Ep. 92: Using Shopify to Create an Online Empire (Guest Aneka Grandison a.k.a Shopify Queen) [From Passion To Profits Series]
SHOW NOTES:
Follow or Contact Aneka: Instagram - Clubhouse - Linkedin
Visit her Shopify store: Website - Instagram
Snatch Queen: Instagram - Affiliate Program
Shopify: Website - Instagram - Linkedin - Print on Demand - Printful - Spocket - SEO Manager
Dropship Vendors: AliExpress - Alibaba
Other Mentions:
Create Human Connection with Clubhouse (guest Rita Goodroe): Episode 90
Authentic Marketing - Going Live of IG for 45 Days in a Row: Episode 91
The Fixx - One Thing Leads to Another
OMG Dolls: Official Website
Cafe Press: Website
Health Benefits of Sea Moss: Article
CONTACT HEATHER:
Contact Heather: Instagram - LinkedIn
Heather’s Passion to Profits Group Program: Register
Get the Balance Right Coaching: Website
Book a Discovery Call (via Zoom) - Schedule
Heather & Get the Balance Right - LinkTree
Zeitzwolfe Accounting: Website - Facebook
Ready to Profit from Your Passion? Click Here!
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Ready to Profit from Your Passion? Click Here! 〰️
In the first installment of our new series, From Passion to Profits, we are joined by royalty. All hail the majestic Queen of Shopify, Aneka Grandison! If you've been curious about getting into the eCommerce scene, you're in luck! Aneka gives us the scoop on starting a Shopify business with minimal cost and no physical inventory. Aneka has built her online empire using the power of Shopify. She shares her insider tips on how to create a six-figure eCommerce business. Not ready to get into retail, no problem! You can use Shopify to sell digital products like books and courses and services such as coaching.
Aneka is a passion-to-profits success story! After discovering a diet supplement that worked for her, she started selling it to the matches and was crowned the Snatch Queen. Over time she added more products and services as the foundation for her empire. Now she runs a profitable business and shares her knowledge, helping others do the same.
Many traditional barriers of starting a side hustle or building a sustainable business are virtuously erased with the web at our fingertips. The world of eCommerce hosts a profitable opportunity, open to anyone with internet access and determination.
With online retailing, you don’t have go through all of the red tape, or worry about renting a space - you don’t even have to know how to code! Because selling products as an online retailer looks vastly different from operating a traditional brick-and-mortar store.
The standard expenses that come with eCommerce versus operating a physical business can be substantial.
Through eCommerce, you’re also able to extend the reach of your business to a significantly larger audience; one that resides far beyond your current demographic.
But eCommerce isn’t just an option for strickly-online retailers! When done strategically, it can be a lucrative path for entrepreneurs in a variety of situations. Even those in service-based industries can add to their mix by selling something tangible. And if your business already has an online presence half the battle is won.
Whether you are a newbie to the eCommerce scene, or are a seasoned pro seeking fresh insight, you’re in luck! This episode, we’re joined by eCommerce Strategist and Shopify Expert, Aneka Grandison. Aneka is royalty in the Shopify world and has extensive experience in developing strategies that transform online retailers into six-figure online powerhouses.
THE INTERVIEW
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “Aneka Grandison, Welcome to Get the Balance Right podcast!”
Aneka Grandison: “Thank you for having me. I'm so excited. Oh my goodness.”
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “Oh, I'm so excited too! You’re another person I've met on Clubhouse. We've had some other queens on the show. I interviewed the Queen of Podcast Guesting. You are the Queen of Shopify”
Aneka Grandison: “Yes, I'm the Queen of Shopify.”
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “That is so cool. Most of my clients are in the service industry. I don't know anything about Shopify and I want to learn from the Queen. Tell me.”
Aneka Grandison: “Absolutely Heather. And guess what? That's the misconception that people have, just because you're in a service industry does not mean you cannot be on Shopify.”
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “You’re blowing my mind already. What is Shopify? It seems like a platform to sell things. I thought it was for products, but now you're saying you can sell services on Shopify. Is it like a website?”
Aneka Grandison: “Yeah basically an e-commerce platform that you could sell products or services on.”
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “Oh, okay. So it has it all hooked up with some kind of payment in there?”
Aneka Grandison: “Yeah, absolutely. Shopify has their own payment processor or you could actually attach PayPal. You could accept Stripe. It depends on what merchant you want to use, but they do have their own payment processor.”
