finding the right reliable supplier for Shopify Drop Shipping can be extremely overwhelming and such a headache when you're first starting your Drop Shipping Store but the thing is once you find this quality supplier you're pretty much going to use them for the rest of your career and if you're watching this video you're probably on that step you've probably built your store you're probably looking for this supplier and I'm assuming that you know no matter how viral you go or how well your ads are performing you can't sell anything until you're able to actually ship out
these products to the customer it is such an extremely important piece of Shopify Drop Shipping and if you don't have it on lock you're going to run into a ton of supply chain issues a lot of customer service headaches and overall it's just going to be a nightmare so today I'm going to show you how to find your reliable Drop Shipping supplier first let me cover a couple things that you need to know about finding this supplier and what actually qualifies them into being this good supplier so I'm going to break down six things that
you need to be looking for the first thing is communication if your supplier does not have good communication you are going to struggle and a lot of the times for an example on AliExpress or Alibaba you have a hard time communicating with them I know know that I know this because I've done it I've been there and it's very very hard to get your point across of what you're actually looking for maybe custom packaging or just even trying to get lead times down or cost down a lot of the suppliers on AliExpress and alib Baba
don't speak English very well which makes it really really hard if you're a native English speaker especially if you're shipping products to the US you have to have good communication if you can't communicate with your supplier they're not a good supplier you're just wasting your time and you're going to run into headaches the second thing that you need to consider when looking for a supplier is trust you don't want to just send this random person on the internet a bunch of money let's say you get 100 orders and they're $25 an order if it's your
first time Drop Shipping you got a lucky viral video or your ads are working really well you're not going to want to send them $2500 to someone you've never even talked to it can be a huge risk because you want to get your product to the customer otherwise you're going to have a ton of chargebacks you send this person money and maybe it takes nine months to get to the customer that's going to be a nightmare you're going to lose all that sale money and it's actually not going to work out very well for you
you need to have trust with your supplier and trust is built obviously over time right but you can build it up by communicating with your supplier ordering samples from them to see how fast they actually send the product and just talking to them in general asking them questions how it works what you're doing a great story from my supplier that actually used in terms of trust was over the course of 6 to 8 months I was actually overpaying for shipping it was just by a slight amount I do high order volume so I didn't really
notice it it was probably 10 cents 20 cents something like that but over time this actually added up and he messaged me on Whatsapp one day and and he was like Hey I've accidentally been charging you uh for the last you know 6 to 8 months extra shipping cost gave him my PayPal he sent me the money and that just really solidified our relationship because I didn't even know that I overpaid him for one and for two he could have taken that money and ran but the point is that he didn't he wanted to Foster
this relationship which I was like wow you are such a good supplier I'm going to be using you from here on out trust is great but that brings me to the third pillar that we're actually looking for in a supplier which is quality if your supplier sends out products that are not quality meaning they don't work maybe they're damaged in packaging or shipping or it's just not even the right product that's actually happened to me a few times where they sent out the wrong product that's another headache that you want to avoid especially as you
scale up your store so you need to Quality test your product so every single time that you're selling a new product even if it's from the same supplier at least for the first year I would recommend that you order one to your house to test that quality make sure it arrives in good condition the package is great and most importantly that the product actually works and does what it's supposed to do now quality over time especially when products coming out of China and some even in the US is actually getting pretty good you don't have
to worry too much about the quality anymore as you did maybe back in 2015 but I would still make sure that you quality test your products because you don't want to run into these headaches this is the whole point of this video is to avoid these headaches because I'll say it again a happy and healthy supply chain is going to be a happy and healthy business if you don't have that and your supply chain breaks you don't have a business it's over now this brings me to the fourth pillar which is adaptability you want to
have a supplier that's able to kind of meet your demands and needs right so if one one day you're selling 25 orders of this product a day and you ramp up to 100 because you get a viral video or your ads are working really well and you're scaling you have to have that communication pillar because you need to tell him that ahead of time so he can plan but this supplier knowing the supply chain and the forecast that's coming in for the demand should be able to actually prepare for this and ship out all your
