Story of Building a Drop Ship Empire & Asia Lifestyle with Nick Peroni

So today we have an amazing topic and an amazing guest, Nick Peroni who has spoken at many events. He is an expert on drop shipping and we will talk about that and his story of building an empire. He gives us his insights, tips and tricks.

It’s a good one. Let’s tune in.

√ Nick’s website
√ Nick’s facebook community
√ Nick’s VIP Page
√ Visit our GFA partner – Mercury – for US banking solutons for your ecommerce businesss

Thanks a lot Nick, it’s been a pleasure to finally have you on the show. Glad to make this happen.

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gfa336

[00:00:00] Episode 336 of Global from Asia talking about drop shipping and the story of building an empire with Nick Peroni. That’s a good one. Let’s tune in. Welcome to the Global from Asia podcast, where the daunting process of running an international business is broken down, into straight up actionable advice.

[00:00:21] And now your host, Michael Michelini. Thank you everybody for choosing to watch or listen to this. Seems like listening is still more popular, but we have this video here. If you’re watching the video version, you’ll see a Chinese kid drawing behind me with Chinese characters and my daughter, I don’t know how she made that or painted that or glued it together.

[00:00:44] And it means, child life basically like small life. And, I feel like we’re all going to go back to the basics in life. You know, like 2020 is almost over, I can’t wait. What a year? Honestly looking forward to getting to the next one. Hope, think positive, but, you know, I think we all went through quite a lot, so we should be proud of surviving 2020. You know, there’s, there’s memes and stuff around there, like before

[00:01:10] 2020 and after, you know, we’ve, we’ve all probably been through a lot in our life, in our businesses. I do hope everybody is doing fine. So today we’re talking about dropshipping, you know, I know sometimes I guess a little bit of a negative meme with a lot of these Facebook ads you get from people saying, I make millions on drop shipping and, you know, drop shipping.

[00:01:28] But this is an amazing topic and amazing guest, Nick Peroni, I had a pleasure to see him. He’s spoken at many events I’ve been to, and he is a, you know, really an expert. He practices what he preaches. He does amazing seminars and he’s also doing it himself and he has a great community for e-commerce.

[00:01:48] People who are drop shippers and using Facebook ads. So it’s really an amazing treat for all of you. So I do hope you enjoy, and he gives some amazing value. We did this also live streaming. We had some 

[00:02:00] great guests or you know, members in our GFAVIP community engaging with him afterwards. So that wasn’t in this session, unfortunately, but this is an amazing one where you get to really hear some insights of his story and tips and tricks.

[00:02:14] And I know a lot of people always wonder, how do I get started? Where do I go from here. We talk about that a lot in this interview. And then after I’ll give a little bit insight on my first drop ship e-commerce business and some of the pros and cons that I went through myself just a little bit in the outro.

[00:02:28] All right. Let’s do it. Take it away, Nick. So I’m starting a new Amazon business. Not yet ready to say publicly, but one thing I’m doing is I’m applying for mercury.com. It’s an online e-commerce friendly USA banking solution, and I’m using that to apply for my seller central right now. And it’s, it got virtual debit cards, physical debit cards.

[00:02:50] They’re our official partner at GFA partner program. And we actually have a bonus for you, cash bonus, and it’s totally free to apply if you use our special 

[00:03:00] link and apply, you’ll get a cash bonus as well as us. So it’s a win-win and I am using it myself. Check them out. If you want to go at globalfromasia.com/mercury, you’ll see a special tutorial I made as well as that link for that cash bonus.

[00:03:15] As of at least 2020, I’ll try my best to keep it. That goes on for as long as I can, but I’m confident to recommend them and check them out. They support the show. I’m assuming it’s the streaming. Thanks Michael, Angelica for your help. And this is one, I think we’re at what is it? Our fourth live stream now, third or fourth, and still, still adjusting to the history, but I think they’re, they’re fun.

[00:03:42] They’re, they’re ways for us to engage more with the community and make things happen. So, all right. Let’s see what, wait for Nick, up next here. Okay. Great. Thanks. Thanks for coming on today. Cool. Happy to be here. What’s up everybody. Hope everyone’s doing well. Yeah, we’re doing good. We’re doing good.

[00:04:11] You’re staying busy as always, you know, and it’s, it’s great to finally have you on the show and even, even talk to you since we met last time in, in Manila. So that was, felt like years ago, but, it’s been only a few months really. Right. When was that? March, March, right? Or maybe February. It seems like so long ago.

[00:04:34] Now. I know that was right before you were leaving back for China. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And now you’re in Cebu right down in Cebu now?

[00:04:48] Okay. Great. Okay. So yeah, let’s just, let’s just dive right in. Okay. So this is Nick Peroni, the founder of e-com empire. I got to know you and over the years. You’re, you’re doing amazing, speaking around the world about e-commerce and building online businesses and, and contributing a lot of value to the community online e-commerce community.

[00:05:09] So it’s really a pleasure to have you on Global from Asia podcast today. Thanks for coming on Nick. Yeah, thank you. I, I appreciate the intro and looking forward to talking with you. Sure. Sure. So I guess let’s, let’s go from the beginning, you know, today we’re going to, there’s so much we can talk about it.

[00:05:28] Yeah, of course. I mean, you, you have amazing knowledge and experience in both doing your own eCommerce businesses, being in Pfizer and training and doing these amazing things you do. So there’s so much we could talk about, but I thought today would be kind of a cool little discussion about the story, you know, getting into.

[00:05:45] E-commerce and also, maybe even talk about what you think the future is, you know, in a post, in a post-COVID, in a new world. So I think, you know, maybe everybody’s a bit curious, how did you, how’d you get into the game? How’d you get into the, the e-com world. Yeah, definitely. So, I got started years ago, actually.

