The Dropship Unlocked Podcast

The £1,000,000 Dropshipping Approach: Are You Using It? (Episode 127)

• Lewis Smith & James Eardley • Season 1 • Episode 127

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🗣In this episode, Lewis Smith and James Eardley break down the £1M dropshipping approach—the same approach that has created seven-figure businesses time and time again.

Whether you're new to dropshipping or struggling to scale your business, this episode is packed with practical insights to help you get on the right track.

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Topics Discussed:

  • Mindset for Success: Understanding the importance of treating your dropshipping business as a marathon, not a sprint.
  • Effective Strategy: Focusing on high-ticket products, working with domestic suppliers, and maintaining quality control.
  • The Right Environment: Building the right network, connecting with like-minded entrepreneurs, and surrounding yourself with growth-focused mentors.

Links and Resources Mentioned:

Key Takeaways:

  • Treat It Like a Marathon: Success in dropshipping requires patience, persistence, and long-term planning.
  • Choose High-Ticket Products: Focus on selling fewer, higher-priced items with good profit margins.
  • Surround Yourself with the Right People: A supportive network and mentorship can fast-track your success and help you avoid mistakes.

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How to Launch a UK Dropshipping Business Offering Next-Day Delivery...
...Even If You Don't Yet Know Which Products To Sell

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Your approach if you want to build a million pound drop shipping business is going to need to be quite a bit different from your approach if you're only trying to build, say, 100,000 pound drop shipping business, because so many new entrepreneurs fall into the all too common trap of our Million Pound Drop Shipping approach that we'll talk about isn't just about uploading a few high ticket products, hoping for the best and leaving it in fact, the very first thing we do is, yes, I think most people underestimate grossly the value of their overall approach until it's too late. At that point, they're me. I've struggled many times throughout the journey getting this wrong, and when someone's starting out now, if they first come to me, the first thing I usually advise them to stop doing is, 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, the home turf advantage drop shipping approach has proven itself time and time again to have the potential to create businesses that can generate 1 million pounds and multiple seven figures. So today, we're gonna be breaking down three steps to make sure that you're approaching drop shipping in a way that leads to seven figure income. So Louis, we've seen so many entrepreneurs now come into this business, but how do you separate the ones who truly make it from the ones who struggle? And what does the million pound approach really look like to you? The Million Pound Drop Shipping approach? Yeah, I think you could probably separate it into three steps, which which we can run through in today's episode. I guess it comes down to mindset. Firstly, making sure you're going into this in the right frame of mind. Secondly, it's the strategy that you actually employ and what you do, you know mindsets nothing without taking the right actions and having the right strategy and but then I think those two things can be an uphill battle without you being in the right environment. And when we say environment, that doesn't have to necessarily be, although it can be physically, it can also be like digitally and mentally in the right environment and absorbing and consuming the right content as well. Fantastic. There's a great structure for our conversation today. So firstly, then that first step that's crucial is getting the mindset in the right place to be able to build a 1 million pound business. So what do you think are the key principles of having the right mindset from the start? Well, yeah, I think you have to make sure you're going into this in a way where, like, for example, you got to treat business as a marathon. It's not some sprint where, like, by next week, we'll have a business that's successful up and running. It's going to be a long term project. It's going to compound over time. And so we have to treat it as such, and a big part of that is making sure we have the right understanding and mental framework and mindset for doing that. The other thing is just being okay with the fact that you are going to face problems, setbacks, hurdles along the way, because they are inevitable. It's going to happen. So you might as well accept them and embrace them, and if you can try and reframe them, see those things as like just learning opportunities, lessons, not failures. They're like just little hurdles and bumps along the road that we figure out, and once we figured them out, we ensure that we don't have to fall down those those traps again. So those are probably the first two ways I would do it, and then also making sure that when you are going about the project, you're building your business, you just have a growth focused mindset. Now this isn't something that's naturally occurring in day to day society. Sometimes you have to separate yourself from the pack a little bit and absorb the right content and make sure that you're absorbing positivity like a sponge, so that you set yourself up for long term success in business, rather than feeling like you are failing whenever something goes wrong, or if someone tells you that it's not going to work, or that they heard a friend did this and it never you know worked for them, or whatever. Like those things are all distractions. They're all noise. But if you have a proven