#232 – How I Sold $350K on Amazon in 3 Months Using Drop Shipping

There are so many different ways to make money selling on Amazon. For many reasons, dropshipping on Amazon is often considered to be a “gateway” platform for sellers looking to get into e-commerce. That’s because there’s a relatively low cost to get started, you can easily “test” a variety of products, and it’s simple to scale up once you’ve found the right product to sell.

Of course, there are also disadvantages to drop shipping. Today on the Serious Sellers Podcast, Helium 10’s Director of Training and Chief Evangelist, Bradley Sutton takes us through a drop shipping case study that he recently conducted. He says that his goal is to make sure that Helium 10 users (as well as the general online selling community) receive the most up-to-date information from ground zero.

This case study is one more way that he’s doing just that. Listen in and find out how he made 350K in Q4 by taking full advantage of the financial solutions provided by Alta, by Helium 10. You’ll also learn why he’s not recommending that Amazon sellers follow the exact e-commerce footsteps that he traveled and what he’s got planned for the future.

In episode 232 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:

• 01:10 – Bradley’s Drop Shipping Case Study
• 02:40 – What’s Drop Shipping?
• 04:55 – How the Case Study Process Worked
• 06:50 – Walmart’s Free Shipping Helped Increase Productivity
• 08:30 – A High Credit Card Limit Wasn’t Enough
• 09:35 – Alta’s Daily Advance Allowed Bradley to Scale Up
• 13:55 – Managing the Bumps in the Road
• 17:05 – A Monster Truck with 60% Profit Margins  
• 19:15 – DoorDash Deliveries Endanger Bradley’s Account   
• 21:25 – Walmart-Labeled Packages Raise a Red Flag
• 29:10 – Alta’s Toolbox of Financial Assistance
• 33:10 – Saving Interest Charges with Alta’s Cash Advance   
• 36:25 – What’s Next for Bradley?

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Podcast or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Ultimate Resource Guide: Discover the best tools and services to help you dominate on Amazon.
• Helium 10: 20+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation. 
• SellerTradmarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.

Transcript

Bradley Sutton: On today’s episode, I’m going to talk to you guys about how I grossed over $500,000 in Q4 of last year, $350,000 a method of selling on Amazon that I had never tried before; Drop shipping. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the Amazon world. And we’re going to talk today about my own serious selling experience in Q4 last year. Now I did an episode a few weeks back. You guys can listen back to it about how I grossed $150,000 on the Project 5k products in Q4. Actually overall on this one account I did more than I’ve ever done in any of my accounts in any one account. And it was $500,000. I did, I grossed in just three months, $350,000 of that was done with me doing a case study for drop shipping. I had heard about some sellers having some success, doing drop shipping on Amazon, especially coming from Walmart and HomeDepot and other websites. And I was like, you know what? I wonder if this is something that everybody can do and let me just dive into it and see if I can build a team on it. And if it works, Hey, maybe this is a great way for people to get into Amazon without having to make a big investment in private label. Now, by no means that I think I was going to do $350,000. That was just ridiculous. I thought this is going to be like a low key test. I was actually super scared that my account was going to get shut down because the sales velocity was just so high on that account. Normally, I would do 30 or $40,000 a month, but I didn’t get suspended, but I came close to it for some other reasons.

