Dean Soto — How To Sell Other People's Products On Amazon

Welcome to the Hustle and Flow Chart.

Podcast with your hosts, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

Hey. Hey. And welcome to another podcast episode of the Hustle and Flowchart. And today we're with Dean Soto, who is actually a business partner and friend of a previous guest of ours, Brad Spencer, who we had on and Dean's the founder of the online Empire Academy where he's actually teaching people how to profit with drop shipping from Amazon is a kind of a big business.

Yeah, no, I'm excited about this topic because it's a world that we don't really know much about. And we actually just interviewed somebody earlier today who sold physical products, but he was not on Amazon and specifically had a strategy of staying away from Amazon. So it's going to be interesting diving in and discussing like the flip side of that equation.

Totally. So thanks for bringing it on, Dean.

It's awesome to be on. Glad to be here.

Right on. Yeah. Tell us a little bit because we absolutely don't know anything about really drop shipping. We know a little bit about Amazon, but tell us a little bit about what you do.

Well, it's funny. So.

I kind of do a short story to get to where I am now and actually it actually a big part of even teaching dropshipping was because of Brad, who you had on previous podcast. Brad Spencer, who's one of my business partners. He is absolutely amazing. So if anyone hasn't heard that, that podcast, it's, it's really awesome.

Yeah.

And so long story short, 2009 started, I got, I was deployed to Kuwait. I was in the army reserves and 2008 to 2009 I was deployed and I got back and I was just like, man, I, I, I don't like, you know, even though I had a great job and even though obviously I was getting paid to be in the military, I'm like, I really want to be independent and I really want to be able to kind of do things my own way and be with my family. And so I'm like, I'll start a business that's going to be awesome and it'll be easy. And you know.

You know, do you see all these gurus out there saying, oh yeah, you know, just start a business and start earning some profit. Everything's going to be awesome. Found out it was really hard and I spent hours, I started off doing it work and just probably spent with my full time job and that 60 to 80 hours a week trying to get my business off the ground.

And it was just a huge obstacle. I actually almost Quit a couple of times.

And eventually I realized, no, I need to take things online.

So I started trying to do some web development. That worked out okay, but still time was a big factor. So from there I started trying to outsource, which worked out pretty well. But then you spend time having to teach people, teach people, teach people. And so everything came down to time. It was affecting my family life and everything.

And eventually.

I started.

Trying to find ways to build assets.

Where I can set the system up and pretty much forget it and let it do its thing. Fast forward. There's a lot of, a lot of other history. Fast forward to.

About two years ago. I, I had been selling on Amazon for a while, you know, doing FBA and doing more of the retail arbitrage stuff where you go and you scan an item and you send it into Amazon and it takes your. Let it yet again. It takes all your time. Like this sucks.

And. But I also had access to some suppliers with some like.

Where, where it was like sports suppliers. I don't want to give them away because you can. I don't want it.

That's okay. That's okay.

My stuff. But, but I had a business, another business partner of mine who was teaching people how to do like sponsored ads on. Advertise on Amazon. He's like, hey man, can you help me just do some videos? Because I can't really explain how to. Do you know how to do this in a way where newbies would understand how to do Amazon sponsored products in a way that newbies could understand? I'm like, yeah, sure, I'll try it out. And then I started doing it, started doing the videos because I understood how to do it. But then I'm like, I freaking hate Amazon fba. This sucks. Why am I doing this?

Explain really quick. Just, yeah, just fba. Just like a quick summary for people who don't know what Amazon FBA is.

Yeah. So Amazon FBA is. It's fulfillment by Amazon. And the majority of people who do Amazon fba where basically what happens is you can send a bunch of stuff to Amazon, they send it rather than doing like a one and done like you, you, you find one product, someone buys it on Amazon and then you, you ship it to them. Kind of like the ebay model of the past. You can put a whole bunch of stuff in a box, send it into Amazon, they've put it in their fulfillment centers and when somebody buys.

They ship it. They do all the customer service. They all, they do all that stuff.

Yeah. So it's basically housed by Amazon.