orders in a timely manner even though you've scaled up that piece of adaptability is kind of both on you and the supplier you have to make sure you're communicating your demand but they also have to be able to supply that demand otherwise you're stuck back at your 25 orders and you really can't scale up and the last thing that you want to do is start reaching out to other suppliers and have multiple suppliers is just a nightmare to keep track of it's hard to communicate some come in different packaging some don't work it just does
not work out especially if you're selling UPS sales with your products because you typically will want them to come in the same package adaptability can also mean sourcing different products for you uh if they're just an expert in one Niche that's great and that's fine you can upsell a bunch of different products test out a bunch of different products in that Niche and you know that supplier is there for you but say you're doing really really well on the golf Niche and you want to move over to pickle ball and start a new store and
just repeat this process to make more money your supplier should be able to get other products in different niches if they are a quality supplier and that's kind of what I mean overall about adaptability now number five is you're looking for experience let's just say you're looking for a new supplier and you find one on AliExpress for example and they've only been in business for just a year I just wouldn't trust them I don't know how long they've actually been doing this for I don't know if they have really good credibility they don't have that
many reviews you want someone that's kind of been in the game and manufacturing or supplying products to Amazon FBA people drop shippers you name it whoever is selling products online for like at least 5 years minimum make sure to ask these questions along the way because they are super important all right number six is partnership you don't want to just use your supplier and that's it just ship out the products to the customer and then you never talk to them you want a partnership right you want a supplier to be like hey you know here's
some products that are actually doing really well from my other clients right now maybe you should try selling them oh if you actually order 200 more units a month then you're going to get $50 off each unit whatever it is right you want a partnership with your supplier that's back and forth and beneficial for both of you guys because when it's a one-way kind of Channel and they're just trying to get as many dollars as they possibly can from you it's just not going to work out especially if one side is greedier than the other
you want to work together and actually build a business essentially together because as you grow they grow as well and if they don't understand that and they don't give you pricing discounts and they don't want to help you out with custom packaging and stuff like that it's probably not the right supplier because you want to build a business that's sustainable for the long term you don't want to just run a Drop Shipping Store for 3 months on a trendy product and make 25 Grand and then you quit your job and then you just realize oh
well that was just super lucky I can't do that anymore and now I have to go get a job again or whatever you want to build a sustainable strong business and that's what we're here for on this channel those are the six pillars that you look for in qualifying A supplier but let's actually break down the multiple types of suppliers and then after that I'm going to give you examples in actually where to go to find these suppliers but don't skip this part because it is super important to know especially as you're building your business
so what types of suppliers are there well there's manufacturers there's forwarders and there's 3pls so a manufacturer is literally someone that manufactures a product usually in like shenzen or somewhere in China where they have this big Warehouse a bunch of people working on tons of different products and they ship them out directly from there what's great about a manufacturer is that their pricing is cheaper what's really bad about a manufacturer is that they don't really have good communication skills and most of the time the packages look like garbage when they come to the house they're
all beat up with a bunch of white tape all over it or yellow tape all over it it just doesn't doesn't look good you don't want to build a brand around that it's just not a good look you're not going to get as many returning customers and they have horrible shipping times they're usually like the 30-day plus shipping times that you see on AliExpress usually working with manufacturers directly is a nightmare and I really don't recommend it now what's next is a forwarder or an agent is what a lot of people call it an agent
is actually someone that works with the manufacturers to get you the best price they order the products to their warehouse where then they can do custom labeling packaging all that stuff and then ship it out for you it's much better because they're kind of the liaison or the middleman between manufacturers and you and then it also goes with the customer after uh I know it's adding one more step to the supply chain but it really does help because they're able to communicate with the manufacturers a lot better and often times their job is literally to
communicate with the manufacturers to get you the best price and then managing their own warehouses and people to actually ship out all these products on time Quality quality packaging Etc now 3pls are thirdparty logistics companies where you can actually order in bulk send it over to their warehouse and then they will ship it out for you these are usually a lot faster in terms of shipping times but the problem with 3pls and ordering a bulk yes you get a discount on the bulk orders but it's usually more costly to actually use this service 3pls are