Bradley Sutton: So let me just get into this and explain what happened, what this drop shipping model was. And if I’m going to recommend it to you guys out there and the dangers in it, and also I’m going to talk about how in the world, I was able to afford turning over that kind of money and spoiler alert. I wouldn’t have been able to do it without the Helium 10 Alta plan. So, I go into that too. All right. So anyways, drop shipping. What is drop shipping? Now, drop shipping is just a common vocabulary word, right? In general, when we’re talking e-commerce it means, you put up a listing somewhere, right? And you don’t have the inventory yourself, but as soon as somebody buys it from you or they give you the order, now what you do is you actually purchase from someone else and then they ship it to that customer, or they drop ship that product to the customer. So you’ve never even touched the product. You are going straight from your supplier to your customer without having to do an initial investment. Theoretically speaking, you’re getting the money first before actually paying for it. So that was why it was kind of like an attractive model to me. And I heard of one of my friends in the Dominican Republic doing this really well also, I was like, you know what, let me give it a try. So I obviously don’t have time to be searching for deals and things like that. So what I did was, I hired a team, my buddy, Abdul from Bangladesh. He’s been working with one of my friends for a while. So I was like, you know what, can you go ahead and let me hire a team and come on and try and find these opportunities. And you guys kind of just handle everything and, and, and I’ll just be the money man. Right. And they’re like, cool. All right.

Bradley Sutton: So this is how the system was working. All right. So, what I do is first of all, I gave this team a sub-account access to my seller central account. So they have their own login where they don’t have full admin access, but they can at least manage the orders and manage buyer-seller messaging and things like that. Right? Now, the other thing is I created a Walmart buyer account, right. And I also did one for home Depot and a couple other websites. And then on these buyer accounts, I gave them my username and password for these. All right. And I preloaded my credit cards to these accounts. And now you guys, I know you might be thinking Bradley, you have lost your mind. You’re giving people your credit card, but I’m not, I preloaded the credit card into my account, but you like, can’t see the number. I think you could only use the credit card to purchase these things. And like I said, these are just like some people off the street. I was dealing with somebody who my friend has been using for a while, so I could trust them. But how it works is what they do is they go onto these other websites like Walmart and other places. And by the way, I had to go through a long process too, to get tax exempt or, like submit my sales permit information and things. So I wouldn’t be charged tax because there is not that much profitability with this business model. At least the way I was doing it, it’s not like 20, 25% like you do on Amazon private label. Sometimes it’s as low as like 7% to 15%. So if tax in a state is 8%, boom, there goes your whole entire profit. If you had to pay the attacks sometimes. So I had to get all that done. That was pretty much my hardest work, but anyways, I give them the Amazon account access. I give them the Walmart and HomeDepot account access. And what they’re doing is they’re basically looking where they could buy something retail on Walmart or HomeDepot, or these other websites at a lower price than what they can sell it for even after Amazon fees on Amazon. All right. And as they find these opportunities, what they do is then they add that listing. They piggyback on it because these are existing listings that are on Amazon with other sellers, other wholesale sellers and or arbitrage sellers. And then they add a SKU in my seller central account to advertise for like three or four or five of those units, right.

Bradley Sutton: And then they’re constantly checking 24 hours a day. If new orders come in. And then as the orders come in, now they go into my Walmart account or my home Depot account. And they purchase it as if it was a regular customer. But then instead of putting my shipping address, they put the customer from Amazon’s shipping address. Right. So, that’s the way it works. And again, they don’t need my credit card number because I already preloaded it into the Walmart buyer account or the home Depot buyer account or the best buy buyer account. Right. But of course I can check to make sure all the transactions are good to go. So now the question is, how did this scale up so rapidly? Well, one of the big changes towards the end of last year was that Amazon started doing a lot more Walmart plus and free shipping right now. This actually came to bite me in the butt more on that later, but now all of a sudden, under $35, since I had a Walmart Plus account, Walmart would give free shipping on it. So what happened before is we would sell a lot of like 10, $15 products, but then I would still have to pay 5.99 to Walmart for shipping to drop, ship it to the customer. We still made money, but obviously that ate into a lot of the profit. Right. But now all of a sudden there were tons of these products that Walmart was saying, Hey, we’ll ship it for free. No problem. We’ll ship it for free to your customer. Right. So I started off slow in like September. And we were doing three or $4,000 a day in the beginning, because I was too scared to like bumping up the sales velocity so fast because I didn’t want to get my account suspended. This is where I’m doing all my Project 5k case studies, a lot of them at least. And I was like, wait a minute. I don’t want to get my account suspended. And then now my whole Project 5k goes down the drain. Right. And it was a very good account. I had great metrics and everything on it since I’ve always taken good care of it. So I was like, all right, let’s just like, slow our roll.

