Is Drop Shipping Right for You? with Anton Kraly

Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Episode 107 of How I Built It. Today my guest is Anton Kraly of Drop Ship Lifestyle. I’m excited to talk to Anton today because way back in episode 101 Chris Lema talked about how an important thing to think about in 2019 is going to be drop-shipping, and in my opinion, there’s nobody better to talk to than Anton Kraly. He gives us lots of good advice on exactly what drop shipping is, and if you want to get into drop shipping, how to do that. In other words, how to build a dropship business. If this is something you’re especially interested in then this is a great episode, otherwise, there’s a lot of food for thought in this episode. Sit back, relax, and enjoy this interview with Anton. Of course first, I need to bring you a word from our sponsors.

Break: This season is brought to you by Plesk. Do you spend too much time doing server admin work, and not enough time building websites? Plesk helps you manage servers, websites, and customers in one dashboard. Helping you do those tasks up to 10 times faster than manually coding everything. As someone who just spent a bunch of time finding the right tools and automations to save myself time, I can tell you that Plesk is invaluable. You can try Plesk for free today at Plesk.com/build. This episode is brought to you by MailPoet. If you build WordPress websites, you’d probably recommend a newsletter solution to your customers. Why not offer them a solution that is built into the WordPress admin? The MailPoet plugin offers just that. On top of that, they have a new newsletter designer that’s easier to use than MailChimp’s, and it takes only a few minutes to configure. Your customers will love it. MailPoet offers a free sending plan to ensure top-notch deliverability, and if your customers run into issues, the MailPoet support team offers free email and chat support. Classy. Save yourself time and make your customers happy. Try the new MailPoet today. You can download the plugin over at the WordPress plugin repository, WordPress.org/plugins/MailPoet. Again, that’s WordPress.org/plugins/MailPoet.

Joe Casabona: Anton Kraly of Drop Ship Lifestyle.com. How are you today?

Anton Kraly: Doing well. How are you?

Joe: I am doing great. Thanks for joining me today. It is a little warmer for the fall here in the northeast of the United States, but that’s OK. I’m cool with it. I want to thank you for joining me today. I’m excited to talk about drop shipping and this general topic. Why don’t we start off with who you are and what you do?

Anton: Sure. My name is Anton Kraly. I see you have a New York Yankees shirt on there. I’m from New York, grew up there, went to school up in Albany. Started business there when I was 21, right out of school, selling cookies. That was my first business. I bought a delivery route for a bakery in Brooklyn, did that for a few weeks, thought “I don’t want to do this.” I learned about e-commerce in early 2007, and from then on there I’ve been building stores on different platforms, getting better hopefully, that’s always the goal with Google ads, and growing over the past ten or eleven years or so.

Joe: That’s fantastic. Did you go to SUNY Albany?

Anton: I did, yes.

Joe: Nice. That’s awesome. As we record this, it is the beginning of the baseball post-season, so hopefully, by the time this comes out, I’ll have a nice little pre-show intro talking about how the Yankees won the World Series. We’ll see. That’s cool. Why don’t we talk a little bit about that? How did you get into selling cookies for your first business? Was it– Were you really into cookies or did you see that as a good market to get into?

Anton: One of my friends’ dads, one of my friends– I realized they had a nice house and it seemed like they were doing well. It was funny because every time we would go to his house, they lived on a dead end street, and there were like five or six massive trucks out there. I asked him, “What is this?” And he said “My dad owns a delivery route business for a bread company. Like sliced bread, they had the rights to pick it up from wherever it’s made and then sell it to the grocery stores all around Nassau County on Long Island where I’m from. That was just one thing that popped into my head. I wasn’t like, “I need to be in this business,” but when I got out of school, and I knew I wanted to get into business, I was looking for opportunities that didn’t cost a million dollars because I was a kid. So I saw online that there were different businesses for sale, one of them caught my eye. It was a delivery route business for that bakery in Brooklyn, and it was about $25 grand. That was an opportunity I could get into. I saw someone and my friend’s dad that had bought something that was small, built it into something big, and I thought “OK this is an opportunity to, not do with the rest of my life at all, but to build this up maybe double the size, flip it and get into the next business.”

