Shopify is one of the biggest and best platforms to host your online store. But on the other hand, it is not easy to get started, know exactly what your first steps are, how to continue from there and how to actually scale and maintain a highly profitable dropshipping business this way. And without having the right knowledge, tools and structure, it's easy to find ourselves in a downward spiral. But do not worry because in this video, I will take you step by step, hand in hand, as I show you the right way to start a Shopify dropshipping business from A to Z, everything that there is to know, and all of your questions will get answered. So do not go anywhere. Quick intro and let's go. Welcome back, everyone. I'm Iran from AutoDS. And as you know, in this video, you're going to learn how to create your own successful Shopify dropshipping store. Even if you have no prior knowledge whatsoever, I'm going to take you through all of the right steps that you need to take and also provide you with all of the right knowledge and tools that you'll need to succeed right before we start. Don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you haven't done so yet to always stay updated and always increase your knowledge on the latest and hottest topics that we have coming out in the world of dropshipping. So once again, subscribe and like and share this video if you appreciate the value that being said, let's go ahead and get started and learn exactly all of the right steps that we need to take step by step to creating our own successful dropshipping story on Shopify. So for those of you who don't know, I'm going to leave two links under this video. The first link is going to be for the blog article, which I always leave on every one of our videos. So if you're the type that likes to read, go ahead and read this article link right below the video. And another link that I'll leave you with is a free Shopify course. This is an A to Z Shopify course with all of the right steps that you need to take. And this free Shopify course will take you much more in depth than what I will go in this video. And that is just so that you will first get the right idea of all of the right steps, everything that you need to do in order to start and run and manage a successful Shopify dropshipping store. And after you watch this video and you see that it is something that you are interested in, it is something that you can tackle and succeed in, then your next step would be to watch this free course. It has about 40 videos going over everything that I'm going over in this video, just much more in depth.  Once again, this course is absolutely free, but watch this video first. See that it's the right thing, that it's the right business model that you want to tackle and then go ahead and shoot for the stars. So for those of you who don't know what is Shopify dropshipping, I'm going to take it from the top. Shopify is an online platform where you can create your own customizable website. So this means that you're going to have your own www.yourstorname.com and everything will be completely customizable from your banner to your whole store design, to your navigation menus, to your product pages. You can even add newsletters, blogs and so much more. You have full control over your store and you also have all of your customers information. So when someone buys from your store or if they leave an email address to join your email subscribers list, you're going to get their email addresses. You're going to get all their personal information. And this is all much different than starting your dropshipping journey on a marketplace like eBay, where you don't get the customer's information. So there are a lot of differences between Shopify and other selling platforms. And we're also going to get to that. So that is Shopify in general. You're going to have your own domain name. You're going to have your own website and you're going to learn how to create it from A to Z. Everything that you need to know in this video and in the course that you will join later on when you realize that this is something that you want to do. Now, what is dropshipping? Dropshipping is a business model. It is an online business model where you can have your own online store and you can sell products without actually holding them in stock. So in other words, you're not investing in any stocks. You're not putting any money up front and you only pay once you get paid. So as soon as I make a sale and a customer purchases a product from my store, only then will I go to my supplier's website, purchase that product using the funds that the customer paid me with. And then my supplier will ship the product to my buyer. This way I have no contact with the product and my profit. Our profits are dropshippers is the difference between the source price, how much we paid our supplier and how much our buyer paid us. Of course, we are buying low and selling high. That is a dropshipping business model. It's been around for years now and it's definitely not going anywhere. Numbers are increasing in e-commerce, in dropshipping and in Shopify year by year. And of course, the numbers will continue to rise. It is not too late to join the party. So dropshipping is a low risk, high reward business model, which we will be implementing on Shopify's platform to host our dropshipping website. That is the connection between them. And that is what we are here to do. Some of the pros that we have on Shopify is that once again, you have full control over your store, over the way that your design looks. Your brand, all of the products that you're selling, you can list thousands of products even from day one, which means no one is limiting you to how many listings you can list, which is different from other marketplaces that do give you huge limits from the start. So here there are no limits. The only thing is you'll have to learn how to bring traffic to your website. It is not enough to do your product research and audience research and adding products to your store. We're going to get to all of that. But you also going to have to learn how to market these products to your audiences and how to make sure that the right people that you're showing your ad to the right audiences so that they will go to your store and purchase your product. Of course, this is something that we're also going to tap into in this video. So let's go ahead and get started. We know what Shopify dropshipping is. What are all the steps that we're going to learn in order to start, run and manage a successful Shopify dropshipping store? Step number one, we're going to learn how to find products to sell. And this should always be the first step on your journey. That is because product research, that is what it's all about. You can put as much work as you want into making your store look good, making your brand design and brand colors look on point, really professional store. But you didn't do a lot of work on product research. Nobody's actually interested in that product or those products that you are selling. And then all of that work that you put in goes to waste. Nobody wants that. So it all starts with the right amount of product research. Product research is something that you're always going to do. You're never going to stop researching for products to sell, unless your belly is full and you're making enough as it is. But if you're watching this video, I'm sure you're not at that point yet. So that is the first step, finding products to sell. After you find your products to sell, you're going to set up your Shopify store. Once you're done doing that, it's time to promote your products. That, of course, is after you add those products to your store. So you're going to find products to sell, you're going to set up your Shopify store, which means signing up to Shopify. I'll show you all the steps, your homepage, your product pages, importing your products from your suppliers and all of that. Step number three is promoting your products. So this is actually the part where you learn about online marketing. And this will take you a long way forward, not just for the Shopify store. This is a great profession to have, learning how to market your brand yourself online. Then you're going to learn about order fulfillment. Because once you market those products, you're actually going to start making sales. People are going to see your product. You did the right amount of product research. You made your store look really good. People will buy your product. So here you're going to learn how to fulfill your orders the right way. Step number five, you're going to learn how to manage returns and refunds. It is not the most joyful part of running our dropshipping business, but it only takes about one or two percent of our total work time. So it's totally fine. And of course, it is something that we'll need to know how to do the right way. Customer service goes a long way. And it all starts from knowing how to process your returns and refunds. And every time a customer reaches out to you, you want to be able to give the best service that you can. And this is for the long term survivability of your e-commerce store. After that, you're going to learn about customer service, which goes pretty much with what I just said. And lastly, step number seven, you're going to learn how to analyze and then scale your success. So once you make a few sales, of course, it's not enough. We want to scale that and really make it to the big numbers. You're going to learn all of that once again in this video. So without further ado, let's dive right in. Step number one, finding trending products to dropship. Now, I already mentioned about the importance of product research. Now, let's get down to it and understand what are the best methods that we have to conduct product research to be able to actually find those products and more products that are similar to those that are selling well and be able to find them using the best dropshipping suppliers, import them to our stores and sell them. So what are the right steps? How do we actually find products that people are looking to buy instead of just using our own minds and trying to think of it ourselves? Which usually turns out to not provide positive results. So there are a few methods for conducting product research. The first is using the AliExpress dropshipping center. Now, once again, you have links to everything that I'm talking about in the blog article, which I'll leave a link to right below this video. And there you'll have a link to the AliExpress dropshipping center. So I'm simply going to click on it and that is going to take you to the dropshipping center. Now, here you can click on find products to