The Dropship Unlocked Podcast

How We Built 7-Figure E-Commerce Businesses with Low Costs (Episode 113)

• Lewis Smith & James Eardley • Season 1 • Episode 113

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🗣In this episode, Lewis Smith and James Eardley share how they built 7-figure e-commerce businesses with minimal overhead costs. 

We break down how starting lean can lead to faster profitability and offer practical tips for anyone looking to start their own successful online business without massive upfront investments.

👉 Prefer to watch this on YouTube? Check it out here ➡️https://youtu.be/5YC24uW41Fk


Topics Discussed:

★ The Start-Up Process for Low-Cost E-Commerce: How to register your business and set up with minimal costs.
★ Choosing a Profitable Niche Without Expensive Market Research: How to use free methods to validate niches.
★ Building a Website on a Budget: Using Shopify’s basic plan for a professional-looking site at a low cost.
★ Managing Business Operations with Lean Costs: How to keep overheads low while setting up systems to automate and streamline operations.
★ Why E-Commerce Requires Less Cash than Traditional Retail: The flexibility of no physical inventory or warehousing.



Links and Resources Mentioned:

Key Takeaways:

★ Start Lean: You don’t need to go into debt or invest large sums of money to start a profitable business. With the right systems, you can get to profitability quickly.
★ E-Commerce is Cost-Efficient: Dropshipping and the lean business model help keep your costs low.
★ Focus on Essentials: Avoid getting distracted by unnecessary tools or investments. Test, iterate, and focus on scaling gradually.
★ Real-Life Success Stories: Hear about how Mason, Jarred, Suraj, and Neil have scaled their businesses.

Learn More:

➡️ When you're ready to start your own e-commerce business with low costs, head to https://dropshipunlocked.com/start for a clear path forward.


➡️ Subscribe to The Dropship Unlocked Podcast to stay up-to-date on the latest episodes, and leave a like to help others discover the show.


