Wix eCommerce | How to Sell Dropshipping Products Using Wix

Hi everyone. So glad you're here with me today. My name is Ariel. Today I have here with me the WIX Stores team as well as Jill Sherman from Modalist. She's the CEO and co founder. So what we're going to talk about today is how to sell dropshipping products. So we're going to talk about what is dropshipping and how you can make your first. And Jill is going to share some tips and tricks and a lot of her knowledge.

Okay. Hi everyone, my name is Shaket. I'm a product manager from wixtores and today we're going to share with you. Actually Jill is going to share with you how to sell dropshipping products in WIX stores using Modalist. So WIX stores is powered from. We have insights from over millions of users, 1 million users, merchants using our WIX Stores service and our complete product went through an overall in 2019. We've added a lot of new exciting features that you can see and regularly updated in our site. And we are a super fast growing, growing company and especially in weak stores. And we have all the knowledge and we would like to share with you some more information how you can extend your business and make more money. Okay, so today Gilles going to present to you what is dropshipping, how you can select the right items to sell and how to do drop shipping with wix. So Jill, take it from here.

Awesome. Great. Thank you for the introduction and great to be here with everybody. So my name is Jill Sherman. I'm co founder and CEO of Modalist. We enable e commerce retailers to connect to a catalog of curated suppliers for reliable product sourcing and drop shipping automation. We're also an official partner of Aliexpress and recently launched our integration with Aliexpress. With Modalist, an ecommerce store can start their business from start their business and scale it without the need to buy inventory, warehouse it, nor handle shipping and fulfillment. It's actually the easiest way to start and scale your business. Modalist was a pioneer in dropshipping and has scaled to work with over 200,000 stores globally. I started the business with my co founder to enable entrepreneurs like you to build a business rather than dream about it. Now, prior to starting Modalist, I worked in retail for 19 years as an executive at Prada, Vogue and Harvey Nichols. Today I'm going to walk through how to set up your store and sell your first dropshipping product. First, what is drop shipping? Let's go through that. Drop shipping is a retail fulfillment. Sorry Drop shipping is a retail fulfillment method where a store does not keep the product it sells in stock. Instead, when a store sells an item, it purchases the item from a supplier and has it sent directly to the customer. As a result, the merchant never sees nor handles the product. So, so let's go through the drop shipping logistics. How does it actually work? There are no upfront costs, inventory costs. When it comes to dropshipping, you can source millions of products across hundreds of categories and have the order sent directly to your customers. So first, the fun part, you get to source products and add them to your store. Second, you sell products to your customers. Now when they receive an order, you need to go to the supplier and order the products directly from the supplier. The supplier will then send the order directly to your customer. So as you can see, you're never touching or feeling the inventory, nor do you need to buy it up front. There are lots of benefits to dropshipping. First, you can onboard suppliers. In a second, it's just a click of a button to add a product to your store. And there's no cost to add in products to your store. You can add one, you can add hundreds. There's no upfront inventory costs for those products to be added. This means that you can offer a large variety of products risk free. It's sort of the endless aisle for you to explore the world of products and see what works with your customers. You can customize products and product details and information to anything you want. And we highly suggest changing product details to have the spirit of your store. Next, you can set your own margins. So so you can mark up products to be multiplied to any margin that you want. Of course, you want to keep products competitive and pricing across the web, but you can set your own margins as well as your shipping rules. And lastly, you can easily adjust to market trends, meaning if you see something trending now and not later, you can easily swap out those products for something new and trendy or a super confined niche. It's up to you what's in your store and it can be easily adjusted. So to sum it up, dropshipping is a low risk way to build a business. It actually doesn't require much capital to get started. It's also very flexible, so you can work from anywhere in the world. Of course, with any business there's challenges, so let's go through some of those. First, you don't have control over the stock. You don't actually own the inventory, the suppliers do. This means that there's a lack of control over the customer experience with fulfillment. In dropshipping, the supplier should not send packages with their own marketing materials and promotions. And at Modalist we're very strict about those guidelines. With this, it's a bit more challenging to build your brand loyalty. That's why it's important to find reliable suppliers who you trust to do dropshipping correctly. And lastly, the margins are slightly compressed. You can make the highest margins when you buy inventory in bulk. With dropshipping, as a supplier owns the inventory, the cost per item is higher than buying wholesale. So you make a little bit less money per product. Now you get to find your niche and select your products. There are endless ways for you to select items which