sell and choose a specific category or search for the keyword that you are interested in and specify a whole bunch of other filters if you see fit. And here AliExpress will simply show you what products are selling, what products are trending today. So here, for example, for this product, you can see that it's sold 137 times. It's got a good review. You can click on Analyze to see it sells history. And so this is just one method, one way to find products that are trending. And it doesn't mean that you're going to be buying them from AliExpress. If you find a good product from AliExpress, you can then later on choose other suppliers, local domestic suppliers that are close to your target country, to your target audience, and that way offer fast shipping to them. Another place to find good products. Another way, another method is by using the Koala Inspector. Now the Koala Inspector is a great tool. It's a free Chrome extension that you can use to be able to analyze what other Shopify stores are doing. So you'll be able to find them, see what products are selling, see what apps they're using, see what other strategies these sellers are implementing in order to take their best practices and then look for those products using your suppliers, which we will talk about soon. So this is another way to find great Shopify stores, other Shopify dropshipers that are selling items, be able to spy on them, spy on your competition. And once again, take their best practices and use it on your own store. Of course, it's not always a good idea to copy and paste, because then you won't be able to stand up from the competition. Look for products that are similar to those that are selling well for others. Look for other additional features and add those also to your store. But before we get on to adding products, we're still talking about researching them and the best ways to find products. So one of the ways to do it, of course, is to imitate the competition, see what works well for them and trying something of our own. That is similar to that. And of course, a little bit different to be able to stand out and be unique. The AliExpress dropshipping center is tool number one. Koala Inspector is tool number two. And there are many, many more methods. For example, you can use AutoDS's product research tool, which is 100% free and already integrated into the system. So if you have AutoDS on the left side, click on those dots and move over to the product research section. And here you will be able to see databases and databases of best selling dropshipping products. And not only can you find them here and analyze them and see the product's information and see the customer reviews and the shipping and return policies and much more than that. You can also quickly import it to your store. So here, for example, we've got this high wasted skirt. You can see that the item only cost $14.99 and it ships out within two business days. Click on import product and it'll import directly to your store or take that product idea and search for it using other suppliers. And of course, import those to your store. So this is another great way to find best selling products, whatever is trending well today. On the left side, you can click on popular products, new products, holiday products to be able to prepare for your holidays on time. US suppliers or China suppliers, depending on what you like. And soon we will have much more additions, much more product niches and wholesale private dropshipping suppliers where you will have exclusive access to. So the Autodesk product research is another method. And as you guys can see, I'm not diving way too much in depth into each topic because we will never get this video over with. But I do want to provide you guys with all of the tools that you'll need in the right structure to build a successful Shopify store. So bear with me here. So those are some methods. We've got more methods like heading over to Autodesk's block page at Autodesk.com slash blog or Autodesk.com and hover over resources. Head over to our blog here under I want to learn about. You can click product finding and bestsellers. And here you'll find all of our articles with the best selling products inside.  What's selling really well in the market today and what you can also, of course, sell on your store. So this is one place of finding great products. That's always updating all the time, at least twice a week. And you've also got YouTube.com slash Autodesk. This is Autodesk's YouTube channel. Once again, all this information is free. We don't want anything from you. Just enrich your knowledge and start to succeed with your drop shipping business. So this is another great place to find best winning product ideas. Simply head over to our play. This called sell these now the hottest drop shipping products in 2022. And here we're sharing all of those product ideas with you guys. Once again, updating constantly all the time with the hottest new topics. So those are some more product research methods. Some of the best ones that I'm still using until this day. Now, what are you going to do once you have a list of products that you want to be able to analyze even more and test it and see if it has any chance of selling on your store? So what you're going to do next is use our product research spreadsheet. Once again, 100% free. You've got a link to it right here. So I'm going to click on product research spreadsheet. And this will open up the spreadsheet for me that I can click on file, make a copy, and then I can start adding in the information, the product information that I found from my product research work. So here we've got an example product, some pop fidget toy. You've got the source link, and then you have to answer all of these questions. The ones that you'll have the most amount of yeses to at the end, those are the products that you will be narrowing down and adding to your store. So here you've got questions like, are you passionate about this product? And this is important.  It'll make your work smoother, you'll enjoy your work more. So try to look for something that you actually have a passion over. So are you passionate about this product? Pop over the drop down menu and click on yes or no, whatever the answer is. Is this product hard to find in stores? Is it hard to guess the price? Is it safe to sell? Or does it have a choking hazard? Or is it flammable? Can this product be bought without much research? And does it comply with Facebook's ad policies? Even if you don't want to run ads there, you still want to learn what are the best practices for running ads and see what you can and what you shouldn't be showing to your viewers to be able to convince them to go to your store and purchase the product. So you're going to fill in the answers to all of these questions and jot down as many products as you can. And those where you have the answer no, skip them and move on to those products where everything is a yes. Those are the products that you should be narrowing down. And those are the products that will once again give you the highest chance to make your first few sales. Now, you want it, for example, to cost less than $30 because we don't want to start with expensive products. It's easier to sell cheaper products, at least in the beginning. Of course, the product needs to solve a problem. That's why we're asking that question. Can it be bought without much research? Or as soon as a customer searches for it anywhere else, you'll see a whole bunch of the same item. Then there's a fewer chance that he will buy from you. And of course, safe to sell. You don't want to sell anything that's dangerous. We don't want any lawsuits coming our way. Hard to guess the price can pretty much go up with the same with can it be bought without much research? So here you can do research, but it's still hard to guess the price of this item like a table, but it's still hard to guess the right price for this product because it simply sells from a huge range from X to Y with a large gap in between. So once again, those products that you have the answers yes to in all of the fields, those are the products that you should be narrowing down on your store. So start product researching, first add your products, then enter the questions, then start narrowing it down. Then you'll have a list of the products with the highest potential to sell. Of course, product research does not start and end here. There's a lot more that goes to it, but those are the tools that you'll need. You'll need to use the product research drop shipping spreadsheet and these product and the product research strategies and methods that I just mentioned. You can also try more things like simply heading over to amazon.com and checking out their best sellers. So let's see what's selling well on Amazon. And it doesn't mean that you have to use Amazon as your supplier. You can use them as a supplier, but we're gonna talk about suppliers later. What you can do in the best sellers section is simply get great product ideas from products that are selling really well. Now, of course, we're gonna stay away from products that are copyrighted and trademarked and big companies and so forth, but there are more than enough third party sellers that will be more than happy for you to drop ship their products. So here in the best sellers, you simply wanna dive into a category that sells really well for drop shippers like home and kitchen, for example. And here, let's continue to narrow it down to bedding. Let's say you wanna check out the bedding niche a little bit and move over to air mattresses and accessories and air mattresses. Okay, so now we narrowed it down to let's see what are the best selling mattresses today. And here you can get an idea. It's not those regular bed mattresses with springs or whatever they have today. It's actually these inflatable beds and each have their own unique feature. So this is another great way to get product ideas that can sell well in your store. And another good place is inside the movers and shakers. So inside best sellers, I'm gonna click on this column, Movers and Shakers. And here I can see all of the hottest trending products that have been spiking in sales in the last 24 hours. Of course, this section is constantly updating and the products here are changing all the time. So once again, narrow down the categories on the left side, get to that sub, sub, sub category that you wanna test and get the best ideas from the Movers and Shakers section. So as you see, there are a bunch of product research methods and these are my top favorites for finding trending products to sell. I've been doing this for over five years now and these are no doubt my