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You're listening to the My Wife Gouder-Dah podcast, the place where I bring on bootstrap business owners and talk about the exact strategies they use to grow their businesses. They didn't have a very special guest on the show, Saba Mohebpur. And Saba is the founder of Spocket, which is one of the leading drop shipping platforms in the world. And literally every single day, I get asked questions about drop shipping, so I figure I'd have someone deep in the industry to come talk about it. And in this episode, I don't hold back the questions and we do a deep dive into the viability and profitability of this business model. But before we begin, I want to thank Zippify, one-click upsell for sponsoring this episode. If you were on Shopify and you want to instantly increase your revenue by 10 to 15% without doing much work, then you'll want to try one-click upsell. It integrates seamlessly with your cart and you'll see the gains almost immediately. And best of all, you only pay Zippify a commission when they actually generate you extra sales. For more information, go to zippify.com. That's zipify.com. I also want to thank Link Whisper for sponsoring this episode. Now, those of you who follow my blog over at mywifequotajob.com know that I've increased traffic 4X in the past year and I couldn't have done it without Link Whisper, which is my favorite internal linking tool for SEO. Link Whisper allows you to easily add internal links to your blog so you can maximize your link equity on the pages that make you the most money. Now, if you have a blog, this tool is a must-have. For more information, go to linkwhisper.com. That's L-A-N-K-W-H-I-S-P-E-R.com. And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcasts that I wrote with my partner Tony called the Profitable Audience Podcast. And not like this one, where I interview other entrepreneurs, the Profitable Audience Podcast is just Tony and I riffing about online business. Go check out the Profitable Audience Podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show. Welcome to the My Life Quitter Job Podcast. Today, I've got a special guest on the show, Saba Mahibpur. Now, Saba is the founder of one of the best drop shipping marketplaces in the world because their suppliers are primarily found in the US and Europe. And their claim to fame is that if you live in the US or the EU, your customers can get their products super fast. Compared to other services that can take a month or longer. And most of you guys who followed me now know that I'm not the biggest fan of drop shipping as a long-term business model, which is actually one of the reasons why I'm so thrilled to have Saba on the show today. Now, clearly, there's a bunch of drop shippers who are successful, otherwise, Spocket wouldn't be where it is today. So what we're going to do today is Saba and I are going to go into depth on what it takes to be a successful drop shipper and highlight what some of his best customers are doing. And with that, welcome to show Saba, how are you doing today? I'm Dan Graz-Steve. Thanks for having me on the show. So Saba, you told me it used to be pre-med. How did that turn into Spocket? Like, your background is medicine, but then you became a programmer and then you created Spocket. So what's the story there? Sure, I'll tell you in the background about myself. So I moved to Canada in 2012. I just studied medicine at the University of Columbia. I did my pre-med and in 2015, while I was sitting in my door. It was August 2015. I was watching YouTube and I saw this 20, 30 seconds interview with this very young guy. He was 17 years old and he built this out called Sambi. And he sold it to you out for $3 million. So that was a trigger in my head that if a 17 years old guy can build such a massive business or software, I should be able to. So that night I started programming. So I learned how to program. I used YouTube and I bought a course at Udemy. So literally starting that, I started, I skipped all my classes, I started my door and started programming 16, 17 hours a day. When I graduated in 2015, I started building many different apps while I was working with time jobs and built probably 10, 11 different apps. And they all failed. And I think Spocket was my number 11 or 12 trite, which we launched it on the Shopify app store back in 2017. I've been trying to sell the company since then. So I'm curious. So you self-tied yourself coding. Like you didn't take any classes or anything like that. I spent $20 to learn how to program. I watched a lot of YouTube videos. I bought a course for, I think it was $14.99 from Udemy. And I downloaded this framework by Apple, which calls Swear programming the strict language. And yes, I tell myself how to program. Amazing. Amazing. And you coded the first version of Spocket from what I understand, right? I did. The first two months, maybe launched a beta version on Shopify. I was, I wrote a portion of it. I didn't write all of it because I heard this call up to that from UBC that was helping me out. I wrote the first version, but yes, I wrote a portion of the code initially. I'm curious. So was this a bootstrap company or did you get funding for that first version? So I think we were eight months into building Spocket after we launched it on the App Store, which our team of June 2017, a couple months after we did our seed rounds with the Canadian VC. And a year after we got into this program called TechStar. And after that, we closed a seed round. But we have not raised any money since. OK, nice, nice. So we're kind of with the app because they haven't gone through a CSA at V, I don't know, fund banks, but not purely with some company. I just find it amazing that VCs will be willing to fund like someone just out of college. But I guess it happens all the time around here. For sure. Yeah, no, it happens a lot. Yeah. Yeah. All right, so most of my listeners are either store owners, people who want to start businesses, especially in e-commerce. And I mentioned before in the intro that I'm not a huge fan of drop