you want to sell. We highly recommend being selective and narrow. Choose a niche and don't be the everything store. Creating a niche helps earn a loyal customer who comes to you for that niche. Then as you see success and that you can start to expand beyond the narrow confines of that niche, it's important to stay true to that niche. Meaning if you're selling shoes, try expanding to socks. But don't suddenly add kitchen gadgets. So here are three strategies to get you started. Select a niche with proven sales like hot selling items that are trendy. You don't need to know your niche inside out. You can go for something which is a hot seller or super trendy. Now, these items may fly off the virtual shelf, but keep in mind that a trend may also fade fast. So you need to keep your eyes open for the next trend. Some trending niches that we've seen during COVID are face masks or at home exercise gear. Next, a low competition niche. This is a niche that isn't ubiquitous across the web. So your SEO and your marketing dollars go much further. You can build a successful business in a low competition niche. And some examples are something like solar energy products or pet gadgets or indoor indoor gardens. And last is, you know, try starting with something that you love and then iterate based on research. This then becomes a labor of love and your authenticity will shine through. And all the supplemental elements that you need to create to build your business. Things like marketing, a blog, social media. It's always easier if you live and breathe that niche. That said, make sure you can pivot if you see the business veer from your beloved niche and take off in another direction. Now, once you've selected the niche, you need to go through a pretty extensive market demand research project. So here are three different ways that you can research your products. First is through marketplaces. Look to See look at popular sites. Here's three examples. Etsy, Walmart, Amazon and look to see what's popular on those sites, what's trending, what's highlighted there, what's selling out. There's so many marketplaces that you can look at. Other examples are Facebook, Fancy, Wanna, Low List, Tradesy, Farfetch, asos. The list just goes on and on. Next, social media. How are people talking about your niche? What's busy in the chatter? This is how you can find out what's trending now and how people are passionately responding to it. And last, look at resale sites and social shopping. See customer reviews and what people are liking and recommending and sharing. You know resale sites and social shopping are super engaging environments. And if you can see that something is taking off in the chatter, you know that you found something good. Now once you found your niche, let's see how it's trending within keyword searches. So you've identified your niche. Now let's see how it trends across the Internet. A good way to start is with Google Trends. See which words are trending over time. So how is it trending from one point in time to another? This helps identify trends fads. Next, Google Keyword Planner. Understand how keywords are searched and how these searches have changed. And last is Buzzsumo research content. So this is the content, not just the keywords to see how it resonates with people and how it converts. Now as a pro tip, check out competitive sites to see to understand product pricing and ensure that you can build a healthy margin. And also make sure to see what products are available for dropshipping within your desired market. For countries outside major markets, this should be a really important part of your research. Also, not every supplier is set up for dropshipping. This is what you need to work with a good dropshipping supplier. First is imagery. Now we're all about appearance and images and it ranges true for your e commerce store as well. You need to provide a ton of amazing images on your store to convey an in person experience. When we can't step inside your physical store and touch the product with our hands, we need to get the full experience from looking at it online. The only way to do this is through clear high resolution images that pop product details. The description of the product is your salesperson. It's even better online as even more information can be communicated. This is where the spirit of your store and your personality can shine through in the product details. The more detailed you are, the more comfortable the your customers will be in buying the product. Next is pick and pack. This means that a supplier can take a singular product and send it itself. Now, this varies from traditional wholesale suppliers because they're used to selling in bulk. So any drop shipping supplier must be able to take a product, one singular product, and send it to your customers. And last, payments. You need to make sure that payments to your suppliers are fast and easy to get done so that there's no hiccups in the process. Now let's go into how you can set up your Modalist account with wix. This is what it looks like when you first land in Modalist. You have four steps to get started and we walk you through each of them very clearly. So first you want to connect your store. Click connect your store. It's going to bring you to this page, add your store's URL and click Install. This is going to bring you to the wix page where you can then select the store that you want to add the app onto. Wix is going to allow it, prompt you to allow permissions, and voila, your store is now connected to wix. That means products can automatically be added to it. Next, you want to adjust your pricing rules so that you can control your margins. Now, we have four different types of inventory on Modalist. We have our vetted suppliers within independent suppliers, name brands and trendy affordable goods. And