strategy, great, but if you don't have the right mindset, it's never going to work, because you're never going to believe enough in it. So I think having that belief, having that self belief, belief in the model, belief in your own abilities, and your belief in your ability and willingness to overcome the challenges as and when they are rights which they're going to so I think those are probably the key parts of my inset that I'd make sure I have right in the first place before diving into anything to do with strategy. Yeah, it's so often overlooked. It's having that right mindset in place. It's always thinking about what this strategy is. So when people come to us, and if they ask us about how do we build our drop shipping businesses, they want to know the step by step approach. But the reason why I know that there has to be the mindset in place first is because when you look at a wealthy person, if they were to lose all of their money, they would be able to generate that income back very quickly, much quicker than somebody who wasn't wealthy from the first place. And that's not just because they know strategies to get in place, but because they've got the right mindset. They've got the confidence in themselves in order to build that back up, that wealth back up again. So it's not just about the strategy. We have to first of all get the mindset in the right place. So when you're going through the right strategy, you'll stick it out for the long term, and you'll embrace those setbacks as failures. Yeah. So I love it. Love it. Love that we had to cover that first so now that we understand that there has to be a right mindset in place, let's now get onto the tactical side of things. You mentioned that strategy is a really big part, the second part of that 1 Million Pound Drop Shipping approach. So what would be your strategy to build a 1 million pound drop shipping business from scratch? Yeah? So there are a few strategic decisions, and I guess criteria that you can make sure are fulfilled whenever you're starting an E commerce business like this to maximize your chances of success. Now, I call it the home turf advantage model. It's not the only way, but it's a proven way to make this work in the UK. And so it starts with, well, which products are you going to sell? You know, because that's going to form the basis, the foundation of your business. And also, where are your suppliers, you know, not just the products you're selling, but where are they coming from, because later on, that will factor into things like delivery times and the product quality. So I guess breaking down when we say, like, selecting the right products. Okay, how do you do that? First thing I do is focus on high ticket products, or higher value products, because that means that there's a higher profit margin. It means that you need fewer sales to make the same amount of target profit, whatever your target profit is for a business, and it keeps things really simple. Takes you the same amount of time and effort to upload 1000 pound product to your store as it does to upload a 10 pound product to your store, except you'll make multiples higher profit with the 1000 pound product. And then, once you have the right products selected, the next is, well, where are we going to source those products from? So this stuff will kind of like, it's a bit of a chicken and egg scenario that, because in order to know that the products that you're going to sell will work, one of the things we'd first do is validate, well, who can supply those in the UK, and who is happy to drop ship those products directly to our customers? The last thing we want to be doing is speaking to a supplier, trying to convince them and explain to them how the Drop Shipping model works. And yeah, having to that's a heavy lift. That's a difficult thing to do. It can and has been done, but it's much easier to just go to suppliers who are already willing to do this. Now the trick here is don't look for drop shipping suppliers. These suppliers typically don't only operate with the Drop Shipping model. They are suppliers that will have the stock in the UK. It might not be made in the UK, but that's fine. The point is, it's crossed the border already, and sometimes it can be made in the UK, but it's here and it can easily be dispatched with next day delivery. That's where it becomes a huge advantage for you. So if you can partner with those domestic suppliers who are here, who can offer fast delivery, great customer service to your customers, because you know, they'll get their orders really quickly, you can then prioritize working with those customers who maybe offer you the best margins, or who have the products that are most searched for and most in demand, you'll ensure that they have good quality checks in place, because stuff's not coming from China on a ship with no recourse, because there's no accountability, because they know that you would never return it. Instead, if something arrives and it's 40 to a customer, which in the rare scenario does happen, then the suppliers are happy to take the items back. So that's another big factor in the overall reputation of your business, making sure it's defensible, and then just making sure that you're keeping an eye on those products that are going out, and the quality behind those and the feedback you're getting from customers. So I think that's what it starts with. It's the right product selection, and as a result, or I guess, upstream of that, like what you've got to do first is find the right suppliers who can offer those right products. Yeah, it's all part of the process that we follow to build a million pound drop shipping business, whether that's a million pound revenue or a million pounds in actual the asset value of the business, either way, you need to be able to build a brand