shipping. So I thought it'd be interesting to just talk about how to get started. And let's just start with how to pick the best products to sell. Like, what are some gotchas? What are some best practices? Sure. I was thinking even without getting into the details and the data because a lot of those companies, and they would like to keep them confidential. So our success would drop first on merchant. What a confident shell, the matters. But in general, probably my first tip was that if a drop transfer is not to not start an Amazon store, your store should not have two, three, four, five hundred products. The successful drops for the one that folks can niche stores. You could have only one, two, three, five, ten products. And that should be enough. Usually, if someone wants to buy just a general product, it would go on Amazon every day. For a drop shipper, you would stand out with your focusing on a niche, as sourcing a very niche product to sell. So that's probably the first thought on the drop shipper side. In terms of data, I'll see there's a lot of the products out there that help you have to analyze what's selling, what's the high selling products, what are the training products, what are the winning products. We recently launched these solutions. We didn't swap the dashboard. We just saw winning products. Also, within the next two to three months, we're launching another section of the $1 dashboard, which basically to show you the trend of different type of products over time, within the past four, five years. So when you see the trends, you decide what type of product and what categories you want to sell. And the most of potential are selling the market. So let's say I was a drop shipper. I actually wouldn't want to see those features there because like you're selling someone else's product, right? And the fact that you're highlighting what the trend, do you want to be selling trading products is what I'm trying to ask. Because that means a whole bunch of other people are going to be jumping on it, which will, when you're selling something and a whole bunch of other people are selling, that generally erodes prices, right? It does. So by the way, when we talk about the selection that we're adding, we didn't owe a dashboard in terms of training products. It's not just the sales across the pocket, but we actually partner even multiple platform and getting access to what's being to sell at different core rights. On marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, what I crossed the Shopify stores, there are over 2 million of them. So the analysis is not particularly to a product or particular to a shop, but particularly to a product is across the market, e-commerce market. So that kind of would tell you that what type of categories you want to get into, what type of products you want to get into. To answer your question, let's say it's August and September, and usually, August and September is back to school season. And those type of products would be very popular. So it's good for you to see that what is a trend in August and September. Maybe it's not selling fashion product. Maybe it's good to sell back to school products. So it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's good because you know what you need to be selling those particular quarters or months. OK. You guys support Amazon, right? From what I remember? Where is your? We are. We are very close to support. OK. All the beginning and next four weeks, we'll be launching our partnership with Amazon as well. OK. So what's funny is you said you don't. I don't actually see how it works on Amazon because the margins are like the fees are so high on Amazon, right? So yes. So maybe I can explain that. OK. One of our step back, I explained a bit more about Spocket and what we offer. Sure. Different type of the upper right side of the offer. Then I can explain on the marketplace side as well. So when I started Spocket six years ago, I wanted to do dropshipping. And I did all what I used, platforms that on the main dropshipping using ad express because right, the poor rights were lower quality. According to a lot of thought leaders, there's 50% chance of failure in shipping. And also the shipping time was like four weeks to eight weeks. It was too long. So that's why I built Spocket in the first place for myself to automate my dropshipping while I get access to the local suppliers. So that's the core of Spocket that we create to be local suppliers who are 90% are based in the US and Europe. Now, we have over 1.5 million products. We have over 3,000 suppliers that the humanity source within the US and Europe with that them. And another interesting requirement for the supplier to join Spocket is to offer us 25% to 50% discount on the products. So when you start using Spocket, you automatically get a good margin on each of those products. So that's your question. If our merchants selling on different channels, do they have any margin? They already have a margin on the products that are sourcing from Spocket. So that was the first section that we launched five, six years ago, which is just US and European suppliers. Over time, we found that a lot of merchants still want to dropshipping from ad express. And what we learned over time is that we should not buy us towards the source of suppliers and how other marketplaces should be functioned, but we should provide with our customers in our emergency. And still a lot of people wanted to do our express dropshipping. So we created another section that we built a school tool called Addy Scraper, which all makes your entire ad express drops. That has over 60,000 active merchants using Addy Scraper today. So think that on, we found out that a lot of our merchants that actually become successful, they want to get out of dropshipping. And they want to build their own brand. They want to do Y-nebopress. So we partnered with this platform called Jubilee, which helps you out to build Y-nebopress products. So if you want to build a Y-nebop cosmetic product, you can literally do that within the dashboard. Put your logo, put