CJ Dropshipping had a video call with Kamil Sattar, who is also known as the Ecom King. Kamil is not only a super successful Ecom business runner, but he is also an Ecom business tutor, he has a company and courses mentoring people how to run business and make money according to his personal experience and a huge amount of knowledge of marketing. We discussed 11 questions that dropshipping beginners mostly concerned about.

 

 

D: Demi, Youtuber from CJ Dropshipping

K: Kamil Sattar

 

Interview Content

 

D: Hey guys, welcome to our channel, I'm Demi from CJ Dropshipping. It's a great pleasure to have Kamil Satar who is also known as the Ecom King to be the guest of today's video. Kamil is not only a super successful Ecom business runner, but he is also an Ecom business tutor, he has a company and courses mentoring people how to run business and make money according to his personal experience and a huge amount of knowledge of marketing. We are very lucky guys, because will have a great lesson from Kamil about dropshipping today, and totally for free, so pen and paper ready? Let's jump into the interview.

 

D: Hi Kamil

 

K: Hey Demi how are you?

 

D: Good, how are you doing? 

 

K: I'm all good, thank you.

 

D: I'm so excited to have you here with us today as our guest to talk about the most concerned questions about dropshipping for beginners. I think many of our audiences know you better than knowing us, for you are very popular among eCom business runners, as you are running a YouTube channel that with almost 100k subscribers, and I just checked, it's 99.5K.

 

K: About 99.7k, at the end of the day, it should be 100k.

 

 

D: I know you got a rapid increase these months right? Really impressive, because I know that from the beginning of this year, the number was just 40k, right?

 

K: Yes, when I started this year, it was around 20k. So in Feb. I hit 20k subscribers. And then ever since from April, things went crazy when I released a free course, I released a free course on YouTube, after that, my channel just grew very fast.

 

D: And what surprised me most is not that you built up such a big eCom group because there was not only one person who succeeded in eCom business. What really surprised me is that you are only 21 years old now right, and you even had made 1M $ in revenue when you were 19 years old, and you even didn't finish your college, that sounds a Bill Gates story. Could you share more about it with us?

 

K: Yes, so backing to 2017, I started a dropshipping. And prior dropshipping from 2015 to 2017, I did buying and reselling. And when I did start dropshipping in 2017, I found my first decent product that did around $25k in revenue, and then in 2019 to 2000 and, sorry 2018 to 2019, in quarter 4 the best time of the year, we were able to do $1M in revenue. And like I said I quit college in 2015 2016. I was around 15 years old when I started everything. So it was a very young start and a very great start.

 

D: Super cool, for those who want to know more about Kamil, I will post his website and YouTube channel link below on the description, you can find high-quality videos there and learn free Shopify dropshipping courses and practical tips for beginners. Ok, now back to the interview. Kamil, I remember that get 100k subscribers for your channel was the target you set late last year, and now you have realized it, so what's your next plan? Do you have a new movement under the current circumstance when the influences of pandemic linger globally? 

 

K: Yeah I think my future plans now are to basically build a couple of branded stores, we'll focus on me and my partner on a lingerie business underwear business, so I want to try and take that as big as we can globally, also do some private labeling for a few stores that we've got in the tech industry and the gaming industry, and I also want to try and just become a public figure in the whole of dropshipping eCommerce space, and I wanted to try and help people learn the industry to the best standard possible, all for free on my YouTube channel as well, and they're the plans of my future.

 

D: Yeah, impressive points. Hope everything goes well with your business, and we all have a promising Q4. The following questions are the most common questions put up by dropshipping beginners. The first question is about What type of store do you recommend for dropshipping beginners? Generally speaking, there are 3 types of dropshipping stores: General store, one product store, and niche store, which one you think is better to begin with?

 

 

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K: So to begin with, if we talk about the months that we've got in the year so from January till September if you've got less than three hours to do drop shipping a day then I'd say a general store, so again to repeat that from January to September, if you have less than three hours a day to do this, then do a general store. Now from January to September again, but you've got more than three hours, let's say you've got five hours a day, one product store. Now the reason why I say do a general store if you've got less than three hours is that building a store adding products can take a long time so if you have a general store and you've got lots of products on there, at least you don't have to keep adding more to it and then it takes lots of time. Now the reason why I recommend a one-product store if you've got more than three hours from January to September is that one-product stores look more branded. They look more professional they're easier to maintain, they're easier to scale and the conversion rate typically is a lot higher on them and I just think. If you've got that time you should really be going down that route because that is the way forward in 2021 and 2020.

