DEAD-SIMPLE DROP SHIPPING
Financial freedom seems like an ever-fleeting goal in today's world of debtor's prison and consumer culture. Blah blah blah... that's enough of that. Look, I'm not going to promise this method will make you rich. In fact, I can guarantee it won't. What I can guarantee is that you'll make a nice little chunk of change to supplement your income with. I figured out drop-shipping out of necessity and it has been keeping me alive for over a year now, and I consistently bring in $400-500 a month. What follows is a step-by-step guide teaching you how to do exactly what I'm doing. Other than the cost of this book, there's no monetary investment required. If you can copy and paste, then you can make money drop shipping, which is a fancy term for selling other people's products at a markup, without ever handling the products yourself.
GETTING STARTED
Things you need:
-A computer with an internet connection
-A Paypal account to receive payments from your customers
-A debit or credit card to purchase and ship the products to your customers (Ideally, you'll want a Paypal Business Debit card so you can directly use the incoming funds to place the orders)
If you've got everything listed above, it's time to sign up for Listia.com. Listia is an online marketplace not too dissimilar to Amazon or Ebay with a distinct focus on getting things for “free.” Listia uses a proprietary currency called “credits” that users can earn by filling out surveys, completing offers, purchasing directly, or by selling things, but Listia also allows sellers to charge a shipping fee, and that's where we're going to make our money.
Given that Listia is marketed as a place to get free stuff, people aren't going to want to pay too much for shipping. In my experience, the ideal number is around $6 or less, though I do have a few products around 7 or 8 bucks that occasionally sell. This model works because your products are coming from China, and a lot of people don't realize just how inexpensive their shipping is, let alone the products themselves. There are others who realize you're making a profit and just don't mind. Of my 1500+ transactions, I've only had one person file a dispute with Paypal to get their funds back after I informed them that I was using a supplier in China to fulfill their order.
To make customers feel more comfortable with giving you money, you should verify your Listia account in as many ways as you can, and add some kind of profile picture. You'll also want to build up some quick feedback with digital items. If you drink Coca Cola products, the “My Coke Rewards” points do well. You can also spend a buck (okay, so I guess there might be some monetary investment) at HumbleBundle.com for a few Steam game keys. List these with a starting bid of 0 and a time limit of 3 days. The goal here is to get feedback ASAP, not build up credits (you'll get plenty of those later on for free).
Now that you've got a few listings ticking down, it's time to create an account on
Aliexpress.com, which is essentially the Asian Ebay. IMPORTANT: I suggest using a secondary email account to do so as you'll be inundated with dozens of emails per day notifying you of shipping confirmations.
I generally only list products that are relevant to my interests because that makes the work a lot easier to bear. You may or may not want to limit yourself to a single niche, but for the sake of this tutorial, let's start off by listing a piece of jewelry as there's plenty to choose from, it's cheap, and it does well on Listia. When scouting out products, make sure that the seller is drop-shipping friendly. If anywhere in the listing you see something along the lines of “We ship to confirmed order addresses ONLY. Your shipping address MUST match your Aliexpress address” then chances are the seller won't ship to your customers. A lot of these sellers copy and paste each others descriptions so you'll sometimes find this text in listings that explicitly mention drop-shipping. In that case, it's safe to assume that they do, in fact, drop-ship.
The second thing to look out for are listings that specify a minimum order of multiple pieces. You may see a necklace for a buck, but if a minimum order of 10 pieces is specified and you only order one, the money will still be charged from your account, but the buyer won't end up shipping.
Finally, try to stick with buyers who well-established, at least when first starting out. Once you've established yourself on Listia, you can afford to take a few risks, and of course the only risk you're taking is that of negative feedback or a lost sale, as it's practically impossible not to get your money back on Aliexpress if somethings goes wrong with an order.
