Building Your Demo Store for High-Ticket Dropshipping Success

Hey guys, Trevor here with eCommerce Paradise. Today I want to tell you how to build your demo store so you can get suppliers.

If it's your first time listening to my podcast, definitely get my free course and niches list on high-ticket dropshipping at eCommerceParadise.com slash minicourse. Alright, let's get into it. So it's easy to build a demo store, but you're going to need a few things first in order to be a professional business. So before you even get started in the first place, with any of this, you definitely want to do some niche research first. You want to figure out what niche you want to get into.

In order to do that, that's really simple. Just go to chatGBT, ask it for a list of product ideas over $1,000. It'll give you a bunch of product ideas, and then go through each one of those and plug it into Google Shopping and try to find niche stores that are selling those products. So stores that are like specialty retail stores, not like big box stores, but have the actual product category in their domain name, in their branding.

And then once you do that, try to find stores that do not have a physical retail storefront or a warehouse. They have an address on their website, but it's a physical residential address or it's a virtual mailbox address, virtual office. And then once you've got those stores, see how many of those stores you can find in each one of these niches. And you'll get an idea of the competitiveness within each of those niches.

And then try to find one that's got a decent amount of competitors, but not too many. So usually I'm looking for any niche where there's 10 to 20, maybe 30 competitors, but not over that.

So a medium amount. And of course, under 10 competitors is not a good idea because it usually means that there's really specialty knowledge required and thus there's either a physical retail storefront requirement by the suppliers or they only work with people that really know what they're doing because they're specialty products. So once you have a list of ideas like this, then you can decide which one you might want to sell.

Demo stores are really cheap and easy to set up. So what I would recommend doing if you can't really figure out which one you want to choose, is to set up multiple demo stores, one for each one. And so before you go setting up a demo store, you're going to need to form your business. So you got to get serious about this. What I recommend doing is forming an LLC in the state of Wyoming because it's a low formation cost and there's no franchise fees and there's no sales tax.

Sorry, no income tax. There is a sales tax, but there's no income tax. So anyway, so form your LLC in Wyoming and then whatever state you live in, if they do have a franchise tax, you're just going to have to report it as an out-of-state LLC, which is fine. But in the future, if you decide to move your residence to a no-income tax-free state in the future, like Texas. Washington, one of those, then you don't have to report it anymore, right? And so that's kind of the benefit there.

So start a Wyoming LLC. I recommend the company called Busy. This is the one I use and recommend myself to all my community members and students, B-I-Z-E-E. And you can get a special offer at ecommerceparadise.com slash busy, B-I-Z-E-E. And they were known as Inc. File before, but they are the same company and they work really great and really easy.

And I just, I recommend signing up for the package where they actually create your EIN number for you as well, just to save you the time and hassle there. It's free to do it, but you have to fill out paperwork. And if you just pay the extra little bit of money, they'll do it for you. So it's super easy. Now, keep in mind that this process is really easy as long as you have a physical residential address in the US.

If you don't have a physical residential address in the US, you'll have to go through a third party agency to form a business. I recommend something like Stripe Atlas, and there's other ones as well. But Stripe Atlas will give you the whole package and you'll be able to form a business in the US and it's usually for software startups and stuff like that so just keep that in mind.

Other things down the road they're going to require physical residential addresses as well like the seller's permit and a business bank account, things like that so just get that squared away right away, if you don't already have it so once you get that done you get your LLC, EIN you want to go get a business bank account started you want to get a business credit card going as well I recommend using Chase Bank for that ecommerceparadise.com slash chase.

You can set up a bank account and get their Chase Inc. Business card. Use my referral link to get a really good sign-up bonus, ecommerceparadise.com slash chaseinc. So that's what you got to do there. And then you'll want to get a seller's permit in Wyoming. It's really easy. You can go check out my seller's permit blog post on my website under the guides, the header menu, and you will be able to find the link to go to sign up for the Wyoming seller's permit in there.

And it's $60 as of the recording of this episode, I believe. And it's pretty easy to sign up for. And then once you have that, the benefit of having a seller's permit in Wyoming is that there's very few online buyers that are going to be buying, particularly in Wyoming. So the chances are you don't have to collect that much sales tax.