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “Oh, okay. So they make it easy. Now what about as far as like collecting sales tax? Do you know anything about that or does that have to do with the payment processor that you're using?”
Aneka Grandison: It’s the payment processor through Shopify, but once you connect, they actually tell you what the processing fee is. And they got you, depending on what state you're in, you could actually put state collected taxes.
But I would say talk to your accountant. Okay? Talk to your accountant and make sure they tell you what is the percentage that you should be collecting. What state to collect taxes in on your platform.”
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “Okay. I'm glad that the queen told us this because I meet people and they're selling things online and they're not collecting sales tax and I'm like, ‘I think you've got a problem there’.
Okay. Well that's good. The platform makes it easy. It sounds like that's great. So people can't use that as a barrier like ‘I can't do this because of the tax’.
I guess you can make a webpage there and start selling things?”
Aneka Grandison: “Absolutely. And the thing too about Shopify, Heather, is that you don't need coding experience actually to build up your platform.
It's just an easy plug-in and go. They have so many resources that can help you plug in and make your Shopify. You don't need any coding experience to get your store up and running and be on Shopify. If you simply pay attention and go step-by-step, you could build it. And they have templates already in place, they have images already put in place. They got everything to make it easy for you to start a business.”
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “They already have images as well? That's cool. So then you can make it look like a regular website and everything? Okay. The average person is thinking, ‘Okay, yeah, that sounds great, but I don't want to have a bunch of inventory in my house’.
How do people sell through Shopify without having inventory? Do you use drop-ship? Tell us the secret. What's going on Shopify Queen?”
Aneka Grandison: “Oh my goodness. That's a great question, because guess what's on the rise now? Drop shipping. And Shopify has some great companies that they partner with, that you go to drop-ship it through on their platform.
For example, Sprocket is one of those companies. That's a US-based supplier. They got Alibaba, they got Ali Express, so many different companies that you can literally plug your store into and you can do drop-shipping. You can even do print on demand.
Print on demand is where you don't have the products on hand. You just put your company's logo, you design your t-shirts, your cups, your coffee mugs, any product that you want your brand to be on. And you can do a print on demand on Shopify and still don't have no inventory in hand and make some money.
So Heather you can put your products on Shopify. I need a Heather t-shirt, a Heather cup, a podcast cup.”
Heather Zeitzwolfe: “It kind of reminds me of like Cafe Press, like back in the day where you could design something a one-off.
Let's just back up for the people that don't know what drop-ship is. Can you explain what that is?”
Aneka Grandison: “Drop-ship is basically when you find a manufacturer that has products already and you just put their products on your website, on your platform. Once your customer gets an order, they're going to fulfill the item for you and ship it out to your customer.
So that's the great thing about drop-shipping. You don't have to have inventory on hand, so if you don't have it, that’s okay.
You don't need a lot of money to start. For some, you could literally start with $0. Just sign up your Shopify account, you get a 40 day trial after that at $29 a month, but that's it. You don't need the inventory. You don't have to buy a product in bulk and then you can start your business.”
Heather Zeitzwolfe: No, you're paying this monthly fee and distraught, defy take a certain percentage of every sale or does it depend on the dropship? How do they make.
Aneka Grandison: No Shopify don't take percentage of your sale. They do have a process and fee like a merchant processing fee.
Just like how Stripe has a processing fee. Shopify has a processing fee and then the $29 you pay a month. That's it
Heather Zeitzwolfe: really? Oh, wow. Okay. Now if you do the payment through some other thing, like. So you're still paying PayPal's fees and then Shopify
Aneka Grandison: fees on top of that only Shopify, a few bit of $29 a month.
Really?
Heather Zeitzwolfe: Wow. Yes. Make some serious money doing this. Okay.
Aneka Grandison: Absolutely. So
Heather Zeitzwolfe: this sounds way better than selling through
Aneka Grandison: Amazon. Well, it depends. Cause the thing about I'm going to be real with you. You have your business on Shopify. You have to drive your own traffic. You have to mark it. You have to have a strategy.
The good thing about Amazon is that they have their own traffic people. Thousands of people have gone to Amazon to search for products that you potentially have. So it really depends on what it is you're trying to do and how you're trying to build a brand. If you don't care about building a brand, you just want to be on Amazon.