Now from September to December, you want to be doing a general store because Q4 is the best time of the year for e-commerce and the reason why you want to do a general store during Q4 is that you've got things like Cyber Monday Black Friday Christmas Halloween  and you want to be able to sell anything on that store that basically accounts to any of those topics and then once you find a really good product a successful product, then you move it from a general store into a one product store, you build a brand around it and you can do that with CJ Dropshipping, you can buy the products in bulk from CJ and then you can private label it as well and that's what I'd recommend you do.

 

D: Yes very impressive insights. Now there are many eCom platforms to set up online stores and like Shopify, WooCommerce eBay, and Amazon and the like, and which platform to recommend?

 

K: Yeah so you've got eBay Amazon and Shopify now, it really just depends now. EBay and Amazon, I would say have a higher barrier to entry to do eBay and Amazon, you need to buy a lot of the stock in bulk, um with eBay you can you don't have to but especially with Amazon, you have to buy a lot of the stock in bulk, and send it to Amazon and that can cost you a couple of thousand dollars. So do bear that in mind, for eBay the profit margins are very very small, you're looking at between uh two to ten percent in profit which isn't amazing especially the time that you're going to be doing. Again with Amazon, the profit margins are small as well and you have to put a lot of money up front to buy the stock. Then with Amazon, you don't have control and with eBay, you don't have control, it's down to Amazon and eBay to what they can do. You're limited to design, like your design will look the same as everybody else's that use eBay and Amazon, so you're very restricted to what you can do. With Shopify, the profit margins are a lot higher, you're looking at between 15 and 45 if you do it properly. And also you have full control over your website. You can change the way it looks, you can add things to it, you can do what you want. And again you've got higher profit margins. Now the only downside to doing Shopify dropshipping is you have to do the marketing yourself, so you have to pay for Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Instagram influencers. With eBay and Amazon, they have already the traffic for you, you just have to list the product. So with Shopify, although you're making more money, you have to do more to make that money.

 

D: So the Shopify is currently the best choice for dropshippers right? So the most important part to run the Shopify store is running ads. So you know but running ads is important, and usually the only way to draw traffic to Shopify dropshipping store. But as the price for Facebook Ads goes higher and higher, do you think Facebook Ads still a good choice and do you have any other recommendations like, uh you know that Tik Tok is very popular now among young people these days, and do you think Tik Tok is a good alternative?

 

K: I think with the Facebook Ad scenario is going to get a lot more competitive, because it is the best platform to scale, so when it comes to scaling a product to a million dollars in one month for, let's say a couple hundred thousand dollars in one month, Facebook is the best. Now if you're gonna go down the Facebook group you're gonna need a decent budget a big budget because eventually, you'll get into something that we call manual bidding. Manual bidding is where you make the bids instead of Facebook and that is very very expensive and you need a lot of data. So I don't want to go too much into that but that's how Facebook works at the moment. Now in terms of alternatives like Tik Tok, Tik Tok is amazing, I've personally never run any Tik Tok ads but I have worked with Tk Tok influencers and they were very very good on the ROI. Now Tik Tok is more for the younger age, you're looking at demographics under the age of 25, it can sometimes go up to 30. So if your product suits a demographic under the age of 25, then it could be a good option. Other alternatives to Facebook that are very very good that I've used are YouTube ads, Instagram influencers, Twitter influencers, and Google ads they are some great alternatives to Facebook. If you want something a little bit less competitive but saying that google ads are quite competitive as well, and if not they may be more competitive than Facebook.

 

D: How do you think about YouTube ads?

 

K: YouTube ads are amazing. YouTube ads are basically through Google but they're a separate platform. YouTube ads are very unsaturated, not many dropshippers are using YouTube ads and the ROI that I and other people in the industry like Ricky Hayes are getting some very good numbers. Now YouTube ads are not that easy to use because the google dashboard's very different to Facebook, but if you give it enough time to learn, then I would say YouTube can be better than Facebook when you test the product and you're doing some low scaling.

