Why I Stopped Drop Shipping
It all started in May 2017.
I was determined to do something. To make something happen. I wanted an online business and I wanted it yesterday. My job was fine but very uninteresting. The sector was a sunset one.
So I asked Google how I could make money online. So many things came up. I remember looking at blogs and pitches and schemes until my eyes were raw and bloody.
I eventually stumbled upon a Shopify sponsored post about how to set up a drop shipping store in 30 minutes.
What the hell I thought. Lets go.
Fast forward a month and I have a store. I have an art student intern and I have a growing Instagram profile and Facebook store page.
We decided on fashion. Street fashion and edgy clothing. We created a brand. (my intern created the brand really — she knew what the teens were into) We loaded up a bunch of products on the store. All from Ali Express and synced up our inventory and order system with Oberlo.
I started buying ads on Instagram on my phone. Mostly promoting posts. It took about a month of doing this for us to get our first sale. I remember it well. I was at a party and talking to someone I was into. My phone beeped. A noise I hadn’t heard before. I looked down and saw the Shopify notification on my home screen. You have a sale. The sweetest notification I ever saw. A pair of sunglasses for £25 ($33). I paid $3 for them and processed the trade that very night.
I was hooked.
Over the next few months sales gradually grew and grew. We got thousands of followers on Instagram and we started to employ someone to work customer service, social media and comments. It was really fun.
We had a brand and all the user generated content we could ask for as we were being tagged all the time by customers. We repeatedly found hot items and sold tonnes of t-shirts and jackets.
I remember the first month we hit £10,000 in sales. After that it never went below that figure. Only more. More and more.
Our first black Friday (2017) was the best day of my life. I could not believe I had put together and overseen a system that was making this much cash…
