How to Start Dropshipping 2023 (Ultimate Beginners Guide)

so in the past two to three years I've been able to generate multiple seven figures every single year but it hasn't always been like this back when I first got started I was just a broke college student trying to figure out what I was going to do in life and at that time I was working with my dad part-time doing hardwood floor construction I was also working as a health technician with kids with autism and I was trying to make sure that I passed school because I was not a good student at all it was during that time when I saw the struggle of my parents and also realizing that I also hated being broke that I needed to make a change and that change started with me starting a business this business that I started about five to six years ago was Drop Shipping back then what had happened was I decided to look online on videos on how to make money and Drop Shipping had come up I was blessed fortunate lucky enough to have been able to generate over a hundred twenty thousand dollars my first year of getting into the space now I'll talk more in detail later on in this video about my story and how that progressed into where I'm at now but for the sake sake of this video I wanted to give you all the information that you need to know from someone who's done it many years ago on how to start Drop Shipping and how I would do it over again so what is Drop Shipping so recently I came across a pretty hilarious podcast with a new girl named Bobby altoff now she's someone who's been just getting all these crazy connections with other celebrities and one of those celebrities happened to be Drake now if you're a fan of Drake like most people are you can go on a site called drakerelated.com this year is a hub for all things related to Drake where you can see his G-Wagon you can enter a studio and go all across this place where you can even click on these white little dots now if you click on some of these dots you can actually buy products that Drake makes but what's really interesting is that some of these dots also points to other stores now look Drake he's Drake he's probably got a million things going on in his life but with this store here what I found fascinating is that he decided he wanted to support more small businesses however without out adding the extra stress and headache of the back and forth that it comes with which usually involves managing inventory actually dealing with the units and whatnot so fast forward a little later Shopify an 86 billion dollar company released a new program called Shopify Collective this is where they solve the problem that Drake was facing where he can now go ahead and hand pick high quality items from different brands to sell on his own store so as an example if you take a look at this inflatable air pump it comes from a company called funboy and it's noted that it's shipped separately now Drake here doesn't own this specific inventory he simply just gets the order on his site and they pass it on to funboy and fun boy actually handles the rest what's cool is that Drake is able to sell his own merch but aside from that if there are any other items that he wants to have his customers get and he makes a profit on his team never actually has to deal with that order so in essence this here is Drop Shipping it's where you're pretty much marketing someone else's product and you're able to get it to them without out ever touching the product now Drop Shipping has been around for ages but this isn't anything new back when I first got into Drop Shipping about five to six years ago people were just all about making as much money as possible to do this you would find a bunch of products for as cheap as possible and that was all sourced from a site called AliExpress now AliExpress is one of the most popular online stores for buying products at much cheaper prices and if you've never seen it or you still don't really grasp it just think about Amazon but even cheaper than what Amazon has and it all happens to come direct from China so usually what people do when they get into the Drop Shipping space is that they would go on AliExpress they would do some product research find that product on their website and then they would create websites using tools like Shopify where they upload those products as if it was their own and then they would ship it out to customers the issue here is when you do this you never get to see the product and I personally ran into a few issues myself one of those was that some people saw the product being advertised on the website and it was come completely different from what they actually received in the mail on top of that before the days of Amazon Prime and getting like one to two day business shipping even five to six years ago the norm for getting items delivered to you was like five to ten business days nowadays A lot of people are spoiled where you can actually get items like delivered to you within a couple hours if you're living here within the United States but on the other hand if you happen to buy a product these days and it's not getting delivered to you within weeks but even sometimes where it takes up months because it comes directly from China people aren't really too happy that's another issue that a lot of people Drop Shipping ran into and another one is just the fact that when you receive some of these products the packaging because they have to use like ePacket it looks like it came straight from a scene out of narcos with Pablo Escobar and people would just be sketched out this is where essentially Drop Shipping got such a bad rep because you had poor quality control over products you had really long shipping times and then the packaging it was just it was terrible I don't know if this is still going on but it was happening during my day where you would see a bunch of 19 year old kids flexing Wi-Fi money in their Instagram bios making Tick-Tock product ads to their Shopify