If you’ve ever looked at drop shipping and thought there’s no way this can possibly work when shipping times from aliexpress or like a month. Then you’re right kind of the truth is e-commerce and drop? Shipping? Has changed immensely over the last couple years and what made sense then doesn’t really make sense.
Now in 2021, month-long shipping times are out shitty chinese packaging that smells like ass is out. Now that doesn’t mean that drop shipping is dead, but it does mean that the traditional way of doing it is extremely outdated, and if you want to be successful with it in 2021, your strategy needs to change with the times and that right There is exactly what i want to talk to you about in this video.
The strategy that i’m about to show you isn’t really all that crazy, but it is how we built a seven figure brand from scratch in less than a year in 2020 and to me it’s. The only form of drop shipping that actually makes sense in 2021, if you’re into drop shipping, or you want to be into drop shipping this year.
You absolutely need to at the bare minimum, be aware of this strategy and ideally be implementing it for yourself. So let me hop inside my computer and let me show you what i’m talking about here. All right.
We got the white board up alex becker style, so this is how traditional drop shipping works. It starts you get products from aliexpress, you list them on your shopify store. Customers buy from your shopify store and then, when a customer buys from your store, you take their information, you put it into aliexpress aliexpress sends your customer the product and you just get to pocket the difference.
The thing with this is when you’re fulfilling from aliexpress here, these orders are gonna, take like one month to get to your customers. They’re, also going to arrive in pretty shitty chinese packaging.
This is just it’s, it’s, really shitty chinese packaging. The customer is going to wait a month for their product. They’re, going to open it up and it’s, going to look really shitty and they’re going to be dissatisfied.
We’re, going to have a big old frowny face right here. In all likelihood, this customer is not gonna buy from you again. He’s, pretty dissatisfied with his experience, and you do this enough times and uh.
Then you get a lot of people like this. You get a lot of really unhappy customers. They leave you bad reviews. They’re, not buying from you again. They’re, telling everyone just how awful you are. Maybe you do make a little bit of money.
We got a little dollar sign here, a little bit of money in the short term, but overall it’s, very likely that your business is probably not going to last very long because you have so many customers who are unsatisfied doing things.
This way you’re, basically using drop shipping as a business model and, as you can probably tell this, is a pretty shitty and unreliable business model. The key distinction i’m trying to make here is that doing things this way using drop shipping as a business model.
It’s, just no longer viable, i think, probably for obvious reasons: yeah not really a viable business model. The thing is, though, while drop shipping is not viable as a business model, it is viable to do something else to illustrate.
Let me show you how we use drop shipping to build a seven-figure brand in 2020., so believe it or not. The way that we started out was actually doing this exact thing right here we built out a store use, aliexpress products got them up, got ads, running, started, testing, different things, different products, different ads, etc.
But then this is where it starts to get different. As soon as we got things working here, we transitioned to doing something else. After about two weeks of running the store successfully and getting sales in it being profitable, we switched the way we did fulfillment from doing this right here to having an agent in china and that agent would ship orders directly to our customers, and it was a little Bit better shipping times a little bit faster, the packaging wasn’t as shitty, but still with this, our customers are kind of like ant.
The shipping times are still pretty long a couple weeks. Packaging’s, not great, and overall they’re just like eh. They’re, not sad, but they’re, not exactly super satisfied either. This right here is the stage that some drop shippers might get to.
But there’s, another stage after this that’s, really really important, because what we did after this was switched to a different fulfillment model about a month after we started fulfilling it through this agent.
Here we placed a bulk order and shipped it to the us. So now we are shipping from the us to our customers with about three to seven day shipping times with us. Fulfillment customers get their orders fast.
The packaging isn’t super shitty and overall they are much more satisfied with their experience. We got a bunch of happy faces over here. On top of that. Another really important thing is our facebook feedback score also remained solid, more smiley faces from here.
All of our customers are happy. Everything is working well and now we have room to scale into something that’s, really big and sustainable, and i think it’s really important to keep in mind that this right here, ultimately is the goal i don’T know about you guys, but my goal in doing e-commerce is to make enough money to be able to support myself full-time, be able to live off of it, not work a job and uh.
Just live a nice lifestyle. You know be able to make my own schedule do what i want during the day whatever now with that in mind, this is really right here. What the end result is us fulfillment right to the customer, happy customers, everything’s happy.
