 Selling on Shopify is something that thousands and thousands of people are doing, especially dropshippers. However, the learning curve today is not as easy as it used to be, as we have to learn how to do so many things besides learning how to create an online store from A to Z. One of those things is simply learning how to do everything the right way from creating your store, researching products, marketing your products correctly, which in most cases require a budget, which many people don't have. But in this video, I have a special podcast episode with Anatoly from gsmgrowthagency.com. And he has lots of experience dropshipping on Shopify, creating high converting Shopify stores. And I think that you have a lot to learn from someone like this. So Anatoly, first of all, welcome and thank you for being here today. How are you? Leon, thank you so much for invitation. And I'm really excited to be on this podcast today, because my goal usually just especially 2023, I start sharing everything that I know as much as I can, because like I have made enough and we are grown to the really good size that now time to came from my end to share with everyone like all my past experience, all my skills and like hopefully that your listeners, it will be helpful. And I can tell you that sometimes I receive messages that thank you about that, like sharing some kind of points. And it's made me understanding that I'm doing the right thing by sharing my experience. So really excited to be here and provide the value ask me anything and I would love to have this conversation. Okay, great. Thank you for that. And yeah, I'm with you there. I think that one of the best things that we can do today, besides knowing how to do it ourselves is also to help others learn how to do it. So many people are wanting to learn how to do it. There's so much content out there, but we we really needed to be valued and structured in the right way in order for them to in order for our viewers to to to learn it. And that's of course the point of this podcast. So wherever you're listening, whether on our YouTube channel, whether on the Spotify podcast, whether on Apple podcasts or anywhere that you're hearing this podcast, you can also watch us in our YouTube channel. So just go to youtube.com slash auto DS. You can also watch us instead of listening if you like to listen, go ahead and listen. So let's go ahead and kick this off. So Anatoly, can you tell us a little bit about your journey and how you got started in the world of actually creating online stores or e-commerce stores? Yeah, I have really long story about that. I will try to be short since the conversation is not about my past. If I will go there, it will be two hours conversation. And in short words, it's full of fails, full of like, all the time, like getting unlucky with the performance and luck with the like searching for better path in my life. And I was like, ended up in 2017 in Dubai, working like for five years in this hospitality and doing some kind of sales work later on. And I was always get real problems in my life financially. And I was in this small master room, we're renting that with my wife in the business or Filipino couple in the two bedroom apartments. And we were not able to rent even our own apartments because of low income. And my wife came to me and said that she's pregnant. And like, she started crying, not because she's happy, because she's terrified what's going to be happening now, because she will lose her job and how we're going to be paying for everything, especially delivery. And I was the happier person, but in the same, the scariest person in the earth. And that moment, I went to the pharmacy to buy another test to make sure that it's correct. And I just stuck there was shaking on the middle of the street plus 35 degrees. It was 24th of February 2017. And I was so terrified. And like, I just was thinking about everything and said to myself first time in my life, such a strong words, which is I believe on the till bottom of my heart that my baby won't come in the world in the position where I am now financially. That was so strong. I was so scared to understanding that I said to myself that it's a setup that I understand I will do whatever it takes, but I had no clue what I'm going to be doing. So you actually set yourself up, you have your back against the wall, and you have something to lose, which is, you know, your, your, your financial independence for you, not just you, but your family, which, you know, puts a lot more meaning into it. And I completely resonate with that because my story was almost the same. Why pregnant with a kid understanding we do not have enough. That was also my motivator, my main motivator. So also when I had my backup against the wall, nothing can really stop you. And I'm glad that we kind of have like a almost a similar shared story. So it's a little bit about what gets you started and what gave you that big meaning of not just, you know, on board, maybe I should find something to do. Like, let's try to find an extra source of income that's probably not going to work out too well, because you're going to fail once and twice and you're going to give it up. And comparing, comparing to what we just heard about, you know, having a real meaning behind that, which will really, you won't care about the failures, you'll just look over it and see it as an opportunity. Strong why? Yes. It's a strong why it's very similar. We're very similar story there, but let's, let's jump more into it. So what actually brought you to, I'm pushing forward, then I'm going to push back, but what brought you from here to getting to a point where you're not just doing it for yourself, but you're actually helping your clients scale and succeed with their e-commerce business? Yeah, sure. So like, first year, first half year in the drop shipping business, I was failing. And what the point I was sharing all my fails and all my loss in the Facebook groups in my Facebook profile, which is unfortunately get banned in 2019. I have a new profile now, not detective, but I got a lot of engagement on that Facebook profile by sharing my story, by sharing all the fails. And when I start succeeding, when I start finally getting my first results, and after that, like October, 2018, first 50,000 November, 150,000 a month, like March, 2019, 250 in couple of weeks, like it's bring me attention and people ask and start asking me to mentor them, which is for me was surprise. Like, come on, like I'm who I am, but I implemented one time, second time, third time, I understand. Oh my God, it's replicatable. It's it can be like working on several things by what I'm implementing in my stores. It's working for others. It's my strategy. Wow. So when I like, I become active mentor till 2020, I got a bit exhausted with the mentorship because I was working not a group coach. And I was the one working one on one, every single student had one on one call with me. And it was six days a week. So I was nonstop on the calls with the students because I have a bunch of them. And after that, we get really a good result with some of the students, multiple seven figures. And after that, like, I decided more people start asking, can you run ads for me? So not not show me, but do it for me. I like, huh, that's could be like, like, I didn't think about that that it's a good idea. I started and my mentor said to me, you have to jump from the, from the mentorship to the agency because you have demand for it, people asking. And they actually did was the best reason because in the first month, March 25th, when I started, we like four weeks our income, I started hiring people and like results was incredible, like 750k a month for one of the stores. Since like it was May, it was May 2020 COVID was a really incredible months for us. We hired a lot of people like ended up here with 12 employers next year with 44 employers next year. Right now we're starting with 30 employees because we dropped down what's like we optimized our human power. And this is like a sweet spot at the moment, like in terms of team. So yeah. And we have been able to generate as agency for three years over 21.7 million in the drop shipping space for their clients itself. Okay, first of all, very interesting. You also answered some of my next upcoming questions, but it's all good. We have a lot of things that we can circle back to here. So I liked the fact that you started just organically, just like talking to the community saying, Hey, guys, I'm doing this and I failed. Hey, guys, I'm doing this and I felt you probably did it in some groups or maybe it was just on a regular Facebook post and people were just engaging with that they were enjoying your content even though you were showing them your failures, which is all a part of succeeding at the end, right? No person that made it to the top couldn't do it without failing so many times. And one of the things that brings people to stop is once they fell once or twice, they think that it's probably not going to work, right? And this is wrong. So I liked the fact that you came up from that and then you started mentoring people, then you realized that, wait, a lot of people need mentorship. I'm using all of my resources and all of my time from day to night, just mentoring people. And there was not enough time for me to mentor all these people and you were kind of wearing yourself out. And from here, one client actually asked you to do it for him instead of showing him how to do it. And that kind of gave you that little light bulb moment. Let's start an agency and see if, this can also be a thing. And you really hit that off. So I really like that. And I hope that all of you listeners are listening to this because you're probably not be successful at your first door and it's okay. But if you keep going at it and you keep thinking of new solutions to the problems, you will make it. And I have just so many examples to back this up. So I'm glad that you also brought it up, but let's continue. So when you started creating these e-commerce stores, first you were doing it for yourself, you learned from your own experiences, you learned from your own failures, then you started mentoring people, then you started