store and then drop shipping those items from the middle of China to regular customers like you and I so back then most people didn't know about Drop Shipping but nowadays what it turns out is most people like in high school or even Middle School know what Drop Shipping is but they just assume it's a complete scam now earlier in this video I mentioned to you guys about how I ran a store to the six figure mark my first year but I wanted to give you guys the complete story behind what happened so first year I decided to become an entrepreneur got into the game I saw some YouTube videos ran a six-figure Drop Shipping Store and even back then I realized that making sales wasn't that hard and I could have kept going if I wanted to but I realized that this was not how I wanted to build a business that I was proud of for all the reasons that I mentioned about the poor quality aspect of Drop Shipping in a nutshell I realized even myself that I needed to solve these problems so once I was able to test the market and realize okay Drop Shipping is not actually a scam I can actually make money I eventually moved over from Shipping items from China over into shipping items from U.S warehouses even back then with AliExpress you just go ahead and sort different shippers to the us and that was just the easiest way for me to find a Us warehouse holders by setting it into that category where I'm shipping directly just from U.S warehouses my prices were going higher which meant my margins were going down but I knew that I could still make up that money through happy customers happy customers meant that they would probably come back and if you have repeat orders you would make way more money than for someone to have a bad experience so I did that and it was working out great we were processing a high volume of sales and orders and I even wanted to take it to the next level where I realized okay if someone gets an item I still can't see the item myself and there's a level of me where I wanted to at least QC it I wanted to make sure that my customer was getting a consistent product that was being advertised by our website this year's is when I decided to make my first biggest investment ever where I bought my first round of inventory and I happened to be on a cruise at that time I was getting like WhatsApp messages from my contact in China at like 2 3 A.M and they're like yo the palette is about to get delivered to my parents house and I remember my parents they texted me they sent me a photo and it's like hey we just got this big old box and it got delivered now my plan was to sell all of these to my customers with an item that I custom designed and a new color that I was so pumped for so here I was on the cruise coming back home by the time I pulled up back to my parents house I saw this box of inventory and I was pumped okay I actually got a new item that was selling well I custom designed it to my own color I added a little bit of an upgrade which I thought improved the product more and it was working out great a few days later I was making over one to two thousand dollars every single day in sales and I knew with this product with my own custom packaging better delivery times that I would continue in you to make some insane dollars and I could eventually scale this to a seven figure business well after a few weeks following that things didn't end up going as I expected this is because of the same manufacturers who I used to drop ship all the items previously decided to copy what my store was doing and they replicated the same new upgraded item that I made and they undercut my prices by over 50 percent so now I was competing against the same people who actually manufactured my first products and with the cost of ads Rising with more and more people getting into the Drop Shipping space and competing in the Ecom world I was just completely getting zoned out now you might have thought there's a happy ending to that story and in a way there is in a way there isn't I ended up just putting that store on pause and I decided to focus on different Ventures what had happened was the fact that in me pursuing Drop Shipping I had learned how to create my own website do my own product funnels I had to learn how to hire my first employee fire my first employee do customers service due product research and most importantly I learned how to run ads and I got really good at doing that one thing through that experience I wore all these different hats which allowed me to have the tools to start then my own marketing agency with a business partner at that time and I even remember that I got so good at running ads for myself that all these businesses and local owners were asking me if I could do it for them although the econ business was something I was so passionate about and I wanted to scale to the Moon I realized I need to put that one aside and pursue these other opportunities that were opening up that probably had better margins and it wasn't as competitive so Facebook whitelisted my ads account they gave me my own dedicated ads manager and eventually I was able to use that skill in running ads to the agency where we generated thousands of dollars in sales and revenues for our other clients it was also around that same time I decided to pursue Amazon FBA with another partner and cool story my partner back then ended up you know working at the bank he was the lead analyst there at Wells Fargo and then now he's been our c of this company which is managing YouTube and the few other businesses that we've run where he's been one of my head of operations since now at a certain point within my career I was a business owner of three different companies I had the marketing agency I decided to start YouTube and to document my journey and to review credit cards and then I still had that Ecom brand that I didn't want to let go with Ecom I realized to scale I would need more of a team and margins were also very difficult to improve