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I found that the key to making money quickly was to really keep overhead costs incredibly low. If you want to build a seven figure e commerce business, you just need to keep the cost down to an absolute minimum. There's no way I could have scaled so quickly if I was dragged down by ongoing fees. There's not many business models out there that allow you to generate a million pounds worth of sales with such a low ongoing investment. I think ongoing costs of businesses are not spoken about enough. So let's change that today. You up. 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 podcast episodes or running our own e commerce businesses, you'll find us helping aspiring entrepreneurs launch their own high ticket drop shipping stores. So if you're ready to build your own six or even seven figure online business, then head over to dropship unlocked.com forward slash, start now, sit back, relax and let's unlock your potential with the dropship unlocked podcast. Welcome back in today's episode, we're going to be taking a deep dive into something that every aspiring entrepreneur needs to know and should know, because it's all about how to build a business with low ongoing costs. Now, you might be thinking that a successful business requires massive upfront investments or taking on huge amounts of debt, but in reality, it is possible to start lean, keep your overheads very low consistently, and achieve profitability faster than you might imagine. But it's important that you have the right business model in place, so that's what we're going to talk about today. So Louis, we'll talk about the initial steps to actually get started with a business with low ongoing costs. How does somebody go from having an idea to launching a successful e commerce Store with minimal costs? Yeah, that's that's exactly. I mean, they say making sales is one thing, but keeping costs low is a minimum. It's not about what you make. Is about what you keep, and that's what actually makes you money. Now, the beauty of this business model is that we have designed it to get you profitable as quickly as possible by keeping those monthly overhead costs as incredibly lean in comparison to more traditional businesses, or even not traditional businesses, but just other types of E commerce businesses, you know, things like Fulfilled by Amazon, FBA, for example, where you're putting 10s of 1000s of pounds into stock, potentially to order Your first batch of units, and then you're having to pour any cash from sales back in to keep ahead of stock so you don't go out of stock. And you know, it can be a really expensive process. The setup process of this kind of business is very, very minimal in terms of costs. From the start, we always start off by registering a limited company, opening up a business bank account. There's actually a service that we've partnered with with tide bank that allow you to do both of those things for less than the cost of doing it through Companies House yourself. So if you head over to dropship, unlocked.com, forward slash company, you can actually get your limited company set up using their service for just I think it's 14 pounds, 99 so it's way cheaper than using Companies House, or if you already have your limited company, but you don't yet have your business bank account, go to dropship, unlocked.com, forward slash tide, and you get 50 pounds and one year of free bank transfers. So those are the foundations, the fundamentals. Tide is a great service. It's the one that we recommend, and then we turn our attention to choosing a niche. You'll have heard this term, I'm sure you know, we've got to make sure we select the right market of products to sell and the right types and group of products to sell. There's no need for those expensive market research agencies or market research softwares that you have to subscribe to. We use very simple, free methods to validate profitable niches. The thing I don't like about these kind of like niche selection softwares is that, if you're setting the criteria on like sliders to a certain way, how many other people are doing that? I'm landing on the exact same products and choosing them because the software tells them that it works, but not because they understand why it works. I think it's way better if we can teach an entrepreneur how to assess the validity of a market so they can get up and running themselves and choose a profitable niche and understand why it's it's proven in demand, profitable, etc. Then it's time to build an e commerce website. So once you have your products selected, you've picked your niche, you want to build a store. And we use Shopify as basic plan to keep costs extremely low and get a professional looking site up and running very, very quickly. And one way you can do that for I believe it's one pound per month for the first. Three months, and there's a like a three day free trial, I think, as well, is if you head to dropship unlocked.com, forward slash, Shopify, we've got to deal with them where you can get that. So for your first three months, it's like three pounds in total, which is incredible. So all of those setup actions are designed to keep your costs low intentionally, and to get our business to a position where we can start generating sales as quickly as possible without having to wait around or sign up to lots of costly services. Perfect. And that's the key, isn't it is getting to profitable as quickly as possible. It's probably one of the biggest benefits that people go with drop shipping compared to other business models that are out there to start nowadays. It's because of the very low starting cost and also the low ongoing cost of running that business moving forward, as well the ongoing costs we'll get into in a second. But all of those actions that we take, that you've been through there, you know, completely, from Dart to having a Shopify store built, we talked about what, 115 pound payment to get business bank account and a company set up, and beyond that, it's a Shopify fee for like, one pound for the first month or first few months. It's very, very low, and you can have a Shopify store built with solid foundations. And also the point you mentioned about choosing a niche, I know startup companies, when they get started, they often reach out to market research agencies who will