You want to make so quick money. Definitely place to be, but Amazon do have a lot of fees too. So then you gotta be careful. You gotta make sure you do your research to see what is really the difference that's going to make for you and your. Do people
Heather Zeitzwolfe: have like two stores? Do they have their Shopify store?
And then they also sell through Amazon? Or do they usually just pick one or the other and just concentrate on.
Aneka Grandison: No. Absolutely. There's some people that do have different platforms that they sell on while this all on Shopify. So what are the things that make Shopify great is that they have a multichannel sales platform.
So you could actually be on Shopify, the same product you're selling on Shopify actually connected on Amazon, on Etsy, on eBay, on Google, on Pinterest. There's so many different platforms you could actually connect at one store to and get money. Multiple stores.
Heather Zeitzwolfe: Oh, my God. You're blowing my mind. Okay. Now, when you're doing that though, that's not one of those things where Amazon would do the fulfillment, then you're still doing the fulfillment, but you could be doing it through the drop ship.
And if my understanding is right, the drop ship guy is going to take care of all of the shipping and you don't even have to deal
Aneka Grandison: with that part. Absolutely. But guess what? You can still be on Shopify and you can have your product listed on Amazon and Amazon couldn't do the fulfilling for you. That's what you choose to do.
Heather Zeitzwolfe: You have to physically mail it to one of the.
Aneka Grandison: Yeah. The Amazon fulfillment center. Absolutely.
Heather Zeitzwolfe: Okay. So you'd get it from the vendor. Who's selling the merchandise in the warehouse price that you pay and then you send it to Amazon and then they pay you after they sell it. Is that how it works? Okay. Okay, so now I'm sure a lot of people are like, whoa, this sounds like it could be a pretty good side hustle.
It could turn into like a full-on deal selling this stuff. Okay. So we've got the drop ship as one of the opportunities that we can tap into. Then you mentioned like just selling the product. So what is that like print on demand. You mentioned like t-shirts and cups and things like that. I could do print on a man.
Shopify is teamed up with some company that has all this merchandise that you can print on. Is that how.
Aneka Grandison: Yeah, absolutely. The company you could use it either. Printful or it's a company called print on demand. You just connect your Shopify store, go to your app store and you just look those company up and you just literally just put your logo or your design and they'll print the products for you once your customer order, they're printing it and then ship it out for.
Wow.
Heather Zeitzwolfe: If let's just go back to the dropship thing as just an example, say for instance, I wanted to sell dolls, like I like freaky dolls. So find a drop-shipper that sells that kind of stuff. And could I order them from like different drop shippers or is there like a few that works with Shopify and what I find all this stuff and then make a page that has all the different dolls and they could be.
From different dropshippers that
Aneka Grandison: honestly you could do it either way have them, but I'll tell you this, you want to make it as easy, as simple as possible for yourself. And so you're not also confused. So I would say five, one company, especially the company integrates with Shopify. Your system would flow so much easily.
So for example, You find a company they integrate with Shopify. You literally could see all the products that they offer, the product, the description, the price, and everything will populate into your platform on Shopify. Now, if you decide, you know what, I don't want to work with a company that positive with Shopify.
I want to find people outside of that. It's just going to be a little bit harder because now you're going to have to ask that company. Can you send me the product pictures? Can you send me the product description? Everything yourself. You want to work
Heather Zeitzwolfe: smarter, not harder. So instead of having like some store, that's got like all kinds of crazy merchandise, what's the easiest way of getting into this, like the lowest money and time that you can get into this.
And then what your profit margin is going to be. Cause like, if I could be selling these dolls, I might be paying. Wholesaler like tons of money to get
Aneka Grandison: it for me. Yeah. That's one of the downside to ship. And when you do drop shipping, because of suppliers do all the work for you, they store on all the products.
You don't have a overhead, they're gonna charge a little bit more. Instead of you buying them book, you may buy it in bulk, for example, $2, right? But you got to buy 500, 200 pieces now with the supplier, who's doing drop ship and they may say we could drive ship before you, but instead of $2, you gotta pay us $10,
Heather Zeitzwolfe: depending on what merchandise you're selling.
Maybe you do want it. In your house and then you could just send it out. Yeah, absolutely. What do you recommend? And if it was like smaller items that maybe like items or something
Aneka Grandison: like that. Number one mistake people make with dropshipping is that they just go out there and start putting random products on their website because it's free to list the product, right?