Joe: That’s fantastic. In college, you were ready to make a $25 thousand investment, which as somebody– We’re both around the same age. I basically worked online my entire life, and the startup costs for that are dramatically lower, like virtually zero, but that’s tainted me a little bit to wanting to make the initial investment. “You got to spend money to make money,” is the old adage. That’s cool that you were willing at that point to be willing to make that investment.

Anton: I didn’t know anything else. Back then when I bought that business, I did not know that I could build the website myself. I didn’t know there were tools out there. In fact, one of the things I was thinking of doing back then, again this is 2006. I was like, “I see an opportunity to have a for sale by owner home website. Have Nassau County, Suffolk County, all of Long Island.” And I was like, “I want to have that website built. Then we’ll find the people to list their homes.” And I went online, looked for Long Island web developers or something, and I was going to their offices and having meetings and getting quoted $100k, $200k. And I thought, “That’s any online business. That’s what you would need to spend to build it.” I had no idea that you can start something for $50 bucks. It wasn’t even an option to me.

Joe: $100k. I know a lot of the web developers listening to this cringed. Or, they’re like “I could charge that much.”

Anton: Yeah.

Joe: That’s interesting. I want to touch on two things, being a New Yorker myself. You’re from Nassau County. Does that make you a Mets fan? I don’t want to belabor the point of–

Anton: Unfortunately, yes. It makes me not like baseball.

Joe: I understand. Though the David Wright sendoff was a very nice one. A bakery in Brooklyn, for those of you outside of New York or maybe New York City, Brooklyn bakeries are the best bakeries. They make– I’m starting to sound a little bit like our president here, but there’s no better bakeries in the world, in my opinion. So that’s cool. From there I want to make sure that we have a good timeline for you talking about drop shipping. You started to do more research on e-commerce stuff, what was the leap you made from having this delivery business to getting into e-commerce?

Anton: Yeah, sure. I had the delivery business and a book, The Four Hour Workweek, that book came out in 2007. I read it, and there’s a chapter in it about building a Yahoo store on that platform. It said it was $29 for a month to get started, and then there was a chapter on Google AdWords. My thought process was   like, “What products do I have access to?” And it was cookies. I built a website called NewYorkCookieShop.com, listed all those cookies, and set up Google AdWords. Figured it out pretty simply, targeting people outside of New York that searched for cookies or anything, saying “Do you miss New York bakeries? Order authentic cookies shipped to your home in three days,” something like that. That was a weekend experiment, and within a week or so, that was making more money than that business that I spent $25k for. So I was like, “OK. E-commerce. That’s what I’m doing.” Since then  I started to get into more and more expensive products and whatnot because I realized I didn’t want to sell $20 items, but that was the start.

Joe: That’s incredible. You took a weekend. I will say, I rag on the Four Hour Work Week a lot, but there is a lot of good stuff in that book. I read it probably around the same time. So you set up a website in a weekend, you did Google AdWords which is a topic we could have a whole show on. And it started making a ton of money. You said you started to get into more expensive products? I imagine that this is the part where we start to talk about drop shipping because first of all just like shipping cookies you need to think of a couple of things to make sure they’re fresh when they’re delivered, and stuff like that. Maybe we can get into the research at this point. What research did you do getting into shipping these various types of products?