Bradley Sutton: But then as September came along, sales were just going crazy. We got up to like $10,000 a day of sales at times, and at least $5,000. Here’s one of the problems I ran into right at the beginning when I started scaling up. And that was the fact that my credit cards couldn’t handle. I’ve got some pretty high, in my opinion, high credit cards. I was actually using my dad and one of my travel credit cards. Like I had one credit card that was like a $35,000 limit. I had another credit card that was $25,000 limit. And those are pretty much the ones I was using. But what happens when you’re selling retail amounts, like $10,000 a day or $5,000 a day, that means I’m probably paying Walmart every day. I don’t know, 4,000 or $5,000 every day, or a little bit less depending on how much it was, but like 50% of whatever the retail price was. I was already paying that for the shipping and other things. But remember how often does Amazon give disbursements to sellers? It’s every two weeks. So I was kind of hurting for a little bit where I was maxing out the credit cards because I had to wait for Amazon to give me my disbursement after two weeks and then wait to pay off my credit card. And so sometimes I had to stop selling because I didn’t have enough money to pay my credit cards. And I was like, man, I want to be able to keep going. So what did I do? I was like, wait a minute, I’ve got an Alta account. I even had my disbursements going into my Alta account. So I quickly applied for a daily advance using Alta. Guys, just because I worked for Helium 10. I don’t get any special benefits or special rates or anything. I have the process that I had to go to– is the same process that any of you guys would have to go to. Nothing special that I did. Right. So they took a look at my account. I got approved in like one day or two days for that. And now I have the Daily Advance from Alta, meaning that every day during the week, for five days a week, I am getting the previous day’s money of what I sold on Amazon. Alta isn’t getting the money, you know, they’re just giving me the advance because they can see how much I sold.

Bradley Sutton: And they’re giving me about 80% of what it was. And then 20% about what they were keeping as a reserve that I’m going to get with my regular disbursement, just in case there are chargebacks or things like that. The actual fee at cost is about like 1%. I think something like that. They’re charging me like 1%, which to me it was worth it. Now, why is that? You know, like 1% that actually adds up, especially when we’re talking about an account that had $500,000, right, of gross sales. Well, it was worth it for me because I literally had to completely stop doing the drop shipping or a few days at a time when I couldn’t keep up with my credit cards. So my profit there went to zero, right. But as long as I could keep the sales going, well, every day I’m making a couple thousand dollars potentially profit $1,000 profit, 2000 on really good days profit. And so it was definitely worth it for me to pay that 1% charge and to keep selling every day. And so that was like the biggest reason on why, especially during November and the beginning, December when sales were just going crazy, the only way I was able to get that $350,000 of sales with this business model of drop shipping was because of that Alta daily advance and being able to get the very next day, whatever I sold on Amazon. So things were seemingly going great. The profit wasn’t amazing. I’m not doing this stuff for tons of profit because it costs money to hire a team to run this. I mean, if I would run it myself, of course I probably would have made a lot more money, but I’m doing most of this just for educational purposes. So, if I take a step back, yeah, I probably could have made a nice, pretty coin right there. If I actually had the time to dedicate to it. Now, what were some of the drawbacks so far? It sounds like unicorns and rainbows, right. $350,000. And I’m not even lifting a finger because this team is doing it well, it wasn’t all unicorns and rainbows. All right. Problem. Number one, there’s a lot of customers out there who are just like scammers. All right. So, like going through that many orders, I could see that. Let me just see, let me just look at my account here. Exactly how many units we’re talking about. Yeah. I mean, this was over 10,000 units. Oh, not worth, what am I saying? 30,000 units of product we sold, so there are a lot of customers who said they never got it or things like that.