[00:06:05] I’ve been doing this for four years now when it comes to selling e-commerce online, primarily drop shipping. But I got started, you know, basically basically like anybody gets started, I guess I was living in Philadelphia and I was already working on a business. But it was a photo booth business actually.

[00:06:25] And I was building it with a business partner. That was my first, my first business that I had started and it was, it was going really well. We actually, over three years we built that into a million dollar company. It was the first thing that allowed me to leave the nine to five life. But it was very stressful, right.

[00:06:43] It wasn’t, it wasn’t giving me the freedom I wanted and then it was right around the beginning of 2016 that I heard about this drop shipping trend that was starting. People were finding products on Ali express, setting up stores on Shopify and using Facebook ads. And I was addicted immediately. As soon as I saw this, I was like, wow, this is crazy.

[00:07:03] People are making thousands of dollars a month without having to talk to anybody or deal with angry clients or anything. So, yeah, that was pretty much the start for me. Beginning of 2016, I jumped in and started my first store and things went really well. And then it was later that year that I started e-com empire is because after I had this success and I got this freedom that I wanted at, you know, I started traveling and doing things and I was like, I need to share this with other people.

[00:07:31] So I started e-comm empires where I created videos to show people what I was doing for free and the rest is history four years later. Now e-comm empires is 94,000 people, been around the world like 20 different countries speaking at events. And I love it. It’s, it’s a, it’s an amazing business model.

[00:07:48] I just feel grateful, you know, at the time we lived in to be able to do this and have these kinds of opportunities. Yeah, it’s amazing. Right. It’s really, really amazing. So yeah. I mean, if I followed your journey, you know, and, and you know, so then you’re in the Philippines now, right? In China, like we said earlier, but I have, I also have a really good, you know, heart close heart with Philippines, friends and team members.

[00:08:14] And, maybe, you know, how did, how did that, how did that happen? How’d you get down to the Philippines? Well, I did an event here in 2018. I was invited to, we put a mastermind together here and when that event was done, I met a girl here, so you know how that story goes.  I kept coming back, I kept coming back here.

[00:08:37] I started dating and eventually just settled down here. I’ve been here now for about two years, I guess, living here and now I live in Cebu, living at a home here in Cebu and I like it. I like the lifestyle here and I liked Southeast Asia in general, but yeah, Philippines is a, is a cool place. I haven’t been able to travel as much because of the COVID restrictions, but, I still enjoy, I still enjoy.

[00:09:04] Yeah, this COVID stuff, but I feel you, man. I mean, yeah, Southeast Asia and, you know, Philippines has got a great, great vibe, you know, really, really, you know, Filipinos are very kind people, right? I mean, they’re, they’re very, you know, trying to find the right word, but they’re very caring and they have heart, you know, I think they put their heart into what they do usually, you know, and it’s, it’s great that you’re helping, you know. We also met at some sessions where you’ve held some training and it’s great to, to help develop the Philippine community for getting more people selling online.

[00:09:39] It’s awesome. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I think niche, niche selection, niche, or niche selection is always, I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a common question I always get, you know, how do you find the right product niche? It seems like the top top questions. I don’t dunno. What’s your common answer for, for somebody asking?

[00:10:00] How do I know what needs to go into what product. I think there’s really two different ways to look at it. For somebody who’s just getting started because you know, right now e-commerce is an amazing opportunity. The silver lining to entrepreneurs getting started up from COVID is that online shopping is booming right now.

[00:10:21] Like it’s, it’s unprecedented how much opportunity there is and so if you’re new, when you’re getting started, you know, the, the challenge is like one, what niche, but also what kind of store do I start? Like, how do I really approach this selling products? And if you’re going to use a strategy where you’re selling through social media with something like Facebook ads, then.

[00:10:42] It’s it’s different than say if you’re starting an Amazon store or something using Google traffic where there’s search intent. Right. So you could really look at it two ways. If you’re, if you’re starting on a platform where there’s search intent, then you want to look at search guardians, right? You want to find some kind of tools.

[00:10:58] So you can see search volumes to get an idea based on research. What, what are people looking for? Where’s the opportunity here? But if you’re doing what I do and you want to sell using social ads, then it’s really, it’s really an impulse thing, right? You’re, you’re appealing to people’s emotions, whatever it is you’re selling.

[00:11:16] And I, I usually recommend now what works really well is starting with one product, instead of just starting with an entire niche, if you know your niche and you know what you want to do, that’s fantastic. But, if you’re going into drop shipping, it’s a lot easier to just find one really good product, one product that solves a problem or one product that improves the convenience of somebody’s life.

[00:11:39] and building a store, just a one product store around that. And later you can expand the product line into the niche if you want to. But, this is, this is actually, I didn’t always do it this way, but as of this year, one-product stores have been crushing it. For me and people might be surprised, but you can build a million dollar store selling just one product.

[00:12:02] And it does really well. You could expand that, right? You could start to expand the product line, find related items, turn it into a niche category store. But I think it’s easier to just start out finding one proven, really good product that solves some sort of pain point or problem for people. And then build from there.

[00:12:21] Yeah, I love that. I love that. Cause I think it’s kind of true. I mean, you know, a lot of times back in the day, people would just import tons of products with a plugin, you know, from Ali express and just have these huge stores right off the bat with like scraped, scraping pictures. But, um, I think those days, those days are, are gone maybe.

[00:12:41] And I like the idea of a one-product website you can do so much. Right. You know, just could be a simple, simple landing page, you know, maybe a, an opt-in landing page. You know, of course sales page, you know, and you, you don’t have to, it’s not, it could be like a very long page, right? Talking about the product, the story, you know, it’s not just like a quick, quick sale.

