 In today's video, we're going to cover how you can start a successful dropshipping business in the UK. Dropshipping is a fairly low risk business model that you can start up pretty much anywhere in the world. You can start your e-commerce business that caters specifically to the UK and you'll be living in the United States. Running a successful dropshipping business really does mean that you can live on one side of the world and have your store in the entire opposite side. In today's video, we're going to be covering exactly what you need to be able to start your dropshipping business in the UK. And since we're dropshipping and don't have to worry about any inventory, we can start up shop from just about anywhere. Now, if you're already an experienced dropshipper, then some of the things in this video that I'm going to cover, you might already know, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't watch all the way to the end because there's always a few pieces of information that you could find useful. So without further delay, let's go ahead and get started with our step-by-step guide to be able to start dropshipping in the UK using AliExpress. Let's run that intro really quick and let's get to it. What's going on everyone? Mario here with AutoDS and if you like informative videos in the dropshipping business or how to be able to start and scale yours, make sure to hit that subscribe button and hit the little bell notification so you don't miss out on any future videos. Now, before we do get started with this video, if you want a more summarized version of everything that I'm going to cover, so that way you can reference a bit easier as you're starting your own dropshipping business, something quick and easy that you can reference as you're starting up and make sure to leave a comment down below with the hashtag AliExpress UK along with your takeaway from the video and we'll leave you a link to the cheat sheet. Right? So let's go ahead and get started. So as we all know, with a dropshipping store, you can be, for example, in the US and start a business over in the UK. Now, that raises the question, is it legal to be in the US and start a business in a completely different country? And the answer to that is, yeah, it's perfectly legal, but you do need to abide by the general standards in the UK. For example, while dropshipping in the UK is totally 100% legal, you do also have to make sure that the products that you're dropshipping or the products that you're selling, you have to make sure that those are also legal as well. You don't want to be selling copyright products or brand names that are protected by intellectual property rights. There's also a few other items that are best to stay away from, such as items that could be considered dangerous or age restricted. If you want a quick guide as to what's legal and what's not legal to be dropshipping in the UK, you can quickly check out the eBay Varo database and in there, you'll get all the information that you need. Aside from that, you also want to make sure that you abide by the UK's rules for business. Since our dropshipping store will be located in the UK, it'll be under UK jurisdiction, you want to make sure that you closely abide by the UK e-commerce rules. If you want a little bit more information on that or anything else that I'm going to be covering in this video, make sure to check out the description down below. I'm going to have a link to the article down there. Now, speaking of the legality of it and abiding by their e-commerce rules, another thing to keep in mind is you always want to be fulfilling your tax obligations. Having a dropshipping business in the UK means that it is going to be governed by taxes. So you always want to make sure that you're up to date with things like income tax, VAT taxes, and customs duty. Now, there's a lot of benefits to dropshipping in the UK using Aliexpress. And for one, they have a massive product catalog. They have over 100 million products that you're able to choose from. And on top of that, the items are fairly low priced, which makes it easier for us to have competitive pricing. Speaking of low cost items, they also have a lot of cash back as well as coupons. And on top of that, they also have the super deals page. We take a quick look at the super deals page. We're going to see that they have a ton of different items all at discounted rate. Aliexpress is a very dropshipper friendly platform that also has multiple warehouses across the UK. And we all know that local warehouses equals faster shipping. Faster shipping means happier customers. They also make it easy for us to source new products using things like their dropship center. Okay, so now let's go over six different steps that we need to do to be able to start using Aliexpress to start dropshipping in the UK. The first thing that we need to do is actually find best selling products for the UK itself. Remember that a lot of the times trends will be varying by country. So product research is extremely important to do. If something's trending in the US, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be trending in the UK. Now, we do have a few different ways to be able to do the proper product research. And the first thing that we have at our disposal is the Aliexpress dropship center. As I mentioned earlier, the dropship center helps us find a bunch of new and trending products based on a variety of filters that were able to set as a quick tip. Always make sure you have the correct country selected as the ship to and for quicker shipping, you also make sure that the country you're shipping from is set to the same country. In our case, it's going to be the United Kingdom. On top of that, you also have the top ranking page where you can see popular and trending products as well as how many people are searching for these particular items. As you can see, for iPhone cases, you have over 340,000 people searching up iPhone cases. And as mentioned before, we also have the Super Deals page. Now, one quick thing to note on the Super Deals page is that these deals are for a limited time only. So once the deals are gone, they're gone, the items are going to be back to regular price. In a case like this, you can either pass on the savings to your customers and give them a little bit of a discount or you can keep all your prices the same and just make a little bit more profit. You also have the option for the Ali Tools shopping assistant Chrome extension. This tool actually helps you monitor price changes for a particular item in the last six months. Alongside that, it also helps you analyze the product's sale potential. Now, on top of that, if you want something a bit more in-depth for your product research with proven trending products, then you can always check out the product research page over at the AutoDS platform. More specifically, the winning products page. Over here, you can see proven products that are selling as well as different metrics. More specifically, you have the product analysis tab. On here, you can see your