Bradley Sutton: And I don’t have to refund them, whether they got it or not. Because as long as, if I can not prove with a signed signature that they got it, I have to refund them. That’s just the way that the rules in America work for e-commerce. So, that was a problem. Obviously that eats into the profit, another thing was I was getting hit with these a few, like, I don’t know what you call them. These complaints from their rights owners, like some of these products were more name brands, and then they would say it was funny. It was crazy. They would send me these cease and desist letters, because I guess they don’t like people reselling their products. Now, I mean, I didn’t know, I wasn’t even picking these products, but all of a sudden I get these, FedEx’s like, Hey, you are either legally selling our products. I mean, what I was doing was completely legal. There’s nothing wrong with it. I was selling legitimate products that came from Walmart. I mean, obviously it’s genuine products, but they just don’t like people eating into their profit margin. So, like I said, this was just for educational purposes. I’m not going to fight with those companies. So as soon as I got those letters, I was like, okay, I’m deleting these products from my account. I don’t have time for these kinds of headaches, but it was kind of scary, and a couple of those things, they actually ended up being marks on my account that are still there today, like policy complaints and things like that. There was a listing problem. It wasn’t my listing, but since I had it in my seller central account, one of the products, I never even sold it, but I have now a bad mark on my report because whoever made that list, he did something wrong. And now that was on my report. So, another reason that was kind of negative or why I didn’t really like what was going on. The team that I had running in. Sometimes they would do stuff that I told them not to like, Oh my God. Like sometimes, the way they would, I gave them buyer-seller messaging privileges, but sometimes the things they would say to customers, I was like, Oh my God, are you serious right now? So, after a while, I just had like, myself and my family take over the buyer seller messaging, even if it was on their orders, because I was cringing at some of the things that they were selling. Like, there’s another minus for this.

Bradley Sutton: All right, guys, quick break from this episode for my BTS, Bradley’s 30 seconds. Here’s my 30-second tip. We’re talking about drop shipping, wholesale, arbitrage in this episode. Well, if you guys do choose to go one of those routes, maybe you find another seller out there who’s doing who you know, is doing drop shipping, or you know that they’re doing the same model as you be at arbitrage, or a wholesale because you see that maybe one of the products that you’re selling, they’re doing the exact same thing. Well, that might be a good seller to go check out their other products, because if they’re doing that product that you’re doing, maybe other products that they are doing on Amazon, you might be able to buy those products from your own suppliers, especially if they share one in common with you. So a good way to go kind of like spy on the top 200 products that they have is take their storefront name or their seller name, where it says shipped by blank, shipped by Amazon, sold by blank, get their store name. Like Helium 10 is how cool is that on Amazon, right. Copy it completely as it is on Amazon it’s case sensitive go into Black Box by Helium 10 and into the products tab. And then there is a filter there for not branding. There’s one for brands, but there’s also now one for sellers. And then put paste that seller name into that filter. And you are going to be able to see their products that they have in their store up to 200. And you can even put filters, like say, Hey, show me all of the products that this seller is selling that is making an estimated a thousand dollars a month or something like that. So guys, if you want to do some wholesale or arbitrage research and spy on your competition, that is a great new way to do that.

