The Dropship Unlocked Podcast

Everything We Know About Dropshipping in 48 Minutes (Episode 93)

• Lewis Smith & James Eardley • Season 1 • Episode 93

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📞 Ready to Take the Next Step? https://dropshipunlocked.com/training-watch-apply?el=podcast-93-everything-we-know-about-dropshipping

🗣In this episode, we’re talking about everything we know with our combined 10+ years of experience dropshipping.

We provide a comprehensive overview of high-ticket dropshipping, covering essential aspects from mindset and niche selection to store building, supplier relationships, PPC strategies, and achieving financial freedom.

👉 Prefer to watch this on Youtube? Check it out here  ➡️ https://youtu.be/sal24pUMigg

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Topics Discussed:

★ High-Ticket Dropshipping Basics: Higher profit margins with premium products. Better customer satisfaction through local suppliers. Sustainable business growth through brand building.

★ Initial Steps for Starting a Dropshipping Business: Mindset preparation and setting realistic goals. Opening a business bank account. Setting up essential tools and resources.

★ Choosing a Profitable Niche: Focusing on average core price, customer demand, and trends. Validating suppliers for quality and reliability. Making data-driven decisions to avoid emotional choices.

★ Building a Professional Store: Ensuring a clean, visually appealing design. Creating effective product descriptions and high-quality images. Setting up strong email marketing sequences.

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Links and Resources Mentioned:

Pick up a copy of Lewis’ book: https://htabook.com 

Get Shopify for £1 a month for 3 months: https://www.dropshipunlocked.com/shopify 

Get a free trial with a professional phone line: https://www.dropshipunlocked.com/circle 

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Key Takeaways:

★ Supplier Relationships: Strong supplier relationships ensure reliability and better deals. Customising your pitch to each supplier increases your chances of success.

★ PPC Advertising: Master Google Ads, set up correct conversion tracking, and use remarketing strategies to maximise ROI and re-engage visitors.

★ Daily Operations: Use tools like Gmail, Trello, and Hubstaff to streamline tasks and stay organised. Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) to ensure business growth.

★ Success Stories: Examples from the community include significant sales and rapid growth, highlighting the effectiveness of the high-ticket dropshipping model.

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★★★Dropship Unlocked - Lewis Smith★★★

🌏Watch Our Free Training ➽ https://www.dropshipunlocked.com/training?el=podcast-93-everything-we-know-about-dropshipping