doing it for others. At some point, you decided that Shopify is your platform of choice, right? There's many platforms. You could have done it on eBay, on Amazon, on Facebook Marketplace, on Etsy, even though Etsy was relatively new back then, but still you could have done it. What made you choose Shopify out of all of the platforms, Wix, WooCommerce, Why Shopify? Yeah, so first thing, when I started e-commerce, I didn't know anything about advertising, anything about e-commerce itself. For me, it was a moment in 25th of August, 2017, I was like, oh my God, is it real? Is it possible? And it was an example of Shopify. Like I read the book, Starting from Zero, it was just a simple lead-gen book, I mean, lead magnet boot, but about the starting drop shipping. And it was related to Shopify, that's the reason why it started there. But later on, I found out different platforms, like Wix, Magento, ClickFunnels and all the stuff. What I can say, I'm happy that I start on the Shopify and I decided to be specializing on Shopify only because if you spread your attention, I learned that in the beginning, you're going to be not good in anything, you're going to be average or less than average in all the platforms. So I decided to be great on Facebook and Shopify back then in 2017-18. When Facebook starts screwing up in 2020-2021, we start looking for the additional channels, not instead, we start looking on the TikTok, Google, additionally to build the advertising ecosystem. So the Shopify, why it's the reason I'm still there, it's the best e-commerce optimized platform for e-commerce sales, for e-commerce brands, for sure. The most of the apps are available only on Shopify. The most of the conversion rate, what I have seen on different platforms, Shopify has, except like ClickFunnels or something like that, which is funnel building. I'm speaking about a big store, opening stores, brands on the store buildings. Shopify is the most optimized, most convenient, most easy to use. And plus, I love to work with them. It's super simple and all the tools can be connected easily. So Shopify is my choice and I'm happy that I'm moving forward with that direction. And yeah, we're just all growing in the different advertising platforms. Yeah, I can agree with many things there. It still has a learning curve. We can't make it sound too good or too easy to be true. It does have a learning curve at the beginning for someone who has no experience in this, but does that make it impossible? No, does it make it hard? No, because once you have the right tools and knowledge, you'll actually see a whole world opening up in front of you because the possibilities that you have with Shopify, I think there's no other platform that can really compare to the amount of things that you can really do here, the flexibility, the apps and everything else. And as well, additional point about Shopify, you were comparing Etsy, Amazon and all the stuff Etsy, I found out about Etsy 2019, so it was really not that famous at that moment. Plus, another thing that Amazon required more investments, guys. Very important to you to understand. If you want to start with something that will generate your cash flow with the minimum investments, compare all the different channels. Shopify drop shipping requires spent on ads or influencers, but in the same time is the biggest ROI and cheapest investments to your ROI. On Amazon, you'll need to buy inventory. You will go, you can go screwed up with the holds for buy Amazon. There is more strict, more harder rules. So that's one of the reasons why I didn't start on Amazon. You have many sellers and all of their sellers have to play by Amazon's rules. And on Shopify, you're pretty much playing your own game. Just don't sell your margin on Amazon. You have no margin almost on Shopify. You can play with the margin. Right. There's also all these category fees on Amazon and selling fees and everything that comes along with that. Whereas on Shopify, you don't have, you just have lower transaction fees and it also depends on your payment settings on your payments. And you own your data in Shopify compared between the two, especially because on Shopify, you can do whatever you want. You can list a thousand products on day one if you want. So you don't have selling limits like you have on eBay and other marketplaces that also restrict you. And there is no location restriction like on Facebook marketplace. You can only do it in the USA. Yeah. There's many good things that we can say about Shopify. It's just still good to know how to learn it the right way. There's tools and knowledge that can help you out on that. And that's exactly what we are here for. So that's a little bit about Shopify. Now let's talk about the next thing that many, many beginner draptubers get stuck on. So product research, right? Because I mean, we can create a beautiful store, the best looking store that's optimized to convert, but the products suck. Nobody wants to buy them. So you wasted all of your time. Whereas on the other hand, I've seen sellers with really bad looking websites. Not that I'm saying that bad websites is a good thing, but I have seen many, many sellers with really bad looking websites, but their ad copy was also bad, but they were promoting a product that people are actually looking for. And the video shows exactly what the product, the problem that it helps them solve. And lots of people engage, lots of people click and lots of people buy because the product was on point. So here I'm talking about product research. It's a crucial aspect of running a successful drop screen business. So what are some of the strategies or techniques that you recommend for finding profitable products to sell on Shopify with all of your history and experience there? Yeah. That's actually a great topic. You're right that so many people are failing on it because they truly like the beginners problem. And I was there, I'm telling you, because I know I have been there like beginners problem, they're trying to sell what they like, not what's people need. That's so you have to put yourself on when you're choosing the product, like ask yourself, not like, oh, I love in that product. I sold so many kind of ugly products, which I won't be liking, but they serve in such a great problem, which is if I would be a newbie, most probably I won't be choose because I'm not thinking about problem serving. As a newbie, I'm thinking about like, I like the shape or no, my wife, if she doesn't like shape, she will not buy at all, even if it's the most, if it's a cancer server, you know, she will still don't believe that it's a serving the cancer problem because it doesn't have good shape. So it's a thing about the average people who are not in the business or who just starting. So the main thing with the product research, there is several ways each way if you look on YouTube, if you look on the courses, different like gurus or like our education channels from learn from my side, there is several ways how to do the product research, the main point, what kind of product to search. So first of all, like, I was always getting luck, not I never get lucky, it's, it's, it's fail. It's not true. It's fails. But I always get good experience with finding out products, which is not really hot on the market. So people are not selling it. There is almost no sales. It's a harder way for product research, but it is the higher ROI. Because if you're one of the first who are jumping in the market with the product, which is unique and serving the big problem, you're going to be really killing it at least first three, four months until all the bigger drop shipping will be drop shippers will find out from the spy tools, your product and start selling it as well. But first months, it's like four or five hours. That's what was on my end all the time. And the thing is like, it's a one of the unique research, simple, old style Ali express searching by the filters, looking on the better margin products, like at least 20 bucks, 10 bucks cost, which means you can sell for 30, 40, 50 dollars extra margin. So you have enough room for the advertising on Facebook or Tik Tok or Google. So you need that to have the good margin, don't sell the cheap products. That's as well, another mistake of the begin drop shippers that they are thinking the cheaper the product than easier to sell. But then you can sell 1000 of them. Believe me, I have done it and you want to make any single dollar almost probably even lose 1000 sell dollars. Very important to have at least 20 dollar budget, 20 dollar margin for the product which you're going to sell. So if you can sell this product is $20 margin, then you can go on Tik Tok with that. If that product is you want to sell on Facebook, it has to be in the ideal at least 30 dollar margin because of the cost of Facebook in our days. So that's as well like price points which you have to look on the products. When you look on the product and it's like shipping four bucks, most probably you'll sell maximum for $19.99. In a good shape, in the good like really great product with the good pictures and content, it will be $29.99. So make sure that you have to understand the pricing before you choose in the product. So one of the criteria is one of the simplest way it's Ali express and Amazon. You look into Amazon and searching for the high ticket products like average ticket, medium ticket products like let's say 50 plus bucks on Amazon, which is on Ali express it will be around 2025 and search for the like really serving problems or improving the lifestyle of people. That's as well very important. For example, one of my favorite niche after the COVID started, it's a family niche improving the home decoration, home environment, home entertainment. Because when people stuck at home, we find out such a huge demand like that they need to spend time with the kids, they need to make the kids busy, they need to like doing something in the garden if it's a summer season, even if it's a winter season, like honey lovers like flower lovers, there is so much sub niches in the family niche that we decided to jump on really hardly in our agency and like a lot of stores are really family niche. And when we find out what