then we have AliExpress. You can select your pricing rules for each one of these divisions separately. So we're independent suppliers. We have this right now set to multiplied markup. You can add the cost of shipping directly into the price of the product, so you can offer free shipping. And you can even select a shipping rate to override all of them with. With AliExpress, we suggest that you mark these up slightly differently. So I'm going to change this to three, so it's three times markup. I can also do an added markup if I want. And I'm going to add the cost of shipping into the price of the product so I can offer free shipping. Don't forget to save your settings. Now we're going to go back to the other setup steps. You'll see that it's marked with a green arrow when you're. When you've completed the step. Next, let's find products to sell. We have a huge marketplace filled with thousands of suppliers. You can search within the keyword search, find a product and then simply just click on add to import list and it's going to add it into a section within modalist where it's saved for you to then edit later. So you can see here I'm adding products directly to my import list for later. And next is connect with AliExpress. Now this is if you want to sell AliExpress products. We have API connected as an official partner, so you're going to want to connect to AliExpress to make sure that your store is connected to them for order automation and product updates. And then after that, I've already actually installed a chrome extension. So you're going to see that the green arrow is already. It's already check marked. Next, you want to join their dropshipping program. This essentially whitelists your store so you can send products to multiple locations without your account getting blocked. When you finish installing on joining the program on AliExpress, you're going to land in the drop shipping center. This is what it looks like. And this is where you can search for products within AliExpress to find the best selling products within that entire marketplace. Next, click on Join the program, it saves it, and that's it. So you've now connected your account to Wix as well as connected your account to AliExpress, all within a couple of minutes. It's that simple. There's one more step to go which is adding products to your store. And when you're done with that, your account will look like this. All four check marks are done and you can mark it as done and the widget will go away. So, as you can see, we have two different ways to search for products on Modalist. We have our independent brands as well as AliExpress. So let me go through what each of these mean. There are many advantages to sourcing products in a vetted marketplace such as marketplace such as modalist, we have a curated network of suppliers which you can trust. Our goal is to provide you with reliable supply. So all you need to focus on is curating and marketing to your audience. So on Modalist, we have curated suppliers. This is a vetted marketplace filled with reliable and responsive suppliers. We don't accept everyone onto our platform. You have to apply and we look for certain conditions within each of our within each of our suppliers to ensure that they can follow all the drop shipping rules. Next, we are API connected to all of our suppliers. That means that if they sell a product across any of their sales channels as well as across any of our retailers that's connected to us and inventory is accurately marked down across all of our partners in all of our stores, so you can trust that the inventory is reliable. Next, we focus on faster shipping. This is especially true for our vetted marketplace of independent suppliers. Of course, AliExpress has longer shipping times and we can go into that in a moment. For modalists, we aim that domestic orders arrive within three to five business days. And supplier communication. We have direct inbox communication to all of our suppliers. So if you have a question you want to ask them, you're welcome to do that. You have an issue with an order or a question about the order, you're welcome to communicate with them directly. It's all about building a relationship so you can trust the inventory and the relationships that you have. Here's how it works. To search for products on Modalist. First, we have over 2,800 categories on Modalist. We actually sync back to the AliExpress category so it's easy to find here as well as there. You can search directly in the keyword search. You can also go directly to per marketplace. So we have the four different types of supply. You can search per any of those. Now shipping is super important. You want to make sure that products can ship to the customer. Request location where customers are located. You can search where products ships from for faster shipping. And then we have filters for shipping speeds as well as free shipping. You can sort the marketplace in different ways as well. And then we have four main tabs to help you cater down to some popular inventory. We're especially proud of our private label dropshipping program where you can have products sent to your customers with your own store branding. And if you don't find the AliExpress products on Modalist, you can go directly to AliExpress and add products through our Chrome extension. Now I'm going to start adding products to my store. I'm making a baby store. So here's a onesie that I want to add to my store. All the product information that you see here will be added to your store. So here's the item cost of what you owe and the markup for the profit that you will earn. All the variants you can see, this is free shipping and where it ships to and this is the stated processing time. So you this is important to pay attention to because that's when it will arrive at your customer.