So, but you want to start with small product like a Tronic products do very well. Kitchen appliance do very well. You want to study the market and see what the trends are, but typically like tronics kitchen, beauty, seasonal items. Those do very well. Try to stay away from like a large. Causing like heavy shipping, because then that's going to cut it to a profitable margin.
Cause now you got to charge the client for more shipping. So definitely try to stick to easy products, easy part of your show through Facebook, right? You ever noticed how they have all these different ads and they're like, oh, do you have an issue with your garage? And then we have just one button to fix it.
That's like a drop ship of products. It just gives you an easy fix to your solution. Those products, all the best products to drop ship with easy explanation.
Heather Zeitzwolfe: Your website is called snatch queen. So I've got to ask you about that name. Where did that name?
Aneka Grandison: You know, three years ago, I had a lot of health to choose.
I have to have surgery. I have fibroids. I was 203 pounds and I lost 46 pounds on five months. And that's how my company got started. So I started out actually my ebook. I put on my recipes, my diet plan inside the book. And because I snatched my waist in like a size eight, and then I'm a queen. I just called myself snatch queen.
But when the middle of rebrand and I'm growing, if that was three years
Heather Zeitzwolfe: ago, On your website, you are selling sea Moss. I'm a vegan. I saw that the products are vegan on there. What does CMOs, what does that do is what you're selling mostly? Is that, is it a diet type thing? Is that maybe I needed to get them.
Aneka Grandison: Oh, you definitely just get to see my seamless has so much health benefits for you and it is a plant. So it is vegan friendly. You can take it. One of the things for me personally see, must have done for me is help with my weight, but health suppress your appetite. So when you suppress your appetite, less than you can lose weight, but there's other clients that I have done for taking it for years, I said it helped with their blood pressure, their diabetes, or they slowly start weaning off all their medication.
So it has a lot of. Benefit, especially when COVID started, see mascot so popular, right? It helped with your immune system. It helps keep you healthy. And it has all the minerals and vitamins that your body needs. So it's just like supplemented instead of taking pills, you take a plant
Heather Zeitzwolfe: base. No. Nice. Okay. So what people want CMOs, they can go to snatch clean.
The website and until it gets rebranded for your products that are in your site, are those drop shipped or are you holding all this merchandise into your house? Or is it a mixture? I wish
Aneka Grandison: I could show you my garage. I have both those products on hand. Oh, okay. Yes, I have all the products.
Heather Zeitzwolfe: Yeah. I would imagine that some of the stuff that you're selling, if you're selling supplements and beauty products, sometimes those don't have a real heightened.
So to get more profit in that profit margin, you probably have to hold the merchandise rather than paying the drop shippers.
Aneka Grandison: I haven't really went full force. Her to drop shipping is because I like to brand my own products. I like to put my touch on it when you do drop ship, but you lose all of that.
Like they just ship your product. The way they want, unless you pay them extra to put your logos or to put your packages and material in it. So that's one of the things that I kind of struggled with in the beginning, why I didn't want it to do drop shipping offhand, but now that I'm established, I'm actually going to open up a drop-ship and still, so I probably have two stores running, a drop shipping store and a person who's top of my drop shipping store would only have one product again.
Oh,
Heather Zeitzwolfe: okay. This drop shipper can actually put your logo on it. So how does that work? Like email them a PDF and it's a sticker and they put it on and they charge you. Like, how does it
Aneka Grandison: work exactly how you explain it? You just ask the company, not all company offers that option, but you could definitely.
Because you got to think about it. It doesn't make sense to do printer for one item. So they may charge you to say, Hey, you know, we could print and we can keep your logo on hand for you and customize a product, but it may be an extra $20, maybe actual $50. Now you're going to have to ask yourself, remember, you're already paying a high cost.
To drop, ship that product as a work that that's going to eat into your profit margin again. So there's things that you have to think about now would say this for brand new people that are getting into business. That's one to test the water. Dropshipping is a great way to test the water, find a product you like, put it out there and see if your audience get attached to it.
And if your audience get attached to it, you're making money. You could always go back and start buying those products and books. So you're not wasting
Heather Zeitzwolfe: money. Let's just back up to the whole drop shipping. Your profit margin. There must be a few things that go into this calculation of how much profit you're actually going to get from these products.
Are there places out there where you can easily calculate, like what the shipping is going to be like little calculators? Does Shopify have something like that? That'll allow you to see like how much money you're actually going to make from a product or you have to do it on your own.