kind of sub niches is working, we optimize the store around that niche. So if it's a decoration of the house, we will be optimizing for the core. If it's like gardening, we're optimizing for gardening. If it's a car supply, I see the accessories, we're optimizing for car accessories. So in this case, like one of the simplest way, Amazon and Ali express it's old style. Right now you can use one of the tools like right now after DS, which is Liran has another Armenia and other one, PPS and there is several more. There is a dinosaur of the ad spice, which is adspite.com. It's a dinosaur, which is like I'm not using anymore. It's too expensive and uses to compare to new tools. Exactly. So like you can use a lot and this is in this way you'll find out what's hot on the market. So when you find out what's hot on the market, you can sell that, but keep in mind, it will be harder to advertise. It will be harder to get attention and profitable sales because already a bunch of people, a bunch of drugshippers are doing that. But by having experience like on my end, this is what's happening. We now selling a lot of the hot products. Why? Because we have good enough experience and we know how to beat competitors. So we're looking on what's working for the competitor. We're testing out similar landing page, similar ad copies, similar ad creatives. And when we find out which products are taking attention from our end by using our strategies, by that being said, we start creating better angles, better creatives, better ad copies. We know by experience how to do that, better offers especially and it's beating your competitors and you're able to scale to multiple five sticks. And sometimes we're rare to multiple seven figures with the single product on drop shipping space. Why I'm saying sometimes because drop shipping space has fluctuation up and down. You can brand it, you can spend some time and money and make it as a brand, or you can just make it like up and down sales by finding out the better creatives, better offers, better angles for your ads. And by knowing what's working in your particular ad account since each ad account is different, you like optimizing your process in the way with the experience that you are able to stay with the same product for a while. So you can sell hot products. Don't think that you can't. You can, but you have to be better than your competitors when you start seeing attraction on your store. And what Liran said correctly, that store could look amazing, but product is wrong. You won't get anything or store product is amazing. But store has no social proof like reviews, like trust budgets, like massive pictures not looking correct and so on. By that being said, before spending any single dollar on your ads on testing some product, which is you think it's going to be a killer, make sure that your product page looks trusted and you would personally buy from the same product page if you would be a customer. That's very important because without the trust, you're going to be just running traffic to nowhere. Yeah, I completely agree. So we start on product research, but we also jump to marketing. We talked a little bit about the optimization techniques, but we'll still talk about those things a little bit more. But let me just summarize a little bit more about product research because there's a lot of, again, beginners who are listening to this, and I really want them to get this done correctly. So when you're starting and you don't have a budget, like Kanatoly said, you're going to go with the old school method of checking out some bestsellers on Amazon and looking for those products on AliExpress. You can also go to the AliExpress drop shipping center. We all have access to it. Just go to your orders page and then you got the DS center on the left side. It's a drop shipping center that shows you lots of analytics about what products are selling and trending well right now. So then you ask yourself, wait, but if I'm doing this, then thousands of other drop shippers are also doing this, which is correct. You're not wrong. But right here, you need to start testing the market because just because others are selling it doesn't mean that you can create a better marketing angle and market to a more relevant audience. And this is what's going to give you more importantly. This is what's going to give you the experience that you need to start building up your data, whether it's the Facebook pixel, Tik Tok pixel or whatever you're using to start building up audience data, save that use that for retargeting and start optimizing your way up. Start learning what works, turn off what doesn't work, turn on and scale even more what does work. And this is what's simply going to help you learn what you can actually sell and make profit on. So this is the old school way of doing it, just getting your hands dirty, doing the manual work. It's time consuming. You're going to spend hours and days on product research and it's fine. This is how you're going to find your first road to success is finding the right products to sell. We may add it. I just wanted the short edit shortcut since we are in AI, like AI world right now. Guys, the shortcut, old style method before like diving into the particular product or like a particular niche, speak to the charge GPT or something, some similar platforms, like even better than charge GPT nowadays, it's BART, which is by Google. Like, hey, tell me for this particular season. Actually, I don't like seasonal products. For the beginners, it's good just like you can sell it fast, but seasonal products, it's a seasonal. But you can ask them, in the last 10 years, what's the most researchable item by people in Google in this period of the year? Or what's the particular niche is the most hottest? Okay, even if we're speaking about this niche, what kind of sub niches are there? Okay, according to this, let's say there is 10 options of sub niches. According to the three niches, sub niches which you choose, ask about the BART or charge GPT, like, hey, charge GPT, give me from these three sub niches the perfect products in your opinion that people are still looking for and still wants to buy. And this will save you a lot of time. And like 99.99% of dropshippers are not doing that because there is almost no proper content for this kind of product research. And this is as well what we are doing by utilizing the AI. We're saving a lot of time and it's given us incredible ideas for the product research and like a CRO of the store, conversion rate optimization. Seriously, it's not a joke. Don't underestimate the AI tools. It's free. You can really beat the competitors even if you are newbie on dropshipping market. I completely agree. Do not underestimate the power of artificial intelligence and what it can do for you, for your e-commerce business. I uploaded a YouTube video just a few months ago about Chad GPT and how you can use it for your business. One of them was to actually find your products, find your niche, and this is what you just touched up on. And that video helped a lot of people. Over 160,000 views as we speak and it's helping a lot of people. This is really important to understand, guys. I've been using Chad GPT from the first day that it came out sometime in December last year in 2022, I believe. And I also use it not just for product research, but also for product page optimization because the supplier that you're going to grab your product from probably has a really bad title and probably has a pretty bad page. Product page, text is bad. It's probably not in bulleted lists. It's probably not engaging. There's probably no emojis. And you can tell Chad GPT to just take this title, copy and paste, make it more engaging, take this product description, make it better, use a bulleted list, use emojis, talk to the, try to get to the, for the readers, for the shopper to resonate with this copy. And it's going to create a much, much better copy. You're going to be able to differentiate yourself from a competition better this way. And this will definitely increase your chances of selling because you've got a much better and more professional product page than the supplier or other dropshippers who are dropping the same product. So do not underestimate the power of AI, whether in product research, whether in product page optimization. Let's continue. So, yeah, so product research. So we've got the free method, Amazon, AliExpress, then checking in on Amazon. You can also go to other suppliers. It doesn't have to just be Amazon on AliExpress. But these two are the biggest. It's going to be easier for you to start off with them. And if you've got a budget aside, you can also use the paid tools like ad spies and things like that. And you also have inside the AutoDS system also product research tool with all of the winning products with the seller's ad copies and all of that. So you can also use that. And there's just many methods like Anatoly said, it's all a matter of diving in, putting in the hours, putting in the time, failing until you start to succeed. Okay. So we talked a little bit about product research. Now let's talk a little bit about, well, I want to talk about branding. But before that, there's a question that I didn't add. And I would like to add this question, general store or niche store? Awesome question. I haven't got this question for maybe two, three years. I haven't got that question to myself, but it's a most asked question for people by people who are starting. So it's up to you. It could be even one product store. But listen, if you want to test a bunch of products and find out which is working for you, what kind of niche, what kind of product, by testing several stuff and save your time, definitely it would be general store. And in this case, we are not calling any more general store. We are calling an our agency family niche store. If you will make the store not looks like marketplace, like Amazon, a lot of punch, like random like t-shirts, shoes, cars, like kids. It's a super ugly marketplace general store. But if you'll make it family friendly, like it's making sense, like home decor, entertainment at home, a gathering car accessories, it looks like it's family niche. So in