Jill. Yeah, I see. Thank you. I'm sorry for stopping you, but I'm seeing a lot of questions about how do you find the drop shipping products from the country that you're in to find exactly who drop ships to your country.

There's a filter in modalist that says drop shipping, it says ships from and ships to and it has all the countries listed there. So you can click on ships to and your choose the countries that you want to filter down to. Okay, I'll just keep going to here. So all those products before have been added to your import list. All you need to do is click on sync, add to your sync list and it will sync it with your store. So I'm going to show you what this looks like, what that looks like. So this is your sync list. These are products that have been added to your store. I filled it with some products. It includes the variance, the stock, the price as well as the profit. So these are all actually sitting within your WIX store. Now because I clicked on add to sync list and this is what it looks like within your WIX store. You can see it looks very similar. And when I click into the product itself, you'll see that all of the information has been synced directly with your store. This includes all of the imagery you can see. There's some high res detail shots, the name of the product and the description. Remember you should always change the product description, especially when it comes from AliExpress. Now there's the variance, the color as well as you know, any additional variants and all the pricing which has been marked up to have a margin of three times from the price of the item. Now what does it actually look like in your store? This is a store that I created. You can see that the products are sitting beautifully side by side. They're all white background imagery and it fits within the spirit of the store. And if I go into the store itself, all the images sit nicely side by side. You wouldn't even know that these are dropship products. Now my recommendation is to change the one on the bottom right because it doesn't fit nicely side by side and have a white background. So here's some expert tips. First, just like that question, make sure that products can ship to the location where your customers are. So if you're outside a major market, you're going to want to make sure that products can actually be sent to that market. So as mentioned earlier, you can filter down to products in the ships to section within modalist. For the most part AliExpress products can ship globally, but you definitely still want to make sure. Next is do test orders, test the supplier to go through the experience. Right? You want to know what your customers are experiencing. You want to make sure you're confident in the quality, that the price to quality makes sense as well, especially with your markups. So make sure that you test and go through the customer experience. Next is personalized data or sorry, personalize the product details right, Change the product titles, change the description, make it, you know, fun and charismatic and give it the spirit of your store. It's also this also makes it harder for customers to do price comparisons online. So you definitely want to make sure that you are updating the product titles and descriptions to be your own. And lastly is to test and iterate. You know, launch fast, don't strive for perfection and then test to see how customers respond to your products and iterate based on their sell through. So again, in the shoes and socks comparison I had before, you know you can, if you're selling shoes already, you can add modalist into your account and add socks to sell side by side with shoes. Perhaps you see that socks sell better. You can then iterate your store and sell only socks. It's completely up to you. But you want to iterate based on sell through and demand. Now AliExpress is an animal all on its own. So let's go through some of the pros and cons related to AliExpress. First, they have a ton of products, over a hundred million products in over 2,800 categories. So you can find absolutely anything that you need and want. These products are very affordable, which means you can mark them up a lot more. Expensive products you're going to want to mark up less, but you make a higher margin because you have a larger amount that you're marking up with. So you have a high markup potential. Most of their products ship globally. They also have some products, a lot of products have epacket and free shipping which is much more affordable and faster shipping compared to other products. So you want to look for epacket shipping. Now when it comes to Aliexpress it has a great deal of variability. So you want to make sure that the products have a quality that you expect. Not all products actually match the customers the quality and size expectations of customers. So you want to be careful there and last, not last second to last. The shipping times can be very long. So look for products that have a more have a reduced shipping time. Often epacket products do. And lastly, returns are sort of a hassle. These products are coming from China. So make sure that the products have a return policy that you're comfortable with. So here's some expert tips when it comes to Aliexpress. Look at the product's feedback and the supplier reviews. Make sure that the seller has a High rating and the product has excellent authentic reviews. Look for products that have the buyer protection or part of the buyer protection policy and or free returns. This helps to avoid expensive return shipping with a product and has, you know, especially with free returns, look for epacket shipping. This is an affordable and short, affordable way for shipping and has shorter shipping times. And once again always do test orders. This is especially important with AliExpress. You want to make sure that it has the quality that you're promising your customers and see what they are going to experience.

One second, Phil. That's really good. We're just having tons of questions about refunds and return policy. How do you, you manage your returns? Because you mentioned that with AliExpress it might be a hustle like any tips about that?

Yeah. So returns are.

