My Time As A Drop Shipper
Back in December, I decided I wanted to try my hand at drop shipping. It was going to be extra money, it should have been easy to set up and enjoy. For those that don’t know what drop shipping is, it’s basically selling other peoples products and having those same people ship it out. Typically it’s made in China, sent to the USA. Nothing in particular wrong with it, but once you know where you can buy it, the drop shippers markup seems like extortion. Especially with things like Shopify letting you set up shops so easily, built for drop shippers through their apps. Of course, part of capitalism relies on the concept of the greater fool. What I mean by that is that it may be foolish to think that if I can source something for 70 cents, and sell it for 5 dollars while everyone else has access to the same seller, there’s someone out there who’s going to be the greater fool and buy it.
Let’s get one thing clear, I hate that drop shipping exists. I think it is a form of extortion of those lacking basic computer skills. You see the ads all over Facebook, and I’ve been pulled into them before as well. Typically the quality of the product is underwhelming in one way or another. These dislikes become relevant later. I wanted to be a better drop shipper, but utilize some of the same tactics. Cheap ads on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and all the other social media platforms you can think of. I wanted to maintain a higher quality, because sources do provide higher quality products for cheap. I also wanted to provide a better experience for the customer, as frustrating as customer service can be.
The Starting Point
I started by doing what I did for every idea I had. I bought a domain. I came up with a name, mildly to make fun of Fortnite (I dislike this game in general, nothing against it, just not my style), but also something that would be tailored to the theme of my shop. I was going to target the niche of cosplay and some board game items, like dice. Fortnight Wares was born. After searching the internet of all of five minutes (yeah, it doesn’t take long to realize how to set up a dropship business the fastest), I signed up for Shopify. I was able to use my technical experience to quickly link the domain to the store, and redirect. Shopify allowed me to set up products, customer items, and even set up a debit card/bank account for all my sales to be deposited to and even provided me a virtual debit card to pay bills or add to Samsung Pay, Google Wallet, etc. They offered to send me a physical card, but I opted out of that process.
Sourcing Products
Great, now I had a platform that I didn’t really have to build, a domain name, all routed through Cloudflare for forwarding emails to my main email, and was able to establish an internet identity. Sure, it was days old with no trust or brand recognition, but it was a start. That was probably just the first couple hours. I then started looking at Shopify apps.
Anyone who’s done shopping on the internet has probably heard of places like AliExpress. They provide cheap (typically Chinese warehoused) goods to be shipped. What I didn’t realize is that they also will ship as if it is coming from you, rather than them. Shopify had applications that capitalized on this. I didn’t want to invest too much money into it, and some of those apps were relatively expensive. If you took it seriously and had a decent customer base, you could easily justify the cost however. One of the apps I looked at advertised products that were warehoused in the USA. Since my target was the USA, this appealed to me to cut down on shipping times.
I finally settled on a couple apps to try out for free. I identified some products and listed them. Keep in mind, my shop is currently password protected and very basic. Even the default theme is set right now. I found some dice, a dice tower that you use to roll the ice with increased randomness (nerd, right?). Now these products were coming from China, I recognized I didn’t accomplish my goal of finding USA sourced items. For now, this was fine. I was testing the process and testing the trustworthiness of the platform. I’ve purchased before from Shopify shops, and it’s been a mixed bag. To Shopify’s credit, they made it incredibly easy to set these up. To societies discredit, there’s a lot of crappy shop owners. I had to remind myself not to fall into those traps.
My first customer
After I identified the products, I wanted to see the process of ordering. It went as I expected, I purchased a small dice tower. I observed the money taken out of my account, I trusted Shopify enough to use my real card and so on. Afterall, I had purchased previously from shops hosted by their platform and accepted the risk ahead of time anyway by giving them enough identifying information to set up the accounts to support the shop. That went as expected.
Fulfillment
Welp, I was my first customer. That’s OK. I wanted to test everything and trust what I was doing was right. Anyone who had any kind of benevolence in their soul for the general population would, right? This also gave me an opportunity to find out how to actually fulfill these items. I saw the order in the shop backend, I saw it listed as pending fulfillment. The pages looked very good, professional and gave me information I might need had my future self emailed me with a problem. The problem I ran into is two days later, the product hasn’t been “fulfilled.” I thought I knew better and passed a lot of tutorial information when I got bored… I do this in video games, it frustrates my friends out. This point became clear when I started to look at the different statuses and so on. I wasn’t about to fulfill it from my house, I wasn’t going to buy it and reship it. That would take it forever. (Remember, I’m pretending to be a remote customer elsewhere, not myself. I wasn’t about to accept the need to buy product, receive it, ship it back out and delay shipping that much further.)
