This is not going anywhere, this podcast, right? I can't, I can't. We have to continue some other time. No, no, we're gonna do it a little bit more time. It's terrible, I can't do it. I'm just not, everything I'm saying is not good and I'm just going yeah, yeah, right. No, it's not, it's not good. I feel you, it's tough. No, you don't. I'm not adding in information. For some reason I'm just kind of like lost and I don't know what to say, I don't know what, every story I have to cut around because I've already said it a thousand times, it's like, I've done so many podcasts, it's like, you just, you know, over the years, it's like, you just kind of get to a point where it's like, what else is there to say? I don't know what else to say, I don't know what else to say. We can live in the conversation at the moment and let it go where it is. I know, but it's like, sometimes it's like, I don't know, we went into matching mountain rides. That was ridiculous, it was really kind of fun.   You know what I mean? Like who gives a fuck? They do, they like it. This was your existential moment? Yeah, you're really having a crisis right now. Do you do this on Belly? No, because, No, because there's a guest. He turns around and plays video games. That's not it is, on Belly it's different because it's like, we talk about, Belly's different because we talk about what's going on in the house. Also we have a guest. Yeah, no, the guest. And then we also, it's also, I always tell like, it's just different, you know? This one, the pressure is more. There's no pressure on that one because this one, you know, it's like, you're so good that like, you know, sometimes I just kind of go, I don't want to, I don't know what I'm doing. You don't want to do it anymore? No, I want to do it. I just, of course I want to do it. No, I know. You know what I mean? I just don't know what I'm doing right now. Well, let's get to another, let's get to another point and then we can, we can, well all we have to do is cruise. I'm gonna make a little break or something. Smoke a cigarette. Then that'll help me. Look at me. Look at me. I don't know why anyone cares. Well, you're doing good. Why are you having this existential weird moment? You don't know what anything means really. Let's talk about that. I don't know what anything means. I don't know anything. That's another thing is I realized I don't know anything. I don't know anything. No, I really don't know. I don't know anything about anything. I don't know how anything works. I don't know what I believe in. I don't know, you know, how long I have left. What am I doing with the time that I have? You know what is this? You know what I mean? I mean, genuinely, do you mean this? Yeah. I have these moments of just like. What would you rather be doing? Even when I'm playing video games, I'm like, this isn't it. What do you think you should be doing filling your time? No, that's the thing. There's got to be something. You're having kind of like a midlife crisis. No, I'm not. I think it has to do with like the pandemic because it's like I can't leave. So it's like, you know, I can't leave. And I can't do anything. I can't do anything that I want to do. I can't do stand up. I can't do anything. So it's like my days are left of just watching old Star Trek Next Generation episodes to trying to watch other things that, you know what I mean? That people are saying, you should watch this. This is great on Netflix. It's trending number three, you know what I mean? And you just kind of watch it this morning when I watched that reality show was just on. I was watching going, this is the day. And this is going to end the same as it did last night. And then it's like, and then I realized, like what's the point of it all? There's nothing to do. Well. And then I'm going to Hawaii, you know, at the end of the week or when a couple, I don't know when I go, you know, but it's like, why go? What's the point? Because there's a job there. Yeah, I know, but... But let's talk, I'm being serious. Yeah. Are you having this crisis moment because you feel like you're not being fulfilled? It's not just fulfilled. What's the point of it all? Well, let's go over the point. There is no point. I hate this business. Let's get out. And I'm done, I think. You're done. In a week, you're going to Hawaii to film another episode of Magnum Piazza. That's not in the business though. That is literally the business. Yeah, but when you show up there, it's like, you realize, they even go, people watch this? It's not a thing like, you know, when I did Love and John Hapital's around, everyone's around, and they take them some seriously. That right there, to me, is the business. You know what I mean? So you prefer when people are taking themselves seriously?  I want to be a part of the cool group. I want to be a part of like... You are in the cool group. I'm not.  Here's the problem that I think you're mistaken. Most people aren't in this fake group that you think people are in. I want to be in it. You're not in it. I want to be. Because it doesn't exist. It does. No, because you ask them and they'll even tell you. I don't even know what you're talking about. Yeah, you want to be in it too. And that's why you butt heads with them. Butt heads with who? You know who you're talking about. Who? I know. Tell me who. What's his name? Seth. Seth? The guy that was in the disaster audience. What's his name? Seth Rogan? Yeah. How do I butt heads? What are you talking about?    Right, but you have to understand that there was tension between you two, you said. No, the idea was like... I don't think they cared that I was bummed that I got taken out. So that made me sad. It was a bummer. Didn't you approach him and then he was like, weird with you? No, but no. I didn't approach him about the lines, but the next time I saw him, it was kind of weird. Yeah, are you weird now with him? I haven't seen him. Yeah, but you think there's weirdness. Do you think he likes you? I don't think he cares about me as a...  I think he probably... Yeah, that's what it is. I think he probably... And there are people that he doesn't care about. Well, of course. Yeah. No, but I'm okay with that. I just think that he goes, that kid's nice, kind of funny. It didn't work out with us. I don't think he cares. But here's my thing.   I know, but I know, I understand. No, that's great.  No, no, I don't want to say high, no. But I want it like... We're not smart enough. You and I are not that smart. That's what I'm saying. What are we doing? This is great. What are we doing? We're dumb. Yeah, it's great. What are we doing? We get around. We're speaking. We're gonna read something, man. We're gonna learn about things. We're speaking for the idiots. Oh, God. That's it. That's what it is. People need, we're dumb. We're dumb. But we've always said we're dumb. Oh. And let me tell you something. Yeah. I don't want to be smart because this is fun.   And it's usually great. It's usually easy and fun. You're in a weird headspace. It's like, you know, there are snooty parts about me. Yeah, but you've manufactured them. No, I'm very snooty when it comes to like, you know what I mean? I don't like these kind of films. Are these kind of? Yeah, you've manufactured that. You've made that up. And I've always wanted to be a part of like the cool group.  I could never get in with the cool kids. Here's the irony. And I want to be in the cool kids now. Name to me the cool kids. Because they were the dorks for sure. Who you think are the cool kids were dorks. I know. So what are you even talking about? You don't want to be friends with them.  I know you make up the idea that there's this group that you would join and hang out with, but it's not. You know, I do these podcasts because it was the last thing that I could do to survive. At the beginning. Yeah. It was like, oh, it's either this or get a day job. But now you do the podcast. My point is that, so the podcasting stuff isn't, I love doing it and saved me in a way, right? But it's like, it wasn't why it came to LA. Why did you come to LA? I honestly thought that I would be a movie star. But that's not a real thought. What does that mean? I know, but that was my dream. I'm gonna be a movie star and I'm gonna do these.  Readjust your dream then. I know, I'm gonna have to, but my point is that, and so every once in a while, and people think that I'm complaining or whining. I'm not whining.  You know, and it has to do with the pandemic too. It's like, you know, I don't, we're like, here's another thing. And this is, a part of my thing is, you know, every once in a while, I like to go buy clothes. I know.  Japanese Rodentum. You know what I mean? I'll wear it out this year. I'll just wear it every day, right? And get the creases and make it right, right? And so you look at my emails. I've ordered 10,000 things online. None of them come. Yeah. None of them come. So I can't even do that. I'm just saying, every morning I wake up, right? And I go out to the balcony, because from the balcony I can look down to see like packages.  Or lamp fixtures, right? And I'm just looking for that little, tiny jacket. You know what I mean? You know what I mean? The underwear that I bought, you know what I mean? Or the socks or whatever, right? And they say it's delivering, track your, but I don't know how to do any of that, right? So I don't know how to track it. I don't know where it is. I mean, I have things, I bought a fucking, you know that couch, the Italian couch I have, right? A part of that deal, I bought these really cool light things, right? They're like light fixtures, right?  He's like, ah, no problem, buddy. How many do you want? I go, four. Great, man. There's only four left anyway. And then, you know, we got the Italian couch and I go, client, where's the lamp fixtures? She goes, it's somewhere in Culver City and something. And I go, I guess I'll never get it. You didn't get it. You know what I mean? This sounds like- So I don't have- It's just you're not getting your, you're not getting things during the pandemic. You can't get anything. I can't get anything. So it's like- The frustration is obvious. And I'm so sensitive, I guess, because of this pandemic. I think that's a part of it. I just so, I can't take any kind of criticism. Criticism. But that's okay. Yeah. Because we're gonna get through it and it's gonna be fine on the other end. Yeah, I'm just like, I'm just a jumbled of nerves. You need a release. Yeah, there's nothing, you know, there's so rude to me at the house. You know what I mean? That I can feel. Yeah, there's so rude to me at the house.  Right.  Do I not say that? Who's the king?  