They're going to go directly going to

go back to the supplier. Right. So there's first it depends on how you. We actually always suggest that you take the return. You would. Sorry, let me backtrack a little bit. And they go between the two different marketplaces. There's a modalist returns and then there's AliExpress returns. So for any product that's not AliExpress, that's what I'm calling modalist returns. The product is going to go directly back to the supplier. We have a 14 day return policy so the suppliers have to take the products back within 14 days of a customer receiving it. We recommend that retailers refund the money to the customer to make a better customer experience. Right from the get go. When it comes to the retailer, they need to get in touch with the supplier to explain what the issue is. Then the customer will send the product directly back to the supplier themselves. If the retailer wants, the product can be sent back to them and they can then resell that product themselves as well instead of it going back to the supplier. So that's with modalist. When it comes to AliExpress, you need to submit a claim on AliExpress and go through their return policy process. But again with buyer protection as well as with free returns, it's going to be a much easier process that fall within their protocol. When it comes to all of this. It's very important that you explain what your return policy will be and it should fall in line with what these two policies are. It's very explicitly stated on our site what each of these are. You can literally just copy and paste the return policies and put it into your site. As long as customers know what that return policy is, you're instilling trust in them buying these products.

Great. Great. Thank you.

Sure. Okay, so let's talk about marketing to get your first sale. First you want to make sure your store is SEO friendly. This is the most crucial factor for generating traffic to a website and defines how well your website ranks and performs. To rank high in search engines, you need to have plenty of relevant keywords included in your website in a way that makes sense. Next is to create a blog. Going hand in hand with this is creating original content and linking that content to your store while making sure that store is also SEO friendly. Create useful articles neatly packed with SEO keywords and being a thought leader in the space while educating and entertaining your customers. Right. So be that authentic voice. Next is test with your friends and family. Use them to test and iterate on concepts. They are your trusted network to help fine tune your store and the customer journey. Next, use user generated content. Ask your tight knit network of friends and family to share your business content on their social feeds and gain a sizable audience at virtually no cost to your business. As an example, 68% of Americans are on Facebook. So make sure to leverage Facebook and other social media platforms while using your trusted network of friends and families. Advocates you can also take advantage of the micro influencer world. This has a small cost but can add a lot of authenticity and validation. Now email marketing have an email list. One survey shows that 60% of marketers cite at least 119% return on their investment from email marketing. So be sure to collect your customers emails. Next, offer incentives. Forget to offer incentives in your email marketing. For example 15% off your first purchase or a contest giveaway or a discount off the next purchase or a loyalty program. Use product recommendations to upsell products. For example, other customers also purchase socks with shoes or pair those earrings with this necklace. There's offered discounts on bundled products from the same supplier to increase the order value while also reducing shipping costs. And that's an important one, right? If you're selling multiple products from the same supplier, your shipping costs overall will go down while your average order value will go up. So I want to walk you through a few examples of some WIX stores. These are all drop shipping stores and they've done a great job of building a beautiful storefront. Wicked. Which you can hardly tell has any dropshipping products. So first is Onekind. Now onekind is entirely dropshipping from Modalist. It's highly focused on skincare and nature jewelry. So you can see there's some validation. That product has sold 500,000. All of these products are related to each other and the marketing imagery all relates to each other as well. The pictures are clear and beautiful. It truly looks like this retailer owns the inventory. So let's go browse some more of this inventory.

It's a beautiful example. So Jill, you're saying that everything on their site is from dropshipping?

That's correct, yes. Everything here is from dropshipping.

In fact, they're all part of it's their own brand.

Yeah. And also they have this beautiful incentive that they plant trees. Right. So there's an emotional value to their store that when you buy a product they're also giving back to the planet. So not only these natural products or nature infused beauty products, but they're also giving back to nature in general. They've also added in jewelry that has conveys that same sort of spirit and personality. So here's some jewelry that they've highlighted. Again, these are all still drop shipping products straight from Modalist and gorgeous, beautiful imagery, high res. And if we click into one of these products you can then see all the details related to the products to help sell that product as well. So here I'm just going through this store in more detail. But let's go into one of the product as well. It's going to open the product page. You can see the picture is high res. It's very clear. There's then further out view and also detail shots on an individual. So lifestyle, we call that lifestyle imagery. So you can see how it sits on a person. This is a description of the product as well as the delivery terms. And again that's very important so that your customers know when they can expect the product. Now I've spoken to the owner of the store and his piece of advice is be patient and persevere. SEO and ads can take time to get right. This store is also in the UK and was diligent about selecting products in the UK for faster and affordable shipping. Here's another example. This one's fitness specific owner is named Oliver. He's focused on fitness specifically with our private label partner. This means that customers who receive the products will receive it with his store's branding on the package. So the sticker and the packaging and the hang tag will all have his store's branding. That's all also organized through Modalist. I like how he's how he selected products that go with a specific lifestyle. And also he added, you may have noticed as I was scrolling down before that he added two products from AliExpress that is that go hand in hand with this kind of person. You know, a blender as well as a massager. So he's able to experiment with AliExpress products and see how they scale with his customer base to see whether or not it makes sense to add more products beyond the apparel. And then when it goes into the apparel details, he's got a very detailed description so your customer feels comfortable with what they're buying and many pictures to show the product up close and personal. There's other categories that he's done well with as well. There's some menswear Jill question that you just showed us.

