I Tried Making Money Dropshipping
a semi-deep dive into dropshipping
You are on YouTube, and youve done it. You have gone down the rabbit hole of making money online. A dream that so many of us strive for but not everyone is able toachieve.
When falling down this rabbit hole, I am sure you came across something called dropshipping which simply just means buying one product cheap and selling it for more without having to deal with inventory or shipping. It is super easy to get started and there are hundreds of Youtube gurus promising to have done it with no startupcost.
These gurus also claim to have made hundreds of thousands from dropshipping. Not to say that they are lying but well, most are lying. For the ones telling the truth then I give them huge congratulations because dropshipping can be a bit more complicated than leton.
Something to realize is that most of these YouTubers are only uploading this content for views. Making content about dropshipping or finance on Youtube makes them a lot of money. Some bring in $30,000 from just onevideo.
Biaheza is one of the most truthful drop shippers out there so I recommend checking out his content but the rest of them can be questionable. So be careful who lures you into dropshipping.
The Reality
One of the most popular websites used to drop ship is Shopify which you have to pay for in monthly subscriptions
As you can see, these plans arent exactly cheap and we have already run into the problem of paying for something when we were promised by someone it wasfree.
You know what they say. If its free then it’s too good to be true or something likethat.
Ah ok. Silly me. There is a free trial. So it is free but only for 14 days. Not bad but now you have 14 days to create a website, find a product to sell, create ads on this product (or steal someone else’s ads), create social media accounts, and scale them organically to have an audience to show that you can be trusted to buy from. Sounds easyenough.
So I have tried dropshipping about four times now and each time I managed to get zerosales.
You must be doing something wrong.
Shut up. Obviously, I have done something wrong but so is every other newbie attempting to drop ship after hearing a bunch of Youtubers promise riches fromthis.
Dropshipping is heavily saturated and there is lots of competition now. Not only are you competing with popular companies who have established a brand that people are familiar with but you are also competing with other drop shippers.
When dropshipping was first gaining attention back in like 2018. Dropshippers used a site called AliExpress, which is an online store that lets you access products from china. These products can be as cheap as $1 and they are accessible toanyone.
Few people knew about this site so people were able to make insane amounts ofmoney.
This is a crazy amount of money made in just one month. I believe the item Biaheza was selling was a viral bubble face mask. Luckily for him, he had a theme page that he promoted the product to and he managed to make thousands. Building a theme page on Instagram is difficult enough so huge props to Biaheza for hissuccess.
Change
Let’s fast forward to the present day. Everyone knows about Aliexpress. This means your customers on your dropshipping store can easily spot items that can be brought on aliexpress.
Nice try, John. No one is going to buy your back massager for $75 when they can go on aliexpress and get it for $20 or arethey?
Times change and making money from dropshipping is increasingly difficult. You have to adapt to these changes to be successful in dropshipping. Before you could get away with a crappy site and make thousands but I like to give customers more credit now and say that it takes a lot more to sell with dropshipping.
More and more drop shippers are starting to brand their stores. Branding takes a lot of work and no, I don’t think you can create a solid brand in the span of a 14-day trial. There is also a lot of money that goes into branding because you have to pay money to advertise. Most businesses pay more for advertising than they profit. They show revenue of millions but only have a profit margin of about 45% because of advertising and other expenses.
Branding is about building trust so that means having a product that works and will satisfy customers. This can take months to years. Yes, lots of businesses have been lucky to see success in a matter of weeks but remember not everyonewill.
My Experience
Wow, hope you guys are still awake because I am going to share my experience dropshipping. Now that you have a deeper understanding of dropshipping. You wont be aslost.
My first dropshipping store was jewelry. I priced everything under $20 and I branded the store to be a cheaper option to luxury jewelry. The jewelry was sourced from Aliexpress and all the photos came right from Aliexpress. I made the theme of the store black and white to make it feel more professional and I must say that it looked legitimate. I sent the store to my sister and she was ecstatic about it. She said she was going to purchase fromit.
The store had tons of traffic but no conversions. This means people visited the store but didnt purchase. The Facebook page I created for the store received a lot of attention as well. Lots of follows, likes, and store visits but no purchases.
This was one of the worst disappointments because I spent so much time and effort on this store. I even spent money to promote my Facebookpost.
I still dont completely understand why no one purchased anything. The jewelry looked high quality and was reasonably priced. Maybe they recognized the jewelry from AliExpress? or I might just be too blind to see my website was crappy. Either way. I made zero sales but learned so much creating everything.
My second store, I scrapped before I finished. I was dropshipping LEDs and portable lamps. However, I ran into the issue of no batteries coming with the items. Lots of reviews on the items from AliExpress complained that the lights came with no batteries.
I had only realized this issue after designing the whole site and importing all theitems.
For the third store, I tried creating a general store. Just a bunch of random items like home decor, kitchenware and, women’s clothes. It had to be one of my worst stores. I focused my ad spending on Instagram and got traffic but no sales. Getting followers and likes on posts on Instagram is so difficult.
In my final store, I found a way to dropship for free. Well, almost free. I found a really cute cat lamp on AliExpress. This lamp barely had any sales which isgood because I was probably the first to attempt dropshipping it.
For this attempt, I wanted to try something different. So I purchased the lamp so that I can film my ads for it. This is more common in the dropshipping space nowadays. It builds more trust to see someone using theproduct.
The lamp got here in 3 weeks and was adorable.
I used TikTok to advertise the product completely free. I simply filmed the lamp using different popular sounds from TikTok and told viewers to go to the link in the bio to purchase.
Getting views on TikTok is easy and in just a day I was able to get thousands of views. A couple of people commented and once again I got tons of traffic but you guys will never guess how much I made from thislamp.
Yeah, no surprise. I had the store up for about 4 weeks and no sales. I thought this was going to be the one that would blow up but yet again, another disappointment.
My Thoughts
Although, I made no sales. I learned a lot about business and dropshipping. One thing I learned is that it is hard and can be stressful for those struggling financially. I guess that’s why we binge those free dropshipping videos.
I recommend having some money when going into dropshipping and being prepared to go ahead and pay the monthly subscription after the freetrial.
Dropshipping can work. Even though you just read about me miserably failing. It is possible. You just have to learn as much as you can and treat your store like a real business. Think of it as more than just flipping cheap items fromchina.
Put work into your store. Buy the product and test it. Make your own ads. Invest the money you make back into your stores. Besmart.
TikTok is the way to go for marketing. It’s free and millions of people use it daily. Just remember younger adults are mainly on the app so look for products that appeal tothem.
Overall, dropshipping is just like starting your own business. You are going to make lots of mistakes but never say you have failed. You just have found ways that dontwork.
Now, go start your business.
I Tried Dropshipping To Earn Passive Income was originally published in Startup Stash on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
