Wix eCommerce | How to Start Selling Dropshipping Products

Hello everyone. Welcome to today's live session. Today we are going to be learning how to sell dropshipping products. We are joined by some very special guests and in today's session we're going to be covering what is drop shipping, how you can select the right items to drop ship. We're going to be doing a live review of some dropshipping websites as well as a live Q and A. Thank you so much all for joining us with us today. My name is Margot, I'm from wix's team and I'm the head of marketing content for our E Commerce division. We're also joined by Jill Sherman, who is the CEO and co founder of Modalist, as well as Jack Jaworski and he is a fellow drop shipping merchant and store owner of one kind. And we are also joined by Asaf Rotem, who is the head of WIX Stores marketing. So thank you so much everyone for joining us. We're really excited to have you all. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm going to pass it over to Assaf who's going to tell us a little bit more about WIX E commerce.

Thanks Margot. So it's a pleasure being here and discussing a super exciting topic. Dropshipping is very exciting and especially in these times. Just a few words on WIX stores. So the WIX E commerce platform is powered by insights from over 500,000 merchants worldwide. We really did a complete product overhaul in 2019, turning and moving away from being just an online store into a robust E commerce platform that allows multichannel sales fulfillment solutions, dropshipping and many other cool and must have E commerce features. And we're also experiencing super high growth. The COVID 19 situation has really turned the tide and retail is now going all in on E commerce and so it's exciting times and I think dropshipping is a really interesting angle for many store owners, especially if you're in brick and mortar and we're thinking on how to go online. So dropshipping really opens some new opportunities. So I think Gilles, without further ado, I'll pass it over to you and take it from here.

Awesome. Thank you for the intro and we're psyched to be here with you guys. So my name is Jill Sherman and I am co founder and CEO of Modalist. We enable e commerce retailers to connect to a catalog of curated suppliers from for reliable product sourcing and dropshipping automation. We're also an official partner of AliExpress and we recently launched our integration with AliExpress and with Wix, with Wix and AliExpress with Modalist, an e commerce store can 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 e commerce business. Modalist was a pioneer in dropshipping and we've scaled to work with over 200,000 stores globally. Our goal is really to reduce the barriers of building a business so more entrepreneurs like you can gain financial independence. So let's go into what drop shipping actually is. What is dropshipping? Dropshipping is a retail fulfillment method where a store does not keep the products 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. And what does it mean and how does the logistics actually work for dropshipping? Next slide please. This is how dropshipping logistics work. First, there's no upfront inventory costs, right? You can source millions of products across hundreds of categories and thousands of suppliers. And those products will be sent directly to your customer. So first you source the products that you want to sell and add to your store. Then you sell those products to your customers. And once you get the money from your customer, you can then go to the supplier and purchase the product directly from the supplier. And that supplier will send the product directly to your customer so you're never touching or feeling the products. There are a ton of benefits associated with dropshipping. First of all, you can onboard suppliers in seconds. It's just a click of a button. And there's no cost of adding products to your site. You can, it's sort of think of it as the endless aisle. You can add thousands of products or hundreds of products just in minutes and swap them out very, very easily based on the trends that you see happening. So you can offer a large variety of products pretty risk free. Most importantly, you can also customize the details of the product to anything you want. And we very strongly suggest doing that. So you have the spirit of your store. You change things like the title, the descriptions, the variant names, all of it, so it matches the spirit of your store. You can set the pricing and shipping rules to automatically increase the margins and set the margins to be what you want. And as stated before, you can easily adjust the market trends so when you see something trending well, you can double down. And if you see products not doing well, you can easily swap it out. And there's no cost to that inventory that impacts your margin. Of course, with any business, there are some challenges to drop shipping. So first, you don't have control over the stock. You don't own the inventory, the suppliers do. And with that lack, since you don't own the stock and you aren't shipping the products, there's. There's less control over the customer experience. That is why it's important to select reliable dropshipping suppliers. The drop shipping supplier should not send packages with their own marketing materials and promotions. And actually we have very strict guidelines for them to follow about this. Now, with this lack of control, it is more challenging to build brand loyalty. And that's why it's so important to find reliable suppliers. You trust to do drop shipping correctly. And it's imperative to have good customer service. And lastly, with lower margins, you can make the highest margins on inventory when you buy in bulk. But with drop shipping, as a supplier owns inventory, the cost per item is a little bit higher than buying wholesale.

Next slide.

Great. Thank you so much for that introduction to drop shipping, Jill. The first thing we wanted to sort of get into, and just as a quick reminder, everyone at home, this session is being recorded live. So, you know, we just want to make sure that you can always come back to it if you need more information or if you want to learn more from today's session. So just a quick reminder to everyone who's joining us now, I wanted to ask you, while some of our viewers have submitted questions before the session, we wanted to understand a little bit more about your businesses and if you could show us some live examples of dropshipping websites as well.