Yeah. Yeah. Who is the king? Interesting. See, that's what I'm saying. That's interesting. Yeah, and she's not the king. Yeah, but I... You think that like, when I was, first of all, you know what I mean? I'm usually, you know where I go? It's okay. No, no, no, no, no. It's okay. I'm so sorry about my existential- I'm going through something. Look at me, look at me. Don't be sorry. Yeah, yeah. It's a great- It's a honest moment that you're having. Yeah, honestly, this whole podcast I was just like the whole time thing it was, what am I doing here? Sometimes your mind gets in those things. Why? What are we saying? Yeah, you're becoming like a nihilist. You know, I'm literally going, why would anyone want to listen to this too, you think? I don't know. Yeah, yeah, but they do. And I appreciate it. Yeah, yeah, and I'm appreciative. I love when they call in the guy with gigantism and the dwarves and all the people in the lady and everyone calling in and going, I get them in. I mean, we love, you know what I mean? Keep going and they buy the merch. You know, and they tag me in it and they make little videos of me. That's really sweet. I really appreciate it. And I go, but deep down I'm going, why do you like it? You know what I mean? And I'm glad you do. I'm going to keep doing it because, you know, there's nothing else to do. Do you like it? I love doing it. Yeah. I like seeing you and I like doing it. Yeah. There are times where I'm like, oh, that's a funny bit or, you know what I mean? Oh, that we really, you know what I mean? Yeah. We went this way with it. Yeah. And that was fun, right? But today was not it. No. Today was just like, oh, that's not it. I'm glad we had, I mean, a lot of it was great. Yeah. Right, George? Yeah. George. All right. Hey. Thank you for being a bad friend. You know, people were worried that we were going to stop the show. Why? Because of your existential crisis that you had on the show. People were like, they're going to stop. It's going to be over. And then people watched Tiger Belly and they were like, what did you say to Bobby? What did you do to Bobby? Nothing. To do? And let me say this. I didn't even know what I said last time. I don't know either. Let me say this. I missed you a lot when you were in Hawaii. Oh my God. I thought about you every day.  I had one nightmare about you. What is it?  But I was going to call you to tell you. I'm not kidding. I had a nightmare you got hit by a car. Yeah. Walking to dinner. Did you walk to dinner one night? Every night. There's no one, where else am I going to go? So mom psychic, you were walking to dinner. You got hit by like a, you know those three wheeled cars? Two in the back, one in the front? Yeah. Hawaii, they're all over the place. Beep beep. You get hit by one. And a big Kowana guy gets it.  I'm coming back from the coffee or the pineapple, whatever.  And he was like, shit, dude, I think you're dying, bro. And you were like, I am. And you could tell you were dying. And he said, any last words? And you were like, tell Andrew Santino, I'm sorry. And then I love him. And he means the world to me.  And I woke up and I ran to my phone and I was going to text you, but I didn't. And I knew you were okay. Nice. All right, Andres, what's the game? No, let me, let me, let me add onto that, please. Give me an opportunity to add on. And just to let the fans know. Let the fans know. That number one, I didn't, I don't remember. I know. What I did last time.  It was okay. No, it was honest, it was great. Fine, I'm just, I'm honest today. Yeah. So I don't know, I remember. Number two, that was also because we had a backlog. So it just got to the point where. We were doing too many episodes. Just, you know, you do Tiger Belly and then I do, and you do whiskey and we do so many in a week. It was a lot.  Well, yeah. Even, you know, I don't even know. We were doing too many. We're doing too many. And also it's like, you need to, you know, take breaks so you can, you know, re-energize. 100%. So anyway, and number two, you're not, the only way this will end, you know what I mean, is if we just physically can't do it anymore in terms of like, we're too busy or, you know, or somebody dies or something happens. I mean, I have been thinking about death in Hawaii a lot. You know, I downloaded a book called The Certainty of Death. Yeah. It was written, I forgot who it was in the 70s. You know, I've been thinking about death a lot. So that's not, no, truthfully, I did have a dream. It was really weird that you say that because I've never thought about death as much as I did when I was in Hawaii. That's why I had a dream. It's really weird. We are connected. Look at me. I hate, don't.  You can say whatever you want. I want to look at you though.  Please. We are connected. So what I'm saying is- What were you thinking about dying? But I did have a dream about you dying. Hawaii is weird. And what, here's what got me out of it. Yeah. And this is real. So I was thinking about death all the time. Cause when you have eight days off and you're alone. What are you doing? What are you doing? You're just walking around. Netflix. You start thinking about death. Yeah. I said, okay, so I'm 49. I'm not the healthiest guy in the world. Let's just, you know. You're not unhealthy. Yeah. But let's say Maradona died. You know, Maradona? Correct. He died and he was 60. He just recently died a couple of months ago. Yeah. Let's suppose I'm like, cause he has the same body as I do too. Maradona. He's a little soft. Yeah, yeah. No, he's just, you know, roly-poly-ish. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He did a lot of drugs. He doesn't eat well. So I said, if I, so I'm just gonna take every moment and just milk every moment and just be grounded in the present moment. That's cool. It's the only way to do it. That's awesome. Cause if you start thinking about death, then it's, your whole day is fucked.


Lior posins demonstration about how he built a dropshipping empire with 35 stores without spending hours in front of the screen. So Lior is the founder and CEO of AutoDS, an all-in-one dropshipping tool that helps people to automate their entire dropshipping business. He has 11 years of dropshipping experience and is still an active dropshipper who manages a dropshipping empire of over 35 different e-commerce stores. Today he's going to cover what the two main types of automations are that can run your business almost automatically. He'll cover what the final goal of any dropshipping owner should be and he'll discuss which types of tasks can be automated to save you time, whether everything should be automated and if so how. After this presentation you'll have a wide point of view about the right business management methods in this era. So Lior software AutoDS is the only one that I personally trust to run my own eBay dropshipping business so more than any other software owner out there he cares about his users so I know he is going to bring you a ton of value here today. Thank you so much for being here Lior. How you doing man? Ready? I'm so excited to be here, thank you for having me in this amazing conference. Of course so I'm going to pass it over to you now, it's all yours. Great, thank you. So the presentation name is how I built a dropshipping empire of 35 different stores without spending hours in front of the script. Now basically I will not talk here about the basic stuff of dropshipping about how you find products and stuff like that. I will talk about the automation part of it. I will talk about how you can automate everything and not only in case of software not only using software or automation tools there are some different type of automation that you can do to make this happen. So I want to first before we start to ask you a question. What is a successful business for you? If you think on the perfect world about a successful business what would it be? Please write down on the chat some thoughts that you have about this. I will wait a few seconds because there are some delays with the live chat so I won't really to hear from you what is your opinion about it. Hands off, I want a business that is automated. What more? Write down in the chat right now if you have more ideas about what is a successful business for you. I want to get started, that's great. Automated business. Okay, so we will continue with this presentation and then we will see what is a successful business for me. But before we get started, who am I? So Paul already presented me but let's make it really quick. I have 11 years of dropshipping experience. I started actually with dropshipping from some Chinese sites to eBay manually and then I started to run some different dropshipping businesses. I have right now 35 active dropshipping stores and it's not only for the profits but it's also because they can run it automatically and because they want to be connected to the market as much as possible. They want to understand what people want and they want to understand what takes time to people to automate this stuff also. I also saw over 50,000 dropshipping stores which is actually the stores of our users. We always check what is working and what doesn't work not because we want to spy on our users or copy them but because we want to help to the market to get better results. And I'm a huge automation believer. I'm a developer for 13 years. Right now I'm not developing, not coding, not ODS but I still really like everything that is around automation. So how everything began? So this is about ODS and we'll go really quick about ODS which is our automation platform for e-commerce and dropshipping businesses. So all started from a friend who asked me and my partner to build a small tool for her. So actually she made calls about how to do dropshipping. It was around four years ago and this time there weren't a lot of good tools to do dropshipping and mainly the biggest tools were only for big dropshipping. So we thought for ourselves, if we build something for her why not to build a dropshipping empire for ourself? Why not to create something that we run a lot of different dropshipping stores for us and then we can just make a lot of profits on these stores. And then we went to a conference in Israel and we saw a lot of different people who are talking about their struggles with the business and the time that they waste about many different tasks. And we spoke with them and we showed them the tool and people told us, why don't you release this tool for everyone? So we just said, okay, let's try to help more people. And firstly, we started only with the big sellers. We gave them the automation tool, we sold it. We saved them a lot of time and it gives us a lot of motivation and a lot of willing to help to more people to actually even beginners to save more time. So that's how everything started right now. We are the biggest dropshipping tool in the market of eBay dropshipping automation tools and we have over 5,000 active users. And that's all about me and about all of this. So about the question that I just asked you before, what is a successful business? A successful business for me is a business that actually not for me, for Warren Buffett. This is something that he said, this is a quote from him. If you don't find a way to make money while you sleep, you really work until you die. So this is one of the quotes that I, one of my favorite quotes because I really feel that this is the right way to go. If the business doesn't work for you, this is not a business. This is not a business that works for you. It's actually you work on this business and you will work there forever, if you don't automate things and we will talk today about how to automate things mostly with this software, but not only that. So these are screenshots from part of my stores and some different stores that we have. And you can see here one of the five stores and other 30 that exist are similar. We usually check different strategies in these stores but all of them are working. So let's talk first about what is involved in a dropshipping business. So I'm pretty sure that most of you already heard some different lectures here from Paul and from Nahar about dropshipping. So I will go about it really quickly. Dropshipping is when you buy something for, for example, $150, sell it for $100 and keep the $50 in your pocket. But for sure after fees. But there are a lot of things that are going in the background. For example, price changes, orders that you need to fulfill, customer support that you need to do, products listing that you need to create, you need to actually copy the images, the description and everything into your store. So here are some of the processes that we have on a dropshipping business. Let's go over there and see after that how we can automate these processes. So the first thing is products finding. There are different methods to find products. Part of them you need to