Mastering E-commerce: Tips from High-Ticket Dropshipping & Crypto Entrepreneur Ryan Garrido

What's up guys, welcome to the eCommerce Paradise podcast. I'm your host Trevor Fenner.

Today I had a conversation with Ryan Garrido who's a fellow high-ticket dropshipping entrepreneur as well as crypto entrepreneur and he's into lots of other things as well. So really cool guy, really engaging conversation and really enjoyed it. I hope you guys enjoy it too. If you're first time listening to the podcast or watching a video on the YouTube channel, make sure you subscribe and get my free mini course and niches list

for high-ticket dropshipping at ecommerceparadise.com slash free course. I'll see you in there. Music.

Yo, yo, yo. Oh, are we on? What's up, people? Welcome back to ecommerce paradise. I'm with Ryan Garrido. It's my G, ecom-G. How you doing today? How you doing? How you doing? What's good? What's good? Does the G stand for Gorito? No, it's just like my G. It's like my gangster. Oh, okay. OG. OG. Original gangster. We're just listening to some Jay-Z. That's right. That's right. That's how we roll. We're out here in the Big Mango, they call it. You know? The New York of the East, Bangkok, Thailand.

That one's good, but the first one, what, the Big Mango? You guys got to see this view, by the way.

Check this out, you guys. Check this out. This is sick. there's like god rays happening out here and everything don't sleep on windham yeah this is a windham yeah let's take you on a quick condo tour how about we do that give the people what they really want here messy you can tell i mean all right check it out guys he's got this sick ass condo at a windham here in bangkok and it's a loft style with a spiral staircase oh shit bed up

top and then the bedroom back here and there's a kitchen back there and everything and yeah it's a crazy like patio or balcony or whatever with the oh and the roof we'll hit up the roof after so you can see the roof yeah we'll do the rooftop when the sun goes down the roof gets crazy because you can see the whole city lit up yeah it's nice super super nice you adjust this camera real quick, oh man so we so i've known you for like i don't know six six years or something

like that we first met 2018 a while yeah 2018 right yeah i would say 2018 or 2017 probably 2018 when was What was the affiliate world that you and I met and Ernest was there? Was that 2018? Ooh, that would have been...

Late 2018 right yeah yeah 2018 okay so we first met at well we went before that i think online right like we'd been in touch before that maybe yeah yeah because i remember it's like oh yeah what's up you know yeah yeah it's cool to meet you in the group in the group yeah like a little bit so back in the day ernest epps is the man and he i don't know if he's still doing it but he was teaching high ticket dropshipping and back in the day

back back back in the day 2016 ish when i first joined dropship lifestyle he was one of the coaches right and he was he's just he's just so smart man like the guy is a conversion rate optimization monster and a sales monster too right just like he's a behemoth he's the man bro like he's got so much energy you know like so much positive energy i mean he has lots of reasons why yeah yeah he's got a big family how many kids does

he have like four kids right four kids yeah hey you gotta hustle you got four kids right he has.

The estate you know i'm saying he has the earnest family estate yeah the whole property virginia right yeah yeah it's beautiful yeah in ground swimming pool he has lamborghini in the garage i mean he has a whole nine yards sick sick he's living well he's come a long way man he he did his thing you know i mean i he he did his course and sold a lot with that i think he had one of those click funnels like million dollar funnel awards or whatever really yeah yeah yeah some

he was taking a picture with some of the other players at the time in 2019 i think it was like kevin david this girl somebody else yeah we spoke at affiliate world i mean that's his big claim to fame yeah exactly and he talked about high ticket drop shipping you know and everybody was like whoa you know what's this he got zach interested my friend zach franklin he started high ticket drop shipping but yeah so we've come a long way you know i think it's been a roller coaster ride yeah can you

talk about your experience with high ticket drop shipping.

What what part what part of it let's start at the beginning yeah how did you first like involved well i talked to ernest so he was traveling all the world so i went to high school with him okay so i knew him from high school so you knew him from high school you know way back in the day way way back in the day he was like like a footballer okay he was fit he was a fit like diesel football player yeah and then i we weren't like close or anything but

i knew of him maybe he knew of me maybe right you know just like oh i've seen that guy before that's all he's a big dude so if you see him you're like oh that's a guy you know and then i saw him we were friends on facebook so we connected right and so i'm traveling over the world like doing a conference in affiliate world or like going all over like i guess speaking here in affiliate world in thailand like they he just he was just always traveling on facebook right and i also

was traveling right so i was like oh what are you doing what are you doing he's like oh i do have to get drop shipping i sell a course if you want to buy it you can buy it so i bought the course and that's how i started. You know, and I was in the process of like getting it started for like maybe six months, seven months. And then it was kind of on the back burner, just kind of, oh,

let me just, you know, do my main business. And while I have time, I'll do this separate, you know, separate thing. And then after about eight months, nine months, I started doing 30K months, 40K months. You know what I mean? How did you figure out your niche? Like, you know, how did you find it? Were you doing a bunch of research? What was it? You know, so a lot of people, I think, overcomplicate, you know, they turn like a really like a molehill into a mountain, like really.

Was there some like inspiration or motivation behind the niche you chose or was it just something that seemed like it was trendy and like you would be able to sell it? Well, there's a few just indicators, right? You know, whether you're going into the market or it's seasonal, you know, in the market or if you're in the peak or the valley of that product, so you want to be going into the market. So it was trending at the time.

Trending at the time. You don't want to start a company selling saunas if it's going to be in the middle of summer. Right? You want me to start in winter where they're peaking up so you can go into the revenue. Sure. Right? That's a good tip. That's a good tip. I like that. And then there's all these other rules. Does the market have enough search volume to justify an entire brand? Yeah, totally.

And you have like, there's like so many, you know, you have your checklist. So if you take any sort of course or any sort of program, you're going to have like here's the checklist.

And then each thing you check you just go okay does it qualify for this benchmark to this benchmark to this yeah there's like search volume how much demand there is obviously like competitors how many competitors how many suppliers yeah so how many niches did you like go through before you found the one oh probably 30 to 40 yeah 30 to 40 something just going through all the checklists like well you have you do your initial research so there's like a

flow to it right so you're like me i want to start a new store okay let me think about what i could do or i learned about high-ticket dropshipping, just brand new. I don't know what the options are, what's possible. Let me just start listing out things that are expensive, $750 or more, right? So, okay, they're expensive items. And then you have a list of maybe 10, 20 things.