[00:13:02] Yeah, exactly. You can find, you know, you, you can find, basically find. And I know, I know you come from an Amazon background, so this is a little bit better than what Amazon sellers would do, but like for, for the strategy that I’ve been using, just to explain it to everybody, you can find products that are.

[00:13:21] High perceived value, right? So maybe it only costs you $10 to source this item, but it’s something that, like, let me, let me think of an example. Say, say a beauty product, right? Maybe it’s only $10 to source it, but you can sell it for 49.99. All right. And so you have a good margin there and you can, you know, there’s a great, there’s a great store out there.

[00:13:44] Some people might know it’s called boom by Cindy Joseph, it was started by Ezra Firestone. He’s super famous in the e-com world. So anyway, like his story is, started with one product, that one original skincare product for women that are ages 45 and older, and then later expanded the product line to new things so that now they have a completely niche store.

[00:14:04] But yeah, you can just start out with a simple store, you know, like a long form sales page type of, type of pet store. And then you have one product that has a higher perceived value so that you haven’t, you know, a decent average order value. And then you can scale from there. Yeah, I love it. I love it.

[00:14:24] You know, I’m free to ask, but what do you think of the whole we’re we’re where are you sourcing stil, China, you know, Thailand, US, Philippines, or, or does it matter where your suppliers from

[00:14:41] China still. Okay, cool. And all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend Aliexpress. Aliexpress is a great place to find ideas. So is Amazon, but I wouldn’t recommend sourcing from Aliexpress, because it’s just unreliable, you know who you’re going to get higher. But as you know, you can hook up with, you can hook up with private suppliers in China, just by doing your research just by networking.

[00:15:08] And they’ll be able to, you know, get the item for you, source it for you in small bulk quantities. They can do a quality check. They can get you custom packaging, they can ship it out faster for you. So, that’s what I’m using. I have a, I have a supplier in China. Yeah, I love them. I’m happy. I was afraid to ask.

[00:15:26] Yeah. I mean, Aliexpress is I don’t know. I feel like it’s dangerous. Like I’ve done some aliexpress sites and they worked for a while, but then suddenly the supplier is out of stock, you know, or, or it doesn’t respond. I don’t know. I mean, it’s a little risky sometimes, so. I think it’s the point to do less product quantity, right?

[00:15:45] Like quality. So you’re in building, having a better relationship with your supplier, whether, I mean anywhere really, but China or anywhere. So I think like, just to kind of summarize your advice, like have a, like a solid connection with that supplier, and then, you know, you could still even take some stock, like you said, maybe take a small quantity.

[00:16:04] They go to like a marketplace. There’s tons of markets in China. So they might be near like EBU or Watson Bay or maybe some going geo markets maybe. And then they’re, they’re like a sourcing agent. They can help you. Yeah, like you said, check the product, shipped the product and as good as good if I felt like I like that.

[00:16:24] Any insights where you think someone could find that now online, or, you know, I guess still go to Ali express or Alibaba or, or maybe gold sources, something like that. Yeah, you could go to Alibaba for sure and, and start a conversation there. I mean, that can work and there are also, there are also, I guess, companies that are now, like they do this to work with drop shippers and basically be that middleman between, you know, like, one big one is called CJ drop shipping.

[00:16:57] There’s another one that I personally used, which I don’t mind sharing. They’re called yacky. Oh five. And, and they, they have no minimum order quantity, right? So you can still test a product with them. They’ll source it for you. And it’s going to be longer shipping times because you’re not carrying inventory.

[00:17:13] But once you see that that product sells, you can ask them to bring a stock into their warehouse. Like say you just get a hundred orders at a time and they bring a stock into the warehouse. That way you can get much faster shipping time because it’s 24 hour turnaround on the shipment. Great. Sorry. I, maybe I, maybe I missed it.

[00:17:33] Cut. Maybe when you said a supplier or at least I didn’t hear it clearly. Oh yeah. Yeah. There’s, there’s several of them but the two I mentioned are CJ Dropshipping and Yacky are two are two that are used that people can look up if they want. Okay. Okay. Great. Thanks for sharing that naked is really helpful.

[00:17:54] Okay. Let’s move forward. So, yeah, like you said, so, so your, your specialty, I’ve seen some of your, some of your, uh, presentations as Facebook ads with, you know, for e-commerce sellers with usually drop shipping. So you have this margin, like. You’re talking about like a fashion and beauty product, $10 product costs, 49, $50 retail price.

[00:18:14] So then you have that $40 margin, you know, what do you think somebody should look at for margins? You know, there’s always a race to the bottom, right? I mean, what, what kind of numbers should somebody put on there? Like their, uh, ad ad budgets and, you know, spending, or what’s a good, good campaign versus a bad campaign.

[00:18:35] Yeah, that’s a fantastic question. One of the reasons that margin is so important is because a lot of people don’t understand, like when you’re, when you’re marketing on Facebook and you’re using paid advertising a good cost per purchase, like what you’re spending to acquire a customer is going to be in the range of 20 to $25.

[00:18:55] Right. At any sort of scale, like if you’re getting customers for 20 to $25, Then then that’s good. But obviously in order to do that, you need to be able to have a margin of more than that to be profitable. Right. So that’s why you generally want to have products that you’re selling that are high perceived value.

[00:19:14] So you can have at least a. $35 margin on the product, which is what I like to see. But when it comes to running the campaigns yet, you know, you actually don’t need a lot of people were always surprised by this. I make videos about this all the time from showing like how I do it. You can start with $5 $5 ad sets, right?

[00:19:33] Like when you’re, you’re creating audience by audience, you can do $5 ad sets. Was that in my side, China and Philippines, internet combined is a little tricky. These me? Yeah. I can still hear you. It looks like it’s kind of refreshing, but I, but yeah, so I was just saying that $5 ad sets work to start, you know, the big thing with Facebook is it’s not when you’re in a testing phase, right.