favorite methods. So you filled up that list, you did your product research, you're gonna have to do much more work than that but this is a great, great way to start. Step number two, now we're gonna set up our Shopify stores. We got the products that we want, it's now time to start setting up our stores. So the first step to do that is to sign up for Shopify and begin your 14 day free trial. You'll have a link to it in the blog below this video. So you're gonna click on that 14 day free trial, sign up for your Shopify account and start your 14 day trial. Once again, it is a very simple step by step process. You're gonna start by entering your email address and then regular login information, your desired username, your password, address and so forth, no credit card required at this time. Now after you sign up for your store, you'll be able to see the Shopify dashboard which is what you can see right here and this is where you'll be able to actually start creating your store. Now this is just a demo account but this is exactly what it's gonna look like and this is where you're gonna be doing most of your work. Now whatever name you thought of while you were creating your Shopify store, it doesn't really matter because you're going to connect it to your own domain name. Now in order to do that, you're gonna have to think of a good name for your business. So for that, we're gonna use a free business name generator which does a much better job than what our minds and what our brains can do when trying to think of random names. So once again, the link to the business name generator in the blog below this video. Under step number two, name your business, I'm gonna click on the business name generator link and once again, as you can see here, we've got a free business name generator which is gonna get us some good ideas. So what you're gonna do here is simply think of what your niche is gonna be and if it's a general niche, one of the questions that people ask is should I start a general niche which means I'm not going for anything specific like I'm not gonna only sell products for pets, I'm not only gonna sell gadgets and accessories but I'm actually gonna start general, see what categories are selling well and then maybe consider creating a niche on that category that's selling really well for me. Now once you get a really good selling category, of course that that is a good time to turn that into its own niche store but it's better to start broad, it's better to start general, test the market the right way and then start to narrow it down and see what is working well for you. So if you're gonna start with a general store in the beginning, just think of any general name when you're on the business name generator. For example, let's run a search for best deals and here we've got a whole bunch of results and the best part here is you can click on any one of these results and see if it has an availability on godaddy.com which is where we'll actually be buying our custom domain name, our www.rstorename.com and connect that with our Shopify store which is very easy to do. So here for example, we've got a whole bunch of keyword ideas that go with best deals. For example, hack deals, crowd deals, absolute deals, advantage deals, relevant deals, interactive best. We've got a whole bunch of keywords that we can actually use here. So let's say I wanted this one trendbest.com. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click on it and then it's gonna see if I have this domain name, if it's available for me to use and as you can see right here trendbest.com is available for me. I can register for that domain name or any other for that matter but dot com should always be your first go to. So trendbest.com, nice domain name. Let's start with that general store, see what's selling well and then create a niche based off of that category. So use the business name generator to think up of a good business name for your business, at least a starting one and of course easily see if that domain is available along the way. Step number three is to connect your domain name which of course goes right after you use the business name generator because now you have a good idea of what domain name you want. And for this once again, we're gonna use go daddy. Now when you do this, there is a step by step process of how you can connect that domain name to Shopify but what you're gonna do first is purchase that domain from go daddy. You simply head over to godaddy.com and give them that domain name that you want and you can also do a quick purchase from the business name generator. So we click on trendbest, click on the register next to the dot com and it'll take you to the buy me page where you can purchase that domain right away for your store.  This is a step by step process of how to add an existing domain that you already have to your Shopify store. And then whatever name you thought of when you created your Shopify store and it created your mystorname.myshopify.com will simply get transferred to that new domain name. And this of course is a great way to brand your store. It looks like a real business. It is not some whatever URL that's not actually your own. And that is the next step into creating a brand, creating a business that people will remember. Step number four is to create a Shopify store logo. So we already signed up for our store. We got our domain name connected. Now it's time to think of a logo and we don't wanna spend too much money on logos because hey, we're just starting off. We don't have that much of a budget. At least the majority of us don't. So how do we actually create a good professional logo without spending too much? My favorite solution for Shopify is using HatchFull. Once again, link in the blog article below this video. Click on HatchFull and you'll get to this free online logo maker, which once again, it's free. It doesn't cost any money to use. Simply click on get started and go through the step by step process. Let's say I'm going for the home and garden niche. So I'm gonna click on home and garden. Gonna click on next and then choose whatever visual style you wanna go for. I'm just gonna go for the reliable business name. So let's say we went for beautiful homes. Creating beautiful homes for everyone is my slogan. This is an online store or website and look how quickly they created a whole bunch of icons. It only took me what was it, two or three clicks. So check this out, beautiful homes and then I've got a nice picture of a bed and more and more very good clean professional looking logos and this really took me under one minute. Check all of this out. It's 100% free. So let's say that I'm gonna go with this one. You can edit it so you can make more changes to the fonts, colors, icons, layouts and more and once you're done, you're gonna click on next and then you're gonna click on download and then that's gonna give you a zip file with a high resolution logo with unlimited revisions, a favicon which is this icon right up here. So you can have this icon show up on their Chrome tabs right up here. You're also gonna get a logo for your profile image, for your Facebook profile image, for your cover photo on Facebook, two different variations, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and YouTube profile images for all of those social media platforms all in under one minute and just a couple of clicks. So you're gonna click on download, enter your Shopify credentials and that is all there is to it. Step number five is to get a Shopify store theme. So now that you have all of the small stuff set up it's time to create a big visual effect for your store and actually get a theme. Now a theme is the whole layout. It's the whole visualization of how your store looks, the style and everything else. And once again, if you'll just click on the theme for Shopify store, you'll move over to the Shopify theme store page where here you can explore free themes and also paid themes and add whatever theme you like best to your store. Like for example, let's say you like this one, you wanna have a banner and then you want your products to be shown. Of course you can edit all these things but if this is the regular theme that you wanna go for you can buy this one for $280. But do you have to pay to get a good theme? The answer is no. So click on explore free themes. And here you have more than enough good themes that can easily convert your buyers as long as you are marketing the right products to the right audiences. So you can just go with this one. For example, Don, it's free to use. And as you can see it looks clean, it looks professional and there's no reason to not start with a free theme before even thinking about spending a few hundred dollars for a paid theme that looks almost the same. Start off free and work your way up from there. Step number six is to choose a dropshipping tool to automate your business. The reason that you wanna use a dropshipping tool and this is one of the most important parts of this video.  And the reason that you wanna add the dropshipping tool now and not later on is to help you import products really quickly to your store. Some of the things that a dropshipping tool is gonna give us is price and stock monitoring meaning every time the price or the stock changes on our supplier's website the price or the stock will also change accordingly on our Shopify dropshipping store without us having to intervene. So if the price goes up the price will also go up on our Shopify store. If the stock on the supplier side changes if it goes out of stock then the product will also go out of stock on our store so we won't be selling any merchandise that's out of stock and then deal with angry customers later. So price and stock monitoring is the first reason why you wanna use a dropshipping automation tool to help you automate your business. Then I wanna talk about quick product importing. If you wanna add products from your supplier's websites to your Shopify store you're gonna have to copy all of the information that you see on your supplier's website so you copy the title, paste it on your Shopify dashboard. Download all the images, upload them one by one to your Shopify product page. Copy the product's description, paste it on the description on Shopify, copy the item specifications, paste it on Shopify and I could go on and on but just adding one product can take anywhere between 10 to 30 minutes and that simply does not make any sense whatsoever if you really wanna profit from the dropshipping business model. What you need to do right here is add as many products as you can, those best selling products or those products that you're testing out the market with, you wanna