And you're like, okay, maybe three of them you like. They go past the first level of due diligence, like keyword and market, all that stuff. And then you just hold those three in an idea and then spend the next like maybe three weeks or four weeks, comparing the new ideas you come up with against those three.

Right yeah and then over the new 30 40 30 40 and then you have oh this one makes sense we're going in the market it meets all the requirements blah blah blah blah and then it's just a no-brainer it becomes like that's oh that's obviously the one that i want to work in did you have any personal experience with the products that you sold personal like yeah like selling selling them or using them or no no selling them well no no so none at all so you just you just chose it

based on the research data and 100 no prior experience no prior experience because it goes to show you guys you don't have to choose something that you're have personal experience with that that's a huge plus like i always tell people like if if you can find a niche that you already have experience with and using that's a huge plus because then you can like you know do like reviews and stuff and just be more knowledgeable right but you don't have to i talk about the

passion if they're interested in that topic okay right so like you want to be something you're going to see it all the time you have product listings you have the website itself you have cro you have seo you're dealing with these products all the time so if it's like something you have zero interest in pool tables and you don't like pool at all it's like it's hard to do the daily work of the business right so as long as you have a passion for something you want to learn about it then it

makes for you know and everything else checks out then it's a no-brainer yeah i mean yeah it's just like you know with high ticket products usually there's there's well it depends there's more complicated ones right like especially the electronic ones where you have like some crazy things and then there's like less complicated like a sofa it's it's not nearly as like complex right right so. I guess you know with the more complicated ones the person who's.

Selling it or at least you know especially the customer support agents. Right they got to have some knowledge on how they work or else you're going to probably get some negative reviews eventually like oh you know they don't know what they're doing or whatever you know but yeah so.

What right i mean it's it's it's drop shipping when it comes down to you're not creating the product you're just marketing the product and selling it sure a different brand but that makes a big difference i mean what you're saying is important because let's say a lot of these new age computer kind of, I don't know what you even call these sort of products.

They're like, you know, they're very low margin technical stuff from China, like some of these different niches. And so the margins are so low, but you have things that are really low tech.

Furniture like you mentioned right or like saw like i mentioned before they're so low tech the profit margins are 30 to 40 percent yeah right compared to where that you're you're fighting for a slim margin on some sort of like electronic so is that usually it sounds like it's pretty common like across all industries is like the more complicated the product the lower the margin right exactly it seems like that yeah because furniture

is like 40 50 percent that's what i'm saying that's what i'm saying so it's people you don't want to be too high tech but it's all about finding a market which is under underutilized underserved underserved exactly you know there's so many i'll give you one example i'll give you one little example so when covid hit my website happened to be selling party tents so every time they had to do a covid stand what did you see yeah i sold a hundred

five hundred thousand dollars worth of tents yeah right so if you have the products on your store you know that one has that trend is kind of gone so it's not really popular yeah covid was a totally crazy it just hit in a different way yeah you know so but the point is that when you have like the store you could capitalize all these different opportunities that come up so you don't have to also be tied down to like just one specific brand like kind of concept you know so i think there's a lot

that like should be said about following trends i think honestly if you can try to find a long-term trend that's just getting started now and getting early you can make so much money because you can be one of the first online dealers to partner with those new brands and everything as things take off and sure like.

Like some industries they peak and they plateau and then they start to decline and then maybe they come back you know i mean like there's always this roller coaster of trends but you know if you can get in early and capitalize you know that's the main that's what they do with low ticket drop shipping like aliexpress alibaba stuff like all you're doing is you're trying to find trendy products things that are like.

Memes and social media stuff like that people are like you know excited about whatever on a certain level, And then, and then you're just running ads for that product and then you get a bunch of sales and then it kind of dies off. It's like, it's like a really quick product lifespan, you know? Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's an interesting point because you kind of want to avoid that in business, right? If you can. Every, every product has a lifespan.

Like you're hardly ever going to find a product that's going to keep lasting years and years and years. Like the company, like a lot of companies just do it. Like they have to create new products season after season after season. Looking back, my experience, there's certain products that were peaking and then died out. And then the business evolves because a lot of your revenue will come from one product, right? Sometimes 80% even upward can come from one product in some cases, right?

So if that's going on and then that market for that product falls flat, then it's like, oh, wait, the revenue dropped 60%, 70%, right? Or one of your ad lead-ins for that product, something happened, right? So there's definitely like technical things you have to understand on maintaining the site to sort of avoid those sort of problems. Yeah.

You just kind of have to go with the flow on that. Cause if you're not doing the actual branding yourself and the product development, you know, the, the, the actual packaging and the fulfillment, if you don't have a direct consumer brand, you're doing dropshipping, you don't have any control over that. Like you can talk to your suppliers and like get, give them ideas or get ideas and brainstorm and help like, okay, like let's figure out a better way to market this product.

Let's update it. Let's rebrand it, relaunch it. You know what I mean?

Like, but that's just how it goes. Like, I guess businesses that are used to that, that already have that mindset, like have CEOs that know that and are willing to like evolve into that or adapt that kind of thing into their business, they do way better, you know? You have to go with the flow because you just don't have a choice. Right. If you create one product like one year and then five, six years later, you get the same product still, it's probably not going to be selling as well.

Well, the ultimate goal would be for this product to become a mainstay and you add in another product, another product, another product, and they all maintain over time. Sure. But that's why you have to keep doing promos, marketing, email marketing to drive up those revenue numbers. You know what I mean? And I guess it goes back to the technical side of things too. like the more complex products are always going to have to be adapted as technology evolves.

Like the less complicated, like a sofa, the sofa design probably, I mean, it might be new, but like similar design sofas were probably in existence 20 years ago, you know, like I'm sure like table, maybe the materials or something, you know, it could be like a new, like, I mean, back in the day, maybe they didn't have fake leather. It's just wood. It's just wood. And then it's some, uh, yeah. There's some cloth. Yeah. I mean, it's really the market. It's really cheap to make. Yeah.

