Can You Make Money with Dropshipping? Here’s What You Wish You Knew
Today, we’re talking about how to make money dropshipping. I’m going to show you how I’ve made as much as $18,000 in one month with dropshipping, with one product and one website page.
What is Dropshipping?
Dropshipping is the idea of setting up your own sales system online. On your sales system, or website, you have links to purchase things. You are the seller, and someone else is shipping the product, sort of “on demand.”
That someone else is your supplier, and they usually sell stuff on wholesale. They might have a big shipping warehouse with all kinds of products, and you sell the products for them. Instead of being a major store like Target or Walmart, companies that purchase thousands and thousands of different things and put them in a store, and have people there to sell them, you are setting up your own sales system.
The product doesn’t really exist for you until that sale is made, so there’s really no risk until the sale is made. You only pay when you sell a certain item.
My Dropshipping Story
Now for me, when I made that $18,000 in one month, I was selling gas-powered scooters. You remember those scooters back in the early 2000s that were all the rage? Every kid had to have one. So I set up a simple one-page website selling these scooters.
I didn’t have a merchant account for this specific business, so I took PayPal. I had someone come on my site and say they wanted a specific scooter in a specific color. They would buy the scooter, and it would send $379 to my PayPal account instantly. There were some PayPal fees, so I actually ended up getting around $360 or something like that (they take around $30 or something).
Then I had $360 sitting in my PayPal, which was great. The problem was that I had to get the scooter to the person. So, I went to this wholesale guy and I sent him $220 through PayPal, and I sent him the address to ship to. The wholesale person would then send the scooter to the guy who bought it. I never even had to touch the product (I actually never even rode a gas-powered scooter until long after I made this website). We made about $360 and lost about $220, so we had about $140 in net profit.
We sold $18,000 worth of scooters in December of 2003. Now of course, there was probably about a 40% profit, so that was probably around $8,000 or so in my pocket.
Start with Your Keyword
So that’s how it works. It’s really easy and really simple. You just set it up, you find some keywords that people are searching for, and you find a product based on the keywords.
In this example, I went for the keyword “gas-powered scooters for cheap”. My guess is that it was probably some kids typing that in, “gas-powered scooters for cheap”, and they were looking for scooters for their parents to buy them. The keywords “gas-powered scooters for cheap” was worth $18,000 a month in sales to me.
Downsides to Dropshipping
Now, one downside to dropshipping is that you are responsible. So if I’m collecting the $379, and I’m paying the $220 to have it shipped, and this customer wants to do any funny business, I’m on the hook for $379. So, I’m kind of in charge of everything here.
If you have $18,000 in scooters out there, and your supplier decides not to ship them, or the shipments are late, that’s on you.
The second drawback is customer support. This is something that you have to do. I had to take phone calls on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day of 2003 if there was some delay in shipping, and I had to do a lot of work to get those scooters out.
Since then, I retired the site. I sold it to someone and they handle it now, because I didn’t want to deal with all the calls.
I could have built a huge business out of it. The guy who dropshipped it was just a guy who had a huge warehouse, and he got these things from China, and he paid like $90 for them, because he got thousands of them. He was making a lot of money with it, and he had a lot of affiliates that help him. I think he’s still in business today.
Do Your Research
If you’re new, and you just found out about dropshipping, this is something you could do. But I recommend starting with affiliate marketing first and seeing what the traffic wants. The last thing I would want you to do is set up a site and not know if people are going to buy your stuff.
We don’t want to do guess marketing. We actually want to know that we can get the rankings, that we can buy traffic, that we could do video marketing or whatever it may be, in order to actually sell this stuff.
This can be a good method. You can make a lot of money, and lots of people are doing it. But I would rather see you get started with something a little bit easier, and a little less heavy on the risk.
Find your keyword, see what’s out there, and see what makes sense. Don’t jump into dropshipping just because you heard it was cool. Actually search it out for yourself. Find out what you want to sell based on what the demand is, and then figure out what the route is that best suits your needs.
There are a lot of different dropshipping methods you can do. My advice would be to build a site based on each individual product. We had a page for the gas scooters, the electric scooters, the different kinds of scooters, and because of that, we were able to rank in the search engines really, really well. And when you find a dropshiping product, make sure that seller is reputable. Make sure they’re not out there just to take your money.
You might find out that dropshipping isn’t the best, or you might find out that it is the best for you. There are people that make millions of dollars with dropshipping, and if you work really hard, perhaps you can, too.
For more information, visit www.AffiliateMarketingDude.com.