[00:20:01] You’re just trying to prove a concept. See if something works with your ad, it’s more important to test. A lot of audiences than it is to spend a lot of money on just one audience, right? Like you can test your audiences at $5 a day, but it’s more important to be testing at least 10 to 20 audiences at $5 a day, as opposed to say, I’m just going to test five audiences at $20 a day.

[00:20:23] Right. That’s what I’ve found is really, really works well. And not just for me or for, you know, everybody that I’ve shown that test this way as well. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think this is, this is the most valuable part, right? Like finding your product market fit, finding your, you know, to finding the right ad campaigns.

[00:20:44] You know, the beginning is everything in life or in businesses always takes the most patients and the most tweaking and time. Right, I guess the next followup of that is, you know, what is, how, how to know when you’re, how much time do you give it, or how long do you, you know, how do you know what’s working?

[00:21:03] What’s not working or, you know, how long do you run this for usually. Yeah. So my testing stage is, um, you know, because that’s part of the game, right? Even if you’re building a one product store and you’re doing your research, you’re not always going to hit, um, everything a hundred percent of the time. So, my testing stage is taking about 10 to 20 audiences, usually 20 audiences and setting them all up at $5 a day.

[00:21:30] And then letting them run for three to five days, it really depends on your, your KPIs, right? Because you have certain numbers you want to be looking at, um, like you want to, you want to know, first of all, what your margin is, cause your margin is your target acquisition cost, right? So if you have a $30 margin on the product and you’re running at $5 a day, then the most I’m going to test these audiences.

[00:21:54] Is up to six days because if they don’t have a purchase, by the time they hit the target acquisition costs, I’m going to turn it all. So you’re, you’re just kind of testing from a, I would say probably a three to seven day period, depending on what your margin on the product is and you’re turning off different ad sets or different audiences as you see, they aren’t performing.

[00:22:16] Got it. This is really valuable. Thanks for sharing with us today, this insights. Are you like, so then I remember it was a competition, maybe even one year sessions, there’s a niche and there’s a product, right? So I think I remember hearing it somewhere, but maybe you could try multiple products in the same niche.

[00:22:34] Until you maybe have the, maybe you pick a niche, but then you choose a product that doesn’t work. You go to another product in that same niche. So then hopefully you can kind of leverage some of your work, you know, cause to start from scratch with a new site or a new co you know, new everything. Maybe you could use the same, you know, are you rotating products maybe and staying in the same like site or the same, uh, you know, kind of target market.

[00:22:56] Is that, is that something you would do. For me, the niche depends on, on, so I like a couple of categories that are, I think are always good categories right now in Q4. So everybody knows, well, maybe not everybody but you know, Q4 is a special kind of trend in and of itself because it’s very geared towards how they gift items.

[00:23:21] And also of course, winter being part of Q4, it brings a whole trend of apparel that always does well, uh, this time of year. So, so that’s not really a niche, but when it comes to Q4, you know, those types of products, if you can find, uh, products that are be good, gift ideas or products that are. Good for winter as some sort of apparel or something that’s needed.

[00:23:44] You know, I really like home and garden as a niche as well. Um, there’s always, there’s always lots of product ideas all year round. And you just want to look at the time of year. It is the season of the year for, you know, whatever country you’re selling in because this, this is a worldwide opportunity, by the way, I’ve built stores that sell in different languages, right?

[00:24:03] So you don’t have to sell in just the United States. You could be selling in your own country wherever you want to go. As long as you can ship products there, then, then you’re fine but anyway, so like in the U S. Coming up in March, we know it’s going to be springtime. There’s so many products that are good in the home and garden niche when springtime comes around.

[00:24:21] Right. And right now, one of the products that have that’s doing really well is apparel. I mean, apparel is always going to be one of the biggest categories. The thing is, can you find something unique? Right. Can you find something that’s super unique about it or that has to do with the trend? Like this one is something to do with norm, you know, like more clothing for people.

[00:24:43] That is, that is good for this time of year. So, so yeah, I think, I think that you can rotate within the same niche, as long as you’re picking a big category. I think people tend to over-complicate the choices. Um, I would stick to, you know, the categories that you know, are selling home and garden. Women’s apparel is always going to be a good category, health and beauty.

[00:25:05] You know, these are like the biggest categories and they’re always going to be, and there’s always new product ideas coming into these categories. Yeah, no, that’s great advice. I feel same. Like, yeah, you start to know a niche, right. You know, that market, you know, the products you notice. So like, you know, you look at the suppliers or maybe your supplier gives you a product idea.

[00:25:26] Which goes the next kind of like a follow-up question. I’m kind of going, I’m kind of just adjusting as I go. But, one idea is where do you get new idea products, product ideas from your market, from your supplier? I guess it’s just not for, right. Like you’re just selling. And then you just see opportunities.

[00:25:43] And how do you usually develop, how do you usually grow your product line? Yeah. So a couple, couple answers to that. One is definitely, it’s important to look at trends like right now I’m working on a supplements brand for 2021 that has to do with the trend of people wanting to get better sleep. Right.

[00:26:01] Cause that’s a big trend in the market right now, especially for entrepreneurs and high achievers. They want to get deep sleep. They want to get the optimal. Uh, so, you know, that’s like by looking at trends and just seeing what’s going on in the market, I think that’s always important too, which is doing the research.

[00:26:16] So when it just comes to drop shipping in general, I actually have a team now that that kind of does that for me. I mean, I still walk and keep my, you know, um, Ear to the grindstone as they say, but that’s, that’s just a matter of looking at the markets. Amazon is a fantastic place to look because you know, a lot of people think of a product is on Amazon, then they can’t go and sell it themselves.