And then so they do the warehouse in fulfillment.

Yeah, got it.

Yeah, exactly. And the benefit of it is you also are listening on am. They're marketing for you, they're doing a whole bunch of stuff for you.

And I guess, I guess it becomes Amazon prime as well. So if you use Amazon prime, you can get the next day free shipping and all that kind of good stuff with it.

Exactly.

Okay, so you hated that. That was too much.

And it was cool. Like when you first do it, as with anything, when you first do it, you're like, whoa, cool. I made a sale, five bucks. And then you realize after doing a few weeks of it, you're like, cause you're going to the traditional way is going to thrift stores or going to all these retail places, scanning items and sending them in. And it's always exciting, that first sale that you get. But then you realize, crap, I have to do this day in and day out. Wow, this sucks. At least for me. Some people love it, but me, I'm like, I really don't want to be doing that.

So in order to teach this how to do the sponsored products, I would have to go and do more of the Amazon. And for anyone who doesn't know Amazon sponsored products, basically when you go to Amazon, it's their advertising platform where you're advertising one of your products on say someone else's listing or on the organic searches. So I'm doing this video and I'm like, and I'm thinking, how am I going to do this? And I thought, okay, well I don't really care about Amazon anymore. I don't care if my account even gets suspended anymore. I don't, I have no, no ties, no, yeah, no t whatsoever. So I, so I'm like, I'll use these suppliers that I have. If someone buys, I'll just, I'll just have them ship it to them. I won't even ask permission, I'm just gonna go do it. I don't know if it's legal or whatever to do to do this on Amazon or not. Who cares? And so I list some of their products and boom, boom, boom. I started making these sales and these are like 50010001500 dollar products if not more. And I'm like, oh crap, I don't want to lose my Amazon account.

This is working.

Nice.

So it went from not caring at all to crap. Like now I care now that I'm actually making money and I know I don't have to do anything. And so I make all those Sales and then.

There were a few hiccups and everything like that, but I ended up profiting pretty well. You know, maybe off of a $500 item. I was doing like 150.

Oh, that's sweet.

Net profit on it.

Yeah.

So pretty cool.

So just to clarify, you, you had a product that you listed on Amazon and then you used Amazon's internal advertising platform to promote to that Amazon listing?

Correct, Correct. So I didn't, I did that. So it proved that, you know, it worked well with the course that I was doing, at least the video that I was making. And what I really found out was although that worked, I was making sales without it as well.

Okay. Just by listing the actual products.

Products. Exactly. Just by listing the products. And, and so that was, I was like, that's a. Aha moment. So then I, then I was like, okay, well let me see if Amazon actually allows this, which is always a good thing.

And so I went to their drop shipping policy and it's a very simple policy. It says you have to be the seller of record, which means that you have to be essentially a supplier or a dealer, an authorized dealer. You have to.

All the paperwork has to have your shop name on it. So packing slips, things like that. And my supplier was like, oh yeah, not a big deal. Cool.

So it's almost like white labeling their product.

Yeah, exactly. Like even if it has their name on it, as long as it has your store name too, you're all good.

Nice. Okay.

Because I mean, don't people get in trouble for like going to like Aliexpress or something and then setting up those same products on Amazon and this drop shipping straight from AliExpress.

Yeah, Amazon hates that. Or they, or they, or if people go to, they'll, they'll list something and they'll buy it from Walmart and ship it that way.

Oh my God.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dirty.

Put the kibosh on that.

Yeah. Okay.

But, but yeah, so, so yeah, so as long as you are essentially doing what like a normal, like if you're, if you were to buy wholesale and you. And resell. As long as you're doing essentially that, but with drop shipping, you're all good and nice. So yeah, I started and then eventually I had a, I had a situation with one of my business partners and.

Essentially I'm like, crap. Like I need to. And it Totally unrelated thing, but I'm like, you know, I really want to be able to make my monthly nut this month. And I had already been working with Brad and he's like, dude, you're going to just create a course on teaching people how to do this. And I'm like, I don't want to. And he's like, well, you're going to.