or a defensible brand that doesn't just quickly sell widgets to customers that go up in a trend, and then it crashes and burns about six months later. It needs to be a business that can stand the test of time through delivering good quality products to your customers, giving your customers good service, and ultimately, giving and selling products that aren't just going to crash and burn and are going to have a continuous demand over the long term, because that's what means we get to build a business that will continue to pay us in years, rather than just in a few months time. So naturally, when you talk about what is a successful drop shipping strategy, you've already alluded to the fact that there are unsuccessful dropship strategies that we stand firmly against. And so just to compare the two side by side, for us, Louis, for people that are considering what is the right approach to take. Week. Could you do that for us? Or tell us what is the previous traditional model that used to work, but we can see big flaws in it now, and the actual drop shipping model that we do in the home turf advantage that you teach now, yeah, if I were to walk down the high street today and speak to someone and say, Hey, you don't know me, but do you know what drop shipping is? The I have, with 80, 90% certainty that, if they're, you know, if they're aware enough about this topic, the first thing they'd say is, oh, that's like, AliExpress and temu, isn't it? That's where you set up a thing in new flog products on like, an Instagram page. And then, you know, it comes from China, and it's that low barrier to entry. It's sold as a, you know, a business model that's, like, really easy to start, because all you do is find some products on Aliexpress or temu, and you throw them onto a Shopify store, and you just run ads to Facebook, and you mark them up by five times in price, and then everything's, you know, hunky dory, the customers pay and everything, everyone's happy, and you get great reviews and sail off into the sunset, as we know, having been on the receiving end of some of those products, the customer experience is often very underwhelming. The product quality is often pretty poor. The customer service on those stores is generally non existent because they have to hide their contact details, because otherwise they'd have so many customers complaining and requesting refunds and stuff. So it's very, very shallow business model. In that sense, it's like, you know, it's surface level. It's like, yes, okay, it might be great, but as soon as you dig beneath the surface, it's like, oh, that's where it comes unstuck. And that's the bit that isn't necessarily portrayed online. It's all very well saying that you made 100,000 pounds in in revenue by selling these cheap products. But did you build a defensible business? Are you able to live on the profits of that business for many years to come? Or did you create what they refer to as like a burner store, where you made a load of quick cash, but you better Now shut up shop before everyone asks for their money back, because it all kind of went wrong, you know. And half the stock never arrived because it's stuck on the delayed ship coming from China for six weeks or something. So there's so many parts to that model that we could like go into and pick apart, because we've just seen it time and time again. So many people join us at dropship unlocked as a result of having been burned by the former traditional type of drop shipping. So yeah, in my experience, night and day, you're working with UK suppliers selling products with next day delivery offering products that are 1000 2000 pounds, earning three, 600 pounds in profit on a sale. You can run them on Google ads to customers who are already searching for those brands and those products. You've partnered with them, you've got real contracts with those suppliers, and you've created a defensible asset of a business that you could one day exit from sell or just use as an income replacement vehicle for many years to come. So, very, very different, completely different. We use the same fulfillment method, but that's pretty much where the similarities end, because they're still technically drop shipping, because we just get the products to be sent directly from our suppliers to our customers address without us ever seeing the product. Yes, we both do that in both models, but it's completely night and day. As you say. Lewis, nowadays, we can get products to customers the next day after they order it on our sites, we're selling products that my average order value for one of my stores is 1200 pounds. So it's really high ticket expensive products, which means that the average profit per sale is over 300 pounds, which when you go and realize what the difference that makes to actual business and an operator and an operator and someone that's owning the business, it means that you've got a lot less orders to fulfill, a lot less customers to look after, and so a lot less admin to run the business that still makes the same or more money, if you were to go through a low ticket option as well. And also, I just think the enjoyment factor. So we both had those experiences where we went initially into the traditional low ticket drop shipping model. And I had lots of headaches, headaches after headaches because I was trying to sell cheap products I found in Aliexpress, and I really thought that they would be revolutionary if I brought them into the UK market. People wouldn't see straight through the fact that I was just marking them up four times, and the anyone could just go onto AliExpress and buy the exact same product directly if they wanted to. And so my headaches involved an inbox full of unhappy customers, impatient customers, because they went in three to four weeks for deliveries. And I realized