I finally found the button to request the application to fulfill it. The status updated, and things started moving. I saw it listed in the applications website as well, and I finally was able to use their services. Except I couldn’t. The first application I chose to mass list items didn’t seem very straight forward. I don’t even remember the name of the application. After failing to order it, possibly because it was stuck behind a paywall that wasn’t mentioned up front, I decided to abandon that application and uninstalled it. My search was back to the applications listings.
I found CJdropshipping. All the apps I found seemed similar, just sync the order to their backend, and they’ll fulfill the order. I use their system to identify and automatically list on my shop. CJdropshipping wasn’t any different, but I was able to list products efficiently and was able to sync my existing orders over and link them to products they knew about almost automatically. It picked up my skull dice tower order and matched it with the exact product I looked for. I found my way around the site to order it and have it drop shipped. I felt more confident this time.
Shipping
It had been a long time since I ordered and paid for the item. The tracking information was available, so I was confident things were happening. I didn’t expect quick shipping, but I also didn’t expect the order to sit forever at the warehouse waiting to be picked. I want to say it was a few days and finally everything seemed to have shipped and so on. I was hoping that wasn’t the norm, so I looked at other options during the ordering process. There were increase in priorities in shipping, which were reasonable costs as well. So I became my first repeat customer. I ordered another product I listed, a bracelet. This one went much smoother, picked the higher shipping cost.
While I waited…
I waited for these items to be sent to me, and I watched their tracking information get updated and such. I also wanted to look at the other capabilities of the ship. At this point, I had found free themes to use, and the website was looking alright. I had connected everything so that emails were sent out, and I even used third party websites to send emails for product reviews and so on. While I’m not a lawyer, I think I did well in trying to comply with spam laws around the world, even though I was shipping to the USA only.
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Some of the things I explored was the return policies, privacy polices and newsletter opt outs. I also identified a few applications to use, such as the Klaviyo application/integration for emails. They also set up some integrations for discounts on first purchases, had the ability to set up text messaging and other communication channels. All very simple, synced to the shop and all recorded within customer records.
Another thing I explored while I waited was setting up the Facebook pages to sell through Facebook. This could also be used to set up through TikTok and sell through them, as well as many other locations. I intended to use Facebook ads to push traffic to my stores, and Facebook had its owns policies about that. I created a Facebook page, an ad account and the integration made it easy to push my products from Shopify to Facebook which would then later on be used to sync fulfillments. It took some time to understand what was going on a little, I had created an ad account earlier without realizing it and this messed up the organization I expected. I was trying to run the business as a side gig, but I also wanted to disconnect personal information so that it would all be branded under its own, in case I wanted to detach from it (say selling it, or hiring others and going from a Sole Proprietorship to a LLC).
Another thing I found while I was messing with all of this is the CJdropshipping website allowed me to set up custom packaging. I could do fun things such as include little (prepurchased) stickers thanking my customers for their order and so on. Little things that might make a difference in customer service. With that discovery, I also found that I could prepurchase items and store them in a “personal warehouse”. The idea behind the integration was that all the stock information would sync to my store automatically, including removing the product from my website when they were out of stock. These numbers fluctuate, and aren’t exactly updated even on CJ’s own website. I discovered this when I wanted a friend to try the quality of a dress, so I offered a 100% discount, all she had to do was order it. She accepted, but a couple days later I got emails about a ticket that was opened on CJ’s website. Apparently the one she wanted was out of stock, even though their own website lists the stock in the numbers of thousands. They offered a replacement, which I confirmed with “the customer” and once accepted, was shipped out.
I had discovered a lot that can be done with the store. Thanks to integrations and Shopify’s own platform, any kind of ecommerce was possible. I’ve purchased coins from Ironsmithco and had a great experience, while purchasing from Sharedpour and had to cancel my order (I’m guessing not their fault, they did refund it quickly. The order was just taking far too long.) Best I can tell, both of these shops are Shopify based, but Ironsmithco did a good job putting their own touches on it and their products are high quality. I assume Sharedpour is as well, their supplier didn’t fulfill my expectations though.