your brand on it. And we would basically warehouse it for you and ship it for you. And this is the extension of Spocket for very successful merchants that want to actually build their brand for the long term e-commerce business that they want to continue to scale over time. Interesting. I actually didn't know about that feature. Yeah. So basically, it's the same product, but you can put your own logo on it, essentially, right? Yes. It's a whole partnership with this platform called Jubilee. They're software solutions outside of Spocket. They have a different interface, but we're seeing promoting them. I have it in our dashboard. With this pocket dashboard, you would see the Y-level solution which would send you to the Jubilee product. So I had to explain a little further. So later on, we figured out that not all the merchants want to sell for these cop products. Maybe they want to sell digital products. And if you've seen the past two, three years, NFT has become very big. So we actually built another solution, which is helping our merchant to sell NFT within their Shopify store. So the product is actually available on Shopify App Store now, a team in Long Beach, two weeks ago. It's called the NFT, Drop Ship NFT. And within a few clicks, you can actually create NFT as sold down their store. So we're trying to evolve, and trying to offer our merchant whatever they need. We now be biased towards a source and the type of things that we think is right, right? Or whatever you think, but provided for you. So your best customers still cater to a niche, right? Like, I have a lot of people that come into me and say, hey, I have access to SPOCKET, so why don't I sell 700,000 products? But you're saying, like, for your best customers that you know of, and you don't have to reveal who they are, they all focus on a very specific subset of products. So is that a? Yes. OK. Yes. So if you see our highest tiers, which is our unicorn tier, we capped a number of products that you can't push from SPOCKET to 10,000. And we do get complaint in some of our merchants that why do you cap into 10,000? I mean, for us, it's very easy to increase that cap from 10,000 to 100,000. It just takes probably half an hour to put that in our code. Because based on our data, we know, like, it's not useful for you to spend your time pushing more than 10,000 products. Even 10,000 products is too many. But we actually tried to help you out to save you time. So you don't go and spend days or weeks or months and importing 50,000 products. Because we had those cases. And you have to answer your question, yes. The best drop-shooting stores are focusing on a niche. They're not creating another Amazon store. OK. So I have several friends who are successful in drop shipping. And the way they are successful is, one, either they've ranked in search somehow and drive traffic to their products that way. Or two, they've created content and built an audience. Would you say that's the typical route for your successful customers? Or how are they getting traffic? I think it's very different. Different merchant-driven drop-shpings that acquire customers in different base. Maybe I can't tap into a few of them. So often, really good marketers. They're amazing at paid acquisition. We actually had this very successful merchant that was moving millions of dollars a sell. And maybe we started talking to them. We found that they had the marketing engines. And they started this drop-shooting store on the side. They were so detailed in how much money they spent and how much money they're making. So the ROI was always positive. And that's how they were able to scale their drop-shooting store, whatever they're making extra. They were spending it back into paid marketing. And they were scaling the company. And they're supporting actually build a brand around their store. So that's one type of people that are extremely good at paid marketing. They're sector-off customers that they have a good social following. They have an Instagram account that has 10,000, 20,000, 50,000. We have some merchant that their Instagram account are a few million followers. So for them, it's very, very easy actually. Because they're not spending any money to our customer. They just, they state out a drop-shooting store, quickly use pocket to source on poor rights. And they go out on their Instagram and they announce it to their customer that this is my store. It could be a bikini store. It could be a female fashion store. It could be a cosmetic store. Those type of drops first usually become very successful early on because they don't spend any money to acquire any customer. So they're positive. The cash flow positive from the beginning. Yeah. At the end of this case study, I've over-bloged, at these dropshippers on my platform, that started this four store. I mean, she started one store with Successful. She started another budget. Then she started another one. Then she started another one. I believe she was moving two to two and a half million dollar worth of sales every year. And very, very profitable. But also many of the Successful dropshippers, they expect to multiple different stores when the first one is successful. Yeah, that makes sense. Would you say the majority of your successful customers are on Shopify or their own website as opposed to, because I know you guys support some marketplaces as well. So, Fiona, on almost 90 different e-commerce platforms, like all of the most popular e-commerce platforms, your Shopify, Wets, e-commerce, Eggware, Square, Square Space, multiple more. We've recently launched our partnership with eBay. And I think there are four weeks. In four weeks, we should be launching our partnership with Amazon as well. I can't talk about marketplaces. They launched and how they have how they function. But I would say probably Shopify and merchants, the dropshippers are on average, probably the more Successful ones, because Shopify offers a wide range of tools and apps to help them out to become successful. Of your most successful Shopify stores, are they doing all the other things that a