You're going to.

And we ended up doing it. And it's been one of our more popular courses on the academy, which has been pretty awesome.

That's awesome. Well, I guess we've been extracting a lot of questions out of this since you've been explaining, but how do you go about actually finding a supplier willing to work with you?

Yeah, it's a great question. So.

That was the, you know, that is really the crux of drop shipping on Amazon in general or drop shipping in general. Easiest way to do it is, from what I found, is you can actually, you can actually find suppliers probably and contact maybe 10, 20 of them in like 15 minutes.

And the easiest way to do that is going to Amazon, typing in a niche, whatever it is, and like whatever's around you right now. Like, I'm looking at. Oh, I have. Oh.

I'm looking at a degree picture frame. Like a picture frame to hold a degree or a diploma in.

Okay.

Yeah, you type that into Amazon. And then what I tend to do is I actually, rather than doing it, rather than just typing in, pressing enter, I do that. But then I go and search high to low on Amazon. And what it does with that is it starts giving you completely irrelevant stuff, which to me is actually a good thing.

Yep.

Because it's irrelevant things that I would have never thought of. So it might be something like, like sometimes something will come up like, you know, hot dog wiener injector, like cheese injectors or something like that. And you're like, what the. Yeah, heck is that? Like, and, and so then when you find some crazy stuff like that, and note that injector might have caught. Might cost like $500 or $1,000. You're not paying for it up front, so who cares? Like.

You, you then go to Google and then you can actually type in hot dog wiener injectors and then do. In quotes, do become a dealer. And so it'll only, it'll only show you pages that have become a dealer on that page on the results. And so then you just go and go into those pages, click the become a dealer link or whatever and contact the dealers and say, you, you know, sorry, contact the suppliers and say that you'd like to become a dealer.

Wow, that's some. That's some pretty ninja trickery right there. Yeah, that is. Are you Looking for like a certain price? Well, yeah, Matt was kind of going to ask this, like if you have a strategy when it comes to maybe sourcing a product, like do you have a threshold of the price or maybe it's a margin.

Yeah. Do you only tend to sell like the higher price stuff or are you playing in like the, you know, five $10 products as well?

Yeah, so that's a good question. So I used to be all about the higher price stuff. Just because a lot of people will not sell them, especially FBAers. People who are doing Amazon FBA, they won't sell the higher price. You know, most people who are doing Amazon FBA the traditional way are buying, you know, $15 items, $20, $50, etc. The higher you go, the more risk they think it is. And so, so when you get to $100 and above, you're essentially weeding out that competition. But you still do have a lot of drop shippers. That's one thing about Amazon drop shipping. I never realized until I started doing it. I'm like, there's a lot of freaking people doing this. And.

To include Wayfair at the time, who, they still do it, but like, who's this Wayfair? And then they end up being like one of like the top billion dollar drop shipping company in the world.

So, so anyway to, so to answer your question, I had one student who didn't watch one of my, one of my webinars where I said only look at, look for things that are $100 and above. And he ended up listing something for about $50. And he makes about $15 off of each one of those things. And he sells about five to 10 a day. And I'm like, I'm glad you didn't listen to me.

No kidding.

Is there a specific project profit margin that you're looking for on the products? Do you have some sort of like everything needs to be 50% markup or is it just based on the competition you see on Amazon for how you price it? I mean, how do you figure out what to price the products at once you find them?

Yeah, that's a great, great question.

So the, yeah, that's a great question. So the, the profit margin in general. And most people are going to be like, that's not very much.

In general, you're looking at between 10% to 25%. And most people balk at that. But what happens is it's all a numbers game. With drop shipping, I could put out a hundred thousand list 100,000 listings out there on Amazon. And you know, if each one of them are averaging, you know, $1 a day, like as aggregate, you know, that's a hundred thousand listings making me $100,000 a day. So rather than going off of the is this one thing going to make me a huge amount of profit? You're kind of looking more at the aggregate. The more that I have out there, the more things are going to sell. Like I just, I sold something, two things last night from a, from a dealer that my, my staff put in recently that I was like, who's that dealer? I don't even recognize that dealer. Oh, like, oh, it's some, it was some furniture company and, and I sold two things on those. They were brand new listings and I'm, I'm off of those. I'm guessing one was 500 and then one was like 650. I'm guessing because I haven't checked yet. I need to, I'll probably make about a hundred dollars off of one, 150 to $200 off another. I'll have those bigger hitters like that, but they won't sell like every day. Other things will sell every, every day as well, you know, just in aggregate.