So if we wanted to, we could do this right off the bat we could say you know what screw all of this over here and we’re. Not even going to do this. We’re, not even going to worry about any of this. We’re just going to go straight to this and everything’s, going to be all good.
The thing with that, though, is that’s, not really the smartest strategy. If we want to do this right off the bat, then we have to order product in bulk. We got to get a lot of product. These are just little products.
You know just a lot of product. We have to order a lot of inventory to be able to do this. Ordering a lot of inventory is very expensive costs. A lot of money doing this is extremely extremely risky. If you have not already validated your idea, if you don’t know whether or not people are gonna buy your product and you go and order say a hundred or a thousand units of that product that is extremely risky.
You need to validate your ideas first, and that is exactly what drop shipping is for if we zoom out a little bit here – and we go back to this strategy with this strategy here, this doesn’t require a lot of money up front because We don’t have to order inventory to start testing products, but, as we mentioned there’s also a lot of downsides here.
Customers are not going to be happy. Orders are going to take a while to get there. It’s, just kind of a show, so the key part here is and why. I think this is really the only way to do drop shipping that actually makes sense.
We want to use drop shipping to validate our ideas up front so that we don’t have to spend a whole lot of money, but then, as fast as possible transition from doing this over here to doing this over here.
That way, our customers are actually gonna have a good experience. They’re gonna be happy, they’re gonna be likely to buy again, and our business is not very likely to crumble. Of course, there are still downsides with this strategy here in these beginning stages, when you’re fulfilling from aliexpress, you are still going to have unsatisfied customers, but the good thing is it’s, only a really small number.
It’s, not gonna be like it is up here where, if this is what you’re doing all the time you’re gonna have a lot of unhappy customers with this. We only have a few, and that is why, before we transition to us fulfillment and we’re still using this strategy or even this strategy, we do not scale up our facebook ads to more than about a hundred dollars a day.
That is like the max doing things. This way helps prevent issues with the facebook feedback score and overall it just makes it so that all the issues from drop shipping all these things that make people go like this.
It really minimizes all of these issues, so not that this is a coherent thing or anything, but i’ll. Give you a second to take a look at this. If you want to me in 2021, shipping is a necessary evil. It’s, not ideal, but the upsides far outweigh the downsides.
When you do it like this, if you can use drop shipping to validate your ideas, you can start something from scratch for very little money and with very little upfront risk and then over time, and ideally over as little time as possible.
Again, you want to do this as fast as you possibly can transition from aliexpress from fulfilling from china to fulfilling from the us and over time improve that customer experience gradually so that you then have a strong enough foundation in your business to be able to scale Into big money territory with the way things are changing and all of these new things that are happening in the ecomm and drop shipping space.
This is really the only way to drop ship that makes sense going forward. Obviously, there are some intricacies here: it’s, a lot easier to just fulfill from aliexpress than it is to find a drop shipping agent than it is to get a bulk order, place and use a fulfillment center in the us.
But the cool part is: if you need help with this, then we might be able to help those of you who watch all. My videos will know that me and my partner scotty own, a product sourcing business where we source product from china for clients.
If you have something that’s working and you’re ready to place a bulk order and get this process going, then we can probably help you with that. Not only can we actually source product for you from china, but we can also hook you up with one of our fulfillment centers in the u.
s, so it’s kind of like a done-for-you type thing. If that’s, something you might be interested then hit my partner scotty up on skype, i’ll. Put his skype address up here on screen. Send him a message saying sourcing: he’ll, get some info from you and we can go from there whatever you do, though, guys please do not do the traditional form of drop shipping over a long period of time or at a decent level of Scale it’s, just not sustainable, and it’s going to cause you a lot more hassles than it is rewards.
What i’ve laid out for you in this video, is exactly our strategy when we start new stores. This is exactly what we do. We start with aliexpress kind of deal with the issues and downsides of it at the beginning and then transition to something much more sustainable.
That provides a much better customer experience as soon as we possibly can. If you want some general guidelines on when it makes sense to do this, i would say that if you’ve been running, something that is consistently profitable every single day for over two or three weeks.
That is when i think it makes sense. Obviously it’s kind of situational. It depends on your results and your risk tolerance and how much money you have saved up, but that is kind of how i like to think about it.
If you enjoy this video, do that you know yeah, you know what i’m. You know what i’m gonna, say you. You already know you already know right. You know the like and the comment and the subscribe. Yeah yeah yeah, you know it, you know you know yeah, please do that.
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