[00:26:39] And that’s just simply not true. You can find good product ideas on Amazon by looking in right. The movers and shakers, the best sellers, the most wished for you can find ideas there and then build your own store around it. You know, like there there’s a difference because Amazon has its own search volume already, but when you go to book and you get a really cool video ad made that displays his product, you can reach a whole new market.

[00:27:02] People and, and a lot of those people are just going to come to your store and they’ll buy, right? Like they’ll, as long as you do a good job creating high quality content, then, then that’s why Amazon can work as an excellent place to do research and get ideas and then when you have a product that’s selling.

[00:27:22] Yeah. You can just start going around and looking at the related products, you can do that on Ali express. You can do that on Amazon, you can just, and you can also just think about like, what would make sense with this, right? Like if, like if you were selling a pair of leggings, then it makes sense to have an upsell for more leggings or maybe an sell for, you know, a different color or maybe an up sell for hoodie, right?

[00:27:46] Like there’s, there’s things that just make sense when, when you’re in a certain category. Uh, so I think that heart has a little bit to do with like, and you can also pull your customers too, right? You can actually, if you’re delivering a quality product and your customers like it, then you’re going to, I have no trouble sending out emails to customers, or just listening to the feedback from your customers about what might work well with this, or what else do they want to see from the store?

[00:28:14] You can use your email list to get I D is too easy. Even test ideas, right? You could send, you know, you could find a new product and create a, just a quick and dirty landing page for it on your store market for a flash sale, 50% off and send an email blast and see are people interested in this? Are they not interested in this?

[00:28:33] Yeah, that’s great. You know, we’re talking about, you know, Amazon is, it doesn’t have the luxury of building email lists. So, you know, that’s actually one advantage of, you know, selling on your own store or a, you know, you know, doing, you know, Not doing Amazon because they, you can just tricks, not tricks, but you can do rebate cards or you can do inserts in the package and hope they opt in after.

[00:28:52] But obviously that’s one advantage of drop-shipping or just doing your own e-commerce store is you get your customer lists so you can do stuff like you’re saying, which sometimes Amazon sellers can’t do so easily but I love it. Yeah. I mean, I love reading negative reviews on, on products and Amazon, you know, I just you know, you look at it, you look at what people don’t like.

[00:29:12] You know what, and then, um, what doesn’t work for them. And so we have a question from somebody on our, in our, in our membership, Travis from ISA he’s, he’s a new member actually really happy he’s at mercury.com is doing e-commerce growth there. A shout out to mercury.com. They’re a actually, it’s a really good online, I I’m afraid to say banking, but online financial solution for, for e-commerce sellers in, with US companies.

[00:29:41] So he’s asking a about platforms to drop ship on to, or recommend like you know, Amazon, I don’t think you can drop shipping on Amazon, is a little bit dangerous. Right? So you usually, you’re doing it on like a Shopify store, you know, with Facebook ads. That’s usually, I think that’s, that’s the most common or, or what would you say.

[00:30:02] I use Shopify. Shopify is so simple to set up easy to use. Very user-friendly they have really good free themes that you can set up and yet, you know, like I wanted to add, I guess, because I just thought of this as you were talking about Amazon, you know, these Facebook ad strategies are strategies that are universal, right?

[00:30:22] Like you could have a product on Amazon and be doing well with it, but there’s no reason you couldn’t run traffic to it. I’ve seen people run traffic to a landing page where they get people to opt in for the discount, and then it redirects them to the Amazon page. You know, or you could, you could expand your brand onto a Shopify store and, and have multiple channels.

[00:30:41] So, I think that it’s, it’s, it’s smart either way, to be taking advantage of Facebook ads and using that traffic. Yeah. Agreed. But I just, I don’t think you’d, I mean, I’ll say it myself. I don’t recommend drop shipping on Amazon. I think they really frowned upon it. I know there’s people that do it. You could drop ship on Amazon cause using the FBM fulfilled by merchants and, uh, you know, not FBA.

[00:31:07] Just, just answer the question you, cause you mentioned Amazon, usually Amazon sellers are using FBA, which means fulfilled by Amazon, which means it’s in Amazon’s warehouse already. So that means you had to buy it already and put it there. And usually it’s a larger quantity but you could do fulfill by merchant FBM and then you could technically drop ship.

[00:31:25] But I think Amazon technically it doesn’t. It doesn’t all like, it definitely doesn’t like it. I don’t know if they technically banned or not, but, uh, you know, you can get in trouble on Amazon if you don’t ship within like one or two days. I think after the customer buys. So it it’s just a little bit dangerous usually to try drop ship on Amazon, just to give that clear feedback to that question.

[00:31:47] So yeah, usually people are dropshipping, like Nick is on using Shopify or e-comm stores using  social advertising, especially Facebook, but it could be anything. It could be. I know some people do read it ads, you know, you could do Google ads, you know, um, I think, you know, just to simplify it a little bit more, I mean, drop shipping is a type of e-commerce, you know, it’s basically years old, you have, you have a shopping cart and you have a way to get traffic to that, to that page.

[00:32:17] Right. And then most people nowadays are doing paid traffic to that page and then converting it. And then like you said, Shopify, right? So Shopify, you know, makes it really easy to have plugins and pretty fast, you know, pretty good, like you said, themes and things like that. So, so that’s, that’s usually the most common, common way.

[00:32:40] Thanks. Is there other questions? We can also bring some people up on stage. Um, we’re going to go maybe five, 10 more minutes, and then, then, hose in the session we can do some, uh, live networking if that’s okay. And Nick has a little bit more time. I know he’s busy, with his empire. That’s fine. And to, to add to what you said, like, like, I love what you said there that drop shipping is, is just a form.

[00:33:04] You know, it’s just a business model, right. And it can, drop shipping is meant to evolve, right. Drop shipping is really the starting point of, of testing a product. But then, you know, like you said, you could, if you have a product that’s working and a brand that’s working, you could bring your own inventory to Amazon.