Got it. So you're kind of spreading the, the whole playing field for you. So you know, totally. You're grabbing all sorts of niches, price points.

Oh, I had one product that hadn't sold in like four months. It listed for $2,800 or something like that hadn't sold for like four or five months or something like that. And it last.

It sold and I'm like, oh, I wonder what the profit margin on this thing is. I made 1500 bucks off of that thing.

And I'm like, woo, heck yeah. That's cool. Yeah. So figure out how to scale that up a little bit if you can.

Yeah, yeah. It all depends.

What was I going to say?

You were going to ask.

I blanked out on something, but I'm going to go back is I've heard from. Because we had some clients in the past that have sold products on Amazon. Oh, it just came back to me. But either way, the advertising inside of Amazon, I heard is kind of underutilized a little bit and there's some, there's. Yeah. And because we've heard from them, like that's where they got a lot of their traffic from as well. They weren't doing your kind of strategy but just for even selling their own product on there.

Yeah, totally. That's the other thing is that Amazon sponsored products just in general is really, really underutilized. The longer you go. It's like Google AdWords in the beginning. Like, you know, most people didn't use it. As time goes on, a lot more people are using it still in its infancy. So it works out really well. It works out even cooler with dropshipping because you can do some things with drop shipping that you normally wouldn't be able to do otherwise. So actually, one of your readers, Tara. Oh yeah, yeah. She's one of my students and she has like, I want to say she has a lot of listings. I want to say that. And one thing that she can do, one thing that I can do as drop shippers is on Amazon is I can do a sponsored ad campaign. And they have this automated like where you just literally say, hey, automatically go find me keywords. I can set it to sell or to bid the cost per click at 5 cents or even lower. I think minimum is like 2 cents, but at 5 cents per and do it across like 250 listings at a time. And I'll have these massive, massive campaigns of all these listings.

Just all of them having 250 products in them. And I'll just boom. I'll get a sale off of something and I'll go and look at the cost per click, cost per click. And then also just like how much ad spend I did to get that. Like, I'll have like a $549 item and I might have spent like three bucks total on ads, but had like 372 clicks.

Right. That's just dirt cheap.

Totally dirt cheap. Wow. And so, so that coupled with, because everything, everything I do, I have six kids, I live in the country.

On 20 acres out here. Everything. I don't have the luxury of, of going out and doing, having inventory or going out and doing retail arbitrage or going out and doing things that would normally be in person. It takes me like 35 minutes to get to nearest big city.

Everything I do I want to basically set and forget. And so Amazon, a lot of people don't like Amazon dropshipping because it's not as sexy as, you know, building a Shopify store. But I have my guys list products all day long. Amazon, aside from the sponsored products that I, that I do, Amazon does all the remarketing for me. It does all of the advertising for me. If things are selling, you know, they're putting that product in, in like the frequently bought, also bought with things. I don't have to do anything.

I've seen Facebook do a lot of Retargeting on or Amazon do a lot of retargeting on Facebook as well?

Yeah, yeah, starting to do that.

Yep. And yeah, and like you know, you go to one of my listings and and you just land on it and then you're going to get it in Facebook like you said or.

In Google Ad roll somewhere, you know.

It'S pretty awesome. Yeah, it, it definitely is a numbers game. Most people don't have the asset mindset.

Right.

They want kind of like the I want to do it myself type thing. That, and that's why I think a lot of people steer away from it. But if you can put out a bunch of listings, I just statistically you're gonna start making more and more money as those are going out.