this case, it's like a general niche store. And after that, like when you find you can test bunch of products, so holders, like car accessories, dog supply, whatever it is, it will be looks smooth there because it's a family related but it's a general products. So if you make your store looks nice as a general family store, I highly recommend to go with that one product store. It's awesome, but you will need every single time to change the store, really optimize the store for the next product and you're going to be suffering. If you want to go with what products will sell and you're only testing one product, so it's going to fail. And then you're going to have to create a whole new store because the product didn't work. So if you don't have experience, don't start with the one product store. But I really like your answer because usually I get an answer general or a niche store, but your answer is general niche store. So why not both? So here I like that because you have the advantages of the general store where you can test out a whole bunch of products until you start to find your winners when you compare it to a niche store which only has a specific niche or one product store even worse because you still didn't do your product research yet. But a niche store which you're testing a particular niche and if it's not going to sell well because either the niche is not interesting or you're not in the right season, then the whole niche store is going to go to the trash. But the general niche store can be a general store where you still have those random products, but they're still somewhat connected. You can categorize them and make it like a home family niche that like you explained. So the general store as a family niche is feeling as a brand. That's the point and people are feeling more trust and comfortable to purchase from. Which gives me a transition to my next question. So building a brand presence, how do you assist clients in creating a cohesive brand identity with our Shopify stores? And what key elements do you consider to ensure a consistent and appealing brand image? Because we know that brand means a lot, right? The brand is customer retention, it's their loyalty. So what do you do there to build a strong brand presence? Especially when we're dropshipping and it's hard to brand our products because we're not like purchasing them in advance. The dropshipping business model means that we're simply listing products on our stores and once we sell them, we go to our supplier's website, we purchase the product and we send it to the end customer without having physical contact with the product itself. So it's hard to brand a store when you're not paying for inventory because the manufacturer is like, wait, if you're only ordering one product, why should I brand it for you? So how do you actually brand Shopify dropshipping stores? That's one of the most greatest questions which I have got so far on dropshipping in this year. I will explain why. We just recently, like recently, I mean 2023, this year, we're starting providing service to our dropshipping clients before it was only for the brands, now for the dropshipping as well, it's exactly what's allowed feel that you're working with the brands. It's MRR service, MRR, it's calling monthly recruiting revenue, which means you are getting your Shopify store on this subscription base with your purchasers. So like for example, it's Amazon Prime, but you're creating like Shopify Prime, like Shopify VAP list. Like we have this ecosystem which we created on the back end, it's a separate service where for the dropshipping store, you can fail in, you can groin, you can fail in, you can groin, but if you implement this kind of VAP list subscription, people will be staying with you for 999, 1599 per month for getting the like on the new collection, 10, 20% off or having the close collection, which is nobody would see only VAP list people seeing with the cheaper price, never sold out and so on. So you're creating a value and you start building your audience. So to bring dropshipping store into the brand, I will tell you one thing, white labeling, I mean the making the brand logo on the boxes, making better quality box and so on. It's important to let people come back to you and buy from you again. But if they are not your loyal audience, it won't be a brand, it will be just looks like a brand. So to start building your store as a brand, what we figure it out for ourselves, you have to get the same eyeballs again and again like a brand doing. So it means like by creating this kind of subscription service, we are as well suggesting to our clients, some of them are doing some of them not creating as well close to Facebook groups or discord channels, where it's like all the people from the VAP group are together and providing the hiring VA, providing a couple of the here and their content, like about the valuable content about the NIF, which they are failing warming them up. And after that, when it's like new collection added, even it's a dropshipping new collection, new item added, hey, we have a new launch for you as a VAP, blah, blah, blah, first two hours, it's like 35% off. And after that 20% off as like your subscription member, and it's give you spikes of sales and it's the same people buying from you, LTV of your clients have rich order value of your client's history is going higher, which is start to creating you as a brand. And by white labeling the boxes, better quality boxes and all that stuff. And you're able to do that with the subscriptions because like another thing, it's additional stream of super profitable income for you. When you got, let's say, 1000 a day, there is a simple calculation 1000 a day average, let's say 15 orders a day, you're generating with your store, you're able to be by end of the year on extra 200,000 dollars in the pure profit from the subscription only, only from the subscriptions and this 200,000 K you're like you obviously using as a profit, but in the same time using part of that to create this kind of ideas, VIP group channels and so on, which is like start converting your drop shipping store into the brands. So one of the best ways to brand it your store, it's not just white labeling, which is definitely important to make the better quality packaging that people will feel that okay, it's not coming in the plastic packaging soft packaging, it's coming in so like hard carton and like you having like even picture on the product with the logo of your store, so like it's already feeling as a high quality brand and they want to make it as a gift to their people, to their friends, to their loved ones because nobody wants to buy the cheapest packaging plastic stuff package to as a gift to someone. So if it's ugly, they will buy for themselves because they don't care about packaging, they care about the item, but if you want to make them buy from you as a gift, you're making better quality packaging. And after that VIP group, you can create one free group for everyone who wants to be subscribed, so you've only done up and after that explaining them that by being our VIP, you're becoming like having these decent benefits. And second group, it's a VIP or just one VIP for paid members. Like this is where you become really looks like a brand, you'll start building a brand and you know guys, even as a drop shipping store, you want to exist by generating couple of six figures a month or a year or whatever, you like want to sell your store. If it's a simple drop shipping store, you won't be able to have a high evaluation because it's dependent on the traffic, it's dependent on the traffic and it's only on that. So you won't sell that for expensive or at all people won't see the buyers won't see the value on your store. But if you implement MRR monthly green revenue on your store, like Shopify, VAP list subscribers, you will sell your your store will be having value from day one. And by end of the year, you'll able to sell your store at least six X of your yearly revenue. If you're a yearly revenue, let's say half million, but the multiplier by six, you can sell this drop shipping store, not even brand with the active subscribers, at least for three millions bomb exit strategy. And you creating another Shopify store, another Shopify store, this MMR, MRR, it's like a golden nugget we should find out for ourselves to brand the drop shipping stores and having incredible profitability from it. Our clients LTV grows because of that. Our clients happiness grows because of that. And this is what I highly recommend. And by the way, this is what we are providing service for if you want, like, yeah, we are doing that. Great. This is great. In my previous podcast with the Ecom King, he's a six figure Shopify drop shipper who started at the age of 18 today is 24, I believe. So in my previous podcast with him, he also revealed that this is what he is doing today. So in the beginning, he was creating Shopify stores and drop shipping store Shopify drop shipping stores and just, you know, making sales and profits. Then he created the YouTube channel and he exploded. He's got, I don't remember how many, over 100,000 subscribers, if not more. Yeah, this is his strategy. His this is his strategy today. This is what he's doing today. And what he sees in the future is just creating more Shopify stores and selling them, making the exits because there's a lot of money there. And you're saying that that's what you're teaching your students to do today through MRR monthly recurring revenue, which I think is great. There were a lot of code words here that were a lot of letters that were used here. So I'll just fill in the beginners here. So Anatoly mentioned ROI a few times that stands for return on investment. There was also LTV, which is lifetime value. So all of the beginners who are listening, this is what those letters are. So, yes, we talked about branding. We talked about actually creating a monthly subscription for your users and then just, you know, fostering a community, giving them some special benefit because there are monthly subscribers and just fostering like a community, whether on Discord, Facebook community and so forth and making them really feel like they're a