Bradley Sutton: Let’s go back to some of the pluses. There were some just products that were going crazy. I mean, there’s one that was so good that they even actually featured me and this product on a CNBC. You guys can probably find that word. I was on CNBC talking about this one monster truck product. There is this product, a monster jam megalodon, I’ll never forget it. Monster jam Megalodon remote control truck. That was such a hot product on Amazon. And it was sold out like almost immediately, but not only was it available at Walmart, it was on sale. So the profit margin was crazy. Like on this one, we were getting like 30% profit. There was a time where we were even getting like 60 and 70% profit. We were buying it from Walmart for 40 bucks and selling it for 100 on Amazon. And we could not keep it on the digital shelf. It was selling so fast. Overall, this one SKU over the Q4, we sold 539 units of it for almost $50,000. One SKU was crazy right. Now, here’s what happened to this, is a positive and a negative. So what happens sometimes is Walmart and Target and all these other places where we’re getting this stuff, they would sell out. But my crackpot team there, they were selling stuff, even though it wasn’t in stock because they were assuming they could get it, and then it didn’t. So then what ended up having to happen was I had to send my kids and myself to drive to all these Walmarts and Targets in the area and buy up, fill up our car with this product, just to be able to fulfill these orders because walmart.com and target.com now all of a sudden we’re out of stock of this. It was kind of fun. It’s like a family activity, and they shipped it all out. But I was like, I don’t have time for driving around just thinking Walmart’s doing what basically is arbitrage, right? But Hey, we were still making good profit. And it was all part of my experiments. I’m like, it is what it is.

Bradley Sutton: All right. The biggest problem here is the biggest problem that we had other than a lot of these orders, my guys could not keep it in stock. And they were selling stuff that we couldn’t even get. So that was a big problem. But the biggest problem was with this Walmart plus thing, all right, that Walmart has been pushing for one and two day delivery. Guess how, where most of these items that are fulfilled by Walmart, guess how they are delivering a big portion of them now. Door dash. Yes, that is right. That’s like Uber eats and Post mates. Somehow I don’t even know, like this has got to be a story somewhere. It’s got to be a story. I mean, I don’t know. I haven’t read it in the news, but hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, thousands of orders of mine, they were delivering with door dash. Not FedEx, not UPS not USPS. Now you might be wondering why is that a problem? Here’s the thing to Amazon. If you are shipping something yourself, fulfill by merchant, you have got to provide a valid traceable tracking number, right? FedEx, UPS. I mean, there’s like 30 different carriers. Door dash. There’s no such thing as tracking. All right. I mean, literally they’re just calling some person in their Toyota Camry to go to the Walmart, pick up a little bag and then take it and deliver it and drop it off on somebody’s door. And that was what was happening. So now all of a sudden I could not provide tracking numbers for hundreds of orders. And guess what? That is actually a requirement by Amazon. You have got to have 95% of your fulfilled by merchant orders have to have a validated tracking number. So my metrics went down to like 70% and I was flipping out. I was like, Oh my God, they are going to cancel my account. This is no way now, right. So that we, at that point, we just totally totally slowed down because I was like, we have got to stop these orders because these ones that are not coming from third party sellers on Walmart, these ones that are coming from Walmart, stinking, Walmart keeps using or dash on these. And we can’t provide a tracking number. And then in addition, the customers were saying they never got it.

Bradley Sutton: Here’s another problem, guys. Here’s another problem with this door dash system is they’re delivering groceries pretty much. It’s like in a little Walmart bag that they were delivering some of these things. And a lot of these things in Q4 were for Christmas. And so I would get these hate messages to my seller feedback saying, all right, I got this product in like 24 hours. That was so awful,  it ruined my son’s Christmas because we came home and there he picked up his Walmart bag that was just sitting in our door and he saw what the present was. I was like, Oh, so I got tons of bad seller feedback, because of that. So that was bad. Now, what is the third thing that’s bad about this, right? What is Amazon’s drop shipping policy? One of the key things is you can not be delivering products where you are not the shipper of record. You can not have it with other companies like packaging, like Walmart box or Target box, like that’s against Amazon’s rules. So that was super, super shady because all the stuff that was coming from Walmart was being delivered in these Walmart packages. So I was like, Whoa, guys, this is like super dangerous here. Sure enough. I got like one of these nasty grams from Amazon saying that I violated their drop shipping policy. I didn’t even see that until I had stopped doing the drop shipping. I didn’t even see this message until later, because I didn’t even check my messages that much, but sure enough, I had gotten the message, Hey, we have got a report that you are violating our drop shipping policy. This is your warning, blah, blah, blah, blah. So anyways, I ended up not going through with this after January, I pretty much put it almost all to a stop, even though I grossed. As you saw hundreds of thousands of dollars, it just is not worth the risk, this model. All right. So earlier last year I think I could have probably made a fortune because it was easier to do it. There’s tracking numbers for everything and it was pretty, pretty cool, but nowadays it’s unless you can only, you’re only looking at products fulfilled by third-party merchants on Walmart and that are not coming from Walmart. That’s pretty much the only way to go if you want to do drop shipping on Walmart. And even if you do that, it’s very few you’re able to find now that are just out of stock on Amazon. So, one of the reasons why a lot of people in Q4 were out of stock on Amazon is because of those severe inventory restrictions. So that was another reason for my success.