Sure. So we have here Jack. Jack, do you want to go into your business and who you are?

Sure. Thanks, Jill. Hi everybody. I'm Jack, the founder of OneLabs and the One Kind Store. So to give you a little bit about my journey, I got into dropshipping totally by accident. My background couldn't have been further away from dropshipping. I was building a very generic holding page for another business of mine using Wix and I came across the Find products to sell button. And I really wasn't expecting to find much, but out of curiosity, I clicked and it took me to the Modellist app, which had all these very beautiful curated products and I was immediately very suspicious. I didn't have any knowledge of dropshipping and I didn't think it would be so simple to sell products by my website, but it really wasn't. Within a few days I was up and running. It's really opened my eyes to dropshipping as a business solution. So I'm even now incorporating it for a homelessness charity I chair. So to help us raise money we will be drop shipping labeled clothes and accessories with obviously the no inventory cost to the charity, which is amazing and it's a very quick win for us just a little bit I guess. In terms of my experience with the solutions, I have tried other third party software and more manual dropship solutions via Shopify before moving back to Wix as it was lower cost and what was important for me was the customization when building a brand. I didn't want my site to really look like everybody else's and that's quite difficult I think with other solutions where you have to pay hundreds of pounds for very simple templates. And then in terms of drop shipping. Modellist for me has been a real game changer and it's been much more intuitive in terms of navigation, settling invoices by PayPal and some other large solutions still don't offer basic filters such as shipping from region recently added. And this was also important to me because I really focused on the UK market. I wanted to be as sustainable as possible that you can be with drop shipping and to avoid customs duty and long shipping delays. I'd also just say around building out a dropshipping site, wix is great because it does have the mobile editor and sometimes people do look over the mobile site where they overlook this part and it's really important. So just from my own experience, experience, 82% of my traffic is mobile and this is really commonplace I think when you're placing your adverts via social media and Facebook. But anyway, that's, that's quite a long introduction so I will stop there. But I'm very happy to answer questions as we go along.

Thanks Jack. So we originally had a second store to join us. It was Jordan from BWSS as he pronounces his boss. Unfortunately, due to a family emergency, Jordan couldn't make it to the presentation. However, he provided us with tons of advice which I think is pertinent to this webinar. So I will be presenting for him. This is Jack's store. He is focused on a selection of workout gear like weights and workout bench resistance bands and jump ropes for At Home Fitness. He built the store from scratch and he scaled it to more than 100,000 in sales in just six weeks.

Weeks.

So he's had a very impactful drop shipping experience.

Wonderful. Thank you so much for those live examples. It's certainly Very helpful for us to see just how much a website can grow. And these are some beautiful examples. So thank you so much. So at this point we wanted to take a question from the audience and one of the first things that we wanted to ask was what's the best method in your experience to vet trustworthy dropship suppliers? How can you find the best suppliers that you can trust?

I'll start with this one. If you could go to the next slide, please. Okay, so on Modus, we feature independent suppliers as well as an integration into AliExpress. And so while AliExpress gives a merchant access to millions of products from China, the indie brands cater to a more niche local product assortment. Assortment which, which isn't ubiquitous. Chuck, what's your take on this? How did you use Modalist for your store?

So for me I was obviously targeting specifically the UK and so that was important for me that the products were being shipped from the uk. So immediately I'm sort of limiting the available goods. I really focused on the independent brands. And what I would suggest here is to order samples where possible. I think that's obviously a great way to test the quality of the product in terms of the shipping time it takes to get delivered. And Modellist also have a rating system which is useful as a guide, but definitely, I think ordering samples and I've actually found just from doing that. So some products which don't look particularly great online have turned out to be fantastic. And then those which you think are, you know, very high quality aren't always the best. So I definitely recommend that and also maybe engaging directly with the suppliers if you have any questions. That's also really helped me in terms of being able to offer something maybe more. So one supplier I stopped by a Modellist even offered to honor a 30 day money back guarantee that they offer via their own site. So that was a very good thing, I think for me to be able to also include.

Great. That's really wonderful advice. Jill, do you have anything else you'd like to add to that?

Jordan had the same thing to say. He tested all of his products. It was especially important for him from AliExpress because the suppliers there have variable quality. So getting to know to find the right supplier, the right products, and then you can also develop a relationship with AliExpress suppliers as well. So he put a lot of time and effort into that to make sure that he found the right supplier that could deliver the quality that he expected for his customers.

Wonderful.

And on that note, if there's any advice you can Give for merchants on how they can choose their dropshipping niche. For example, Jack, how did you find your niche when you decided to start drop shipping?