traditional marketer would do, like email, SMS, automated sequences, and that sort of thing? Just try to get an idea. Yeah, sure. So, I don't know the details of what the dropshippers do and every dropshippers are functions, different, some of them do, some of them don't. But I think things like email, SMS, push-up application, sobs, or a little bit later stages after you acquire a customer, because if you don't have any customer, you don't have any email to, you're in an email to. So, also, the first step is to really think about how you would start acquiring customer and how you would be capturing an email, like either in checkout or reading a blog post or somehow opening your website. But first, you need to create an email list and list of customers that are interested in the products of yourself. But then you can retarget that through, or remarketing through sending emails, push-up application, SMS, or you're going to retarget them using email audience or event add-up, Facebook, Facebook, that way. When you say the margins are, you make sure that the supplier can provide adequate margins. And let's say you said 40%, right? Like a 40% margin. What is that off of? Is that off of MSRP? And are these suppliers actually selling their own products on their own website, or are they just strictly suppliers? So, again, you have wide range of different suppliers. You have suppliers that are just pure suppliers, and they adjusted their housing and their shipping to suppliers that are from Etsy and they're making things limited to B-Shan and they're handmade. They also have a few wholesomeers within our marketplace that this wholesome is sourced from right from both with different suppliers. And they're responsible, it's just warehouse and shipment. So they're not the producer, they're just aggregating many different suppliers. So we have those suppliers too. So again, you have a wide range of different suppliers. To answer your question, when we're on-order supplier, there's different criteria requirements. There's a checklist. I think you have almost 10 different requirements. For onboarding every supplier, onboarding this supplier is a multi-week, sometimes multi-month process. From starting the conversation to going through all the checklists, onboarding them. But one of them is that they need to offer us 25 to 50% discount of the retail price. So if they are, let's say, directly selling their store for $50, we request that it goes 25 to 50% discount of that $50. So our retailers, merchants have a margin as soon as they start resourcing product from Sparkit. Are those suppliers that sell on their own website? Are they allowed to give promotions and discounts on their own site? Yes, they could. But one thing that you have to consider is that there's a difference between selling products on marketplaces and Amazon. And again, that's exactly what I said. I explained the marketplace situation later on. There's a difference between selling a product on Amazon or selling on your independent online store. So if you're selling at Amazon and selling the same product, we need listing it. When someone searches without product, it's basically a price competition. Because the customer would be able to see all these products and see whoever is cheaper, they got a purchase from them. But that's not the case if you have your independent online store. If you're selling a Shopify, you make 200 stores, 500 stores, and it has a store, could be selling the same product and all of them have a good amount of sale. Because when you have your independent online store, you will be basically targeting different audience from different location, different age groups. So you're not necessarily overlapping on the target as much. I mean, US on its own has still got a 50 million people. If 500 stores have been selling same product, each of them could be targeting many, many people only to be here to us. And that's all considering Europe and many other regions of the world. So we do have this balancer on our side that has been merchants try to search for a product or push product from all the market, please. We try to balance it out. So if order has been pushed too many times, we try to not show it as in the searches often than the product that has not been pushed. So we sort of balancing the number that every product has been pushed and is sold on different stores to reduce the amount of competition on different products. But that being said, we're not too worried about it because these are like independent store and it could be targeting different audiences. Yeah, I mean, if you have your own audience, like you mentioned on social, that it usually doesn't matter. People probably aren't price comparison or doing comparison shopping and that sort of thing because they're just buying from their favorite influencer. I guess the same time with direct response ads as well. I am curious though. So you could potentially be competing against your supplier though, in certain circumstances. Like just, yeah. And I want to say so. I want to say so. So think about it. I mean, maybe like a very small case says, but in the most cases, usually suppliers and manufacturers are not good marketers. They're not good sellers. We're good at producing and warehousing and shipping. And basically what we do when we discuss when we have our negotiation conversation with suppliers is tell them, what if you really focus on manufacturing and get really good at that and let how does the other merchant do the job of marketing and selling it for you? So basically dividing the responsibility on the both sides. So no other suppliers actually do it. They're super happy because they actually bring in more stuff. They sell that they had to actually spend money to acquire those customers. Do you recommend taking your own photography of the products and writing completely new descriptions or I'm just trying to get an idea of what most of your customers do. Do they just take the stock photos from the supplier and the descriptions? Well, what are your recommendations there? Yeah. So we actually have