[00:33:22] I personally don’t sell on Amazon, but I know people that have done that, or you could bring your inventory to the US using a 3PL right? Like there’s, there’s multiple companies that you can ship in bulk, overseas, and then you can integrate with your Shopify store, woocommerce, that. You know, you could use that as well.

[00:33:38] A lot of people like woocommerce. Okay. Yeah. So, I mean, it’s really, it’s just the business model. It’s just a way to easily with a low barrier of entry gets started. But it’s a real business model because it’s very scalable. Like it’s very, it’s, it’s very, not everybody does it, but it’s, it’s very, I don’t know any other business model that you could scale to a million dollars in sales as quickly as you can with drop shipping other sites other than maybe say digital products.

[00:34:09] Right? Right. It’s something that once you, once you lock in a, a funnel that’s working. Whether that’s going to a, an, a funnel could be as simple as going to the product page and then they go to the car and they check out. Right. But once that is working and you’re using something like Facebook or Google or both, I like to use both actually, but Facebook is just so scalable to me.

[00:34:32] I’ve never like, I’ve been able to do well with Google, but I’ve just never been able to, again, When Facebook is working, I don’t know any other traffic source that you can just scale so quickly. Like if you have money, if you have credit, which you should use credit, by the way, if you have credit, then you can just, it’s like throwing fuel on a fire.

[00:34:50] You can literally take off so quickly. Yeah. I mean, I agree. I mean, also just to kind of, it’s cool to bounce back and forth, but yeah. I mean, a lot of people say I’m an Amazon seller, I’m a shipper, but those are just channels. Right. That’s why, I mean, you use e-comm in your brand. I mean, I, I usually like to say e-comm e-commerce is more the.

[00:35:10] Big picture, but it’s really just commerce. Right? It’s selling a physical product online and drop shipping is, is a supply chain solution for you, like you said, without as much upfront, like I think the next level is wholesale, right? Wholesale. You buy like a carton, like a hundred pieces or 50 pieces.

[00:35:29] Right. Then the next level is like, you know, private label, which is kind of what we talk a lot about here in a, in a community private label means you actually buying like a thousand pieces. Putting your own logo branding, sending it into Amazon, or even in your own warehouse, you know? And then we don’t talk about too much, but you could do a Kickstarter right.

[00:35:48] Then that’s like a whole new thing. We’ve we’ve had people talk about that in the community that’s where you actually invent your own products, like a new invention, right. A crowdfunding. So they, and they all crossed back and forth. You know, you can evolve from one to the other, and there’s also affiliate even above a drop shipping.

[00:36:05] Right. You can just be an affiliate and just send traffic, uh, to, you know, Amazon or to, and other sites for a commission which is the lowest risk because you don’t even have to have a, the transaction happened on your shopping cart. So, yeah, I mean, I, I love that, you know, we’re bouncing back and forth, but a lot of people get stuck at the beginning.

[00:36:24] Like, how do I get started? How do I pick a product? But I think like, I think the biggest lesson people should take is it’s about taking action. Right? And it’s about testing, you know, and you’re saying like five, 10, $20 a day on ads. Of course, you got to find a product supplier, build out a Shopify site.

[00:36:40] But yeah, I mean, within, within a week or so you could get some customers or at least get some data and know what’s working and what’s not right. And then, but I know it’s overwhelming. I know, you know, obviously you’ve been doing it so many years and, uh, and others, I understand it’s overwhelming for people, but, but it’s really just like experimenting.

[00:36:59] You’re like a scientist, right? Like you’re like, they call it growth hacking. Right. You’re like, kind of just trying to find that spark. And then, like you said, once you find that. Once you find what’s converting, then you just increase, like you said, into Facebook and. Scale it right. Kickstarter is actually a great place to research as well.

[00:37:20] Because that is basically the one product format right there. They’re doing it a different way, but they’re just selling one product on a long form sales page with high quality content and a video, usually an, a video ads. So, Kickstarter’s actually a great place to get ideas in the sea. When you look at good Kickstarter campaigns to see the type of products that sell and also how they are crafting the content and the copy to make it sell.

[00:37:50] Because I, I, I agree. I think where, you know, and one of the things that I find interesting and I’ve worked with a lot of people now, I think for people tend to over-complicate things sometimes is we it’s like when we enter into a business model like this selling online, it’s like we take off our human hat and we put on this marketer hat of, of who we want to be and how we want to talk and what we want to write.

[00:38:14] And I find a lot of times people are just picking products that like, if you were to just step back and think about it, like an actual consumer, like, and actually think about, okay, let me take my marketing hat off and put my human hat on and think, would I buy this? What I really, by this, what I really be excited about this product, what I really trust this store that I just built, you know, like sometimes.

[00:38:35] It doesn’t even pass the test. It’s like we get into this mode where we’re trying to be clever or we’re trying, you know, like, you know, sometimes you just have to think about it, like, like, is this product something that genuinely provides a lot of value or solves a problem or is really cool or it’s going to make people go, wow, I need that.

[00:38:51] That’s so cool. You know? And, um, That’s my product research is one of the harder parts because it takes time. It’s a process. But yeah, I think a lot of times people just kind of don’t have the right criteria. Like they’re just, they’re just being random about it instead of putting their product ideas through, you know, a series of questions to test, if this is really a good product to be selling.

[00:39:14] Yeah. Agreed. That’s one thing I should’ve added, but you’re probably investing in photos and you know want descriptions, right? You’re not just. I mean, people could just take them from Alex or something by usually really succeed. I would say, you’re investing in a unique product description title, right?