at the level where you're a massive brand probably $5 million plus somewhere in that range where it's actually worth it to Warehouse your own inventory per se I mean you're using a third party but it's still like you're kind of owning that inventory and buying in bulk at that stage which probably a lot of you are not so I'm not going to talk about it for to too long but that's when you do more private labeling and custom packaging and things like that all right so now you know a little bit about what to look
for in a supplier and you know a little bit about what kind of suppliers there are let's actually break down on how to find these suppliers that you're going to be using as a beginner drop shipper all right the first option which kind of checks off everything on our pillar list is using a software like autods now I've been a partner with autods for a very long time now and they consistently improve their software and the capabilities which is fantastic they're kind of an allinone One Drop Shipping software they do everything from product research suppliers
and auto fulfillment it's pretty crazy and I know there's a lot of softwares out there in terms of being like third party kind of suppliers for people but autod DS is the best in terms of shipping times they have absolutely insane shipping times especially to the US let me just show you here you go on the marketplace look at best sellers okay let's say you're selling something really quickly before Halloween by the time this video is posted it's probably past Halloween but you have a late start and you want to sell a holiday product you
can get these light bulbs with some eyes on them for Halloween in just two business days so scrolling down here they have a ton of different products in all kinds of different categories with shipping times anywhere from 2 to 14 days but a lot of them are under 10 days which is absolutely fantastic and a really good place to be especially if you're a beginner right when you reach that 12 to 14 day mark is really when you see more customer complaints coming in especially if they're not notified ahead of time it's going to take
that long so everyone I teach in e-com remastered I recommend using autod DS it's just the easiest way to start Drop Shipping as a beginner without going through all this headache of trying to find a supplier for example if you're looking for golf products you just type it in the sports and fitness category we've got golf balls grips all this stuff 3 days shipping time 2 days shipping time uh bags you can get them customized if you want to as well 15 days 10 days so that's not bad at all and it gives you a
lot of opportunity to focus on other elements of your business and not have to worry about finding this supplier now of course supplying products is just one of their newer features that they're working on and it's really come a long way but they also have a ton of other things like Tik Tok ad spy you can also automate all of your orders so if you go into your settings and then you go into buyer accounts you add your account and Link it to your product in your credit card so that way let's say you made
25 orders yesterday today it'll automatically fulfill them through autods charge your card for the orders automatically pay for them so they'll automatically be shipped out the next day and they will actually add all the information like tracking back onto your Shopify store automatically then it gets sent out to the customer so you don't have to do any of that work it's pretty much all automated so that's the first Supply recommendation I have they pretty much hit all the pillars they have communication unlike other platforms you lit click on the bottom right contact a mentor help
center live chat so whatever question that you have about a product or their services they'll just answer it for you which makes it super super easy with their good customer service for the pillar of trust it's a massive company they've been around for I think 10 years now so they really know their stuff in the game for Quality they vet all of their suppliers so you don't really have to worry about that one as much I still recommend that you order a product to your house to sample it take videos and all that stuff experience
again I already touched on 10 years of it in Partnership they want to work with you they want to give you discounts on bulk orders and all these things they want to earn your business so I can't really recommend autods enough and if you want to try it out free for 30 days I'll have a link down below now if you don't want to use autods for some reason as a beginner and you want to take on The Challenge on your own that is fine here's another option that you can do you can go directly
onto AliExpress you can find forwarders on here which I was telling you about earlier how they're better than manufacturers the thing is it's going to take a lot longer you might cycle through 10 15 25 50 different suppliers and text messages with them before find the right one but it is possible to do and all you have to do is go on to AliExpress and let's just say you want to sell this uh hand sanitizer gun right here right we're going to look at the positive feedback score it says 95.6% so not too bad 1,400
followers that's for sure fake the problem here is shipping's already like 3 weeks for this but maybe you can reach out to them and see you know can you get any faster shipping times I want to order a bunch of these blah blah blah all you have to do is click on message and then it'll pop up this little messenger screen here once you log in and here you can reach out to these suppliers and you're probably goingon to have to message A bunch of them until you find ones that hit all of the pillars