So what we've done is just reverse engineer the whole process so that you never encounter one of those pitfalls later, because you were aware of them from day one. But what we want to try and do is condense so you understand everything that we teach into one episode. The excitement of seeing such a significant amount of profit from one transaction was incredible. So instead of going through that pain, it's all about teaching you how to get to profitable as quickly as possible. And so we've noticed over time, there are some initial foundational steps that you have to get right in order for everything else to work down the line. Now welcome to the dropship unlocked Podcast. I'm Lewis Smith, the founder of dropship unlocked, and with me is our client success coach. James Eardley, now, when we're not recording the podcast episodes, we're running our own e commerce businesses and helping aspiring entrepreneurs launch their own high ticket drop shipping businesses keen to build your own six or even seven figure business, my book The home turf advantage is your blueprint for launching a profitable online store. Grab your copy@htabook.com today, and let's get you started. Now, sit back, relax, and let's unlock your potential with the drop ship unlocked Podcast. Today, we're going to be doing something a little bit different on the podcast, so we're going to try to condense everything that we teach at dropship unlocked into this single episode. So this is hopefully going to be one of your one stop guides to finding out about high ticket, drop shipping, Shopify, Google ads, and, crucially, strategies to create financial freedom through E commerce. Yeah, it's a lot to cram into one episode, but we're going to do our utmost to try and deliver so that hopefully by the end of today's episode, you'll have a really comprehensive overview of the entire home turf advantage model, how our master class program works, right from the foundational principles that it's built on through to some of the more advanced strategies and tactics that we can deploy as we're building these businesses. So we'll be covering everything from mindset to niche selection. How do you select the products that you want to sell? Building out your website, your store, design, supplier, signing relationships with suppliers and advertising, how you actually bring traffic to your store, so PPC, or pay per click mastery, as we call it. And then finally, the daily operation, so how you run your store once it's up and running, to ensure that it remains a lifestyle business for you and gives you back freedom over your time and location Exactly. So 1000s of people have been through this system and been taught by you and myself, Lewis with the home serve advantage, and we've taught this through hours of content on the podcast. We've got hours of content in the master class program and video content, but what we want to try and do is condense so you understand everything that we teach into one episode. So if you do want to build financial freedom for yourself through E commerce or through online business, then this is a great place to start. So Lewis, let's kick things off with the basics. Firstly, what is drop shipping and how does high ticket drop shipping differ from the traditional model? Sure. So high ticket drop shipping, as it's called, focuses on premium products, which means that each sale that you make brings you in way more profit than with the traditional cheap products from China model that you'll see flaunted around all over the internet. I remember when I made my first high ticket sale after dabbling in the low ticket, low priced goods world, you know, selling products that were like 20 pounds for barely any profit, once all of the advertising and taxes and everything ate up the remaining profit, I remember making that first high ticket sale, which was for several 100 pounds, like six 700 pounds, I think it was. And just the excitement of seeing such a significant amount of profit from one transaction was incredible. And that feeling of, oh, this is what they mean when they say work smart, not hard, because it would have taken me the same amount of effort to upload and prepare and run ads to a product that was 20 pounds as one that was 600 and whatever, 70 pounds. And I realized, Oh, this is kind of like selling luxury cars instead of budget vehicles, but each sale that I make brings in so much profit that it means that the volume of sales that I have to make is so much lower to hit my target monthly income and replace my salary at the time my income. So the other benefits that come from this are obviously the better customer satisfaction as well. When you're working with a local suppliers, we advise working with suppliers in the market where your customers are living. So for us, it's in the UK, and ensuring that products don't have to cross borders, that everything's there, it's ready, can be easily delivered with fast next day delivery. It just ensures a much better buying experience. Because you've got better quality control, because the suppliers in the UK have usually inspected the products and quality assured them to ensure that your customers are going to be happy when the product arrives with them. And it just gives you a nice sustainable business model with sustainable growth over the long term, if you build a brand around high ticket items that you know are in consistent demand that you know aren't based on a trend, and we'll go into niche selection later, it just ensures long term success without having to make 1000s of low ticket sales and force your customers to wait for 30 days and have a bad buying experience. So in a nutshell, that's the home turf advantage, exactly. And we've tried both different types of drop shipping, Louis, I know we both failed with that low ticket idea of drop shipping, which is probably the first thing that people think of when they hear the term drop shipping, is they understand the concept of selling someone else's products on your own website and taking a margin between how much your customer pays and how much you pay to your supplier. And that comes with so many benefits, but it's crucial the type of drop shipping that we teach is completely different from this traditional drop shipping, apart from the name, there's really not that many similarities because of the different type products that will sell, the different way that we market the products, the different way that we interact with customers. And it is way away from the traditional drop shipping business model, but it still has those core benefits of drop shipping, which is not needing massive upfront capital to buy stock, not needing to risk lots of money in buying that stock, not needing to risk lots of time and effort to get these businesses up and running. And you can do it all from a laptop, all online. And that's the reason why we do drop shipping, and why we teach it to so many people. So if people are interested in starting the Drop Shipping that we teach, what would you say are the first steps that someone should take when starting a drop shipping business? Yes, as you mentioned, we've helped hundreds, if not 1000s, of people start these businesses, and so we've noticed over time, there are some initial foundational steps that you have to get right in order for everything else to work down the line downstream of it. So you've got to make sure that the foundations are in place first, and the foundations that we see time and time again coming up later. So we want to address these early are. And it sounds cliche, but it's mindset preparation, you know, really making sure that you're building on a solid entrepreneurial mindset. And I'll explain a bit about that in a