part of your family. And I think that's just great. One of the hard things to touch up on is how to actually brand the boxes when we're only buying one unit. I can say here that you can use the AutoDS warehouse for this. We have a warehouse. We have lots of trending products there. This is one way that you can do it where you can just import the products, the trending products that we have in that warehouse. We have, you know, database with years and years of experience on those products, import them to your store. The orders will be automated automatically and we'll also send them out with your branded logo, even if you have only one order. So I think that's also worth mentioning here at this point because we talked also about branding your boxes. All of the advice that you gave here so far, I don't totally spot on and we're only about halfway done. So guys, there's a lot of more value coming up. Let's continue. Customer service. This is something that we cannot leave, right? We talked about the lifetime value. Yeah. Sorry, did you say something? Yeah, I'm just saying it's a number one thing, like customer services. Customer services. I think that's what it's all about because after you make the sale, someone bought from you. You guys have to understand that someone put their trust in your store and they bought from you. They're your customer now. So do you want it to be a one-time purchase like what most purchases on eBay are like? It's mostly just one-time purchases or do you want to keep this customer? And what happens when a customer reaches out and they have a problem? So, you know, we can kind of say like, ah, this customer is kind of bothering me. Let me just maybe ignore him or just give him like whatever answers he'll leave me alone or we can take it to a different direction. So let's talk a little bit about customer service and what you think, what kind of a significant role you think this plays in the success of the e-commerce business. So I will tell you where I am today. It's only because like my past experience in hospitality and the sales in the bank, I learned in my life journey what is the great customer service means. And I'm really appreciated being a waiter for a couple of years in my past young life. It's just like, it's not what I wish for myself, but I've been working in the top restaurants in Dubai, like in really top, top one, which is like they were teaching me what customer service means and how to sell. If like, I will give you an analogy. If someone is really full and really doesn't have one dessert because like they are full, you won't be buying dessert. You're learning how to sell the dessert. You can offer like going and taking home, you're saying like, this is the number one tiramisu which you never eat anywhere. Like it's like just a crime, do not try it. So let me put it for you, take away box. So when you'll be home until hungry again, you'll try it and you'll tell me, tell me thanks. So you like creating this kind of sales tactics and customer service tactics because for them, you sold them an amazing customer experience and like not like you're trying to push them sell, you're trying to give them additional emotions and taste and so on. So by that being said, I learned what is great customer service, especially on my mentorship program, like when I start mentoring people, they all love me and I understood why because of my approach, because of the customer service which I had. And this is what I transferred to my agency, to my team as well, where like I was teaching them what exactly how we have to treat our customers. That's why LTV of our customers are quite high and we don't have retention in the team almost never some of the team members working since opening with me. Two, three years, it's never reached our team staying in the agency. So by that being said, like customer service, if you own in the drop shipping store, especially drop like brand drop shipping store, it doesn't matter without the customer service, without answering on email sometime, without making proper conversation through the emails, you will be screwed up with disputes, you will be screwed up with the complaints, you will get a lot of like loving of the shit going on in your story for this language. But it's true, like you can generate six figures because you got luck with the product and offer and like, wow, I made the six figures this year, this month. Guys, next month, loving of shit will hit you because without good customer service, disputes will start showing up also on your payment providers. All of that anyway could happen. But with the better customer service, you will decrease the chances decrease of the percentage of this happening. What does it mean? Good customer service. When you're in email, for example, you don't have yet nothing you're answering by yourself, you're still small, always place yourself as a middleman. Let's say your name is Maria. I mean, your name is Steven as a store owner, but you are in email. Hey, this is Maria customer service account, account manager for XYZ brand. I'm really appreciated and I understand your concern. I feel that I will do my best to help you out and find out the best decision with our management and come back to you soon. So in this case, they put trust on Maria, because if they catch that they are speaking to the brand owner, store owner, they will be screwed you up because they your decision maker, they're gonna be like, I want, I want repound over or it will open dispute. I want different size on any how I receive it. I don't like it. Give me another one for free and so on. So they will screw you because your decision maker, but if you play as a middle maker, so they will be all appreciate Maria. Yeah, thank you. I will wait for that. And they calm me down because Maria didn't make anything bad for them, even if bad things happen. If I like, it's one of the things which is working so great on email customer support in the charts, the same plus like treating Hey, a valuable customer, we do appreciate always starting in this because I have seen the like, Hey, yeah, like, this is tracking number this like, come on, like, it's not the way how you have to speak to your even if you drop cheaper, especially if you drop cheaper, you have a valuable customer, like we do appreciate for your interest and your trust in our brand, your interest and trust. So, you know, you already like, we are here to support you out our average response rate, it's up to 24 hours or whatever it's your rules will be on your end, like really give us some time. I got your question about the item has been lost, or it's delayed with the shipping. I can I just I will double check everything for you, but I just want to inform you that because of the high demand of this period of the year, we are having some kind of we could have some delays for some particular orders. Again, my apologies. By the way, in the same time, I appreciate you reaching out to us and for for show you my appreciation, I have possibilities to give only five special discount or discount for only five special people in a month. And I want you to give it to 20% code special coupon code as from Maria, because I believe you are the right one, one of the five. So, and they're like, wow, they're like, whoa, what is that? Nice way to get the customer the wow effect. I like your advice. It's a lot of unique advice that I'm hearing here. That's not the usual, you know, the usual, usual things that come from still successful people, but it's usually like the same around the same concepts and techniques. So yeah, I really like that, you know, also adding that middleman so kind of like taking the authority off because once they realize that they're talking to the store owner, they'll pretty much feel like they can request anything. And when they have that middleman Maria taking care of them, and that's offering personalized service, which by the way, guys, if you don't know, if you don't have like the creatives to write these message or even these message templates for these messages for once they come in so you can reply in a real professional and fashionable way. Again, that's what AI is for. You can tell AI that you have customers that are reaching out to you for this reason. And this is a solution, but you want to create a good answer for it. And boom, let it shoot it, let it shoot a really good one for you. And also take his advice like offering that discount, because you know, we only have like room for let's say five customers and that will really give them that wow effect that okay, they're not giving everyone this discount. They're just giving it to me specifically because I had this specific issue and they feel like I'm the one that should get this. I really think that that that that will give them the feeling that they are special. And I really like that. I really like that. And I'm also going to adopt that strategy if you don't mind. Okay. And I would like to just say that regarding this point, very important one, by talking this way to your customers, you will be able to negotiate when they are coming to you. I will open this view. They will end it up with buying from you again. And you will be able to negotiate with the most toughest customers, most probably 50% refund, which won't hurt you that much. And 50% you'll hold it with yourself and plus giving them three item or something like that. Because this kind of like feeling, warm feeling from their end, even when they met or trust feeling from their end will allow you to negotiate the best possible deal for you. You have a room for that. Whatever price you have to pay to to please that customer. I mean, not every price, right? But whatever reasonable price you have to pay to please that customer. It's definitely worth paying. Don't look at your profits in the beginning, right? Even if you're making some profit, let's say you just started and I don't know, you only made let's say $200 profit. You can wipe it all out in customer service. It's fine. You don't need those $200 right now. If you have customers that need help and you can actually help them and use some of that budget to help them and actually get them to come back to you later, it's definitely worth the