My wife and I had looked into buying from China, selling on amazon. We dug into drop shipping in a few instances. We went to China to source vendors at the canton fair, which was fairly amazing.

My impression is that the vendors in China know what they are selling, know about amazon, etc. They were looking to us for information on how to do it better. One of the vendors was basically opening dozens of accounts, listing their items and having them removed for various violations from amazon. They had a specific team creating new accounts.

The real estate on amazon is owned by amazon. If you are selling an item from a drop shipper, build the listing up to hundreds of sales and reviews, the vendor or another shipper could take over your posting by offering the same product at a lower cost. You are literally competing with the vendors you are buying from, directly on pricing. They will very happily cut you out of the sales you built up for them.

The only way around this is to put your custom UPC code that you own on the products, incorporating the product into a package of goods where they would have to be sourced individually, etc. You have to do something to make your product unique and protected. This means manual work and cost, which you will probably have to do yourself in the beginning.

It’s possible, but not so easy as “Just get a vendor in china, list stuff in the USA, then have China ship it.”

When I do see these shiny new products people are advertising heavily, I just go buy them on alibaba.com

Because it worked at least once.

Because 10 years ago, on Amazon, it was.

Now it’s all but banned on most marketplaces.

Most of you may make tens of dollars. Anything that is treated like a “side hustle” will never make you rich.

I think it used to be in the early days of the internet.

my boss’s bil got in & out

I don’t think normal people think that. You sell dogshit products in automated manner with all the risks of returns, refunds, customer support and so on I bet profit margins are not that great in hyper saturated space. The only people actually getting rich of this are the ones that help you setup shop or sell you course.

I wish there was a law requiring you to tell people you are drop shipping.

Cuz people still believes on easy money,…idiots

It’s because of those gurus we’ve all seen on YT ads

I haven’t done drop shipping but as someone who visits places like this subreddit and researches entrepreneurship, it seems like anything with a low startup cost is spun into a get rich quick scheme by YouTube gurus and wishfully thinking people. And drop shipping is among the lowest in terms of startup costs.

The way people make content about it feels scammy. The idea itself is fine, and it’s a grind.

Selling dropshipping courses is a get rich quick scheme.

The dropshipping itself is quite a bit harder.

Drop shipping in a vacuum is a pretty lucrative business.

• Minimal start up capital needed - you literally don’t pay for anything until someone makes an order in which case you can pay the drop shipper with the proceeds of your sale
• Minimal work needed - you just set up a website or a listing of your drop shipping crap and wait for people to buy your junk. All the actual work of storage, packaging and shipping is handled by a drop shipper.
• Inifitely scalable - you don’t need to pay more money to scale up your business. Every order you sell pays for itself and you keep the difference.

The problem is that due to all of the above factors and the fact that the barriers of entry are essentially zero, competition rolls in and the only thing you can compete on is price (since you are all selling the same crap from China). This means eventually the margins are almost non-existent or you get so few sales that it doesn’t make sense to even bother.

Becauae people can think they can just become a VAR and drop ship everything.

A VAR can take advantages of drop shipping and use that to their benefit. But anyone doubting inventory and what a VAR brings to the table is who loses out.