Right well furniture is a huge industry and and and by the way i don't really recommend that any beginners get into the furniture thing with dropshipping because even though the margins are high the problem is that you have a lot of competition yeah but think about what about exciting ideas like arcade machines yeah exactly do you know what i'm saying those are the best or just some weird funky niche something fun lacrosse

yeah you know what i mean like there's something like funky that or scuba diving yeah do you know i mean there's all these ideas for niches, you could become the whole idea to become the expert or the authority in the niche, right? If you're the authority in the niche, then you just dominate the niche and everyone wants to compete with you. And then over time, as long as you keep driving revenue, you're building up the business, right? You're growing it.

So, I mean, it's really like if you're a beginner, the thing is in the beginning, everyone struggles with like picking the niche, right? Like, okay, what do I want to get into?

But really it's just all about jumping in. Once you've done the research and you feel confident and sometimes even when you don't feel confident right you just jump in both feet you know and then if you're either going to win or you learn, you know what i mean so that's just the reality of it look at it right so if you fail forward if you have to you know yeah and then just you learn you test things and then i mean because the the thing is that people get stuck at the first step or

like the doorway but you got to realize there's a whole journey on the other side so you're sitting at the front door for like a year do i get started do i not get started you know what makes sense oh maybe it's not the right time maybe it is the right time blah blah blah blah and then it's like you could have been halfway to mordor you know if you just would have like went to the door and just kept going then you would have been already halfway

there and you might even already have made your first sale i mean once you have a site up you run ads you get a sale within an hour sometimes yeah the the shopping ads really work good to get targeted traffic yeah people are looking.

For that product right now they're just looking around sometimes they'll see your site and they just like it you know and they'll just buy it you know 100 especially if you have the best offer you use like some of those special techniques you know anything like at the you know and those techniques what are some of those techniques that you do the biggest one i think it's pretty well known you.

Know you know obviously is you just offer the free gift right so you take a percentage of your profit you go to amazon you can click free gift you send a free gift out complimentary product that goes along with that market and then also when it comes to the branding of the sites when we're talking about this early phase another thing i talk about a lot is like going towards a specific customer avatar right so like for example if you're going towards like a high level keyword let's

say you know scuba diving equipment let's just use that example right you would know way more about scuba than i do so i'm a novice i'm an amateur so i'm gonna make up some nonsense right but let's just say there was scuba diving equipment then you would have like your your air tank right and maybe that's the main product your site sells is the air tank right but you have all those complementary products you got the fins you got the whatever goggles you

got goggles you got all the different stuff that goes with that product right and some of those are necessary to buy but are very cheap and have a high perceived value yeah it's like package deals you can package things together and make much higher ticket or espresso machine or a 3D printer that's what they came recently a 3D printer you need the plastic so you give some extra plastic for free they're going to buy the plastic anyway

true right so you take maybe 3 to 5% of your profit margin, maybe less, depending on where you want to be. And then you buy the free gift and send it out with every order. So now when they're shopping and they see all the competitors, guess who's a no-brainer? It's your site, right? Now you just have to not screw it up when they actually land on the page.

You know what I'm saying? If your offer is the best one in the marketplace, when they go to Google and they see best offer, there's all the green text for the promo through the Merchant Center, right? And you go to the website, they're already sold. They just want to buy it. So you have to offer a pleasant experience. And then most people, nine out of 10 times, are going to buy. And then you have retargeting ads. You have all these ways of bringing them back. You have email marketing to build

that connection with them. I mean, it's a foolproof model. The main point is making sure that just the margins, you negotiate those properly with the vendors and onboarding the suppliers and managing their product inventories. That's a lot of high-level knowledge in a three-minute segment.

So how did you go about getting your first suppliers? What was that experience like? Through the script. Yeah. Every time I've done everything on the store ever, I've literally pulled up Ernest's script and just read it. So what is it? So the script is, I have to pull it up, but the main point of it is we want to work with you on a dropship basis. So you introduce yourself, you're the lead buyer or you're the owner or whoever you are for your company.

You're looking to expand your product catalog to their product line. You'd like to work together on a dropship basis. you're not looking for payment terms like to have net 30 terms not looking for net terms so payment terms you're going to prepay all of your orders and people go oh yeah okay what do I have to do? Nothing nothing just take a seat back I'll copy everything in your store I'll take care of it no problem okay cool go ahead.

What's our margin oh it's this much okay they negotiate the margin when when you were reaching out to suppliers were like they're bigger and smaller suppliers most of them small businesses or like distributors yeah you're common you got a mix right you have like diamond level you have you know all the different levels but levels yeah yeah yeah but the thing is that i reach out to them repeatedly so there were vendors who i reached out into the beginning who wouldn't enroll with me and then

later as i built up my suppliers you know you take beggars can't be choosers in the beginning right so you take you can get you know whoever's available whatever but then actually when you build the store up then you can actually like okay do i want to work with that one do i want to work with this one and then you reach out to them they'll decline you right like no and then reach out six months later a year later and a lot of suppliers who told me no later on board

of me because like well who do you work with i work with this person i work with this person with this they know the industries are small they know the competitors so if they're like i'm working with this guy this guy this guy this guy they're like oh okay cool well i'm bored so you just build it up naturally so were you were you using like references kind of to make yourself more of a warm introduction to the supplier always oh yeah or ask for referrals from your current suppliers as

a reference even that is amazing too yeah but you can also just mention them in the conversation with ones that aren't references. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, of course. Just name dropping constantly. That's how I got some of the biggest name suppliers in the niche. Right. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, because then they trust you more. Yeah, of course, of course. It's the perfect way to get pretty much connections with anybody in this world is to get a referral. Yeah.

Especially businesses. If you want to work with a big business and they have no idea who you are, it's very unlikely they're going to sit up with you just right off the bat. But if they know that somebody that they know and like and trust knows, likes and trusts you, or at least you drop the name or whatever that you're already working with that person, then they're way more likely. A thousand percent. A thousand percent. It's so much better.

Yeah man i think that you gotta be willing to just get that first supplier like you know what i mean like some people call one guy they're not committed they gotta call another guy and you make it no no no but when you get that one supplier that approves you and then you can you can load their products you get a few sales like they become the basis from what your business is built on yeah do you know what i mean totally yeah you have one i had one major supplier i I onboarded.

