Starting a drop ship business/side hustle

Has anyone set up a drop ship business?

I am looking into this possibility at the moment and am interested in hearing others experiences

 

Just make sure you choose a niche and not choose AliExpress.

When you say set up a dropship business, do you mean selling stuff off a dropshipper or becoming one yourself?

 

hey Beginner,

forget dropshipping, we build private label business on amazon very successfully and have now had 2 big exits..

check this out below to see if it interests you

its a couple of well known guys in the industry talking about how to find a product plus more

good luck

 

Thanks for your response GoldCoastBound - that sounds very interesting. I will watch that video and look into it further

 

I have a friend who has given drop shipping a good crack.

With the right product he was making a profit of $500/wk just from the 1 item. It was a laptop stand when working from home became a thing.

As above, where I've seen true value, and resilience is building up your own brand.
Could go White Label, before building enough confidence / rapport, to start modifying the standard marketed items.

He set up a new product a couple of weeks back at my place after leaving his job
He has sold several of this item since then, and has surpassed, or is about to surpass his break-even point and should be mostly all profit from here on that particular product.

It's an interesting space, and clearly very profitable.

Had me looking up items my missus purchased from Instagram during Covid through his suppliers channels. Like 100's of % markups. I feel so ripped off. HAHA.

 

Its an interesting model. Essentially they make money from people who are too lazy or dont have time to research for the best price. Impulse buyers. Emotional buyers. Which tbh is a lot of people.

 

Read your posts and its pretty amazing, Any other tips on how you got started? were the products something you knew about or just based on what was selling?

 

hi Carbon,

we chose the products based on criteria the course taught at the time...its different now, you must search for demand, THEN find/create a unique product to sell to that demand

for our current brand which is quite big in 8 months, we have created 5 products and rolled them out to many niches and have about 80 products now...purely built this brand to sell & retire, after xmas

 

thanks, will see what I can find online to read into it a bit more

 

Not strictly dropshipping, general comment : Always thought how/why the buyers find your website and not hundreds of thousands other websites ? Shipping is a hassle (lost item, dodgy buyers etc.), massive $ tied up in stock as need to have the items ready to ship.

 

Drop shipping is getting old and many online market places like eBay will not allow you to do it and if they do its hard to keep your reviews and standing in high regard due to items being shipped for your orders directly from China or from India or where ever you choose to source your supplier.

Deliveries take forever sometimes upward of 30+ days so your going to get many unhappy customers and negative reviews. Thats why drop shipping has lost a lot of tracking and many ppl are leaving that practice.

A safer and more sustainable approach is to find a product first or manufacture one yourself, then invest in a few 1000 dollars to buy stock. Slowly build you product and business and it will take off.

I started a drop shipping company back in 2016. It was very successful and turned over $200k in the second year but because of the inconsistencies and supply chain it will eventually screw you over. Since then I no longer do drop shipping but stock ALL my items in my factory. I still run this company as a side hustle and it takes up about 3 hrs per night + maybe 8 hours over the weekend and grew my turnover to over $250k per annum even over covid. Business actually picked up as everyone did shopping online.

I get my brother/mom to pick and pack orders as I have a fulltime 9-5 job as well.

Its evolved from drop shipping to moving completely away from it. From experience Amazon/Ebay/Etsy are the best online marketplaces. The most customers and its got the most traffic. Shopify is OK and running your own website with sales terminals is ok but you need to invest alot in instagram marketing/facebook and google analytics which cost a tonne of money if your serious.

This is my feedback from starting where you are to where I am now about 6 years into this business.