Well, it's kind of like people using Facebook as an advertising platform or Google. You're leveraging Amazon because it's the biggest online retailer out there. So inherently there's like frickin so much traffic. Can't even put a number on it.

Amazon's a good search engine.

Yeah.

Everybody who's searching on Amazon is a buyer intent.

Exactly, exactly.

And to pay $0.05 per click for buyer intent traffic.

Yeah, well, I mean when you advertise on Google, you know, it's usually like information intent traffic. Most people are searching out information when you advertise on Facebook it's like interruption traffic. You're interrupting their scrolling of the feed and trying to grab their attention Where Amazon, anybody who searches on Amazon is somebody looking to buy something.

Exactly, exactly. And that's what makes definitely the sponsored products powerful. And like another stat strategy you can do super easy with drop shipping on Amazon is you can create bundles of things. So like say, say you go and you see you, you know, you have a supplier and you see 15 people on a listing that you're like wow, you know, this thing's selling well. It has, it has, you know, a frequently bought with box that has like that product plus another product from that supplier. I can just go take the pictures of those two listings, put them together, go to like go put them together on a white background, go create another listing with those two things and just say hey.

Utilize the sponsored product search. Like maybe it's like the keyword that you're going after that you know that traffic, there's traffic. It might be something like you know, hot dog wiener injectors with cheese blocks or something like that. Don't, don't go after that. I don't know if that's real or not. But.

The, and you Put those two pictures together, you put the listing up. Now you have another asset that potentially makes you money. You didn't have to go out and source it. You didn't have to go out and buy anything. It's there and you run ads to it, see if it works. If it doesn't, oh, well, if it does, great, you just made money.

Yeah.

Do you have any sort of, like, criteria for what products you'll list? I mean, is there, you know, obviously we know you're looking for $100 plus for most of your products, but there. Are there any other criteria that you're looking for on the products that you're going to list? Because it seems like, I mean, there's, there's infinite possibilities of products you can take and put on Amazon. So how do you narrow down. Oh, this one looks like a good one. I'm going to try to list this and see if anything comes of it.

Yeah, that's a good question. I want to say yes, but I don't really have a criteria.

Basically with drop shipping. And I might be totally inefficient, but I also have, you know, my guys in the Philippines doing a lot of this too. So, like, I'm not, I'm not told they're finding suppliers for me. They're putting up listings, they're doing all other stuff, which is another big cool thing about this.

The. Basically for a drop shipper like me, I just want a price list from the guys and I'll throw it up there if it's not gonna make money. You know, my guys probably wasted maybe three hours of their time, which is like six bucks or six to eight dollars. I don't really care. You never know what will happen later on too. Like, like no matter what asset that you have up there, like, you know, a normal Amazon FBA who had to buy something up front, they have to go and look, what is the sales rank? What's. Yeah, what are the keywords on this thing or whatever? For me, it's. Even if there's no sales rank, like that $2,000 thing that I sold that had no sales rank whatsoever, and I don't know if it had ever been bought, it looked like it had never been bought before. I don't know. Had I been. Had I gone and said, hey, this has no sales rank whatsoever. Am I going to do it? I would have missed out on 1500 bucks.

Right.

And so my guys are just constantly listing. They have a whole system of finding vendors. Essentially what I teach in the course, finding vendors, listing Products, creating bundles, doing brand new listings, doing all that other stuff. And for me, if, if it's a difference between them spending five hours and potentially having one product out of the hundreds that they've list actually make sales, you know, that five hours of them listing, you know, translates to, you know, at most like 20 bucks.

To me. You're in profit then.

Yeah, for the most part. And I think that's the big difference that kind of clicked with me at least is that you literally are not worried about where ranked, how much stuff is on. I mean you don't have to worry about supply other than your suppliers having their own, you know, but you don't have any upfront costs other than ads and maybe some stuff that Amazon charges you. But literally your job is put more assets, be more places to more people and just have something for sale and just drive some traffic there.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

I dig it.

You know, some people.

