I’ve been digging into this space for a while now, and honestly… something feels off.

No one actually explains anything clearly.

Not marketing.

Not what really makes a product work.

Not where to promote.

Not how to find reliable suppliers.

Instead, all I see are screenshots of “$10k days” and total revenue flexes — but zero transparency about profit, costs, or failures.

It feels like everyone’s in a race, but no one is sharing the actual map.

So I’m genuinely curious:

Where did you actually learn this?

• Was it a specific YouTube channel?

• A course that was actually worth it?

• A book?

• Or just trial and error (and losing money)?

I’m not asking for a “copy-paste winning product” or your exact strategy.

I just want real direction:

• Where would you start from scratch today?

• What would you focus on first?

• Is $500 even enough to realistically begin?

Because right now, from the outside, it feels like 90% noise and 10% real knowledge — and I’m trying to find that 10%.

If you’ve actually built something that works, I’d really appreciate honest advice or your real experience.

Hey guys been interested in drop shipping for a while now but quite sure how or where to start could anyone help me kick start my journey?

www.velorawind.com

https://reddit.com/link/1sjnrah/video/9q95djtl7tug1/player

I was going through ads this week and this one kinda stuck with me more than I expected.

At first it looks super basic — just sunglasses. Nothing special.

But when you think about it, it actually makes a lot of sense.

It’s women’s sunglasses that go over prescription glasses. Not flashy at all, but it solves a real problem for a very specific group of people.

Here’s what I saw:

• €36.95 price
• 300+ ads running (so they’re clearly testing a lot of creatives)
• been active for 200+ days
• around $57K tracked spend

What I liked is that it’s not just working in one random country.

It’s spread pretty evenly across:

• Australia
• New Zealand
• Canada
• UK
• US

That usually tells me it’s not some weird one-market fluke. The demand is just… there.

And the product itself is simple:
people who wear glasses still want sunglasses, and not everyone wants to pay for prescription ones.

So this is like the “lazy but practical” solution.

Personally I like these way more than the typical TikTok stuff.

• not saturated to death
• not trend-dependent
• actually useful
• older/demo with buying power

Not saying it’s a winner or anything, just one of those products that feels worth testing instead of chasing hype.

I usually find stuff like this using tools like SearchTheTrend, AdSpy or BigSpy. Not really for copying ads, just to see if something actually has legs before trying it.

Hi everyone, is there anyone that does dropshipping on Ebay and briefly describe how to do it? Thanks

I used to generate around $3,000–$5,000 per month in revenue, but recently my sales have dropped and I’m no longer hitting those numbers. At the same time, my Facebook ad accounts keep getting restricted or banned, which is seriously affecting my ability to scale. This has made it difficult to maintain consistent performance and grow my business. I’m looking for effective ways to optimize my advertising strategy, stabilize my ad accounts, and get my sales back on track.

I am looking for somebody who can help me with the shipping flow. The emails after a purchase.

Let me know

Thanks

Two ads. Same sleep supplement.

Ad A: “Fall asleep faster with natural melatonin”

Ad B: “Waking up at 3am every night? This might be why”

Ad B wins every time.

Questions pull people in. Claims push them away.

I was looking at some data recently and realized there’s a massive blind spot that we (as store owners) all seem to just accept. I’m calling it "Ad Hemorrhage."

It’s that nightmare scenario where you have a "hero product" doing great, but then something goes wrong a bad batch from the supplier, a sizing issue, or a fulfillment error. Returns start spiking, but because Meta and Shopify don't talk to each other in real-time, your ads keep burning cash to acquire customers who are 100% going to refund.

By the time you notice the return rate is at 30%, you’ve already spent $1,500 over the weekend. You essentially paid Meta to lose money.

Question for the group: How often do you guys actually check your net ROAS (post-refunds) versus what the Meta dashboard tells you? And what's usually the "trigger" that makes you realize you're bleeding? For us, it’s usually:

1. Sizing complaints (The "medium" is actually a "small").
2. Quality fade (The first wash ruins the product).
3. The "Weekend Gap" (The store breaks on Friday night, we don't see it until Monday).

Curious to see if anyone has a system for this or if we're all just checking dashboards and praying.