potential profit, the audience that you should be targeting for this particular item. You also have an example of a winning Facebook ad that's currently running and some insights into the seller's website. Our product research tool is an all-in-one product finding solution that can help you find winning and trending products for AliExpress. And the best part is, it's a compatible tool for pretty much any selling channel. As an added extra on our website over at AutoDS.com, we have blog posts dedicated specifically to best sellers. And on top of that, we also have our Sell These Now playlist here on YouTube. If you want any information on the blog posts or our YouTube playlists, make sure to check out the description down below. All the links will be down there. So now that we know the products that we want to sell, we have to figure out the platform that we want to sell them on. That's where we can choose either making our own website or going to a pre-made marketplace. If you're selling on a marketplace, in general, you're going to be selling on something like eBay, Facebook Marketplace, or Amazon. Now, if you're going to be creating and selling on your own website, you're going to be using something like Shopify, Wix, or WooCommerce. If you're going to be selling on a marketplace, you're pretty much going to be selling on their platforms the way they have it all set up. And you're going to be selling things based off of their rules. Whereas if you're selling on your own website, you can customize the website however you want. You can customize the landing page, how you're going to sell it. One of the biggest differences being on a marketplace, people go there and search up particularly what they're looking for. And the marketplace is going to put your item in front of them if it's relevant versus your own website. In that case, you're going to have to be bringing your own traffic to you, whether it be organic or paid, Facebook ads, or social media marketing. There's a bunch of different ways to bring in traffic to your website and start selling on there, but we'll be covering that a little bit later in this video. So now we know the products that we're going to sell, as well as the channel that we're going to be selling on. Next up, we have to start bringing in those products to our selling platform. So let's go ahead and start importing our products. So there's a few ways we can start importing our products. And the first way is by doing that manually. If we're doing everything manually, the first thing that we have to start doing is downloading all our images from our suppliers website. After we download all our images, the next thing we can start doing is copying over and optimizing our titles as well as our description. After we copy over the titles in description, we have to start making our different variations. Now, this in itself isn't that big of an issue if you have one or two products with little variations. If we're looking to import more products with more variations, then it can start to get very time consuming doing all this stuff manually. In this case, we can really start benefiting from automation. We can use AutoDS as product importer to be able to start automating all our product imports and have everything done in a flash. Now we don't only have the option to automate our product imports, we pretty much have the option to automate our entire store process. On average, users who automate their processes using AutoDS save an average of about 20 hours per week. There's a few different ways to be able to start automating your product import process. The first way is going over to the add product section and then here we can either import a product by itself or we can import multiple products. Let's go ahead and test out the multiple products since we're gonna be adding a bunch of different ones. So once we click on adding multiple products, we're gonna come to this page right here and it's gonna give us the option to add all our products either by the URLs or the product IDs. For me, it's a lot easier to just use the URL. And also if you look up here where it says publish to, these are all the different stores that I'm gonna be publishing my items to. If I wanna change any of those or take any of those out, I'm gonna just click that little edit button and we can uncheck whatever stores we wanna take off. So for now, let's go ahead and click on over to a different tab. Here I have this pillow that I wanna add. I'm gonna go ahead and copy that URL, paste it right there, hit enter and make sure we go to the next line. Then I'm gonna get these BobaT pillows thing, paste and enter, now this little neck, shoulder, relaxer, paste that on there as well. And last but not least, this little Kawaii dog blush. It's not that little, it's pretty big, but it's pretty cool. Let's go ahead and paste that on there as well. And next thing we're gonna do is go ahead and click add as draft. When we click on that, it's gonna import everything to our drafts so we can start optimizing all our product detail. Now, if you wanna see the status on our product imports, we can just go ahead and click on the draft tab on the side and then on top you'll see the progress of each product import. Now, if we scroll down a little bit, we're gonna see all the products that already uploaded and our inner draft. So let's take for example, this BobaPlushie listing. Let's go ahead and click to edit. And once it loads up, we have the option to optimize our title. We wanna make sure that it has a clean optimized member SEO stands for search engine optimization. Having the proper SEO on your titles and descriptions can help you rank higher on search engine results such as Google. Aside from that, we also have the option to add it to any of our collections. We can add any tags to it. We can choose the shipping methods that we wanna offer. It can either be the cheapest. This usually has no tracking, the cheapest with tracking or the fastest with tracking. Aside from that, we have the location of the item itself in this case, it's China and then the city that it's shipping from and the brand of the item. Now, if we click on over to the description tab, here we have the option to edit our description and optimize it as well. When it comes to this, this would be a bit overkill. This is way too much to add to a product description, but in this section is where you would edit and optimize your descriptions. Then if you click on over to the next tab on your variance, you're gonna see all the different variations that you're gonna be offering. Here you can click on edit and you can edit either variations one by one. In this case, you can change your fee percentage, profit percentage, how much you're gonna sell it at. Then if you click on over to general, you have the option to change the variation name, how many you have on hand, the way and a few other options. Let's go ahead and exit out of that. Now you can also bulk edit here. So you can choose either specific variations or you can select them all at once. Then we have the