moment. The other things would be formalizing the business, so that you actually have a business, rather than it just being you. You know that is the business, and then just setting up all the essentials as well. And we'll run through that. But I think if I put myself back in the mindset of an employee, which I was for 10 years before starting my own e commerce business, the moment that I decided that I was ready to leave my nine to five job and fully commit to e commerce and drop shipping. I remember that feeling of the excitement, that feeling of fear, that that, I guess the fear comes from the level of ownership that you know you now have to take over your business because the buck stops with you, which is both a blessing and a curse. It's a great thing, because it gives you control, autonomy. You can do what you want with the business. It's yours to run, but also, there's nowhere to hide. There's no one to blame. So preparing your mindset for that is really important, and establishing a clear vision at the beginning of what why you're doing what you're doing. Why is it important for you to build a business that creates that time and location freedom, what specifically will you use it to achieve and do in your life? Because that's the thing that will carry you through those annoying, early, frustrating days of things going wrong and stuff breaking and stuff, you know, technological frustrations that we'll all encounter with an online business and also setting realistic goals, making sure that you're not saying, you know, I want 5 million pounds in sales in my first couple of months, because very unlikely to happen. Using this model, we're not claiming that it will happen. We we our goal with this is to ensure that you create a business that can replace your existing income. Now, if you want to then scale it beyond that, that absolutely can happen, but the initial step is to help people escape from the shackles of the nine to five. So think of it like mapping out your journey on a trip before you start driving. We don't just suddenly drive, put off it down 100 miles an hour, but not have a clue where we're going. We need to know roughly, like, well, where, where's the road that we're trying to get to leading. And so that's the first thing, getting the mindset right. And we have a whole process inside week one of our masterclass program, guiding you through how that works, so that by the end of that, you are confident you embody the mind of an entrepreneur, and you feel really confident in your ability to go out and deliver on that vision, the next is registering your limited company. So this is actually one of the foundational steps that a lot of people miss, because they think that maybe they don't need to do it. I'll do I'll start a company later. But what we find is, later on, if you don't have a company, there's, there's kind of a level of, like legitimacy and protection missing, um, if you don't have it. So we just. Getting your limited company set up from the outset, if you're in the UK, or if you're running a business in the UK. And so we have cheat sheets inside our program that have step by step tutorial videos guiding you through, answering all the questions, showing you exactly how to do it. And so yeah, once you have that limited company, the other thing you can do is separate your finances. You shouldn't be using your personal finances to run a business, you should make sure that the business has its own finances in place. So that your finances are separate from your business. Makes it much easier to calculate profitability and come tax return season, everything's much simpler. So setting up a business bank account, gathering all of the necessary tools, making sure everything's set up and integrated. And I think once you've done that, you feel like you're ready to jump in and tackle the world of entrepreneurship. So those are the important foundational steps, absolutely crucial, and it's a huge part of what we teach at dropship unlocked. I remember when I joined the master class few years ago, and I was surprised by the level of detail about the mindset that we need to have involved, and what we've talked about there, it is so crucial to have that positive frame of mind while going into this and having a really clear vision of what success will be for you, so that you inevitably get there, because you can overcome all of the obstacles. Because I think What's crucial is if, if you've got a weak desire, then you'll achieve weak results. If you've got a really strong desire to achieve something, then that's when you see the strong results. It's completely correlated. To how much of a desire you have to achieve something, and that's crucial in what we teach before we go into doing anything. Then one you've got, once you've got that mindset, limited company, set up business, bank account, and we're ready to do some work, ready to go to business and ready to make some money. So probably one of the biggest questions we ever get asked Lewis is, what product should I sell? Because that's they've decided they love the idea of drop shipping. They're ready to succeed, but they just don't know where to start. What should I even sell? So it becomes a huge part of what we teach choosing a profitable niche. So how do you think somebody should go about choosing a profitable niche? Well, with niche selection or product selection, we've in the same way as we did with mindset and building your business and registering your company, we've tried to reverse engineer it, so we've seen a lot of businesses succeed and some fail as well. So we know the reasons, the common reasons, and the pitfalls that people fall into later in the journey. So one of the benefits of education like this and mentorship is that we can help you avoid those pitfalls right from the start, rather than allowing you to get six months into your journey only to find out through trial and error that all the niche you picked isn't viable or won't work long term because of XYZ reason. So some of the things that we do, and we have a nine step niche validation criteria system, where it's very, very clear that we guide you through in every single video, step by step, over the shoulder, tutorial on how to do this. But it would be things like focusing on on average or price for your product group. So that might be, and if you were to look at the search results of the products that you're considering selling what's the average, the mean, core price of those products, not the price of the cheapest one or the most expensive one. Those are the outliers. But what's the kind of typical value of one of those products? Because we want to ensure that our average order value is nice and high, ideally above 300 ideally above 500 pounds, if we can, we've got people in our program who have average order values beyond the 1000 pounds, right? So, and that's for one single sale, and it's just because they chose wisely with the niche. You know, they they have to do less work or the same work in order to make way more profit than the next person who's got an average order value of 20 pounds or 50 pounds. And so that's one of nine criteria. Another few might be things like customer demand. How often are the products, the niche that you're looking to go into, being searched for by customers in the market that you're considering going into? We can get access to this data. We can actually see how many times some people, on average, searched in the market, so in the UK that we're selling in per month, the kind of parent level keyword for the products that we're considering selling. So that's another system. If it's if it's too low, we want to exclude those products, or maybe we just want to expand the