this feature on the spot-cust side, just for all sample orders. We were not direct to consumer products. So we do not allow people to call it a web platform and purchase things. Well, this is just for sample order. And it comes from a merchant. So our merchant could be ordering sample orders and they could do their photography themselves. Some do. Good number of them I should do that. But not everyone does because that costs them some money. They want to do photography on their end. I personally do not suggest it initially. Oh, I think it's probably better to not have too much cost initially. Push those products to restore. Do a little bit of testing. Save that correct cells. And then order a few sample orders to do the photography and build your store around those products. That makes sense. All right. So here's a different angle of a question. Do you recommend building the audience first and then starting the store or starting the store first and then trying to sell your products? This is a really, really good question. I think the way that I can answer that is how I end up scaling Spock out as a company. OK, so as I mentioned, I built 10, 11 different products and they all failed. But to me now, they were actually a failure because when I launched my first product, I learned how to code. When I built my second product, I learned how to route Facebook ads. My third product, I learned to hire my first co-obsteed. The fourth one, I learned how to apply for grants and get some more grants. So every single of those products I built, maybe it failed at the end, but it wasn't actually a failure. I learned so much. So by the time when I landed on a successful idea of a sprocket, I knew how to hire. I knew how to raise money. I knew how to apply for grants. And then all those steps that are required to be on a scaling a company. So to answer the question, I don't think you should spend a year building your audience and not starting your online store to hopefully get to that number of audience and then start your store. In my opinion, you should be doing it in parallel. Building your audience and at the same time, trying multiple times building your option in store. I mean, the cost is so low right now. Yeah, but you can't pay the Shopify monthly cost is $25, $30. I think they're increasing the prices to $40. Sprocket is $30. Your cost is less than $100 a month. That's honestly like going out twice. It's like having two dinner, two lunch outside. It's like eight coffees, nine coffees. The cost is just so low that 18 is really worth experimenting, even if you know you're going to fail. First time, second time, third time. But every time you learn something new, the first time you learn how to use Shopify, how to set up your theme, how to set up your taxes, at the same time, you might choose a platform like Sprocket or how to automate using different Chrome extensions. The third time you learn how to write Facebook apps and every time it's going to cost you less than $100. By the time that you have the arguments, you exactly know what to do. You exactly know how to scale your e-commerce store. That's my personal opinion? Again, everyone has their own way. Especially knows me. You know what's funny about this is that where you and I live, like one meal could easily be the monthly cost. But people don't perceive it that way. They're like, oh, I'm willing to spend that much money on a meal. But when it comes to like a cost of Shopify, for some reason, they bulk at $30. It just doesn't make sense to me. Honestly, many of my friends that they let anything down wait and tried to change their mindset. I'm like, we went out last night, $800 on cocktails. And how would you not? How would you don't see that cost to the above when you want to start your business? You think $100 is cost to it? Exactly. So, exactly. I am curious. So how does Sprocket make money? Is it primarily from the monthly fees? Or are there any other ways that you guys make money? So, we started Sprocket on a subscription business. And over time, we wanted to, we'll be to the GMV style and taking a cut or doing a mix of both like Shopify, the ones that they charge the facts, the amount that also they take a cut. We wanted to introduce it more, Jane, out of the cell. It's been like two years I wanted to introduce it, but we always said not yet, not yet, because we always wanted more and more to be on our customer site, on our merchant site. So they say in business. So if they say in business, they got to stay long during the business and we got to make more money on their flat two year everybody. So we have not introduced any cut of the cell. Maybe we do that in the future. We definitely wanted to do it. And the experiment did it elements for a month or two. And it was very successful for us as a company. But we thought it was probably not the right time yet. I think I saw some complaints from over merchants that they're like, hey, what are you charging us fees and stuff? So I haven't tried to not continue on that yet. OK, so it's just the pretty much the flat monthly fee. At this point, it's just a flat fee, yes. OK. And just logistically, from just a drive shipping standpoint, do the people get access to the supplier in case something goes wrong? Or do you guys handle all the go between between the supplier? So I think it's a good segue that I've talked a little bit about our customer support team that I'm sure had. Yes. And honestly, in the past, that's five years, probably been one of my top two priorities all the time. I still, every single day, check 10 to 15 tickets. I read them and they give comments to our customer support team, 35 people doing 24, 7 customer support. We offer two minutes to respond. So I mean, you can test it yourself, Steve, if you go on our website and you send a message to all our customers support team, on average, you should be getting a respond within two minutes. This is the sort of part of our KPIs that we track on a week to week basis. I've been doing it for six years now. I would say I want Saba to respond within two minutes. Is that going