Let’s Talk About Dropshipping

Before moving on, we should briefly touch on dropshipping, an ecommerce approach where you don’t store or handle physical products yourself. Instead, a third party stores and ships whatever it is you’re selling, leaving you to deal with only marketing and customer service.

This guide is for people who want to create, stock, and sell their own ecommerce products. Sometimes entrepreneurs dropship early on to test out a market, and you might experiment or start out with it. But for the most part, we recommend that you don’t dropship. Instead, try just stocking and sending things yourself.

Profit margins on dropshipping can be low, sometimes 10% or lower—not a good number for a small, young business. Plus, putting shipping in the hands of someone outside your brand, while having to worry about customer service, can be a recipe for disaster.