Bradley Sutton: So again, the cool thing is, is that, Oh my goodness, I became addicted to that Alta system of getting my daily advance. I mean, not having to wait two weeks. That was a game changer for me. I mean that by itself probably resulted in a hundred, $150,000. More sales that I was able to get is I was able to get my disbursements everyday. So for those of you guys out there, even if you’re not doing wholesale or drop shipping, even private label, it might be the difference between you cutting a PO today or having to wait two more weeks to cut a PO. And that could be a big difference for some of you. So, look into the daily advance by Alta. If you have some history of selling on Amazon, they can see that, and you probably should be approved unless there’s nothing– or unless there’s something really shady going on on your account. So I highly recommend looking into that. I highly recommend not doing Walmart to Amazon drop shipping though, because it’s just not, in my opinion, my personal opinion. It’s not a sustainable model. If you’re trying to make big money, here or there, if you can find some third-party sellers you can buy from that are not going to have Walmart boxes and they give tracking numbers. Sure. You go ahead and do it, but you’re not going to make anywhere near those numbers that I was doing this year, I’m going to try a different method of drop shipping. I’ve been hearing people are doing Sam’s club to Walmart. And so I might try and do another case study on that. But for right now, it’s a no-go for Walmart to Amazon drop shipping.

Bradley Sutton: Alright, guys. That sound means it’s time for our CAT, our cat of the episode, which stands for Clubhouse After party Tip. Once a week, we go live on the clubhouse app and we bring back former Serious Sellers Podcast guests to take live questions from you and they give you their best tip out there. So every episode we’re going to be giving you guys clips from these episodes that we’ve been doing on Clubhouse so that you can get some great strategies from our former guests. Now, if you guys have that clubhouse app, make sure to search for the club Serious Sellers Podcast and follow it so that you can be notified when we go live. And you can also follow me there. H10 Bradley. Today’s CAT is from Selene Dior originally from Episode 201 of the Series Sellers Podcast. And she came back to answer some questions on Instagram and influencer marketing. Here is her tip.

Bradley Sutton: So my question is what sort of things do you look for when you’re choosing influencers to work with? Are there any specific things that are really good or alternatively, like red flags that when you see this on a profile, you ideally don’t want to be working with them. And like in addition to that, are there certain strategies you’ve used when picking influencers to reach more potential customers that you haven’t really tapped into yet?

Selene: Yeah. So there’s few red flags for us if we look at their profile and all their comments, like amounts are kind of the same, I don’t even need to look in the comments to know that they are from engagement groups. I just know because like all posts have like roughly around a hundred comments. Like that is weird. So, for me, I just know that they’re from engagement groups and that is a red flag. I mean, it’s like they don’t really have an engaged audience. The next thing for me is I think, if someone doesn’t have really good content on their Instagram page, that is a red flag to us. We try to look for influencers that are capable of taking good content. So we can reuse that content on, for example, like our Instagram or Facebook or other social media channels, or even like Facebook ads and marketing, having good content is really important for us. And then in terms of reaching a new audience, we always try to run giveaways with influencers so that we put ourselves in front of their audience. And so, for example, if I work with Bradley and we run a giveaway together, Bradley needs to post on his own page and the rules would be follow up. And then also, save this post and then share your story for extra five entries or whatnot. But that way I’m putting my brand in front of Bradley’s audience and it creates a much better effect because the audience also needs to follow our brand. And then it’s really up to your brand on how you convert those customers into customers. So by posting more knowledgeable organic content, like workout videos for us or self-care tips, that kind of stuff does really well. And then just to capture their attention. And then if you also run sweepstakes giveaways on your own page to try and collect their email, that would be a really good way of growing your email list as well.