with this model that there had to be something else, something had to give. So I was one of those people you mentioned there those that joined the dropship on what Master Class program, having been burned previously by the previous e commerce and drop shipping model that I tried and I wanted something different. So would you say that in terms of the successful people that you see, do you think a lot of them have experience with drop shipping like I did in the past? Or do you think people can just get started and skip the headaches and go straight for the homes of advantage from the start? Yeah, it varies. There's probably a split in the community, as I'm sure you see now as well, right in that sometimes people come in and they have a lot of experience and they're like, I understand the model. I understand all the flaws. Everything you said in the podcast, and then the ads resonated, because I am currently that person. And the reason why I can say those things in the podcast and in the ads, by the way, is because I was also that person, so I can speak from like, first hand pain, of like, where you're at right now. And the other group I'd say were, would be people who are like, I was. Thinking about doing that, and maybe I saw some other stuff, because often we're not the first company that they've seen, you know, that can show how to start an E commerce business, but they might say I was about to go down that route, and then I listened to an episode of your podcast, and I was like, I think you just saved me, like, six months of pain and expenses not going down that route. And I see all the problems ahead now, and I'd much rather just, you know, not have to learn from personal experience, and just learn from your lessons. And so that's really what we've tried to do. It's like distill years of pain and lessons and not not just my lessons as well. It's like the collective experience now of the hundreds of members in our community who are doing this every day and all of the things they've learned that we can now just condense and consolidate that information down into its essential ingredients, where you just step by step, work your way through it. You take little micro actions, and you build upon those every day, and you compound so you have a business that's up and running. So absolutely no need for former e commerce experience that's not a prerequisite to success in the community, but sometimes people have to learn from their own experience. And we'll speak to someone on the phone sometimes, and they'll be like, Yeah, you know, I'm thinking about doing this, but I'm also thinking about doing I've got this supplier who's a drop shipping company in China, and they're going to do that, so I'll see how that goes first, and then come back, and often you're like, I feel like you're one of those people that maybe just has to learn the hard way. And then they often do, and they're like, six months later, we're having the same chat again, and it's like, yeah, it didn't work. And it's like, that's kind of why we exist here. If everyone could just do the China route and find suppliers on how they express, we probably wouldn't need to be here, would we? There would be no pain to solve. There's no challenge. And likewise, if it was just like, super straightforward and simple to do this model again, everyone would just do it. You just call the UK suppliers, sign them up, get a product, and off you go. There's nuance to this. There's like, steps under the surface. The devil is in the detail, and you have to make sure that you get those bits right in order to succeed. And the fastest way to do that is just learn from other people who have failed along the way and figured it out eventually. Yeah, learn from others mistakes. You know, don't let our mistakes go in vain. You know, if you can, if you can save yourself six months of the headaches and the heartache that we had by putting all the effort into building Shopify stores and partnering with suppliers and Aliexpress just to find out that it wasn't profitable in the end, then you should jump at the opportunity. And I wish I had come across dropship unlocked that much earlier, so I wouldn't have had to go down the model that I thought was going to be the million pound approach, but it definitely didn't turn out to be until I joined dropship or not. And then, yeah, I think things have completely changed, and it's much more enjoyable to run this type of business as well. So so we've got people through this, this three part steps that you set out for this episode, Leo. So people have got mindset in the right place. They've got the strategy in the right place, understanding how to build a million pound drop shipping business. But what's the final step that you mentioned? You mentioned it was about environments. So how would you allow people or teach people when it comes to getting in the right environment for success? Yeah, I think this part really just allows the mindset that you have and the strategy that you have to flourish rather than be repressed. You know, because if you're really positive minded and you you see yourself as as a successful person, you understand that, you know, challenges are just going to be temporary, and they're all lessons, not failures. And you've got a great strategy, but you're doing it in a echo chamber of negativity, where you're just getting bombarded with, like, why are you doing that? That's not like, back in your box and, you know, do do your normal job again, and go back to where you were, and all that stuff doesn't work. That's just the stuff on the internet, like, That's a load of rubbish. It's a scam or whatever. It's very difficult, because then you're trying to not only do something for the first time, remain positive, follow a strategy that you're doing for the first time, but