Aneka Grandison: That's a good question.
Cause there's two folds who as the answer, right? So if you do plug yourself into a drop shipping company on Shopify, for example, right. Like Spock it, that's a great company. They're European based and US-based so when you plug Spock it into your Shopify, so they actually have a listing of different. They tell you how much it costs and what's the estimated retail price.
And it tells you how long the shipping is and how much the shipping costs. So you can see your profit margin right there. Now, if you don't go inside of Shopify, you find like a company that's outside of Shopify, you're dealing with a company. You're going to have to ask the agent those questions, you know, how much has the product, how much has the potential shipping from my house to your house?
Just so you have an idea how long it's going to take. You're ever going to have to do that more intensive research. But if you do use the Shopify platform, which I'm hitting hinted, use it, it's going to make your life so much easier. But the second part to that is this Shopify. I do have a space where you could literally list your products, right?
You're going to put the retailer. They do have a sexual list as price per good. And you could actually put the price per good right there. And that system is going to tell you what your profit margin
Heather Zeitzwolfe: is. Perfect. They make it easy. That's great. And you mentioned, I had heard of Alibaba before. And then what was, you
Aneka Grandison: said Sprockets, AliExpress.
AliExpress. So
Heather Zeitzwolfe: those are, they're already connected with Shopify. So you can choose like, say you were looking for. I'm just going to say bamboo steamers. Cause I use bamboo steamers. So like you put in bandwidth and it'll tell you who's selling those, I guess. And then they give you a suggested retail price.
If you want to try to raise it, but they're telling you what the competition
Aneka Grandison: is paying. Basically. I did the research for you. Absolutely. Wow.
Heather Zeitzwolfe: Okay. Then you got that. Like the whole elephant in the room is of course Amazon where people have prime and they don't have to pay for shipping.
Aneka Grandison: How do you come up with that?
Let's let's go back now because Amazon has changed it. I don't know if people noticed, but Amazon is not shipping in two days no more. And they do charge you cause you're paying for that subscription and the subscription. Shopify
Heather Zeitzwolfe: queen. That is very true, but I'm, I'm a movie fan and you know, they get me cause they got the, the movies that comes with it.
So you got to entice people to want to come to your site. Here's the thing, Shopify queen. Okay. I, because. Scammers out there. I sometimes I'm like reluctant to buy from someone's website because I don't know who they are. And one time I wanted to get like a mini pool for my backyard. And on Amazon, it was the summer.
It was like during COVID and they were so expensive. And I found this website where I could buy these pools. They had all the videos, they had the pictures, it looked completely legit. I bought the pool and then figured out. Paid for, it was the name of the person. It wasn't an LLC or anything. I'm like, I just got duped.
Anyways. I called my credit card company, got everything taken care of. Now I'm a little nervous about buying online. So I
Aneka Grandison: understand that completely. What are things you got to look for to see if the site having a trusted badges, always pay with a credit card, not a debit card, no cash and PayPal. No. I just pay with a credit card.
Cause everything goes wrong. You could always just call your company and get your money back. What you could do too, is look up. But the company name, if you type a snatch queen, I'll pop up on Google. I be on so many different places. I can't be scabbing if I may 10 or 20 different places. And then your Bizible conduct too, as registered check to see if that business registered in the state.
And if they're not registered in the state, then I wouldn't shop with them because that means they're not taking their business serious. Is there
Heather Zeitzwolfe: anything on a Shopify page that would be. Certified by Shopify or something where people
Aneka Grandison: would know it's legit. If you scroll to the bottom of most Shopify store, you're going to be able to say powered by Shopify.
You'd be able to see that on most of those Shopify. So now there's some companies that may get there's edit out. So that may be a pro and con, but reach out to them, send email. They may have one 800 number, call them if they don't have contact information, no way to get in contact with them. I wouldn't shop.
Heather Zeitzwolfe: You mentioned we could sell services on Shopify. Can we put videos like video testimonials? And if we do a video, we upload an MP4 or does it link to
Aneka Grandison: YouTube? How does it work? You can do an MP4. You can upload it, or you could connect you to videos on there. Be careful when you're uploaded videos. Um, and Lord pitchers to your website because it will slow your website down.