You know, there are a lot of myths behind dropshipping on Amazon. A couple really big ones is just that, you know, if you run out of stock, you're done. Amazon's gonna suspend you. I have yet to ever get suspended. I have yet to have any students ever get suspended. I had one student who, who did get suspended, but and this happens sometimes, it's actually a good suspension for selling too much too fast.

Because they have bots that will create listings, they'll make sales, they'll say that they shipped, Amazon will send them money and the person actually won't get their product. And so Amazon, when they see a certain velocity happen, they go, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. It's just now algorithm that says, hey, we're stopping you. Send us all your information.

And will unlock you at some point in time. I actually had that happen when I first started too.

Got it. You're too good at what you're doing. It's kind of like PayPal does that crap to you too.

Exactly.

It's like, dude, we're in the middle.

Of that with PayPal right now.

Yeah, we're literally dealing with, I like stop holding my money. Like everybody's delivered everything they've purchased.

Whatever. It could be worse. I guess.

I want to real quickly before we wrap this up, I actually want to kind of look at the high level overview of if somebody wanted to sort of go down this route. What are some of the quick, like step by steps, like where would they go on Amazon if they wanted to become a seller, to sign up to be a seller, you know, if they find.

A product that they want to drop ship, you know, what would their next step be inside of Amazon to list that product? You know, could you just give us some like real kind of high level overview, step by steps. I mean I don't want to like cannibalize your course or anything but you know, just, just some quick overviews of, of what the process looks like.

No problem. If you could just charge for this podcast the episode. Awesome.

Seriously, it's pretty amazing.

No, definitely we'll be pushing into your course for sure.

No, I'm totally joking. Totally joking. So. So yeah. So first things first.

Is to go to AmazonServices.com Amazon Service. Not, not Amazon Web Services, AmazonServices.com and you can set up a, an account there. Even though you're not doing fba, make sure. So you'll go through the setup process there. Make sure that you do the fba because you never know. Like I think, I don't know if it's still this way. I haven't done it in a while. But if you say that you're not going to do fba, they actually won't give you an FBA account. But if, if you say that you do, they will give you that and the normal merchant fulfilled account which you need for drop shipping. It's really weird. I don't know why they do that, but make sure that you do that. And then.

There'S two types of accounts. There's an individual account where you're not paying a monthly fee to Amazon but you can only list 25 products. And I don't think you can do sponsored products with it. And then you have a pro account which is like 30 days free. And I want to say it's 40 bucks a month. I don't even keep track, but I'm pretty sure it's 40 bucks.

Yeah, I think it is. That's what it says on the site.

And so you need a bank account for it. You don't have to worry about your store name. A lot of people are like, oh, what should my store name be? Just name it like as long as it's not copyrighted or anything like that. Like name it like Sassama Frass or whatever. Who cares? Yeah, like that's another thing is like you're probably going to be selling everything under their sun as a drop shipper. Just name it, whatever.

Yep, gotta get it.

Yep.

And then so once you have the bank account, all that other stuff set up, it's pretty much you can start listing as if you have suppliers, but that's Generally it, if you, you, you don't necessarily need a, like an ein number. If you do, if you have that, if you're like an LLC or something like that, great. There are people who drop ship.

That don't have it, but you will need. You don't need it up. Okay, I'll say it this way. You don't. I'm not an attorney or CPA or anything like that, but I know some people.

Some people who may have been on your podcast now or at some point in time.

I love it.

Not have a sales license, sales tax license, or like sales tax certificate or anything like that. When he started.

Got it. I think that's most of us when we're in business, just start.

Anyway, my philosophy when I started my business was I don't know what I'm doing, so I'll just, you know, ask for forgiveness later if I'm doing something wrong.

And then I, and then I made it slowly more legit over time.

Totally, totally. After I made sales, I'm like, oh, I need to have that. Okay, sorry about that. Here it is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, nothing wrong with that.

Now when somebody. Okay, so when, when. I'm not quite sure how the whole process works with a dropshipper and Amazon. So if somebody buys the product, does the money go to you? Does the money go to the drop shipper?

That's a great question, actually. So the money is like. Amazon is essentially like an escrow company at that point.