also fight off all these like negativity demons. It's really difficult to to maintain. So the best way of enabling yourself to grow through that mindset and strategy combination is just changing your environment. And as I mentioned, that doesn't mean physically, although that is a great way of doing it. You don't have to like physically put yourself in an environment. It's more about setting yourself up for success mentally So, surrounding yourself with like minded voices, whether that be like through podcasts like this, for example, if you're on the commute to work you know, or you're in the gym, or you're out for a walk, or you're walking the dog or whatever, and you are going to be following the steps to build this business, and you've got the right mindset, why not listen to something like this to really like bolster that Feeling of positivity and the right strategy as well surround yourself with other people that are on that same journey. You know, we've created a supportive community of entrepreneurs that help keep you motivated and accountable as well, because they're following the same steps as you are. So I think that's one of the secrets to making this a lot easier than it would be otherwise, because otherwise you're just operating on your own in on a desert island, trying to reassure yourself that you're following the right steps, but never quite sure if you are, whereas if you have a growth focused network of other people that are all on that same path, you can connect with the other successful entrepreneurs in there. You can connect with people who are experts in the industry. You can ask for their experience. Experiences and their lessons. Whenever you hit these, like little micro challenges, you don't have to, you know, let those delay you for months on end. You just ask. You just say, Hey, I've just encountered this, like we see it every day, don't we, in our community, I've just encountered this, or this thing on my Google Merchant centers just popped up. Or I was just trying to set up my tax settings. Or I need some advice regarding, like getting an accountant or VA T or cork tax. Is that? What did you guys do in this situation? Yeah, you could spend days googling it and hoping that the blog post that you stumble across is relevant and accurate, or you just join a community where you've got people around you who've all been through that already. And I think that's why it makes it so much faster and more enjoyable, and that's why we created that environment, and because we knew it needed to exist. It had to exist because I think naturally, the environments we get ourselves into, perhaps in the UK, and if we're into a nine to five job, the environments that we're in a lot of the time are not entrepreneurial environments. They're not people that are really pushing you to be the best person you want to be and pushing you to a different lifestyle. Naturally, if you're in a nine to five job, the people you're going to be spending a lot of time around are people who are also in nine to five jobs, because you're at the job together, and so they've all got similar mindsets. I noticed this when I was in my job and I was building my business alongside, was that there was nobody there to speak to a nine to five job about building a side hustle alongside the job I was in, or speak something about their long term goals and how they're going to become digital nomads and live around the world and still generate an income and push themselves with growing businesses. There just aren't people like that naturally around you. And so I've got a great analogy that relates to this, because we, I know you love analogy, Lewis, it helps people to really visualize why environments so important. And I thought about this the other day, which is like when you have a mentor in place. So you're you're my mentor with dropship unlocked you put the ladder up for me towards the success that I had in mind. So I had a ladder there, got the strategy in place, and I've got the mindset that you taught me in order to climb the ladder, but the environment is like somebody at the bottom of that ladder, footing the ladder and holding it still. Because what I found whenever you're doing something challenging, like building a business, you're slip you'll have difficult times, and it can be dangerous, because you'll feel like it's real. You're taking risks potentially. But if you haven't got somebody there to hold that ladder for you, or give you advice and give you emotional support for when things are tough, then you can quite easily slip off that ladder and never make it to the top, even if you're given the strategy, even if you're given the right mindset to approach things with, it's also having that extra support guide there. So I know you're the king of analogies. Lewis, normally on the podcast, but But what do you think of that one that that makes sense? I like that, yeah. Analogy approved. I think that's good. Is it analogy or a metaphor? I don't know that. It's yeah, it's approved. Regardless it's Yeah, exactly that. I think it was to extend that further. You know, you said you might fall off the ladder, and it would be good to have someone there to hold it underneath. Or it's almost like knowing when you go on this journey you will fall off the ladder. Like, let's not sugarcoat it. You're gonna fall off. So you might as well have someone underneath there with a big, you know, safety net mattress or whatever, trying to catch you, because it's inevitable. You can almost just gamify the process. So if you just accept that, like, Yeah, I'm gonna fall off. Like, I took my kids to a trampoline park the other day, and they've got these, like, foam pits, and, you know, you try and climb the monkey bars, and it's like, no one makes it to the other side. Every everyone falls