just because it was within the product based business when I moved into agency work margins were still good but I felt like I was an employee to all these clients and I just hated that feeling and YouTube well this is where things started working out with YouTube I realized I could work whenever I want I didn't feel like an employee and I just loved making videos seeing comments and being able to stay creative within my own zone of Genius so the whole lesson out of that story is the fact that I learned so much from Drop Shipping and I could have taken it either direction looking back now I would not be here today where I'm at in my house with my dog I don't even know what I'd be doing in my life right now if I didn't actually start out with Drop Shipping even more full circle I still have my old e-commerce brand I still got all the inventory right now and I'm working together with other seven figure e-commerce brand owners to scale and build even more businesses something I also realized back then was that there's a lot of scammers and fake gurus within the space that are just all trying to sell you a course but you can literally watch my journey here on YouTube where I went through my process of buying orders shipping out orders going through like my thought process on what to do to pursue this to not pursue that it's all here available online from then I went from a zero dollar net worth individual to now multi-seven figures approaching eight figures and it's happened to be all started with the business of Drop Shipping if I were to do everything over again I wouldn't change a single thing because I don't know if there was any other way for me to get into the current timeline that I'm at now so Astro is it still worth Drop Shipping yes or no if you've asked me the question again is it still worth Drop Shipping I would tell you yes and no that's because there's the new way and there's the old way and the new way right now is finding good manufacturers and Brands it's utilizing AI to make copy and build out websites faster than ever before and it's having systems in place where once someone places an order you have all things automated and ready to go most importantly if you are interested in becoming a better entrepreneur and you want to just make money I say this here is one of the best businesses to still start now on the other hand if that's not your case if you're just trying to make a pretty penny and you're trying to just use the old way of doing things like you know finding a product that everyone's selling going on AliExpress Drop Shipping from China running ads on Facebook losing more money then no most definitely not don't even try so here's what you need to know for up-to-date video on Drop Shipping in 2023 and Beyond right now competition is definitely higher than it used to be with Drop Shipping but you have even more resources and tools to win with think about it like this AI really just started to pop off like three four months ago and it's still a growing world where people are just getting accustomed to the skills back then it would have taken me like one to two weeks in order to build up a website do all the copy and the writing but right now you can build up a website with templates that exist using AI getting all the copy built for you getting product photos using like mid-journey having that optimize it and you can do what it would have taken me multiple weeks to complete where you just do it in like one to two days maybe even less than that the second thing is Industries can always be disrupted with a bit of thinking and there's so many new platforms and trends that it's even more advantageous for the younger you are because the old heads right now I'm telling you they can't keep up and I think I'm one of those old heads now I'm turning 27 this year and I started making videos on this channel back when I was just 21. crazy crazy time flies now if you are interested here's how you can get started today first of all you can launch your own store or you can buy a pre-made one so Shopify exchange allows you to buy pre-made stores and what's great about this is that you can see all the data for that store to see if it's you know still making sales if it did make sales you can ask the owner hey what happened why was it making so many sales but it's not anymore and you can find a store that might have been all set up emails are ready to go you have a customer list and you can just take it over and you can start from there this year is great because it can save you even more time and you could also be generating profit with very minimal Investments now the second option is to just launch your own store the way that I've done this many years ago and the way that people do this now is using Shopify Shopify in a way is geared more specifically for people who want to start their own successful Drop Shipping Store if you guys have not yet signed up for Shopify check out the link Down Below in the description this is an affiliate link so you also support this channel but with these affiliate links you'll be getting a better offer than most of their public offers where you're not you're not getting anything free you're not getting a free trial you're not usually getting like a dollar a month free promo something like that so Shopify runs these cool little deals using our link down below check out what the offer is and if you want to sign up they have a free trial link Down Below in the description so in order to get started and to launch your store you can actually get started today the way I would do this first sign up for Shopify the next thing you want to do is make sure you have a subscription to chat sheet BT or even if you don't want to spend like the extra 25 30 you could use chat gbt for free or you could also use other AI Bots like Bard now this year is great because you can pretty much use a second brain like AI where you wouldn't have had access to tools like this before