Now you can definitely list your service on Shopify. For example, you want to book in a consultation, their booking app that you could put on Shopify, Alicia service on there. If you have digital products like eBooks courses, workshops, like I do, you can definitely list that on Shopify too, along with your price tag.
Just have the platform there for anyone who wants to use it. So you do have those options is definitely there.
Heather Zeitzwolfe: Oh, wow. This is really good stuff. I work with a lot of creatives and creatives love to do things on Etsy. What are your thoughts on Etsy? And you mentioned cooking Etsy and Shopify. How does that work?
Aneka Grandison: You could definitely have an Etsy store by yourself, like you said, or you could actually have your Shopify store like I do. And then I integrated my Shopify store with Etsy. So the same product, like you see on my website, the see MAs the e-books, um, on Etsy. So you could definitely integrate them. You do have to be careful because remember Etsy have their own fees.
So X is going to charge you a separate fee for my Shopify charging. I'm debating about this. I'm really undersheriff about the because Etsy fees are more than Shopify. Yes. They're between their processing fee and merchant fee. I calculated last night, I was up to like two in the morning. Cause I'm like looking at my numbers on X I'm like, wait, what's going on.
I said what at 8%, 8% all together between all the fees? Yes. So just do your research and see if it really worth it to be an Etsy. And what are the things about Etsy? I just want to share with you guys that it's just like Amazon, you have tons and tons of other sellers as solid as Sam product gets solid.
So if I go to Etsy right now, look for, see MAs. 50,000 people selling to miles and it becomes like a muscle price competition, right? So people look at what your should I buy? Should I buy this and stuff like that one? And they may go the cheapest person because your merchant or your wholesale is charging you more.
You may not be able to compete. So you really got to decide what products do you want to put on Etsy? Try to be creative with your products. But yeah, at CPS is modern Shopify and I've kind of bumped out about that, but we've all worked around it. Wow.
Heather Zeitzwolfe: So if you do. Crafts and one-off type things you could actually sell through Shopify.
Aneka Grandison: Yep. You could do it through Shopify or do do Etsy, but if you do it on Shopify, guess what? You can just send somebody to your platform. They only going to see your products, or if they're Google you, depending on how good your SEO is, don't be a website like we're landed on the first page of Google for our workshops or different things like that.
Our competitive, just type of scent. We pop up on the first page. So you'd be able to just go purchase our products. So it depends on how well you have your SEO done for your website.
Heather Zeitzwolfe: We've had some SEO experts on the show, but we did not talk about Shopify at all. So is there any kind of key things for SEO when it comes to Shopify?
Is there something. That can absolutely ahead of everybody else. W
Aneka Grandison: what are the absolutely, because the thing is you don't want to have to keep paying for traffic. You have to really get your SEO done, getting somebody professional to do it. Or Shopify has some apps that you can actually plug into your Shopify store to help you do your own SEO.
One of the apps I've been giving you to your show had there. Okay. I'll give you guys. Okay. What are the apps that you can use for SEO is called SEO manager. Okay. Just go to your Shopify store type an SEO manager. And it tells you literally how to do your SEO, your website with the key places on Shopify to put those keywords that you want to.
For on Google. So customers cause searching, for example, they wouldn't start to see mosque, gummies wholesale. We're going to pop up. Right? So whatever your product is, you want people to be able to go to Google and search and find you. So you definitely have to work on your SEO for Shopify. Wow.
Heather Zeitzwolfe: That's so cool.
Okay. Well, while you're dropping all kinds of value bombs here, you had mentioned something about like an overseas kind of drop ship. We live in a crazy world where things get caught overseas. We may not be able to get to that product when you sell from Shopify, if you are picking a drop shipper, do you know for sure that those products are sitting in America when you go to sell them, or could they be sitting overseas waiting to get through.
Yeah,
Aneka Grandison: it depends on a company you work with. So if you go to Alibaba, AliExpress nine times and 10, that's going to be international. If you go to spot pocket USA, that's a US-based company, Europe based company. So then you don't have that issue, but it depends. I mean, most of these companies. Dave, I'm going to tell you, they're going to say we're shipping from XYZ.
Oh, it ship it from this place, but this is why you gotta be an educated business owners. You gotta know the key questions to ask. And I just want to share with you guys, somebody key question to ask when it comes to drop shipping, what is the price of the product? What is your shipping cost? How long it's going to take you to ship with this product is going to be one.