off. But as long as you're accepting them for the fact that you are going to fall off that thing at some point, then it's, you know, it's a just a journey, isn't it? And you just enjoy the process of going on it. You're not really expecting to succeed. It's like, yeah. So I think it's a great way of looking at it. There are going to be various steps you can take, and it's a rewarding thing as well, providing that that ladder, like you say, but at the same time, it's you can only do so much to help people. And actually, I think if there were hundreds of people solely looking to me for like, every advice whenever they got stuck, that's really as a heavy weight for me to bear as well. Like, I can't be everywhere at once. But once you've got people who've kind of Horos on the ladder with you, and they've got to the other to the other side of it, they can start to help other people as well, and be that safety net. So, yeah, I like it perfect. It's approved, yeah. And I think because the pain of not having that safety net, which is obvious with climbing a ladder, or using the monkey bars analogy for your trampoline park experience, you know, you go, you go splat, if you fall off the ladder from a great height. And that in business terms, is that you never go back. You never recrime the ladder. If you fall hard enough in business, you can really put yourself off if you fail and you don't have somebody to catch you to put you back on and to tell you what they did in the same situation, and it can lead to quitting. And yeah, and the only way you fail with these businesses is if you quit. So if you guarantee that you won't quit by having people around you that are going to push you on when times are tough, then I think that's the final piece in the jigsaw to put this all together and approach drop shipping in a way that you can guarantee up to a million pounds in sales and beyond. So for people that want I wanted to really skip the heartache and start now on the right path towards the Million Pound Drop Shipping business that they have in mind. What be your best advice for people in that position? Yeah, to try and avoid the overwhelm, I think so. Just start by being very clear on what your goal is, if it's to replace your income, if it's to create a business, if it's to create a business that allows you to be free travel the world whilst replacing your income so that you can leave the job, just be very clear on what that is. But then don't try and tackle the whole thing at once. Break it. Up into goals, chunk it down into actionable steps, and then chunk that down again into like micro, daily actions that you can take to really start to achieve it and set realistic milestones behind it. I think sometimes the pressure of like such a big goal and then you want it to happen in such a short timeline, starts to make the whole thing unravel. So most importantly, I think if you can follow a proven blueprint where they've broken that up into micro actions as well, then that's going to be the best way to avoid getting overwhelmed and getting in a community, you know, making sure you have that mentor, that safety net, to make sure that when you fall not if, but when you fall off that ladder at some point along the way, you've got, like, a team of people there who are there to support you, advise you, help you and get you back on your way. Yeah, so crucial. And obviously we say this because, you know, we have a community. We have the master class program. But it it comes to a place of actually, genuinely having gone through that situation, and had I not had something to fall back to, which was the dropship or not, masterclass program when I first failed my drop shipping venture at the start with my other approach, the Chinese model we were talking about earlier. Had I not found the master class and that gave me that community and ambitious people all around me, perhaps I never would have got as far as I've been able to get so far with my E commerce businesses as well. So yeah, it really does come from a place of knowing how hard it can be to tread the path without having people around you. So for people that are keen to get around, ambitious people to change their environment, to have the right approach. Have we got somewhere that you can suggest for people to go to start straight away? Absolutely, yeah. If you are ready to start and you think, yeah, I want to do this. I want the safety net. I want the ladder. I want all the other metaphors you've talked about. Then head over to dropship, unlocked.com, forward slash, start. 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. Now it's that part of the podcast where we're going to answer a question that we've received from a listener of a previous episode. So if you want your questions answered, all you need to do is comment on a YouTube video version of one of the episodes, and not only will it be answered in the comments, but we may also feature it on an upcoming episode. So this week, the question has come in from the YouTube handle, which is called at popularity Pulse TV. So their question for you, Lewis, so popularity pulse has said it would be good if you could provide, slash name, a couple of UK suppliers. Yeah, interesting. Thank you for the question popularity Pulse TV. And it's really interesting because I can see myself having asked that exact same question before I understood the nuance and the specific of how this works. So let me give you an example. If you were like the model that we teach right is to validate your niche first and validate the market that you're going to sell it. Now, there are nine different criteria that we take you through. There's other podcast episodes on that stuff. How to pick a niche search that you'll find. Lots of content we've done on that. But say, for example, you've decided