 

D: Yeah definitely, that is because more and more people now spend more time watching videos right?

 

K: Yeah especially with the pandemic that we're in especially with the pandemic that we're in everybody's watching YouTube videos. So why would you miss out on that massive like group of people that are now at home not working or working from home and they're watching loads of videos on YouTube you know.

 

D: Yes indeed so influencer marketing is trending and as people spend more time watching videos, YouTube ads is also a good choice and just choose a proper channel according to your product right? Yes, and someone if he has a decent budget and Facebook as is still a good choice right to test products and then there comes a question: “As we know that most of the budgets are spent on ads and others on building a store and a little on paying for a domain name and so how many budgets do you think is a minimum amount to begin with and this is a very important question from beginners?

 

K: Yes so I would say the bare minimum is around about a thousand dollars, you can go to 500 but it can be really really hard, so I would say anything above like a thousand to like 3000 is a very good starting point. And you've got to remember dropshipping is a real business, it's not some crazy little thing it's a real business model so it requires a real business cash flow, so you're looking at between a thousand and three thousand dollars if you want any decent um traction to get going with three thousand dollars.

 

 

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D: Is the budget going up as the more competitors going in?

 

K: I wouldn't say there's a bit of truth to obviously with the more comp the more competition the more the ad spend goes up because of the competition but it's not just that but it's about people that are shopping online now, you're getting so many people that are shopping online, and to really make a significant about amount of income from it like to make good money from e-commerce, you need a decent amount of money to put in from the get-go like. If you want to put in like 500, you're going to make a few sales here and there. It's not going to be money that can change your life, make you go part-time or full-time, it's not going to do that. So if you want to make money you should put my own money first, and yeah if you want to go down the route of making this your full-time living quicker than yes of course yes.

 

D: Indeed, very valuable opinions. But many people, many young people you know like students who have a lot of spare time but don't have much money to run ads, so apart from running ads are there any other ways that really worth our efforts to spend time to increase sales?

 

K: Yeah so what they can do if you've got no money or you're on a very low budget then you need to be messaging influencers on Instagram, Tik Tok, Twitter, you need to be saying, look let's do an affiliate based uh partnership where you offer them 40% of the commission on each sale. And then what you need to do is you need to be messaging between 100 to 200 people a day and there's software's you can use to do this, and you just want to be basically saying to influencers, look let's collaborate let's go 40, 50% on the commission and maybe every five sales I'll give you a free product or something like that, and you need to make sure that the influencers that you're working with have under a hundred thousand followers or it's not going to work.

 

D: Yeah they're that are smart ways so I actually we are also working on these channels to draw traffic, and they do really work. Now let's move to the next question, it's about branding. Branding is a good way to add additional values to the products and build a sustainable business, so do you recommend newbies to try branding their dropshipping business at the beginning?

 

K: So what I would say is, I don't recommend branding the products the packaging straight away but I definitely recommend going down a branded route meaning. I made a video about this where you can take a product from Aliexpress or wherever you get it from and you can build a one-product store around it, you can name your website the domain name after the product, you can build the website where it looks like you're the person that owns that product but it's not actually branded it just makes it look like you come across as a brand so it's important as a beginner that that's why I say do the one product store because you've got more of a chance of making it look like a branded store because let's say you take a waist trainer and you put it on your website and you call your website waist trainer or something like that it looks nice and branded. You make the website just about that product it makes it look more like a brand and then once you're starting to get 100 to 300 orders a week, then you can start to buy and bulk private inventory, label the product do the packaging. But to start I don't recommend it because it's way too expensive.

 

D: Yes so branding is a step after you found a winning product which has steady sales for a period of time, it is not wise to brand if you are not sure about the product you pick will be the winning product. Let's move to the next question. As most of the dropshipping products are provided by Chinese suppliers right uh more than 90% right so um so many dropshippers are selling the same hot products so there would be a problem that their product photos and videos are all the same, do you think it's worth to pay for exclusive images or videos like hire photographers to take pictures of your products to distinguish your products from other competitors to increase your transaction rate?

