Lewis Smith Dropship Unlocked - A New Model Of E-commerce Perfect For Anyone Based In The UK...

By Lewis Smith - Dropship Unlocked

Transcript

Hey everybody. I hope you're doing well today. So I wanted to start off today by asking you a quick question. Have you heard about the new type of e-commerce business model that's specifically for people in the UK? If not, you're probably going to want to stay tuned for this one. So before we get started, I just wanted to let you know if you're particularly interested in the stuff that we talk about in this video, you can head over to DropshipUnlocked.com/FREE for an on demand training, where you can learn much more detail about exactly what I'm going to be covering today. So if we haven't yet met, firstly, hello, nice to meet you. My name is Lewis Smith and I help people start their own e-commerce businesses based in the UK primarily. And in today's episode, what we're going to be talking about is how we do this using a specific model of e-commerce that I like to call the home turf advantage.

Now it's a type of dropshipping, but when I say dropshipping, don't panic. It's not the type of dropshipping you're probably thinking of at this stage. So in today's episode, we're going to cover exactly how we do this and use this type of dropshipping business without having to go and source products from China or AliExpress or Oberlo or wherever you're sourcing products from abroad, or use Amazon or anything like that, or without having to go to eBay to sell or buy products, nothing like that, not retail arbitrage or that type of trading. We're going to cover exactly how we do that. So when it comes to starting an online business, like an e-commerce business that you want to run, there's a few things we know. So the first thing is you've got to pick a market that's in demand. You have to pick a proven niche market, really, if you're going to succeed in e-commerce, because you can't be the everything store. Amazon have pretty much won that battle. So don't try to compete with them on that front.

And ideally you want one with consistent demand. You don't really want a really seasonal niche that's moving all over the place or one that's temporarily really hot and everyone's in and then suddenly it just dries up. So ideally that's not the kind of business you want to run. But I think a huge question that holds people back when they're first starting out with this type of business model is what type of e-commerce model should I follow? Because there's a lot of different models that you can follow. And I get this all the time. Clients come to me because they want to build an e-commerce business, primarily, that's their first goal. They want to get that time and location freedom back, so often they're working in a job or whatever, working for themselves even, but are in the trap of trading time for money and they want to get out of that. So that's understandable. And then the third one is they want longterm financial security.

And even though they've already done a bit of research, they've decided against running their business on platforms like eBay or Amazon for various reasons, things like first primarily, the obvious one, that they take a huge cut of every sale you make, so you're already making life harder for yourself to remain profitable if you're giving away such a huge chunk of the profit. But also things like the terms of service with those platforms. You hear so many horror stories and we've heard them from clients that have had businesses on those platforms, that then once something happens, overnight they changed the terms of service, suddenly, without realizing it, they were breaking the terms and their business gets shut down. We've had clients that have gone from thousands and thousands of pounds in sales a day to nothing because the business just got shut down. So it's that instability that they were concerned about. So they've ruled out that as an option. That's not the type of business they want to run.

They understand that it's a longterm play. So as I mentioned before, they're not just looking for a bit of quick cash. There's lots of ways you can make a bit of quick cash online. That's not what this is about. And I guess the overall thing is they understand that they want to invest in their business, both in terms of time and financially to support it, but they don't want to be risking thousands of pounds in buying stock upfront. And understandably, they don't want to import one of these huge containers from China. I mean, that's not really happening at the moment anyway, but if they're doing that and then just running social media adds to it, the risk is that they might not even sell some of them. So they're worried about not picking the right business model for them, which I understand.

They're worried about creating a business that creates more problems than it solves. No one wants another job. If you're already working a job, you don't want to create an online business that creates you more work than you currently have, because what's the point? You might as well just stay in the job you're in. You want to simplify things presumably, and you don't want a business that suddenly is feeding your family and everyone relies on you for that income, that then one day it just gets shut down overnight. That's not the kind of thing, just because you unknowingly broke the terms of service, which change all the time, or you often hear about Amazon launched their own version of your product line, but do it at a fraction of the cost because they can buy in bulk and they just undercut you. So I completely get that. That's exactly how many of our members felt when they first came to us.

