What A Dropshipping Failure Taught Me About Life

An attempt to “make it” taught me a lot

I remember exactly where I was the moment I realized I got scammed. It may have felt stomach-churning and absolutely devastating but in hindsight, it helped me learn a lot more than if it succeeded.

A mixture of greed and desperation may have left me broken, but it built me up even more afterward.

Here’s what I mean.

The Bad Trifecta

After I graduated college, I couldn’t find a stable job to start building an income and making a life for myself. Without valid funds, I moved into my parents' house and tried saving as much money as I could.

Now, living at home is one thing, but also not really dating anyone at the time is just as damning.

So I was single, unemployed, and living at home with my parents; the cursed trifecta had landed upon my head.

A Possible Salvation

I had found a job in a startup for optimizing e-commerce storefronts for a short period of time. But while there, I stumbled across a fairly new passive income stream that seemed promising.

When I got let go and found myself in-between jobs again, that option gnawed at my brain. Couple that with living at home with parents who seemed more frustrated than supportive, and I felt compelled to consider drop-shipping as a viable option for some income.

See, drop-shipping is the process of selling products on a website without needing a warehouse to store products. The orders from your website go directly to the manufacturers, wherever they are, and they send them from the factory to the customer’s address. Think of websites like Wish.com, but for different things.

The ability to make a website and keep most of the profits of sales sounds incredibly enticing to people without any income and involves barely any overhead.

Imagine being able to sit at the dinner table and tell your judgemental family that you made $500 that month, then that same amount in a day. That ought to shut them up.

So, I dove right in and began to build my website.

The Scam Begins

Following the advice I found from a website, I went to a website marketplace and looked for a viable site. According to Wholesale Ted, I should look for a website that’s affordable, has a fairly popular product, and has promise. Suddenly I found it; the perfect website idea.

Couples-themed products! You know, those king and queen t-shirts and similar things? And I found someone selling a website with the right amount of potential, with what seemed like decent profits.

This website could be grown with some work, so I messaged the seller.

Here’s where everything began to go south.

The seller then asked me to go to an escrow website to process the sale. That’s illegal according to the site’s rules, but I was too blind to notice.

So I joined him on that website and wired him the money. He told me he’d send me the information and the login info for the website, plus any kind of optimizations.

Multiple red flags should’ve shot up at this point, but this was the biggest one; he hadn’t made the website on Shopify, but rather Woocommerce, another platform.

He then haphazardly put together the website on another platform, and I was supposed to fix the rest. I asked him for help with the site, and he sent me one video about how to fix a particular problem.

Then, weeks before Black Friday, he went completely radio silent. Only afterward did I realize that he closed out his account and completely disappeared.

Black Friday Arrives

I bought and fixed the website in preparation for the biggest weekend of the year for shopping. To get the most exposure for the website, I jumped to Facebook, built a business account, and hooked up that account to my Shopify website.

After fixing the website, including optimizing the marketing funnel (marketing jargon for bringing the most people to purchase as fast as possible) as much as possible, I put together a few ads.

My knowledge of Facebook’s analytics platform was about to be tested as I threw together pictures and ad copy.

Are you noticing something here? Did you see how fast I was going and trying to chase some big opportunity without much preparation? We’ll get back to that in a second.

Until then, witness the moment it all went down.

The Gulp

As you might’ve guessed, I didn’t make a single sale that day, despite my constant refreshing of the analytics page. I decided to at least reach out to someone who could help. One of my friends works exclusively on Facebook Ads, so I reached out to him for advice on optimizing my ads.

He asked me about the product, and I mentioned how it was a dropshipping company that I took over. Then he asked me about its profits, and I told him that it had made money before.

While I texted that, I realized that the seller never sent me the income statements. He had also put the website on a different e-commerce platform, removing the old analytics in the process.

In the span of seconds, I felt violated.

I gulped.

My stomach pinched and I sat down in my chair with the hope that it might swallow me up alive.

I barely talked to anyone about it, and only time has helped me recover from the crazy amount of money I lost during that phase.

What I learned

Everyone gets scammed

Everyone thinks they’re invincible on the internet, that their money is safe with them and it won’t be pried from their cold grip. That hubris is constantly tested, and I paid for it.

I used to think “a fool and his money are soon parted” was happening to others until I became the fool.

Nowadays, I’m a lot more careful where I spend my money, especially on passive income projects. It’s a tough lesson to learn, but it makes you go on high alert.

For example, the promise of passive income is always too good to be true. Making a lot of money off of limited work doesn’t happen in most cases.

Put in the effort

Another thing I realized was the kind of effort I put into the website. I couldn’t vouch for the product, nor did I have any audience to capitalize on.

Not only that, but I had no idea how long it took to build a presence online; let’s just say it costs more than a few ads on Facebook and certainly takes more time than a few days (at least in the beginning).

There’s also a lot of content needed for the site to bring a target audience in, a more engaging UI, blog posts to keep people interested, a possible newsletter, and so on.

If I was going to make a product site, I couldn’t just throw money at it and do nothing else.

Do the research

Sure I found an idea for a product to sell, but it would be a smart idea to find some part of the culture that has a growing audience and capitalize on it.

Couple's t-shirts and such could work, but tying it into something popular and selling based on that could be a viable way.

I also needed to learn more about ad space, how to sell to a demographic, and how to use different kinds of marketing.

There are dozens of tools to use, and I wasn’t humble or rational enough to think it through without bowing out almost immediately.

Most Importantly: Don’t let the money define you

I rushed into it on the enticing thought of monetary success because of greed. It was only a surface-level chase solely for the chance of making money to prove to others that I was capable.

This mentality of going into something to only show your worth to others is a flimsy foundation. They fall apart at the first sign of adversity.

Chase something you truly believe in, even if the money doesn’t come when you expect it.

If something fascinates and challenges you to become better at different things (without hurting others), then go for it. Seek meaning from your work, especially if it pushes you towards your goals.

And if you want to go into dropshipping, don’t do what I did. Stay on the site and don’t go to a sketchy escrow website, which is how I found another scam.

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