 Hey, what's going on guys? Welcome to a new video. So in this one, I'm going to take you through my predictions for drop shipping and what it's going to look like in 2022. Going to be discussing things like delivery times and also what I see being the most effective strategies going forwards for the rest of this year. Now, before we jump into it, I just want to take a quick minute to say I really appreciate the support on the channel lately. The people who tune in and watch every single week and leave comments down below, the people I talk to on Instagram, it's really interesting actually, it's great to get to know some of you guys, the sorts of position you're in, the sorts of products you're selling and helping you out the best way possible. So I really do appreciate it and please keep it coming. Also, I've had quite a few messages from you guys about one of my latest videos where I actually discovered a pretty cool product. It's a new product for me and it actually fit into a niche which I've got a lot of experience into. I have actually taken action, I've built a store around it. I am in the testing phases at the moment and started to pick up and see some sales. So look out for another video perhaps in the next couple of weeks where I'll take you through what that testing strategy looks like. I just wanna wait until I scale it up a bit more and have some for the bit more substantial to show you guys rather than simply 100 or 200 pounds per day. Anyway, with that being said, thanks for tuning in. I hope you guys enjoyed the video and let's jump straight into it. Okay, so the first point I want to address in 2022 is delivery times. Obviously when it comes to drop shipping it's a pretty taboo subject, the amount of people I speak to. It's their number one biggest hesitation. They ask the question of can you really build a business? Does the business work? Making people wait three to four weeks on delivery. And I always answer this question as honestly as possible and the answer is definitely not. There's nobody out there unless it's a custom made bespoke product, of course. In fact, I ordered some golf clubs a while ago and that was like three months ago and I'm still waiting for them. But unless it's a custom bespoke product like that then nobody's gonna wait three to four weeks. Or certainly not a lot of people that are gonna wait three to four weeks. And not actually what I recommend either. Everybody who kind of comes into the program that I work one-on-one with, I will steer them away from any particular supplier which is gonna take that long to deliver. I think the main reason people have this perception is because they go into AliExpress, they see the quoted delivery times from suppliers and they automatically assume that it's gonna take that long. What a lot of people actually forget is that if the supplier gives you a guaranteed delivery date or it gives you a date in which the delivery should arrive by and if it doesn't actually arrive in that time, you can claim that money back. And because it is coming from China to the UK or to the US, wherever it may be, there's obviously a lot that can go wrong between there and there, between kind of dispatch and delivery. So they quote higher times to account for those problems so that they can get a lot of basically disputes and end up having to refund a lot of customers. When in reality, your orders will actually arrive a lot quicker than that. Another word of advice as well is not to base the average delivery time on one test order or on one post, what somebody's put on either Reddit or in a Facebook group. Let's take a weird example of Man United, so I'll support Man United religiously. I watched them every single week. I watched them last week against Aston Villa. They were the worst team but that doesn't mean that Man You are a worse team than Aston Villa. If you take the averages over the course of the last two years of the times they've played against each other, then Man United are clearly the better team and that's what you need to do with your AliExpress delivery times. Don't just judge it on one delivery. Try and judge it on the first 50 orders or the first 100 orders. Also, it's no secret delivery times through COVID went to crap. They were rubbish. It was really difficult to find any reliable supply coming from China. There were so many things that were affected. However, I believe we're through the thick of it now and there is a light at the end of the tunnel. And this is shown in a number of ways. Number one, you may have noticed already that there's numerous suppliers, more and more suppliers, typically the bigger ones that are offering a 10 day guaranteed delivery. Now that isn't always the case. It doesn't always arrive in 10 days unfortunately but on average you are looking somewhere between sort of seven or 12 days. Number two, you may have also noticed that a lot of the popular products that pick up traction, more and more suppliers from AliExpress are keeping stock in local warehouses. There's more and more suppliers offering to ship their products from a US warehouse from a UK warehouse from a Spanish or French or Poland or even Russian warehouse depending on where you're selling to obviously. And the third way in which this is improving is with CJ Dropship in. The more and more people who start to use CJ, the bigger it gets, the more they can afford to open up fulfillment houses in local countries and the product ranges are increasing too. When it first looked at CJ a couple of years ago versus now the amount of products that you can source from the UK and do UK to UK shipping has significantly increased versus what it was two years ago. So what this means for Dropship in in 2022 in my opinion, delivery times will only continue to increase and all in all, I think this just makes 2022 a great year to actually take action, take all that research you've been doing for the last six months, 12 months, whatever it may be and finally get started with your business. My second prediction for 2022 is that user generated content will become a lot more popular. So what user generated content is is it's basically where you take a 20 to 32nd clip. In fact, the duration of the clip is pretty relevant actually, but they're usually sort of 20 to 30 seconds and it's an actor or influencer that unboxes the product or uses the product or talks about the different kind of benefits and features of the product. User generated content is growing in popularity quite significantly over the last 12 months and TikTok is partly responsible for that. Typically, if you look at or do product research on TikTok, a lot of the best performing ads, the ones that get millions of reviews and do really well are typically user generated content. And the reason for this is because people like to listen to people or people like to watch people, especially when they're talking about products. So