I was on the phone with him for like an hour, two hours. Like the first guy who said yes. Do you know what I mean? And then he became the most profitable item in the store for the first year as it was growing. It's crazy. Yeah. It's all from one supplier. That's how it goes. You know? I mean, you just got to make those calls. And half the time when you make calls, they're not even going to answer the

phone, right? Or like you're not going to get through it. They're just not in the office, leave a message, that kind of shit.

So it's like you keep calling back, you know? or like emailing calling emailing calling that kind of calling is the best yeah of course people try to get away with emailing yeah and even i'd be guilty it works but like not as good you know like it's a they get a million emails in their inbox and they're all you know a lot of them are spam and like just people like agencies trying to get them to pay them for services or something like who the heck are you you know so also

a lot of their a lot of you know their businesses right so they're open for business when you call them they're gonna pick up do you understand like You're not calling John Smith from 21st Street. It might be worrisome if they don't pick up, right? That's what I'm saying. So they're going to answer the phone. It's just a matter of can you get to the person who handles the reseller account. Yeah. Right? But someone's going to pick up. Hey, this is Sally at the front desk.

You know what I mean? And you can, hey, can I transfer the... You just immediately ask for who handles vendors or reselling accounts, right? And they transfer you over to that person. And then it's almost impossible to not get them on the phone. You leave a voicemail, whatever.

You keep calling, leaving voicemails. I mean I'll call multiple times in a week if I think hey this guy is like really I want to work with them if I haven't got him on the phone I'll keep calling him do you know what I mean what are some of like the worst experiences you've ever had with suppliers yeah.

Well, that's a great, I don't know, man, worst experience. You know, like, I don't know, like product is damaged, you know, that kind of thing, or shipping damage, like the customer files a chargeback and like that kind of thing. I had like those tents, those party tents from the COVID time. A lot of them got damaged when they were mailed out because they're made of these hollow tubes, right? They're like Chinese products, a little bit less.

So they would arrive and some of them would be bent in. So they'd have to give out lots of these replacement parts.

But in that case i work with a supplier they will refund the customer or send it out okay but the issue is when they ran out of inventory yeah right you know i'm saying a long wait time right exactly so you have to wait for another shipment sometimes depending on how their model is set up yeah so they had to get them in that you know i don't want to name them but you might have an idea who they are right yeah of course so i was you know so and that's the

big thing is inventory really is managing the inventory you know but other big issues you know not really too many because you have pretty well established terms with the supplier do you know what i mean like you know they have the order you get the order you give the supplier they ship it out you know blind ship it so you don't really i don't i don't what what the order process is easy it's usually the things that come after the order process like the shipping warranty issues and

this is more common with more higher expensive technical products like big electronic products or things that are easily damaged in shipment exactly you know and like you said there can be like back orders or there can be wait times on replacement products and things like that. And maybe the person wants to use it like that weekend for an event. And now they have to wait a month just to get the replacement tube to make it work.

Exactly. And what are you going to do in the meantime? The only option for you to be a good retailer is to pay the supplier for another product to get shipped out and then just have them ship back the bad product or something, right? Well, usually the supplier is willing to work. A good supplier does that. Yeah, most suppliers will. If you're working with, you You couldn't work with overseas suppliers, right? Right. So if you're working with overseas suppliers, maybe they get weird.

But if you're working with local national suppliers, right? You're an authorized retailer. I've had experiences with US suppliers that are pretty bad too. But sometimes if they have inventory. It just depends on that. I think a lot of times it depends on the people that work there. Yeah, that's true. That's true. And if they're having a good day or not. Sometimes it's just like, I've had weird situations, especially lately in the last six months to a year.

I think it's because a lot of businesses are having to go through a lot of changes right now because of like lower than usual sales and stuff like that. And so they're changing their teams and stuff. But there'll be like lacks of customer service in certain timeframes. Like they won't even write us back about a certain order for like a week or something like that, you know, like, and then we call and they don't answer

phone calls and stuff. And that's crazy stuff that happens, weird stuff, you know? Yeah, it's, I mean, they... Yeah, every supplier is different. I guess it depends. Yeah, really. It's so different. Because some of them are really spot on, really there to work.

And then some of them are not. And then some of them are in the middle. And it really runs the whole game. Like the bigger ones, I feel like, if their teams aren't as dedicated as the owners are, usually the people at the customer support level, they have to be just as dedicated to the business as the owners are, or else it just doesn't work very well. I try to maintain a relationship with the person who manages the resellers. Yeah, the general manager. Yeah, the general manager.

So whoever I got onboarded with originally, I like to maintain that relationship as much as I can. You know, as I maintain that relationship well, then if there's an issue, I can always follow up with them. Hey, and they'll tell you. Can you check this out? Yeah. Yeah, and they'll tell you at least what's going on. The item's not here. It's on pre-order. And since they like you, they'll take care of you. Exactly.

Just do them a favor, you know? Yeah. And then another thing is I'm always renegotiating for a higher margin, right? So part of my relationship building with the manufacturer, with whoever handles it, whoever their title is, whoever handles the reseller accounts, I'm always asking them, okay, what is the next number to get more margin? So I want five more percent. I want 10 more percent. So if I have a higher percentage, how much volume do I need to do in order to

justify that percentage? And so it'll give you a tier. Oh, you have to do this much. right? And you have a goal to work towards. And then you're always like in the negotiation process for a higher margin. You know what I mean? And you tell them, look, the more margin you give me, the more I can give to advertising, right? So the goal is to get more sales based on how much saving on the margin for the product, right? So that's a high-end negotiation, Tiff.

That's a good idea. Yeah, yeah. You just talk about how much you've been selling, you know?

Like, hey, we sold this much in this time frame like why don't we make our partnership a little bit like you know or what would be the next step to get there yeah and they'll tell you what's the milestone yeah exactly so then when you hit the milestone you go back and you say okay yeah or if the milestone is unacceptable you say we can renegotiate the milestone and some suppliers have that set up before you even get the account like you sell 10 units you're

at silver pricing you sell 100 units you're at gold pricing right that kind of thing exactly and then it's like a 10 additional margin or something like that that's major because sometimes we're talking about 10 margins on some product categories yeah that's like more free gifts you can offer more maybe coupons that kind of thing more money in your pockets and then or that too obviously even if you have free gifts and coupons in your site not everybody wants them like some

people don't even check the box to get the free gift or they use the coupon they just buy and they're that's all and they don't care you know yeah i mean you have all different types of shoppers right you want to go after people who have a high disposable income right so not your, hey nickel and diamond you want the guy who's like hey I might want a sauna. Let me just buy one. And you can do that, by the way, in Google Ads.