We've going to be two weeks. Is it going to be a month? Okay. Because most customers, they don't want to wait that long. How often do you stock this product? How are we going to commute? How long it's going to take you to ship the product to my customer. What is your package? You know, these are the things that the packages damaged that reached the customer.
Are you going to replace it typically when you're a business owner, you have it in bulk. You know, I already know I'm responsible, but how's your drop ship supply going to handle that? This is really, really important because there's a lot of people who do drop shipping. They get excited. Cause it's almost free to start, but they end up in the red, they got a lot of returns.
Okay. Cause the customer don't have the product.
Heather Zeitzwolfe: Well, how does that work with the payment? So you get a payment from the customer and then you pay the drop shipper and then maybe the drop shipper never gets the product. He thinks he has it, but he doesn't have it.
Aneka Grandison: And
Heather Zeitzwolfe: you have to refund the customer. Okay.
Aneka Grandison: Yup. Yup. And then maybe the dropship, a company may have your money.
You still get your money back. So you gotta be very careful. This is why I really highly suggest use the companies that in with Shopify use a US-based company. If you can, especially right now. With the pandemic, the war it's really stressful time. I'm even having some delays because some of our products do come from international could be a nightmare.
You got to have money to play with when you're doing business with international, because they lose your package. You can't find this package, but your customer is waiting on an order, you know, do I'm not going to cancel. And I have an order with another vendor. It's just so much that really goes behind getting this business done.
You're going to do drop shipping, save yourself the headache. And find the US-based supply. I do have vendor lists though. Thousands plus vendors you guys need. Wow.
Heather Zeitzwolfe: This whole idea of kind of holding the wholesale items on hand, like you're doing, you're putting your labels on them. I would imagine when you buy from the wholesaler that if you're buying them in bulk, you'll get a better price when you buy them in bulk.
Is that one of the benefits? Of course, you have to plunk down the money ahead of time, but is that one of the reasons why you do it then?
Aneka Grandison: Yeah. That's one of the benefits. Sometimes you can't get a better deal buying it in bulk. Depends on who you're working with. That's the advantage. And then you get to rebrand it the way you want.
Then you have the product on hand, so you have more control. So you can tell the customer a really good then like, okay, I'm not shipping. It's going to be one or two weeks or has got to be one week while you're doing drop shipping. It's like your business in another company's hand. And the customer don't know that they think it's your business.
They don't know that you do drop shipping. Right. So you're going to. Playing into doing things really go wrong. That's out of your control.
Heather Zeitzwolfe: It was a drop shipper. Wasn't me. Yeah. Okay.
Aneka Grandison: Remember they don't know we had dropped you for it because they ordered from you.
Heather Zeitzwolfe: Yeah, exactly. You're putting labels on things. When you think about companies that you buy for him, like it's, I'm just going to say it's flour. Like somebody buys flour from one. And then they put their label on it and then another guy gets a flat from the same guy.
He puts his sticker on it. So when you're ordering, does it come blank? Are you repackaging things and then putting your sticker on it? Or how does that work?
Aneka Grandison: It depends on a company that. So gigabyte and wholesale, like I do our product come with no labels whatsoever. All I have is just the ingredients. I know we were packaging with our company label and the ingredients and stuff.
So it really depends. There's some people now who may buy it in bulk. What was on the, I have done that too, where I have the manufacturer. I send them my labels. I tell them the specs. I tell me greedy is what I want and it customizing creative for me. But of course, again, that costs more because they're going to say customized before.
A quantity of a bunch of pieces or a thousand pieces. So it really just depends on your budget, but you can do it either way. I see
Heather Zeitzwolfe: people that are inventing things and selling them on
Aneka Grandison: Shopify. There was a gentleman on clubhouse too, that I've met that does nice. And he got them customized the way they want.
And he's selling on the platform together. There's a lot of companies, you know, there's a lot of large corporations like Kylie Jenner. The only Shopify red bull is on Shopify. NBA is on that platform. There's different packages. So talk about, they have the 29 now we'll play up for like basic business like me and you were just starting out, but then they have those larger plan for large corporation, like the Kylie Jenner and red bull and MBA and their monthly fees was a lot more, but they've got a lot more surface.
Heather Zeitzwolfe: You're rocking this. You're the queen of Shopify and you're on the $29 plan. So
Aneka Grandison: really that's all you need. We've made six Biggers in eight months. I want to shop with five with the same plan.
