What our top performer wants you to know

Starting off

Hi guys, Jake (ssl) has asked me to help you guys along with your dropshipping journeys, as I’ve had a good win using Drobo so far. Thought I’d post a bit of a guide / some tips I’ve found after using Drobo since April of this year. Let me know if this helps you out or if you have questions, you’re welcome to put them below or PM me. Fair warning I ain’t no guide writer and I’m sure I’ve missed a lot so you’re welcome to ask me what you want. I run this from ebay.com.au but pretty much US is the same except we basically have no listing limits here.

As you can see, these are my sales since April. It’s only really taken off since May. So you’re seeing about 3.5 months of data there.

At current, it’s 5–10 orders a day constantly with most orders netting me between $10–25 in profit each. AUD ($7–$17 USD). As I’m writing this, I’ve just finished 5 orders for the day making $52 AUD (36 USD).

I hope that what I write encourages you on your journey.

If you’ve JUST begun your account I’d start small, posting your way up so not to trigger anything suspicious from Ebay. For your first week scale up to 50 listings a day by the end of the week. Dropshipping rewards patience so don’t rush it and risk a ban. All of Ebay’s bans / warnings / suspensions are run completely off AI algorithm so we want to avoid that.

Set yourself up a freight policy, returns policy and a brief store bio / banner. Maybe work on setting up a markdown sale. (Marketing → Discounts) I have running 5% sales running pretty constantly. It’s good for site metrics and improving your visibility on searches. Download the ebay app, the chime sound it makes when you make a sale is addictive and you can send your buyers offers from your phone. Make sure you’re always sending offers to the people that add your items to their watchlist. Offer them 5% off and fairly frequently they’ll go for it.

Daily listing

I use these settings pretty much all the time on Drobo. I started originally at 70% markup and every time I ran a markdown sale on Ebay, I’d raise all my prices by 5% before I started the sale. (Ran it for a weekend or so) when the sale’s over your prices have risen by 5%. Now I just run everything at least 85% on Drobo. Working towards 100%. I believe scaling margin % functionality has just been added to Drobo, so I’ll be using that in future. EG you could do, listings $5ish at 100% Listings $10–$15 80% Listings above that maybe just keep scaling down markup %.

The reason I don’t like doing listings too cheap is because amazon often requires you to get 2 of an item if it’s really cheap to be eligible for free freight, I’ve been stung a few times before. That $10–30 mark most people will pay without checking a price elsewhere. Anything above that most people start doing their due diligence and you won’t be able to dropship.

This is completely up to you what you choose. I started my first few months at 70% markup running items $5–15 in value with 12% promo enabled. Now I run 5% promo because I already have good exposure. ALL of my listings are promoted. Starting out I’d go max promotion at 70% markup if it was me.

Amazon

Warm your amazon account up properly so it doesn’t get suspended. Make it. Send 1 order to your home address. Wait a day. Fulfill 1 order for someone. Next day. 2 Next Day 3. Next Day 4. Next Day 5. Don’t ever send more than 5 orders a day from each amazon account you have. On average 1000 listings = 1 order per day. This is a rough threshold and sales are completely random, but from my experience I’ve found it’s scaled like that.

You also do returns via Amazon and send the buyer on ebay a return QR code. Returns are super simple, at no point does the buyer realise they’re returning it to Amazon. (And neither does Ebay)

Costings

Use Trackerbot. I use Aquiline within it (you’ll understand when you get it) had issues with VDtrack not auto posting trackings into my order. No tracking means, the buyer can just request a refund anytime and you HAVE to pay it regardless whether they got their item or not. No proof means Ebay will always side with the buyer. Trackerbot basically embeds orders with tracking automatically so if you get a buyer complaining something hasn’t arrived you can win a case with a proof of delivery / connote. It transfers amazon connotes into Ebay format whilst making sure ebay doesn’t know they’re from Amazon.

Amazon Prime. Ebay Store Subscription. And Drobo obviously.

This is your monthly costings.

I have 8000 listings currently, and I can make those costings back within a few days. The rest is pure profit.

NOT EVERY ORDER YOU WILL PROFIT ON. Sometimes you’ll get caught out with something not being eligible for free freight, not being available / out of stock / you can’t post to the buyer. Find an alternative, fulfill it at the small loss or if you really can’t fulfill tell your buyer it’s out of stock and get them to request a cancel or if you want you can cancel an order and with the description issue with buyers location. Don’t ever cancel an order selecting the out of stock reason. Ebay tracks this. Don’t ever leave a case unanswered. Ebay tracks this. Run your business smart and you won’t get in trouble (hopefully).

Does it actually work?

Look I ain’t no guide writer, I’m just saying this definitely does work. I was skeptical at first and came across it on reddit fully expecting a scam. When Drobo broke initially a few months ago and jake (ssl) went into hermit mode to fix it I swapped over to Ecomsniper. It’s a tidy setup but honestly it’s so messy to work with compared to this. The support’s mediocre and they’re all too busy to really invest time into you. The costing is easily double than this model. Essentially they’re the exact same thing. Just this one is way smaller and lesser known whereas EcomSniper is huge with hundreds of users, so they can charge a premium.

I did learn a lot over there though about suspensions and what to do. MC011 bans etc. If ANYTHING happens on your ebay account immediately contact Marty and he will put you on the right track. Don’t risk it contacting ebay, you’ll probably get banned straight up.

I’m 3 months in and just bought my wife a robot vacuum off Amazon cost me $600 and every dollar was made from dropshipping.

I set up a separate bank account where all my amazon purchases / running costs and daily payouts go into so I can track where I’m at. I’ve made plenty of coin doing this in a few months and you could too, just gotta give it a crack. I work fulltime Mon–Fri running an electrical business. I literally do this as a hobby in the evenings. Takes me 15 minutes to answer buyer questions, do orders, listings and listing maintenance. Give it a try 🙂