[00:39:31] Like kind of like the user experience. Like that’s your job. I think as a dropship, right? It’s presentation presenting this to the customer in a good way. Yeah, presentation super important. I think that’s one of the areas where a lot of people fail and it’s one of the reasons why one product store works well or even a niche store, you know, and these stores work too.

[00:39:52] But you can create high quality, branded content and it’s one of the reasons why the general store method is you mentioned earlier is, is kind of dying a slow death because there’s no brand, there’s no value and the market is just saturated with them at this point. But when you create that brand value there and yeah, you, you can, I mean, ordering the product is, is a fantastic idea.

[00:40:15] You can actually then get real shots of it, real images of it. Or if you hire a talented graphic designer, you can probably get that done without ordering the product, which is generally what we do. I have somebody that will go through and create really, really good content for everything. If it’s a brand new product that nobody’s ever seen or heard of, then yeah, you might need to order it to get that content made.

[00:40:38] But yeah, it’s, it’s so important and copy too. You know, one of the things that I’ve done over the years that I can say has directly impacted my success is studying copywriting. It’s such an important skill to have. I think it’s one of the top skills anybody can have that wants to sell online. I would agree with that.

[00:40:58] Totally. Yeah. I mean, you always use, you know, my first couple hours every morning is writing, you know, creating, you know, creating, even running email. I try to put it in my morning, you know, writing up, writing out content. It’s, it’s very important. There’s there’s some really good copywriters to learn from the old school guys too.

[00:41:17] You know, you don’t even need to read the new stuff. Right. Just learn. The old stuff is actually sometimes better. Well this has been fascinating, Nick. Maybe we can give a little shout out to immunity. You have an amazing Facebook group and website. How can people find more about you and what you do?

[00:41:36] Yeah, sure. I appreciate it, man. So the group is called e-com empires. You can see it there in my little, my little tagline under my name. So, uh, if you just search it on Facebook, you’ll be, you’ll be able to find it. And there’s a lot of great free content in there. I know people tend to be skeptical of, of stuff.

[00:41:54] Then it should feel good for a good reason. There was a lot of terrible content out there on drop shipping, but I have a lot of videos in there that I just recorded for free, where I talk about my strategies and show like actual examples of running ads. You know? So if anybody wants to get a little bit more deep dive in the Facebook ads I have and on my YouTube channel as well, I have completely free videos in there where I actually show inside my ad accounts and show you the way that I run my ads.

[00:42:22] So you can see but I actually do want to talk about, and like how it actually works as well. The overall the overall strategy. Yeah. It’s a breath of fresh air. I mean, like you said, drop ship does have a bad name. I don’t know if you know, it has got a bad rap man on the internet because there’s a lot of.

[00:42:39] Yeah. A lot of people that are, uh, yeah, like selling a dream same, you know? Cause like you can, you know, you say like I it’s, you know, no low upfront investment, you know, make money, you know, you know, it can attract that kind of, uh, you know, kind of vibe. But, uh, but yeah, it’s, it’s a business model and it’s a great ones definitely to get started and you can grow it.

[00:42:58] You can go wholesale, Amazon, your Kickstarter. And, uh, it’s been, it’s been really a pleasure to have you on the show. Finally, Nick, it’s been even on my list for, for awhile and glad to make this happen. And, so, we’ll link this up on the show notes and then just stay right here. If you’re on, if you’re on live call, we’re going to go into networking.

[00:43:17] So there’ll be in this table mode. And then I think it would be one or two tables, but Nick, if you could just, we’ll just hang out with a couple of people here, uh, for those on, on the group. Thanks everybody for tuning into the live stream and the podcast. And, uh, it’s a pleasure until next time. Yeah, thank you.

[00:43:33] We’re just restarting our new, yeah, GFAVIP masterminds. We’re making groups of around six people per group. We have a group now for the Amazon sellers. We have another group for B2B trading and, and a little bit more service side. And we’re making more groups. If you want to get any insight of what we’re doing, we do these right now, the first and third Tuesday of each of each month.

[00:43:54] And we’re working on it’s more, a little bit easier, your uptime, but we’re working on a US friendly time too. We’d love to have people in the community join us. Check it out. Yeah. At gfavip.com. Thank you. Thank you, Nick. For sharing. We actually tried to do that in person. I didn’t know if I say that here, but, we’re both in Manila at the time.

[00:44:12] And I was almost, I think we almost had a date, but I think I was the one had to cancel. He was still in Manila. He’s in Cebu now, but. I’m in China. And, it was like evacuation in March, 2020. So I didn’t get to do this in person, but I still think we had an amazing opportunity to get them on the show.

[00:44:26] And I hope all of you enjoy that amazing value that he has shared with us. He had a lot of fun and maybe, maybe we’ll have him on again, or get more involved in, uh, other, other types of things we do here at global from Asia. So thanks again, Nick. I said in the intro, I will share some of my insights doing drop shipping at the beginning.

[00:44:43] And my story started in 2004. I was working on, in Wall street in New York City at the time. And I really like, I think I said maybe an interview. I’ve said sometimes I had no idea what I was doing. I’ll be honest. I. I was starting to internet marketing. I was starting to do website marketing with an app company.

[00:44:59] I was, my friend started and I was joining onto his startup while we were both working the nine to five in banking. We both want to do startups. So I started learning about like growth hacking. Uh, that’s a whole nother story, but basically I got, I got advertisements. I remember I saw an ad on my Yahoo mail and it was like a banner says like, Oh, holiday, it was at a holiday Inn in New York city on.

[00:45:22] I think it’s like 29th street, maybe near Penn station, for those that might be familiar with Manhattan. And I was sitting there with my friend and my roommate, Andrew, and I was like, Hey, Andrew, do you want to go to this free seminar about how to make money online? He’s like, what is wrong with you?