Sure. So first I did do a little research. I was totally new to drop shipping so I would always recommend that. So before you start even building the page, check what products are available to sell in your desired region and also make sure you can resell those with a good profit margin. It's amazing to see how many people I think don't do that. Also checking trends via Google Analytics where you can have a look at Amazon best sellers, even competitor websites. So for me it was very much skincare competitors and even AliExpress does have a list of best sellers. So I didn't necessarily select my niche based on interest, although I probably had a good knowledge of that field. I first checked really what I could ship from the UK to keep things as sustainable as possible and then did some competitor analysis around pricing.

I'll step in with Jordan. On the flip side. Jordan actually is very in tune with this with his industry. So he, he had once been a fitness instructor and so he, he chose his niche based on the experience that he had there and the during these Covid days when it was impossible to go to the gym, he saw that there wasn't enough stores that were focused on at home fitness. So he chose his niche taking that into account. There's also all these research, there are all of these researching tools that you can use to help see if the trend works for you and across the Internet. So here are three that are listed here. Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner and. And Buzzsumo. So you can use these to see what's trending over time, how the keywords look and how content trends within your selected niche. Next slide please. And so here are three niche strategies that we sort of talked about. You can see that with Jack he selected a niche that had proven sales and sorry, with Jordan he selected a niche that was a low competition niche and had something that he knew and loved. And with Jack he chose a niche that he knew had proven sales and had a good profit margin that was healthy for his business. Here's also some best selling categories that we see taking place across the Internet. So when we looked across the Internet to see what's trending, here's a little graph of or graph of what's actually trending. So we do see that fashion is the largest trend. It is going to be the most saturated and competitive, but it is still the largest trend. And then you know, there's A myriad of other categories that are highly trendy as well. But then when we went to niche to look into, like, really niche categories, there's some really interesting ones that came out for, like, especially during these Covid days, we're seeing that anything related to Covid or personal protective equipment or homes that, you know, we're all at home. So people are redesigning their homes. So we see that, you know, shoe covers and face masks are really popular. People redecorating their homes with furniture. And of course, we're all lounging around our house working. So women's leggings are hugely popular these days.

Yes, I definitely think I had something to do with the popularity of women's leggings category. I think most of that was me. With that said, those of us that are joining, they were wondering what are some of the simplest as well as the most difficult products for beginners to start dropshipping?

Jack, do you want to start?

Sure. So, I mean, I wouldn't say I'm a total expert, but as a beginner I would maybe avoid jewelry and clothing or restricted products which can't be advertised unless you have a good feel for those markets. I found it's harder to get a return, especially if you can't advertise via social media. So that's only sort of specific health products or maybe more sort of adult market. But I am more interested generally in lower cost goods with a higher margin. So, for example, skin care, because people are always changing routines and likely to be more open to trying a new product every so often or following the latest trends.

Jordan said that lower cost items with higher margins are the easiest to start with. So. So he liked things that didn't require much branding and therefore likely had less interaction for the sale. Jordan's products, as you saw, they're heavy, they're heavy weights and are particularly hard to ship. So AliExpress made it easier for him to get those products to his customers since they were shipping in an epacket from China.

Great. Also speaking of shipping, is there any information you can share on how to customize packing materials and the information that's included within the product when you ship it? Are there options for getting samples? How can you know what your clients are receiving when you start drop shipping?

I think we want to move up a few slides. Yep. Oh, actually, Jack, why don't you start with from your experience in terms of the packaging receipt?

Sure. So I guess for me it's very clear I'm stocking other brands, so it wasn't too Important to have total control over the packaging. But what's great via Modellist is you can upload your logo and for suppliers which support it, they will provide branded receipts. So that's also something I've checked where possible by ordering the samples to just really see what comes in the box so that the branded receipt and obviously the.

The product.

Cool. And then I'll highlight this program here. So, you know, as I mentioned, some of the challenges with dropshipping, it's hard to control the customer experience, especially when it comes to branding and brand loyalty. So we're really proud to have introduced a private label drop shipping program. This is a completely free program. There's no minimum order requirement and it's been a huge success. It means that the products that are sent to customers have your logo on the packaging itself. So like with apparel, it's going to have a sticker and a hang tag. And with these actual like CBD and hemp private label program products that we're introducing on June 30, it will actually have the sticker on the product as well as in the box with your own customized stickers. So this allows you to control the margin better because customers can't do price comparisons as easily. And it also creates tremendous brand loyalty because customers need to come back to you to find that brand again. This has been immensely popular and it's super unique to Modalist. We're the only private label dropshipping platform that offers it in these categories.

Jill, does this require any more intense relations with the supplier or does this come. You don't have to do anything differently.

Yeah, so we have a partner who runs this with us. And so we will then introduce you to that partner who will collect the assets like your logo. And in fact they'll even send you a sample of the product. So for example, with the. Let's say you want to sell women's leggings a really hot category right now. Once you will introduce you to them and then you'll give them your logo, they'll, you know, they'll put it on the sticker and a hang tag and all that and they can send you a sample with the actual private label labeling for your store. So not only can you get a sample to experience it, but yeah, you do end up with a deep, meaningful relationship with our partner as well.

