside your shops you have a tool to be able to promote your products so check that out see what Facebook offers there work of course on your product title and this also has to do with eBay the better your title the more likely organic traffic is going to arrive by searching for the same product that you have listed and don't forget on places like Facebook and eBay you don't need to do much marketing as long as you did the right product research for your target audience your products will sell you will make profit and you will learn from there how to continue multiplying your profits by adding more products similar to those that are selling and as I mentioned while continuing to test the market for other products that you haven't tried selling yet because you always want to learn more than you know now and this is one of the best ways to do it now you're going to start making orders and you need to learn how to fulfill your orders once you start getting them on your online store it's time to go to your suppliers' websites purchase those products and ship it directly to your end customers using your customers address details from your order on your online store now there is the manual way of doing this by going to your suppliers' websites for every time you have a sale and putting in all the information and doing everything manually but this of course is time consuming and there are two ways to put up with that one is to hire a virtual assistant and you can also do that with the Autodesk platform so just go to settings and inside your plans and add-ons make sure that you also have the VA users or the virtual assistant users at $15 a month and this will allow you to create a user under the users column right here click on add user and here you can add more and more virtual assistants and be able to delegate all kinds of tasks to them according to how much trust you built together so far so you can give your virtual assistant the ability to see your dashboard to view and edit your active products to delete your drafts or edit them same thing for orders to take care of customer messages and cases to view and import on track listings list new products and active products and view and edit your settings so all in all you can give them lots of access you can give them a little bit of access simply enter their names their email addresses and the desired passwords send it to them and they'll be able to log into the Autodesk platform and take care of whatever tasks that you need now my biggest tip here my biggest takeaway is do not hire a virtual assistant right from the start you want to learn how to process your orders and how to run your business before you allow a virtual assistant to do it if you don't have the right skills to do it yourself how will you be able to pass it on to the virtual assistant in the best way possible you need to learn how to run your business before teaching someone else how to do it or how to do some aspects of it some parts of it so besides manual order fulfillment you can also have a virtual assistant fulfill your orders for you but the simpler way to do that is to simply go with automatic orders so we have an automatic order solution on Autodesk where the system can fulfill all of your orders automatically as soon as they come in using your buyer accounts on your suppliers websites so for that on the system on the settings on the plans and add-ons you want to make sure that the orders processor is running and then what you want to do is go to buyer accounts and add your buyer account so if you have a buyer account on Amazon you want to fulfill orders there from that supplier you want to add a buyer account for Amazon and the same for any other supplier that you want to use and the same goes for Aliexpress, Walmart or Home Depot so if you want to automate those orders create a buyer account there add your buyer account information right here and Autodesk will simply log into your buyer account every time you get an order the process is completely automated and it will order all of the products for you so here on the products page you can see an order that is pending so I can send it to automatic orders you can also send it to automatic orders automatically so you won't have to do it from the pending and once the system will order it it will move it to the ordered status with the order ID once it's shipped it will move to the shipped status of course everything is automatic with the tracking information we also have free tracking conversions so to go to sleep at night with zero orders and to wake up in the morning with five or 10 orders that were already ordered and some of them may be already shipped is really a great feeling because your customers are going to receive their packages really fast you didn't have to have any interaction you didn't have to have the responsibility of sitting in front of your computer and fulfilling your orders in order for them to move out it will simply result in great customer satisfaction your customers will return to purchase from your store they'll refer their friends and their family to purchase from your store and this is the best thing that you can have going for the long term survivability of your drop shipping business now you also have the fulfilled by Autodesk service and that does not use your buyer accounts so if you don't want to have your own buyer accounts you can opt in to the fulfilled by Autodesk service and allow all of your orders to be automated for you in both cases you will need auto order credits each order costs one credit so click on buy credits and purchase the right package for your store and if you're using the fulfilled by Autodesk service to pay for your order since it's not using your buyer accounts with your payment information you're going to have to top up your managed balance the more balance you have the more orders you'll be able to process because those funds will be used to pay your suppliers when fulfilling those orders that is all that you need in order for automation to work perfectly and to get really fast shipping times since you are processing your orders even while you're traveling even while you're sleeping and even while you're out on vacation that is some of the automation features at its best step number nine is customer service now that you're finally fulfilling your orders every now and then your customers are also going to reach out to you so the best place to handle your customer service if you're drop shipping on eBay is through the Autodesk platform simply click on customer support and here you will have all of your customers messages all in one place you'll be able to reply to all of them even if you have multiple stores even if you have five eBay stores, 10 eBay stores you'll be able to see all of their messages in one place create chat snippets copy and paste messages really easily for the repeated messages and so forth now with the automatic orders you're also going to get automatic messages sent to your buyers so in the Autodesk settings you can change all of that and edit the messages that you want to send to your buyers after they have an order after you process their order after you have tracking information after the order was delivered and more time after that just to make sure that they leave you a positive feedback so you can edit all those messages and really give the customer an overall really good feeling that they purchased from your store and not from anybody else's now if you're not using eBay and you're not using the customer service feature embedded inside the Autodesk system you can of course take care of all of your customers and you should of course take care of all of your customers depending on what selling channel you are using one of the best parts about Facebook is that all of the customers messages will simply be in your messenger inbox and for Shopify, Wix, WooCommerce, Amazon and other places you can also see them on those selling channels and also in your email inbox so be sure to check out all of your customers messages do not ignore them reply to each and every one of your buyers and make sure that they are all fully satisfied when taking your service okay, these customers were not easy to get in the first place and now that they're reaching out to you you want to give them the best service possible for the main reasons that you want your store to continue on further down the road you want them to continue purchasing from you and to refer their friends and family to also purchase from your store the best way to do it is to offer the best customer service that you can even now and then you will have some setbacks you will have to refund some money you will have to process some returns that is completely fine take care of your customers and they will take care of your business step number 10 is to scale and multiply your profits so now that your store is finally running you can analyze it you can use the AutoDS system to go to the products page and see what products are selling well for you you can use a smart filter system to be able to filter products according to any option that you want any filter that you want like product tags see how a certain tag is performing for you a certain niche and simply keep the products that are selling well for you add more products that are similar to them using the quick importer tool and continuing to test continuing to analyze continuing to add more products similar to those that are working well for you while continuing to test out the market I said it a few times in this video I know but that is the importance of it once you get that down and you practice and you will learn that in the drop shipping business model practice does make perfect the more you try the more you practice the more you research the more the results will follow so keep that in mind work on your product research this is the part where you need to put the most amount of time on because it's all about your products you can even have a really bad looking store your Shopify store or your Wix store could look horrible but if you're selling the right products and you're targeting the right audiences in marketing then you will be able to still make those sales but if you're selling products that people are not looking to buy and your store looks wonderful it looks perfect people are still not gonna buy your products so understand that it starts with product research everything else is a bonus but you do wanna make sure that you can perfect well not perfect because it's I mean what is perfect but to continue optimizing your stores as much as possible after your product research before and during product research but you still wanna keep everything looking good you wanna keep everything looking professional and you wanna keep everything looking optimized start with product research and work your way down from there I hope that this video helped you understand how you can start an online store without any inventory if you have any questions let me know in the comment section below once again do not forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel to learn about the next step in your e-commerce business with full step-by-step tutorials case studies, success stories what products to sell and so much more that we have going on good job on making it this far now go ahead and take action and I'll see you on the other side