be able to add them in just the click of a button just as I created a logo really quick. That is how fast I wanna import products to my store. I don't wanna spend all day doing this. I'll never be able to work on what really matters the most in order to grow my business. I don't wanna spend all day importing products. I don't want my virtual assistant to do it. We'll talk more about that later because that will simply take up all of the time. When using a dropshipping automation tool I can import one, tens, hundreds or even thousands of products in just a few seconds with all of their information to my stores that easy, that simple. That's another reason to use a dropshipping automation tool. Besides that, you'll also enjoy automatic order fulfillment but we're gonna talk about that when we get to the fulfilling order section but a dropshipping tool is a must. It's an necessity. You don't really have to have it but if you wanna scale, if you wanna profit from huge numbers and not just little numbers that, I don't know what you're gonna do with, you have to use a dropshipping tool. No other successful dropshipper and there are tens of thousands of them worldwide. No other successful dropshipper has ever made it without using dropshipping automation. So this is your secret tool to succeed. It's not everything that you'll need but along with this and the rest of the things that I'm gonna go over you'll understand exactly how and why this will create your dropshipping empire. So the dropshipping automation tool that I'm going to recommend is none other than AutoDS, the best all in one dropshipping solution tool for everything that you need regarding dropshipping, suppliers and everything else, automation, price automation and everything else that comes with the territory. So if you haven't heard about it yet, once again, read the article, click on the link, learn about it, see all of the best features that AutoDS has and once you start up with AutoDS it's very simple to connect your Shopify store. This is the AutoDS selling platform. Right now we're on the product research section which I showed you guys a few minutes ago but if I go back to the platform you can see that this section here holds all of your stores. So here we have a whole bunch of eBay stores, Shopify stores, Facebook marketplace stores but here we're talking about Shopify. You can add as many stores as you want and then you'll have a full business overview all on one page. So if I select all my Shopify stores you can see how well they've been doing and this here is just for the last week or the last couple of weeks. You'll see your total profit, orders, revenue, how many new products you added, your top selling products but what you wanna do at this step of course is to add your Shopify store. So you're gonna click on the store adder up here, click on add store, click on Shopify store, enter your Shopify URL, not what you got from GoDaddy but from your mystore.myshopify.com URL, click on add store, very easy step by step process and then AutoDS will be connected to your Shopify store which means you can enjoy all of the automation settings that I just talked about which we will get to but now that you have the dropshipping tool we can move over to the next step which is importing products to your Shopify store and that is why you added that tool just one step before. So now it's actually time to start adding those products. There are a few different methods to add products to your stores and of course you're gonna add the products that you added from the product research dropshipping spreadsheet. So go to those products one by one and add them to your store. So let's say I'm gonna take the first product let's see where it's coming from, it's coming from Amazon. Now, before you add the products to your stores of course we haven't talked about dropshipping suppliers. After you research all of the products using the product research methods that I showed you you found some products, some of them maybe you found them from AliExpress some from Walmart, some from Amazon, it doesn't matter. Now you're gonna look for the best suppliers that can actually sell you those products and it doesn't have to be from that first place that you found them. So here for example, on AutoDS's website simply click on suppliers here on top and here you have a list of about 25 dropshipping suppliers with tens of millions of products in total and here once again you'll be able to find those suppliers that you can find those products, find more variations of those products that you found when you were product researching and now you'll be able to actually find the ones where you actually wanna purchase them from if of course you make sales on those products. Here for example, you have a whole bunch of suppliers. In this example I'm gonna stick with Amazon but just so you know some of these suppliers are dropshipping friendly meaning they will welcome you with open arms and say hey come dropship our products all day long like Wayfair and Costway and AliExpress and Banggood and CJ Dropshipping but it's important to note that if you open up a buyer account on suppliers that don't necessarily support dropshipping as a buyer like Amazon for example, they could lock your account after you put in a few orders and the solution to that is to use automatic orders which will not use your buyer account which means you can dropship freely from them and I'm gonna get to this in a few minutes. In any case you can use all of these suppliers and look for those products using those suppliers and add the ones from the best suppliers that you found there. So for example, let's say that this PopFigit toy is one of the products that I wanna add to my store. So what I'm gonna do first is I'm gonna take the title to that product and I'm gonna search for it using other suppliers. So for example, I know that I also have AliExpress I know that I also have Walmart and then what I'm gonna do is simply head over to those websites and search for that product. So I'm gonna search here for PopFigit Sensory Toys and I can see that Walmart also has a whole bunch of them and I can search for it also on AliExpress and the rest of those suppliers that I mentioned. You can also use the Autodesk Chrome Helper extension so on Google search for Autodesk Helper extension, download and install this free Chrome extension right here and this will allow you to do many things one of which you can search multiple suppliers. So here for example, I'm gonna select my region so let's say I'm targeting the United States and I wanna select all of these suppliers Amazon, Walmart, Wayfair, CJ Dropshiping, Home Depot, Costco and Banggood. I can add more by simply clicking in and adding in whatever other suppliers I want and then search for whatever I wanna look for like PopFigit. Now you see that a whole bunch of new tabs just opened up each using the suppliers that I added in the Chrome extension and it's simply searching for those products under all those suppliers. Now Home Depot, it comes to no surprise it is a home niche, they don't have any PopFigit Toys Costco, surprisingly it doesn't have any but Banggood has a lot, CJ Dropshiping doesn't really have too much, Wayfair seems to have some. Walmart has a good range and as does Amazon.  So if you're targeting the US audience look for a US supplier because this way you're gonna get fast shipping from the US to the US you're gonna keep it domestic, you're gonna keep it fast and your customers will appreciate it. Buyers today do not wanna wait three to four weeks to receive their packages if they can receive it on the first week that they ordered they'll be very, very happy and a high chance that they will be returning customers to your store which is something that you wanna hope for. Now it's time to start adding these products to our stores. There are a few different ways to do it and you can learn all about it from the blog article from our help section. I'm only gonna mention one of those methods but there is a single product or uploader you can also bulk add products which means I can simply stand on this product page right here where you see I'm searching for all these products. Let's say I wanna add all of them to my store. So I'm gonna click on the AutoDS extension right here click on extract. Now all of the product IDs that you see here got extracted into this little extension. Then I'm gonna click on export a CSV. A CSV file was just downloaded onto my computer. Then back to the AutoDS platform I'm gonna click on add products, multiple products, upload CSV, choose what stores you wanna add them to and here you're gonna drag and drop that CSV file or click on it to open up your file browser window double click that CSV file, processing CSV and file is uploaded. The supplier is Amazon in this case the region is there United States I'm gonna click on add as a draft and all of those products that you saw in that CSV file extracted into the AutoDS extension will be added as drafts into all of these stores. So that is how simple it is to add not one but even thousands of products or hundreds or tens of products into your drop shipping stores in just the click of a button. Now once you'll import them they'll be on the draft section right here where you can continue to optimize them like the title, the category, the tags, the policies, the product description, the automation settings, the variations you can add more variations you can even take products from other suppliers from other regions and add them as more variants to your product page which means that this way you will have a product page with variations that no other seller around the world will have. You can create your own unique pages when you mix in different variants under one product page just make sure that the variations are actually relevant to the main product so that the title will make sense and that's pretty much it. Here we have all the images and the item specifications which was all automated. Everything here had no intervention from my side. All I had to do was add them to my store to the draft section of my store which I just showed you how to do. That was just one method. Another is to simply click on add products, single product, click on whatever store you want to add it to and enter the URL right here. So for example, let's say it's this product I'm gonna grab the URL, copy and paste it right here and click on edit now quick. Now once again, there are multiple methods you can click on multiple products and stores and here you can simply add more and more URLs with a line break in between and add all of these products to a specific store. So like I said, many methods choose