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If you're an entrepreneur, Alibaba opens up a world of opportunity. Let's have a look
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Dave Taylor here, and I've been doing a series of videos on Alibaba.com. Now, it's mostly business to
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business, but you could be a business. So, let's talk about the entrepreneurial opportunities of
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olibaba.com. Now, most things end up being large quantities, but you can find ones or twos or dozens or even 50s of items
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and you can get them customized, which means you can get some pretty phenomenal deals
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So my daughter's volleyball team was looking at different opportunities for fundraising
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and I thought, let's see if Alibaba offers any opportunities. Now, of course, athletes all love their little thermos water bottles, right
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So I thought, let's look on Alibaba.com and see how much it would cost
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to get BPA-free vacuum water bottles with the organizational logo on them
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So here's how that went. I'm going to start by looking for insulated bottles, custom BPA
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Now, BPA is a chemical you want to try to avoid in your water bottles. So for our sports team, we definitely want to do that
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So I'm going to do the search, and you can see there are over 6,000 matching results
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and they're kind of all over the place. So the first thing you'll find is you need to educate yourself
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a little more on the products that you're looking for because there are lots and lots of nuances
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from a manufacturer's perspective that turn out to be important. But fortunately, I scroll down
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and I find this company, and they seem to have a pretty good set of options. And most importantly
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they have a minimum order of 10 pieces for customized logo. Now, a lot of companies list that
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the minimum order for customized is 100, 500, 1,000. I'm not sure our
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team needs a thousand water bottles with a logo on them, but maybe 10 would be great
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In fact I thinking probably 50 because that means each member of the team needs to sell somewhere between five and 10 units That not very hard And color choices capacity choices It super easy because literally my next step is to click on the contact supplier button
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And now there's lots of questions and characteristics about the product that I didn't fully understand
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So I just went straight down to the actual question box. And then as you can see, I typed in quantity 50, 18 ounce bottles in dark blue
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with flat lids and a custom one color logo shipped to the United States
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I sent in the inquiry button and immediately Alibaba said, oh, well, while you're doing this, why don't you do an RFQ, which is a request for quotes
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and then they'll send it out to other suppliers of a similar product
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and we'll see if anyone else responds. Now, be aware when you do this, you're going to get a lot of responses for most products
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because there are thousands and thousands and thousands of manufacturers represented on olibaba.com
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But this was certainly very easy, and I submitted it, as you can see
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And then literally within five minutes, a representative from this particular manufacturer
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was going back and forth with me and talking about sizes and colors and styles
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and I uploaded a sample logo and they immediately applied it to a bottle and showed me a picture
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And it's like, wow, that looks really great. And then I said, all right, well, it's $225 for 50 of these bottles with the one color logo
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What is shipping going to cost? And as you can see, the answer is, well, if I want to do it by air and get it within two weeks
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it's going to be $228. But if I'm willing to have it take twice as long, 30 days, they can send it by ship
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and then it's only $100. That works out to $6.50 per unit for these custom vacuum bottles, dark blue, with a white logo put on them
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And our teammates, we can easily sell these for $20 or $25
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That a pretty nice profit margin on these individual items And we included shipping We included any import taxes tricky This will show up at someone house in a really big carton individually boxed and ready to go Super easy But what was most
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amazing to me was that because I did that RFQ, I also had a second query within 10 minutes of going
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on the olibaba.com site. So you can see here, Rita Chen immediately jumped in and said
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well, what exactly are you looking for? Tell me some details. I'll give you a quote too. And I thought
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wow, that's fantastic. So I responded to read it to. And then the next morning, I logged into
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Alibaba, and all I can say is, this is a popular query. I have eight more manufacturers asking
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for details from that request for quotes, which means I can price them and compare them and maybe
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lower the price even more. Wouldn't it be great to get those bottles for $5 a unit
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shipped and including import taxes and everything, and then when we sell them for $25, that's $20 per bottle profit
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Now, you can imagine if I did this myself on Etsy or Craigslist or eBay or even through a local store or something
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boy, that's a big upside. And $25 for an 18-ounce vacuum BPA-free bottle is a pretty darn good price, even without a logo on it
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It's pretty remarkable the pricing you can figure out. And here's what to think about is that not only can you use this for a fundraiser
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but you could do the exact same thing and then go to somewhere like Etsy or eBay
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and you could sell them as individual items. So I might buy all these water bottles with my own custom artwork on them
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and then I might sell them for two, three, even four times my individual unit cost
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and then make a pretty serious killing on the deal, right? If you can turn around graphics and designs quickly you can imagine having like a political image or slogan on a water bottle or a cup or a mug or any of the thousands of different things you can pick up on Alibaba and then turn around and sell them and do pretty darn well for yourself So this isn just limited to people that want to sell online either Let say you run an internet cafe right You could sell ANC headphones for honestly five times your individual cost
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No logo, no customization, just get a purchase of a hundred units
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Put them in your garage or something or in a warehouse and then sell them individually at your cafe for people that come in and don't have headphones
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No problem. They're 25 bucks. bucks but you know that you got them for four dollars so really the opportunities are endless
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cups at a coffee shop you know you could have a restaurant and you could have on a little restaurant
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little store that you have you could be giving away all sorts of products too right thematically
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associated there's just endless opportunities definitely worth checking out ali baba.com now do your
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homework make sure you have the rights to the intellectual property so you can't
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just say cool I'm going to go ahead and put the Paramount logo and then sell
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Paramount or Universal Studios or Disney Mickey Mouse images on my cups or bottles
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obviously that's not legal but once you do have the rights or if you create
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your own artwork there's really endless opportunities and there's so many different ways I have to say as I've said in my previous videos just poking
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around on Alibaba.com is fascinating because there's so much There's so many different things available
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So it really is the entire world of manufacturing at your doorstep on your computer, easy for you to use
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So check it out and let me know in the comments what you ended up getting and how that worked out for you
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And go ahead. Please feel free to subscribe to my channel. I appreciate it
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All right. That's all I got. Please check out olibaba.com and I will too
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Catch you in my next video