to pick your niche as coffee machines. Right? That's what you're selling, industrial coffee machines. If I say to you, here's a supplier, you know, and they make barbecues, that's not going to be particularly relevant for you as a coffee machine seller, because the supplier is niche dependent. It's niche specific. Now, I don't have a list of suppliers in every niche, because part of the process of researching a niche is to find relevant suppliers that would work with you. But even take that step further, imagine I did have a list of coffee machine suppliers, and I just gave you one and said, All right, popularity posts, that's your niche. Here's a supplier that I've worked with in that niche before. You might then call them and say all the wrong things and have nothing to show them. I'm not saying that you would do that, but like, let's just imagine for a moment you had no website, you have no script, you have no trust symbols set up. You haven't gone through our pre store launch checklist. You call them, and then they say, sorry, we're not ready to work with you. And then you you might say to me, well, Lewis, you said that this was a good supplier. And I'd be like, well, they are, but only when you have the right foundations in place already. You are in that niche. You've got your store launched. You've got all the trust elements in place that help a supplier make the decision to say yes to you. You followed the supplier script to sign them. You know, if these were the type of suppliers that was so easy to sign that all you had to do was click a button and they just sent you through a form and it was like, it's all done. You never had to jump on a phone call or send an email or anything. Don't you think everyone would use those suppliers, and therefore the value of the products that those suppliers sold would be minimal, because there'd be so much competition and saturation that it wouldn't work. So the point of this is that hopefully you can see where I'm coming from here. It's not like I have a list of suppliers that I'm not giving it's that the suppliers that you work with are dependent on the niche that you go into, and as. Such you would want to be the one to research them. You know, we did a whole episode on this, which was called How to Find premium suppliers. So dropship unlocked Podcast, episode 81 if you haven't already, go and have a listen to that. And now we walk you through the exact strategy to uncover suppliers in your niche. So I don't, it's not like we give you suppliers, we show you how you find those suppliers in your niche. Because I could give you 10 suppliers now and next month. There's another two that have just started up in business, but I couldn't give you those because they didn't exist at the time. Likewise, the ones I give you might have shut down by then. So you want to have the skills and the tools to be able to do this yourself. But the process fundamentally starts with choosing a niche that's already been validated. Because as a part of that process of researching the niche, you'll be looking at suppliers who already drop ship, and therefore you'll have your suppliers when you go into that market. But you wouldn't contact them until you have your MVS, or what I call your minimum viable store, set up, because then you can go to the supplier, show them something, read them the script that we give you, the email script, the phone script, and, yeah, get them signed up. So hopefully that makes sense and adds a bit of that kind of, you know, the few of the missing links there, potentially. But yeah, check out episode 81 of the podcast for the full strategy on finding and signing suppliers. Awesome. Yeah, no. Great answer, Lewis, and it's a great question. I think when we first decided to get into drop shipping, we want to know, okay, who are we going to work with, what products we're going to sell? But there's a reason why we do the the approach of teaching people how to fish rather than giving people fish. And actually, if we were to give out names of suppliers that we work with, it wouldn't even be giving people fish. I think it would just be giving people bait, because it's all part of the overall picture, and nobody wants to just be handed baits, because that's completely useless. But that's how I see it coming into the whole strategy. We have to be teach people how to fish and so actually, they can go above and beyond what we've succeeded because they know exactly how to achieve e commerce success and sign great suppliers. So a great question, and equally well answered. Lewis, so yeah, keep your questions coming in. I'd love to answer them on the on the podcast. Okay, it's now time to highlight a recent review that we've had for the podcast as well. So a big thank you to Helen Drake 930 for sharing your thoughts in a recent YouTube comment. So really appreciate it. Helen. Helen said, very good advice to focus the mind on profit over revenue. That's right, Helen, revenue doesn't pay the bills in this type of business. If we're building it, if we're bootstrapping an E commerce business, then it's profit that we need to keep us going. And yeah, cash flow will be the blood, the life blood, of any business like this. So I'm glad to hear that you enjoyed the content and that you've been enjoying the podcast. Now, if this episode today that we've covered resonated with you, would you consider sharing it with someone else that you know who might benefit from it? Your recommendations really help us grow this podcast and continue delivering valuable content. So a really quick share to someone today that you know on WhatsApp could make a big difference in their lives, and it helps us grow our podcast as well. For you, 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 you 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