THE LISTING PROCESS
Click the button in the upper right-hand corner on Listia labeled “List Item” or go to http://listia.com/list to go to the listing form. Give it a title, choose the appropriate category, and grab at least one good image from the Aliexpress page. In windows, you can do this by hitting the PRTSC button, then pasting and editing the image in Paint (sorry OS X users, you'll have to Google it). Alternatively, you can google image search the item's name followed by “aliexpress” and download from there. Do your best to find images without a watermark, or remove them if possible. Go for large images (zoom in if you need to) and keep them saved and on your hard drive as you may need them later on.
You'll want to include a few key bits of information in the description of every listing:
The payment methods you accept for shipping. Listia allows Paypal, concealed cash, and money order. I recommend the first two, and maybe money order for orders greater than a certain amount, depending on how often you feel like cashing them. Also specify that you can send an invoice to be paid via debit/credit card to users that do not have a Paypal account.
State that you do not offer discounts/combine shipping costs.
Delivery time (roughly 3-5 weeks for most items).
Your Paypal address in the following format: address[at]host[dot]com so as to avoid having it scooped up by bots and sold to spammers. You can also use a paypal.me link, but I recommend against doing so as may people will choose to send payments as gifts, which will bring in a lot of extra money in fee savings over time, and that option
isn't available if you use a paypal.me link, or at least, you'd have to create one link for each method, and in that case I'm not sure how many would opt out of purchase protection.
Instruct them to include the auction URL in the description of their Paypal payment
Instruct multi-item winners to make a single payment as opposed to paying for each item individually, which will eat up a lot of your profits in fees.
Include your username in the description of each item and instruct users to search for it to easily browse all of your items.
If you choose to accept concealed cash as payment, instruct customers to include a note with the numbers following the auction url. A lot of buyers use the app, so you'll have to provide them with this number. You can then navigate to the listing by going to listia.com/auction/NUMBER as everything following them is irrelevant. Most of the site's users are in the United States, so if you live elsewhere, it's probably not worth it to accept concealed cash.
Save this description in a text document so you can easily copy and paste when needed. Also keep the Aliexpress URLs for each product you have listed saved here. If I could start over, I'd use a number system to keep track of everything. For example, in the description of the auction you could discretely add something like “#001”, and keep a clean record of hyperlinked numbers instead of a mess of ambiguous long-form URLs which gets confusing after a while.
I recommend keeping the starting bid at 0. Not only will you beat out any competition that starts higher, but you'll often get customers who sign up solely to bid on something of yours, and don't have 499 credits to drop. On the other hand, the majority of my auctions are won by people who never pay, and a 499 starting bid might cut back on this, but these non-payers could be considered helpful as Listia limits you to 100 listings if 50% or more of your last 100 listings end without a bidder. Because a lot of buyers don't end up paying, don't worry about messaging each customer about payment. This is not scalable, and is why we include our Paypal information in the description.
You'll see the “Get it Now” option is grayed out until you have your Seller Wings, which you'll get once you have “5 positive seller feedback ratings, 5 listings, and a 90% positive seller feedback rating after being a member for 20 days.“ Once this option is available, I recommend setting the GIN for each listing to the minimum of 2000 credits. After fees, you get 1800. Essentially, people are paying you so they can pay you sooner, and if you earn at least 500,000 credits in a single month, you can apply to sell these credits to users for cash, at a rate of $1 per 27,500 with Listia taking 20%. Profits will jump significantly once you can set GINs as customers will no longer have to wait for the auction to end. Until this point, I recommend setting your auctions to end after 7 days, then kick it up to 21 after you have your Seller Wings.
Keep “Auto-Relist” checked. Note: If an item ends without a winner and is auto-relisted 10 consecutive times, it will have to be manually re-listed. For months I'd wonder why my product count was dropping here and there until I messaged support and was informed about this feature.
Check the “Item will be shipped” box. Cost → Flat cost, and enter however much you feel you can get away with. I shoot for $2.50 profit, which is around $2 after Paypal takes their cut. If the item is of a particularly good quality, I'll go a little higher. I see a lot of sellers with a flat $6
shipping fee across all of their items and they seem to be doing alright. Play around with it. Better to start high and gradually go lower than to sell too cheap and run out of customers before raising it. Add “Everywhere else” to the shipping locations, and enter the same shipping cost.