quote them in the 10s of 1000s of pounds to check if there is a market for this products that they're planning to sell. And there's still no guarantee that, you know, there's going to be a fantastic business when you get past that research stage. But instead of having to go through all of that process, you know, what we what you showed me in week two of the program is the niche validation process that shows you which products have a market, have a demand already. So we can tack on straight into that without having to use very expensive software or an agency to get started. So hugely important, it's not about what you make, it's about what you keep at the end of each month. And a big part of that is about bringing your costs down, keeping a really tight, lean business, so you keep as much of the money that you generate as possible. So once you've launched that business through the process you've just been through there. Lewis, how do you manage your costs of running an E commerce business to ensure they remain very low, especially in the early days? Yes, I think it's acting almost in like a minimalistic or minimalist business owner mentality, so keeping your overheads low, not tacking on all of the different paid apps that you could add on, but at the very early stages, does it really make sense to be spending, you know, extra subscription money on those so things like Shopify, a phone line, Google workspace for your kind of domain hosting or your they don't do domain hosting anymore, but like your your email address, your company email address, all of that type of stuff, your domain registration, your actual website address, through whichever service you register that. So you can actually do that through Shopify now, and I mean, you're looking at less than 50 pounds per month, you know, maybe a little bit more, but like that is unheard of to run a business for under, even under 100 pounds a month. It's just like in what other time could you do that, you know, without trading your time? Because people will say, Oh, no, you could start a business for free. You just have to be the business. So yeah, but right now, we're building a business that frees up our time as well as being low cost to start. So it's really, really a special type of business, in that sense, using automation tools as well can help reduce the manual workload, because at first, you've probably not yet hired a virtual assistant in this business. You may not have the profit coming in yet to do that. So you want to try and automate tasks like order fulfillment or customer service. We can lean on AI now AI chat bots to be able to kind of scrape the entirety of your website and then answer those very simple customer questions on live chat very, very quickly, and even like close sales for you in the middle of the night, whilst you're sleeping. Of course, marketing systems setting up your Google ads correctly and making sure you're sending laser targeted traffic into your store, rather than just hoping that someone stumbles across an ad or a social media post on Facebook or Instagram or something, and also then just making sure that when you're focusing on paid ads, and you're driving only very targeted buyers onto your website using Google ads, which is what we use, focusing on making sure you've got a well targeted budget, and making sure that those clicks are qualified. They're coming to the site knowing the price by using something like Google Shopping or performance Max campaigns, and that they are a high commercial intent clicker. You know not every customer is going to every viewer to your website is going to buy, of course, but you can increase the conversion rate by only paying for clicks that have been pre qualified to know the price they're interested in the product. We're only paying for clicks on products that would make us enough profit on a sale to offset all of those ad costs. So by the time customers land on your site, if they buy a product for 2000 pounds at a 30% price. Bit margin, you might make 600 pounds. That could be two months worth of ad spend, all made back in the profit from one single sale. So you can see why that works. And then from there, you can start to think about putting money into other channels, like organic marketing, SEO, social media, marketing. And then maybe you want to kind of get an agency to manage that stuff for you and keep churning stuff out and making sure that you're putting out good content across those platforms again, without you as the business owner, being inundated and having your time sucked up by spreading yourself so thinly that you you know you can't really do any of those things yourself exactly. Yeah, and when you've got more time to focus on the overall business, you can then ensure you're keeping your costs low. And look at the overall business and make sure they're not getting carried away with all these costs that could catch your eye like fancy apps that you really don't need, etc, etc, so you can keep your business really lean and minimalist, as you say. So as soon as you make a few sales of these high ticket sales, that goes straight to the bottom line, because of your costs being so low, less than 100 pounds a month to continue run this business. And it was so important to me. I mean, I'd save some money when I first got started with drop shipping, but a big thing that I needed to make sure the business could do for me was to keep my costs very low to make because I didn't have a lot of money really to go, you know, I didn't have this huge backing of 10s of 1000s of pounds into a business. I just wanted to get started from my bedroom initially, and so it's important that it kept low. Also, when you've got a business that has really low ongoing costs, the amount of risk that you are open to is much less as well, because even if you didn't make a sale for a month, your costs are so low that it's it's not going to damage you financially. And then as soon as you make 123, sales a month. You're well into the green because of the high ticket type of drop shipping that we do, where we sell 2000 pound products regularly and have 600 pounds profit per order regularly as well. So yeah, it's a no brainer why we go into this business model, and you can see we're very big fans of it, especially because of how low those ongoing costs are, and the marketing side of it as well. That's