whatever's good for you. This is one of the advantages of using drop shipping automation tools. Now that you imported products to your Shopify store your store is starting to look good. It's starting to get ready but it's not 100% ready yet. Your next step is to learn how to optimize product pages to convert. Now I can not show you the step by step process here. It'll take too long but once again, use the blog below this video. We also have a link there to the 10 ways to increase your product page conversion for your Shopify stores. Click on that, go through this article. This is why you'll notice that it's too long to add to this video but these are the tools that you'll need. You have everything here, all of the topics, everything that you can do from optimizing your images, adding videos, adding gifts, making your page mobile friendly, making your page load faster, creating better product descriptions, answering your customer's questions before they even ask them and more ways to gain the customer's trust by adding customer reviews, testimonials, adding influencers to create shout outs for your product which is a part of marketing, psychological warfare like adding quantity breaks, discounts, countdown timers, stock counters, adding a live chat, trust badges and icons which add more to the trusting branding effect of your store and so much more. Once again, I cannot go over it in this video but these are the tools that you'll need to optimize your product page to convert, take it step by step, that's the next step that you're gonna take after importing products. That is why it is very important to watch this video to have a structural flow of everything that you need to do from A to Z along with all the links and tools that you'll need along the way. Step number nine is to create a professional Shopify homepage. The homepage is the main page that you have of your store and you want it to look good. This is an example that we have from the doggiedogclub.com. It's a demo Shopify store that I created. It has a homepage and in the Shopify course I took you step by step into how I created that homepage, how I created the navigation menu, the images and everything else but at the end of the day you wanna have a professional homepage that will be able to help users convert. They'll see your homepage even if you're add directs them to your product page. Many buyers will get out of the product page and click on your homepage just to see what other things you have to offer. See if you look like a real business and if they should be buying from you. Everything that you need to know about that especially on where to get images because you cannot simply go to Google images and download those images. They're copyrighted. You wanna use at the beginning free stock image websites that give you free images that you can use for your website that doesn't have any restrictions on it. And of course you can also hire graphic designers to create the images that you want to be shown your cover image and so forth on your website. But everything that you need to know once again on how to create a professional homepage in the blog right below this video. Your next step is to create store policies and legal pages and this part might not be very interesting but it's something that you have to have. Your buyers need to know what their payment policies are, what the shipping policies are, how fast they're gonna get their items, what the return policies are if they can return that product to you if they just simply do not like it or if there's any problem with it and the terms of service, frequently asked questions and all of those legal pages that once again you have to have. But to make all of this once again easier for you guys, we have created templates for the About Us FAQ shipping policy returns and refunds, privacy policy and terms of service. Simply click on those links in the blog below this video. Let me click for example on the shipping policy just to show you what it looks like so you'll click on it and you'll get this template to use. What you're gonna do is simply filling these brackets with your website address or business name or whatever information it requires to make it unique and relevant to your website. So you're gonna copy this information and on Shopify you're simply going to create a page. You have a full explanation of how to create pages in the Shopify course and you're simply going to create a page for each and every one of these policies and then you're gonna edit the navigation menu to be able to showcase these links on the top of your website or on the bottom or wherever you want them. Once again, all of the explanations to that also in the blog right here, as you can see the next step is to set up the navigation menu for those pages that you just created. You have the step by step here but a more step by step once again on the Shopify course.  That's a structure that I want. Let's start taking action. You're not gonna take action according to this video. You're not gonna take action according to the blog article. You're gonna take action according to the Shopify course and that is because here you have all the lessons split up and you can take them one by one. So for example, you're gonna learn about the six criteria for choosing a good product to sell. You're gonna learn how to spy on successful Shopify drop shipping stores. You're gonna do that and then you're gonna move over to picking the best drop shipping suppliers. You pick them and then you move over to the next lesson. It'll make it much, much easier for you especially when you get to creating your Shopify store which is what we're at now. So as you see, you're gonna connect your domain together. We're gonna create our unique store logo together. We're gonna select a theme together. We're gonna do everything together and you're only gonna move on to the next part after you checked in the last one. And when you get to online marketing, things are gonna get really, really fun. Here, as you can see, you're gonna learn how to set up a Facebook page, create a Facebook ads account, install the Facebook pixel which is responsible for tracking events and customer behavior that's happening on your website and it'll also help you retarget those audiences and look like audiences and we'll get to that in the course. I wanna leave some juice for you there. Audience research. So you'll also learn how to research your audience and not just research for products but you also need to do audience research. You'll also have a spreadsheet to use to help you along with that, creating a video for your ad which is very important because you want people to be able to see your ad, setting up your campaign goals and ad sets, launching your ad, being able to analyze it and scale it. So once again, you're gonna watch the course after reading the blog, after watching this video, that is the perfect structure if you wanna be able to do it the right way. Now, after you set up your navigation menu, the next step is to set up your store currency and print payment provider. The store currency is whatever currency the buyer's gonna see when they enter your website and just because you wanna sell for US dollars, it doesn't mean that that's the currency that your buyer needs to see. And if you'll use the auto-multi-currency converter as you can see the link right here, this will simply show your buyers whatever currency is local to them when they enter your website. So they won't see, for example, US dollar if they live in Europe or the UK and they're paying using the GBP, the Great Britain Pound currency. They'll see their currency and you'll see whatever you wanna see. So that is the store currency and then you've got the payment provider. If you live in the US, most people in the US use Stripe. If you live outside the US, then there's a whole bunch of third party payment providers that you can use. You can simply click on additional payment gateways in the blog below this video and that will show you all of the payment gateways that you have available to you locally. Simply get those businesses on the phone, tell them that you wanna use their payment service or ask whatever questions you wanna ask. And they'll also help you with the synchronization process which is pretty step-by-step on Shopify. They'll already know how to do it. You can get help from them or of course do it yourself once you get their information from them. And the payment provider gives your buyers the payment options. So you wanna use a payment provider that allows the most amount of payment options for your buyers. First of all, you can always work with PayPal and a lot of US shoppers like to buy from PayPal. So if you don't have a PayPal account, you can create one really quick, connect your credit card or your bank account to your PayPal account and that way your buyers will be able to also purchase using PayPal. But those that wanna use credit cards, debit cards and so forth, for that you're gonna have to synchronize with a payment provider. And the payment provider allows your buyers to be able to swipe their credit cards. Your payment provider will get the payment and send it directly to your account. Step number 13, Shopify checkout settings and shipping zones. This is what controls what countries or what states around the world can see your product listing. So this way, for example, if you don't wanna sell to Zimbabwe, then you can disclude them from the shipping zone and that way they'll still be able to go to your website and your product page but they will not be able to check out. So in your shipping zones, you're going to configure what countries you can ship to and what countries you cannot ship to in order for those shoppers to be able or not be able to have the checkout button. And the checkout settings is the whole structure that your buyer goes through when he's on checkout. And you wanna simplify the checkout process as much as possible. You don't wanna make it complicated and you don't want the buyers to give you more information than what they actually have to. For example, having a guest checkout is a great idea. Some customers do not wanna leave a whole bunch of information and they don't wanna have to create an account on your website if they wanna check out. You don't wanna lose buyers just because they had to create an account and they simply didn't want to. So guest checkout is another way to get more sales. So you wanna enable that in your checkout settings and you'll also wanna enable that customers can check out using only email. So that's a brief summary of the checkout settings and the shipping zones and of course the full step-by-step some in the article, but all of it is in the free Shopify course. Now after your checkout settings and your shipping zones, that is pretty much it. Your Shopify store is ready.  