Bradley Sutton: Speaking of Alta, how else did Alta help me? Well, one key thing that is new is, and I would have used is a brand new feature that is not available in all Alta accounts yet, but it’s going to be soon and that’s a virtual credit card, right? It’s a virtual credit card that is linked to your digital wallet in Alta, by the way guys, if you’re wondering what the heck is this Alta, that is our financial technology system that we have available in Helium 10. You guys can find more information at growwithalta.com. It’s growwithalta.com also by Helium 10. So anyways, there’s a brand new feature that came out of a virtual credit card. So how this works and how it could have helped me when I was doing the drop shipping and how maybe it can help some of you is it gives you a virtual credit card number that you can use wherever credit cards are accepted, you know, online, you get a number, you get a CVV, two number, all that stuff, and it is tied to your digital wallet. So for example, if you’re getting your disbursements to your Alta account, or if you have the Daily Advance, like I did, and I’m getting money into my account, all that money can be immediately used by this credit card. So what I was having to do was the disbursements would come to my Alta account from the Daily Advance, but then I would have to take that money and withdraw it and have it go to my personal, or my business checking account, which is what I use to pay my credit cards. Right. So even though it was faster than every two weeks, it still took like this process, like two or three days, right.

Bradley Sutton: But now if I would have had this, which I mean, I didn’t, because this just got launched last week I instantly would have been able to use these credit cards plus I mean that the credit card that the Alta credit, but plus I would have gotten 1% cash back. So any transaction you use this credit card for you are going to get 1% cash back. So, if you guys are interested in looking at that, sign up for growwithalta.com, get your disbursements coming into your Alta bank account and then apply for that business credit card. And you’ll be able to pull those funds right away and even get 1% cash back on whatever you’re purchasing. Other ways that I use Alta, I use it to pay my suppliers, a lot of times, instead of paying it from my bank, I was just like, you know what? I got this disbursement, I’m just going to send this money directly. One time I sent it in China, R and B, to save a couple of dollars on a couple of my invoices. And it was just really, really nice to have that functionality. I also now have my Canadian disbursement. I opened up selling Amazon Canada, and now that money goes into my Alta bank account as well. And I’m saving a few dollars on the exchange rate, compared to what I would have gotten if it was Amazon. Another big thing that I use Alta for was because I was pouring all of my money into this drop shipping experiment. Now I had no money to reorder Project 5k products, right? So I was still ordering products. I was developing new 5k products. I was reordering ones that were selling out, et cetera, but I was like literally living day by day, just sending all my money to the credit card so I can keep this dropshipping experiment going. And now all of a sudden my sourcing agent in China was asking me for money because I had to pay for some shipments and I didn’t have any money. So what did I do? I applied for the line of credit, or actually I already was approved for a $50,000 line of credit from Alta. But what I applied for was just to take out the money that I need. And remember if you guys didn’t hear my old episode about why this is so much better than borrowing money from Amazon lending, it’s because in Amazon lending, you’re told, Hey, you qualify for $50,000 or $40,000 or whatever. Right. And you can only pick yes or no. If you hit, yes, they give you that entire $50,000, whether you need $50,000, or not, right.

