[00:00] Starting a dropshipping store used to mean weeks of setup before you could sell a single thing. But you can now get almost all of that setup done with AI. So in this video, I'll show you the tools that build the site for you, find the products that are already selling, and then place the supplier orders without you.
[00:15] The store itself used to take me a week, and it comes down to two answers and a handful of clicks now. Everything in this first part runs on Build Your Store, and the link is in the description if you want to follow along. You hit Build My Free Store, sign in with Google,
[00:27] from there it's Claim My Store, then Claim Store on the tab that opens, and it drops you back on Build Your Store. It opens on the niche, and I'm going with fashion and apparel. I pick a niche off two things, whether I'd still want to read about it in a year,
[00:39] and whether there's enough margin in it to survive paid ads, because you're writing product descriptions and ad copy for this thing long after the novelty has gone. And if you're bored of the niche, you'll stop opening the store before it ever makes you money.
[00:51] Fashion and apparel clears both for me, because people buy it in every month of the year. The same customer comes back for a second and a third item, And clothing is the easiest thing in the world to shoot an ad around, because somebody just wears it. It also means I can put my own designs on this stuff later, and that's where this whole build ends up.
[01:06] With the niche locked in, it moves on to the look, and it generates six banner options for the homepage, and you keep two. They're presets on the free build, so you're picking two off a list, and there's no design work in it. Activate My Store is the next one, and that's where Shopify puts its offer in front of you.
[01:21] Three days free, and then a dollar a month for the first three months. That dollar is an intro price, so the real bill starts in month four. I mention it because month four is roughly when a store has any traffic on it. So that's the month people quit, right as the cost turns up and the sales haven't yet.
[01:36] Subscribe on Shopify, then back on the Build Your Store tab. It's I'm Done and Continue, and two versions of the build are waiting, a free one and a professional one-product store at a one-off $97. I'm taking the free one because the paid version swaps the 10 products for one hand-picked one,
[01:51] and I'd rather choose my own with the tool I'm about to show you. So it's free beginner store, continue with the basic store, confirm the skip, then customize my store, and it goes off and builds it. It works through that in the background on their best templates while you carry on straight into adding your product.
[02:05] At the bottom of that same page, there's register to AutoDS. AutoDS is an all-in-one platform that helps you run and automate a dropshipping business. From product research and product importing to order fulfillment and store management.
[02:18] And that's the second half of this. So I'll sign up with the same Google account and pick Shopify as the selling channel. The plans are priced on how many products you can list, so I'll take the smallest one. There's no point paying for a thousand listing slots when the store is empty and you've got no traffic yet.
[02:32] And moving up a plan later takes about 10 seconds. The AutoDS trial is a separate 99 cents for its own three days, with full access to whatever plan you pick. So both accounts are open, and what's left is finding out whether the store the AI built is any good.
[02:46] And the homepage comes up with both banners on it. Under them, there's a collection block with all 10 preloaded products in it. then a review section, then a footer with the policy pages already written into it. It looks like a store that's been trading for months.
[02:58] What the free build does not give you is the copywriting, so treat every word on those pages as a first draft It doesn do your shipping setup either so open the policy pages and check the shipping terms match what you actually going to promise the customer Shopify will regenerate any of them off a template and do that before you spend anything
[03:15] on ads because a refund policy is the first thing a payment provider looks for and the first thing a buyer checks when they've never heard of you. When I do come back to the copy, the homepage headline goes first since it's the line that decides whether anybody scrolls past the banner
[03:28] at all. The other thing I should be straight about is that none of this brings anybody to the store. Traffic is still the job, and everything AI has done here is take that week of building off the front of it so your time goes into customers instead. The store can take an order today,
[03:42] and once somebody gets there, those product pages are what decides whether they buy. All 10 of those products were picked off two words, fashion and apparel, so they come off, and whatever goes up instead has to be selling right now. And there are four places to go looking for proof of that.
[03:56] AutoDS is doing the product research and placing every supplier order from here on. It's the sponsor of this video, and the link is the second one in the description. You get to it with the exit button top left of the theme editor, then apps down the sidebar.
