Drop Shipping is Dead! Long Live Drop Shipping!

Why there is an absence of activity and posts on drop shipping in 2019

I’ve spent the better part of the last three months researching. What subject you may ask? How to never have a boss again. At least that’s the dream anyway, a dream I’m happy (and lucky) to be pursuing at the moment.

It started with going through countless lists of different ways to make money online. In reality, I searched the subject a decent amount over the last couple years, but nothing really seemed to strike out at me as worth pursuing.

Or maybe it was the fact I knew in my mind I wouldn’t put forth any significant effort while still being full time employed in a stressful job environment. Let’s go with the latter.

After taking more time to properly go through the 10,000 ways gurus make money online (at least according to them), I eventually funneled my way down to drop shipping. I also decided to try out the new hobby of writing on Medium, but that’s not really for the money, more for the challenge and the fun of it.

Let’s Begin

So WTF is drop shipping? Its a business model that aims to cut out the huge cost of buying a bulk amount of inventory and instead, drops one item at a time directly at the customer’s place from the manufacturer.

Its a fascinating business model and one that further helped China’s Alibaba and its subsidiaries move onto massive success. The main player on the North America side is a cool company called Shopify (not Spotify, as my phone often tries to correct me).

This company established a platform marketplace where the usual purveyor of goods sets up a store, then uses another subsidiary of Shopify called Oberlo (no idea how to pronounce that one). Oberlo itself is used as a source engine for millions of products.

Do you shop on Amazon? Instagram? Etsy? Pinterest? If you do, and the item isn’t handmade or branded (not fake) then chances are you may have purchased something through these platforms.

Golden Age

Rewind to five years ago, which is when I believe the golden age of drop shipping first started. Material and posts from 2014 to 2018 are abundant and overwhelmingly exciting. They really tend to elicit that feeling that many entrepreneurs have of “I can do this!”

Yet, much of what I’ve read about this industry in the forums in the last year or so has a distinctly negative feeling. The sub reddits are full of these kind of posts. The main bloggers stopped blogging about the subject. Do a search on Medium, its hard to find anything past early 2019 at the latest on the subject.

So I wondered to myself, is this industry actually over now? Has it magically been swallowed up to become a new-age oligopoly in only 5 years and with e-stores of all things?

Well thankfully my natural tendency to distrust angry biased statements kicked in and I got to researching.

Gurus?

From what I’ve gathered, the industry really did take off amazingly well in the last half decade. And what does that success usually entail?

Just like you see on Medium, you have a few super successful people (guru’s if you will). You then have a larger but still relatively small group of successful people that certainly make enough to be wealthy and replace any normal careers. Finally, you have the sh*tloads of failures.

And as these industries expand, its almost by the modern e-nature that those super successful people end up being the only ones interviewed.

They always make it sound so easy don’t they?

And as we all know, people love easy money. Only it usually isn’t easy, is it.

Guru’d.

So that’s what I came across. Dozens of success stories, each with their own unique product or take on how they made their money. Often with hundreds of comments asking how they did it, over and over again. Many of them went on to making their own e-classes and e-books.

Then you see the illegitimate gurus (if there even is such a thing as a legitimate guru, outside of the older meaning of the word). These tended to be people of a likely greedier variety that created these super hyped-up courses with little mettle to back their statements up.

I also came across a lot of angst towards what seemed like fake successful rich kid gurus, which I found pretty damn amusing. The accusations against these guys in the forums were that they basically had enough money from the get-go to spend a small fortune on marketing & ads, and thus their only secret to success was their trust fund.

I didn’t care enough to investigate if these accusations were true or not, I merely had to look at any of the e-book/video/class ads to know I didn’t need to click.

Me, Myself, and I

So what did my months of research find? Drop shipping is still a very viable business! With caveats:

• Ad costs on Facebook and Instagram have gone up over the years.
• There are way more potential competitors now than in 2013
• Some long-term competitors have honed their craft of stealing success
• Amazon is an absolute monster competitor now (but it was back then too)

So why is it viable? Because there’s still a massive niche of people that are actually willing to work hard to build successful stores. By far, most of the fail stories I came across just encouraged me that there is still opportunity in this space.

What was the major cause of all these failed stores? Grit and determination. Sooo many of these people made a decent first attempt at a store, didn’t make perfect business decisions, lost some money, and gave up.

The same story, over and over again.

Great!

I’m glad to see this is the main problem, because guess what, truly driving at something over and over again is a huge factor in most peoples success. Entrepreneurship as a whole is so hard to succeed in generally, with all the many facets and factors that can possibly go wrong. But when I realized that the main reason a lot of these stores are failing is just because of a lack of effort?

Damn, there’s opportunity knocking.

As for my own ventures into this area, I have a plan of attack that I’m going to follow over the course of the next few months as I continue to learn about this industry.

As part of that journey and many others, I find that writing and learning more and more encourages me to forge onward. As such, I hope to write more about drop shipping & eCommerce in the months to come and see if I can revive the subject on Medium a bit for those still curious in 2019.

Feel free to check out my other stuff on Medium and follow me here. Thanks for reading and have a great day/dia/dina/deň/روز/journée/день/天/jaj!