niche so that it's not just that group of products, but it's that and maybe something else, we would talk about going up to, like, a level two niche and expanding out. And the next thing would be like trends and seasonality and supplier validation, making sure that the suppliers in the niche already are happy to drop ship. These are all things that we see later on. In the past, we've seen members get to that point and then stumble and be like, you know, it's only popular in the summer or the winter or ah, and the suppliers just don't seem to want to drop shit. So what we've done is just reverse engineer the whole process so that you never encounter one of those pitfalls later, because you were aware of them from day one. That's the benefit of this. It saves you time, it saves you money and lots of expensive. Of trial and error and mistakes. So I did a huge amount of extensive research to find the niches that I decided to enter with my high ticket drop shipping businesses. I know you will have done too, James, and I think when you're analyzing those trends and trying to look for a stable group of products, we're not looking for something that's trending. We're not looking for, you know, the next cool thing that goes spikes up in trends because of some viral concept on Tiktok, and then the next month is gone. We're looking for something that's going to be here in five, 610, years, so that we have a stable, cash flowing business that makes sales regardless of the environment. So it's about making those data driven decisions and avoiding the trap of all being led by your emotions. That's what we want to avoid. We want to make sure that we're making decisions based on data, trying to take emotion out of it, but then you could overlay emotion afterwards. You could look at your data driven finalist ideas and then say, Okay, which of these am I passionate about? Which do I want to run the business about? Because that that is important. But yeah, if we can focus on average core price, on customer demand, or trends on seasonality, on brand dominance. You know, ensuring that we're not trying to go after niches that are dominated by global brands like Sony and apple and LG. Like those brands are unlikely to supply you as a first time limited company just starting out in business. So go for a niche where the brands are much smaller and they're more than willing to partner with smaller retailers like us. And then the most important bit really about niche selection is ensuring that the suppliers meet your standards for quality reliability, but also making sure that they are already happy to drop ship. That's one of the key ingredients to making this all work. And so it's similar to, you know, if you're vetting candidates for an important job, if you've got lots of applicants coming in, you'll have lots of suppliers that you see, but you want to find the ones that are already happy to do this and to forward orders out without you having to hold stock, because later, when you're making sales, that's going to be really important to making this whole model come to life. Yeah, it's a huge part of what we teach Lewis, and the reason why we teach it in that way is because of the mistakes that you made initially, and the mistakes that I made was good about this in the complete wrong way. So I initially tried to pick a product purely based on what I could source and what I thought would be popular in my own mind. And what that led to was spending far too much on Facebook ads, not making any sales of these products because I hadn't chosen the products to sell based on data. So then I was, you know, could see myself as a failure, and didn't think I was going anywhere with that business, and had to restart all over again. So instead of going through that pain, it's all about teaching you how to get to profitable as quickly as possible. And so by going through that exact process that Lewis just outlined and checking all of the different criteria are met, and often we can just do that with Google, then by the time you get through the end of that process, then you've got a pro a product that you can guarantee success with, because you can see it already working elsewhere. So once you've chosen that product, we've done that based on data, we're ready to build a store around it. How should somebody actually go about building a website that's going to sell these products for them? Yep, so building a professional store, as we call it, involves, and you'll want a clean design. You don't want it to look too busy, something that has effective product descriptions, so it sells the products through text and maybe video and images as well, through to customers and a strong email marketing setup as well. So we'll go through how we link all that together. But I know that designing my first store was a kind of a long, arduous process, and I felt like I gotta, it's got to be perfect. I've got to, I've got to do it. And I kind of just, at one point, said it for now, it's good enough. And I just set the ad campaigns live, and I started making sales pretty much straight away. And I realized I could have probably started running ads weeks ago, and there's so much profit I've missed out on because I was so, um, striving for perfection in that process. So now we call it a minimum viable store, MVS, and it's a concept that I talk about that's similar to the concept of MVP, minimum viable products. We want the thing that looks clean, trustworthy, simple enough, but no frills, no bells and whistles, for now, because the purpose of it is initially just to start making sales. Once we've got those sales coming in, we can reinvest some of the profits from those sales to make the store 10 times better by hiring expert designers on sites like Upwork who are way better at store design than I'll probably ever be. And that's okay, because I know my strengths as a business owner, but I also know that there are people out there that are just experts at this stuff, and I'd much rather have them spend half a day or a day doing it than me spend weeks trying to make it look perfect and still get nowhere near what they could achieve. So I think realizing the impact of high quality product images and descriptions on customer trust was key. Things like trust badges, these are all things that we'd guide you through inside week three of our program, how to set up your store in a way that ticks. All the boxes for for customers, and actually, we do have a literal checklist of box ticking exercise before you go live with your store, of all of the common mistakes over the hundreds of stores that we've reviewed in dropship unlocked that people got wrong or people missed, and so we've just put all of those into a list so that when you go through it before you go live, you can be sure you've met 99% of the requirements, and you'll start making sales because the store is good enough to do that. Then it's things slightly more advanced tactics, like implementing email marketing sequences and seeing the boost in customer engagement and sales that comes from email. So we use a system called Klaviyo that allows us to retarget customers who came to our site, maybe entered their email address in a pop up, or maybe they abandoned their basket at checkout, and then we can retarget them. And I'm sure you've received those types of emails as a customer as well, where still says, come back, use this discount code. Don't leave yet. You know, it's that kind of marketing. It's maybe it's corny and cheesy, and you'll say it doesn't work on you, but it definitely works on the wider population of customers, so we use it. The other thing is ensuring that your store is visually appealing and easy to navigate. I think people over