work really hard and for part of them you can actually automate them. And not only that, you should always think about this that if you found something that works for you, mostly we just continue with the same method or same niche and get more products from this topic to save for yourself time. So this is the first process. The second process is uploading products on a daily basis. One of the most important things for eBay is to see that you're actually active. They want to see that you work every day as a regular marketplace or store, any store in the market, like always you will see the store owner or sound from the employees that is working on the store, same in any online business. eBay wants to see you working every day on your business and this is why I need to list products every day. So this is another daily task that we need to do. So when you have the products finding and have the uploading products to our store. The next one will be price and stock monitoring. We added a product to our store, the price maybe increased or decreased and now we want to adapt the price on our store. So this task should be done actually every hour or every few minutes. It always changes. It depends on the amount of your products but the prices and stocks are always changing. So that's another thing that we want to do. We need to optimize our pricing. We have a competitor's on eBay and we want to compete with them by price. For sure not only price but sometimes they also want to compete with price especially if we don't sell. So if you have a product that doesn't sell for us we want to decrease the price a bit because maybe this is the problem. But if we have a product that is booming and has a lot of sales we would like to maybe increase the price a bit. So we can make some more profits on the sales of this product. The next step that we have is orders fulfillment. We got an order, we are super happy. We want to process this order. We want to fulfill it and send it to our customer. So now we need to go to our supplier and fulfill the order. So that's another thing that we need to do. Tracking number updates. We got a tracking number from our supplier. We need to provide it to our customers and how to do that. And customer support which is one of the hardest tasks that you need to do every day to give customer support to your buyers. We will talk about that more later. So let's start and see how we can solve any of these steps automatically. So the first thing that we have is the products finding. So for products finding we have some different methods and they know that other people already talked in this amazing conference about how to find profitable products. But there are many different options and versions of how to do this process in the right way that you can implement in your business. So what I use for my stores and everyone that you will ask from our clients or everyone who works with me for some time, will know that I'm a big believer of the big numbers rule. I'm not saying that this is the only method that works. For beginners maybe you will want to work with other methods. And I'm sure that you can find here in this conference many people who thought this. But if you want to grow and manage a lot of different stores automatically, you need to make this process automated. And this is how I do it. So in Autodesk we have a tool which called Autodesk Finder. Now important thing here, I'm not trying to sell Autodesk. I'm trying to really open your mind and show you how things can be done. So we have the Autodesk Finder. This tool actually helps you to save time on the task that called products finding. You can choose here the supplier that you want to find products from. For example, Amazon US. You can choose which of the categories you want to upload. For example, products with coupons. So let's say that I want to list to my store 100 products that have coupons. And then I can make actually more profits from these products. Because the coupons can be even 20% or 50% from the product price. So think how good is it for your profits. You can also list products that sold eight times in the last month, which means that if this product already working for someone, maybe it will work also for us. Or at least it has a really high chance to work for us. So I will put here, for example, then when I click upload it, when I click upload it, it will ask me which criteria I want to put for the products, which parameters I want my products to have on eBay. So for example, I can choose which design I want for the products. I can choose the profits that I want for the products, the policies. And then I can with the click of a button when I click here, upload products listed to my store. Now, as I said, I want this task to be done every day automatically. So when we understood that people are just going to this page and then listing products every day with this click of a button, what we did, we created a feature of creating a recurring upload. So here I can choose a time when I want the products to be listed. Click on film and every day at the same time as I said, X products that I just defined in the previous step will be listed automatically to my store. Now, the amazing thing here is that for those of you who don't know eBay so much, when a product just listed, there is higher chance to sell it. Why? Because eBay will promote you more. It's called a newly listed and these products get more promotion from eBay, from eBay Cassini, which is eBay's search algorithm. And this is why if you list the products on the best time when more people are buying on eBay, which is actually six PMST, so most of your products will be uploaded at this time and you will get much higher chance for sales. So let's continue to the next task that we can do. So actually products finding we already solved this issue and now we can do that automatically. Upload products on the daily basics. I already expanded also, so you can just schedule it and every day it will be listed at the same time. For those of you who want to list products manually without us finding products for you, what you can do, you can use any other tool for products finding or any other method that you find on the network or courses or everything. You can go to the upload section again. Copying any of the product's links, put it here, click grab details. And then what actually Autodesk does is it's copied all of the details from the product page from here, the title, the description, the images, even the item specifics it's called which is the size, color, brand, manufacturer and everything like that. And then it will just paste it on Autodesk. So let's see how it works. From now I will read some questions here. Okay, I think we'll do that in that. Okay, so as you can see, the product copied to Autodesk with the title, with all of the variations you can edit any of them. And it already created for you a beautiful description for the product which you could choose before which of our descriptions templates you want to use. And then if I click upload product, it will be just listed to my store. So that's the other option for products uploading. We listed our product, what we should do now. So as I explained before, now we want to check if the price of the product changed. So we have our monitor. This is something that called price monitor or stock monitor. And this is a tool that checks if the price changed for the product. If the price increased by $10, we will also increase your price by $10. So you will not lose any money. If the product stock disappeared, for example, the product stock went to zero which happens a lot with our, you know, with COVID-19 and actually it always happens. So if the product stock goes to zero, we will put the product stock for you also a zero because if you sell a product which is out of stock, eBay will punishment you after sometimes like that and you don't want that to happen. So this is another task that can be done automatically. And the last thing here about the prices is the price optimization. We want always to compete with our competitors. So if I go to monitors on Autodesk, we have here a feature which called orders monitor. What it does is that I actually can prepare here some tasks for Autodesk to do for you automatically. For example, if the product sold five times, I want to start and increase the price for each sale by three percent, for example, up to maximum of 20. Why do that? I want to try and maximize my profits. I want that every sale that I do will be more profitable than the previous one if it's possible, not always it's possible. So maybe I increase the price too much. Then I got some new competitors or even maybe they're all made some changes with their listings. And then what we will do is that we'll start to decrease the price automatically every X days. So for example, I can choose here five days and then every five days without a sale, the product price will be decreased by 3% which I configured here. So all these tasks actually making that happen that I don't need to worry about the pricing of my products. I don't need to worry about products finding everything is actually done for me automatically. So all these tasks already we talked about how to do them automatically, but what about all those fulfillment? So we got an order. Now we want to process this order and send it to our customers. For those of you who don't know the road shipping much deeply and what you can do what you should do actually is to go to your supplier, copy the address, put it on, sorry, go to eBay, copy the address of your customer, put it on your supplier site at address page, then you click buy product and the product will be sent directly to your supplier. Now, when you get for example, 100 orders per day, it's a bit hard to do all this process manually. Think about the time of going to Amazon or Home Depot or Aliexpress and then starting to copy all the stuff manually. So what we created in order there, this is some different methods that we can use to fulfill our orders fully automatically. Let's see how it works. I'm not sure if I have here orders for example, let's see. Okay, so if we have this product for example, and we have the others of the customer that I will not open here because I think it's better not to show on this video but we will have there on the top a button of copy without phone or copy with phone. What this button does is that we can clear this button and then go to our suppliers site, for example here. Let's make an example. So I can add this product to my code and then here I have the paste button. So I didn't click the copy because I cannot open it right now in a live demonstration but if I click this paste button, it will just paste here the full address of the customer and then you can just deliver to this address with a click of a button. But we call this semi-automated process because there is much better option to do that. In Autodesk, we created two more other different features. So the first feature is actually that you can add your Amazon account to Autodesk. It works for Amazon or AliExpress. Under the orders processor, you just click add purchase account, adding the account and then all of the orders will be done automatically using your account. So in this case, all we need to handle is customer support because we're already finding products automatically. We are doing the price optimizations automatically. We are doing the price and stock monitor, products uploading, now also the orders fulfillment. All what you need to do is to care about your customers and answer all of their questions. But what will happen after the order process? So the process is that when you make an order on Amazon, Home Depot, AliExpress, any other supplier after one or two days or