There is a way you can actually target those specific audiences of people with high net worth and bid higher on that. Yeah. So I figured that out. I don't know how accurate it is. You never really know with Google. But I guess Google knows through some way that the person has more money, right? You're talking about audiences, right? Yeah. It's in audiences. Yeah. Google Ads audiences. Audience is interesting because it's all individual verticals. They don't combine. Right. Right?

So it's very interesting. So it just means they're highlighting.

So is it better to like max out audiences or is better to not max out audiences? Do you know what I'm saying? Because you can potentially say, I want to be targeted for these 10 to 15 different categories and audiences, right? Or you can just say, give me everything. I want to hit every vertical. And if it's all individual, does it make a difference? Are you talking about like optimization or are you talking about like just setting a separate campaign for a particular audience?

I'm saying putting the audience in the high, medium priority campaign. Okay. So when you do that, all you're going to be doing is telling Google, hey, bid a little bit higher if the person is actually in this audience and is shopping for my product. Right. But what if you don't have enhanced CPC on? So you have a strict bid. It doesn't matter. You're still going to give it a bid adjustment. No, you don't have to give a bid adjustment when you do that. No, that's how it works.

What if you add the audience with no bid adjustment? Well, nothing happens. Yeah. There's two settings you can use with audiences. There's one setting where it only targets that audience. The other setting is where it can target the audience. Right. And it'll tell you the data when someone clicks your ad is from an audience. But then you can also set a bid adjustment up or down on that particular audience. Right, but you can just set zero.

But then it will funnel some of the traffic towards that vertical. No, all it's going to do is bid higher if somebody happens to be also in that audience. Really? Yeah. Are you sure? I thought by adding an audience, it also gave some incentive just by having the audience there, even with no bid adjustment. No. Really? No benefit whatsoever? Yeah, there's two different settings.

Interesting. One option is like with a basic retargeting display ad, you have it so that it's only set to target the people that have gone to your website, right? Yeah, of course. Like you wouldn't want to target random people with that. Yeah, that's a typical retargeting. Now, the other way to do it, use audiences, is to give it the option to use it. So it's like you don't have to just target. You can target anybody. But if they happen to have been in this audience as well, show me that data.

And then you can give it a bid adjustment and say, hey, bid 10, 20, 30% more if the person's got a high net worth. So you can do that. That's one of the tricky parts of running the ad account is when you combine those bid adjustments and you have enhanced CPC on. I don't think they do enhanced anymore. They took that feature off. Did they do? Really? It's just all manual CPC? Yeah. Now they have like target ROAS and like, Whatever it is, there's like automated stuff now. Oh, but that's through,

that's not like, you should not use that. Yeah, I just use manual CPC. Yeah, that's their like automated campaign where like it shoots ads out everywhere. Sure. Yeah, you know, Pmax is not meant to be used by itself. It's meant to be used as like something beyond what your foundational ads are based on to get you further reach. Okay, so I heard this. I heard that if you run Pmax on the same account as your medium, as your priority, the Pmax will take priority and take all the traffic.

Yeah, it might. Yeah, that's the problem. So the way it's supposed to be run is that you set the other campaigns to high priority. And does PMX let you set priorities? Probably not, right? No. Yeah, see, that's a problem. I think it destroys the whole account. Yeah. I think you have to maintain the high, medium, low priority. Yeah. And maybe do a new account, maybe, with PMX or something. I don't think, yeah, you wouldn't be able to do a new account.

Yeah, I don't think it's even worth doing. Yeah. They're just going to set crazy bids. Their algorithm doesn't seem to really know. No, it's like it's a learning thing. So they say like it goes to learning phases but still really what it's for is for beginners that have no idea what they're doing. It's a black box. Yeah, what you should do instead is learn how to do this properly, right? You can't optimize it. So even if you get some early results you just suck, you just flatline.

It doesn't tell you, the thing I hate about PMAX is that it doesn't tell you the search terms people type in. So you have no idea if your ads are running for the right search terms. It doesn't tell you anything. Yeah, it hardly tells you anything. You don't even know, you can't, I mean the stuff that we're doing, you're granular.

You're changing the skew level yeah you know the product level what you want to make the bid on not like oh just use my whole account and just show whatever you want for any price you think is okay yeah exactly you know it's like the whole concept is crazy i i think some people have success with pmax just because like it's they already have such a good site setup and everything and like really good suppliers and all that and then

pmax just already kind of like can see that and they just can't scale it that's the problem right because i i the one of the the clients i was I was telling you before, right? That was one of their problems. They started running those ads and then it went. Like decreased or maybe increased a little bit, but then it flatlined for like four months and then it started going down. And then we took that off and then re-implicated the proper campaign and they hit over a million. Is that guy right?

That's what we're talking about. Yeah, yeah, okay. So it's like, you know, like that PMAX, it hits a certain point, diminishing returns and then it just drops off. Yep. So it's not even worth it. Yep. You know? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Maybe in other models, maybe affiliate marketing is great. Maybe, you know, I don't know. I've never been in that industry, so I don't know. So when it comes to this

stuff, it's not really... Yeah. The PMAX, I think, is mostly for really small businesses that are just starting out, maybe like a direct-to-consumer brand. Sure. No idea what they're doing. Let's just show some shopping ads. And usually, it's going to be targeted towards generic traffic because it's their own brand. Right. Right. So it's not going to really matter. Now, when we do Dropshipping, we're selling multiple brands, and we want to really target those branded search

terms, those model-skew search terms. Those are the bread and butter.

That's the low-hanging fruit. so but if you don't do that if you're targeting generic search terms for like a five thousand dollar product like who's gonna buy a five thousand dollar you know range you know kitchen range off a generic keyword probably it's very few people so you shouldn't really be putting a lot of ad spend there especially in the beginning yeah it's interesting but also keep in mind that every market is different do you know what i mean yeah

totally and price points too by the way yeah if you're selling like a three hundred dollar product or something like yeah generic keywords might convert great and i had success like a five hundred dollar product like we got tons of sales over the holiday season with the generic keyword for a $500 product. But yeah, it happens. It's just, it's like. You gotta know your market. Yeah, exactly. That dials into like the passion, right? You have to be interested in the market.