to happen? That's probably not going to happen. If you're all a team, they're doing a great job. I mean, if you go look at our reviews and show the final then I would just trust that I don't make it for platforms. You see how much they're talking. The reviews are definitely top notch among all drops of in platforms. There's no question. Yeah, I would honestly give most of that to our customer support down top of it. If you have some sort of KPIs, what then is that? It has to be two minutes to respond time. Below two minutes to respond time, they must get over 95% and the customer satisfaction, NPS, on a week to week basis. We understand that some customers are not going to be happy with what we do so we can't really be 100%. But every agent that we have in cool is 75%. So we have like some very strict and very high bar KPIs on the customer support site. So to answer your question, we wanted to be in the middle. If there's any communication, our merchant wants to do with suppliers, we wanted to meet in the middle and we were in the middle for four years. Like any communication from merchants was coming to our customer support team. We were reaching out to the supplier, getting information from them and getting back to our customers. And we did that for multiple reasons. But one of them was that we as a company probably have higher authority to send this message to our suppliers and get a faster response. Then let's say our merchants reaching out to the suppliers and it takes days where we get the response. So also when we are in the middle, we're reaching out to the supplier, if they don't respond to us, let's say within 40 hours or 24 hours, we can remove that supplier. But if the communication is directly in our merchant and supplier, we don't know, let's say that communication is efficient. We don't know if supplies are responding to our merchant fast enough. So we could not have a KPI's on our supplier end. That big said, seven, eight months ago, we launched a direct communication between our merchant and our suppliers on a limited number of suppliers, which we actually are going to expand it to all our suppliers by the end of this month. So at the end of this month, if our merchants want to talk to any of the suppliers, they could do that directly. And if they want to talk to us and we reached out to the supplier, they can do that as well. I mean, this is a segue to my next question, which was how are disputes resolved? Like, let's say I buy something from this, one of your suppliers, and I'm not happy with the quality, but the supplier doesn't agree. Like, do you guys mediate or how does it get all worked out? We are mitigating, we are in the middle. If there's any issue happens, in terms of the product, ratio is broken, or it hasn't reached into the customer, or there's any issue, like our merchant would reach out to us. I mean, not 100% of the order is reached successfully, even not all the orders from Amazon are successfully, I think Amazon's successfully disarming 8%. We're really aiming to increase that power and getting it as close to 99% on the success rate, but there's issues on the order process, I think, for sure. And we're there, our customers support team is there 24% to help out. We do reach out to the suppliers, we are in the middle of transaction, so if the situation is in the way that we think is fair, we will process a refund to the merchant on our end, and we will discuss the resolution and supplier later on. But because the transaction happens within our system, we could be processing those rates on in case there's an issue with the order. Right. Yeah, that makes sense. So under what circumstances would the seller reach out to the supplier directly? You mentioned you just introduced a new program, which shouldn't suppliers are like that? Do you encourage them to speak with the supplier directly, or do you prefer that they go through you guys? Yeah, so Arson, the reason that we launched that, sort of was beta and making it across open with suppliers, but end up this month, was not really for a situation like disputes. It was more a situation that let's say, a customer wanted this product to be a different color, or they wanted to ask questions about the inventory of products. So we're like, it might be unnecessary for our merchant to reach out to us, and so I have how many inventory of this product left, and they reach out to the supplier, and the supplier let us know, and we get back to our merchants. Like, do you have the color of these t-shirts, and they come to us, and they reach out to supplier, so probably get back to us, and we communicated with our merchant. So for those smaller sort of questions, or if there's any dispute, we're still encouraging them to reach out to us, because we're in a position to resolve their dispute much faster, and then more efficient. Inventory accounts are automatically updated though, right? There's things to talk into. Okay, it does, yeah. Let me ask you this question then. Since there is communication now, is it possible for the seller to interact directly with supplier outside of Spocket? So I mentioned one of the reasons that we didn't have direct communication for four years, four and a half years. There was multiple reasons, like we wanted to increase the quality of Sp and we have to protect our marketplace, and all the work that we put in place, in the five, six years, to build this marketplace. So we wanted to protect it. We really believe at least the value out of Spocket is big enough that does not work for all our merchant dropshippers, or for our suppliers to go around us to save $30 a month. So our started planning is $29. You've gained that, you're basically getting access to units of products, you get access to our partnership and integration with both Alibaba and the Express. You get access to wide-level solution, you get access to our NFT creation, you get access to our winning products, you get access to email search, you get access to real-time inventory update, you get access to 24-7 customer support and many, many other features and solutions that