even some hours sometimes, we will get a tracking number from our supplier. Then what we need to do, we need to copy the tracking number, put it in our eBay account, and then the buyer will get a notification, then he will be able to follow up the order. Now, all this process also done for it automatically. Where a tracking number is arrived to your account on Amazon or AliExpress, the tracking number will be copied automatically to your store and another magic will happen that I will show you in the customer support section of this webinar, of this presentation. So I want to ask you a question. We talked about this, that all these process can be done automatically. The product's final, the product's uploading, and the price optimization, price and stock monitoring, all those fulfillment and tracking number updates, but how can we automate the customer support? Should it be done manually? Please write down in the comments in the chat. If you have any ideas how we can automate this process also, because it's nice that Autodesk does all this stuff, but I wish that we could even automate your messages with the clients, and maybe one day we will be able to do that, but for now we don't know how to do that. So how can we do that? Write down in the chat, if you have any ideas how to automate your customer support. Can answer also, I'm thinking we can semi-automated with stock answer also, customer service, no weather wind by no, customer service, by the way, this is the most important part of our business. Remember that I don't know how many of you are already doing dropshipping, how many of you don't do dropshipping already, but if you don't give the best customer support that you can give, eBay will not like you and will suspend your account later. So this is something that you need to remember. About all of the questions we will answer in the end of this presentation. For now, please answer me. What can we do about the customer support? How can we automate it? I don't think we should with the use of VA's, any other opinions, how we can do that? Okay, you can automate it with VA's. Okay, so we have two types of customer support. We have the questions, we have the messages that we initiate, which are mostly updates about the status of the order. What does it mean? It means that, for example, I want to give to my customer now that the order was shipped. And after I get a tracking number, I want to update the customer that we got a tracking number for him and send him the tracking number update. So yes, the customer can go and check it on eBay, but think about how better the customer will feel if he got a personal message from you with his name and actually feels like it's customized just for him and we just care about him. And the last one is thank you message. The thank you message is the most important question and a message between these three because this is our time to tell to our customer, hey, you already got your product. Now I hope that you are happy with the product and if not, please let me know.  And then you can ask them also in this message, if you're happy with our service, please leave us a positive feedback on eBay. So from our experience, if you do all this process and you compare it to a process without these three messages, the difference will be around 60% in feedbacks if you do that or if you don't do that. So this process can be actually done automatically. Let's see that I'm not a DS. So if I go to messages to buyers and here we have after order success message. So here we have a pre-made message that we already created for our customers and here you can actually feel the buyer name. So if I put here first buyer name and comma, so the first name will be replaced with his name. And I can add the item title here and the feedback you already want but it's not recommended in the first message. Then for the tracking number update message I can do the same at hey, hey and name. Here you can track your order using the tracking number. And this way just created in a second a personal message to your customer which will notify them about the tracking number update. So think about the feeling of your customer and it will take you zero time to do that. And the last one is the thank you message as I said it's the most important one. Thank you for buying from us. We hope you got the package. Please give us a positive feedback and then you can even add the link here. Thank you. That's it. So this is the part where we initially a conversation with our customer. But is that enough? Because we also have the messages that the customers are sending to us and they send us what's going on with my order where is my product or just even simple questions about products. So what can we do in this case? So there is a method that any professional drop shipper is using and actually and basically like that. So every professional drop shipper is using this method and this is primary messages. What it can do, you can have a file with X messages for any case that you will have. And I'm sure by the way that for example, Paul will give that for his students because this is something which is really basic and will help you to save a lot of time when you answer your customers. And then what you do, you just ending these messages to order this or if you don't have this feature because in some cases which called non-API stores for those of you who know, we don't have this feature but for API stores we have that. And then you can just with the click of a button paste the message and send it to your customer. Now if you don't have this system, it's also fine because you can just copy it from Google Sheets file and that's all. So maybe this process is not automated. There will no any software that does this automatically for you. There is no and anything that actually runs this automatically for you and you can, you should really make it manually but think about the time saving when you do that using pre-made messages. Now how it looks like if I go to customer service on Autodesk I will have here some different messages. This account is not active so we don't have here messages from customers. You can click the plus button right here on the template and you will also have here pre-made templates that you can use. Here you don't see it because it's a message from eBay so we cannot really reply them but after that it will look like that. And then with the click of a button you can use any of these messages send it to your customer and continue forward. But should it be done by you? Should you really sit and like I have right now 35 different eBay stores do you think that I go every day for each of my stores and replying to my customers? What would you do? People who ask questions on the chat we will have a lot of time this presentation for questions because this is one of my favorite parts and I feel that after all this knowledge and all this information I will get a lot of questions. So please say them. Okay, so should you do this task every day? Dancewear is for sure not. Everyone, every successful drop shipper will not continue forever to click on and send messages manually. There is something that is super common in our niche, the drop shipping niche which called VA, VA is actually a virtual assistant. Mostly these people are people from countries where the price per hour is cheaper, the salaries are cheaper than from the United States, for example, and then we can actually maximize our profits and our time because if I pay to someone, for example, $2 or $3 to make these tasks for me, I can grow much easier because their profit to our business will be much higher than if we would sit and do all these tasks manually. So VA is something which is super common in the drop shipping niche and this is the way to automate the last task that we had. So we had here all of these tasks, product finding, uploading products, pricing, stock monitoring, all those fulfillment, tracking updates, but the customer support was always the hardest part. So to initialize messages, we already showed you how to do that and to reply to your customer messages, this is the way to go using the A's. So this is the easiest way to automate all of the process of the drop shipping business. How to avoid problems when you work with your virtual assistant. So there are, there is actually a very big problem. A lot of people are afraid to trust other people and afraid to give them an access to their account. What you can do in Autodesk is just to add a permission for someone to use your account. So if I click here at the account, I can write here any email and VA name, password and then I can choose which permissions I give them and which permissions I don't give them. This way we can avoid any problems, any type of problems because the only thing that we will afraid here from this part is the time that we will not pay them, that we don't want to pay them too much. So we can use some time trackers for that and some screen sharing programs. But basically if you give them, for example, an access just to upload listings for you, they can only access the uploader. If you want to give them only the customer support system, so this is the way to automate your messages to your customers and give the customer support. So right now we've finished all of the process of the dropshipping business and everything we showed actually how everything can be done automatically. Some other tasks that more professional dropshippers will do to save even more time. So one example of that is that we don't want to keep not profitable products on our store. Why? Because we don't want to pay too much fees to eBay and we don't want to affect our conversion rate. So what we have here is a system that we can configure that if the product has one more day before we pay for that product again and the minimum quantity of the product is, sorry, the product never sold. So we don't want this product on our store and it will be removed automatically. So this is how I manage the stores to a situation where I even don't need to care about which products I delete and which I don't delete because everything will be done automatically here also. Another thing, if you work with Amazon, so for part of the products we have tax on Amazon. So the average tax is usually around 5%. And there is a small trick that we added on Autodesk. Mostly products that are not sold by Amazon will not have taxes and products that sold by Amazon will have it. So this way we will put a different pricing for each type of product. So this is another task that we can do automatically. Another thing, if we work with a different type of shipping speeds, for example, with non-prime sales on Amazon or prime sales so we can use the dynamic policy creation which will create automatically for us policies. Something important here, it's irrelevant for non-API users. But anyway, for those who use API, it will save them a lot of time. Round prices to 99. This is actually marketing trick and that I'm sure that you saw on any store in the world, on any site in the world. And this is actually a trick that people checked and it actually works. It helps you to sell more. Why it works, it works because usually people are checking only the digits on the left of the end dot. So this way we put the 99 cents. We make more profits here while the price will look like the price will not look as the higher price. So this is another thing that can be done automatically. This, by the way, combined with all those monitor which will optimize the prices for you making crazy results because you're using some psychology pricing and also your pricing is good for your products. So everything there also done automatically and you don't need to care about checking what is the best price for your product and stuff