And I think there was more factors too. Like we were one of the only dealers of that particular brand and we were offering free gifts and the brand wasn't. Sure. Like that's one of the cool ways we can stand out besides like from Amazon and stuff, you know, is Amazon never offers free gifts, right? Well, I mean, it's hard to say, man, because Amazon sometimes is cheaper. Right? So you have to compete with that. Well, if there's map pricing, usually not, but sometimes still, yeah.

Yeah sometimes it seems like it's sometimes a little bit cheaper yeah but when you run the products on google shopping there's a market of people there who are searching for products right and then sometimes you're the only guy on there selling that product category like electric saws yeah who's ever thought to sell an electric saw before do you know what i mean or like power depot i'm sure yeah exactly home depot or you know the power saws or the drills and all that sort of

right like that's a market people sell those right and so it's just you set up a store and you just run the it's i don't know man if anyone's on the fence about starting a store or not starting a store like oh is it hard not hard it's like it it just takes uh 30 minutes to get started it really doesn't take that much effort anywhere especially with ai with chat gbt you know chat gbt will write out all your pages it'll write all like you can put content all across your site that's totally

optimized just copy the manufacturer's content i mean yeah but now with chat gbt you can you can give that content to Javity and have it rewrite it and tell it, hey, optimize it for these keywords and stuff like that. And you can have these really well laid out copyright, perfect descriptions. Put the proofread it a little bit there. Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah, true. No, no, you do have to though. It can tell like hallucinations, you know, about the product and stuff. Yeah, yeah.

So you need to be careful. Yeah, no. And you have to take responsibility. I feel like if you just copy and paste, the responsibility is on the manufacturer. You do need to check it and edit it. Yeah, if you don't, you're taking a big risk for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can know what you're doing. In the beginning, I would just say copy manufacturers.

It's probably the same you know if they have good decent product descriptions i've had manufacturers have no product descriptions just like a list of specifications yeah blue one yeah uh 32 by 24 by 73 yeah exactly okay yeah and that's fine too then you can make your own that's what i was doing yeah i would just make my own yeah which is cool because it does make you stand out also like in the in the you know ads and in the organics a lot of manufacturers are not marketing experts.

Yeah, they're product element experts. I mean, they're developing, they're importing. Exactly. They warehouse it, they fulfill it. So they need us as dealers to help them to sell their products, you know? Totally, it is the whole point. I mean, if you ever have a supplier that comes at you and says, hey, we don't really find the value in our partnership, you should definitely already know the value in being a dropshipper. Like you're taking on all the risk. You're accepting the payment.

You know, the customer can file a chargeback. And if that brand themselves took the payment, then they would have to deal with that and there's a whole customer service department and all this crazy stuff they got to deal with and so they're taking a lot of risk off their plate from like fraud from chargebacks friendly friendly fraud you know product damage they're still going to help out with that but at least you're the one that gets the nasty call ah what the

heck my product's damaged you know crazy customers and stuff sure but you just ask them do you want more sales no yeah bottom line the good suppliers should already know if they don't then it's like, well, okay, they're probably being a bit greedy and they want more control and more market share, whatever. They don't want to give you the 20, 30% margin, but they want to keep it themselves. You know, like a lot of brands are like that. Yeah. But that's like a logical fallacy.

That's like, you know what I'm saying? Cause like, if you want to get more revenue, then you need to open up the market and you have to allow people to do business. A hundred percent. Right. So like it's, you just have to have vendors who are give you that freedom. You can't like... You have to fire them if they suck. Do you know what I'm saying? Like if they're not doing well and you're working with a supplier, because what you find is 80-20 rule. It's across everything.

So like 20% of your suppliers provide 80% of your revenue, right? So just fire the bottom 10%. Do it every month just for fun. Right. Just because you can, just fire those sales from this supplier, I want to just get rid of them. Yeah. I mean, if you spend ads on a particular supplier and they don't get sales. What's the point of keeping them? Right. And you've already fully optimized. You check your competitors and there's, for whatever reason, you're not selling them.

Like, there must be some other reason. And you could spend hours and hours researching one product category to find a way to sell that thing or you can just be, okay, next. Do you know what I'm saying? So, it depends upon what kind of business model you want to create, man, you know? Well, I think the really successful e-commerce people, they don't just stay with dropshipping but they end up building their own brands, you know?

Like, like, let's just take the sauna thing for example like you have a sauna store and you're selling saunas and you're doing a ton of money or whatever but you don't actually own the brand so it's like anybody can start a sauna store get the same suppliers and compete with you it's a low it's not much of a moat but if you build a brand of your own saunas or maybe you know a sauna accessory or something like white label yeah white label yeah your own suppliers

might even be able to do that for you you know some suppliers they'll like sure they'll get the generic product imported from china and just slap your brand on it yep or whatever maybe just put a sticker in the package or something and then, you know, that kind of thing. One of the suppliers that I know that was one of their big business model. Yeah. Private label. Yeah, private label, yeah. So if you can do that, you're home free. Usually it takes a bit of upfront investment.

That's the one thing that people are afraid of, I think. You know, like it costs 5, 10, 20, 30,000 to start because you got to invest in the branding. You got to get the branding done first, right? You got to get the packaging. Like all the special things about your brand ready. I mean, it's a whole separate business. Well, I wonder if you could just have the same SKU and just retitle it.

Okay. So like if you take the example of what grocery stores do, like they always have like the top name brand product and they have like their grocery store brand. Right. And it's like cheaper. You know what I mean? But people will buy the cheaper product just because obviously it's cheaper, but it's kind of the same thing. It's not as good, but they know it's still decently good, and they're going to save some money. So that's kind of what we should model.

It's like what people do really well with in the private labeling world. It's like you have a store, and you have the top main brand, and you put your private label brand next to it. Sure, sure. And it's a little bit less expensive, still decent quality. Of course, it's going to do well. Starbucks model. Yeah. Cannibalism a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, right. Oh, interesting. And that same top brand is probably the one doing the private labeling. Yeah. It's likely.

That's interesting. Yeah. That's interesting. I mean, you can find your own supplier in Alibaba, but that's going to be a whole nother thing because you still need warehousing and fulfillment in the US.