Anton: The transition there was, again, same thought process. “If I’m selling $20 items why can’t I sell $1,000 items?”  Back then– It’s not the same now, so I don’t recommend anybody do this, but my research process was to go on eBay and go through all of the categories, search for products with the filters that were above $500 and then sort by completed listings. Then I was looking in all the categories for completed listings that sold at Buy It Now prices over $500 that looked to be consistent. Lots of green. When I saw that I was like, “OK. People are buying these things.” Once I figured that out I picked a subset of products I wanted to start with, still didn’t know what drop shipping was, so I went on Google and figured out everything comes from China. Then I found Alibaba and back then I  was importing, we don’t have to talk about it, but for three years I was importing products from China. Bringing the containers to a fulfillment center in Long Beach, California and then I was selling them online. The fulfillment center was shipping them all out all over the country, and then from there once I had all those websites up, a few years into the process I started to get phone calls at my e-commerce businesses. I’ll give you an example. One of them was selling bed frames, so I had a bed frame company call me, and they were like, “We see you sell these products. We have our brands,” whatever bed frames ABC, and “Do you want to sell our stuff?” And at first, I said “No,” because I thought they wanted me to buy them and put them in the fulfillment center and I thought, “I don’t want to do that for the margins,” but then they explained to me “Listen. You put them on your website. We have them in our warehouses. When you get a sale, you let us know, we ship it direct to your customers. For me, that meant no overhead, no extra overhead, and the ability to increase the amount of products that I offered. Once I found out about that I started working with as many different brands as I could, that would work on that model.

Joe: That’s incredible. And that’s sort of like Amazon-ish like you’re the conduit for people being able to buy these products without having to yourself buy these products at wholesale.

Anton: Exactly.

Joe: That’s fantastic. You mentioned that your research process of 10 or so years ago is not the best research process today. What would you recommend for somebody today if they want to get into selling physical products, or their own products, online?

Anton: Some things that I look for, and again I want to see that somebody else, meaning another business, is making money doing it. Some things that I look for are– I use Google, so I go on Google, and I’ll type in different industry names. “Modern leather Italian sofa,” “Mahogany wood dining table,” things like that. Then I’ll pull up the first three pages of websites that have those products for sale, and from there specifically what I’m looking for are websites that don’t have retail locations and that don’t have warehouses. I want to find other internet retailers. The way that I check that, once I have a million tabs open on my computer, is I go through all those websites, and I check their contact page, and  I check their about us page. I see if it says “Stores” or “Store locator,” and when they have that I’m just closing those out. Because I’m not going to be competing with them. What I end up with is a handful of sites that sell the stuff that I want to sell that don’t have that physical presence, and from there I take those domains. I usually check on Alexa to see how much traffic they’re getting. Obviously, it’s an estimate, but I’m looking for stores that are in the top hundred thousand or higher in the United States. Once I have those two things confirmed I take it to the next step, which is how many different brands are these websites selling for? Is it a modern Italian leather sofa website that’s custom making them in their garage in New York? Or is it a company that has 30 different types you could buy? And if I could find that, a website without the address, with that traffic, with multiple brands, then I’m  like “OK this is an opportunity.” That’s the starting point.

Joe: Gotcha. That makes sense. You want to make sure that these are people who aren’t necessarily catering to a local crowd, they want to cater to everybody. Then you said that you want to make sure they don’t have a warehouse either, and that’s because a warehouse implies that they are stocking their own stuff. Right?

Anton: Right, and when that happens, the way that we get– Just so everybody, if anyone is thinking “I should try drop shipping,” never go online and Google drop ship suppliers or anything like that because you’re going to find these middlemen that will say “Pay us X amount of dollars per month, and you get access to a million products,” and you’re never going to make money with companies like that in the long run. The companies that we sell for, we sell for directly. We have direct relationships with every single brand and the way that we find our brands is by finding companies that we’re going to be competing with. We find them from those websites. If my research was just anybody, even that has a retail store, and I’m going to try to sell the stuff that they’re selling. A lot of those brands will say “We don’t work with online retailers.” It’s a waste. We want to segment down further before we start extracting suppliers.

Joe: Gotcha. That makes a ton of sense. We haven’t defined drop shipping, I made the assumption that people know what it is, but maybe– Can you define it for us–?

Anton: Sure.

Joe: Before we move forward?