And now it's time to go live with your Shopify store. And once you go live with your store, you're gonna have to start paying Shopify a subscription starting at $29 per month.   So in order to go live with your Shopify store, once again, you're gonna have to register for your store and that option is available on your Shopify dashboard in the settings. You'll have the option to cancel the free trial and register for your store. Once you do that, your store will be live and anyone will be able to enter it and start purchasing. The only problem is that no one knows that your store exists, at least not yet. And this is where online marketing comes into play. So step number three, promote your products online marketing. This section scares a lot of people because here you're actually gonna have to pay traffic sources to bring traffic to your website. Now there are a few marketing methods to bring traffic to your website. The first is using PPC ads, PPC stands for pay per click and you are paying a traffic source for every time someone clicks on your ad whether they purchased or not, whether they stayed on your store or not, you're gonna pay for every click. Now in most cases, it's gonna be just a couple of cents or a few cents, several cents an average for every click. It really depends on what audience you're targeting, what ad placements you got and so forth. So some clicks can even cost less than a cent. So it really, really depends on what you're targeting and you're gonna learn about that the more campaigns, the more ad campaigns you run. So first you've got PPC ads which runs on Facebook, YouTube, Google and more. These are the top three PPC ad platforms that people use to market their product, their brand to their target audience. Here we're gonna learn about Facebook ads because it is all around one of the best PPC methods for us to use. But besides that, there are more online marketing methods that are not just PPC. For example, we've got influencer marketing. This is where you're hiring in an influencer to create a shout-out for your product and they have behind them a long line of audience that's actually relevant to your niche. So they're gonna create a shout-out, they're gonna say, hey guys, check out this product, I just tried it or whatever and their audiences are gonna click on that product and get to your page and hopefully purchase. Influencers are one of the most used methods today for marketing and I highly advise you to also check that out. For that, we also have an article on influencer marketing platforms which are websites that hold a whole bunch of influencers and stats about those influencers, what audiences they have, what their niche is, how much they usually charge and reviews that other people left them so that you can really be able to narrow down and filter down the best influencers that are good for your business. Besides that, you also have email marketing. Once you collect enough email addresses from your audiences, you'll be able to use their email addresses and send them promotional offers to get back to your website and purchase again. This is one of the most effective and oldest methods that still work really, really great up until this day. Once again, we're gonna focus on Facebook ads because it's relatively cheap to start off with them to test out the market, to have a nice broad reach into the market and once again, learn more and more about online marketing. Facebook ads is a great place to start and even if you don't have a high budget, you can even start with $5 a day ad sets, see how that works and whatever's not working well, you can always turn it off, whatever is giving you some good results. You can always play around with it a little bit more to try to optimize it and you're also gonna be doing multiple testing. So you're gonna have three ad sets, three different ads all running at $5 a day, each with maybe a different video, each with a different three seconds of the video. You can play around with different variations and you're gonna learn all about that way, way more in depth in our free Shopify course, which as I showed you, takes you through all of the right steps that you'll need to know and take to be able to create successful Facebook ads. It goes through everything and some of the most important lessons here is audience targeting and also creating a video for your ad because the video is really what's gonna grab your audience's attention. It's gonna show them whatever problem this product is solving and usually changing the first three seconds of your video has an optimal effect when you are testing out different audiences. So those are some of the variations that you should be trying and once again, more in-depth information in our Shopify course. Now, besides just reading it on our Shopify course, we also have an ebook on the eight steps for running Facebook ads for your e-commerce store. So you have a full ebook on the subject. You can simply click on it or simply head over to the ebook section. When you hover over resources, click on ebooks and there you'll have more ebooks but right now we're talking about the Facebook ads ebook. This one goes through all of the eight steps. Everything that we have in the Shopify course just written into an ebook. So whatever format you like, go ahead and use that. We're trying to help you out in every way possible. And once again, those eight steps are gonna show you everything that there is to know from beginning to end on running Facebook ads. Just for a quick look, here is my Facebook ads account and this is what I used on my Shopify store and also in the Shopify course. And this is exactly what you're gonna learn here. You're gonna start from the campaign. You're gonna move down to the ad set. You're gonna move down to the ad. You're gonna learn step by step everything that there is to know here on how to actually do it successfully, how to write the best descriptions, how to create videos for your ads even if you don't have a video for your product. So I went through everything here minimizing the amount of work that you need to do but maximizing the knowledge and maximizing the optimization power that you have from here. This is one of the most exciting parts of the course and I hope that it will also be exciting for you. It's jam-packed with all of the information that you need. So Facebook ads, one of the most important parts of the Shopify course. Step number four is order fulfillment. And like I said, this is the part after marketing since you're actually showing people your products, people are gonna start buying them and now you need to fulfill those orders. So the first way to do it is the manual way meaning you're gonna go to your supplier's website and say, okay, I sold this item so now I just need to add it to my cart and then I need to purchase it and in the shipping details I'm gonna add all of my buyer's details and I'm gonna do this one by one. However, non-drop shipping-friendly suppliers like Amazon could lock your account after a few purchases when they see that you're shipping to different addresses but even worse than that, you will not be able to scale your business when you're doing manual work. So once you reach 10, 15 orders per day, you're gonna spend many hours of work every day simply fulfilling your orders, writing down the customer's name and copying all the information and hoping that you're not gonna make any mistakes by shipping out to the wrong address or anything like that which will put you at 100% loss for that order. I know from experience because it happened to me at least a few times before I joined order automation and this is the next thing that I wanna talk about. Order automation will simply save you the most amount of time by automatically fulfilling all of your orders as soon as they come in. So even while you're away, even while you're traveling, even while you're sleeping, even while you're on vacation, as soon as an order comes in from your buyer, the system will fulfill it, it will go to the supplier's website, it will purchase that product, it'll ship it to your end customer and it'll even automatically add tracking information as soon as it's available from your supplier so your buyer will always be able to track the progress of their delivery without having to reach out to you and your buyers will also be very happy to get their items really, really quick because they don't need your intervention to process their orders for them. How does order automation work with AutoDS? There are two types of order automation services. The first is semi-automatic, meaning it's going to use your buyer accounts to process your orders, but the second, my most favorite one is the fulfill by AutoDS service, meaning it's not using your buyer accounts. In other words, you can drop you from Amazon, you can drop you from AliExpress, you can drop you from other US suppliers with a USD currency and everything will be automated from A to Z when it comes to order fulfillment and updating tracking numbers 100% automatically as soon as the orders come in. A full explanation of how that works once again in our fulfill by AutoDS page, it is linked in the article below this video as well as automatic order fulfillment if you do want to use your own buyer accounts. But fulfill by AutoDS is my personal favorite because AutoDS have their own buyer accounts and they're going to use their buyer accounts to fulfill your orders. And if you ever have a return, all you need to do is click on the order status and change it to request a return. The order statuses are very, very simple on AutoDS. Your orders will start impending, it'll move to automatic ordering, then it'll move to ordered with your supplier's order number. It'll move to shipped as soon as the tracking information is available with the tracking number and delivered once it got delivered to your buyer. Everything 100% automated, 100% hassle free. The only thing that you need to do is opt into the fulfill by AutoDS service. Once again, it's really quick. All the information for that is on our website.  