a big part, probably your biggest cost of the business. But it's not an overhead cost. It's not ongoing. It's variable based on how much sales you bring in. So the lower the budget, the less sales. But when you have more sales, you'll have a higher budget. But as long as you're keeping on the profitability of that campaign, it will only rise in line with the amount of sales that you're making as well. So that's why we make sure to have very highly qualified traffic, and we increase our budget slowly to make sure that we are profitable from as early as possible when we run our businesses. And so yeah, it's a great business model. I love talking about it because I get passionate about why it makes so much sense for people that started without 10s of 1000s of pounds being backed to get started, because a lot of businesses do need that large investment to get started. Why do you think e commerce, especially with this Lean drop shipping business model, requires so much less capital compared to a traditional retail store? Well, the first one, and probably quite obvious, is that there is no physical inventory. So you know, with traditional retail, in having a shop, you needed stock. You needed products. You needed to buy those products a lot of the time, and you needed storage from them as well. So you needed a space, a premises, a retail shop or a warehouse, you know, which then you had to pay a monthly lease on and have a contract and have insurance and all of those things and then probably have, like, a warehouse person or an employee in the shop that you're then paying national insurance on you, then paying, you know, pension contributions on all of the extra stuff on top of that, the responsibility. And then they go off on sick leave or maternity leave, or two weeks holiday, and suddenly you have to pay for cover. Like, there's all these things that you just no longer have to even think about because with drop shipping, there is no upfront stock. Therefore it's almost like a cascade of problems that it solves. Because you then don't need a physical premises, you then don't need any staff for that. You then don't need a fulfillment center. You then do you see what I mean? Like, it kind of staggers down, and it just solves one problem after another after another. The other thing is, just because you're selling products virtually, you know, through a digital platform, you're selling these physical products, it doesn't mean you need to start with 10s of 1000s of products. I think sometimes people get overwhelmed and they think, Oh, well, if and the physical premises and and having a warehouse isn't a constraint, then let me sell everything. So they create this like Monster store, that you know that expression, if you're trying to talk to everyone, you're actually talking to no one. And it's like we're just plastering different types of products all over the store trying to compete with Amazon or Wayfair at their own game. And customers land on your store and they're not really short yourself. Instead, if you focus on a very subset demographic, a market, a group of people, and you sell a specific type of product to those people later on, once that's working, you can start to branch out. And what you'll find is when you sign suppliers and you realize their products are selling well, you can say to them, Do you have other ranges of products that you may not have thought we would want to sell? But actually. We'd like to put it on and when you've positioned your brand correctly so you've not kind of pigeon holed yourself to the point where you couldn't possibly expand, you can just add on those other sub categories, and suddenly your business can double or triple just through the amount of extra products that you have available for customers without even signing a new supplier just from expanding the range of that same supplier groups products that you're selling. So it's really powerful. And I think those are a few of the key reasons why it's it's takes so much less cash to get started than if you, you know had to go and put 50 grand or 100 grand into starting a retail franchise or something like that, exactly. And one of the key things as well, when it's all online is that you don't need to physically man a shop, so you don't hiring staff to be in person to serve your customers. Doesn't need to happen. And because it doesn't need to happen like that, it means we can hire people from different countries to serve our customers, to fulfill the orders that we generate with the business to look after the stock on the website, etc, etc. All of the day to day tasks of running an E commerce business doesn't need to be done by somebody physically in the UK. Another big benefit of that is it's another way of keeping your ongoing overhead cost of your business low, because oftentimes we can hire from, you know, countries that have experts at customer service. So, for example, the Philippines, they are experts at customer service. You know, they've got a lot of training in that country already for people that are doing these virtual assistant roles for huge companies like Amazon, often hire from from the Philippines as well. And so we can then also hire somebody from that country who are outstanding at English, very cheerful, friendly, good at their jobs, good at customer service, better than I could ever be. But as well, they are also much lower cost than to hire somebody in the UK to do the same role. So another benefit of an online job or an online business is that we don't need to spend so much in the ongoing costs of running it through the people that run our businesses for us as well. Yeah, so many reasons, but it is easy to get carried away, I think, with E commerce or any business, to start trying out different unnecessary purchases or investments and trying different things out. So how would you recommend or how did you do it in your business as well? How did you stay disciplined and avoid costly mistakes when you start your business and don't go into too many unnecessary purchases. Well, my opinion is you have to focus on just the essentials when you start. So you've got to prioritize, what are those core tools, or what are the core services that are absolutely necessary to run this business for in order for it to make a profit, what do I need? And when you strip away all of the rubbish and the