But here's the thing I always say. If you can pick a proven and in demand niche, ideally products upwards of 300 pounds per item, because it's going to require so much less hassle selling those products, than selling products that are two or three pounds per item, but compare the two like for like, think about what type of business you'd prefer to run. How many customers would you like to have to keep happy? So there's less hassle, there's less customer service, there's less returns. I always say to people, think about it like this, most e-commerce entrepreneurs treat product selection like luck of the draw. They think about it in terms of... They'll go on Jungle Scout or something like that, and they'll treat it a bit like going fishing. Imagine if you went fishing to a lake, so you cast your fishing rod into the Lake and you're like, "Right, what am I going to catch today?" And that's kind of hope and pray type research.

You might catch one that's good. You might catch a winning product as they say, a hot product, and that might last you a few weeks and you might make some good sales, but it's not a long term play. That's not something that's going to sustain you for the next decade or anything like that. If you're thinking about this longterm and you're considering the opportunity cost of leaving a career. I was in that position as well. I had a job and everything, I was on a track and I decided I'm going to do this, but I wouldn't have done it if I wasn't sure it was going to work. So there's that side of things.

I think they're also concerned about... The other thing that I always say to people is you have to work with domestic suppliers. So if you're in the UK or selling to the UK market, that means working with UK suppliers to sell products in the UK. Because think about it this way, if you're going to be importing products from China, how much more difficult is that going to be in terms of all of the import taxes and all of the barriers to getting those products to the UK, not to mention once you have them here, if you're just using UK suppliers from the start, you can just next day delivery all day long and customers expect that. So that's got the benefit of added customer satisfaction as well. And that's really important because that brand loyalty, what's the stat? They always say that a happy customer will tell something like 10 times more people about their experience than someone that had an okay experience. Well you want that. You want that word of mouth marketing. You want them to tell their friends and family. So that's a big one.

Then I think the third thing that clients that we work with tell us that they understand and that they want to do is use what we call search intent marketing. So this is where we sell products to customers that, shock horror, already want to buy those products. It's as simple as that. So rather than us going around and saying, "Hey, would you like to buy this product? Would you like to buy this product? Can we offer this product to you? It's a 10% off." Instead we just say, "These are the products we sell. Please raise your hand if you'd like to purchase one." So the customers do that and we use Google marketing to do that so that customer customers searching for those products are the ones that we're selling to.

Now, it might sound simple, but the reason we do that is because the acquisition cost is so much lower. So much easier to get someone to make a purchase when they're already looking for the product. If you say, "I have what you need, just come and buy it from me." That's pretty simple. There's not much that you need to do. I wanted to share an interesting bit of research I just found actually, in just a moment, but before I forget, if this sounds interesting to you and it sounds like something you're really serious about, you can head over to DropshipUnlocked.com/FREE to access a free on demand training that we're running at the moment about how to actually go into this in more detail. So we've put that together for you. Feel free to take a look. It might be helpful to you.

So yeah, as I was saying... Excuse me. I was doing some research on this stuff, because our members at Dropship Unlocked always come to me about this and say, "Is there really enough demand in the UK? Shouldn't I sell into the US? Shouldn't I sell to other bigger markets?" So check this out. I just sourced these stats from Statistica, and they're published online, you can access them, so it must be legit. Now, if you look at this, it shows that the UK online retail sales, if you look at the bar on the right, so 2019, you can see that the online and retail sales alone in the UK market grew between 2018 and 2019 by over six billion. So when you think about that, if you're just getting started today, you only need a tiny percentage of that to make the market work.