And there's some hand holding along the way, I'm guessing, for people who are aware or where, you know, into jumping into this sort of new relationship. If it's the first time they're doing it.

Yeah, they'll help walk you through it. But it's pretty, it's pretty clear and simple. It's really no different. The, actually the only different one is going to be the CBD and hemp one because you see that bottle that's on the screen is blank and that bottle will actually have your logo on it. So. Well, instead of getting a mailed to sample of your products, we'll also give you, or in addition to, we'll also give you imagery with your logo on the bottle. But you're right, there is, there is a little bit more of a learning curve because there's a couple more relationships in here. But the brand loyalty is just tremendous and it's really worth, it's worth that extra effort.

Very cool.

Amazing. So, Jill, you and Jack as well, you also sort of touched on this. In addition to having your own branding printed on the products and the tags, et cetera, you know, how can you make it appear or seem that your products came directly from your business if you're sourcing them from overseas? Is there any other advice you can share about that?

Jack, you want to start?

Yeah, sure. So I think it's obviously important to where possible, as we sort of touched on to include the sort of logo and branding in the receipts. Also, the store experience does matter. So something I've done in the past when I've ordered samples is I've taken photos or new videos of products which weren't really sort of selling themselves well. So it sort of goes back to the ordering samples and also just I think managing the customer care. So offering maybe promotions via your website and sort of following up with those who have subscribed. So really sort of building that relationship.

Jack, I love how your site also focuses like you really take local and make it part of your branding. And so I love that you have this sort of sustainability and carbon footprint that you encompass into the branding of your store, especially the sustainability edge where you want to go into a little bit about that. It's super interesting.

Love that. Sure. So I think for me it's just really in line, I guess, with other values and what I've tried to do in business elsewhere. But I did want to try and stay as focused on sustainability and stocking the more ethical products. So that's why I was quite proactive in reaching out to the suppliers. I stopped by a modellist and checking with them, you know, are they sustainable, do they follow certain practices? And then I also incorporated a sustainability initiative on my website, which is it's not sort of uncommon. I think other people do use it, but they're a great program to really offset your carbon from orders and also in terms of your team, if that's something you want to do. But it definitely appealed to me. So actually anytime somebody orders from my website and they, they will help calculate that carbon footprint and we will, but we're actually carbon positive, so we offset more than we. Yeah, more than our footprint, if you like.

And then Jordan from Boss, as mentioned before, his products are from AliExpress, so they're all shipped from China. So for him it was, it was really important to him to be upfront and honest about where his products are shipping from. The delivery time is mentioned throughout the site and he reminds customers on their confirmation email. I thought this was really interesting, so I'm going to quote him. He said, I immediately saw the effects of being honest about the source of my products and the tone of my customer interactions. Customers went from saying, what do you mean you're shipping from China? This is a scam to, hey, I know that you're shipping from China and it might take four weeks, but can you give me an update? So their tone and their expectations completely changed.

Great.

Is there anything else that you want to add about sourcing products from China in terms of, you know, what the viewers at home should understand in terms of your brand identity, how to maintain that when you're importing products from overseas?

I can't emphasize enough how important it is to be upfront about the shipping times, you know, everywhere that you can say it, you should say it because you don't want customers coming back to you to being upset that they, you know, that the products are taking longer to arrive and in doing so you avoid things like chargebacks, which incur a fee, as well as, you know, refunding the money. So you want to make sure that you're very clear about choosing the right a, the right suppliers. So those that you develop a relationship with them, even on AliExpress and that you're upfront with your customers about the timing. But here I just, I love how both Jack and Jordan have, have really taken hold of their story and made it, you know, very apparent on their site with what their morals and values are as well as what, what value they provide to their customer.

I wanted to. One more thing which I like about these stories is like how each business sort of used dropshipping to enhance traits or things that we're doing in business even before and sort of found their niche according to the stuff they already know. And I think that's a great way to go about dropshipping. I mean, we talk about inventory free hassle free researching and ordering it, so you can sort of feel the entire shopping experience and fulfillment process. But nothing will replace your affinity for business and your style of doing things. And dropshipping is just another tool to do that. It will not create one in itself for you.

Exactly. Nicely said.

Great. We wanted to open the floor for some more questions from the audience who are wondering what is the easiest way to sell products. If you know you don't necessarily have much social proof, how can you use social media to promote your store and get social proof? If you're, you know, just sort of starting out without that.

Jack, why don't you take this one on?