Anton: Yes. It’s a very vague term, and there’s a lot of different things that would fall under drop shipping, but all it means is you’re selling something, and you’re not fulfilling the orders directly. Even if at your house you were making wooden tables, and I put one on Craigslist, and I’m in Austin, Texas now. I put one on Craigslist, and I sold it. Then I was like, “I got the sale. Can you ship it to my customer?” And you did that, that would be drop shipped. That’s one way to do it. With the cookie business, I don’t even realize back then, but as that website grew I was selling them on my website, and then I was having the bakery in Brooklyn ship them directly to my customers. That technically was drop shipping. If you go online and Google it now, you’re probably going to think it means using a website like Ali Express and selling stuff from China through Facebook ads. And technically that is drop shipping, but again it’s a generic term. It’s a method of order fulfillment.

Joe: Gotcha. As you said if I want to get into selling Star Wars prints, like Star Wars digital prints. Or not digital prints, the canvas type prints.

Anton: Yes.

Joe: And I’m not making them, and I’m not shipping them to the person. I contract with a few people, artists sell them through my website, and then they ship them out. Another good real example is my website for selling T-shirts. That’s all through Printful.com. I uploaded the artwork, somebody orders a T-shirt, Printful prints the T-shirt and then sends it. I don’t touch that process at all.

Anton: Right. That’s drop shipping. We use them too. Good company.

Joe: I’m testing out a few more different products right now. So, cool. I like the advice that you gave about never Googling dropshipping suppliers. Much like what you said, selling from Ali express or whatever, through Facebook ads, it’s a little bit disingenuous. Because you’re taking advantage of the fact that people aren’t sure what to look for.

Anton: Speaking on that too. Never Google drop ship suppliers, and never, when you’re talking to the real brands that you want to sell for, you also shouldn’t use the term drop shipping. My website is called DropShipLifestyle.com so people can find us. But when I’m talking to suppliers, I don’t call them and say,  “Do you drop ship?” That’s not– It has a negative connotation associated with it because a lot of beginners think it means something that it’s not, and they think they’re going to make all this money by selling some big company’s stuff. The truth is the companies that you want to sell for, and they are only going to let you sell their stuff if they trust you and if they think you’re building a real business or already have a real business. That’s not a term you want to throw around besides discussions with other people that are in the business.

Joe: Gotcha. That makes sense. Because they’re putting their products on the line.

Anton: Exactly.

Joe: And if you’re disingenuous, to use the term I used before, then you’re diminishing their brand as well.

Anton: Exactly.

Joe: That’s cool. That’s almost like SEO ten years ago. If somebody said I’m a Search Engine Optimization expert, you’d almost look at them side-eyed. Like, “What are you trying to tell me?” Cool. So to talk about DropShipLifestyle.com, this is the thing that will be the title question. How did you build it? Can you tell us a little bit about that website specifically?

Anton: Sure. It’s a WordPress site, and it has so many, probably way too many plugins and themes. We’ve been through having everything done custom, and the problem with that for me is I’m not that technical, so when it came to making quick edits for changing out promotions or new content, it broke too much. Right now the front end of it, the main content site is running on WordPress using [thrive themes with thrive, architect]. That’s our builder. I love it, and it’s easy enough for me but still seems to load fast enough for Google to show, and we use that. Then for our community– A lot of what we do is teaching based. Our members area is also built on WordPress, that’s using a whole combination of tools, but using a tool called [Memberium], and that does content mocking and [Memberium] is a plugin that works with Infusionsoft. Infusionsoft is our CRM, so whether someone is getting emails from us or whether they buy from us and then get access tags, that’s all handled there. Then Infusionsoft works with [Memberium] to say, “OK give this person access to this thing.” That’s our main content for this company.

Break: This episode is brought to you by Pantheon. Starting a new project? Looking for a better hosting platform? Pantheon is an integrated set of tools to build, launch and run websites. Get high performance hosting for your WordPress sites, plus a comprehensive toolkit to supercharge your team and help you launch faster. On Pantheon, you get expert support from real developers, best in class security and the most innovative technology to host and manage your websites. You can sign up a new site in minutes with a free account, and you only pay when it goes live. That is my second favorite feature to Pantheon, only to the easy ability to create dev staging and live servers, and push to GitHub. It’s very easy to set those things up on Pantheon. You can head over to Pantheon.io today to set up a free account and pay only when it goes live. Thanks so much to Pantheon for their support of this episode and this season of How I Built It.