So that's why I always say to people, if you're going to go into business, go into a sector that's already growing. So if you're selling into the UK market, the e-commerce market as a sector is growing in the UK, so you only have to be involved and have a business to actually take advantage of that growth. Think about it this way. Imagine we went back in time and you were buying a house in 1996 in the UK. The average house price at that time, I just looked it up, was about a hundred grand. It was about 98 grand, I think. Now say you did nothing with that house, but you rented out to tenants and you just held onto it. So it's earning you money every month because the tenant's paying rent, et cetera. So it's cashflow positive. But then if you did nothing to it and just left it, on average, today, by the current point in time, that house would be on average about 200,000 pounds. And we're just talking about average figures across the UK here. But just by owning that place, you've doubled your money.

And by the way, these e-commerce businesses, these types of dropshipping businesses that we're talking about specifically in the UK, they can be a lot more profitable than a property. So if you're looking to invest your money, think about digital assets rather than brick and mortar assets, especially in the current climate. Now, if you grow that business in the meantime, that's a bit like... Imagine you had the house in 1995 and you decided, "You know what, we're going to double the size of it. We're going to extend it by three times," and made it into this huge house. Well, again, yes, there's a bit of an initial investment in cost and time and hassle doing that, but then by the end, it's going to be worth more than double than what you paid for it. So the point I'm making is simply by holding onto a business like this, you're benefiting from the growth of the sector in e-commerce as a whole.

Not to mention that you can then have the benefit of running it from your laptop and running it from wherever you want and having all of your free time back as well. So that's one of the side benefits of this and like owning a property, it makes you profit every month, so you can live off of this business and one day decide, "Actually, I'm ready to sell it." And guarantee, if you started it yourself, it's going to be worth more at that time, isn't it? So the clients that we work with understand it's a no brainer to do this. And as I said, if you're interested in learning how this works and you want to do this in e-commerce, specifically in the UK, then head over to DropshipUnlocked.com/FREE.

So just by building one of these businesses, you're protecting yourself from the risks of having to rely on someone else's platform, like we talked about, like Amazon or eBay, where they can just kind of shut you down overnight without you really having a say in the matter. You're not having to work with suppliers that are selling questionable quality items from China. If you're anything like me, you've probably bought products, whether you realized it or not, that were being dropshipped from China, and when they arrived, were you happy with the quality of them? Were they really what you expected? Did they look as good as that shiny photo they had on the site? 99% of the time when that's happened, I've been disappointed, and it's not the kind of experience that I'd wish on my customers. So why would I think of starting a business that does that to my customers? It just doesn't make sense to me.

So when you're running a business where you're selling in demand products that are high quality, that are from UK suppliers, and that are upwards of 300 pounds in value per sale, then imagine the increase in the satisfaction of running a business like that for you. Skip forward now to where you own that business. Think longterm. Don't just think, "How can I make money as quickly as possible?" Think down the line, five years from now, which business would I rather be running? The quality of life at the end of it is pretty much incomparable. And I'm talking from personal experience. I've tried both and I know which one I would rather stand behind.

So with that said, I just wanted to thank you all for joining me today. If you do have questions and you're on live with us now, I love it when people are on live, then feel free to ask those questions inside the comments. And if you found any of this video helpful, feel free to let me know in the comments, and if you're a true legend, then you could even give this video a little like, and that would be much appreciated. And also if you know anyone else that is thinking about this kind of business, is thinking about e-commerce or dropshipping, or has had any interest in this online business space and thinks they might want to run a business, send this to them, share it to them, because it might come to them at the critical moment just before they're at that fork in the road where they decide which route they're going to go down, and this could save them a huge amount of headaches down the line.

So that's it for today's training. I hope everybody's enjoyed it. And don't forget, if you think that you might want one of these businesses yourself, if it sounds appealing to you, we're running an on demand training that's completely free that you can access by going to DropshipUnlocked.com/FREE. So thanks very much for joining everyone and have a great rest of your day, and we'll talk again soon.