Sure. So I think for building trust and engagement, what I found in the past works much better is short videos as opposed to photos. And the sort of main reason behind that is essentially if you upload a video and you do a very small ad campaign, you can get 5,000, 10,000 views, whereas if you do the same with a photo, you'll probably end up with a couple of likes. So to help sort of build the trust behind the brand, I would use videos where possible. Obviously they're more versatile too, in terms of the content you can include and number of products. But there's really so many ways I think you can work on the social proof. So uploading your store or integrating it via Instagram and Facebook, which is very easy to do again via wix, and also offering discounts or promotions via sort of the social media channels. So if somebody was to tag your product for say 10% off or something like this, those tend to be effective. But you can really. It tends to be quite an iterative process. But I would say, particularly for the Facebook ads, maybe start off by taking three products with healthy margins, ideally in different price points. And I would run an ad campaign for a minimum of two weeks. It can be very low cost, so you really don't need a lot of investment. You can do an ad for dollar a day. So even if you're sort of setting like a $10 budget or running it for 10 days just to see how effective those ads are, I think that's great. And then once you've done that, you can refine the ad campaigns. So once you finish that advert, you'll be able to see the insights and analytics. So you can then look at what your sort of interactions are around the age ranges, also geographically. So if you're shipping globally or if you're focused in say uk, it will often tell you sort of Wales, Scotland or even towns, which is great. And then also I think one of the sort of biggest mistakes maybe I did at the beginning is I selected particularly on the ad side, I selected very sort of general mass market interests when sort of specifying the interest. So for example, beauty, which will give you a huge sort of target market or something like 60 million users and very few of those will probably convert and actually purchase. So it can be a bit of a wasted ad spend. The Facebook algorithm will I think, struggle to convert huge groups of users. WIX do have an automated ad system too, so that's pretty good. But what I would do instead is really try targeting niches. So it might be instead of beauty, you actually specify something like organic beauty products and you can do similar with fitness and other areas. So finding I think the smaller niches within those broader macro markets.

Dec, I wanted to ask you really quickly. You had mentioned creating videos to really make an impact.

Yes.

If you don't have necessarily the products in hand, how do you recommend. Beginners can create videos to promote on social. Just quickly, you know, kind of lead them.

Sure. So I mean, I think it's, it's actually very easy. So even WIX has a video builder, you can, there's a few ways you can do it. So what's quite nice is simply sort of flicking between the products and maybe saying a little bit about your store if it's sustainable or in terms of your shipping policy if you're advertising a sale. So you don't necessarily need the physical products to be able to do that. You can sort of upload them. So take the RAW files from Modellist. Again, it's always, I think, good to check with the stores or sorry, the suppliers that they're happy for you to do that. And there's a ton of sort of free imagery and visuals online and you can also get from other places. So you can do a simple Google search and it will come up with a ton. Just always make sure that there is sort of within that they're commercially sort of available for free use. So you don't get into any trouble down the line.

Great. And then once you've created an amazing social campaign or an asset and a customer orders something, how would you handle, perhaps if the customer is unhappy with the product and they would like to return it, what does that look like?

So I have actually, I've been quite lucky because I've not had a lot of Those experiences, I think what's really helped me is the ordering of samples to make sure the quality is correct. But you do, where possible you want repeat customers. So I think quality is very important. I think obviously timely responses to customers and answering any questions they might have and clearly state. Well, another way to sort of look at it is making sure in terms of your website that you clearly state the shipping terms, that it's really clear to the buyer what to expect. And I guess the other example was saying the, the products are coming from China. I think that's a really good one. Just to be transparent. I mean, I don't really have that issue because I do target the sort of UK suppliers and a UK market.

I mean, I'll add to that and say that we've standardized the return process so all of our independent suppliers have a 14 day return policy so that the products can be returned within 14 days and of receiving it, it's a requirement for them to join Modalist and it's an easy refund process for the retailer to message the supplier and get a refund at the same time. We see best practices being that if you know, the better the customer experience, the more likely the customer is to be loyal. So people don't get upset when they need to return a product, they get upset with the process of the return. So it's important to make sure that you handle that well. And our advice is always to return the money to the, to the customer, customer even before it's returned from the supplier because the supplier won't return the money until they receive the product and that can take some time with shipping and everything. So the best practice is to make sure you have awesome customer service and refund them for the, for the product even before you get the refund from the supplier.

Great, thank you so much. Now I wanted to ask you, Jack, now that we've seen some of the amazing products that you have, I'm ready to do a little online shopping. Perhaps we could review your store for a little bit and just sort of go into that so that everyone at home can sort of see what, you know, a successful dropshipping website looks like.

Sure, yeah, please do.

Great. If you want to take us through here, you know some of the pages, how you got that set up, maybe asaf, if you have anything to lend here while reviewing the site, any best practices that you notice here that you want to share with those viewing today.