complicate it, sometimes that it actually becomes quite convoluted and complex, and that is just the enemy of a high converting store. You want it to build trust and be very simple and straightforward. And actually, the way we run ads, and we'll talk about this, and when we go through the advertising, is that we're actually sending customers, most of the time directly to the product page anyway. So they're not even going to the homepage, they're not even seeing the collection page. They're going straight to the product page. And usually they're buying or not buying from there. And so, yeah, it's, it's really good on that product page. If you can have really high quality images, really detailed, well written products descriptions, the trust symbols that you need to build that trust and encourage purchases, then you know, it's the 8020 of store design. If you can do 80% of that, then you're going to get the important 20% of results, and that's that's the important part for us. It's making profit from sales so we can reinvest it later and improve it exactly. So it's all about going live and launching quickly with the Shopify store. When we see a lot of people get this wrong when they try and build a Shopify store that's too perfect from the very start, and it all that does is just hold them back from finding out how profitable they can be, and they spend too much time before they launch. It common startup philosophy now to actually start with a minimum viable product, as we do with the store build, which just means that we can get to market, show our products in front of customers as soon as possible, start getting revenue back into the business, and learn how we can improve as quickly as possible. So big part of what we teach now, once you've got a store built, one of the reasons we do that so early, before we even sign suppliers, is so that we have a store to show to suppliers when it's time to sign them. So these are the suppliers that will provide the products to our customers. So supplier relationships are obviously important, and signing the right suppliers is crucial. So how would you teach people? How would you recommend for people to sign their first drop shipping suppliers? We always prefer to do it as close to the old fashioned in person way as possible. Now, the closest thing you can probably get to that is maybe like a zoom or a Google meet call and but the next closest is, and probably more accessible, is just a phone call. So that's typically where we start. We try and get on the phone with decision makers. Strong supplier relationships are going to be crucial for your stores, reliability and growth over time, though, that's what you want. You want a really good supplier sign up. We call them premium suppliers, and so signing your first premium supplier might require a little bit of preparation, bit of research, bit of persistence. Maybe, if you can't get past the initial gatekeeper, the person the receptionist that keeps saying, you know, nope, sorry, it's not available at the moment. Or we can't, she can't take any calls at the moment. Like, okay, I'll try again on Monday. You know, you keep trying until you get through to that person. Maybe go and see them in person. You know, heaven forbid, do it the old fashioned way and actually go and see the the person eye to eye, and I understand, like I joke, but if you haven't been in a role like that before, in your job, there is a level of anxiety and nervousness and kind of excitement as well of making those first few supplier relationships and introductions and even the calls that you can kind of feel your heart pounding you're about to make supplier calls, but There's nothing better than the feeling of successfully signing them once you you realize, oh, they're just a human running a business that's looking to also make money. They that's fantastic, like, I've signed them, um, I never have to have that conversation with them again, because now they're on board. I've got the contract signed, and they can deliver products and make us hundreds of 1000s of pounds, if not millions of pounds in sales over the coming years, all because of one phone call where my heart was being a little bit faster than usual. You know, when you put it into perspective, it's actually just a minor activity that you need to do, but it's such a high leverage activity, it's really one of the most important bits. So, yeah, it's fantastic. The momentum that you'll gain as well in comm. Confidence after signing your first suppliers. I know that when I first signed my my very first supplier, I was thinking, this is incredible. I'm going to do another one. And I wanted to call the others straight away, because I was kind of on a high of realizing I can do this. I've got the belief. And so if, if I was going to give a few tips for this, it would be, do your research. You know, have a professional pitch. We actually give you a script that is proven time and time again to impress and build trust in potential suppliers so that you don't say the wrong thing. And over time, you'll find that when you do build these great supplier relationships, I actually had a call from one of our top suppliers yesterday, offering us like an exclusive deal that he's not offering to other retailers, and that's because we've worked with them for years, and they realize that we are one of their biggest sources of revenue, and so they're not going to their other retailers. They come to us first with these deals, and we can then pass those deals onto customers and generate a lot more revenue because of it. So that's the kind of thing that comes from getting these premium suppliers signed up and building that trust with them early. The other thing is, don't just use a script verbatim and just read it out like a robot. Customize your outreach. Have a bit of small talk with them. Chat about things that you know, that you have in common, or compliment them on their brand, their products. Ask about what they're up to, go and see them if you can have a coffee like they are, just human. And ultimately, people want to deal with people. People buy from people, as they say, so your chances of succeeding to sign that supplier are much higher if you can, you know, tailor your CV for each job application, you know, like you would have done in the working world, that ultimately, once you have that supplier signed, they can be a consistent source of revenue, and you a source of revenue for them as well. Remember, you're not, it's not them doing you a favor. It's a partnership. They will make a lot more money because of saying yes to you than they would have done if they had not. So remember, it's a two way street, and you should back yourself to know that you're bringing something significant to the table as well. Exactly. It's a 5050 partnership. And if anything, I think the further through the relationship you go with your supplier, you end up almost providing even more to the relationship than they do, because you're the one that's bringing all the sales, looking after all the customers, and doing that on a consistent basis. And you can see how it's such a fantastic deal to suppliers. But when we first start, I know I remember those nerves about calling suppliers and but I flipped that on on its head, and by the time I had finished and signed my first four or five suppliers, it actually became one of my favorite parts of the program, calling suppliers, because of that buzz that you get after you sign a supplier, there's real thrill and a real sense of achievement after you sign every supplier that says yes, but yeah, following a script, making it clear why you're calling them in the first place. So saying, Hello, my name is James. I'm looking to