and you can ask it questions like hey what products could I sell that you think would be valuable or what niches right now are blowing up and trending from there use this bot in order to write down a list of your top five interests or different markets and niches you could have chat CBT expand on what those look like and this right here is going to give you a huge Head Start now furthermore getting started with the Drop Shipping Store there's usually two ways to go about it you can have a more special specific Market Niche store selling maybe one product or two or three products okay we'll talk a little bit more about cross sells and upsells later on or you can have a general Niche store about five years ago General Niche stores were still able to generate people seven figures a month but right now I think the space is getting pretty saturated but if you do know how to Brand yourself properly and you get yourself good items on the store at cost I believe that it is still very viable for you to make a ton of money now a lot of people get overwhelmed with this whole stage where they're like okay Brian I don't even know the general Niche store I don't even know if I should do a product first store here's what I'll say just pick one General market that you're looking to expand into do your research with chat gbt and make sure it tells you not only the pros but also the cons and you also want to look at the General market size how big is the market are you in a market where like you know you're buying exclusive things for exclusive demographic of people like maybe people with a certain allergy those markets may not expand and as much as you think it would and maybe the most you'll only make is like a hundred thousand dollars a year on the other hand if you expand into a market where it's more applicable to people in a certain area in a certain location or a certain age demographic you might have an even higher chance to scale I personally think it's good to just Niche down a little bit don't keep it too General but the focus that you should be putting more of your attention into is going to be building out specific product pages a lot of people get so overwhelmed with how like the their front page looks at their site and how their Instagram layout is but that is not the focus if you want to know what makes people the 80 of the money the focus is gonna have to be as soon as someone goes on your website and they're right on the product how you're going to convert them from looking at the product interested in buying it to someone converting it to buying it now the best way to get inspiration on this guys just go on Kickstarter okay I was doing this back then it still works now Kickstarter is based off of crowdfunding so people have to go ahead sign up and you know if their product is going to launch they need a certain amount of people to sign up and back that project but in order for them to back that project it needs to look good they need to do a good job of marketing it so this is where you're going to see really good product funnels they're going to be talking about the features how it can change your life what else it can do like the different color variations like things that might interest people where they didn't have a clue before so after you generate a list of ideas using some of these AI tools you can also use Google Trends to see what's popping off right now even a few months ago guys pickleball as an example that was blowing up and there weren't any like huge legitimate brands that people were going to so it turns out like Drop shippers are making some of the most amount of money in this space because they could get these paddles at Cost because a lot of beginners are getting into it they don't care about the carbon fiber plating or whatnot and they're making some serious money even for my girlfriend and I we went over on Amazon in order to buy a set of pickleball sets and I just know it all comes from the same place I that it would have gotten drop shipped from anyways product research I think is so important there's a couple ways you can go about it one of the ways that people do it is to go on Amazon or to even go on AliExpress and see what the most popular items that are getting sold now I think this here is not a blue ocean you're competing against every single person who might have probably watched my video here today and that have also heard that from like a hundred different other YouTubers and blogs if I were to start over again I think a better way to do product research is to use tools like Tick Tock because a lot of people they will look at Tick Tock and they'll think it's just another social media site like Instagram but that's not what it is Tick Tock yes indeed is social media but it's a sophisticated algorithm where it tracks you it learns what you like what you like to buy and if you're able to feed it that profile like manipulate that data just a little bit so anytime it shows you an ad on a product click on the ad click on the product scroll around a little bit click add to cart click buy it's going to force you even more items on ads of products that might be doing really well so this is actually a little cheat code order to get and generate even more ideas so use tick tock try to get a lot of product ideas see the engagement on them are people like blowing it up Are there specific Tick Tock accounts made just for one single product so as an example I don't know if you guys can see this this is like one product it's like a pig getting slapped okay there's a rubber Pig it's been blowing up on Tick Tock and from even something like this a lot of people ended up selling it and then you can use tools to see how many items they're selling with Chrome extensions some of them are free and you'll realize these products they make a lot of money if you check the market you realize okay someone else is doing this but it hasn't really blown up yet and you know that you