investment now. So invest in your customers. It's a much better starting investment than to pull the profits up, withdraw the profits to your bank and buy yourself something. Customer service is worth much, much more than that. And there's no better feeling than giving a customer a warm feeling, someone who had a dispute. And after the dispute, they come back to purchase something else. It's one of the best feelings and it's also going to get you the longevity that you're looking for in your e-commerce stores. Yeah. So that's about customer service. So let's move on. So we talked about marketing. We talked about tips of increasing customer revenue, optimizing conversion rates, maximizing lifetime values. Let's talk a little bit about still getting a higher AOV. We haven't talked about AOV. It's average order value. And this is one thing that can help us here is upselling and cross-selling techniques. So let me know, are you using upselling and cross-selling for your products and what are some of the techniques that you're using here? That is my favorite one on optimizing the stores because AOV, it's where all the profit is except the email SMS marketing on the back end. But AOV, increasing your AOV, really making your $20 margin product to $60 margin product or $50. Seriously, I love to sell two products, the same products to the same person. There is several tactics how you can increase your average order value. One of them is like Post-Purchase app. Any Post-Purchase app, for example, OCU or sweet upsell, you are set up to your store. It's not charging you until first sale. So basically like the app paying for itself when it starts giving you sales. The thing is like, Post-Purchase, what does it mean? Someone is like having trust to your page, they press on checkout, they fill up the information, they insert their credit card information. And after that, they press purchase. And before moving them to the thank you page, they have like pop up. Hey, only these five minutes, you have possibilities to buy the same item. Second item is 40% off from original price or 25% off. It depends on your margin, taking or leaving. And what's the point, guys? What's the sense? Like the same item, who will be buying that? You will surprise. People are buying two, three, four pieces because it's freaking cheap. I mean, they, the human mentality, they like see the offer, they're like, they cannot deny because they're supposed to be like, sorry for this word, stupid to deny. This is the offer. Like Alex Sommers is saying in the $100 million offer, they're supposed to feel stupid to deny it. And like you, they bind for them because why they will buy it? Because they have husband, they have a daughter, they have grandmother, like they will give it as a gift. It's super cheap. Why won't be, or even reselling to someone else. So people have different ideas, but they have mentality of buying even with, when they don't need the second item. So by that being said, this is one of the things or related item to this main product. Like for example, now we have one great AI, the road camera for the car, as a car accessories, which is, which is moving 360 degrees during the driving. So it can fix all the, not fix, it's can like track all the accident, any kind of problems, traffic and so on on the road because it's AI integrated to the camera. But we are selling as a, we are cross-selling with the related product, which is camera for the back bumper. If you don't, if you drive an old car, so it's a camera, which is fixed into the back bumper and on your mirror inside of the car, it will be changing the mirror to the electric one. So you have a mirror and camera on the side. So like it's an amazing product, more expensive one. So you're selling something medium ticket and upselling them with something super related and like more expensive or more cheaper item for higher margin because you're not paying for that for the second item. This is where you can give discounts and still be super profitable. And like you can do that with the post purchase, but post purchase, we love to sell the same item. This kind of cross-selling, we are doing like a Bogo offers or like offered one, people buying these plus these, like how you can generate this idea of what to cross-sell to them, which I just give you like about the camera and camera, just different variations of camera. You're going simple way. You're going to Amazon type in the niche or exact product, if it's existing on Amazon, which you're trying to sell, and you start selling, it's giving you sales, but slight profitability. So you need to increase every shorter value. It will bring your more profitable results. And okay, so what can I cross-selling for this product? You're going to Amazon, find out the same product or similar and look on the what Amazon suggestion to you. Other people love this as well. I'll get customers of you, this product also viewed or frequently bought together or customers who bought this also bought this. And those are the ones that you want to cross-sell with that product. They basically Amazon, it's already platform, Amazon AliExpress, it's already platforms, which has optimized all these algorithms and showing to the people what will be most probably great fit for this product. And you're just taking that idea. Oh, awesome. I like this one. Find out on AliExpress the same product or similar, add it to you as to your offer as a boggle, buy this one and get another one, because everyone are like most frequently bought items together or the same product plus another one for free. So now your product is going to be instead of 40 bucks, it will be off product, you'll be costing you 60 bucks. And you're giving second one for free, which is cost only let's say 15, you already have extra $5 margin, 60 minus 15, it's already 45. When you were selling for 40, you have actually not $5 extra margin, you have more because cost of the item, let's say 15, you're selling for 40, it's 25, but now your average order value or your order says 60, your profitability in this end will be 30, not 25. So you're increasing your profitability by selling two items for price of one. So there is a lot of things how you can improve your average order values. This is the simplest one, which you can implement on your end. And it's very, very important guys, the average order value or the AOV is something that you really want to work on, especially of course, once you start making sales, because now is the time to actually scale those sales, just because you made a sale doesn't mean that that's the maximum that the customer could have bought from you. So, and since they're already buying from you, so why not more, they're all pretty much ready for it. So there are a few ways to do it, as Anatoly suggested, you can give, you can offer volume discount pricing. So once a customer adds to cart, send them a popup, hey, did you know if you buy three, you'll get this much off or buy two, get the third free. So volume discount pricing, get them to buy more of the same product while offering them a discount. And of course, profiting more, maybe your profitability will go, the percentage will go down, but the average order value will still go up because you give them the discount, but you're still going to make more profit. And so that's one way to do it is the volume discount pricing. And the other is to just tell them, hey, once they added something to their cart, you can say, you know, customers who viewed or who bought this, also bought these, and you can get suggestions from Amazon or the Express were super optimized for these types of suggestions. So you can do the frequently bought together. And you can also tell them, hey, you know what, you just bought this camera, but we have an upgraded version of this camera, which is this one, it's more expensive, but these are the features that it has. And that way they're completely wiping out what they wanted to buy in the first place. And now they're buying the upgraded version of that product. So there are several ways to do this. And it's really important to implement it because the customers, once they're adding to cart, once you bought their trust, they can definitely, most chances 90% and above that they can and will increase their average order value if you give them something that's worth it. Okay, so that's a little bit about upselling and cross-selling. Let's talk a little bit about something that we haven't mentioned yet. So you have a lot of students that you're helping them grow their business. Can you share some of the success stories or case studies where you've actually really significantly improved a client's store performance and achieve impressive results? I have quite a bit of them, but one of the most I always giving that is an example, one of most I would say shiny one. When I just like started the agency before I start agency, I was already running a couple of accounts managing by me. I hired one friend to teach him being a media buyer. And like we were running a couple of stores. That's why the idea of being an agency came in because more and more people start asking, you manage, can you manage? So one of the first stores which we start managing, it was a POD brand, Khan was for waiting couples. And she were already three years in the business and she would test it out several people, freelancers, agencies, advertisers and didn't work out for her by doing by her end and doing by others. And she joined it us. It was March 2019, I believe. Yeah, I guess it was 2019. So the main point, she joined it us in March. And we were trying to find out which product, which POD Kanva will be working the most for her. And we were trying to get from what she was selling before, like get out of from eat something the best. So seven months, we generated 100k, but there was like break even lost. There was no like it was like that. It's like we just taking off and pumping taking off and going down. And it's his brand. It's not a dropshipping source. So it shouldn't be like that. So we were trying to find out the best offer. We're trying to find out the best creative and start after that, start changing the products, the creatives and so on searching for the best angle. The