fluff, you actually end up with very, very low overheads in a business like that. And obviously there are lots of nice kind of bells and whistles and things you can tack on later when you have the profit to do that. But at the beginning, the biggest challenge is avoiding shiny object syndrome, if you've heard of that, and that's where like, like, um, is that a magpie that like shiny objects, I always forget. And they like, go and steal people's keys, and they see a new shiny thing, and they're like, oh, shiny object, let me go and pick that up. I think that's what we have to battle constantly as entrepreneurs. The reason is other entrepreneurs, who are very good at marketing their Shopify apps or their services and their products, are very good at persuading you that their shiny object is the thing you need, that is the key. And so then suddenly we're in this world and we're like everywhere we look. Suddenly our Facebook feeds full of these people trying to like, sell different services. It's very difficult to kind of sift through the noise and figure out, what do I actually need here? And actually, sometimes the best thing you need is just the basics, just the essentials, just the kind of the pathway to actually get the business up and running with the bare minimum overheads. So I think, yeah, if you can avoid overspending initially on marketing as well, that will help. And don't just say, Okay, well, I'm going to pour some money into ads, and that'll be that. And the more I spend on it, the more returns I'll get. That to me is a surefire way to just hand over your money to the ad platforms like Google or meta. Instead invest slowly, and then as you see a profitable return on ad spend. So say you're getting, I don't know, 12 or 15 times return on investment. So you put a pound in, you get 12 pounds back in terms of, you know, sales ratio. If that's profitable for you and that works with your margins, then maybe you start saying, Okay, well, I'm going to increase my budget a little bit. Then if we're able to maintain and meet that return on ad spend, then it doesn't really affect me. Whether I spend 10 pounds a day on ads or 100 pounds a day on ads, I'd just make way more profit with the other way. But you can't dive into that and hope that works. You have to start small and iterate and test and, you know, work your way up to it. Start with a small budget test what works? Let it run for two weeks, 30 days, and then reinvest those profits on incrementally increasing that budget, assuming you can hold that return. On ad spend. Instead of saying, Okay, I need to go and get a business loan now for 50,000 to pour money into ADS, because that's the way businesses succeed, all you'll end up with at the end of that is a load of unprofitable sales and an outstanding loan of 50k that you can't afford to pay back. And so that's not a position you want to be in. I imagine, exactly. I think that the biggest danger that you'd have with such a low cost business model is getting carried away with your marketing spend. So as long as you're focusing on the bottom line profit at the end of each month, and you're not just trying to scale revenue at all costs, then you know you can't go wrong. You just got to that. That's the one mistake that I can see people making, is trying to go too quickly into doubling their ad spend to double their profit, or when they haven't got the profitable return yet, they start to increase their profit, their budget too quickly. Instead, you start low, you keep the low cost that we that we were talking about today, same with the budget, be a marketing campaign, and increase it gradually over time as you get more and more profitable, and take your time with increasing it. And so, yeah, you'll be set up, and you're protecting your downside the whole time as well. Yeah, I think I know I reflect on my business now and the tech stack that I've got to the stack of different tech that that I use for my business to run like Google workspace, Shopify, Thai business, bank account, and my circle loop phone line, my live chat. It's so basic as a tech stack to run this business, and I find myself sometimes thinking that I need to increase or add more to that to really build the business. I think that comes from initially to get it off the ground in the first place. I did need to add lots of different softwares that I wasn't used to using before, but I found that even three and a half years now into running this e commerce business. It still runs and it generates profit every single month for me, without having to add all of these different shiny objects the magpie syndrome that you're talking about. To rename it Magpie syndrome rather than shiny object syndrome. You don't need to get carried away with lots of different bells and whistles for the business. So that's how we we've started the business with low cost, we run it with low cost ongoing, and then in terms of scaling, that would be the next sort of phase, the next chapter of your business, once you're up and running and making consistent sales, you want to scale from that position. How would you or how have you gone through the process of scaling a business without getting carried away with costs? Yeah, I think probably stripping away what you're spending ads on helps. So focusing on the higher ticket items, the items and the brands where you're making a better margin, a better cost per sale, you know, if you've got two brands, and one of them is a couple of core products, but then a lot of, like accessory products, and they're like, 10 pounds, 20 pounds, and you're paying, I don't know, five pounds shipping or something for those. Do you really want to be running ads to those if you're only making four or five pounds in profit on an order? Or do you just allow those sales to rise in the search engine results organically and sometimes get them as additional sales from customers who are buying a core product and added those onto their order, and instead target your and channel your ad spend towards items that are 1000 2000 3000 pounds, maybe even 500 pounds, plus whatever your kind of higher ticket products are. Now obviously that definition changes depending on the niche you're in and what your price range is but certainly the products where you're going to make over 100 pounds in profit on every sale that you make, because then you you've