This is absolutely insane. Tariffs just changed again. E-commerce is cooked.
I'm selling all my cars, going broke. I knew it wouldn't last. US President Donald Trump just made some crazy changes.
Okay, look at what's going on. Goods being imported from China to the US just got slashed from 145% tariff to only 30% for the next 90 days. And vice versa.
Chinese people trying to order goods from the US used to have to pay 125%. Those tariffs just got reduced to only 10%. Now, there's also been massive changes to what are known as dimminimous packages.
Many people in the e-commerce space don't know this term, but it certainly affects you. So, we're going to talk about that in a minute. But, just so you know that the person giving you this information is legit and actually in the industry, just one of my e-commerce brands made $461,000 last month.
You can see here on Amazon we did about $180,000. Then Shopify was about a quarter million and then we also sell on Tik Tok shops. So I'll explain in this video how you can still do e-commerce and how you can still be profitable even if you do want to drop ship.
Now for over 10 years, people have been using drop shipping as a way to make money and start a business without a lot of money. In fact, it's how I got started at 16 with my lawnmowing money and flipped it into a business making millions. Your customer buys the product from you and at that point you use that money and go purchase the product and it gets sent directly to them.
You're the middleman. You don't buy the product up front and you never touch it, which is great. Now, the truth is a little over 90% of products that are drop shipped come from China.
That's where most of the Alibaba and AliExpress suppliers are. A lot of that's coming from China. So, these tariffs have had a huge impact on it.
Now, people are freaking out. Let's start here. Whatever the tariffs are today.
Oh my gosh, it's only 30% now. Look, we're celebrating it going back down to still above where it was. Look, look, it is what it is.
But the tariffs are going to change. And this is the point I want to make. Whether it's 150%, 7%, 25, it it's going to change.
It's probably going to change a few weeks after you watch this video. There's also been major changes to dimminimous packages. I sold in e-commerce well over $10 million before I learned what this term was.
And all of our products came from China one by one. A dimminimous package, which is every one of my drop shipping orders, is under $800 in value coming through customs. And there used to not be any sort of fee.
It was exempted. Well, under Trump, that changed. It went to a 120% fee or a $200 flat fee.
Huge change. Now, whatever. Here's the overarching point that most people seem to miss.
Pay attention here for two seconds. I don't give a what the percentages. It's going to change.
It's going to change again. I look at simply as cost to do business. And you're always going to have a cost to get your product, no matter where it's coming from.
So, this might change the percentages and what's going on. You got to look at your numbers. You do.
But it doesn't change what I'm trying to accomplish. What I tried to accomplish that made me tens of millions of dollars in sales was having a 3x margin. I buy it for 10.
I need to be able to sell it for at least 30. All of these added fees is really what it is. Just makes it more difficult to find products that have that spread.
And here's what you need to do. You need to scour drop shipping sites. I'll show you a few in a second to basically see what they're going to charge you for all these products.
And at that point, you should cross reference that with Amazon because usually I can price a little bit above Amazon. I almost always do. Amazon's a great indicator.
If there's a big listing at $35, it's like, hey, people are willing to pay in the 30s for sure. And it's clearly happening. So, we probably sell it for $39.
99, you know, get a slight premium. So, I would be doing that research to see what's the general spread of this type of product from the sourcing companies that I can get it from to Amazon. That's a great research tool.
You could also use Tik Tok shop. Now, there's three platforms that are kind of wellknown and that I would trust for ordering products uh as a drop shipper, right? There's the many different sourcing agents and things you can do, but three big boy platforms.
You've got Zenrop, you've got CJ Drp Shipping, and you've got AutoDS. I only have experience personally with sending orders through Zenrop. Okay, that's my experience.
I know plenty of people that have done both of the others, and those are large companies that I would still look at to get quotes and figure out how much you could source your product for. But basically, Zenrop is a company that has contacts with a bunch of different manufacturers and suppliers, and that whole connection web allows you to source a product and ideally get the best price. Now, you're obviously paying a premium when you're drop shipping.
It's one by one. You're not buying inventory. There's pros, there's cons, but this is what allows you to get your foot in the game, especially if you don't have a lot of capital.
It's still possible. Now, we actually have an automated store builder. I'll have the team leave the link somewhere down below.
Uh these are quite common now, like an AI store builder. Just puts the template, puts the legal pages, the descriptions, all the the theme, everything like that. It builds a store and it'll add a bunch of products that are automatically connected to Zenrop for fulfillment that are already selling well.
Some of them have a decent margin. So, you can go ahead and check that out. Um, totally free.
We'll just build you the store on Shopify. It'll save you some time. Now, people always hound me for this.