In the location field, type in “China.”
That's the gist of the listing process. Do as many of these as you can stomach per day. Once you've built up a product base, you can afford to slack off, but of course the more you list, the more you'll make. For maximum efficiency, find a bunch of products all at once and save the save the URLs, then list in chunks divisible by 5. Why? Because it makes keeping track of things a lot easier. For example, I know I have 940 total listings. Right now, I can see that I have 934 active. That means I need to navigate to the “Ended With Winner” page and relist the 6 most recent auctions.
PROCESSING ORDERS
So you've made your first sale. Feels good, right? Navigate to the product's page on Aliexpress, click the “Buy Now” button, and copy your customer's shipping information into the address form. You'll notice it asks for a phone number, so just use your own. I've never received any unsolicited texts or calls nor have I had any issues with the area or country code not matching the address.
Once the order's been placed and you have the order's URL, you should record it, along with the Listia auction's URL in a text document along with the date of the transaction. This will allow you to easily find the transaction page if something goes wrong. Here are my records as an example:
I also recommend keeping a more detailed spreadsheet to track your profits.
I mark the item as shipped on Listia immediately after processing the order as it's too time-consuming to keep track of when each individual order ships, but when you're first staring out
you may feel that putting the extra time in is worth it to minimize the risk of negative feedback. When you do receive positive feedback on Listia, it's good form to leave feedback for the Aliexpress seller immediately so they receive their funds. This will also cut back on the number of emails you receive about purchase protection running out (I recommend checking these once per day and extending the purchase protection at least once per product (if it's been a while and the customer hasn't marked it received or asked about it, they just may not be in the habit of leaving feedback, so check their Listia feedback habits and use your best judgment. Most importantly, it increases your ranking on Aliexpress, which lends to your favor when filing disputes with sellers.
EXPANDING BEYOND LISTIA
Listia is a great starting point but is inherently limited in that you can't charge too much for shipping. You may find that you want to expand down the road with a shop of your own. In my case, I created a shop using the Shopify platform for $29/mo, and it's been well worth it. I've turned a profit each month, and on my best day I made over $200 from a single product, which isn't possible on an auction-based platform like Listia. Not only will you be able to charge more for each product, you'll be able to sell higher-end products that ordinarily cost too much to be viable on Listia. Most importantly, you'll be able to build a brand and establish a shop that isn't reliant on the existence of a third-party auction site. Click Here to try Shopify free for 14 days.
EVERYONE LIKES FREE MONEY
You may have heard of a browser add-on called Earn Honey. In a nutshell, it helps you save a little money here and there when shopping online by notifying you of lower prices elsewhere, and by automatically trying a bunch of discount codes at checkout. You can also earn “gold” for purchases, and this applies to Aliexpress as well. This gold can be cashed out at a rate of$1 per 100. At 1-20% cash back per purchase, it's nothing major, but a few bucks per month here and there add up. I also use it when I shop for things for myself and to date have redeemed more than $50 in free Amazon gift cards.
CONCLUSION
Your first month will see your lowest earnings, for obvious reasons. As time goes on and you build your catalog and positive feedback, you'll earn more. In my first month, I made $127 while undercharging for most of my items. Someone I helped one-on-one profited $60 in their first month, and that was with hitting the aforementioned snag that limited them to 100 listings. It would not be unreasonable to expect $50-100 profit in your first month. Now go make some money!
UPDATE: Listia will be introducing their own cryptocurrency called INK. Users will be able to exchange their credits for INK, so it may be worth considering offering some items for credits as well. In my experience, it's not difficult to get at least a few hundred thousand for a $1 item due to inflation and long cashout times. INK should combat at least the first issue. https://blog.listia.com/2017/11/15/coming-soon-get-more-from-your-listia-credits/
If you would like this guide in PDF form, you can download it for free here: https://payhip.com/b/7maU