Joe: DropShipLifestyle.com is an area where people can come to learn about drop shipping, and there’s the community aspect where people can talk to each other. It looks like you have a couple of courses on here too, what are you– Are you using WordPress for the courses as well?

Anton: Exactly. WordPress. They’re on a subdomain, so it’s Courses.DropShipLifestyle, but that’s on WordPress as well with–  It’s using [divvy] as the theme on there, but we use a plugin called Sensei, and Sensei is a good course plugin. It’s pretty basic but more than enough, and it tracks people’s progress throughout so they can click, they completed a lesson. It allows us to attach different downloads to different modules, like worksheets and whatnot. Easy to embed videos, we use Vimeo pro for all of our video hosting there. For our community side of it,  that’s where the content lives for the education of it. But then we wanted to have a forum also, so people can interact with each other. We do have a Facebook group, but I started Drop Ship Lifestyle back in 2013 when Facebook groups weren’t even a thing yet, so we needed a forum integration. For the forum we found the best solution to be through Invision Power Board. It’s InvisionPowerBoard.com, and we use their software to run our forum.

Joe: That’s cool. I haven’t heard of Invision Power Board, and I’m definitely going to check that out. I use bbPress for my community, and it integrates well with my LMS LearnDash. But Sensei is the one that integrates with WooCommerce, right? That’s the WooCommerce LMS?

Anton: They do have a plugin, yeah.

Joe: Cool.

Anton: An extension.

Joe: Nice. It sounds like you have a lot going on, but it sounds like the perfect site builder map. If I wanted to go off and build a website that is a course and community, or an online courses and community, you’ve given us a good blueprint for what we should be using. Which is always insanely valuable.

Anton: Especially since there’s so much out there. We’ve been through so many different tools, and nothing’s going to be perfect, but if you do want to create something like an online course, pick something. This works for us, it does work, so if you want to use it then use it, but don’t get caught up. That’d be my advice for anybody, don’t get caught up in “Which one out of these thousand things should I use?” Because they all do the same thing.

Joe: That’s great advice, and it’s something that– I started a second podcast called Creator Toolkit where I go through things exactly like this. “What do I need to do to set up an online course?” I talk about the themes and different plugins that you could use and stuff like that, but you’re absolutely right, the tools are one thing, and the content is a whole other thing. So even if you want to use Vimeo pro to make the videos and sell the videos, you can do that on Vimeo pro now too. But this is fantastic, and I’ll be sure to link all of that in the show notes. It looks like– As we come up on, we’re coming up on time already I can’t believe it. You have three different courses. I don’t want to make this sound like an advertisement, but this is. There’s so much to know about drop shipping, and you’ve given us, again, like I said a really good blueprint. But what’s the difference between these three courses? I’m looking at the pricing table, but if I wanted to get started with drop shipping today, which course would you recommend for me?

Anton: Either what we call our premium course, which is all our training videos. That’s every training video we have plus our– We do have an app for Shopify that’s not in the Shopify app store, and it’s something that’s on our website. It lives on our website, but we allow our students to use it. That’s included with that. Then also we have– We call it the Drop Ship Lifestyle Shopify theme,  really original name, but you get that too. So I’d recommend either that or for the people that want just us to build the website for you, we don’t go as far obviously as getting traffic and sales and supplier approvals because then we would sell the website ourselves for a lot more money. But that’s the top tier package where we will set up your Shopify store, and we’ll upload your products for you, do all your content pages and your logo. We will set up your social media pages. We will set up your first Google ads on Google Shopping campaign, but that’s for the people that are like, “Let me just hand that off,” and “I’d rather just pay to outsource it.” Depends how hands on you want to be in the beginning, I would say.

Joe: That’s great. This is the reason I ask this question because this is for anybody who wants to sell online courses. This is a great model.

Anton: Definitely.

Joe: You’ve got basic, which is some educational information. You’ve got premium, which is basic– This is the middle tier. This is what probably you’re–

Anton: That’s all the content. So if you want to learn again, boom here you go. You got it.