Get a credit card. I mean, you're going to have to wait one to two weeks for Amazon to give you the money. But essentially what happens is. So I have a credit card that it's devoted strictly for drop shipping. It pays off every month. I get points on it all the time. I bought my whole neighborhood before we moved over to the country. I bought my whole block, a bunch of Starbucks gift cards using my. For Christmas. Using my points.

Nice. I was just thinking this is the best way to get points for a car, the airline. I just literally typed this to Matt in our little like doc here. I was like, points hacking.

Oh, we could do a whole podcast episode on points hacking. We've done a bunch of trips because we run all of our advertising through credit cards just for the points first. It's, it's.

What better way.

Oh my God.

To get points.

Right?

Yeah, sorry, that was a tangent. But yeah, go on.

Yeah, so, so, so, yeah, so, so they, they're getting credit card. Essentially what happens is the customer pays for it. They. Amazon will not even put it into Your, your, like, they won't even say that you're going to get any money until you ship the item. And so you're looking at, from the time Amazon gets the sale, from the time you're shipping is anywhere between one to four days or whenever you end up shipping it. Once it's shipped, Amazon will say, okay, cool, it's shipped. Here's your money in your account and it'll be given to you when it's time for disbursement, which is usually.

Two weeks.

Okay.

And so.

At two weeks they'll send you, they'll send you the money. So there is float time. You're gonna definitely need like a credit card unless you want to hit, get hit cash flow wise.

So essentially somebody orders the product, you have to go to your drop shipper, place the order with them, pay them, right. Then it ships out and then you receive your money from Amazon maybe a couple weeks later.

Correct? Correct.

And you bake all the airline points you want.

Now is that a manual process? When somebody, when somebody orders something on Amazon, is it a manual process? Do you have to go to your drop shipper and say, this order just came through, can you ship it out? Or is there some sort of automation that happens in the back end when an order gets placed?

I'm lazy, so obviously there's automation. And so Matt's our systems guy.

Obviously.

I always, always, always tell people, start manually first, just so they feel the pain of it and they can eat.

But basically, you know, someone who's starting off super, it really is easy. It's just if you were to do it every day, it get pretty tedious. But the order comes in Amazon, Amazon will give you like a packing slip. And you take that packing slip, attach it to an email to your supplier. Supplier and then just say, hey. You'll email your supplier, say, hey, send one unit of whatever their, their SKU is, their, their unique identifier for their product.

To this address and you know, go ahead and charge my credit card or whatever. Usually, usually suppliers will have like a credit authorization form where you, where you credit card number and they'll, they'll hold it and charge it anytime you want.

Yeah.

And so then they say, okay, sounds good. And then they, they ship that, you know, when it ships out. And then you go back into Amazon, you take the tracking number from whatever they shipped, FedEx, UPS, or whatever you put into Amazon and then you confirm that it's shipped. And that's generally it, it's not super difficult. There are software out there that Like Spark Shipping. There's also Ecom Dash that you can use.

Different people like the different ones. But essentially when you get an order from Amazon, those pieces of software will.

Do the emails for you. They'll say, hey, you know, ship this out. Some are more complicated than, than others, like Spark Shipping. You can even do like.

You can even do like edi, which is huge. Drop shippers use edi. It's called, it's electronic data interface or something like that. I have one supplier that uses that. You can use edi, FTP, API, XML stuff.

Oh yeah, I see it here. Yeah. CSVs.

Yeah, yeah. So it all depends on what you want to do. But there are ways to automate like my right now, especially if you're outsourcing in any way, shape or form.

For me it's 100% like I do not, I rarely ever touch my drop shipping business right now.

That's smart.

Got it?

Yeah.

Do you now if you have any big winners or anything like that, do you ever take them off of Amazon? Do you do any selling off of Amazon?

Me personally? No, because like I said, I'm lazy. Like I go like, you know, Amazon's working like. So the way that I see it is this, like I have my hands in a whole bunch of stuff. So, you know, online Empire Academy teaches a whole bunch of different things to include outsourcing systems.