 

K: Yeah so something that I'd recommend straight from the get-go is nine times out of ten you can order the same product on Amazon and get it the next day. So I would recommend that you order the product that you're selling off Amazon to your house you'll get it the day after all the day after that, then use your smartphone and take some photos of it. We've all got good smartphones nowadays, take some photos take some unique videos, spend a couple of days doing it. There's free software where you can edit the videos and the photos to make them look really nice. If you can't do that's the that's probably the easiest way to get unique content. If you can't do that then go on to websites like professional video ads, and get a 3d 2d animated video made that way it's animated to look like your product, and that way, it's your content copyright free. Something else that you can do is you can go on to Fiverr or you can use CJ Dropshipping and you can pay them to basically do the photography and the videography for you. I personally get all my films made for the products i get custom made cinematic films made for my products as soon as I hit ten thousand dollars in revenue then I'll start to get proper videos outsourced.

 

D: Well you really know CJ Dropshipping really well because you know we provide a photographing service okay that's amazing. So you will allot a part of the time on the creatives of your products, so to make them more professional and appealing. Next question, as we know that the USA is the biggest market for dropshipping, then comes Europe and as we know as CJ has set two warehouses in the USA and one in Germany and the UK and France are the next countries to launch CJ warehouses, so the dropshipping business in Europe will soon increase. So for those who are planning to enter the European market, could you analyze what's the difference between the market in the US and European countries like the UK or France?

 

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K: Yeah you're talking about this, remember something very important, culture is a massive difference so culture in the US is different to culture in Europe the mat the culture is so different so you have to understand the culture in the different parts if you're selling in Europe you need to make sure you understand the kind of culture they use also if you're going more specific in certain countries, let's say I'm selling in France, you need to make sure that your video ads, your ad copies are all in French. If you're selling in Germany make sure that your video ads your ad copy and your thumbnails are all in Germany because that way you're going to get a better conversion rate. Because although English is spoken in those countries, that's not their main language, obviously German is their main language, it's their normal language, so that's very very important and like I said to you before, it's very very important that you understand the culture in each country and how it works in Europe.

 

D: Any niche of product preference between these two markets? Is there obvious preference on products or niches before these two markets?

 

K: What I would say is for sure is there's a few little things that are different.  If we look at the Netherlands, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, those kinds of countries like Denmark, cycling is huge. If you go to Amsterdam, Rotterdam, you'll just see people riding bikes, you won't see many cars, you just see loads of bikes, so the biking niche in the Netherlands is very very good.

 

D: So my next question is you know that Q4 is the most important quarter for business runners and there would be Christmas season and many other festivals and many dropshippers made their first success in Q4, so do you have any recommendations for our audiences out there, I mean any trending niches that would do good in Q4?

 

K: With Q4 the best niches are jewelry, gift jewelry because obviously people are gonna be buying gifts for people for christmas. So people like to buy people jewelry so you might want to buy somebody might want to buy their boyfriend a piece of jewelry that might have a love heart with their name on it and you can do that and that's what I'd recommend. You've got the pet industry like pet toys. People treat their cats like their kids so people buy their pets toys for Christmas. The kids industry is very very good like kids toys, kids clothes and those things do really really well. Other things that do really really well are hobbies passionate hobbies, so things like golf fishing because if a wife wants to buy a husband a product, then they normally buy them a passionate thing like the wife might buy the husband the new golf set or something like that, that works really really well. Other niches that tend to do really really well are home appliances, so things like new things for the house like TV, new storage units things like that. Also what works well is fashion, so clothes and fashion work really really well in Q4 too.

 

D: Kids toys, pet accessories, jewelry and anything that suitable to be given as a gift right and anything to improve their life, home improvement. And you talk about fishing you know, I just checked the top 100 bestsellers on CJ that two fishing products were big gainers in the previous month because they were on the top 50 best sellers list of the CJ platform that they never appeared on the top 100 list, so they were big gainers in the previous month, so they will be very promising in the Q4.

 

K: Yeah because you've got the cause you've got the fishing season in the summer and then the fishing season changes again, so people will buy their partners their kids fishing products for Q4.