Bradley Sutton: And that means from that day, you are paying interest on that $50,000, even though maybe you only need $10,000 for a PL. So in my case, I only needed in the beginning, something like $3,000 in order for a down payment, a 30% down payment or a PL. So what I did was I pulled out $3,000 from my line of credit from Alta. And now I only get the $3,000 and I’m only paying interest for what I use instead of paying interest just for the entire $50,000, I don’t even need. So I was able to take that $3,000, send it to my supplier in China. Product started getting made. Come December, it was time to ship it. They’re like, all right, we need the other six, $7,000, whatever it was. So what I did, I took out another pull or another draw from my line of credit, only $7,000. So now from that day, I’m paying interest on the $7,000. Again, saving me hundreds and hundreds of dollars in interest fees compared to, if I would’ve gotten that loan from Amazon lending for the same amount. So that was a real big benefit for me as well to kind of sustain me during Q4, since all my money was going to this drop shipping project, able to leverage that line of credit, to still be able to fund my Project 5k private label products that I was ordering from China. So anyways, what are we going to conclude from this episode? There’s a few takeaways. Number one, I love doing tests. I want to find the best ways out there, to help you guys give you guys some strategies. And so, I love doing these tests, but Hey, not everything I try is going to be wonderful and something that I would suggest that all of you do. In this case, no, I do not suggest you guys go and start doing a Walmart to Amazon drop shipping. As you guys can see, there’s a lot of dangers involved. And if you guys are doing drop shipping, make sure that you know of all of the regulations that Amazon has for drop shipping. You do not want to get your account suspended. Don’t be blinded by this. Oh my goodness. Bradley did $350,000 in three months. This must be the greatest method of selling on Amazon in history. No, no, no.

Bradley Sutton: Don’t look at just the numbers guys. There’s too many negatives to this model, which is why I wouldn’t suggest making some long-term strategy for you. Another thing is whether you’re doing arbitrage or wholesale, or you’re trying to turn over inventory super fast, guys, that Daily Advance is a game changer. For those of you who have your credit cards maxed out, and you have to always turn off your sales for a few days, just to be able to get the disbursement from Amazon, make sure to apply for that Alta line of credit. Again, that’s growwithalta.com and if you guys need some extra money in order to pay for invoices from your factory, the line of credit is also something that’s good that you will hopefully qualify for as long as you have some decent history selling on Amazon. So Altar FTW, for the win, helped me in Q4. So what is up for me now this year? Well, I’ve started some other case studies. I have a like two or three new Project 5k products that are on the way from China. I’ve got two or three new Project X products that are on the way from China. One of them, you guys are just going to die, laughing about like, I didn’t even do a test listing on this because I know you guys are always watching the Project X account and you guys get spoilers when you see me do test listings on there. So, you know what’s coming, but there’s one product that you guys are absolutely going to get a kick out of. And it’s probably going to arrive sometime in May, I would say of this year. So look out for that. Look out for new updates to Project 5k. I’m always launching products for $5,000 that end up bringing way, way more money in than I put in. And I opened up a couple of Walmart seller accounts, so I can start doing some Walmart testing. I’m doing some testing. I’m continuing to do some testing on Etsy. I’m starting to do some for Wayfair and New egg as well. Guys, I am just 100% dedicated in 2021 to test out all these selling models to see what I would suggest that anybody can get into. Speaking of shipping, that’s another thing, the reason why that just slipped through my mouth is I’m also doing a test right now with Project X on Amazon global shipping.

Bradley Sutton: A lot of you guys have asked us, Hey, how do we use this Amazon global logistics thing where they’ll pick up the products from China and send it to Amazon directly. So I’m doing a test on that right now, so that I can give you guys a report on that. Anyways, guys, I hope you were able to get some information out of this episode, I love doing story time with you guys and letting you know that I’m in the trenches trying to find out new stuff for you. And this one didn’t work out too well, but hopefully, maybe I was able to save a couple of you guys who are maybe thinking of trying to do this Walmart to Amazon drop shipping. I hope you can listen to this episode and maybe be a little bit cautious if you’re looking into getting into that model. But anyways, guys, thank you so much for joining and we’ll see you in the next episode.