speak to somebody about opening up a retailer account, making it clear that you're confident and that you'd like to be a retailer for their business. And that can really make a big difference. And have a smile on your face when you're saying it as well. And you compare that with going into those phone calls, pick up the phone and saying, Hi, I'm James. Can I sell your products? It's not going to work. You've got to. There is a way to do it, but it's about having a smile on your face be a professional. And in the end, it actually becomes one of the most enjoyable parts of signing, signing building a business, is signing those suppliers. And also, just want to say, as well, we don't need to make it into such a huge thing. It's easy to do that before you sign suppliers, but actually, once you've signed a few and you realize there's just a person on the other end of the other end of the phone that wants to make more sales of their business. It's actually you realize it's quite an easy job, really, in reality, once you know what to say. So now we've got suppliers on board. We've built a store. We know which niche we're going to operate in. It's now time to start making some sales. So how do we get traffic? How do we get website visitors onto our site so that we can start to generate sales for the business. Yep. So this week has intentionally been put as Week Five inside our dropship unlocked master class for a reason. And you know the old expression, build it and they shall come. It's not true of high ticket drop shipping. Unfortunately, you build an amazing store. But then there's just cricket. You know, no one, no one will find your store. If you're not actively doing something to drive traffic to it, you might find that an occasional customer stumbles in and from a you know, page three on Google search results and finds you. But unless you're proactively advertising or putting efforts into search engine optimization, that's not how you're going to grow the business. So what we typically do, and this, again, is another reason why we set up the business as a high ticket drop shipping business from the beginning, so that we make a good chunk of several 100 pounds, usually in profit on every single sale. Because of that amount of profit that we have to play with on every sale that we make, we can afford to run ads and be at the top of Google to outrank all of the other search results and the other retailers to acquire that sale and still have profit remaining in the order. So you can't do that if you're selling 520 pound product. You have to try and make your sale on the repeat purchases. So you actually, usually you're if you're running out. So you'll make a loss on the first, maybe even second sale when you're doing it that way, much slimmer margins, much harder to make it work. So we've built in buffer for this. So when it comes to setting up advertising, we use what's called Pay Per Click advert, so that's PPC abbreviated, and it involves laying a really strong foundation. So something that we use more than any other ad platform is Google ads. Now the reason for that is because the customers that are most likely to buy these types of high ticket products are usually searching for them in the first place. Is much cheaper to just serve an ad in front of a customer who's already looking and thinking about buying a type of product than it is to show an ad on social media to try and pull someone off the platform, convince them that they might want the thing and then sell to them. Much harder to do, much more expensive. So we prioritize our focus and efforts in Google ads. And I made a lot of mistakes early on. The trial and error of setting up my first Google ad campaigns and try to pour money into it and optimize things and tweak it. And actually at one point I realized, I think I'm doing everything right, but what's going on? Why can't I make sales? And realizing it wasn't an ADS problem, it was a supplier problem that was earlier on in the process. So hopefully you see now the order of the activities that we've done here. We've got the suppliers, the premium suppliers, we know they're in demand because of week two, the niche research that we did, therefore, when it comes to running ads, we're not going to run ads and then be like, Why is no one buying? Because we know the suppliers are popular. We already validated, making sure that we set up our ad campaigns and optimizing them effectively, making sure we're getting a good return on ad spend or row as we have our calculator so you can calculate your different return on ad spend by brand inside the master cast cheat sheets, and then using remarketing strategies as well to re engage visitors and remind them that if they left the store that then they keep seeing your ads pop up all over the internet and different apps and over social media to come back, because there's a special deal that you can offer them that type of stuff psychologically brings your brand to front of mind in the consumer, and they will eventually come back, or they're way more likely to. So in terms of the actual steps, we set up the accounts, the ad accounts, we set up the conversion tracking so that we can correctly measure and successfully attribute sales that come through back to which ads they came from, and will know what's working and what's not, setting up the different campaign types. So like performance, Max campaigns, search, text, ad campaigns, retargeting campaigns, and then we'll use remarketing on other platforms as well, like social media platforms, like meta so Facebook and Instagram to give your brand visibility across other platforms as well, so that in your customer's mind, they're thinking, wow, this company everywhere. They must be big, they must be legitimate, they must be popular. But it's because they visited our site in the first place. We pixeled them, and now we can show ads across the different platforms. So again, this stuff really works. And I'm sure you you can think of personal experiences where this stuff's worked on you as well. Yeah, I mean frequently, myself, I often search for things on Google if I know that I'm in the market to buy a new product, and that's where you then get drawn onto the websites that have the ads at the top or doing well at ranking highly in the organic search results. Also when you're browsing Instagram, and how often do get called back by a website that you've been browsing the same day? And I used to think this sort of marketing was reserved for the huge companies of the world with millions of pounds, with a marketing budget they could do until I got into it myself and realized that actually, within a few days of setting up your accounts and making sure that you have products in your store and suppliers that we've signed already so all of the things that we've talked about to get us to the to get us to this stage have been done, and within a few days, you can have ads running on the first page of Google so that you're showing your products in front of people who are in the market to buy the products that you're selling. And it can be done very, very quickly, as long as you have the right campaign set up and the right suppliers signed in the first place. So it's exciting to know that it is accessible to us. Even though we haven't got millions of pounds to spend on our marketing campaigns, we can be profitable from a very early stage of running these campaigns as well. So Louis, now that we have sales coming in, we've got ads running. We've done all this work to get to this stage where we've got money coming into the business. What is the end goal of all of these efforts in the first place? Yeah, well, this might differ depending on who you are and what