got so much more buffer and so much more room to get ads wrong, you know, and not be that good at them. Because even if you you like, make a cost per sale on ads of 4050, pounds. Well, if you're making 200 pounds on a sale in profit, then you're still making 150 pounds after that on every sale you make, you know? And then that machine can just keep running, and eventually, maybe you get that 50 pound cost per sale down to 40, down to 30, right? And that's not possible when you're making five pounds in profit. So, yeah, that's probably the simplest thing you can do. And the other thing is, as you scale focus on the campaigns that have shown you results. And as I said, if you're meeting the return on ad spend on those campaigns, then scale them up gradually. Look at the areas of that that campaign that aren't performing well. They send brands that are dragging your campaign performance down. Maybe you exclude those brands, maybe you don't run ads to them. Maybe you split them out, run them in a separate campaign with a lower budget. You know, there's all kinds of things you can do, and then eventually automating as much as possible, so that the jobs that they're left to do that can only be done by a human, can be done by one outsourced virtual assistant in a place like the Philippines, for example, where the the monthly salary is an incredibly reasonable rate in British pounds, for example, if you're earning in pounds, but paying in Philippine pesos, then it makes it incredibly affordable for you to hire some some really good talent, and for them, they earn a great monthly wage equivalent to them going and working in a call center, except now. They don't have to travel across like, a two hour commute, and, you know, go and spend their whole time in a call center. They get to sit at home and be with their family and work for a laptop. And it's a real win win for both scenarios. So or for both both individuals, it is, yeah, you can make a real great symbiotic relationship with virtual assistants. And yeah, they've been a revelation for my business. So we've seen lots of people succeed with this low cost approach to drop shipping that we teach now. And you talk to me initially, Louis, I think what really hammers home how beneficial it can be to focus on low costs is to talk about some real life examples of people who have put this into place and because of the directly keeping the cost very low, they've been able to generate lots of sales profitably. So I think, could you think of some real life examples to share with us now, of people that you know have scaled their business while keeping their costs to a minimum? Yeah, aside from you know, you and I, running our own e commerce businesses and making these podcast episodes as well. We do also coach people, as many of our listeners will know, and and, yeah, we coach people to build their own successful drop shipping businesses. And so it's always inspiring to see their success inside our community. Because it's one thing realizing that this business model is possible for yourself, and being like, I think I've just unlocked the keys to freedom, like time freedom, financial freedom, because I can now travel anywhere in the world. And as long as I have my phone and look down at the Shopify app and see I'm making sales, I don't have to do that much because I have a virtual assistant in place, and I have everything else automated. And occasionally I'll log in and pay suppliers, you know, with a bank transfer. Other than that, it's fairly hands off. But what's even more exciting than that? Because that don't get me wrong, that's amazing, but what I find even more exciting, and I think you do as well now, is actually seeing other people where that light bulb moment of realization happens, and they realize the path they were on before is no longer their life route. They don't have to go down that route. And so one that springs to mind recently is a gentleman called Mason. So Mason was on the podcast recently. You might have seen the episode where we interviewed Mason about this. He just joined us at the dropship unlocked master cast, and he's now made 70,000 pounds, I believe, at the time of recording, within his first five or six months of running ads to his store. Now, the low overhead from this business model allowed Mason to get started and scale very quickly following his first few sales, because he saw what worked and he scaled things up. That's an incredible story. And Mason's, uh, you know, only just getting started in his career is, I think, was 8018 when he joined the program. So, you know, he's he's early into his journey, but has got some great momentum and is on a great trajectory as well. Another one that always springs to mind is Jared. So Jared is a great example of someone who kind of came flying out the gates. I remember early on he, I think he hit 310,000 pounds in sales within his first six months of of working with us, and then went on to surpass 4 million pounds over the subsequent four years. And we had him again on the podcast recently. Suraj is another example. Somebody made his first 100,000 pounds with two stores that he built using this model. And I saw a success post from him in our community the other day. I think he's probably well beyond that now as well. It's hard to keep up with these, isn't it, Neil. Neil's a good example, someone who made think it was 95,000 pounds in his first five months. So there's lots of good ones. In fact, actually, if you want to hear more about Neil's journey, we did a podcast recently on that, didn't we? So have a look at Episode 110 where we dive deeper into Neil's journey. Because that was a good one. It was, yeah, no, Neil's an inspiring story. He's come from a very different background to Mason, so people from all different walks of life, when they focus on keeping the costs low, they generate lots of sales. And it does change the lifestyles that we're able to live once you've got an online income stream. So yeah, it's what we do it for, isn't it? Lewis, it's seeing the results that come from people that put the work in and follow our advice to build businesses with low costs. And also, something else to be said is the sense of peace I get knowing that I've got a very low cost business that keeps on running regardless of where I am in the world. So, yeah, I think for anyone that wants to take