All this other stuff. Like for me, Amazon is a means to an end. I always assume that I'm going to get suspended off of Amazon at some point in time. Everyone does.

That's true.

And so it's a means for cash flow. And so for me, I'm like, I'm taking that and I'm gonna, I personally, I go and I use that cash flow that comes from that to do things. Like I put it into cash flow, real estate, I put it into other investments, tax advantages and stuff. So, so, yeah, so that way, you know, I'm just transferring that cash, that cash on hand to other assets. Everything I do is based off of assets.

Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately this topic is so interesting to us that we could probably talk about it for another two hours.

I know, but you're trapped away from your family and you're probably wondering, what is dad doing?

You know, we could, I mean just the travel hacking stuff and the talking about, you know, parlaying the income you make off this into other assets and stuff like that. That's all stuff that Joe and I talk about on probably literally a daily basis.

Oh yeah.

So we could probably go on for this stuff with like, with like another two hour call. So we might have to do a follow up.

I'm down. I'd love to, but we do have.

A couple like last minute questions that we always ask everybody. The first one is do you have any, any book recommendations? Any book you find yourself reading over and over again, any book you find yourself recommending often, anything you could send people to kind of get their knowledge on?

Yeah. So my favorite book of all time, and it has nothing to do with drop shipping, so I apologize if it disappoints anybody, is actually a Robert Kiyosaki book that's not really popular as far as I know, but it's called Unfair Advantage.

Oh, I love that book.

Yeah, that I have not read that one books. Out of all of those books, all those books, that was the one that probably.

Really resonated with me. And I don't know if it's because you know, some of his other like, you know, cash flow quadrant and things like that, which are great. I don't know if that's just because it's tainted with MLM. Not that, not that MLM's bad. It's just, I don't know, doesn't jive all the way. Yeah, exactly. And so, so like that one is, it's just such a nice frequently asked questions. And it's the one where I was like, where for me, taking the asset, taking all of my assets and taking the cash that I'm getting from drop shipping or from anything else that I'm doing and realizing, oh crap, like I can put that into, you know, real estate. You know, whether it's 15, $20,000 for a down payment at a, in a place in St. Louis or Memphis or something like that and, and depreciate. Depreciate the full amount of the place. Now I just, now I'm dropped my taxes way down. Now I can invest into another business or I can invest into whatever. It's pretty awesome.

Yeah, I will be reading that. I'll be stealing that off your bookshelf.

It's actually on my bookshelf right now and I see Joe eyeballing it. So I'm sure, sure I'm gonna lose it today.

I need a new book anyway. There you go. Right on. So last thing is where do people find out more about you or purchase that course?

Yes. So if they want to find out more about just online, Empire Academy in general, they can go to theonlinempireacademy.com and if they want to check out Dream dropshipping, which is my course. They can go to theonlinempireacademy.com forward/dream and. And learn how to do some drop shipping.

Dude, this is super cool. So check out the website. Definitely drop shipping. I mean, it's a good education nonetheless. And just getting started in business or just learning how to grow your wealth in different ways. Like you said, asset building.

Definitely.

Yeah, totally.

Smart.

Smart.

Well, and we'll have to do a round two, too, because I know, I.

Know the people are asking for it. All right, all right. They're all. I hear them.

Yeah, no problem, man.

100 of the audience who has heard this so far is asking for it.

True story.

All right, buddy. Thanks for the time. And give back to your kids and family.

I appreciate it, guys.

All right.

Hey, thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. Now, if you don't know already, myself and my partner, Joe Fear, every single week, we put together this killer weekly newsletter that's completely free. If you go to theweeklyprophet.com you can get on this weekly newsletter. And what we do with this newsletter is we scour the Internet. We read every piece of content, listen to blog posts, check out new software and tools, and we distill down the best of the best into a weekly newsletter and deliver it directly to your inbox every single week. So head over to the weekly profit.com and make sure you're signed up to receive that weekly newsletter. You're going to love it. Thanks so much again for listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. We'll see you in the next one.