So that's kind of the idea there. Most of the buyers are going to be in the big cities, usually like California, Washington, New York, Florida, Texas, Illinois, those states. So anyway, let's see. So once you get past the business formation stuff, you'll be able to go and get a business email address. That's the next thing. I recommend using Google Workspace for that, otherwise known as G Suite. So ecommerceparadise.com slash G Suite, that was what they used to be called.

You can get a free trial or I believe a discounted sign up for that. I forget exactly what the offer is, but go and get G Suite set up, Google Workspace. You'll get a professional thing. Sorry, before that, you have to get a domain name. So figure out your domain name first. Because if you set up email before domain, it doesn't really make sense, right? So you need a domain name. So get a domain. It's really cheap, namecheap. So I recommend using that source.

You'll want to figure out what your domain name is first. I usually recommend just putting your category first in the domain name. Let's just say you choose... Appliances, just like a broad category. Well, I would recommend going way narrower. Let's just say you want to use massage chairs. So put massage chair and then come up with a branding name after that, like Depot or Source or Online Direct, that kind of thing. So the category and then the branding name, that's usually what works best.

So get a domain name, go to Namecheap, ecommerceparadise.com slash Namecheap. They'll give you a special offer there. and then you get your domain, set up your email and then you want to get a phone number as well, a professional 800 phone number. I use Grasshopper for mine. Grasshopper is really good. It's like a low cost startup based business. It's based for small businesses and it works really good and it's easy to use. So go check it out, ecommerceparadise.com slash grasshopper.

So Grasshopper phone systems works great. Get an 800 phone number. Don't go with like an 877 or 866, go with an 800. They'll have it there in the menu when you sign up for an account. So with all this done, then you can go to Shopify and start your store. So go to ecommerceparadise.com slash Shopify. You'll get a free three-day trial and then $1 a month for three months with my link. So ecommerceparadise.com slash Shopify. So get that set up.

Shopify has free themes. So go in there and choose one of their free themes. And then all you got to do is get a logo done on Fiverr. Ecommerceparadise.com slash Fiverr will get you an account there. And get you set up and just type in there logo for e-commerce store or something like that and there's going to be lots of sellers that will make them for like 5 or 10 bucks and then you'll be able to get a logo made.

What I usually do with logos is I have them put a little icon to the left and then the text to the right. Just keep it really simple. You can research competitors and brands within your niche to find the right color for that. So maybe like a blue or a purple, a red, whatever kind of goes with it. Like if it's a wine cooler you're selling, maybe a reddish tone would be good. If it's, Like something in, I don't know, elderly niche, maybe a blue color would be good for trust.

If it's something in a younger niche, maybe yellow would be good for excitement or orange. So you can choose whichever color you want. Just take into consideration color psychology and what your target demographic is with your website. So usually what I say is just model whatever your competitors are doing. Don't copy, but just do something similar and make it your own, make it unique. So get a logo made on Fiverr that's cheap and then put a logo up in the corner of the website.

Just take whatever your top competitor has as far as menus and just copy, paste, copy, paste, copy, paste, make the same menus. Although what I would say is if it's very complex, simplify it, especially in the beginning. You don't need all the subcategories and stuff. Just make the basic categories. And then what you should do is to get all your pages made. It's really easy using ChatGBT.

So just type in a ChatGBT, write an About Me page or write about us page, write a contact page, this, that, and the other thing. And then if you go to make your policies, it's really important your policies are done correctly. So I used a service in the past called Terms Feed for my policies. It works really good. You can go to ecommerceparadise.com slash Terms Feed and get the policies made there.

They'll ask you a few questions about your business and then they'll have really professional, actually legally correct policies that will work with Google Merchant Center later on down the road. So Terms Feed is the way to go there. Don't go with the Shopify template ones. They don't work very well for getting approvals later for ad accounts. So get the pages done, get your policies done, get your collections done. And then you'll want to create some demo products for your site.

So demo products are pretty easy to make. Just make sure that the products that... All you have to do is go into a marketplace like Amazon, eBay, whatever. And try to find products that are in that category, right? But you want to find products that are not by the brands that you're trying to recruit. Okay, so different brands. So like sometimes in a niche, it's easy because there's like top name brand products, right?

And then there's like all the other brands. And you're never going to get those top name brands because they only sell in retail stores, whereas the rest of the brands you can get.

So you can upload those top name brands temporarily and then take them down after the first recruiting process, right? You're not going to actually be marketing or advertising any of this stuff. But even that's a little bit sketchy because Shopify could find out and then take your store down. So what I would recommend doing is uploading completely generic products. What you do is you look in a different market altogether.