can make a better version of it maybe you can improve the product or you can improve the marketing boom you have a viable way of getting sales you have a viable marketing method because you have these type of platforms like Tick Tock didn't exist when I was doing Drop Shipping and you can use it to blow up so easily this also reminds me of another story real life story here one of my good friends Daniel he got into to e-commerce lives in my area in the Maryland area always see them at the gym in Rockville and I said yo Dan what's going on man he's pumping the curls on the bicep machine looking like a monster I was like how's your Ecom stuff doing I heard you know you're getting into Drop Shipping while back did that do well he's like oh yeah it's been going okay I was like well how much are you doing this man tells me he's doing like six seven figures a month his product was blowing up he was doing like 70 80k profit it's just crazy crazy amounts of people making money and I asked him well what was your product research method and he told me going on Tick Tock man you know doing product research finding it there using that for marketing running paid ads using that the algorithm for what they're provided to people who want to start their business these days is so sophisticated and good and I would not sleep on it one bit now let's back up just a little bit though we skipped a lot of steps you do product research use chat gbt if you're questioning any part of it use chat gbt to give you even more advice is there a probability of this succeeding what do you suggest I do in order to properly Market this give me a full content calendar plan in order to have an efficient marketing strategy you got that all done you have the ideas in it make sure you organize it everything all right write it down put it on your Apple notes I like using notion for everything for all of our systems here at our company what I do next is then look for Distributors you need to know the cost of getting that particular item is it going to be expensive is it based out of the US do they accept wholesale orders could you move out of the Drop Shipping method for this some of the sites you can use is Aliexpress still you can sort it to just us warehouses you can use oberlo sail who wholesale to be you can use spocket there's a lot of these companies actually still coming up where they're finding you viable products that you can go ahead and market as a drop shipper now I don't know if I mentioned this earlier did I mention it earlier Astro no probably not Drop Shipping is pretty much just means you're a marketer first okay you're doing a lot of business stuff but if you are really good at marketing certain products you are going to be successful after that what I like to do is check the competition and in order to do this once you've found a few products that have profit potential and you found the supplier you want to then see who else is selling the product so search up the product name on Google you know reverse image search the actual product photo Google's algorithm is insane for this you can go on social media platforms Tick Tock Instagram shopping and see how often it's really getting sold and if it's oversaturated or not if a product is oversaturated I hate competing against others I hate the whole idea of like stealing people's ads stealing people's products and like doing what everyone else is doing always find a different way to put a product and spin the wheel now it doesn't mean that the initial strategy of copying people doesn't work because it still works I know a lot of people making a lot of money doing that method but I just don't think it's a sustainable business if your whole business is built off of copying others I just don't see the longevity in that now it could be wrong and if I am wrong let me know Down Below in the comments going back though say you've done that okay you've found a good product chat gbt recommended you you found one from Tick Tock whatever it may be you realize the competition is not that high you can come into the space and this is something that you foresee a trend Brewing well the next thing you're going to want to do is create your own website I talked about this earlier use Shopify build up your website you can then automatically add that product into your website they'll go ahead and allow you to do a whole bunch of customizing to it you can discount your products you can create a limited time offer sale you can limit the quantity of it or you can just process orders automatically what I use to process over a hundred thousand dollars in orders was oberlo and all this was was like one click I would just press one click as soon as I got the order coming in it pressed order fulfill I would use one of my credit cards where I'm earning additional points by the way all of you guys should be doing this if you're in the e-commerce business because this is where I accumulated millions of points where now I'm traveling for free first class flights you know really nice sweet upgrades to hotels always make sure you're maximizing this aspect of it but set up the website use some of these apps link the product to it and then the next thing that you want to do is marketing with marketing there's two different ways to go about it back then you would have to do paid ads because organic wasn't as good as it is now but right now organic reach using platforms like Tick Tock is so powerful where if you are able to create a good video or send someone a product that you plan on promoting on your website this could be called ugc user generated content have them post a video and then you repost it and then maybe you pay like two three hundred bucks from there you're going to be able to generate yourself a business you're going to be able to see that whatever product that they post even if they get you one or two sales you'll realize that this quickly starts to add up back then what I had to do I