we offer. If you really think, all of these doesn't work, $30 a month, and you'd rather to go around us and do all of these things manually by contacting the suppliers, sure, I mean, you can do that. We really think we're at the stage that our value is much higher than saving $30 a month. Also from the other side, on our supplier side, if our supplier side to work with all of these merchants, like on a direct basis and processing these orders, getting these orders, the transactions, all of this thing, do we have a hottest of retailers, Mammedy? It's a tiny, I agree. Yeah, so a lot of our suppliers, even if a merchant wanna work with them outside of it, it would have worked with them on the drop shipping or startup. Let me ask you this question. So one way I teach it is, if you have no money, start out drop shipping, figure out what sells, and then maybe carry inventory of that item to get higher margins. Is there that option in SPACA? Let's say you drop shipping something really successfully. Is there the option for me to buy 500 units and get a bigger margin on that product from one of the suppliers? Yes, so as I mentioned, our suppliers offer 25% to 50% discount. So if you wanna process a bulk order with them, they could, again, if you have houses on some suppliers, like this is something that we can discuss with our merchant on our case by case, but they could even offer up to 50% discount, which is a wholesale price. And you could warehouse it and it can ship it yourself. Some merchant wanna do the packaging himself, because they wanna have their packaging in a certain way. So they put it all quarter, they put it in the housing, the house or the warehouse, they create the packaging himself, they create the experience that they want to for their customers. So you absolutely can do that, yes. Is that something that requires talking, or is that already kind of built into the system? So right now we do have a feature that you can process a sample order at a discounted price, but I think we have a limit of 10 sample orders per product. And the reason that we added that limit is because we don't wanna become a consumer. Yeah, absolutely. Because we may be seeing the motioning all this discount with our suppliers, we do that with the condition that business is going to be selling this product to the end consumer. So there's a limit of the number of sample orders that someone can produce, sorry, order, but if they wanna order and want it down, yes, they need to reach out to all our customers. Okay, where do we go to facilitate that? Another question I have is, we talked about Alex, press drop shipping earlier, and you added it because some people wanna drop ship from AliExpress. Looking at your customer base, are your more successful customers drop shipping from your US and EU suppliers as opposed to people from China? Like the Alex? So, yes, so as I mentioned, let me actually share some of these titles stats. Okay, now I'll ask you a question. Sure. So we add over, and I think at the end of April, we cross 150,000 active merchant across all the commerce platforms that we partner with. And that has grown by almost 50,000 in the past eight months. So it's been a really great year on the growth and having more drops for trusting us and using out the other solution. Out of that, since we launched our added Square Per Solution, which is automating AliExpress drop shipping, we have over 58,000 active merchant using that solution. So that's how I know about offline, the usage base. In terms of orders, I think I was actually looking at our order stats. Let me go to a week ago. Rough to around 68 to 70% of our orders are processed in our USA-Europe marketplace, that AliExpress. So I would say more than two-third of our orders are based in suppliers that are fast shipping and high quality, and we've done the bidding and verifying their suppliers. Okay. But you don't vet the AliExpress suppliers, right? That's probably a hard problem to solve. We cannot really do that. And there are some measures on the AliExpress side, like you would be able to see the rating of suppliers, the rating of Portride. So we'll lead that to our merchant. If they want to use out Express, they can use our out-of-store price solution. But then on the vetting side, it's on their end. They have to decide if they want to work in the suppliers on our experts or not. Yeah. So what I'm getting at is it's a much better experience to use your vetted USAU suppliers than the AliExpress. 100%. Okay. 100% And then the support that we offer afterwards, that we cannot really offer the support for AliExpress. So if there is a dispute with a supplier when you add Express, because we did not vet them, we did not verify it. Those are not verified suppliers. They cannot handle that, but we did our market, please. We can help with the resolutions and in-store up disputes. I just thought I'd ask you this question. Do you know of any people who are doing AliExpress drops shipping successfully in the long term? So I know people that are doing great building AliExpress drops shipping and they're making good amount of money by the short period of time and they die afterward. I mean, they just sort dice after a couple of times or maximum, I say six to eight months. I think they find a winning for life. They go hard on marketing, I pay that position mostly. They sell a lot, some of them are just $3 million in the two, three months. They're making very good margin, very good amount of money, but very soon the competition grows and becomes so big that you can't really compete as much. So they usually die and they sort of dies and they look for new products to scale. But the customers that sourcing local suppliers might not overnight like in month or two, get to a million, two million dollar sales, but they feel like more than all terms of sustainable business. Yeah, I am curious, maybe you don't even have this data, but how many of your customers who are the successful ones start out dropshipping and then move on to like the white label option that you mentioned and even going on a private