away actionable advice. They've listened to other people that have succeeded. They've listened to our advice about keeping their business very low cost. And somebody wants to get started but their own e commerce business, what would your advice be to those people? Well, start small, keep your costs lean from the outset. Focus on building a business that's sustainable, that's long term, following a strategy that's proven, making sure that you're not pouring money and time into something that's not going to have the strong foundations to build and grow. And if you are ready to take that first step and you want to get started, then head over to dropship, unlocked.com, forward slash, start to get started. We'll put a link to that below the show notes today. Okay, are you enjoying the podcast? We'd love to hear from you leave a comment or a review, and we might feature it in an upcoming episode, and for detailed show notes and resources, visit dropship, unlock.com forward slash podcast. If you found value in any episode of this podcast, please. Could you take just 10 seconds to leave us a quick five star review on your favorite podcast app. It helps us more than you can imagine. And who knows, you might just hear your comments read out on the show. Thanks for being a part of our community. Your support helps us keep delivering new episodes to you every week. Okay, now let's answer a question that we've received from a listener of the podcast. So thank you very much for getting your questions in. Remember, if you have a question that's come up from listening to this episode today, and you'd like to ask it to Lewis and I then simply leave a comment beneath the YouTube video version of this episode, and it might just be answered on an upcoming episode of the podcast. So this week, the question has come in from grant. So grant has asked, How does delivery tracking work once the courier picks up the package from the supplier, do I need to get a tracking number to send to the customer, or is there something else that I need to set up? Yeah, it's a great question, and I noticed, James, you pronounce it grant, but I pronounce I pronounce it grant. So you have to let us know in the comments, the Great North South divide, you'll have to let us know who's correct on that pronunciation. Thank you for your question. Grant, so yeah, exactly about couriers. Once you've paid your supplier, they'll typically arrange delivery with the usual courier that they use. So they'll then send you as the retailer tracking numbers or consignment numbers. They call them sometimes, and you can then just plug those into Shopify, and then what it will do is you can use an app like after ship, for example, is a good one, where that will then plug in courier notifications to the customer. So if you've ever ordered anything, and, you know, you sometimes get a text message that says, like, Oh, your password will be delivered with you today between, you know, seven and 8pm or whatever, and make sure someone's in reply, yes, if you know to confirm that will happen automatically, you, as the brand owner, don't need to even think or worry about that. That's kind of an integration between the courier consignment system and after ship and Shopify. So yeah, really easy to notify the customers. And then once the item has been fulfilled, you can literally click fulfill on Shopify, then that automatically triggers an email to your customer, and that email will include their tracking number, the link to the couriers website, so that they can go on and track their delivery. Because what you'll see, the most common question, probably from customers, once you are making sales, is, when's my order going to arrive? What time is it arriving today? You know, how will I know when it's coming? So you can just remove all of that uncertainty from the process by implementing a process like that. So really nice, uh, easy way to do that for you. Grant, perfect. Yes, thank you. And yeah, I'd like to see some comments in in the in the comment section, but need to see whether it's grant or grant. I think grant should get the final say to say how he pronounces his own name. All right. So thank you for your question and thanks for your answer, Lewis, a very easy way to answer that, because the couriers and the suppliers really handle all of the delivery process for us as drop shipping business owners. But now it's time to highlight a recent review that we've had for the podcast. So a big thank you to MB business for sharing your thoughts in a YouTube comment after you watch Mason's recent episode that we talked about earlier. And MB business said, I absolutely love this one full of gems, my favorite so far. Oh, nice. Thank you very much for your review. MB business, um, yeah, it was a really good episode with Mason. I really enjoyed it, and we got loads of people messaging us afterwards being like, it's that episode was the one that resonated with me most. So if you haven't already watched that, then do check out that episode of the dropship unlocked podcast where we interviewed Mason. Yeah, really glad to hear that you've been enjoying the podcast before we end this episode, though. Can we ask a small favor of you, if you haven't already, could you take a moment to leave us a quick review for this podcast? It helps us so much more than you'd ever possibly imagine, and just takes you a few seconds to do. But your support just keeps us motivated. It helps us in the podcasting algorithm, and ensures we can keep bringing you the best content that we can. We also love to hear what you think, and so we would love to share your review in an upcoming episode, too. Thank you for joining us on this episode of the dropship unlocked podcast. We hope you are leaving with new insights and inspiration to fuel your entrepreneurial journey. To kick start your E commerce business. Head over to dropship unlocked.com. Forward, slash start. It's the perfect place to start and get access to resources that will help you build your business from the ground up. And don't forget to hit that subscribe button for more episodes packed with strategies, tips and success stories, plus, if you enjoyed this episode today, a five star review would mean the world to us and. Might even get a shout out on the next episode. Thank you for choosing 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.