At the start of summer i took it upon myself to start a small project on something that was trending all around the internet at that time – Dropshipping. I’m sure most of you may have heard of this by now and know what it is, but for those who don’t, I’ll give you a brief introduction to it.
Simply put Dropshipping was a popular “Get-rich-quick” business model where the idea was you’d put up an online store to a sell a choice of products while in reality you wouldn’t hold stock of a single product listed on your site. Then once you receive the order, you’d forward it to a supplier who did have those products in stock and they would handle everything from packaging and delivery of the product to the customer.
To make profits, you would inflate the price of the product on your website compared to the real price of it from the supplier, and the difference in prices is your margin.
My plan of action
Being the ignorant 17 year old i am, i came into this with a fresh delusional mind filled with unrealistic expectations, often times, I’d day dream into a stream of fantasies, a world where my dropshipping hit off and a world where i made 1000s of rupees every day. Unfortunately, these dreams were crushed within just a span of a few weeks.
My original plan was to try this out as a short term gig(a few months), a way to make a bit of pocket money for myself and also an avenue for me to learn something new. I went in with the mindset i had nothing to lose, and though there were several people telling me it’s a waste of time and it wouldn’t work out, and i knew that even if that was true i would still gain something. Experience. Even if i failed, i knew i would’ve at least learnt something from the failure and that gave me enough confidence to give it a shot.
I also went in with a budget i set for myself. A budget of 10,000 Rupees. I didn’t want to burn too much cash on something that i had neither any experience nor insight on, nevertheless, i still wanted to give myself a budget with a bit of wiggle room, enough for me to try it out without worrying about being short on investment.
After all, everyone markets Dropshipping as a “0 investment side-hustle”.
Stage 1- Choosing my tools
The first thing i needed to start dropshipping was a website, and after watching countless YouTube gurus and videos on “How to make $100,000 a month by DropShipping” i finally decided on Shopify to create my website. To be honest, Shopify was perfect for my needs and not to brag but i think it was an astute decision on my end, and i’ll tell you why.
Shopify at the time had a free-trial plan of 3 days, perfect for me to set up the website in, and after that, it had a plan for 3 months @ 20 rupees per month. Jackpot. This was a perfect fit for my plan, it was short-term and it fell under my not so generous budget.
Great, now that my website was sorted i needed to find the next crucial element, a supplier, and this was the difficult part.
In most countries where Dropshipping is Popular, they have access to a plethora of suppliers dedicated for dropshipping, They also have the famous Chinese suppliers such as AliExpress. However these options were out of my reach.
Given the relationship between India and China, any delivery using AliExpress would take more that 21 days, this was simply not viable for me and so that was out the window. So now i either had to find local suppliers or a dedicated supplier. Infuriatingly, none of the local suppliers would supply products for retail orders, they all had a minimum order quantity and would only sell their products by wholesale, this defeated the purpose of dropshipping. And so i had to go on a hunt for dedicated dropshipping suppliers
Something this had taught me is that the state of dropshipping in India is remarkably poor. Even after hours on google and watching countless videos i still couldn’t come across a SINGLE dropshipping supplier. How? How in the world was there not a single supplier?
Luckily, Reddit and Quora saved the day.
After scouring several online forums i found out about a supplier by the name of “RoposoClout” and even then, all the forums were filled with vague,insufficient testimonials for the app. However, given that it was the only supplier that i was able to stumble upon, i went ahead with it, walking into a void of darkness, but here that void of darkness was just a void of information.
Once I had my supplier and my Website Builder ready, i needed a domain provider and a payment provider and for these two my options were Go Daddy and Razor pay, two well known names.
Stage 2 – Setting up the Store
This part in my opinion was the most tedious and repetitive task that required a lot of attention to detail. Setting up the store through Shopify however was quite easy, given that there were several pre-made templates to choose from.
All i had to do was edit my colour schemes, add a logo, edit the format to something more appropriate for my use and polish up the site to make it look clean and easy to use.
This process was relatively simple for someone like me who is quite savvy when it comes to matters like this, and with a help of a few YouTube videos here and there i was able to churn out a simple, basic but effective site within a matter of 2 days.