like that. So this is actually, these are actually the tasks that we can do automatically. I see that I have some more time so I will show you some other things that we can do. There is another task that people are doing which is creating collage. You want, one second, you always want your product to give as much information as possible to your customers when you list it. So what we can do is that if we put a product ID, for example, if we take this product we have the product ID here, I can put it here and then here I can choose some things that when I list my products will be done automatically for me. The first one is that we can make first upper letters. So it means that every title will get customized, will be changed by auto-DS and every first letter of each of the words will become a upper letter. We can duplicate the main picture to 12. We always want to have as many pictures as possible on our listing because it's better for our promotion so we can use this feature also. And we can make collage. We can take the four first images of the product, combine all of them together and then we will just have an image that auto-DS created for us looks very professional and looks like you actually took Photoshop and created this picture and actually it's all also done automatically for you. Let's take an example here. If you want, you can write also other stuff that you think that I didn't cover about how to automate it and I will show you how it can be done automated also, just write down and I'm sure that I will be able to automate anything that comes to your mind. So we have here some different pictures and we have here two different features that can help us to make it much, to make our listing looks better. If I click create collage, it will take four images from base listing, combine all of them together and make something like that. Then if I put it as my main image, it will be different than any of my competitors. So I will get a higher chance to get a click on the search results and we can also set a watermark. There are a lot of people who want to put on their images that this product is high quality or that it has fast shipping or stuff like that. This can be done with a click of a button or if we use the Autodesk finder that I showed in the beginning, in the beginning it also will be done automatically because when I click upload it, I have here all of these programs that I just showed you and then I can just choose here that create a set watermark for example or the create collage and that's all. So this also will be done automatically. Now I want to keep some time for questions. So before we finish this lecture and this actually amazing, I hope that it said you like open your mind a bit. So this is some metals that you can contact me and you can keep learning and keep stay updated with dropshipping. You have the amazing channel of Paul on YouTube and you have his amazing courses but also I suggest you to follow as many people as possible so you can learn different methods. And so this is our YouTube channel and this is our dropshipping community which is super active. It's not only questions about Autodesk and mostly even not only not about Autodesk because we really try to keep the community active for any dropshipping question. I'm super active there. I'm always answering any question there. You can go to the community and check that. Actually it's me and our team and you can try the tool, the Autodesk for $1 using a Paul's link here which is will give you actually one month for $1 instead of one week and you will get with it 400 hot products, 100 products monitoring. By the way, you can choose there also an option of 400 of, sorry, yeah, 400, 4,000 and 10,000. So if you prefer any other package you can just choose it there and it also will be for $1 and 30 automated orders including the tracking number updates and three messages to your vials. So this is the link. You can go and check the tool there and here we go, Q&A. Cool, so that was excellent. Thank you so much, man. And we do have a lot of good questions for you. I really liked that overview. So let's get into some of these questions. So we had one user or one, something in the chat named vgood and she wants to know, she wants to move from a store where she's never used software over to Autodesk. Is that possible to do? It's possible to do. There are two different methods to do that. The first one is using API because I just saw a question here and the second one is not using the API. Everyone can choose what he prefer to do but you can link any store and then you can also link all of your products to Autodesk with the click of a button. So even if you have some orders that you still didn't process, for example, you can link your products then you will see all orders and you will be able to send them to automation. Yes. And I've done it before. It's, when you, when you go to set it up, it kind of walks you through it. So it's pretty easy to do. What about does, let's see. Can you kind of explain if this is a good thing for someone who's new? How complicated is this? Diane wants to know. So you need to know how to do dropshipping. I will not say that you can just, with the click of a button, start making money because otherwise, everyone will do that and that's all. But you need to actually start and learn how to do dropshipping and then Autodesk will help you. It would be a tool to automate your tasks and make everything easier for you but it will not replace the knowledge that you need to actually get. Cool. Let's see. Oh, I'm looking the wrong place. How many, are you, do you have any plans to add other suppliers? Yeah, so we're working on a system that will help us to create much more suppliers in a much easier way. So we will add more suppliers but the difference between Autodesk and other tools, there are other tools that offer a lot of different suppliers. The difference is that any supplier that we add, we actually test on ourselves because we want to see that this supplier is reliable. Any other supplier that you see on Autodesk is actually a reliable supplier with good customer support, with good products, with high quality products that we tried before. We already built in the past some suppliers that we just decided not to add Autodesk because we saw that the quality there is not good but we will add for sure more suppliers. Cool, that's exciting to hear. How to find Vero items, Nabil wants to know. Maybe you can explain what Vero is first and then how Autodesk helps with that. Yeah, so Vero items are from what I understand from the question on items that are and have a lot of sales right now in this period of time. For example, if we check now, so it will be masks, for example, or machines for haircuts and stuff like that. What I would do is to write on Amazon or any other platform and check there by reviews, by competitors to check who is selling these products at the best way. Another trick that I recommend to people to do to save a lot of time is what we can do is if we write, for example, let's say that we got a bag and we had a sale for this product. So it means that this niche is working for us. I don't want to spend more time and going to other niches. What I would do is I would go to Amazon and just list many different and other products from this specific niche, which can be done very easily. We have here the Autodesk helper. I can click extract. It will take the product IDs from all of the products on this page and then I will be able to just copy it to Autodesk and list many other products from the same niche. So to answer your question, if you found the product that is going well for you and trending right now, you can just go and list many other products from the same niche. Cool. So that's answered a question about how to find some good winning products. Maybe you can talk about Vero, V-E-R-O products. Vero products, I see. Yeah, okay. So Vero products, this is also something that is super important to know for any beginner. Vero products are products that if you go to Vero.ebay.com, you will have here a list of different brands. Now all of these brands are brands that if you list a product from them without contacting them before and get an approval, mostly your account will be suspended. But the thing is that the Vero problem on eBay is a bit complicated because everyone can go, show to eBay that this product is from their brand and then you will still get suspended even if your product doesn't appear here. So something that, even if the brand doesn't appear here. So something that we did on Autodesk to decrease the amount of Vero products that you can list to your store is that first of all, for sure, we will show you a warning. Hey, you cannot list this product because the brand X, for example, Apple is a Vero. The second thing that we do is that we scan all of the messages of all of our customers that use API. And if someone got a Vero violation, which means that his account got suspended because of Vero, we will just add the brand to our list of brands that you cannot list for. So basically, Vero are brands that you cannot list products from them without approval from the seller. Cool. And the other thing I'll say about Vero is that most people who do get suspended for Vero, it's usually only for a few days or a week and then they're allowed to start selling again. So that's an extra kind of protection. So I kind of see it as Autodesk is the first protection. It'll alert you if you try to list one. And then worst case scenario, what normally happens is you just get a warning from eBay and then maybe you'll get suspended for a couple of days but then they always let you come back. But you want to avoid getting suspended even for a couple of days, because that's lost money. Profit, Profit says, can you tell us what API and non-API means? Yeah. I would like to add one small thing for the Vero. Sure. So sometimes you will also get a message from someone on eBay, hey, please remove this product. These are all the nicer brands people who are actually first going to you and telling you please remove it. But there are a lot of people who just, you're competitors and want you to remove the product. So my suggestion is to ask the other person to prove that this brand is actually out there and then go and remove the product immediately. About the API and non-API. There are two different methods that drop shipping software can work. The first one is to be linked to eBay directly, that you actually go and give permission to your software, to Autodesk, to modify your pricing, to add new listings to your store, to delete listings. This is API, the connection with eBay, the way that the software communicates with eBay or with any other software called API. Non-API is a method to work without this connection with eBay. And then eBay thinks that everything that you do is manually, that you actually go to eBay and changing the price. For that, what should be done is that your Chrome browser needs to be always opened and then we will have an extension that just goes and does everything for you automatically. Most of the features that I just show today work for both of the methods and the only one which doesn't work for now is the Customers Service and the Profitability Monitor, which is the feature that removes best selling products. And why to use Non-API or API? It depends on your strategy and everyone's strategy because it's a bit deeper topic. Okay, this is a question. Does eBay know if you list the items manually or automatically, no, does Autodesk track the listings if you add them manually or automatically? So if you add them automatically, for sure, if you add the product manually and you want to connect with automation, so yes, you can do one of the two