So you're going to advertise in the US and sell US products, look in the Australian market and find products by brands out there. Or just try to find products on Amazon that are in that niche that don't have any particular branding on the pictures. And the brands are just kind of weird Chinese names, stuff like that. And you want to find completely brandless. And then when you make the products, You just want to make it like a demo product.

If you really have trouble with this, you could try using AI to formulate, but the images always come out all funky. And you can use Google image search as well, but you want to just find a product that is completely brandless. You want this store to look like you're doing a direct-to-consumer brand. It's your own brand. You just don't have a brand name for it.

Whenever you go to the grocery store and they have their grocery store brand of products, that's what you want to make these products look like. You just don't even have a brand.

And if you really wanted to, you could create your own brand your own like hallucinate hallucinate just come up with like a brand name and put a brand on it to make it look like it's your own brand or you can have multiple brands that just don't even exist if you really want to but just generic usually works fine just create generic product names just the product category generic description right so all you want to do is just use chat gbt hey write a description for

this for me completely generic blah blah specifications it'll just pull from whatever. So you want to fill out each of the collections with a few, like three to four different, Like maybe just make it look like it's a full store. So three to six, maybe 10 products per collection. And then make sure that you have your product pages set up properly. It doesn't need a bunch of optimization right now. Just make sure the prices are clear. There's some sale pricing.

Descriptions are there that you have your add to cart, your cart page. You have your policies in place. Make sure the footer looks clean. You have your categories. You have your pages and policies, an email opt-in, some social media. so you've got to set up some social media channels. I mean, you don't really have to set up social media at this stage, but if you did, it might help. Really, a demo store, what you're going to use that for is to get suppliers.

So maybe it'll take you a day or two to get this going, but once the demo store is ready, then you can contact suppliers, all the suppliers you found on your competitors list, and you can reach out to them and say, hey, can you set up an account for me? And then once that's done, you start filling out dealer agreements and get going from there.

So it's a pretty simple process after that. And then once the dealer agreements are signed, you get all the assets from the suppliers, you can start uploading their catalogs. And this is why I always recommend to newbies for beginners is do not start in niches where the suppliers have huge catalogs. Because you're going to be uploading things manually probably, unless you're like a tech whiz and you know how to use certain programs to upload like huge bulk catalogs.

But in the beginning, probably not. So just start with a niche that has a small product catalog so you can manage uploading them manually or hire a VA to do it for you. I mean, there are VAs on Fiverr that'll do it for you. They're just not going to do that good of a job at it. They're just going to basically copy and paste from the supplier's site. And by the way, never copy and paste from your competitor's site.

But if you just have a VA on Fiverr, you can have them onboard suppliers directly, copy and paste from the supplier's site if they have a site or a spreadsheet or something like that. And then after that, all you got to do is use ChatGPT or an AI app like SEO Ant to change the product descriptions, optimize, get high quality images, that kind of stuff.

And then there's a whole process beyond that. I go all over this stuff in my high-ticket dropshipping masterclass slowly and step-by-step over the shoulder, showing you how I do it in real life. So if you're interested in something like that, in training, go to ecommerceparadise.com slash masterclass. I also provide a done-for-you service where my team will actually set you up an entire one of these stores.

So if you're interested in more of something like that, where it's done for you, you can book a call with me to talk about it, ecommerceparadise.com slash turnkey. And that's usually a really good idea if you have some money, but you just can't spend the time, but you do want to get involved in it. But anyway, so this is pretty much the process of getting started. You got to have a demo store going. If you don't, it's going to be difficult to get the suppliers.

So it's kind of one thing after another after another. But you can get this work done. It's not that hard and it's definitely doable. So just focus on it and one day at a time, one step at a time and you'll get there. If you want private coaching from me, I can help you out. Get past some mindset issues or specifics with your website, that kind of stuff. I can look at your website. I can do conversion rate optimization coaching.

I can help you with all sorts of stuff. So go check that out at ecommerceparadise.com slash coaching. If you have any questions on specific stuff, You can reach out to me on social media. Just search my name, Trevor Fenner, and also Trevor at ecommerceparadise.com is my email. Thanks so much, guys, for listening. Make sure you subscribe and leave a review on the iTunes podcast. I would appreciate that. I need more reviews. And share this with a friend you think it'll be helpful for.

Thanks much, and I'll see you out there.