So, I'm going to give you another resource. How do I find products? What marketing and research tools do we use?
Cal Data is literally the only software tool um for research and stuff that my company pays for. It's the only tool we see value. And here's really what we use it for.
Um, let's say we're looking at products on Tik Tok shop. Okay, we can go under products. This this is a Tik Tok shop platform.
So, we can see in the last month, you know, Nell Supercom, they made 1. 4 million. this hair curler 1.
3. So, this allows me to see all the different products that are rising and falling because Tik Tok, oh man, it moves super fast. But I can look at all these products and I can see exactly what commission rate they are giving to all of their affiliates, you know, only 8%.
I can see how much money they're making, which is super helpful. But the big thing is I can also see every creator who's promoting them. So, you could reach out to these people, try to have them make content for you.
I can also see every single video. This is a big advantage. If you're going to be running ads on Facebook, maybe you copy the framework for a similar product, you know, rip them off entirely.
But for a similar product that's on Tik Tok, take their video. Take the framework. How does it start?
Clearly seems like a woman showing her big poofy hair is the the start of most of these videos, right? That's so we're starting to pick up on patterns. We can copy these video examples and like this individual video made 77 grand.
Now, it was also boosted by ads, but this one wasn't. It made 103, right? So, this is a great research tool.
uh you can look at shops, you know, each brand individually, their products that are selling. We use this for general research mostly from a marketing perspective, but it can definitely help you find products as well. Now, I want to give you a quick warning because I see a lot of e-commerce people doing this.
They're like, "Oh my gosh, all the tariffs and stuff in China. Let me try to find sourcing in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Mexico, Brazil. " Look, Trump did not just target China.
He clearly went at him a little more aggressive, but there's blanket tariffs pretty much everywhere, right? And because they're changing so fast, I wouldn't want to try to change my entire sourcing plan to like jump to different countries. So, I would really recommend you find a way to get it going normally, not trying to do some back channel, maybe sketchy manufacturer where you have to send them a wire and there's no recourse.
Yeah, you just don't know. And spending months trying to set that up, which I have multiple friends trying to do right now. I'd rather make the numbers work with a reputable quality manufacturer I can scale with, even if they're in China, and pay the tariffs because eventually it's just going to go away.
That's my opinion on it. or at least be reduced to kind of a a non-issue, you know, 10, 15, 20, 25%. Uh, right now it's 30th.
It's not even that bad, you know. So, that's just one of the things that I would keep in mind. And I'll tell you from my own business perspective, the company that I just showed you, 461,000 last month.
I've been building it for just a hair over a year, right? Well, we do supplements and we manufacture them here in the US. But that doesn't mean we get everything here in the US.
Our bottles come from China. That cost has gone up a lot. Okay, we're talking about I won't give you the exact numbers, but I'll say just put it like this.
Our entire cost per unit went up about 12% just because of the bottles. That's huge. Labels to print those and make those has gone up a little bit.
And then we order all of our custom packaging, right? So, every package a customer orders, it's in a nice branded thing. It's all black with our logo.
Looks sick. All of those come from China. Now, they're not super expensive.
You're talking about like 10 cents a unit. We ordered 50,000 of them or whatever. But now with a huge tariff on it, that does make the cost go up.
So the last order I placed placed like a it would have been a $7,000 order. It costed me like 105, right? Or whatever the number was.
So it is an increased fee. It's still marginal. The big issue with all these tariffs is when it's on your entire unit cost.
That's where again it's just harder to find your margin. It has made drop shipping more difficult. It will knock out a lot of competition.
A lot of sellers immediately just became unprofitable. A lot of Chinese sellers on Amazon, like my competitors bidding against me, which is an annoying thing on Amazon, gone. and half of those gone immediately.
So, it's actually cleared out the space in my opinion for people who know what they're doing to actually make more money. Like, I will make more money 100% because of everything that's going on. And I absolutely think you can, too.
So, with that being said, I'll keep you informed and updated on all the tariff stuff and everything going on. Make sure to like this video so you get recommended the next one and you won't miss any important updates. And check out the resources down below.
I'll put some of the tools and resources and things uh that we had mentioned in this video that will help you out if you're trying to start drop shipping or build an actual brand. We also have a school group which is great for beginners, a private coaching group you can apply for, and then we help people who have a much bigger budget uh who want to build a US manufactured supplement brand. We help you do that.
You need a lot of money because you got to buy a lot of inventory and we're doing all the whole product formulation and helping you with everything. But if you want, you know, inventory in the US with a quality product that you're proud of, you can also check out that option. So, I'll leave all the resources down below.
Let me know if you have any questions and I'll see you in the next video. Cheers.