Like I remember you said that we should always change the description, right?

Yeah.

Our own. Do you do it here or on your modalist?

Oh, you can do it in either, actually. So the description can be changed in Modalist in the import list. So that's prior to adding it to wix. It can also be changed in wix and we sync that back. You don't see it synced back in our sync list, but it is captured as a backup in our admin so it can happen in either place. The one thing that you do need to change in advance before adding a product to WIX are the variant names which you guys call the option choice that needs to be changed in Modalist before syncing back to your store. So make sure that you're consistent with how that looks. If it's a capital. If it's, you know, a color blue, that's capital versus lowercase or all caps, whatever it may be. You want to name your option choices consistently in modalist but when it comes to the titles and the descriptions, that can all be edited within wix as well. So you could choose whichever platform you're more comfortable with.

Great, thank you.

Sure. Okay. So I've also spoken with Oliver, who's the owner of Fitness Pro, and his advice is it's important to have a business plan and factor in all the costs involved when setting up a store. We can go into that a little bit later as well, but essentially have a business plan and make sure that the costs that are part that it takes to create your business make sense and can scale. And the last example is Gabrielle Dixon. So this is a WIX site that then added a WIX store. Gabrielle was a. Gabrielle wrote a successful book and was working on scaling the business through word of mouth, advertising and friends and family and she said that nothing seemed to work. Then she added a WIX site to her store. Wix store to her site. And the results were super interesting. So to go into detail, this is the store that she added. So this gave her a way for her to market her store beyond just her life coaching. And so when Gabrielle added the WIX store to her site, she then took two days to market her store on Facebook. She only spent $2.59. And from just that money, $2.59, she saw traffic to her site increase by 38%. And not only did it generate revenue from sales of the products, but it also generated leads for her more lucrative life coaching business. So in Gabrielle's words, in just two short days, I've gained 14 clients and I made more than $87 from sales of my store. Now, to someone else, that may not seem like a lot, but for me, that's enough to pay my electric bill for a month. Also, each client will pay between $40 and $175 for a 45 to 60 minute session once they sign on. Also, Gabrielle's on the free plan on Modalist, so it costs her nothing to add Modalist products to her site. So just to Repeat, she spent $2.59, she made a profit enough to pay her electric bill, and she gained 14 clients that will pay anywhere between $40 and $175 per visit, you know, per session with her. And ideally they have multiple sessions with her. So this was a very easy way for her to drive more people to her, to her, to her business, as well as generate sales on products.

This is an amazing story, Jill.

Thank you.

I was yeah, it's really, I was

so inspired by her. Her story was just awesome to hear and it's just, it's awesome. You know, there's so many, so many businesses out there that can really captivate or activate their audience with simple action of adding a store not only to drive more traffic to their site, but also to sell the products that sit that their customers would like to have. For example, if you're a yoga instructor, you can then sell yoga mats and cups and apparel, anything to complement the business that you actually have.

A great revenue stream, a new revenue stream, and a way to earn more money.

Exactly, exactly. So that's my final example. I've now walked you through all of it. Thank you so much for your, for the time to present this.

It was really, really good, Jill. Thank you so much. It was very informational and I felt like you shared a lot of your tips. We have some more questions from the audience which we would love to ask you and shaket too because some of them again we received in advance and some of them I was just seeing that a lot of people were asking, so I would like to repeat those. So for example, a lot of people talked about the trust issue. So I know we have modalists there for us. But how can you make sure you outsource the right products and you don't lose any of your brand, you know, your brand trust that you've been building.