[00:45:38] I was like, I think they give you a free lunch. I think they offered a free lunch. So. We signed up and, uh, we went and, you know, there was a huge room in this seminar, right? It’s like the classic, you know, selling a back of the room kind of thing. And they’re like, some dude was up on stage. Actually. It was really valuable.

[00:45:54] He was sharing his, he was sharing about his drop ship business of selling these vegetable basically making juice out of vegetables. So he sold these machines that you could just like grind celery or grind things. There’s actually a term for that, but he was so into how much money he made and how he was growing his business without having inventory.

[00:46:12] And they get everybody excited. And then it was like sales rep taking into the back of the room, you know, like I remember doing like, you know, I was sitting there in this hotel conference room in New York city and it was. Yeah, sales woman comes up to me. She’s like, Oh, would you like to sit with us and back and talk about your opportunity?

[00:46:26] You know, it’s like this. So I have this warm, like I’m not signing up for this no way and they’re not going to get me. And we went and Andrew went with me. I think that let us go together in a seminar room, you know, meeting room in the back of the training seminar and. I was, you know, Andrew was a more open, he’s all excited.

[00:46:44] I’m like, man, I’m a sucker. I’m not into this scam. I can like sign up for this. And, uh, so we left. Right? And it’s like, uh, it was a Saturday, I believe, Saturday afternoon. And we’re walking back to our, in Manhattan apartment. Andrew is still saying, man, we should do this. We should do this. And then I’m like we just said, okay, let’s do a 50 50.

[00:47:04] And I don’t know what street we’re on Maybe 20, 28th. And third avenue, something like that, where that street corner in Manhattan. And I’m like, okay. So I think we just shook on it. We just said, let’s do this. I’ll do the marketing. He used to do the like logistics and the kind of like the operations. And I would do the marketing and the promotions.

[00:47:20] Cause I was excited about, I was already doing website marketing. We’d go back to their hotel room and they were cleaning up and they were like, Wow. We got these suckers, you know, like fighting over us and we signed up and but we definitely thought about it. And man, it was really no idea. I mean, overture and you know, for those in the overture before.

[00:47:42] Before, I don’t know if somebody knows Google bottom 2004 and I was watching CDs and the male, the male do it, or they maybe gave it to me when I signed up, it was like a old school binder, you know, and CDs and the back and, and printouts, you know, of like how to do online marketing, how to find drop shippers.

[00:47:57] It was like totally overloaded. Like I had no idea what I was doing. I mean, there’s so much more to the story, but basically I got into the bar products, roundabout through eBay and my website and Google ads or overture ads. And, but I mean, Actually, they went through a lot of lawsuits that company, I won’t say their names just so I’m not trying.

[00:48:14] I don’t, I think they’re already bankrupt, but I use their software. And honestly, I think them, you know, it was a few thousand dollars. But, um, they weren’t so much class action lawsuits. Cause a lot of people sign up for the software and their package at the back of these hotel rooms. They did this all around the U S they were getting people to ask some speaker talking about making money online, and it had salespeople in the back selling these packages and they had.

[00:48:37] There is a whole scheme to it, but I think I’m for it. I think I’m boring. You know, a lot of people sued them. I think they didn’t get money back, but they even had horrible reviews online about scams, et cetera. But I don’t call them a scam. I mean, I paid a few thousand dollars. I had a, some software, some training.

[00:48:51] I had no clue what I was doing. And Andrew and I, we, we built our first e-commerce business that way. You know, we didn’t use a software after a couple of years, maybe a year or two, we used it, but we [00:49:00] upgrade to another shopping cart. But, you know, I think for that, you know, I. I don’t know if I would have started.

[00:49:05] I remember even then, even in 2004, the guy on stayed is like, it’s not too late to do e-commerce. He says, and everyone’s like, it’s too late. It’s too late. You know, they’re already too many sellers online. There’s already too many e-commerce sellers. There’s already too many websites. People were like having these limiting beliefs and a stage and an audience they’re like, Oh, it’s too late.

[00:49:25] It’s not too late, man. This is 2004 man, 2004, I think it was like September, 2004. And. People thought it was too late to sell online. Can you believe that it’s 2000, almost, almost 2021. Right now, if you, if you started them, we still actually still have the site, but, uh, you know, if you had started back then, I mean, nobody knew what they were doing yet or was eCommerce stores and websites, but obviously the game has changed so much since then.

[00:49:50] So, you know, I bet you in 2030. I noticed many people like, you know, people like me, you know, our podcasts is I hope them so podcasts and then 2030. But, you know, I got to say, if you started in 2020, or you started in 20, 21, 10 years from now 10 years ago, you would be, you know, I’m sure to games that change, you know, I hope Amazon’s still here.

[00:50:11] But, you know, back then it was all E-bay. It was all eBay in 2004. I think Australia is still eBay, but you know, I think the main point is just take action. You know, I know it’s scary. I know that there’s risks, you know, you know, may take time, so many people I talked to, you know, they think is easy, you know, and then that’s what people get scammed.

[00:50:29] They sign up for these courses, these programs, and they don’t do the work. I think most of the programs probably are good enough for you to get going. You know, anybody’s course anybody’s program, it’s mostly about you and you taking your own action. So I do hope that people take action, you know, and, uh, and make things happen.

[00:50:47] Well, I’m not for the lecture, but that was a little bit of my early stage start. And then there’s obviously so much to it, but, you know, I just jumped in there and I didn’t complain. I didn’t call the course of scam. I didn’t call the software a scam. I actually engaged with others doing the same thing as me.

[00:51:02] I learned from others. I was networking and making things happen. So I hope I hope that’s something you can do. And I wish you the best in your business. See you next time to get more info running an international business, please visit our website at www.globalfromasia.com. That’s www.globalfromasia.com.

[00:51:22] Also be sure to subscribe to our iTunes feed. Thanks for tuning in.