label? Is that like a stepping stone that you guys are seeing with your customers or do they primarily stick with dropshipping? So that's a very good question. So you know Shopify launch Shopify Plus, I think I was on board T. And I listened to the interview with Toby and Hari Me that wide the launch Shopify Plus, the reason wasn't to get into, the reason wasn't to get into enterprise e-commerce initially. The reason that they started Shopify Plus was that there's so many people who are coming with Shopify and they become successful, but as soon as they become successful, they would not go on to use Magenta or other platforms. So they technically the best merchants of Shopify, they were living them after they become very successful. So that's what Shopify started building Shopify Plus and you basically graduate to their Plus solution when you start selling auto dot T. Like $100 million a year, but don't quote me on that number. It's like if you're making like six to 10 million or something, it makes sense to upgrade or something like that. I can't remember the exact number, but yeah. Yeah, so those are more like merchants that graduate to a Plus customer. So the same situation happened to us, like a drop-in was, it's for beginners, people that are entrepreneurs, people that want to start their businesses. And the ones that become successful would graduate at our production and they want to build their own brand. They want to warehouse their own product for a very long-term building the brand and we're going to part of that market. We're going to part of, we're going to solution for them. So we've part of this bubble called Jubilee, which right now it's purely focusing on cosmetic products and we're going to expand that to fashion products and other type of products too. So if your drop-in store becomes successful and as helpful you want to build your brand, we can help you out with that as well. And you're using sort of our system and our customer support, the same level of support, the same level of solution that we have, but now you build your own wide-level brand. And another very interesting stat that I might be just sharing too much, but I think this is very interesting stat that as soon as we saw our partnership with Jubilee four months ago, they've been from pretty much zero to over 12,000 active merchants using that solution now. So they're scaling too, which on the wide-level side and private-level side scaling is very beneficial because it's significant reduces the cost of shipping and warehousing. Yep. Yeah, nice. Okay, so it's nice to know that you guys are going in that direction. It seems like there's plenty of demand for that. And right now there's no extra charge for that. Is that correct? Jubilee has its own sort of fees, which is like honestly, even small, it's like $19 a month. But I think there's a very small card off every sound, but that's very small. It's not many. But it's not even useability, it's the same. Like you use the SPOCKET app, you can import these wide-label products directly in your store, right? It's a safe experience. It's a safe experience, but it's a different solution. Yeah, okay, okay. Cool, Salva, I know you gotta go. Where can people find more about your company if they have any questions and that sort of thing? RC, our website SPOCKET.co, we have our customer support team, you guys see this Percolon Ball Ball in the right bottom side of our website, our app, you can reach out to them. You should be getting a response in two minutes if you don't reach out to myself directly by most Salva at SPOCKET.co. Try over customer support. If the door is falling in 10 minutes, then send me any more. Ah, ha ha ha. But yeah, that's how they can get more information. We have our help center. I think Percolon has articles and content for every action within the dashboard and our solution that should help out as well. Yeah, I mean, one thing I've noticed, but by the way, if you guys are listening, SPOCKET also has a free program where you can just kind of look at what's being offered. And then the customer support is top notch compared to the other drop shipping marketplaces. Like I don't do drop shipping, but I do see it as a good stepping stone for other things. And your answers actually confirm that with me today in the interview. So, Salva, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate your time. That takes you, I would just add one more point. Yes, after. Or be in this conversation. Last thing, yes, she launched our Academy. This is another section that we added in our app that if there's many courses over 50 courses, most of them are for free. So, if customers want to learn about SEO, the one they have to do, eight marketing, or how to start the drop shipping source that are on the Shopify store, there's a course in that. And that's honestly the last thing I want to mention. Maybe if you just send me those links, I'll link them up in the show notes. The show up is so good. Yeah, all right. Okay. Well, thank you so much Salva. Thanks, Sustin. Thank you, Sustin. If you enjoy that episode, now if you have any questions about drop shipping, feel free to email me over at Steve at MyWipeCooterJob.com. And I hope this episode helped to clear up any questions that you may have had. For more information, go to MyWipeCooterJob.com slash episode 462. And once again, I want to thank Link Whisper for sponsoring this episode. They have search engine optimization is important to you, and you run a blog. Make sure you check out Link Whisper over at linkwhisper.com. I also want to thank Zipify and one click upsell for sponsoring this episode. Seriously, adding this one tool will instantly increase your Shopify revenue by 10 to 15% with doing very little work. Go check it out at Zipify.com. And if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to MyWipeCooterJob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just enter your email and send me the course right away. Thanks for listening.

462: The Hidden Truth About Dropshipping: Is It Really A Profitable Ecommerce Model With Saba Mohebpour