things. Actually, you can do only one thing, which is I can go to untrack listings, I will have here the product that I listed to eBay and then I can decide if I want to monitor the price of the product using API or Non-API, it depends on my store, but it will be linked to Autodesk, the orders will be done automatically after you added it from the untrack listings. All right, getting this question a lot today, do you think that dropshipping right now with COVID-19, do you think it still works or should people wait until it's over? So let me do something here. So this is a post that I listed yesterday, that I uploaded yesterday on my Facebook account. And this is the graph of the sales on Autodesk signed the COVID-19. So can you explain what that is that you're showing? Yeah. So what we showed here is that this graph is a weekly graph of the amount of sales on Autodesk. And these are the sales of all of the users together. And this what happened. So basically the amount of sales doubled signed the COVID-19. And I showed here all the progress. So you can see it every week how it changed or if you check the online shopping keyword on Google Trends, you can see that this is also skyrocket. Actually it's a new record for that. So the answer is for sure yes, the amount of sales now is crazy. Like it's smaller than we had on Black Friday, more than we had on Christmas. So for sure you can do dropshipping now. Yeah, amazing, amazing time. Someone in the chat said that's crazy, LOL. Carolina wants to know if you're able to open multiple eBay accounts and still keep them automated. So yes, one of the things that, okay, one of the things that we added on Autodesk also from our needs, because we understood that it's something that we must have, is the option to choose here multiple users together. So I can link how many accounts I want to Autodesk. We have for example, one user who has a strategy to work with hundreds of accounts. So he has like 200 accounts in one Autodesk account. You can select all of your users together, click filter and see all of the results for all of them together. You can make bulk changes for all of the accounts together. You can also see the orders for all of them together. So it's not a problem to open multiple accounts, but if you are a beginner and you want to go and immediately open multiple stores, there are some things that you need to do to know. For example, that if the stores are all of them on your main, you can not list the same product to all of them. That's just one example, but for sure you can automate all of them together. Cool, let's see. Oh, and if you have more than one store and they're both into Autodesk, will it let you know if you try to list the same product? You mean I, if you were, I see. So yeah, if you have two different stores on Autodesk, we will prevent you from listing the same product. Cool, okay, let's see. Okay, see any other good questions here? Went back down to the bottom of the chat. I also have a challenge here, if someone wants, you can try and say things that you think that they didn't cover in both of the automakers. So if someone has something like that, I would be really happy to answer that. Let's see. We got through a lot of these questions, trying to see if there's anything that we missed. I see, do you have any strategies to avoid getting banned? Okay, so this one is very interesting. So we already talked about the Vero and about the duplicate listings, but one thing that they already covered a bit on this presentation is something that I don't know any beginner who understood it completely. The most important part for eBay, for any business, is the customer support and customer experience. So there are people who get banned and then they come to me and say, you know, I got banned, but I did everything, okay, I shipped all of my orders and I don't know why. And then when I checked their messages, I see that they didn't answer all their customers. They didn't solve cases or returns that people asked them to solve. And then they come through the ban. But if you do everything by the book, you follow, you give the best customer experience, the best customer support, and you ship everything on time. So you will not have any problems with suspension because eBay likes good sales. It brings value to their marketplace. It brings good experience to their bios. No reason to spend. Cool. So of your 35 stores, how many are API and non-API? What Deb wants to know? So for me, I use a bit different strategy for me, all of them API, but again, there are different methods of working and all the whole manager stores with non-API. So it depends and what he prefers. Yeah, different strategies. They all work though, you know, they all work just pretty cool. Different ways to do things. What about, how do you find your virtual assistants? Mansour wants to know. So in the past, it was much harder. Right now, if you go to any dropshipping community and you post there a post about, hey, I need a VA or even, hey, I need a VA with experience with Autodesk, you will find it super fast. It's so easy now. There are thousands of them and they always search for more job and more work and they always add their friends or family. By the way, this is an amazing way to scale. Tell them, if you already have a VA, try to tell them, hey, do you have someone from your family who wants to work with us? And you will find them immediately. Another method is to go to Facebook groups like a Philippinian virtual assistant and you will find there groups of tens of thousands of people. And the last option, which is the most expensive one and the less recommended one, but if you want to save time and do it more safe way is to go to sites like Upwork, which is a site to find different employees online and find it there. But Upwork takes some commissions and so it makes it much more expensive. Cool. I think we have one last dropshipping question about customer service from Hamza. Wants to know, there's lots of different personalities of people of buyers. So how do you deal with different personalities? Maybe the reading between the lines question is, how do you deal with difficult buyers on eBay? It's a good question. As dropshipping is a business, it's an online business. You can manage it from everywhere. The initial investment is super small, but it's still a business. And as a business owner, you should care about your customers and you should just work with your brain and answer them and make them feel happy. And there are, even if you hire a VA, the VA is not a robot. So you should teach your VA to think, to answer reasonable answers and not just to send a copy-pasted messages. But in 90% of the cases, it will be just a response with remain a message and that's all. Right. All right guys, so underneath this video, we'll have links to get in contact with Leor. We have the links to AutoDS, his YouTube channel and a free Facebook group. So you guys can join that. So you don't have to type that in. You can just click the button. Like I said before, AutoDS is the software that I use to run my business. So the link underneath this video, that is my affiliate link, but the only reason I recommend it is because we actually use it and love it ourselves. We think it's the best one for dropshipping onto eBay. And I've tried a lot of them. So I'm really big fan of the software. I'm really big fan of what you do for the community, Leor. So thank you so much. Thanks for this presentation. And I want to give you just another minute so you can kind of close this out. The question I like to ask at the end is, if people are struggling to get started and not getting started, what advice would you have for them? Okay, so my advice for people who are struggling, you mean to decide if they should get started or not? Yeah. Okay, so if you feel that you can and you want to really change your life and you want to really save your time and create something for you, I think that you need to think in this direction and take someone who will help you to start this business. And what more is that everything is about mindset? I think that the hardest part of the dropshipping business because as you can see the initial requirements are super long. So the hardest part is the mindset. And if you work on yourself and you understand the business and business and you really want to succeed, so I'm sure that you will succeed. You just need to be patient and you will succeed for sure if you have someone who really taught you on the beginning how to do it the best way. Cool. Well, thank you so much. And make sure to use the links down below everyone. Thanks, man. Really appreciate it. So thank you very much for all this amazing conference poll. I'm sure that it gave to people a lot of value about a lot of different topics and money-making methods. So it's amazing that you made this thing and you're the first one who made something like that, huge like that. So thank you for having me here and I hope that everyone enjoyed. They did. And thank you, the honor is really mine. All right, everyone, see you in the next presentation. Bye.


What to do when you bring a new plant home, you ask? Watch this. Do not repot right away. We don't want to repot right away, but we wanna check if our plant needs repotting. There are two signs that we need to check for in order to see if our plant needs repotting. The first one is the roots. You can check the bottom of your nursery pot and if you see that many roots are coming out of the drainage holes, this is a good sign that your plant needs repotting because she needs some more space to grow. And what I would strongly recommend is that if you decide to repot her, use a pot that is gonna be maximum one to two sizes bigger. This is because we don't want to shock our plants and if we repot them in a big pot, they will not be able to absorb all the water that we give them when we're watering them and this may lead to over watering and root rot. The second sign that your plant needs repotting is that she may be in a pot that is too big for her. Our new plants may be in a very big pot and this may be too big for them. So check that the pot is not too big for your plant. It is recommended that the plant should take two thirds and the pot one third. So make sure to check and if you find that the pot is too big, you can move her to a smaller pot. Now a very big note here, always know the requirements for your plant because some plants like to be very compacted on the roots whereas others need a little bit more space. So always check before you repot your plant. Number two, clean the leaves and the stems. What I usually do when I bring a plant home is that right away I clean the leaves and the stems of my plant. This is to prevent any pest infestation. For this, I use a solution that has water, castile soap and peppermint essential oil. This one is very good to prevent pests. If you want, you can also add a little bit of neem oil which is a great natural pesticide and clean your plant thoroughly. Number three, place your plant in a quarantine space. Remember, this is a new plant that you're bringing to your collection. So you want to make sure that there are no pests or any diseases that you can spread to the other plants. So I recommend that in order to prevent this, you place your new plant in a space that is not close to the rest of your collection. And I usually do this for a couple of weeks. Then you can just observe your new plant just to make sure that she's healthy and happy. And once you confirm this, you can place her with the rest of your plants. So what do you do when you bring a plant home? Make sure to comment below. I can assure you that the whole community will appreciate it. And as always, I will see you in the next one. Okay, ciao.