 

D: The next is a harsh question, as more people know dropshipping and join in, it seems uh it's getting harder to succeed in the dropshipping business, do you think those who treat it as a part-time job will succeed or people have to do it full-time to success?

 

K: What I'm gonna say is if you treat dropshipping like some little side hobby or some little side thing, it's not gonna work, you have to be all in like I know even if you work a job. I'm not saying quit your job I don't recommend that but what I'm saying is if you work a job you've got to take this seriously, so if you come home from work, get straight to doing some dropshipping before you wake up to go to work, do some dropshipping like you've got to treat this like a real business that needs attention, so if you're not training it like a business you're not investing into it, you're not reinvesting into it you're not giving it time, you're not 100 committed it's like me saying to you, what ends if you was 99.9 committed to your marriage, it wouldn't work your marriage wouldn't work so you have to be 100 committed to the dropshipping. 

 

D: Harsh reality. So for now it's hard to succeed in dropshipping if you are harboring an attitude of simply trying. So those who made a success just spare no effort in building an eCom business not just set up a store and make money by luck.

 

K: Yeah what I would say though Demi is you want to understand business, in general, is very risky the chance of success in business is very very low, it doesn't matter what business you do, it's just low now the risk that because the rate is so low doesn't mean that it's not good. What separates the people that are successful to the ones that are not successful is the ones that are successful are the ones that just never gave up the reason why most people don't do well is that they just quit. You can't lose you can only quit so I can't emphasize this enough you can either win or you can quit you can't lose you can just quit. 

 

D: Yeah obviously, so tons of beginners gave up when they didn't get a single order in the first week or some never start again when their Facebook ads account get banned. There may be many difficulties for beginners to make them give up. So I was wondering were there any different difficulties that you met at the beginning of your dropshipping that nearly made you give up?

 

K: Yes of course I've had loads of bad experiences in dropshipping. A lot of people think the guys that are at the top are all nice roses, everything's good it's not the case when you get to the top things get harder, things get riskier. Now the problems that I had in my journey were things like I always doubted myself because I've not got any grades. I have always deemed the one that wouldn't be successful in life so I was very self-conscious which kept getting myself down I had very negative people around me which gave myself negative thoughts and stuff like that and also I wasn't very good because I was dyslexic, I'm dyslexic so learning things takes a lot longer for me. So like Facebook ads looking at lots of numbers, it's very hard for me to do that, so every time I was doing my Facebook ads I was like oh I can't I don't understand these numbers, I don't understand the metrics I don't know if I'm doing good things bad things. Then I thought am I just wasting money so I felt it that made me feel like quitting, also when things started to get better for me I remember I had a problem with the supplier and basically I lost almost 10 000 pounds because he made a massive mistake and that made me want to quit. 

 

D: That was not your mistake just because of the mistake of the suppliers that maybe you lost lots of money oh that's just awful. 

 

K: Yes but then I learned a lot from that because some of the stuff that happened was my fault as well like I should have done certain things to prevent that from happening, so I learned a lot from that. In terms of now, what struggles have I got when you're spending lots of money like there's more risk involved instead of maybe losing a thousand dollars, now we could potentially lose 20, 000 pounds, there's a lot more risk now involved, and that's the problems that we face the most.

 

D: Yes so every difficulty and you fail every time that you learn a new lesson to make your better and stronger to run business. It's very valuable insight so thanks so much for those valuable suggestions and we've talked about what kind of store to begin with and how many budgets dropshipping beginners need, and ways to increase traffic and conversion rate and promising niches in the Q4, and it's really a great lesson. I think many dropshippers out there learned a lot and at least I got many valuable insights, thank you so much. Any comments that you want to share with our audiences?

 

K: What I'm gonna say is look Q4 is around the corner, there's no better time to get started, 70 percent of e-commerce sales are done in Q4. Get your head down we're in a pandemic which means Europe you're at home, there's never been a better time to learn something because you're never going to get this chance again where you're at home nothing to do so put your head down learn dropshipping get ready for Q4 and just don't give up that's my best advice.

 

If you want to share your success story with us or you have great insights about dropshipping or ECommerce to share, just send an email demi@cjdropshipping.com, you will get a 100% response.