if you take two ads, one is just a slideshow of different clips with some funky music in the background or some light spirited, whatever is music in the background. And then you take a clip of an actual real person showing their face, smiling, there's progression to the video. The person can actually watch the actor or watch the influencer actually unbox the product and discover and kind of get grips with the product in live time. And you can watch them do that and kind of follow along. Then obviously the user generated content is going to be a lot more engaging. People are going to watch it for a lot longer and it helps sell them on the product too. When you have a natural real person talking about a product and talking about his real life kind of application, it helps the consumer, the viewer of the ad actually picture themselves doing that themselves. So a real person talking about how a color could protect their dog when it's nighttime and they're walking it outside, somebody's initial thought might not always be to think that but the fact they've heard somebody say that then triggers those same thoughts and those same emotions in the viewer. The second reason is having user generated content actually humanizes the brand. People of course are becoming a lot more savvy into online scams and dodgy businesses. So if you come across an ad for a particular product and there's no faces in it, no human beings, then you go into the website and again, no kind of contact information or no human beings or no real kind of person behind the brand. It looks a bit dodgy and it almost looks like somebody might be hiding and therefore it could be a scam site. Whereas if you have a real person talking about a product, it humanizes the brand, helps build that kind of rapport connection with the customer. So my advice to anybody watching this video is yes, you can try out those typical kind of viral e-com ads which are just slideshows of different pieces of content which are chopped up with kind of like a backing track but also try and reach out to some small time influencers and say, hey, if I send you this product, will you send me three to five different pieces of content? Or again, there are other different ad creation services. I believe viral e-com ads even do have a user generated content service now and so do a company called Billio. Okay, so moving on to point number three which is branding. Now, obviously branding is nothing new but I believe in 2022 there's gonna be a higher emphasis on it or at least there should be. Just in case you're not 100% clued up as to what branding is, essentially it's where you take a product in your business to the next level. So you start holding stock for it. You're gonna get a logo printed onto the product, you have custom packaging and you could even involve yourself in some form of product development and actually making the products unique. If you look at all of the most successful e-commerce brands that primarily focus on those kind of drop shipping type products, all of them are private label in their products. I'll put some on screen now and just do like a flick through of some of the most popular ones. And the reason they do this is to help separate them from the competition. The more you can do to separate yourself from the next person selling the same product, the better chance you have of success in actually capturing customers versus your competition. And the reason being is if you brand your product in the correct way and establish yourself as an expert in the field, somebody would much rather buy something off of an expert than buy it off of some random kind of pop up looking store. And this is why I believe in 2022 there's gonna be a higher emphasis on this. Now, it doesn't mean that there isn't a space for general stores. There's always a space for general stores because in terms of flexibility and speed, then you can't beat them in my opinion. When it comes to rapidly testing products, then I think they're ideal. And as a beginner, if you're not quite sure what you're gonna sell, then this would always be my advice to start with a general store. However, once you've been testing products for a couple of weeks and you found a product that's selling pretty consistently each and every day for a couple of weeks, then start rebranding your store, rebranding the product, getting a logo, thinking of a name which you could potentially trademark so that when somebody comes across you and your business versus another business selling the same product, they can buy it from general store which is an unbranded product, a cheaper product. That's the other thing. If you brand the product and kind of position yourself as the original person selling that, then you can charge a lot more for it too. And a great example of this is the heated vest. I'll put up now the leading company selling the heated vest on Facebook and they're selling it for $20 more expensive than anyone else. Why? Because they've branded themselves and they've established themselves as the market leader, the expert in that field so people naturally gonna trust them more. Some more advantages to starting a brand. I could talk about this and probably should do a separate video on this. But if you have a branded product, then all of the information that goes through your Facebook pixel is all about the same type of person. Your pixel's gonna optimize and learn who your ideal customers are a lot quicker. When it comes to building your email lists, you'll build them a lot quicker. There'll be a lot more targeted and there'll be a lot more valuable. And all of these little things add up to basically a more sustainable business and a more profitable business in the long run. If somebody comes onto your particular site and buys a product and you do a good service, you deliver it quickly, it's a high quality product, it's branded so on and so forth. They'll tell their friends about it, they'll come onto your site and again, as long as you keep giving people that service, then word of mouth will spread, which is an actual more powerful thing that you might believe, but also your customer retention too. People will keep coming back to you for those same types of products. And so with that being said guys, I'm gonna wrap the video up there. I really hope you enjoyed this one. One final message then before you go. If you are wanting to get stuck into dropshipping in 2022, but you wanna do it the right way, you want somebody who essentially is gonna hold your hand through the whole process, somebody you can talk to on a daily basis, then make sure you check out my Ecom Accelerator program. It is a 60 day mentorship program with myself. So if you want more information on that, leave a comment down below that says Accelerator and I'll send you the link that you need. Thanks again for watching, have an awesome 2022 and I'll see you guys in the next video.