If you wanna start a return, you'll have a return label right next to your order right here. You can simply click on it to open up your return label. If you are, of course, eligible for a return according to your supplier's policies, which are the same policies that you are passing onto your buyers. And if you're not eligible for return, you're gonna get a return failed along with the failed message. In this example, return window closed, meaning you had, for example, 30 days to return the product and you tried to return it after 40 days. Whatever policy the supplier has is the policy that you are building for your buyers too. So one equals one, two equals two, and there shouldn't be any problems with this. So that's a quick explanation of the orders page and the order statuses. Use fulfilled by AutoDS to fulfill orders from your US suppliers. Otherwise use automatic orders to save your time. And that is order fulfillment. Those are my recommendations when it comes to that. Step number five, managing returns and refunds. Like I mentioned, it's another part of the process and there's nothing we can do about it. If a buyer wants to return a product and he is eligible for a return, according to your policies, then you have to let him return the product. You'll have to go to your supplier's website, get a return label or get it automatically if you're using fulfilled by AutoDS and send that to your buyer. Your buyer will then use that return label. He'll stick it on the returning package and he'll drop it off at UPS. UPS will send it back. If of course it is a UPS return number. UPS will send it back. There's a tracking number on the return label that you can actually track the shipment. See that it got shipped back.  Sometimes it can take your supplier a little bit longer to send the refund so it's okay to refund the buyer a little bit before but check out whatever scenario you have, whatever situation you have. Each one is different from the other but managing returns and refunds once again it's something that we're gonna have to deal with. It's only one or 2% of our business but still something very important that we have to take care of. Step number six is customer service and it goes together like I said with my previous explanation of managing returns and refunds you wanna offer the best customer service that you can and this is for the long term survivability of your drop shipping store. If you wanna be here for the long term and I really hope that you do I really hope that that is what you're shooting for. Customer service goes a long way for the long term survivability and profitability of your drop shipping store. So every day go to your Shopify store see if there are any new customer messages and to your customers be kind, be professional and they will not only return to buy from you return to purchase from your store but they'll also refer their friends and their family to purchase from you and this way you're gonna get repeat purchases multiple purchases, more customers to add to your email database list and like I said once you have a large email database list this is when you're actually gonna start promoting for free because it doesn't cost money to send emails not even to thousands of users at once promoting your products to the right audiences to a warm audience that already visited your website already gave you their information they wanna buy from you and this is gonna be the next step in your e-commerce journey once you have a few thousand emails. Step number seven, the last and final step is scaling your success. You've worked really hard to make it this far you've got your store up and running you did your product research people are watching the products in your stores they're purchasing some of them and of course those slow movers you wanna replace them with other products that you wanna test while always adding more products similar to those that are selling well for you because you wanna continue multiplying your success but there are many more things that you can do to scale your success for one, if you see an ad set that is running well and your daily budget is still only $5 per day scale it to $10 per day scale it to $15 per day and find that sweet spot where your return on investment, your ROI is the highest, the most profitable and optimal that it can be the next thing that you wanna do and you should be doing this already is using dropshipping automation so Autodesk is gonna help you scale your dropshipping business by easily importing more best sellers and automating your orders and doing so much more to help you take care of only the most important tasks of your day to day which is growing and expanding your dropshipping empire and not getting stuck on daily tasks that will not allow your business to grow another recommendation that I have is adding virtual assistants and you can of course do that also on Autodesk and what the virtual assistant does is take care of more daily tasks that you don't have time for because once again you need to focus on what I can do to grow my business and scale my business exponentially and once again not get stuck on the same recurring tasks every day on the Autodesk platform you're gonna click on settings, plans and add-ons you're gonna enable the VA users add-on and then under users you're going to create their account so you're gonna click on add user add the name of your virtual assistant for example, Mary, add her email address the password that you want her to use and then give her privilege on all of your stores or only some of your stores select which ones and what privileges you wanna give her like viewing your dashboard editing your products, deleting your drafts sending messages to customers you can give some privileges or you can give all privileges whatever option suits you best now if you don't know your virtual assistants from right from the start you still wanna get to know them don't give them too many privileges right off the bat the more you get to know them the more you get to trust them and then slowly start releasing the leash and giving them more and more control and power over your business but of course do not hire virtual assistants before you actually know how to run your business from A to Z you cannot teach someone to do something that you don't actually know yourself and in the best way possible in the most professional way everything from beginning to end only then should you hire a virtual assistant to help take that load off of you but once again, dropshipping automation can do most of the automation work for you and more than enough if you ask me but once you're really ready to expand virtual assistants are one of the best ways to scale your business so I really hope that this video explanation helped you get a general overview of how to run a successful Shopify dropshipping store now of course there's a lot more to it you need to put a lot more hours of work into each section that I went over but I went over all of the important steps and in the right structure to start, run and manage a successful dropshipping business on Shopify your next step is to go over the blog article once again, link right below this video and then sign up for our free Shopify course and this is where you're going to start taking action watch a video, take action watch the next lesson, take action and by the time you're done with the free Shopify course your store is up and running you're already doing online marketing you did the best product research that you can for your store and you did a lot more which I couldn't cover in this video like audience research and so many more important things but we went over the right structure and now you have the perfect mindset of whether you do want to enter Shopify or of course, if you want to check out other selling channels and other suppliers thank you for watching this video don't forget to like, share and subscribe of course, if you haven't done so yet to learn about the next step in your dropshipping business thank you for watching and good luck building your Shopify dropshipping empire


Thank you everyone for being here today. I know there are a lot of great talks out there, so I'm really glad that you chose to attend this one. My name is Dennis Kleben, and I'm here to tell you why Pulp 3 is going to be simpler, better, and more awesome. So a little bit about myself. I'm primarily a Python developer, and I've been doing that since about 2009. I'm employed by Red Hat, and my primary responsibilities are contributing to Pulp. In my free time, I like to juggle. So if any of you want to juggle later, you can find me.  All right. So I want to start by telling you a little bit about what Pulp can do.  You can mirror external repositories, you can upload your custom packages to Pulp, and then you can mix all of that content and make it available to different environments in your infrastructure. So what's new in Pulp 3? The greatest feature that we're adding with Pulp 3 is versioned repositories, which means that every time you change content in a repository, a repository version is created and it is immutable, and you can publish that version or roll back to that version and it just makes things much smoother than Pulp 2. We have also provided a very concrete plugin API and it is semantically versioned so that there is now a Pulp core plugin package on PyPy that our plugins can depend on, and they can know that as long as they're using a specific version of the plugin API, their plugin is going to work. We were able to also reduce the size of our code base by relying on frameworks such as Django, Django REST framework, and Swagger. With this, we were able to create a Browseable REST API which I will demonstrate later in my demo. We also include REST API documentation with every install. We can take a look at what that looks like here. Let me zoom out a little, maybe a lot. All right. For every resource and endpoint, on your Pulp 3 installation, you can just go to API v3 docs and look up the documentation. We also dropped Mongo and I'm so glad that we did. We fine. Yeah. We're now using a relational database which can now do joins instead of having to use Python for that. We decided that we want to make Python our primary packaging method. So all of our builds are uploaded to PyPy and you can use PIP to install Pulp 3. We're also including an Ansible installer that will install using some Ansible roles that we published to Galaxy and it also installs some config files that you need. Pulp 3 also removes some features. We decided that the Pulp agent that we were providing with Pulp 2 was not something we wanted to keep carrying. There are other tools out there that can do a really good job of managing your machines such as Ansible. So we recommend to our users to do that. We also got rid of scheduled tasks. Once again, there are tools that can do this much better than Pulp can. I believe there's Rundeck and if you want to use Cron you could do that but there are tools out there. We also got rid of Celery Beat. So there is now one less daemon that you have to run to run Pulp. The responsibilities of Celery Beat have now been distributed to other