Heather Zeitzwolfe: Wow. That is really awesome. Well, now you've got so many cool things going on, so it's not just the CMOs. You mentioned that you have downloadable PDFs and it's training courses on Shopify.
Is that tell us about what you have
Aneka Grandison: on your. Oh, man. I got so much. So what are the things I try to do? My website is make sure that it's well-rounded right. You know how people say, oh, you need seven sources of income. You need multiple sources of income, but guess what you can do to one business, you don't have to have all these different businesses.
So what I did is create a product around everything. So we have our retail. Of our products where customers could buy one single piece that we do have our products in bulk. When we do wholesale those products for other entrepreneurs that want to start a business, but they may not have the money to order 50 pieces of 60 pieces from larger corporation.
They could order like Tempe. Of our products and they could be able to go back and rebrand and sell it. Then we have eBooks and eBooks around Shopify. I run a Steve MAs, you know, around education and weight loss. And now we have our courses and our courses around C minus Shopify, weight loss. And that was from that.
We have. Everything again, comes all together at one place. Wow. That is
Heather Zeitzwolfe: so cool. Okay. I'm like thinking about all these ideas. I got swimming around in my head,
Aneka Grandison: but you have to have a unit to get on it and we do have a Shopify DIY ebook. And I'll tell you this ebook makes it so easy for you to build your own store.
It literally in college, I call it Shopify for dummies because that's how simple it is. Like a 10 year old could build a store and isn't colors, bold letters. Step two step three, and you could build your store within if you're really serious about business one day, you could build your store and have enough to run.
Heather Zeitzwolfe: Okay. So, and that is on your website.
Aneka Grandison: That's on my website and the tab that says Shopify. So on my website, there's a tab that just says wholesale. Dennis says Shopify, you know, different sections. And once you click on it, you'll be able to see all the Shopify eBooks and on the courses and different things.
Heather Zeitzwolfe: What about Facebook ads? I didn't even ask you about that. Do you even get involved with that
Aneka Grandison: or? Oh yeah. When I first started my business, I got to be honest because of budget. I was just more posting sharing, doing marketing that didn't require me to pay. Then I got into Facebook ads and Facebook ads.
You make ton of money. We have videos that went viral with Facebook ad, but then the pandemic. And then there's a lot of changes that happen with Facebook ads. So it's just a little bit different. Now you can make money still with Facebook ad, but you could also lose a lot of money at the same time. I mean, organic market works get all clubhouse.
It's a great platform to be on. You can make ton of money on com house and that had to do paid advertisement all the time. But yeah, Facebook definitely works. Take times works. Instagram works, Google ads. Patrons ad words. It's just a matter of where do you want to be? What is your budget and how much money are you willing to lose before you could get?
Well, well,
Heather Zeitzwolfe: thank you so much for being on the show today. So people can find you snatch queen you're on clubhouse. Do you have a clubhouse room or you appear in other people's rooms?
Aneka Grandison: Yeah. I'm going to come house at least five days a week and try to do at least one room. You can definitely find me.
Grandson, all clubhouse, Nika or Shopify queen on clubhouse. If you were to find me on Facebook, you don't find me your Facebook to my name. Uh, Nika. Greg said he just type me in. Timing on Google app top up. That's a big cohesive branding. Keep your name the same across the board and people find you.
Heather Zeitzwolfe: Yeah, I got to learn from you.
Okay. Oh my God. This has been so awesome. Thank you so much. Thank
Aneka Grandison: you for having me. I had a really great time. I thank you so much for having me. Thank you for inviting me. And your podcast stuff. I love, I was looking at your Instagram. Instagram is so beautiful. And I was looking at, does she have any merged?
Like, where's her, like, I would love to see your bright pink hair out and a tee shirt, you know, something with just slug. And I was like, oh my gosh, she's so pretty. If you need help, let me know. I get you some resources so we can get this done. Cause you already have a fan base. People love who you are.
They just buy it.
Heather Zeitzwolfe: Well, I can sell. Yes, we can put my own logo on it and the t-shirts and all that stuff. It's just a matter of putting your name on it.
Aneka Grandison: And two seconds, your name, your logo, your, uh, phrases. I think do phrases are really good catch phrases,
Heather Zeitzwolfe: catchphrases. Oh, wow. I say, see, on the flip, the flip side, thank you so much for, for all of your knowledge.
This has been amazing. Amazing.