but if you want to this is how you do it you can send them a message like this and if you want to save this for later just take a screenshot here or whatever hey my name is Austin Ren I run drop shipping stores I'm very interested in sourcing my products from you and your team I'm looking for a long-term partnership with a supplier and would love to work with you and your team I have a few questions that I hope you can answer for me first question would be do you support the Drop Shipping
business model and allow for single customer orders and have the capacity to fulfill large quantities of single customer orders that's just drop shipping right you're going to have 100 customers and they're all going to be different customers most likely so they have to be able to actually send out 100 orders to 100 different people uh two what is the fastest shipping routes you have available and what are the costs associated with each one so shipping routes as an example is like FedEx to UPS to USPS they all kind of have different shipping times and different
pricing so it's really good to reach out to them to see you know what your options are again you want to get something under 14 days for sure and you don't want to pay too much cuz if you use like a DHL sometimes they'll charge you like $50 to ship it and it's just not possible the third question you should ask is what kind of packaging do you provide could could you please send a photo of the packaging that the customer ordered so let's just say you're sending this to a customer it comes in a
little a little box or whatever and the box is all beat up it's ugly it's yellow it doesn't look like it came from a nice brand it's just going to rub your customers the wrong way you want to make sure they have clean packaging you don't have to necessarily custom label it in the beginning but you do want to make sure it at least looks nice now the fourth question would be do you offer customization for the products such as laser etching printing Etc this is something that you're going to be looking forward to in
the future because in the beginning you're probably not going to laser at your products but it's nice to know if they have this plus a lot of the times forwarders actually have this not manufacturers so this is kind of like a test to see which one's which number five is if I were to provide you with consistent amount of daily orders would you be able to provide pricing discounts this is super important as you scale if you are selling 100 orders a day and then you ramp it all the way up to 500 orders a
day you want some sort of pricing discount because you're giving them a ton of business and consistent business and when you're running a Drop Shipping Store you really want to squeeze all the margins that you can out of your business more margins more profit so once you hit a certain amount of order maybe 25 maybe 100 orders a day you should start reaching out to get these pricing discounts number six is are you a manufacturer of the product or a forwarder and if they don't know what this is just explain to them the difference between
afford and manufacturer which I just told you so you're going to send this message probably to a bunch of different suppliers and some of them if not most of them just won't even reply to you you don't want to work with them don't Place orders with them you want someone that at least will reply and you might have to send this out 10 25 50 times like I was saying before anyone even replies and hopefully they can answer all of your questions and check it off the list and then you can move move on to
phase two which would be ordering a sample product and starting to communicate with them offline maybe on WhatsApp and that way you can start building up this relationship with them it is a little bit of a process if you're doing it through AliExpress you still can find good suppliers on here it's just going to be a lot more timec consuming but you really want to make sure that you have a good one because again it's kind of the lifeline or the blood of your business I hope that this video explains suppliers a little bit more
in depth there's not that much content on it on YouTube and again it's such an important part of the business so you kind of have to learn a lot about it and make sure that you're working with the quality supplier otherwise you will run into a ton of headaches trust me it's happened to me in the beginning but if you're on this step or you're just preparing for finding suppliers you're Pro active and you're probably going to succeed in Drop Shipping so that's good to know if you've made it all the way through this video
and the last thing I want to say is if you want to work with me and my team at Ecom remastered where we can build custom websites for you custom ugc content host four coaching calls a week and we will work with you until you hit your goals it's lifetime access if this sounds like something you want to do and work with me personally I'll have an application link down below it is by application only you can't just come in and pay money and get into the program you do have to be a right fit
for us and our team we like hard workers people that just aren't going to give up after a week so if this sounds like you make sure to book in your time slot all right guys I hope this is informative thank you all for watching going to be posting way more videos this quarter and quarter 1 as well all right with that being said as always have a great rest of your day