Yeah, that's a great question. Okay, let me dive into that. So let me first, of course, you know, Modalist, we vet the supplier. So you want to make sure whether or not you're working with Modalist or any other dropshipping platform that you feel comfortable with the suppliers that you're adding. And that means that you need to feel comfortable, comfortable in the process that that that platform has in adding their suppliers. So there are things that we look for. We look to make sure that it's a long standing business and has been around for a while. We want to make sure that their products look professional and therefore will look professional on your site. We want to make sure that they have inventory so they can, you can sell the product assortment without worrying that it's going to run out of inventory and also that they have a good social media presence. So we do our homework. But things change over time. Of course, brands may grow tremendously since the time that they've been added to our site. And we also suggest that you do your homework too, right? It's important for you to feel comfortable with your supply. So I highly suggest that you order products from the supplier so that you also go through the experience that your customers will go through. Right? So you can understand that the processing time, the shipping time, the packaging, the quality of the product, all of that is living up to the standards that you have for your customers and that you're promising them. Right? And for AliExpress, we also suggest that you do the same, order the products, go through it. There's many suppliers are selling the same products. So you could have a bad experience with one supplier and sell the same product and have a better experience with another supplier. So although it takes time to go through this because the shipping times are a little bit longer, we just very much suggest that you test the products before you send them to your customers or add them to your site. AliExpress also has what's called the drop shipping center that's new for dropshippers. In our partnership with AliExpress, that's a place where, which I landed on when I joined the program in my presentation. This will give you some really good insights into what's trending on AliExpress. So it'll help pinpoint the exact support that the best supplier to sell that product. Also look for seller ratings, product feedback, fulfillment ratings. And you know, the last thing is how do you. Sorry if I'm going on too long about this, but I think it's a really important topic. The last is how do you convey the trust, you know, trust to your. To your customers. Right. So I just want to go and make sure that you're very explicit with your customers in terms of things like processing times and logistics. Your return policy or money back policy. Have a FAQ to explain how your site works so that customers have questions, they can go directly to your fact before they even buy a product. And most importantly, have awesome customer support. You're not in control of the process for when a product gets to your customer, but you are in control of it afterwards. So make sure that you have awesome customer support.

I would like to add something to what Jill suggested. I used to be. I'm a former dropshipper and what I used to do is always contact the suppliers I was buying from. I wanted to create a personal relationship and usually it resulted in better products, better shipping and branding. Better branding from. For my product. So it's always good to. To contact your customer, your supplier and build a relationship with them and maybe they can suggest things that you haven't imagined. So it's a good thing to do.

What about adding reviews? Is this something you can help for trust?

Absolutely. Reviews is very important for your whole site, not just for dropshipping specifically. And also you can ask for permission from the supplier to use the reviews you already received on your site. So that way from day one you'll have proven reviews on your site and it will be trusting for your customers to buy there.

Great advice. Very good.

Yeah, thank you. Some other questions. So you talked about how to find the right product to sell, like searching for trends. Can you share with us from all of your, you know, from all of your knowledge, what's the trends for 2020 in terms of products for dropshipping?

Yeah, that is such a hard question to answer, to be honest. I mean, I almost don't even want to say a specific trend because it can change tomorrow. That's the whole thing about a trend and a fad, right? So I mean for sure we can see anything related to Covid is trending and think about all the ways that your life has changed. All of those things are changing, are trending. So face masks in home fitness, at home fitness, anything related to like kitchen or growing, you know, that's why I mentioned some of these in the presentation. Like the, you know, at home, garden, gardening, anything related to activities that take place in your home and you know, educational toys or activities with your kids. Those are all trending. I'm fearful to go beyond that because trends change so quickly. So you're right.

Do your research.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. My suggestion is to do your research so you know, you can look up what's trending. But I would go beyond that and use the, you know, the methods that I had mentioned, Google Trends and Keyword Planner and Buzzsumo and literally just searching on the Internet. The tips that I had for how to research your niche are also the same tips I have for finding products that are trending in 2020. Again, these trends change quickly. So you want to make sure that you have your finger on the poles and once you find it, don't just stick with it, you have to continuously work with it to make sure that it's still trending.

Yeah, great, great answer. And also drop shipping is great because trends are, trends are changing. You can always just, you know, shuffle, shuffle and try new.

That's exactly right. And you should do that. Right. If you see there's a product in your site that's not selling, don't waste that real estate on your page. Swap it out. But you can, if you do see a product that works in an ad and brings people to your site, people may not be purchasing that but purchasing something else, you want to keep that product on your site for sure.

A lot of people asked about the minimum required investment to start a drop shipping, like for beginners, to even start with dropshipping. Like I know that you showed an example of two and a half dollars, something like that, but usually what do you find? Like your recommendation for starting it.