QuickBooks Desktop 2023. Inter-transaction purchasing investments using bank feeds. Let's do it within two-ish, QuickBooks Desktop 2023. Support accounting instruction by clicking the link below, giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website, broken out by category, further broken out by course. Each course then organized in a logical, reasonable fashion, making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources such as Excel practice problems, PDF files, and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable. So once again, click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. Here we are in QuickBooks Desktop Bank Feed Practice File. We started up in a prior presentation going through the set of process we do every time. View drop down. We've got the hide icon bar, open windows lists checked off, open windows open on the left. Reports drop down. We're going to open the major two financial statement reports starting with in company and financial, the profit and loss, income statement in other words, changing the range up top from 010122 to 123122. That's going to be the range or the year that includes the bank feed data that we are entering 123122. Then I'm going to customize it so I can go to the fonts and numbers tab, change the fonts up to 14. Okay. Yes and okay. Reports drop down again, company and financial, the other main financial statement report, balance sheet report. I'm going to first customize then change the range from 010122 to 123122 and then go to the fonts and numbers to change them up to 14. Okay. Yes and okay. Now I'm also going to be opening up the bank feeds because that's where we've been working. So banking drop down bank feeds. We want the bank feed center, which would only be there if you set up the bank feeds, which we had done in a prior presentation. So now we're thinking about the decreases. I'm going to go to the unrecognized items and sort them thusly. We're looking at the decreases still and looking now at some items which are more complex when you're looking at decreases and trying to record and create your financial statements from the bank feeds. This time we're dealing with investments. So if I go back to the balance sheet, let's just talk about some of the complexities with regards to how the financial statements will be built when thinking about investments in things like stocks and bonds. First thing to note that if you have a business, then typically you're not going to have a lot of investments in your business unless your business is financial investments. So in other words, if I have a business of selling guitars, for example, I'm not going to have a lot of my stock and bond savings for retirement in the business typically because the business is designed to kind of separate our books on the business side to the personal side. If I have excess cash in the system, then I'm not usually going to just park it into investments within the business, but rather I should distribute that cash to the owners. If it was a sole proprietorship, that would be a draw. If it was a corporation, that would be dividends so that the owners could then invest on their own, typically in things like the stocks and bonds. So that's one thing to just keep in mind. But note also that you might be using QuickBooks for your personal investments, in which case you might be tracking your personal investments in QuickBooks. You can also use QuickBooks if you have a small business to try to separate personal and business using class tracking, which can still give you an income statement, which could help you to fill out like a Schedule C, for example. And that way you can have one file possibly, which could make things easier in some cases, but also can cause some problems. We talk about some of that stuff in other courses. But the next thing we got to consider is like, well, if I have the investments on my books, that's going to be an asset if I'm investing in stocks and bonds. Now, you might invest in stocks and bonds that are under the umbrella of one mutual fund, which might be under the umbrella of an IRA or 401K plan, for example. But you might also have multiple mutual funds or multiple stock investments. So then the question is, well, how much detail do I want? Do I want to have another asset account for every type of investment that I am investing in? And generally, I would think not, no, not usually on QuickBooks, because QuickBooks is not there to design on the detail to break down the detail of all your day-to-day type of investments. It's there to usually give you kind of a summary of where you stand at any given point in time. There's other software that can help you track the detail, which would include the actual investment platforms you're investing in, like a Vanguard or an E-Trade or whatever, something like that. And you can also construct a balance sheet from your financial institutions using software connecting to the financial institution that's not accounting software but finance software. So the pros of that is that it'll also, it'll always give you like an end to balance, but it won't give you all the detail of the activity. With QuickBooks, it's designed for us to enter the financial transactions, so we not only end up with a balance sheet, but also an income statement. So you can experiment in addition to having your accounting books and like a QuickBooks, you might experiment with like a personal capital software or QuickIn has some stuff on it as well as a financial kind of software. So within QuickBooks, the idea would typically be, how can I group my accounts in such a way that it's a reasonable grouping so that I can see where I stand from an asset equal liability plus equity kind of standpoint. Typically you might want to group your assets then by institution.  Or if you're using personal investments, you might want to put your investments in say those that are under the umbrella of a retirement plan like a 401k or an IRA and those that are not because the ones that are under the umbrella should be long-term assets. You can't access them. The ones that are not would be short-term because you could access that cash to use it if you need to. Now when you invest in it, then the money is going to come out of the checking account and it's going to go into the investment. So that you can see when it clears the checking account. It's not something that's going to happen all the time, but that can be seen in the bank feeds. However, you're also going to have transactions that might be involving dividends and interest that you receive. And then you might have transactions with regards to the value of say the stocks or mutual funds going up or down. How do you account for that? Because oftentimes people want to keep their books on real-time numbers with regards to their financial investments, as opposed to what we do with the equipment where we put it on a depreciated cost. Because with the financial investments, we know what the current market value is because the stocks are all the same. There's a stock exchange, which is trading the stocks. So we can get a pretty good, accurate idea of what the stock value is at any given time. We can't do that with equipment, a building, for example, or something because they are unique in nature. Okay, so what I'm going to do is set up some investment accounts here and then we'll put some investments in it. So I'm going to go into the list drop-down chart of accounts. And let's first just imagine that we're going to set up some investment accounts. I'm going to put a parent account by going to the account rise up. I'm going to say new. And then I'm going to say that I want an other current asset account. And I'm going to say next. And I'm just going to call it investments, investments as just a generic parent. This is what I'm going to think is as the parent account. And then I'm going to have my sub accounts underneath it. Now note, if you're doing personal investments, you might want one that's going to be other current assets and another one that's going to be the current assets because these current assets are going to be the ones that you cannot access. So the ones that are in a 401k plan, you might want to separate. That's one way that you could separate them out. I'm going to say save it and close it. So there's our investment. And then I'm going to make sub accounts to that investment depending on or based on the financial institutions I'm investing in. So I'm going to say a new account and I'm going to call it an other current asset again and continue. And I'm going to say that this one, let's say one financial institution is B of a bank of America. And I'm going to say that it's a sub account of the investment account. So it's not an asset account. It's my investment account in stocks and bonds. And it's going to be a sub account of the not inventory investment. I'm going to get those mixed up going forward. Got to be careful. So we're going to say save it and close it. Boom. So now it's a sub account. So then I can do that again. I can go account rise up new. And let's make another one and just pretend I had another financial institution other current assets continue. And let's call this one primary America another financial institution. It's going to be a sub account of investments. And okay. So there we have our two investment accounts. Now oftentimes if you were starting up a new file for your personal file or your business file and you had investments in it, it's going to have a beginning balance in it already. So you're going to want to look at the financial statement and you're going to have to enter kind of the beginning balance and then you can track what is going on from that point going forward. So let's do one way you can do that is I could double click on the register and I can put this in there. I'm going to put it as of 010122. And maybe maybe we should actually put it in there as of the first day of the prior period. So it would be 123122. And what I'm trying to do is have it not impact the current income statement, which I'll do in two ways. One, I'm going to put it in there before like the cutoff date, meaning the new year started on January 1st, 2022. This should be 2021, let's say. And two, I'm going to put it to an equity account. The other side's going to an equity account, not the income statement. So for example, I'm going to say there's an increase. Let's pretend we had 10,000 as our beginning balance. And then from there, the bank feeds, if I add money to it, will increase this account if I invest more in it. So I'm going to put this in place. And the other side is going to go to an equity account. So I could put it into opening balance equity. You might put it into another account called owner investments, but I'm just going to put it directly into the owner's equity, which is the account that income is rolling into. So I'm going to say, and then this is going to be the beginning investment balance, something like that. I misspelled it, but I'm going to leave it. Now it says here, hey, look, you're posting something to a retained earnings account. I'm paraphrasing. Usually you don't do that unless you know what you're doing, because that's the account that rolls stuff into. But when you first set up the beginning balances, then sometimes it makes sense to do that. So I'm going to say, okay, and then close that out. And then if I go back then to my balance sheet, now I've got the $10,000 in Primarica. It's an asset account. It's a sub account here. I couldn't do it with the bank feeds because these were transactions happening before I started the bank feeds, which this amount I'm imagining then being dependent upon what was the beginning balance before I started the bank feeds on the finance from the financial institution. So if I look at the transaction then QuickBooks put it in with a deposit type form. So there it is into the investment account. I would have thought they would have used a journal entry there, which is that's a little weird, but they use a deposit form. The other side went into equity down here. So you could see it in equity if I change this to one. So there's the deposit on this side. Okay. Now one issue from there is, well, what if we put more money in? That's not going to happen all the time because we probably only do that periodically. We put more money in when we have the money to put in that would increase this amount. So I'm going to go, okay, bank feeds. Imagine I had a transaction. Let's just pick up a one that say, just see if I get one of these ones for 25. Let's do this one. Let's say this one imagining this one is an investment amount or payment amount. So it's coming out of the checking account and going into our investments. So I'm going to say the payee is going to be Primarka.  