had to use Instagram shout outs I'll have to find like Niche Pages all right random pages and be like yo can you do a shout out for this like Photo post because even videos and stories didn't exist on Instagram back then and they would run a image and it would be like a canva generated image that I made and I was so surprised because that ended up actually even getting sales so right now if you're using video if you're able to utilize the apps you do not have to pay as as much in advertising as I did and still get even better results so here's what I'll say start out with ugc user generated content you can make it yourself so you don't have to pay anyone to do it from there try to make more organic content okay stretch the dollar because I know most people who get started within this space they don't have a lot of money to just waste and blow away on ads so buy the product film it yourself you know have other people or friends or family using it filming it try to get as far as you can with Organic leads from there if you want to amplify your performance that's when I would get into paid ads this is where you can retarget people who went onto your website they came in they added it to car and then they didn't end up buying but then you give them a new angle like hey how about 20 off and usually sometimes changing the price changing the angle you know showing it to them just a few times actually triggers the buy this is human psychology a lot of people unless it's an Impulse buy they're not going to just see it buy it at once they would usually see it it would be in their subconscious like oh maybe I should get this this product but I don't need it and then they see it over and over again and then one day they just end up buying it they realize okay there is a need for it and then they see a sale and it'll trigger the conversion using ads is really easy but there is definitely a learning curve because it looks like an Excel spreadsheet for most people with even more sophisticated data that you have no idea what it means on top of that when you're running ads you have to create the creatives so that means like the text the video the photo and you're going to be putting a lot of thought because if you're going to be spending 10 20 30 40 50 a day that starts adding up even if you're running ads for ten dollars a day you do that for a week that's 70 out of your pocket and you know if you don't keep track of it or you're doing multiple products you realize okay this is why a lot of people end up not liking Drop Shipping because they see that it's a lot harder than they anticipated so I'm all about reducing the amount of risk in starting any business so fully utilize organic reach and if it's not working try a different product but try to get your first sale organically before moving into paid ads and then once you get the hang of paid ads that's when you can actually scale from going to a hundred dollars a day to a thousand dollars a day to then ten thousand dollars a day now the last step here is going to be in optimizing your business at a certain point and as soon as possible you want to be able to track everything this means sales visitors how much your ads are spending how many views you're getting what the likely conversion rate on someone landing on a page is how long they're sitting on a page for if you want to then use this data to continue optimizing because you realize that you want to make sure you're efficient as possible on top of that you want to continue to look out for new product offerings you want to hire out customer service with va's from across the world where you can hire them for five to even less than that five dollars an hour for them to help you and get back your time eventually you can also have your own newsletter where you're hitting them with retargeting ads in their newsletter like by the way you know we released a new product or hey you know updates to this or you know a discount to that Black Friday sale to this owning your own email list is going to be free traffic and that's where you can then Escape scale your business even more so in those seven steps you pretty much have gone from A Drop Shipping Noob over into someone who's running a scalable and sustainable business by the way keep in mind you're not always going to get it right the first time I did not get it right off the bat with my first store it took me multiple multiple products and stores before things started to kick off now the biggest lesson guys is if I was able to do it I'm confident that you are too as someone who just like dropped out of school and like I never took a class on business entrepreneurship marketing whatever and I simply just learned everything from the internet and then from my own experience of doing it I'm so confident that there are a lot more people out here smarter than I am that could do it too so guys if you did find any value in this video first of all do me a favor okay drop a like down below subscribe to this channel if you guys want me to talk more about Drop Shipping if you guys want me to even start a series on starting a store from scratch building it up and showing you what the possibilities nowadays are in being able to make money let me know Down Below in the comments too thank you all so much again thanks for watching be sure to check out Shopify link Down Below in the description if you also want to get started and in the meantime take care stay blessed and I'll see y'all soon peace

Channel: Brian Jung

Views: 381,378

Keywords: Habits of a millionaire, How to become a millionaire, Self development, Habits of succesfull people, 10 habits of a millionaire, Million dollar habits, How to be a millionaire, how to become a millionaire, how to be a millionaire, habits of successful people, dropshipping, side hustle, business, how to dropship, beginner business

Id: _EHxGkCWRX8

Length: 30min 11sec (1811 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 02 2023