Yeah, you know, I wanted to go into real life examples. So I let's go into the three stores that I showed there. Actually even before that. There is very minimal costs related to getting your account set up. Right. You have your WIX account costs and then on Modalist there's a free account. So and as the example at the end that I have with Gabrielle, she's on the free account. So you can certainly make money on a free account. All of them said to start with testing with small amounts of money. So for example, $2 a day or a dollar a day to see how products are trending in terms of sales and clicks. So Gabrielle's example, yeah, was a very specific one. She spent $2.59 to get action going for her site. Oliver had a much more precise, so much, you know, much more precise advice. He said to define a budget. So he spent around. So and I think in just a few months he spent around thirteen hundred dollars on his store. That includes his, you know, the cost for wix as well as he actually bought an annual membership to Modalist because that reduced the per month cost. And with marketing in that time period he spent $150 on Facebook but from that he saw a $500 profit. So certainly you're able to make a profit with very little expenditures. The advice that Jack had was to really find a very targeted niche so that you're not spending lots of money when it comes to finding your audience. So his example was very similar to Gabrielle's. You spend $2 a day to gain insights for a very targeted market. He believes in narrow age ranges and geographies and niche trends because it's better to have a million high intention shoppers that are highly focused on your niche rather than 60 million from a broader audience that don't have any intention to buy. An example related to his store is going to be don't do advertising for beauty, but do it for organic beauty products, which is much more specific. I'm mentioning this because it all falls within how much you end up spending per day on your marketing because the costs aren't going to be your modalist costs and your WIX costs. It's going to be on your marketing dollars. So you define a budget and then that you have over a specific period of time, say like three months, and then work backwards to make sure that you're not spending beyond your limit within that budget and you're making a return on that investment as well. You're going to need some time to test and iterate and get your SEO and your marketing correct.

Yeah, for sure. Thank you. Yeah, sounds good. Shaked, I have your question about can you dropship any product not related to my business?

So yes, absolutely. You can drop ship whatever you want, but I would suggest adding products that do relate to your brand and whatever you already built because it will be much easier for your customers to trust this kind of store. So imagine yourselves going to an online shop and seeing so many different products. It will make you feel like this is not the owner of these products and suspicious buyers won't buy. So you need to make sure that it's very credible. But my suggestion is when I first started I used to have this big store with a lot of niches so I can try out what works. And the minute I saw that some niche took off I just created a whole different website specifically for this niche and focused on that and then expanded my whole inventory on this specific one. So I think it's a good idea to gain knowledge from dropshipping different products but don't focus, don't make it your whole, don't make it your main business. Like always try to take out the knowledge and make a specific niche your target.

I think that's great advice. We see stores or I guess people start multiple stores based focus on a different niche per account. So that similar to what you said that you're not going beyond your niche and you're hyper focused on each of one and you can see which one does best and then you know, expand upon that.

Cool. Jill, apparently a lot of questions about becoming people like wixers are asking. They want to become a supplier for Modalist.

Cool. Get in touch with me jillodalist co. I'll take a look at your account and see if it's a good fit.

I just wanted to tell you guys that this webinar is recorded and we will send you this by email. Also we have a lot of resources available for you so we have our WIC support article knowledge base so you can just go ahead and ask questions. You can of course go to Modalist website and get all the resources there. We have a few how to videos on how to set up Modalist and wix so feel free. And maybe another thing that might help you is we held a webinar last week about how to optimize your storefront and a lot of the examples that Jill shared are covered there in terms of how to create a converting product page with different pictures and with good description. So this is something that Shaked talked about last week and I think you can find this helpful too. And of course Facebook ads we have not touched upon this but we have Facebook ads integrated to wix. So if you have a store then it's open for you and you can use it. We do the work for you so give it a try. And lastly I want to thank you Jill and thank you Shaked for joining me today because it was so good. I think it was really helpful and of course for you guys who are here listening to this webinar, thank you so much for your time for your great work. We're so inspired by your creations and loving to see those stores growing and selling. And it's beautiful. And of course, stay healthy because that's the most important thing. So, Jill, if you'd like to add something or shaked, please do.

Thank you for having me. I mean, I love these webinars. It's always good to get to know our customers and I really appreciate the opportunity to present. So thank you very much. And if you know, again, any anyone who wants to join, you know, sign up and feel free to reach out to me as well. My email is jillodalist co, always available to my customers.

So thank you so much.

Sure. Thank you. Bye bye.

Thank you very much.

Bye bye.