Joe: Then there’s the ultimate package, which like you said, will do everything for you. You get to learn, but then you understand what’s happening and the setup is being done for you. So you can understand, but you don’t have to sink a bunch of hours into the nitty-gritty of setting the site up and making sure, “Is this right? I think I understood this correctly, but I’m not sure.”.

Anton: Exactly.

Joe: And again, to hearken back to what we talked about earlier, this ultimate package is $4,997, one-fifth of what you paid to start your first business.

Anton: I know. It’s funny. People think about it different like you said too, and I get it. Even when I’m building a new website I’m like, “Can I start this thing for $200 bucks?” And it’s funny. I bought– The truck that I got with that delivery route was like a 1985 dodge something piece of crap that I paid to sit in traffic for two hours on the BQE every day, like that was my investment. And now people are like, “It’s going to cost me $29 a month for Shopify? That’s a ripoff.” Like, it’s powering your entire business. Relax.

Joe: Exactly. That’s something that I try to talk about a lot on this show because I was guilty of it starting out. I’m getting better about it now if I can pay $300 hundred bucks for something that’s going to save me even ten hours that is totally worth it for me. But you’re absolutely right, and it’s so funny. I quoted out a project for somebody, and they wanted an e-commerce site that would have 2,500 or 25,000– Some preposterous amount of products on it. But for simplicity’s sake, let’s say 40,000 products. And I quoted them at $20 thousand because it would just be WooCommerce where we’re sourcing the product somewhere else, and he’s like, “That’s expensive.” And I was like, “That is 50 cents a product.”  It’s interesting because people understand how expensive it is to build a building because they can see it get built. But with a website it’s like, this guy goes into his magic box and sets up a website, and it’s done. That’s cool. We’re coming up on time, and I’m enjoying this conversation. What are your plans for the future of DropShipLifestyle.com? Or maybe if you want to wax poetic a little bit, what do you think the future of drop shipping is?

Anton: That’s one thing– The future for Drop Ship Lifestyle, what’s cool about it is, again, it’s been around for five years. The reason it’s still around and the reason I still do so much for it, like I’m doing a coaching call today for it at 2:00 PM, but it’s because things always do change. It’s enjoyable for me because I do love the business side of it, both on the info business which would be Drop Ship Lifestyle, and on the physical product business. It’s fun for me. So the future is seeing where things go, seeing what works for us and then sharing it once I can confirm some data with our other businesses. It’ll keep evolving as the e-commerce site evolves, and the future of drop shipping is more about the future of e-commerce than drop shipping. Because again, drop shipping is one method of order fulfillment. I don’t think that even if– I don’t see any big difference there between e-commerce as a whole, but what I hope doesn’t happen, because we’ll see what the government does. If they have to break up Amazon or not. Because right now the type of stuff we sell,  knock on wood, it hasn’t been an issue with Amazon with prime because we don’t sell prime products. If you want to sell inexpensive stuff and have your own brand, that’s a great place to have your stuff too. With our stuff, it would never happen. In the future though, if it does, and there becomes a day that you’re moving into a new office, and everything’s going to be furnished from Amazon, and you’re going to place a $20k order on there and so is everybody else and they eat up the entire market, we’ll see if they get broken up or not. That might be five years from now, that might be ten years from now. It might never happen. But that’s the type of thing that would cause a big impact on sales. Same reason when Home Depot went everywhere, smaller retailers went out of business. Not happening yet, but again it could be a negative future for it.

Joe: That’s a really interesting take. Because we do see Amazon getting into– There’s the Amazon grocery service, Pantry I think it’s called, where you can get groceries on Amazon and if you live in the right place, you can get it in the same day. I live near Philadelphia now, and I’m indignant when something takes more than two days to get to me because I have same day shipping now. But that’s a good point. And they have prime wardrobe now which is the same sort of thing as Stitch Fix. They could conceivably monopolize the e-commerce market.

Anton: They’re trying to. That’s their goal.