Imagining it's an investment account though, setting up the vendor as we saw in the past because it's a cash outflow vendor. And then the other side of the account is not going to an expense, but this time it's going to go to our investment account. And we had, let's put it into the Primarka investment account and then 25. Now if I hit the drop down and add more details here, then you could see it in this format. Same kind of information. There's the date and it's going in here. Now we could also make a rule for that one. If we so choose to make the rule, I'm not going to do that here because I'm just using this as an example. So I'm going to save it and add it to the register. And then we could see it's been added on this side. We can go to the balance sheet and we can see now that added investment of the big $25 has been put in place. There it is. It's been in place with a check form. So whenever we put more money into an investment account, we can wait till that clears the bank feeds because it'll probably be an electronic transfer and we can easily kind of add that to the proper investment account. The things that often become more complicated with regards to automating the process with the bank feeds are one, you might have dividend and interest depending on what you're invested in. Now, if you're saying that the dividend and interest is set up, that it flows through to your checking account, then you're going to see them flow through and you can add them from the checking account. And you could say that there's going to be an increase to the checking account when you receive dividends and interest, and you can set them up then as the other side go into an income account, but rather than income up here, you might put the income as other income, which will show up on the bottom of the income statement because normally, even if you're thinking about your personal investments, if you're still working, you might think of your main income as like your W2 wages and whatnot. And then your investment income dividends and interest, you might think of that as other income down here. However, sometimes on your personal side, it might be your primary income, maybe if you're doing well, if you got substantial investments, so maybe you put it up top in that case, if it was on your personal side, if it was business kind of stuff, I would think that unless you're in the business of investing in financial services, you might want to put it down below so that you can get to a net income amount that doesn't include the gains from services or even interest and income, and then you can add those at the bottom. So then the other thing that we would want to do is to say what happens with the unrealized gains and losses. So if I check my financial statements periodically at the end of the month or the end of the quarter, you might say, hey, I would like to put this if my finances went up to buy $100 or $1,000 or something, I would like this to reflect the actual value given the fact that I could know the actual value with some degree of accuracy because there's an exchange trading the exact same thing, so I know what the amount is. So we can do that a couple of different ways. One, let's say this went up by $1,000. I can enter a transaction increasing this by $1,000, but the other side isn't going to cash because I haven't yet sold the investment. The other side is unrealized revenue. Now I'm not going to get into the generally accepted accounting principles on when you do one thing or the other thing, but just in general, there's two options. You could put the other side to equity so that you always have the other side in equity. It doesn't hit the income statement at all. Or the easier thing to do is that you'd put it to the income statement. So you'd have the other side of the unrealized gain as income. Again, I wouldn't put it into income up top. I would put it into other income that would show then down below at the bottom of the income statement. The reason putting it to the income statement is easier is because then you could see the gains and losses. The income statement would indicate that this is usually your realized stuff that happened on the income statement, but then it rolls into equity and you don't have to deal with it when you sell the stocks or anything like that as well. So if I go back to the balance sheet, the other thing that you could do is say instead of increasing the primary account itself, you might try to create another account which represents the unrealized gains and losses so that you have both kind of the cost, what you invested in Primerica, and that would include the original invested and then possibly the reinvestment of the dividends and interest. And then you could also try to track the unrealized gains and losses as a separate account so you can see both of those things. That might, may or may not be something useful to do. It does add another level of complexity. Let's see how that might be done. So if I go to the chart of accounts again, lists chart of accounts, and I'm going to make another account under Primerica sub account that's going to give me unrealized gains and losses. So I'm going to say new and let's say that it's going to be another current asset continue and I'm going to call it unrealized gain slash loss Primerica. And I'm going to make it a sub account of the Primerica account, which is a sub account of the investment account. It's getting complex. I know we got levels, layers upon layers upon layers. So there it is. If I go back to the balance sheet, now it's going to show up under here once I post something to it. So let's do that. Let's imagine that this went up by $500. So now it's at $10,525. So now I'm going to say, okay, I got to increase it. I could do that with a journal entry. It's easier to do oftentimes with the register. So I'm just going to go to the chart of accounts. There's, there's my item. I'm going to double click on it. And I'm going to say that as of, let's say 103122, let's say that it went up by $500. And then the other side is like, well, where's the other side going to go? I'm going to put it to a new account that I'm going to call an income statement accounts. I'm going to create a new account. I'm going to say it's not an expense account. It's an income account. And I'm going to call it unrealized gain slash loss. Now the reason I call it gain slash loss is because it could flip from like a debit or credit. If you think about it that way or an increase or a decrease. So if it's a gain, it'll be a positive income. If it's a loss, it'll show as a negative. And so that's a kind of unusual for an account, but it's, it's useful in this case to do that. Otherwise you got to deal with gain account and the loss account and try to get it gets messy. Okay. So in any case, so this is going to be the unrealized gain. So we'll say, okay, let's check it out. What happens then?  And then within the primary America account, you've got the 500 here for the unrealized gain. And then this is the cost. So the total that should tie out to your statement then is the 10,525 50. And that is broken now out into the 10,025 the amount that you invested in theory. And then the 500 is the gain, the increase in the value of the stock. Now note, like the way we set it up here is with the least number of like accounts, you could set it up like a primary America parent account, and then have, have the, the cost, and then the unrealized gain and loss under the primary parent account. That's another way that you could set it up so that it doesn't show up as like primary America other and then the 500 here. But I won't get into the deep, you could, you can kind of play with those, those differences. The other side is going to be on the profit and loss here. And so now you could see on the P and L, I've got it up top. I really don't want it up top. I wanted to put it on other income. So let's go to the chart of accounts. I'm going to say that profit and loss, what did I do? I put it in his income, right click and edit the account. I'm going to change it to other income, other income. Okay. And then back to the balance sheet or income statement. So now it's showing up down at the bottom, which is nice because then I get the subtotal of my net ordinary income from operations. And then this is unearned because I haven't really sold it. I haven't really realized it, but I'm still recognizing it on the income statement. So one, it's not my normal source of income. And two, it's not earned. I haven't actually sold anything to realize it. And therefore, it's kind of appropriate possibly to put it on the bottom. If you're going to put it on the income statement at all. And, but it still feeds into the net income after the other income and expenses. Now, if this was a loss, this would flip to a negative. So it would still say other income, but it would have a negative, you know, down here. So those are some of the complexities with regards to tracking the investments. So when I, so just to recap, you're probably going to want to be adjusting your investments periodically to the financial statements monthly or quarterly. So, so you're going to want to do that with, you're going to have to do that with a journal entry. You can't use the bank feeds typically to be doing that. And you want to be careful in terms of how many investment categories you're going to have in QuickBooks. You don't want to get too detailed because QuickBooks is not really designed for that. You're going to look at other software to drill down on the day-to-day activity. And one other software that you might use are called financial statement software, as opposed to accounting software, which is designed to kind of give you the balance sheet and possibly some of the trending activity for the stocks like a Primarica, for example, or possibly a Quicken. I'm not advertising either of those. Those are just a couple options. So what we have at this point, if I hit the drop down and I go to the trial balance here from 010122 to 123122 and we customize that fonts and numbers changing. Let's bring it to 16 here. Okay. Yes, and okay. Just to advertise the trial balance and how it can be a quite nice tool for us to go to one place and see the balance sheet on top of the income statement. It doesn't give us all the subtotals, but you can kind of see what's happening. If you imagine balance sheet, assets, liabilities, equity, and then income statement, revenue costs to goods sold as an expense and expenses.