So I feel like we saw it a little bit earlier in our session. I think it's really Clear to see right off the get go that you know this is a very well designed store. So this, it appears that you have done those things before or at least had some help from a professional. Either way it's great. You mentioned that you were design oriented which is part of the reason you chose wix and did not go with some competitors that offer more like themed or more structured themes. And I really like first of the images really pop out which is something that I think is super critical as you sell products in a specific, you know, beauty industry and stuff like that. So you sort of have to almost make it tangible on your online store so people can really not only relate but sort of like feel how it is. You know, we're all familiar with those products. I'm not sure with these ones specifically but with beauty products and how they come packaged and you know, how nice the Butler list and stuff like that. So I think this store does a great job in really conveying the message of high quality products or at least they seem that way. It's hard to tell before you order them. As a shopper, I'm saying and another thing that I really like here is the navigation bar is super clear on to break down the collections and I think collections are also a great way for you to sort of entice potential shoppers to browse more and see what the offering is. So overall I think it's a very well designed store. You also mentioned mobile. We can't really show it, even technology will not allow us to do it. So we have to stay here on the website version. But please, if you guys are watching right now, just go to one kind shop from your phone and see. I think it's a great interpretation how to do mobile and not just let the platform do it but also invest time there. And as we said, most of the mobile traffic we know it across the board in WIX comes from mobile. So don't leave that at the last second. Always have mobile in mind. So mobile first world and that's where you can really scale your business.

Great.

And also I know we had wanted to check out BOSS because Jordan had some amazing advice to offer that Jill has conveyed through him to the audience. So if there's anything on the BOSS website that you'd like to point out to anyone at home that they can learn as well.

Just a couple of quick things that I really like. One single clear call to action and the clarity of concept is really, you know, it's evident here right from the get go when you go into the shop now, you know, it's hard not to understand, I mean, what this shop is all about. I also like, you know, the fonts in the dropdown here, allowing to browse things and helps visitors as they try to narrow down their search. You probably see this pop up here on the left. That's salespop. It's a pretty cool app that adds a little bit of fomo. So you know that other people are also looking at this right now. Back in the day when we would travel booking and other huge websites used to have these and people would dramatically order more once you see other people are also looking at that single room that is left in that hotel. I also want to say the quality of images is really great on both storefronts. And I think there is no way in today's world, in this competitive market when you have so many online stores and huge marketplaces offering stuff, you have to provide a sense of what this product that you're looking is, how it would look like in your own hands. So obviously, Dumbbells, we all know them. And I think the only thing that I would add here is maybe having some sort of scale, like having a person training with them so we can see how big they are. Even though, like dumbbells, if you ever went to the gym, you sort of know what you're looking at. But I think having scaled images that allow people to understand how they would use it is always good to have, even if it's something as trivial as, you know, Dumbo.

I'll add that it's important, especially with, I mean, with any image, but especially with AliExpress, to clean up the imagery. They have a lot of imagery that is subpar and has logos on the side and it's super important to clean up that imagery.

Yeah, you really don't want to follow. You don't make those rookie mistakes. But you're going to work hard on your store and then you're going to lose all the trust that you have built with visitors by displaying some stock images that have the waterprint on it or something like that. So really try to avoid it. It's a great tip. One last thing. I also think videos are super important, especially for something as tangible. Again, weights might be a little bit too known for videos to play a factor, but you always want to provide people with the sense that it's just like they walked into a store and can really browse everything and feel it with their own fingertips. So the same thing here with your

digital language, even the details with the product right you want to have your spirit, how you want to sell the product to your customer. You see how he's changed the names of the products and the descriptions of the products. Those are all important to have in the, you know, I always say the spirit of your store. So it's the Persona of your store, yet you should change the names of the products and the descriptions so that they're both clear about who you are as well as explains what the, you know, what the product is all about.

And one last thing that I really like here is the buy now button. So it sort of provides. You don't have to edit the cart and then go to the checkout. If this is something that you want to buy right now, just like a single product, just click on it. It really expedites the shopping experience. And I think we see more and more of this people, even for places like supermarkets and other things that you have a ton of products not only for like when you have two or three. I think adding it is always providing with new opportunities for shoppers like me who are impatient by nature to complete the purchase process. So I kind of like it. I'm not sure, you know, everyone should have it on their store, but it's in my personal opinion it should definitely be there.

Great. Thank you so much for that. I think it's really, really helpful for everyone at home to see examples of these sites in action. So we definitely appreciate you sharing that with us and putting your websites on the spot in front of all of our viewers. So thank you so much. Now that we've seen how you've built your site, we'd love to know. We'll start with Jack. If you have any tips for marketing your store so that you can really get up and running and if you have any tips you'd like to share and obviously Jill as well, we'd love to hear more about marketing your drop shipping business.

Sure.