Now comes the tedious part. The supplier RoposoClout was just an inbuilt Shopify plugin that had 1000s of products listed on their website from categories A-Z and that made it easy for me to scroll through the array of products and choose what i wanted.
The website even suggested hot selling products and also showed the rate of RTO (return to origin) for each project, and this was immensely useful, given that RTO is a crucial part of dropshipping.
RTO in simple terms is when any product you sell gets returned to the supplier, in this case because of spam or scam orders, and as a result this leaves you bearing the cost of the product, and so with every product as a Dropshipper it is crucial to minimize the your RTO’s.
Moving on, RoposoClout was well integrated with Shopify, meaning once i found my desired product, all i had to do was click “Add to shop” and it would import the product, product images and product descriptions to my Shopify product page.
There was however, an unsatisfactory side of this.
For example several product images on the product page in RoposoClout were blurry, unconvincing and cheap, and given that as a dropshipper i had no inventory on the product, i often had to rely on these substandard images, furthermore, the Product descriptions were often second-rate and for every product i had to manually generate my own product descriptions just by the information and the photos given by the supplier. This took a great deal of patience and time and i would say it was the most time consuming part of the whole process, however, with the help of AI i managed to get it done rather quickly.
Once all this was done i had to set up my payment provider, for which i chose Razorpay as mentioned before, and this was a fairly easy process that needs no further explanation.
Stage 3 – Getting sales
Now, to get my initial sales, i needed to find a way for my website and online store to be known by potential customers, and the most optimal way for me to do this was through ads. I narrowed down to 2 main ways to market my product in a way that was most optimal for a dropshipper. One was using Facebook(Meta) reels and ads to create trending clips of my products that would blow up, in fact you yourself have most probably seen 100s of reels like this. The second method was through Google Ads.
The Facebook method is often considered the best way to get customer engagement, however my experience trying to set up my account in the app in the first place proved exasperating. Once i created my account, even after several dozen tries, it still wouldn’t let me create a page for me to showcase my products. It kept stating some error and after a while it told me to try again later, and even after a week of waiting, when i finally tried again, to my frustration it still didn’t work. And so i had to resort to Google ads, and mind you i have myself a budget of 3000 rupees to test out google ads and get the hang of it.
I ran a total of 1 campaign for 7 days before i shut down the whole project for reasons that i will soon explain, and my campaign was limited to a budget of 100Rs a day, which is a very meager budget that is not enough for one to see valid and significant results, nevertheless, my campaign had did better than i expected. Down below are the results and stats for the campaign i ran.
To my surprise, my ad campaign successfully brought in 2 purchases, and 731 clicks to my website, a number that wasn’t near the slightest of my expectations for a campaign with a budget of 700rs, and to me, this was thrilling. My ad campaigns were somewhat successful according to me, and i got my first 2 orders. Everything is going great, isn’t it? Well sadly not.
Terminating the (not so) ambitious project
Before i fulfilled my first two orders, i wanted to test the products myself to ensure that i wasn’t selling out any faulty or fake products without my own knowledge, and so i placed an order for one of the most viewed products on my website. A simple, cute little table fan as you can see below.
Though the product came within a week, to my dismay, it was defective. Even after following the instructions on the package, and charging the fan overnight to ensure it was full of charge, it never seemed to turn on. It was utterly inoperable and it was then i realized that my whole store would have to come to an end if the very products i aimed to sell, were dysfunctional
And with that my dropshipping journey came to an end.
The takeaway
From my experience, I’ve learnt that the supplier is one of the most paramount parts of dropshipping, especially given that you yourself don’t hold possession or stock of the product, it’s essential that you find a reliable trustworthy supplier. Because without a functional product your dropshipping store is just impractical and pointless.
There are several dropshipping suppliers out there and in-fact I’ve heard several good reviews about RoposoClout and how they have helped others to set up their stores, but for me, it just wasn’t the right pick and so i highly suggest you do some heavy research, and test out your products and supplier by ordering them for yourself before you finally set up your store.