main point seven months client with us. That's what I'm saying to you. I want to give you example. Because I know myself. It was the customer, incredible customer service, which she never got before. And like on the months number seven, when I came to her and said that we need to proceed with the payment for the next months. And I feel I was feeling like really bad because we are not generating yet anything good. And like saying to her, it was for me hard feeling. It was my first experience to someone saying after seven months, you know, like, we have to continue. And you know what I have got as answer, guys, no problem. I'm in the business for three years. And I never have feel more comfortable to work with someone except you guys in the past, because I see that I'm in the right hands and just matter of testing and find out what's going to be working. For me, it was mind blowing experience to hear these kind of words. I remember these words till now. And I believe I will be remembered for my life because in seven years, what kind of trust will be or seven months, what kind of trust we built for her that she knows that it's just matter of testing. So by that being said, it was after seven months, March plus seven, it's, yeah, it's exactly was September around September. And first of October, we're finding out the creative for the bigger canva, which is has great every shorter value around 139 the biggest size, the smallest size, it's 70 before we were like running 40 bucks, 50 bucks, 100, 200 bucks. And we find out the biggest size canva 150 something like that and 70 the smallest one. And we start testing creatives and we find out the creatives with the angle made in United States and flag of United States. So it was really powerful for people understanding that it is the United States made. It's a family niche. It's like waiting niche. Everyone like the Democrats are there who want to see an at home on the US products, let's say, and by this simple angle, we finally find out the right creative and that it was first of October when we find out Black Friday on November, which is 26, 27 of November, we were with her $27,000 a day revenue after one and a half months by end of the year, by the beginning of the year, we generate first million after three months, three and a half million. And in matter of six years, six and a half millions. So by that being said, this is the most shiny case, but I would say this is really powerful. After seven months of missing out, after seven months up and down, so I'm losing somewhere, somehow client trust on us and bam, it's happening. It's not the one case. There is a several case like that, but this is really the shiny one. You provided good customer service. We just talked about the importance of that same thing goes for our customers who are buying from our stores. You could have given her good results even in the first two months. You could have given her positive results, but what if your customer service wouldn't have been that good? You weren't that communicative or you don't speak in the most formal or in the nicest way and she simply couldn't resonate with your style? She could have just said, okay, he helped me. I'm making some numbers. I don't need him anymore. And each side would have went their own way and she probably wouldn't have been successful. But here, the customer service really played its part and she stuck with you for a long time because of that. And at the end, you were both able to hit it off, which I think is amazing. And the numbers I heard are pretty hard to imagine. Okay. So let's move on. So that's a little about a successful case study. We are out of time for the podcast, but I still have some really good questions that I would still like to ask. So I'm going to try to summarize it some. So as a seasoned professional in the dropshipping space, what are some of the common pitfalls and mistakes that you have seen new entrepreneurs make in this field when they're starting off their stores? And what are some things that they can do to avoid them? One of the things which is I like personally mentioned before, it's running the traffic to the awful product pages. And by awful product pages, what I didn't mention as well, when you add in reviews, and I have several times from the experience advertisers, which is mind blowing for me, that people running traffic to the store, which is there, that they use looks or some similar apps to upload the reviews from Amazon or AliExpress. And they even didn't read the reviews, reviews on Russian, on Chinese, on Arabic, like, come on, that's directly killing your conversion. So the most common mistake, people running traffic to the awful product page and surprising why it's not converting or it's converting, but conversion rate is horrible and they are unprofitable. That's one of the things making sure don't like use the Apple style tactic, don't make it like perfect until you will start running ads. I mean, because by making perfect, you are spending a lot of time and after that you're running, it doesn't work. Make it just good enough, start running traffic, and then if it's working, see what is conversion rate, if it's need to be increased or whatever, start improving the page, because now it makes sense. So as well, don't, it's a second actually advice. You don't try to create the perfect product until you start if this product work, you know, no, Apple doing the same, they launching iPhone five after that iPhone five s when they find out from people all the mistakes and they update it and five s, it's a perfect product. Now, you know, this is Apple, what is doing all their life. So that's why it's a great tactic to do. So it's two advices. The third advice, especially if you're the beginner, seriously, it's actually number one advice in general. If you want to start, you have two ways. Or find out first one, find out a mentor, person who you can trust, it could be paid one is the best or it could be a free one in YouTube. But the thing is, if it's in YouTube, don't do mistake, which I have done and all everyone are doing learning from thousands of people in YouTube. Everyone has own strategies. Everyone has own processes. If you combine all of them together, you screwed up. It's not nothing is what we call analysis paralysis too much to analyze and then you start getting paralyzed. It's what I have done for the first six months and fail all the time. And like when you find out the one which you believed it's trust and back records or from his center are real in your opinion, then follow him and follow his strategies. On the other hand, take the paid mentor because it's the best you'll be behind your shoulder, taking your head and making sure that you're at account and everything performing the way how it should. And then the second option is the agency. Like for example, our agency where we like managing for you, it's done for you. You're just in a passive investor and doing a couple of things here and there according to our request, but suppliers, customer service, fulfillment, store management, ads management, it's on the agency side. It's all that depends what's your budget, what's your interest, you want to become a skilled advertiser, marketer, or you want just to have your Shopify store, which is generating your revenues, and you want to give it a shot and see how that will work out. So these are two different ways which you must, must follow or this working with someone or give it someone do it for you because you're going to be screwed up alone. Believe me, like I'm alone. I lost everything what I had. As I said, I didn't share full of my story, but only when I got mentor, first 15 days, $8,000 in the profitable sales. It doesn't mean that in your entity will be the same, but it means on my example, this is where I find out the hack. And this hack is asking more experienced person, what should I do? These three main things which is I highly recommend to follow for the beginners. Okay, there you go. And also very, very insightful. So when you guys are starting off, as Anatoly mentioned, there's a couple of things that you can do. You can try to do everything manually. You can go to YouTube and start looking at all the mentors. And you will learn a lot from here, but you won't know where to start, where to continue from there, where to end. You won't have a structural order on what you need to do. And then you'll get stuck in analysis paralysis. Once that happens, you need to start narrowing down and find the ones who actually have real experience in the field and the ones who can actually help you because they actually did it and they're not just creating content on it. Okay, so you want to look for the ones who actually have the testimonials, the social proof ones who are actually in the industry and not just creating content on it. So that's one thing that's really going to help you narrow down and find the best ones. And a paid mentor is usually better than a free mentor because we can all do things for free because then we need to also put food on the table. But because we have the experience, because we have the knowledge, because we really can help you succeed, this is why paid mentors are the better option here. But again, you have to do your due diligence, do your research, and find the right ones who can really help you take it off. And so that's a little bit about, and again, a little bit about the common pitfalls that people usually make, it's just not knowing where to start. Once you start, once you start having some success, you're not at the beginners field anymore, and you're not looking for a direction, you already have the direction, it's already working and now time to scale it up, which you can also do if you learn it by yourself or of course continue with the mentor. But these are the usual beginner mistakes that people actually do. They'd rather learn from their own mistakes rather than others. And this way they're going to consume more time, they're going to see more failures, which in the mentality, it brings you down when you fail, and you fail again, and you fail again, and you fail again. So that's why if you're going to learn from someone with actual experience, you're going to take the