goals you came into the dropship unlocked master class with. For me, it was to build a lifestyle business. It was to build a business that gave me freedom to be with my family, my friends, to go on holidays, to not have to worry about where my income comes from, because it's set up in a way that is independent of my time and input. Once I've front loaded the work and eventually brought in a team to do the activities, it's not linked to my time, so I'm not trading my time for money anymore. So in order to make that happen for me and your goals might be different, you might want to build a billion pound e commerce Empire, and therefore might might be a bit of bit more. Personal input required and a bit more of a different strategy. But if you want to replace a good income and build a business that you could then build multiple of, if you wanted to to, like, triple, quadruple your income eventually, then the end goal is to be able to manage daily operations really efficiently, ideally independently of your time. Have it so that your key performance numbers or key performance indicators, KPIs, in your business, are monitored, maybe not necessarily by you, but by someone in the business. And then to automate as many tasks as you can, and then outsource the remaining tasks that require human involvement to somebody in your team, so like a virtual assistant, for example. So the first thing that we talk about is streamlining daily operations with tools like Gmail, for example. Inside Gmail there's lots of automations. You can do lots of labeling to manage an inbox, to ensure that everything has a place, everything's well managed. There's like color coordination systems so that when you hand it over to a virtual assistant, they can very quickly pick up the reins and continue managing your business without having to ask you questions. Then we use a service like Trello. There's a good one for managing like supplier invoicing. So some of our suppliers, once you're up and running with them, and you have a bit of trading history with them, they'll give you credit terms. So suppliers might, for example, we had a supplier call us the other day and say, Your Account set, I think was like 70,000 we need payment on the account because we've hit our I think we'd exceed it. I think we might have had a 60,000 pound credit limit with them, and we went 10,000 over. So they needed payment. So my job is once every week, or once every couple of weeks, I'll just log into the online banking app, make a transfer to the supplier, and then move a card over on Trello and say, done. And that's it. You know, that's the bit that I have to do. The rest of it happens automatically or by a team member. So that's a really good way to manage like supplier invoices and bookkeeping. Hub staff is a great tool as well to keep a team organized to assign the right projects and time tracking and things like that, if you've got a team of virtual assistants that you build out, and then just really making sure that you're monitoring the key performance metrics in your business, making sure that you can look at your business at a glance and know, yep, we're hitting our return on ad spend, or all that brand's underperforming. Or what's wrong with the website conversion rate has just dropped suddenly. Or why is our revenue versus ad spend down this month? You know, just seeing those numbers, you can quickly dive in and diagnose and then come back out again. You know, you're not in there every day, spending nine to five chains to your desk. You can go out and enjoy life experiences in that time. That was why I built the business in the first place. So delegating as many of those remaining tasks that you can't automate is going to be another thing. So bringing in a fantastic team member, and actually in week six, we give you the hiring template and job ad template for how I've hired virtual assistants in the past. So we take you through where we hire them, how we interview them, how we filter down the applicant to get someone that's incredible at running one of these stores for you, and then you can pay them a salary, and they can manage the store for you while it generates you profit wherever you are in the world. So that's the end goal. If you can get the business to that point, you will find that you've now got an income, but you haven't used up much more of your time than before you had the store, because you've built those systems. So now the question becomes, what do you do with that time? Do you want to create another business? Do you want to just duplicate the process several times over? Do you want to build a little portfolio of businesses? Do you want to reinvest in property? Do you want to build a different type of business, or do you just want to go and live the Tim Ferriss location independent lifestyle and experience some amazing things in life. So at that point, you've got so many options, and that's the end goal, and you get your control back. I know certainly when I went through this process, there was the upfront sacrifice, the upfront front loading of all the work to get the business in place, and then once you've built it, the end goal of it all is that you've got a system that brings in income so that you can be anywhere in the world, and that income is going to still come to still come in. And also it's allowed me to, you know, spend time coaching others through the dropship unlocked program. And I know it's the same for you. Leah, she had that time that that that opened up when she had the income taken care of with the business, so that you could then build dropship unlocked that was your next challenge and your next journey that you've been on since then to teach more and more people. And so the the results that you get after implementing everything in this video are unbelievable. I think it's it's easy to say that now, because I've been through that and I know what the the end results are, but there's been lots of other people as well who have seen success by following the program and by building drop shipping businesses with the high ticket model that we teach Lewis. Can you think about any that come to mind, some success stories that you'd like to share with us? Yeah, absolutely. So we've got a feature in our masterclass community where you can filter on posts in our community by topic type, and one of our labels for topics is celebrating success. So if I. Just open that up now and have a look. And click on celebrating success. We can see some of the recent posts that we've got. One from will here, who says biggest sale to date, 3190 pounds on a single sale, and 15,000 pounds in sales across the first three months of running ads. 15k in his first three months of running ads. And then Glenn said, what a buzz this is. I think just getting started. Loves the initial feeling of entrepreneurship. Julia said, three months running ads, 60 sales, with an average order value of 500 pounds, which equals over 30,000 pounds in sales. So amazing success story there from Julia, who's still pretty early on in her journey. Adam said, our largest order so far, 7000 pound order. So an incredible order that's remember, that's a single item. Imagine a 30% profit margin on a 7000 pound order that's all in one sale. That's one order you need to forward to one supplier, and then one product goes out to one customer. There's hardly any admin involved in that, and you probably made a month salary from one order. And then Kenneth posted biggest sale yet. And then a screenshot for a sale of 6790 pound. So just a few kind of, like snapshots there of what's popped up in our community when you filter on the celebrating success tab. But it just shows like, you don't need many, 7000 pound sales