You still need to import it. Yeah, but you can do all that branding stuff as intellectual property. So you can do it really, really cheap. Of course, fiber. I always use fiber. Yeah, so you don't even have to. It's super easy. So I don't think the upfront costs me that much unless they force you to buy a certain amount of inventory. That's the thing, usually. Yeah, it's the inventory.

But if this is- if you're doing revenue with them I bet they'll do it for free if the supplier already is importing the products right yeah then they'll probably be willing to import like a whole container just for your particular private label brand warehouse it and ship it out you know they'll do the warehousing for you a free licensing deal too yeah that's true there's other yeah that's super true though yeah interesting yeah I mean that's definitely the way to go I mean it takes more

investment but I think the long run I'd like to see if you can avoid that investment there might be a way to get that investment there probably is yeah for sure working with the suppliers I'm sure there's probably something that they'll do where it's like print on demand style you know where it's like they have the generic products in their warehouse and all they got to do is slap your label and then ship it out when you sell i had one where they had the schematics.

They give you the schematics and then you can take the schematics to where you want and they can rebuild it for you. You know what I'm saying? They'll give you like, but they don't always do that. But sometimes they'll like, they discontinued a really top selling product. And I asked them for the entire blueprint to make the product. So they gave me like all of the instructions for how to make that product.

So I could take it to another company and have them make the exact same product because I have the dimensions, all the measurements, all that kind of stuff.

So, I mean, there's really interesting things you can do but for me it all comes down to that passion you got to be interested in like you know what you're doing you're interested in like the deeper you go for sure yeah because when you start getting nuanced and really these details it's like you got to be like at least having fun because if you're doing something that's not fun then it's like it's not it's not fun by definition you know so

yeah it's actually something you're really interested in so if you know if you have experience in it that's great so if you if you're not that passionate but you're making money with it and you're just really good at it like why would you go deeper into it just just chill do the drop shipping and maybe even just exit like have a nice exit and get into something you're more passionate about you know what i mean like just like rinse and repeat i mean if you're really good at business

you don't necessarily need to be passionate about the products you sell and then all you got to do is just like build scale exit build scale exit build sale exit or you or you can buy scale exit you know flipping that's easy because you're adding in value. Yeah. In this case, you're not even like creating the demand for the product. That's like the major advantage.

Like that's a huge advantage, right? If you're selling an affiliate offer and then let's just put it because this is the affiliate world, right? So if you're putting, if you're selling an affiliate offer and the offer is for a company that's never been heard of. Or if you're selling an affiliate offer for the United States, I don't know, let's say Verizon, right? Or some major company, right?

Then the major company's offer by nature is going to sell better than the one for the company no one's ever heard of, right? So you get to literally start day one with high authority brands, right? There's one other market. Can you just get the guy on the phone? Hey, I'm going to work with you. All right, cool. Awesome. On board the products. and you already have all the authority. You just skip that entire step of product development. If you start an agency.

You got to build up your entire brand. Oh yeah. You have to build up every single client. You need to get like a whole case study, you know what I mean? And like show the proof concept, all that stuff. So you literally skip that entire step and go straight to just making money. Yeah. I mean, there's no other model that I've seen that allows that. Yeah, affiliate marketing, but yeah, exactly. It's the same, same.

Dropshipping is just like the e-commerce version of affiliate marketing you know the only difference is instead of sending referring a customer to them you're taking the customer you're you're getting the customer and then you know you you're working with them for fulfillment right and then it's a real business because you have at least some ownership and a lot of people start with affiliate marketing they move to drop shipping and then

a lot of people start with drop shipping and they like expand into affiliate marketing like like both business models work well together if you have a drop ship store you can do affiliate marketing like you know after the sale you can have like a whole thing hey like you can go on vacation blah blah yeah insurance or insurance insurance shipping insurance i mean there's so many things you can sell yeah and then maybe just even accessories

like if you don't want to drop ship the accessories you can just refer them to amazon to buy them yeah or warranty you can you can pitch it through email marketing through blogging just through like a funnel white glove delivery yeah and there's so many upsells in the back end yeah totally yeah it's really incredible, it's a no-brainer it's just.

There's so many different ways to take it. And it depends how big do you want to make it? I mean, that's really what it boils down to. It's like, do you want to build a $5 million a year business? Do you want to build, you know, 300,000? Where is your benchmark? You know, and that's really what it boils down to. Because you can go as big as you want.

You can build high. You can build long. I mean, having a ton of revenue is awesome because you can take advantage of the credit card points and stuff like that. But also it becomes crazy complex to deal with like all the finances, all the organization, the bookkeeping, the keeping track of orders and stuff. You need a bigger team, you know, like it gets down to it. Like all of a sudden you're past $100,000, $200,000, $300,000.

That means every order you get is probably like average order value between $1,000 and $2,000 and $1,500 usually on average. So that means you're getting, you know, 20 orders a month. You're doing, you know, already, what is that? You know, $60,000 in sales or something like that, right? Sure, sure, sure. So you start getting to $100, 100 orders a month, you know, and now you're doing like a crazy amount of orders.

The emails are nuts. Yeah. I mean, if you have like one product that's charged back, that's like pushed back for delivery, it's out of stock. You know, there's so many technical details that need to be managed. So how do you manage your templates, your customer service? How do you manage your supplier relations? You know, is your company operating as a well-oiled machine? Do you know what's, what's available? What's not available? These are all questions.

And as you scale up, what I've found is that the infrastructure required to make that system work becomes more expensive than the margin you get on that high revenue. Right. You know? Yeah. So I felt, you know, that is, or here's an interesting perspective as well. Just work in markets that have high margins, right? Furniture or super expensive products that no one ever thought about. Like, what about, I have an idea. I don't want to share it, but I got one that I'll share to you offline.

Zach showed me one the other day that really blew my mind. What was it? Some kind of like an oxygen therapy tank or something like that. Yeah, those are good. Yeah, those are good. Like $10,000 a piece. Yeah, yeah. He showed me one of his clients was selling a ton of them. Or hyperbaric chambers, that's what they're called. That's a whole model. I was like, whoa. That's a big business. I didn't even know those things existed, but yeah.

Ice plunges, coal, all that stuff. Or that stuff. Yeah, exactly. Yep, yep. But so it's like really, really niche markets with really like specific type of product. You're not going to find it at Walmart. You're not going to find it like a Home Depot. I mean, you might, but like you're going to probably have a whole list of brands they don't have, you know? So that's the kind of ideal thing is like when people can't find those brands in other places, they're going to come to your store.