images tab. Here you can edit your images. You can either add or delete based on the variations that you're selling or just the relevancy of the images themselves. Remember a lot of times when we are importing these products directly from AliExpress or pretty much any other supplier, there's gonna be a few low quality images on there that you sometimes don't want to have. So this is where you can go ahead and delete them. Then on our last tab, we have the item specifications. Here you have all the specifics of your items and their variations. Now, once we're done optimizing everything and we want this product to go live on our website, all we have to do is click on Save and Import and the item will go live on our site within minutes. Okay, so now we have our website live and it's full of products. But we're not getting any sales because nobody knows about the website. This is where we have to start marketing our website, especially if it's your own website. When it comes to marketing on platforms such as Shopify, Wix or WooCommerce, you're gonna be doing it a bit different than you would be marketing on marketplaces such as eBay, Amazon or Facebook Marketplace. So when it comes to marketing your own website on something like Wix, Shopify or WooCommerce, for the most part, you're gonna be using things like pay-per-click ads or Facebook ads. You can also do email marketing and you also have the option for influencer marketing. Now, when it comes to promoting on certain marketplaces like eBay, they have their own unique ways of promoting sometimes. For the most part, you're gonna be doing promoted listings but on something like eBay, you also have the options for promoted listing standard as well as promoted listings advanced. If you want a bit more information on any of the ways that you can market on your dropshipping store, again, make sure to check out the description down below. I'm gonna have the link to each article down there. So we're finally marketing our products and promoting our listings. We're getting our website and our products in front of the eyes of new shoppers and we're starting to get a few sales in. Now what do we do? At this point, it's really important that we start getting our orders fulfilled ASAP. Customers don't like waiting for their orders and they don't like waiting for their orders to ship. So the quicker we can do this, happier customer's gonna be. So once those orders start coming in, the first thing we need to do is quickly head on over to AliExpress's website. Once we're there, we're gonna locate the product, place the order for the product and have it shipped directly to our customer. Once it's being shipped to them and we get our tracking number, always make sure that you pass that tracking number over to your customer so they can keep track of it and so that way you also know when the item is delivered. So in case the customer decides to say, I never received my product and tries to do a charge back, you have proof that the item itself was delivered using your tracking number. Now aside from that, we also have the option to automate our order fulfillment process from AliExpress UK. The first thing that we have to do for this in particular is head on over to the AliExpress website. Once we're on their global website, we're gonna make sure that up here where it shows ship two, we're gonna make sure that that says United Kingdom. Let's go ahead and save that. Now let's say I wanna look for a pillow and where it says ship from, same thing. I wanna make sure that I'm shipping from the United Kingdom to the United Kingdom so that way we can get the quickest shipping possible. Now when it comes to the automated order fulfillment process, certain websites like Walmart UK and Amazon UK, unfortunately aren't supported, but you can automate your AliExpress orders because you have the option to be able to specify where you're shipping to and where you're shipping from both being the United Kingdom. Now when it comes to automating your order fulfillment, you have two different options. You have the automatic order fulfillment where AutoDS will place the order with your supplier using your own buyer accounts and then you also have the option for fulfilled by AutoDS where AutoDS will place the order using its own buyer accounts with a preloaded balance that you'll be loading as needed. Now with all that said and done, the last thing that we have to do, not just at the end, but pretty much throughout the entire process, is always provide top notch customer service. Remember that when a customer experiences great customer service, they're a lot more likely to come back and be loyal customers. On top of that, they're also more likely to refer other people to our website. You always wanna respond to emails and messages as quickly as possible. At least within the 24 hour period, try not to let it pass a little bit more than that because people start to get a bit angsty and they don't like waiting that long. Now if you're dropshipping on eBay, then you can really benefit from something like the AutoDS customer support management system. Using this feature, you can read and reply to all of your different eBay messages from one single screen in the AutoDS platform. It's also good to know that AliExpress offers some pretty good customer service as well as some pretty good return policies such as the fact that you have a 15 day return policy. Now another cool thing about that is even after the 15 days pass, if you still need to return your item, you can. The only difference is you need to pay for the shipping. All right, so our e-commerce store is up and running. We have products listed, we have our ads running and we're making a few sales and automating it using AutoDS order fulfillment. The next thing for us to start doing is start scaling. We need to start growing and scaling our business to the next level so we can start making some more money. Now one of the ways we can start doing that is by automating our entire dropshipping store. Overall, 90% of our users have seen increased efficiency in their day-to-day operations. With AutoDS, we have the options for price optimization and price and stock monitoring. On top of that, we also have inventory management and automatic tracking number updates. I actually really like the tracking number updates because whenever an order is fulfilled by a supplier, AutoDS will take that tracking number and automatically update a customer with it. We also offer a lot of other resources to help you succeed, such as our mentorship program, our blog posts and our YouTube channel, which you're watching right now. So if you do like the video, make sure you leave a like and if you found it informative, also make sure to hit that subscribe button. Also remember, if you want access to the cheat sheet, leave a comment down below with the hashtag AliExpressUK along with your takeaway from the video and we'll leave you a link to it. Once again, my name is Mario with AutoDS, wishing you the best in your dropshipping venture. Catch you all in the next video.