workers. So all the workers are looking out for each other and doing the work of Celery Beat. We also got rid of SimLinks. So now when you publish, you don't have to wait on your slow spinny disks to write out all those SimLinks. All of the publishing happens at the database layer. So where are we with Pulp 3 now? We are in the Alpha phase. We're building Alpha builds about weekly. We're pushing them all to PyPy and we're hoping to enter beta pretty soon in the next few months. We have one plugin that already works and that's the plugin I'll be demonstrating today and that this plugin manages files. We are also already writing a couple of plugins. The Python plugin is under development and a plugin to manage Ansible roles is also being developed already. And we're going through the planning phase for RPM and Docker. And we're going to be publishing roadmaps for all of these plugins in the near future. And now to my favorite part of the presentation, the demo. So I'm gonna be rotating between the terminal and the slide deck here. And here we have a repository that's out on the internet. It contains three files. We also have a user that's going to upload a file and we also have a pulp which doesn't have any content in it right now. So let's begin by creating a repository. We're going to make a REST API call that looks like this with HTTP Py. We're gonna do that in the terminal. And so the repository got created. So now we have a repository. Next, we're going to sync that remote repository that we have. In order to do that, we have to first create an importer. The important part to notice here is the feed URL. This is the URL that the importer will use to discover content to download. After we create the importer, we will tell that importer to sync. And the sync will be an asynchronous task. So let's go do that. All right, so this asynchronous task can be followed through the REST API. And this is the browsable API right here. This is thanks to Django REST framework. We can see that the task completed and that three content units were added. And as a result, a repository version was created. The repository version has three files in it. And we can also look at the actual content. These are the three files in here. Test two ISO, test ISO, and test three ISO. So now we have a repository version for a repository foo. And we also have those three files stored in pulp so they can be reused for other repositories. Next, we want to publish this repository version. We're gonna make some REST API calls here also. We're gonna create a publisher that's specific for the file plugin. And then we're gonna call the publish method on that publisher. Publish is also an asynchronous task, which we can follow here. It has completed and it created a publication. So here I wanna point out a difference between a repository version and a publication. The repository version is an immutable set of content in pulp and the publication is the same set of content plus any metadata that needs to be present for a client to consume that content. So for the file plugin, it's the pulp manifest file that just lists all the files that are available in that repository. So we already created the publication and that's what we are showing here that the publication A is that of repository version one. Now, whenever we want to make this publication available via HTTP, we need to create a distribution. Distributions basically serve your publications. And we're gonna make this REST API call and we're gonna specify which publication we want to make available. So we made a distribution, which means we can now look at the generated pulp manifest file in our for that distribution. So as you can see, we performed a curl here on the distribution and the distribution contains the three files that we synced from our remote repository. So we now have a distribution that's serving our publication. Next, we're going to upload some content into pulp. And then after we upload the content, we're going to add it to our repository. And whenever you add content to a repository, a new repository version gets created. You can add one piece of content or you can add a bunch of content at once to create a new repository version. So we're gonna do the upload and now we're gonna do the, create a new repository version. And let's look at the output of this task. The task completed and it produced a new repository version, which has now four files in it. And if we look at the content, we will see that there is now a new file in there. foo.tar.gz. So we have a new repository version. So let's publish it and create another publication. Now, now that we have a new publication, we want to update our distribution so that new set of content is available at the same path that we published our first publication. So we're going to update the distribution and we're just gonna specify the new publication that we want to be available at that relative path. Yeah, so right now, before the update of the distribution, I curled the pulp manifest and it still has only three files. We're gonna update the distribution and then we're gonna go check the pulp manifest and we see that now there is a fourth file available. So let's talk about content promotion now. In pulp two, if you wanted to make the same set of content available at a different URL, you had to create a new repository, then you had to copy all of those packages into that repository, publish it again, and then you would have it available at a new URL. In pulp three, all you have to do is create another distribution, point it at the same publication that you're interested in serving at a different URL and you've got it available at a different URL. So we're gonna create another distribution and we're now gonna check that it's available at a different URL now. The other URL was foo slash dev and this one is foo slash test and it's showing us that it has the same content. This is the link to our YouTube channel. We do demos about once a month. So if you wanna follow the progress of pulp three or you wanna contribute, join us on YouTube and I'll take some questions now. Now UI interface. The question is did we start working on a UI interface? We have not, but all the plugins for pulp are going to be, they are Django apps. So it would not be hard for someone to create another Django app that is basically a UI for pulp three. So I think this will be a great contribution to make the pulp three. Yes? When will the GA be available? The question is when will the GA be available? I don't have an answer for that. We're hoping to go into beta soon and get the plugin writing going. So can't commit to a date. Go ahead. When you upload a whole bunch of files, is there an atomic guarantee?  For the version. For the version. The way the upload API works is that you first upload artifacts into pulp and we have an artifact API and then you convert, then you create content units out of the artifacts. So you do that before adding them to any repositories and once you've created those content units, you can do a bulk add to a repository and create a new repository version. If there is a problem with adding any of the content units for whatever reason, that version will not be created and you can try to do it again. Yes? Have you considered uploads via native tools like pip or whatever other tooling users? Could you rephrase that? If you publish a Python package for example using pip and it also publishes to pulp, is there anything planned around that? I believe, so the question is, does pulp plan to support publishing? Uploading content. Uploading content using API similars to PyPy? Yeah, same one, like directly from pip, like pip uploading into pulp. Yes, I believe actually on the Python plugins roadmap there is a use case that covers that. Yum repositories or DNF repositories, RPM packages, what's the state of the plugin? Oh yes, so the question is, what is the state of the plugin, of the RPM plugin? The RPM plugin is being planned and a roadmap for it will be published soon. It is a very important plugin, so I'm sure development will begin soon. Will there be a Debian support? The question is, will there be Debian support? Absolutely. With pulp two, we added Debian support last year and it has been a very popular plugin. We have made sure that the plugin API is very straightforward and easy to use, so porting that plugin from pulp two to pulp three should not be difficult. And how does replication between data centers let's say work, it's the same as pulp two? The question is how will replication between different instances of pulp work? We will not have nodes, nodes were deprecated in pulp two and we plan to support being able to sync from one pulp into another pulp, as if it was just another repository out there and you're just syncing it to your other pulp instance. The question is, is there going to be an OSG plugin? Yes, there will be. I forgot to put that on the slide. I wanted a year from now to make an HA pulp end point. How might I do that? An HA pulp end point? Yeah, how do you do that? Yeah, I believe that that was already built into pulp. And you can have redundant services running so that if there is a failure, it will fail over. That's already built in. Do you wanna? Sorry, I'm just clobbering on pulp. Yeah, pulp supports full HA both in pulp two and pulp three, each piece. There's no single point of failure at any level. It's been one of our goals. And pulp three right from the work, I was gonna say, can you repeat that a little bit? Yes, I'm gonna repeat for the camera. Pulp two and pulp three both are fully HA. The question is, can pulp be a container registry? Pulp itself cannot be a container registry. There's another project that we work on also. It's called Crane. And it works together with a pulp docker plugin to be a registry. So the content is stored in pulp but it's actually served by this other project called Crane. Yes? When you import the data, if you import it from a pulp manifest, is it possible to import data from a data set that isn't managed by pulp or is it flexible enough to have it possibly imported? Yeah, so pulp is designed to have plugins. Oh, sorry, I'm gonna repeat the question. Is it possible to import content into pulp that does not have a pulp manifest? The pulp manifest is only required by the file plugin. Each plugin is dedicated to particular content types. So the RPM plugin is going to support importing YUM repositories and every plugin does its own thing, yeah. And you probably can write a custom answer. Yeah, you can create whatever kind of plugin you want. I like to say that you can write a plugin for managing your cat photos. Though the file plugin kind of does that. Thank you, everyone.