The final look
As you can see from the above image, it looks very good. There are things I’d do with my own custom theme, but it looks like a shop. I found high quality pictures to display and products that look like it fit my theme. It took some time, but having a basic theme for the shop helps. The integrations were countless but instrumental in creating what appeared to be a professional business. Overall, it was very easy with basic technological knowledge. I was able to also list these products on the Shop application, owned and operated by Shopify as well, and adding new channels was easy. If I opened my own shop, I could list that and order Point of Sale (POS) equipment to integrate directly.
I could have easily seen myself preorder popular products, have them shipped, and even take them to fairs all over to sell, and drive more traffic to the site when I ran out or did not have product for a particular taste. I even had a page specific to tracking the product that used the shipping site to pull information in. Emails went out for abandoned carts and everything! It was pretty smooth.
Why not keep going?
I decided to shutdown Fortnight Wares in the coming days. There are a few things to lead to this. The flow made orders very easy, but it was not effortless. Nothing should be if you’re going to make money, but there’s no guarantee of it. I was also risking my brand, my reputation on other people. I honestly felt like I didn’t have a unique purpose here, these products were great that I ordered, but what about the ones I didn’t order? There’s no way to promise that there would be quality for every product out there. I did not want to be one of those crappy store owners.
What was the point then? I tried something new, it didn’t cost me much (maybe a total of 100 bucks, given domain, services, and gift card/discounts to friends). I see how these stores operate, so I learned to be a better online shopper, and even grew my patience for those that do this. I also got to try some systems that work really well. I just didn’t feel like the shipping times (21 days for my friends discounted dress) and the touch and go quality of the materials would be great. Additionally both products I ordered for myself, while decent in quality (considering what I paid for them), didn’t come with instructions for assembly or even felt properly represented. I did not want to be one of those shop owners who did the least to make the most amount of money. I also didn’t want to risk that I’d end up in the red, unable to fulfill customers because someone chargebacks an order, or someone makes a fraudulent purchase. Shopify provided anti-fraud tools, but I don’t make a lot of disposable money to risk it.
Technologically, I had reinforced my skills to setting up a domain, integrating with third parties and understanding concepts that I might not be exposed to daily at my normal job as a Software Engineer. I can also see how this appeals to others as well. I’ll probably keep the shop open for some time, I’m still in some free trials. Also allows me to reference things.
What to do differently
If I had to give any advice on anyone wanting to set up their own drop shipping (or even ecommerce store), I’d recommend a few things.
- Set up a business address. Everywhere I was mildly paranoid because my home address was a warehouse, which might be exposed. There are virtual offices you can rent out, they even provide mail services, phone options, etc. I was careful to make sure my information didn’t show up anywhere, and used a Google Voice number for any customer service items. It might increase the cost, but peace of mind for any disgruntled customers. I am paranoid, however, so may not have been a problem.
- Find somewhere to source from your local markets. If you’re shipping to the USA, find USA drop shippers. This will also increase the cost, but it helps to have these items stateside. I suspect my 21 day deliver might have been shorter if it didn’t have to go through customs. This becomes less relevant if you’re selling your own product.
- Test your products. If you’re not making them, how can you know for sure they’re quality. This only really matters if you care, honestly. If you don’t care if your name is attached to it, even by extension, and might show up as snake oil, then I get it. Rent has to be paid. Ultimately, I’m not displeased with the quality of the products I have found, I just know drop shippers get a bad rep for hawking bad products.
- Market research. Honestly I felt like crud selling items for 300% of what I buy them for (shipping ate into some of that cost, but most of the shipping cost was paid for by the customer ahead of time too). If you can get into a niche, identify products from a drop shipper and hit that nice price point that balances profit and investment, I can see how it’d be fulfilling.
- Treat it like a job. I didn’t treat it like a job, I didn’t add investment either. Run your ads, pay attention to the market, and keep identifying things. You don’t want to change too much every day, but adding new products would definitely help. Learn what you can about your industry. I could have gone a lot deeper into SEO, Google shopping, Instagram and TikTok. All of that takes time, so if you’re not willing to treat it like a job, you’re going to find you’re spending more money on services you don’t need.
- Expect some failures. Don’t become too weighed down if things don’t go right the first time. Push through and you’ll learn something or find a better way to do it.
The shop is going to remain open and operational for some time, while the free trials expire and so on. Let me know if you want to see more about how I did certain things and I’ll either find a tutorial or put one together for you.
Originally published on Jan. 27th, 2024 on demortes.dev , a blog from Kevin and first “journalistic” attempt.