per month to replace a good income, right? And you might not be selling product. You know, Julia said her average order value was, what, 500 pounds. And she's made 30,000 pounds in sales in her first three months. So you know, you don't have to sell these really, really expensive products, but you absolutely can do as well, and either way works. No, it's amazing. It's so satisfying to look through that page of all the success and hear about the success people are having. Because, yeah, just inspirational. Every time you hear about it and read it or see it, because it's people from all different backgrounds, people from all different parts of the UK, even people from abroad as well, making great success with this business model. And it's inspiring to know, because oftentimes we know the background or the jobs that they're in at the time and the deep desire they've got to build successful online businesses. And it's so nice to see when when it all pays off, and they got these milestones that they share with us, then inside the community. So we've covered a lot today all the way from choosing a product and getting the mindset right at the start, all the way through to setting up your your your PPC, your pay per click advertising, and then talking about how the daily operations look as well. So all the way through, how we build a drop shipping store? So I think Lewis, we've done a decent job of condensing, creating a condensed version of the entire program. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think the key takeaway from today's conversation is to just start with a really strong foundation. Don't underestimate the mindset that is required to become an entrepreneur, because it's different from that nine to five, you show up to a desk and you get your paycheck, it's different, and you have to almost evolve into an entrepreneur. But if you're already there, then the next foundational step is choosing the right niche, choosing the right products. Beyond that is building a professional store, but not striving to be perfect before you launch, just getting it to that MVS standard so it can start making you profit and then continuously optimizing your marketing efforts over time. Then obviously beyond that, it's what do you do with all that spare time? Like you say for us, it was giving back. It was helping other people. I loved the different type of business with dropship unlocked, whereas a lot more hands on, it's a lot more involved, but it's a great use of time, and I find that very rewarding for you. It might be something else. It might be working with the charity. It might be traveling the world. It might be starting other businesses. There are so many things that you can do with that time that really is up to you to dictate your own journey. So for more detailed strategies on the discussions that we've had today, and if you check out episode 46 of the dropship unlocked podcast. That's episode 46 it's called nine things I wish I knew before starting drop shipping, and remember this episode is just the beginning. If you're ready to dive deeper for a comprehensive guide on drop shipping, pick up a copy of my book The home turf advantage to access that simply open up a web browser now and visit H T A book.com. Enjoying the podcast, we'd love to hear from you leave a comment or a review, and we might just feature it on an upcoming episode, also for detailed show notes and resources. Head to dropship unlock.com. Forward slash podcast. If you found value from any episode of this podcast, please take just 10 seconds to leave us a quick five star review on your podcast. App of choice, it helps us more than you could imagine. And who knows, you might just hear your comments on the show. Thanks for being part of our community. Your support helps us keep delivering a new episode. In every week. Now it's the part of the episode where we'll answer a question that we've had in from a listener. So remember, if you have a question and you'd like to ask that to either Lewis or myself, simply post your question in a YouTube comment beneath the YouTube video version of this episode. So this week, the question has come in from Sonia Moran. So thank you, Sonia, for your question she has asked. Hi Lewis, would you say this drop shipping is something anyone can start? I'm not very tech savvy, and I'm just starting out looking for another income. Okay, thank you for your question. Sonia, um, yeah, absolutely. Drop Shipping is something that anyone can start, even if you're not very tech savvy, the tools available to us all at such a low cost. Now make drop shipping accessible to pretty much everyone. Now, Shopify is the tool that we use to build our website. We use it to handle orders, receive payments. It's kind of a one stop shop. It's all there in one place. And Shopify is spending billions of dollars every year to make it more seamless for store owners to run their businesses as well. So every time you log into Shopify, they've made something easier, usually with their updates. So many of our members come from completely different backgrounds, with very little to no technical experience whatsoever, and they still find success. We've had members that are retirees or just about to retire, who have very little technical experience. See this, this business model through to up and running and getting sales ex trades people as well, who went from working on like a building site to running a business like this, a huge transition. Then we've got, like nurses, teachers, all kinds of backgrounds, of people who've managed to set up their business following our step by step mentorship program, despite their initial doubts. So the key, I think Sonia, is to have the right guidance and support, which we provide through our detailed, easy to follow training videos. You'll learn everything you need step by step in the right order of the right time, and obviously our community is always here to help you along the way as well. So that's one of the really important parts. If you're committed and you're willing to learn, you can definitely make it work. Exactly No, I couldn't agree more, Louis, and thank you, Sonia for your question. We'll now highlight a recent review that we've had in for the podcast as well, as I love doing this on the podcast, and a big thank you to rob 5896, which is your YouTube handle for sharing your thoughts in a recent YouTube comment. So Rob said, great podcast. More secret sauce. Very much appreciated. Thanks guys. Thank you so much for the review, Rob. We're really glad to hear that you've been enjoying the podcast. If you liked this episode, please leave us a review on Apple podcast or Spotify, or just drop a comment on our YouTube channel below this video, we might even read your comment or review in our next episode, giving you a shout out and showing everyone that you are a key supporter of the dropship unlocked community. Your feedback helps us make better content and reach more listeners. So thanks for being part of our journey. Thanks for joining us on this episode of the dropship unlocked podcast. We hope you're walking away with insights and inspiration to kickstart your E commerce journey. Grab a copy of my book, the home of turf advantage@htabook.com it's a distilled guide based on real experience to help you build your E commerce venture, don't forget to hit the subscribe button for more strategies and success stories. And if you like what you heard, a five star review would mean the world to us, and you might just get a shout out on an upcoming episode. And finally, thank you for deciding to spend your time with us today. We can't wait to bring you more insights on the next episode of the dropship unlocked podcast. You