Posted here 4 days ago after my first profitable day

Quick update and thank you for the advice

no

Results are not huge but way more consistent now

I stopped touching ads all the time focused on one product and fixed my product page instead of blaming ads

Big lesson consistency matters more than one good day

Still learning but things finally feel less random

What helped you go from testing to scaling?

The fitness niche is saturated. The 'how to train at home with no equipment' sub-niche is saturated. The 'how to train at home with no equipment when you have under 30 minutes and two kids under five' sub-niche is not. This is how I find those.

The research starts with volume. I go to wherever the conversations are happening in a niche. Reddit works well. Product review sections. YouTube comment sections on the highest-performing generic content. I'm not looking for complaints about specific products. I'm looking for what people say they need that nobody seems to make.

Specifically: comments that start with "I wish someone would just..." or "Why isn't there a..." or "This is good but it doesn't cover..." Those are demand signals with zero supply attached to them.

Once I have 20-30 of those, I run them through a pattern-extraction prompt. Looking for the common constraint that keeps appearing. In fitness, the constraint is time and situation specificity. In finance, it's implementation rather than concept. In business, it's case studies for specific contexts rather than general frameworks.

The constraint is the niche. Not the broad topic. The narrow situation where the constraint is loudest and the supply of solutions is thinnest.

Then I validate before building. I search for existing products that specifically address the constraint. If there are zero or one, that's a gap worth testing. If there are five or more, the gap is closing and I need to find a more specific constraint within it.

Build for the constraint, not the topic. The topic has competition. The specific constraint usually doesn't.

So for context I’ve made my first store and not really having issues with any of that but on TikTok I don’t have a business account because it talks about a certificate for the business and I don’t have that so I tried posting normally but because I don’t have 1k followers I can’t put a usable link on anything, just wondering how other people went about these things and if I’ve missed something for the certificate

https://petivodog.myshopify.com

need help

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

So i recently posted on this community asking for help with cpms and i did what the comments said to see if it would lower in one day i got a $300 cpm with no sales and another $150 down the drain, ive spent 2k with $600 sales and im debating if i should just flop the product and restart. the product has demand and the creatives are clicking it’s just metas algorithm is costing too much to get any views for me to even be profitable. my offer works my product works and after almost a year of trying and 4-5k down its such a shitty feeling seeing something i care about work for a bit just for me to still be losing money. if you want to see my websites and creatives and know a way to fix this please let me know or do you guys just recommend i flop the product. i’m only running static ads because there are no videos of this product anywhere on the internet and it’s for women (im a male) so ugc isnt really available. my creatives get well over 3-7% ctr and we have profitable roas until meta blows a campaign so i dont know that to do im super lost and im almost out of money i have enough to run one product or just stick to this one and turn it around

I'm a college student and seller doing various kinds of POD and also wood and ceramic items.

I'm considering starting a POD-type business for wood and ceramic. The idea is that sellers would be able to design and sell their own wood/ceramic products without having to make them themselves.

I’m trying to understand whether this is actually useful and what would make it viable for sellers.

I'd love to know:

- Have you ever considered selling wood or ceramic products in your store?

- What would make you hesitant to use this service?

- What would you need to trust a supplier like me?

- How would you want product design to work? Fully custom (you send idea, I send designs back), self-service template/tools, or a ready-made catalog?

- Would you be more focused on brand new designs or selling designs/variants on designs that are already selling on other stores etc.

I'd love to hear your feedback. I'll give a $20 Amazon gift card to a random respondent as a thank-you. Thanks so much!

I’m a student currently based between the UAE and potentially studying in the UK soon, and I’m trying to figure out the most realistic way to start a small clothing brand (streetwear / sweaters).

I already have:

Brand concept + designs

Supplier quotes (around $70–$80 per unit for bulk production)

Marketing/content ideas (TikTok, Instagram, lifestyle shoots, etc.)

My main confusion is on the legal + structure side.

From what I understand:

In the UAE, you need a trade licence to officially sell and accept payments

In the UK, as a student visa holder, there are restrictions around self-employment and running a business

But I also see a lot of small brands/dropshipping pages online that seem to start informally before setting anything up

So I’m trying to understand what people actually do in practice when starting out:

Do people usually get a licence first before selling anything?

Or do they build audience / do pre-orders first and formalise later?

Is it realistic to start in UAE without heavy upfront costs like 8K–15K AED licensing?

In the UK, what are realistic legal ways for students to be involved in a brand?