So I touched a little bit on the, I guess the Facebook ads already. I would say in terms of SEO, obviously that's important, but it probably varies with the type of products you're going to sell. I think for me, I probably knew from the outset I had very little chance of coming sort of top of Google if people type in skincare when there's other companies spending hundreds of thousands a month on SEO. And so I think unless you've got something very unique, you're probably better to go down the social media campaigns. But I do run a much sort of lower cost SEO campaign for one kind. So if anybody does at least type in one kind. It will always be at the top there just to sort of help. Because if somebody has visited your site in the past and they're trying to get back to it, obviously you want to give them that assistance. So yeah, I would really, or at least in my experience, I've focused on the social media campaigns. So integrating my store with Facebook and Instagram and then doing the marketing really

from there, I'll chime in and go through some of these, which we have seen have been really interesting tactics for stores to get their first sale. So Jack already tapped into SEO. So we also see that creating a blog is super important. It gives, you know, it goes hand in hand with creating original content and linking that content with your store. So you become the thought leader in your space and makes you sound very authentic. It also gives you the chance to sort of be a person and entertain your customer along the way. Next is friends and family. They are your best advocates, right? So when you are starting your store, balance it across your friends and family. Have them test it out. Have them go through the customer experience, have them buy products, you know, just use them as much as you can to make sure that your store is not only something that they would love, but you know, that their friends would love and friends of friends and then it grows from there. Creating user generated content. So same with your, with your friends and family. If they're going to test the user experience, why not have them also create content around that? What was their experience like? What is the product like? What does it look like on them? They can create this content. You can add that content to the blog. You can use that for your advertising. There's all kinds of initial ways to use that content for you to gain that first non friends and family sale. Have an email. Oh yeah, go ahead, sorry.

User generated content. Are you referring to reviews or how do you go about approaching the user to get content and what, what kind of content can they share?

Reviews is a fantastic one. So yeah, if you're going to have your friends and family, it starts from the whole experience. So have them buy a product and make sure that the whole flow of your site works well for them and they don't get stuck along the way. Then when they get the product, they can write a review on it. You could also create content on that product and on their experience and then there's some stats in here and then you can add that onto Facebook. You know, if you, when we looked at the stats, we saw that 68% of Americans are active on Facebook. So you can take that generated content and put it on Facebook and create a real social presence around it. And actually like I bet that that that percentage of 68% is probably higher in these Covid days. So it's, it's taking the content from your, your, you know, your initial users or even, you know, you can even go with micro influencers. You know, people who are not your friends and family and are willing for just a small fee to help promote your products. There's a cost associated with that. But with micro influencing, it could also be a real fantastic way to grow your content. I'll keep going. There's. Email marketing is super important. 60% of marketers see 119% return on their investment when they do email marketing. So it's super important to collect your customers emails. Jack alluded to this earlier when he was talking, but he said you offer incentives to get the customer to come back or for them to have that for sale. So things like free shipping and in fact with modalist you can add the cost of shipping into the cost of the product. So you can offer free shipping without it eating into your margins. You can do contest giveaways, pop up shops which are less possible now in Covid days. But it is a good way to just do a small pop up shop in your neighborhood to test the product. And then upselling, of course, like you know, if you sell shoes, you can sell socks along with it. So find ways to have product recommendations to upsell products that sell well together.

Yeah, and let me jump in and just say one, that we're going to have a webinar shortly or I mean soon about how to get like your first sale and how to sell your first five products. So we'll talk more about that with more merchants. And I especially wanted to emphasize for a second the influencers. So Jill, you mentioned the micro influencers maybe and it's important because often when people think about influencers then you sort of, I don't know, think about the Kardashians or Rihanna, like the big budget influencers. And that's great if you can get them. But you don't have to, I mean to start, especially if you're selling locally, it's enough to have somebody who has like thousands of followers on Instagram and stay active in everything that you do in terms of marketing and just reach out, send a DM and offer them, you know, taste of those products and see what happens. And if it, you know, if it costs a little bit as it probably will it could still be worth it, not only in getting the first sales, but also getting some more traction as you move forward into bigger and, and perhaps more influential people or influencers down the road. So it's great to have some credibility because they're going to ask you, who did you do this already? And you have better answers than reaching out to the big ones with no credentials of working in your industry.

And Jack as well as Jill, if you guys have leggings or any skincare products that you want to send my way, I am happy to. I don't have that much of a influence, but I'm happy to put in some good user generated content.

Awesome. Thank you. Great.

So with that said, we'd love to take some questions from the audience and you know, we had gotten a lot of questions about wanting to see the integration from the drop shipping, you know, from Modalist, for example, into wix. So we just wanted to remind everyone in the audience that we do have a previous session that was recorded that you can check out. We did a webinar all about this. You can check that out on our YouTube channel. We will make sure to link that so that you can see all of the previous live sessions that are available. So we will definitely make sure you have all that information as well. And all of that, like I mentioned before, today's session is being recorded as well. So if you ever need to see that, you can find that information there. Great. Moving right along with our live Q and A from the audience. We have a lot of people in the audience asking about tracking and how to manage the stock. So, you know, it might feel as though you're a bit out of control of these factors. Is that the case? And if so, how can you really make sure that you are tracking your products and how do you keep track of stock?