Joe: Right. That’s so interesting. You’ve given us a ton of great advice, but I do want to ask my favorite question though. Which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Anton: Maybe. It might not be a secret based on the kinds of things we’ve been talking about, but one thing that made all the difference for me with growing our businesses was focusing on expensive products. It’s one reason also, even with Drop Ship Lifestyle, it’s why the course doesn’t cost $7. It’s why we make premium products there. The stuff we sell online also, the products we drop ship and the brands we sell for, it’s more of a premium price point. It’s more of something that honestly is going to give our customer a better experience, but it’s also going to allow us enough profit per sale to be able to pay for ads and to be able to have support people, to be able to invest time into growing these things. So, maybe it’s a secret maybe it’s not. But I would say for anybody, whatever you’re selling online, try to sell something– For us, our minimum is $200 hundred bucks that we look for. Ideally closer to $1,000 or more, and since we made that shift, it’s made a massive difference in how we can spend and how we can grow.

Joe: That’s great advice. Because like you said, if you’re going to be selling smaller stuff then maybe sell it through Amazon. Or people will likely buy it from Amazon anyway because their shipping overhead is a lot lower than what your shipping overhead would be. That is great advice, and that’s not just great advice for people who drop ship either. If you’re selling digital products, I for a long time underpriced my courses. I had to grind out each sale, and it wasn’t worth it for me. I’m raising the price of my courses, which allows me to spend more time creating good content, and it also communicates the value of those courses to the buyer. That’s another really important thing. If you’re selling a chair for $20 bucks or something like that, that’s probably a cheaply made chair. But if you’re selling it for a $1,000 bucks, people know I’m getting a good quality chair.

Anton: And it brings in the legitimate buyers. For Drop Ship Lifestyle, if I said “I’m going to teach you how I’ve been doing this stuff for the past decade and how I’ve built multiple eight-figure stores, and how I spend a million dollars on ads a year,” and it’s $599. People are going to be like, “OK this is a scam.” Right? Or instead, people are going to buy it thinking they’re going to get rich overnight. Instead, the people that invest in our program, at least 99% of them, they’re serious, and they’re trying to build something. That allows me to put like you said, more time into the content. It allows me to do things like– I do a monthly call with everybody, but a monthly webinar Q&A type thing. And if I sold something that was cheap you wouldn’t be able to do that. So everybody, go premium and give people what they want which is results, and more. They want more from you, so give it to them.

Joe: That’s great. And I will– Before I ask you where people can find you, there is one more anecdote I want to share with somebody who’s in my mastermind group. She was selling a very cheap or free membership, and they expected this from her because of where they were in their career. They weren’t ready to spend $2 thousand or $5 thousand on the proper learning material, but they still spent money and viewed it as “I need to get everything I can out of this.” And it wasn’t viable for her. That’s a good point about bringing in the legitimate buyers. Cool. Anton, thanks so much for your time. Where can people find you?

Anton: The best spot would be DropShipLifestyle.com. Everything is linked up off there. All the social pages, you want to contact me, we have the contact on there. But that’s where we’ve got all our links.

Joe: Awesome. I will include that and everything we talked about in today’s episode, which is a lot. It’s going to be lengthy show notes. Be sure to head over to HowIBuilt.it for those. Anton, thanks so much again for your time. I appreciate it.

Anton: Awesome, thank you.

Outro: Thanks so much to Anton for joining us today. I liked his thoughts about expanding his ability to sell, and how he built his website which is WordPress and a lot of stuff I use, which is cool. Then his future predictions for drop shipping, especially that of Amazon and how that’s the elephant in the room, and how that’s going to affect the future of drop shipping. He offers a lot of great advice, and I’m appreciative for that. I’m also appreciative of our sponsors, Plesk, Pantheon, and MailPoet. Be sure to check them out. For all the show notes you can head over to HowIBuilt.it/107. My question of the week for you is, have you been thinking about drop shipping or is this the first time you’ve ever heard of it? Let me know your thoughts at Joe@HowIBuilt.it, or on Twitter @jcasabona. If you liked this episode be sure to give us a rating and a review over an Apple podcasts. It helps people discover the show. Until next time, get out there and build something.