[04:08] That pops open a search with your installed apps listed, three of them, and AutoDS is the one to click. That one is fine for day-to-day, but AutoDS themselves say to make product changes on the platform, so I'll hit access AutoDS platform at the top of the page and work from the full thing.
[04:23] There are four ways to find something to sell in there. Marketplace, hand-picked products, ads, spy, and trending products, and Marketplace is the one included with every plan. I'll click Marketplace in the sidebar, and it's a search box with filters on it, so you narrow it down.
[04:37] And for this store, that's clothing, shoes, and jewelry, then men, then clothing, then hoodies and sweatshirts. The price range I set to $30 to $100. Under $50 is impulse territory, where somebody buys off the ad and the photo, and above it, they read the whole product page before they commit.
[04:51] Shift from goes to China, and that's the cheaper side and the slower one. So sorting by fastest shipping pulls the workable suppliers up. The sweatshirt I take has a plain design on it, and the product page gives me the item cost,
[05:03] the total orders priced, and 11 days to the buyer. The order count is the number I read first, because a product with hundreds of orders behind it has already been tested by hundreds of other people at their own expense. It beats anything I'd guess at from a photo, and it costs me nothing.
[05:17] But it's the weakest of the four signals I'm about to show you. With the size and color set, import as draft and enhance with AI, writes the title and the description off the product data already in AutoDS and drops the product into my draft and Save and Import puts it through.
[05:32] That click doesn't cost you anything. The import itself is always free. Credits only come in if you want title optimization or title and description optimization. And what those cost depends on the product. And it won't pull in the supplier reviews or the truck badges.
[05:46] Over on the products page, the media image, the variants and sizes, and the meta fields all go on by hand. That review block on the homepage stays empty until you bolt on an app like judge.me and then it saves more actions preview to see the finished page.
[06:00] AutoDS is about $27 and Shopify is a dollar and the product itself only costs you anything once a customer buys one So that a sweatshirt with a real order count behind it on the store with the title and the description already written But an order count only tells me the thing sold at some point and it the most indirect evidence any of those four tools will give me The other
[06:20] three flip that, and the proof a product sells turns up attached to it. All three are inside the product finding hub, an add-on at about $15 a month, on top of whatever plan you're on. Handpicked is the list the AutoDS team choose themselves, and every product in there comes
[06:35] with their research already done, filtered to more than 100 orders in clothing, shoes, and jewelry, and a $15 to $30 cost, that leaves me three sweatshirts. Hovering the graph in the top right of each one gives me the profit I could make, the
[06:47] most anyone else is charging, the orders, and the competitor counts, with the engagement and saturation scores underneath. Saturation is the score I actually care about, because a high one means loads of other stores are already running ads on that exact product.
[07:00] That means I'm bidding against all of them for the same clicks, and paying more for every one I win. That's how a store loses money on a product that technically sells, and it's the most common way a first dropshipping store fails. The competitor pricing tells me the ceiling before I've spent anything finding out.
[07:15] So if they're all at $42, mine at $49 needs a reason for the extra $7, and I need that reason before I write the ad. So it's import and enhance with AI, and save and import. Same two clicks as the marketplace wants.
[07:27] AdSpy comes at it from the other end, because the first thing up there is a competitor's ad, the one they've got running for a product right now. It pulls real Facebook and TikTok ads. So a search for sweatshirts with a like set between 100 and 1,000 gets me products on the way up before the market has caught them.
[07:43] Filter to ads with a product linked and an interaction rate above 5%. And every card gives you the likes, the comments, and how long that ad has been running. The runtime is the one I read because a losing ad gets switched off inside a week.
[07:55] So anything still up four months later has been paying for itself the whole time. Somebody else has already spent the money proving that product sells, and it costs me nothing to watch them do it. Trending products sorts on how the engagement moved over the last week,
[08:08] so that list is what's taking money on TikTok right now. There's no team vetting that list the way they vet handpicked, so it's the riskiest of the three in here, and it gets the smallest test budget I'm willing to lose. Handpicked gave me the second one, and ads by and trending are two more lists I can pull from without guessing.