I'll take that one on. So we're API connected into all of our suppliers. What that means is that we're synced directly to the inventory that they have on hand. So when a product is purchased by you, it'll reduce the inventory and it'll send notifications and all the product information to the supplier for them to start fulfilling the order. And they have specified on the site that the time it takes for them to process the order and when they process it, they go onto their, you know, their website and they add in the tracking and shipping information that's synced with us, which is synced with you. So with you, meaning you, the merchant. So it's, it's all completely tracked and synced along the way. And if you have it set with your default notifications at the moment that we alert you that there is with the tracking and courier information, it'll also automatically send your customer an email from wix or from your store to your customer. So it's all completely linked. The same actually goes with AliExpress. So we're API connected with them, we're an official partner. And so when you get your order and you sync it to AliExpress once, the whole process starts from there as well, you pay for the order, the supplier fulfills it within the processing time and all the tracking information comes through to us, which then goes through to you. So everything is completely connected. It's pretty hands off fulfillment experience.

Great.

And since we have people joining us from all over the globe, we have a lot of viewers that are asking about tax and how does that work from country to country and especially when you're working with drop shipping, how is tax handled?

Jack, can you take that on from the UK perspective?

Yeah, sure. So from the uk, I mean, this is part of the reason why I really focused on suppliers shipping from the uk. I have previously tried shipping from US and other regions and my concern was around again, sort of going back to carbon footprint and shipping times. But often if you're shipping outside of the uk, depending on the the total cost of the item, it really varies from sort of skin care to fitness. So you have to check the different sort of customs rates. But for the uk, certainly I think anything over definitely over a hundred dollars, you'll have to normally pay customs duty. So for me that was just something I wanted to avoid from the outset. But again, that is, I think, something you can probably factor into pricing. It depends really on your targeting strategies. And if you are shipping from other regions, I would just obviously make sure again, you're transparent and the customer is aware that that's what you're doing. They may have to pay a small customs duty and. Yeah, so that's really how I guess I've managed it.

Yeah, I'll tap into that and say, as Jack alluded to, most countries have a certain threshold when it comes to taxes and customs and duties and most of the products fall below the price of that. So it's not something that we bump heads against very often. But certainly it's important to make sure that if that is a concern or something you want to think about to be below the threshold of where the majority of your customers are located. And then when it comes to independent suppliers, we've Actually limited to exclude Africa and South America and most especially when it comes because of taxes and duties, the cost to send a singular product from the US to say, you know, Brazil is very expensive so that market tends to be more local. Or if you want to drop ship products, you can absolutely use AliExpress for both Africa and South America and that will send without customs and duties to those regions.

And in any case, Margo, I think this should be part of your research as you're looking into the products. Definitely know the basics of taxing. You don't have to be an expert on it, but make sure that you're aware of everything that will keep you out of jail.

Yes.

I don't think I can start a drop shipping business from jail and I'm not sure if I can even get the product. So I appreciate it.

Well, the leggings, the leggings might work well there.

Great. Well everyone, we are going to begin to wrap up but I just wanted to give someone say a huge thank you to Jill and Jack for joining us today. Thank you. Thank you so much for this insight. Really appreciate you joining us this evening. Assaf, thank you again so much for reviewing the websites and offering advice as well. Before we begin to wrap up the session, we just wanted to encourage everyone to go to our WIX ecommerce website which we will put up on the screen now. So make sure to check that out. We have tons of wonderful expert tips on our blog as well which you can find on our WIX ecommerce website. So be sure to check that out. And don't forget that today's session will also be available to watch again if you want to see our smiling faces just one more time. And more importantly, if you ever have any more questions or want to review any more information about dropshipping, this will all be available on the WIX E Commerce website. So thank you guys so much. Is there any closing statements you'd like to make before we wrap up?

Thank you for having me and featuring us and allowing us to share the story of dropshipping with COVID It's just an awesome opportunity especially it's a fantastic way to add an additional income stream to your life.

Love that. Great.

And Jack, you too, thanks for joining.

Thanks for having me. And yeah, just to I guess those sentiments, I think the last sort of piece of advice I would give if you do sort of begin the dropshipping journey is really don't give up, invest the time. I think it does take time to get right. So yeah, put in the time, and hopefully you'll have a success.

Great. Thank you so much, everyone. We want to remind you that we have many exciting live sessions coming up, so be sure to check those out and tune in. Tune in for more e commerce expertise, tips. And without further ado, we want to say thank you and we'll see you guys in the next live session. Thank you, everyone. Thank you.