shortcuts, even if it costs you a dollar or two, it's going to be well worth it in the long run. And this is true not just for the drop-sharing business model, it's pretty much true for anything that you want to learn in life. Okay, so Anatoly, once you're already inside the business and for someone who's been doing it for years like you, how do you stay updated with all of the latest trends and all of the latest things that always happen? Because as you know, things are never stable, they're never as they were the year before, two years ago. So how do you stay updated with all of the changing things in the drop-sharing business model or policies or what it may be in the e-commerce industry? How do you ensure that your strategies and techniques remain effective? Yeah, good question. Nobody asked me that before, and I will tell you one thing that it's very important to be updated. Otherwise, you won't survive. Things are changing so fast that like so many agencies and so many drop shippers quit and even big brands are shut down the doors after COVID, after iOS 14 happened when the attribution from Facebook fell down because of that. Like so many people were not able to adapt. So one number one thing here is you have to be ready to adapt to any kind of changes. How to get updated? Like without you want it or like if you're like I'm doing that on daily basis with the hundreds of ad accounts, hundreds of stores and hundreds of thousands of clients in the past like students, clients and so I have seen thousands of different ad accounts and stores. It's not a joke and like but when you're always on the different like it's all omnivision. So you understand common problems, common successes and so on and all of that giving you expertise of what's going to be happened. You can project. So in this case like how you can be prepared or like I know all the updates. First of all, very powerful thing is the master minds or being at least if you're at the beginning in Facebook groups because even without you listen watching the news which is I'm not reading news. It's only negative stuff. I like whatever the most horrible happened I will find out from the friends or also whatever. So I cancel that for myself. I don't know what's happening in their world until it's coming the most important information to me. So by that being said the same it's here. Like if you are in the right community like Facebook group, mastermind, Discord channel, like reading comments under YouTube, reading comments or blogs on the subject which you are studying, you will get all this information coming to your head. It will come to you by itself without even you want it. And when you find out some information you like okay this is I have to make attention on and study what's going on or in my case just go to the person like hey you already experienced that yes and start discussed. So he has already experienced like is when you have already good circle network because guys in the Facebook group in any kind of channels like Discord and so on talk to people, talk to people because it will be it will be your future best friends. One of the persons back in 2017 I have been connected by old friend from hospitality by somehow he was in UK, I was in his Hungary guy in UK, I'm in Dubai, Ukrainian guy. We just got connected in three way chat. Right now we are best friends and business partners on software which we building together. So by that being and he's in Forex market so we like completely separate the niches but we met each other online and you never know who can become your business partner who can become your friend and who can give you most valuable information about updates. So by being active online speaking to people especially at the beginning of your journey when you don't have networking and the high level people won't be speaking to you and add you in the high networking group for free or because you are low level yet you need to start with something and then like you have a lot of people who want to sell you something it's normal it's fine don't be annoyed by that it's a part of the journey but this is how you will get a lot of updates and like read the news on the pay on the groups and from those news you can ask questions in the comments or what exactly is that how are you planning to manage what's your thoughts facebook restrictions what's the option or tiktok tiktok is going live okay what about tiktok and you just diving diving diving and you are completely updated or watch a couple of youtube videos because everyone are fighting for the content find out the good really watched video with the high views me or like even not high views like just you again person who you trust everyone fighting for the views and if it's a new topic everyone will record the video about that and watching it and you're going to be updated in 20 minutes 10 minutes 8 minutes it depends on the video and done you didn't waste your time you just find out here and there a couple of information you collect on them together that's all you updated and if it's super important then you dive in by yourself i think the biggest takeaway that we can take here is networking and this is also advice for beginners and no matter what or even advanced network with the right people that i also have my own experience with that when i started dropping seven years ago and i took my first course i took a really expensive course because i really wanted to learn that i didn't care about the money at that time i cared about the money but i cared more about the value that i'm going to get and i networked with the people with the course members inside that course and today almost seven years later we're still in touch we're still sharing each other success stories we helped each other a lot along the way and we're still doing it excuse me so i think this is one of the most important takeaways here network with the right people now if you're going to go to forums and you're going to like start asking questions and you're going to look for advice from people who are successful you're most likely not going to get it it's harder to find it in the beginning and this is simply from the reason that not only in dropshipping but you know like think about it like how often do you hear from really rich people or how often do you hear from people who are struggling you hear a lot more about struggling people who are struggling than people who are rich and who are successful because the successful ones are usually a little bit more quiet than the non successful ones people who are not successful like to make a lot of noise they like to make sure that the world knows about their troubles and all the things that they're failing on in life and that also goes with the dropshipping business model so if you're going to go to forums you're going to hear a lot about dropshipping is dead you're going to hear about all of the about all of the people who failed and you're not going to learn a lot about the successful ones because they're in the background and they're a little bit more quiet so i'm trying to be a little bit less quiet with that and i'm sharing my success stories you know on our blog page on our youtube channel i'm showing the actual stories and i'm being 100 transparent and i always try to encourage our community to do the same that is because it's easier to be able to network once we actually find people with positive experiences and if we can connect of course with with an agency like jsm growth agency to help us also grow and and scale our business and even do it for us and you know and and we can network with them and we can network with us we can just build a huge network of people who are successful people are successful people who have a lot of experience in this it's going to be much much different than just going to reddit or going to some facebook communities about dropshipping and learning from only only trying to get insights from those who failed okay so i think this is one of the biggest takeaways from here network with the right people for everyone who stayed up until now guys good job it shows that you're really that you're really interested in that you're really serious about your e-commerce business whether you guys got started or whether you're somewhere in the middle along the way maybe you're making some sales and you're looking to scale maybe you just got started and you're looking to make your first sale or maybe you're scaling and you're ready to scale it even up some more and you're kind of like stuck there in the middle so no matter what stage you are on i highly recommend going to gsmgrowthagency.com i'll leave a link right below this video if you're on our youtube channel again if you're listening through spotify podcast or apple podcast just go to our youtube channel at youtube.com slash auto ts i'm going to leave a link below this video to gsmgrowthagency.com if you guys want if you guys want this to be done for you if you guys want the stores to be created for you if you need mentorship anything like that they're going to take care of that for you so again link right below this video anatoly i want to first of all say thank you this video was really insightful and again for those who stayed until this last minute i'm sure that you appreciate the golden nuggets that you got from this one and i can also personally and professionally say that i got some nice unique answers from you in this podcast so i also really really enjoyed it anatoly thank you for being here and guys for anyone looking also to automate your business go to auto ts.com or youtube slash dot com slash auto ts if you enjoy content like this we have a lot of podcasts a lot of success stories full drops being guys no matter where you want to sell on no matter where what supplies you want to use and if you want to automate the whole business itself and of course you can do it both automating and with gsm growth agency dot com anatoly thank you very much for being here i really enjoy talking to you today thank you all around i really appreciate it because like i enjoyed sharing all that and seriously guys like implemented whatever you heard and it's the best impact for me sure sure thank you very much bye bye thank you