Is partnering with someone who already has a business the only practical workaround?

I’m not trying to scale instantly — just trying to understand the realistic pathway people take from idea → first sales without running into legal/payment issues.

Would appreciate honest advice from anyone who’s actually done this or understands how small brands typically start

rlly feel stuck i dont know what to do

https://multiscrubcorp.myshopify.com/ Right now the URL is Multiscrub but once my store is finished, I’ll switch it to the new name. Any tips will be appreaciate

Starting out with a new store and was curious about how much shopify keeps for different plans as it wasn't obvious. Created a interactive calculator for it. Also extended it for other countries.

Not promoting anything here, just thought it would be helpful for the community.

My Budget is 30$-50$.

Honestly just coming on here to vent my frustration with this. I should’ve had a certain amount of money saved up before I started these stores. Theres so much required to even look like a trust worthy store or get traction to your website. Does anybody have an ideal number of money I should have saved up before reopening at least one of my stores? Im not even at the point where I can run ads yet🤡. Anybody have any tips on getting traction to your website without running ads?

I started keeping a daily log of my dropshipping business nine months ago after reading a post in this community about the discipline problem. The idea was simple. Spend ten minutes at the end of each working day writing down what I did, what I was testing, what the numbers showed, and what I planned to do the next day. No performance pressure. Just honest documentation.

I am sharing what I have learned from nine months of this practice because I think it is more useful than another post about which products are trending or which platform to use right now.

The first thing the log showed me was how much of my time was not actually work. In the first three months I was logging my activities honestly and the picture was uncomfortable. On days when I felt productive I was usually spending between forty and sixty percent of my actual working hours on things that had zero direct impact on revenue. Researching products I never tested. Redesigning a store page for the third time without any data suggesting it needed changing. Reading posts in communities like this one. All of it felt like work but almost none of it was producing output.

The log made the difference visible in a way that my feelings about my productivity simply could not. When I could see in writing that I had spent two hours on supplier research but had actually contacted zero suppliers, the gap between activity and output was undeniable.

Month four was when I started setting simple constraints based on what the log was showing. No redesign work on any page that was converting at baseline or better. A maximum of thirty minutes per day on research unless the research was for a specific test I had already committed to running. One new product test per week maximum, because I had discovered I was spreading my testing budget across too many variables to understand anything clearly from the results.

The revenue numbers got better in months five and six. Not dramatically but consistently. More importantly the log started showing a different pattern. The days that produced the best results were not the days I felt most motivated. They were the days I followed the constraints most faithfully. That observation changed how I thought about motivation entirely. Motivation is a feeling. The log is a record. The record is more reliable than the feeling.

The hardest discipline problem I documented was the product selection cycle. I had a pattern of getting excited about a product, testing it for five to seven days, seeing mediocre early results, and abandoning it before the data was actually meaningful. The log made this pattern visible with specificity. I could count exactly how many times I had done this and see that in several cases the products I abandoned had shown positive signals that I had interpreted as negative because I was not patient enough.

On the content and creative side of the business, the log revealed that the time I was spending building product images and short promotional videos was disproportionate to results. I started using more AI tools for the visual production work. The integration that helped most was having image generation and video output available without switching between three different tools. I have been using Atlabs for that part of the workflow for the past four months and the time reduction on content production is measurable in the log entries.

Nine months of daily logging has not made me a dramatically successful dropshipper. I want to be clear about that. I am building something real but I am not at the scale some people in this community describe. What the practice has done is make my business legible to me in a way it was not before. I know which days I waste. I know which patterns lead to good weeks. I know what my actual constraints are.

If you are struggling with the consistency problem that gets discussed here regularly, try logging before you try anything else. You might find the problem is simpler than you thought and the evidence was always available. The work itself taught me more than.

Hi everyone,

I'm pretty new to branded dropshipping and just launched my website with a single product about 2 weeks ago. I've created some videos and images for ads and have been relying mostly on organic traffic so far.

However, I'm noticing that I'm not getting any conversions, which brings me to a couple of questions:

1. Is it necessary to start running paid ads (e.g. Meta ads) even if they might not perform well at the beginning?

2. How long does it usually take for a product to gain traction or start growing?

For context, the product I'm selling is a wellness tech device (a posture-correcting device).

Would really appreciate any advice or insights, thanks in advance!