[08:23] The sweatshirt from Marketplace is still 11 days out, and that's the number sitting on the page while somebody decides. You can put that supplier out to tender without hunting down a replacement yourself. Sourcing requests is further down the sidebar,
[08:35] and on that page, you select products and hit sourcing requests again next to the sweatshirt, which hands it to the AutoDS team, who come back with quotes in around 15 minutes. A request off the products tab costs one auto order credit,
[08:47] and once the product has actually sold, you can send that one from the orders page for free. What comes back is the details with prices, delivery times, and ratings on them, and which of those matters most depends entirely on the product.
[08:59] Delivery time is worth paying for on anything you're running ads to, because a slow parcel turns into a refund, a chargeback, and a review, and you've already paid for the click that started it. Handling then takes three or four days to get the item into their warehouse, so it's
[09:12] five or six days all in before the thing even ships and the transit time to your buyer sits on top of that so i take the slower end of that quote when i put a date on the product page and if i miss it i refunding somebody i already paid to get there a quote that comes in under the 11 days door-to-door
[09:27] is worth the switch and if none of them do i keep the supplier i've got once the quote's in link product puts it straight onto the listing that's already in the store so the 11 days becomes a choice between real quotes. And the AutoDS team did all the hunting. Every order reaches that
[09:42] supplier through me and a keyboard, one at a time. That keyboard stays in my hands until there's money in two separate places. Orders is the next tab along, and buy credits is top right of it. Auto order credits pay for the automation itself, so that's it placing the order with the supplier
[09:56] and sending the tracking number back to the customer. Every new account gets five free, and after that, they come in packages, with the bigger ones working out cheaper per credit. Directly above buy credits, there's the flag icon for your wallet,
[10:08] and that balance is what pays the supplier for the product and the shipping. You need money in both of them because the wallet can be full, and the order will still sit there waiting on a credit that costs less than a dollar. Once they're funded, the supplier order goes out the moment the customer pays,
[10:22] and every hour you'd have spent placing it yourself is an hour the parcel isn't moving. At two orders a day, you could handle that yourself, and at 20, you'd be doing admin every evening on the one job that makes you nothing.
[10:34] Returns run through the same balance. So when a customer sends something back and you refund them, AutoDS credits your balance once the supplier has refunded AutoDS. There are limits once you're letting AutoDS fulfill the orders for you, and that's the setting the next part runs on.
[10:48] Because returns close 30 days after delivery, and if your return rating hits 5%, every new request gets denied automatically, funded, and the automation has everything it needs from me. But every product on there is one any other store can list tomorrow and undercut me on.
[11:02] There's one way around that, and it has a catalog of its own. Print on Demand is down the sidebar, and it's where a sweatshirt out of that catalog becomes the base for my own design. So I pick the same style I'm already selling, upload the file, and nothing gets printed until somebody buys it.
[11:16] That changes what the store actually is, because reselling somebody else's product means competing on ad spend, and selling your own means competing on the product. The catalog runs from clothes and decorations through to things for the house.
[11:28] So the same file goes onto a hoodie or a mug without me holding any stock at all. Print on demand only runs with fulfilled by auto DS switched on. And the printing comes off the same wallet. Nobody else can copy that one because nobody else has the design on it.
[11:41] Then it's back into Shopify to audit the whole thing properly. And the phone icon in the theme editor gives me the version your buyers are looking at. So that's where the product images and the buy button get checked first. Grouping what I've listed into collections is the next job.
[11:55] And Shopify's own bundles app is free off the app store. So my design and a plain sweatshirt can go out to the same buyer as one order instead of two. So an order comes in and every step after that click belongs to someone else. And the design on that sweatshirt is the one bit I had to bring myself.
[12:10] Yours goes on a different niche and three days is long enough to get it built and listed. Open AutoDS through the second link in the description and import your first product today. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one.