And if you can talk to the supplier and become like one of their main dealers, points of contact, they're going to refer you leads probably because they would rather you have deal with the customers and they just do the fulfillment and it makes their life way easier because they're doing all the other stuff in the back end and they'll let you do that. Some of the best suppliers I had, those kinds of partnerships. Sure, sure, sure.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's easy to get suppliers, really. I mean, it's not hard. Once you onboard them, do you know what I mean? And then it's not hard to work with them either. They're generally pretty easygoing. It's like two guys working on a team for the same result. They want to process the order. You want to process the order. The customer wants to be satisfied. If there's a problem, they'll generally help as long as you're a reasonable guy and not a crazy dude.

Other than that, it'll work with you. And so you just maintain the relationship. But you want good margins on products so you have at least a reason to do business. What if you're doing... 5%, 10% margins. Yeah, it's like, what am I doing? The stock market has better returns. It's like working a job and getting paid peanuts. You're not going to work there too long. Get it quick and find a better job. 6%, right? If you put in a 401k, 6% is annual.

So you might as well put that money in a 401k rather than we're on a business it's five percent ten percent right you're playing in bitcoin bro that goes way better yeah for sure i mean people here's a little little side note about crypto is people here's a little little known fact people look at the highs right the high high high but look at the lows the lows tell a much more interesting story that every year over year it's never

gone down the low has never gone down So the low has gotten higher as the high has gotten higher. Yeah. So the low of the COVID 15, 17,000 was the high of the previous having. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. So if you look at the low, then that's a better indicator of the value of crypto. And it's clearly only increasing. So it's like, you might, if you're going to get involved in crypto, buy it now and hold it for 10 years.

Yeah. You just kind of like dollar cost average over time or just, just wait till the lows, wait, wait till this crazies. And usually you can just follow the halving schedule. And like when the halving happens for the next year or so, you know, it usually goes crazy high and then it will come right back down. And then somewhere like around two years after the halving, it's like at its lowest point. And then the two years following, it's going to come right back up again and go crazy.

Yeah. It's been happening the last four halving cycles. which is, you know, 16 years or whatever already. And it's probably going to continue to happen like that. Yeah, exactly. It's just kind of baked into it. It's like, that's what they coded. That's what they built, you know? Exactly right. Exactly right. And with the way things are going too, with the dollar, the US dollar devaluing and the Fed printing tons of money, you know, like there, of course we need

another reserve asset. Gold is not enough anymore. Let's see. I heard something about this might get flagged quantum. That's the new thing. There's a man, this is like deep state.

So I don't know if it's real or not, but there's like a quantum computing they're gonna have a new system called quantum it'll be a new financial system okay so it'll be kind of like you know chinese social credit score kind of in a way you know but it's like a base on quantum computing so it's supposed to be a much more evolved system but it's another you know peonage feudal lord yeah type common i'm not gonna get into

it but it's like the same type of system is the point right but with crypto in my case i do a lot of trading more than investing right but the the thing about crypto is the price or bitcoin specifically is the price will always go up and the price will always go down yeah, so you can be it's a lot more volatile if it's gonna go up it's gonna go down if it's down it's gonna go up that's what's gonna happen just don't get caught buying

at the top and holding it till the bottom and selling it you know that's the worst it's kind of gambling right because it's like who knows who knows you can say you're predictors you can be a good gambler and you can be a bad gambler it's all about being a good gambler you know you just gotta know the odds you gotta play the game right you gotta only take good odds you know, Right? So fold or all in. Fold or all in. It's all about timing, baby. It's all about timing. You know?

Yeah, that's right. And you know, with trading too, like there's a lot of emotions involved, man. Like you can't escape your emotions. Like when you buy something and it goes up, it feels great, but then it goes back down. You're like, oh, you know? Like you just lost like something so precious to you. It's like your own ego, you know? It gets destroyed. So, I mean, you have to learn these lessons. Like trading and markets,

they work based on supply and demand, you know? It's like the prices move based on who's willing to buy it, who's willing to sell it, who's trying to sell it. You know what I mean? Like ceilings and floors, that kind of stuff. Sure, sure. It's basic economics. But if you can just understand where to pinpoint supply zones and buy at that point and where to pinpoint demand zones and sell at that point, you'll do pretty well. That's more than I do. That's like candlesticks. Yeah, yeah,

yeah. Candlesticks. Candlesticks charts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. See, I just buy and then I resell like a commodity.

Right so just like if it was bitcoin was a chair or whatever so i just buy it at a discount and then sell it yeah so you're doing you're doing like arbitrage yeah arbitrage right crypto exactly it's kind of like dropshipping in a sense yeah exactly yeah but there's no product that's the cool part you're dropshipping digital products yeah so there's no follow-up customer support because it's just done

now how what's your average order value uh very wildly based on currency Like highest and lowest. Well, I restrict most transactions on like 300 bucks. So the top is 300. But that's depending on the payment method. That's a more of a high risk method. You have the methods are classified high risk, low risk, right? So like a bank transfer might be low risk, but PayPal might be high risk. Right. So there's limits on PayPal versus bank transfers.

So the money moving around in different ways changes this. That's a payment method. Okay. Right. So each payment method is actually a market. It has its own liquidity, depending on the currency, where it's being traded, right? So you can consider each payment method its own market. Now, do you have to own the crypto before you start doing this? Or do you actually just, you're the middleman? You got to own it. Okay. You got to own it because it's in escrow.

So they open up a trade and it's in escrow and you finalize details of the trade and then you release the escrow when it's done. So then there is, you know, like a trust on both sides. Sure.

So, all right, guys, I hope you really enjoyed that podcast. Unfortunately, the podcast got cut off almost halfway through. We had a much longer conversation beyond just what we talked about, but that's okay. We're going to do part two later and also have a lot more conversations about various other topics that Ryan's really interested in diving into. He's a really cool guy, really engaging guy. Make sure that you follow him on

his YouTube channel and his LinkedIn profile. Both are linked below in the description. And also definitely subscribe to my YouTube channel and comment below what you're interested in and what questions you have about high ticket dropshipping or any of the other topics we discussed in the podcast. Thanks so much, guys. Music.