How I made $3,630 dropshipping products on Aliexpress and Shopify

So, in 2017, I’d jumped on the dropshipping bandwagon in exploring another side hustle, and today, will spill the beans on everything I’ve learned. Is it a legitimate side hustle? Yes. Is it for me? No. Is it for you? Well, find out how I made $3,630 dropshipping products on Aliexpress and Shopify, and then come to your own conclusion. 

If you don’t know what dropshipping means, it basically means a retail fulfillment method in which a storefront that doesn’t keep any inventory in stock. Instead, when someone purchases from a dropship storefront, that owner then goes to the manufacturer, buys the product, and the manufacturer then ships it on behalf of the storefront to the consumer.

I’m sure you can see some benefits of dropshipping right off the bat. Zero cost of inventory, zero cost of holding inventory, positive cashflow (you only purchase the products when you get a purchase on your site). There were some fixed costs though. For example, a basic shopify subscription comes at $29 per month plus transaction fees. As my store was a new store, I also used paid traffic to drive traffic to my site. 

What is Shopify and Aliexpress?

Shopify is a platform that allows you to easily create an online shopfront, add products to your store, and start selling to the entire world! Whether it’s physical goods, digital products or services, shopify is your storefront to the world.

Aliexpress is a online retail service based in China, and is owned by Alibaba. 

The basic premise of dropshipping, is an arbitrage play by purchasing items cheaply from Aliexpress, and re-selling them on your storefront whenever you have new purchase orders coming in, thus ensuring a positive cashflow for your store.

Can you make money dropshipping?

Anyway, back to the setup. I used shopify as my storefront, and aliexpress to source for items to sell. Oberlo is an app within Shopify that allows for a seamless integration and orders between Shopify and Aliexpress.

Based off a lot of reading on forums and chats, the way for a lot of dropshippers was to test a whole host of different products, and find one that was selling like hotcakes, and leverage the shit out of that one hot product. Legend has it that sales from that one hot product will more than make up for every other losing product you test.

Well, great! I thought.

I proceeded to pull in many items to test, as shown below. These items included watches, bitcoin and crypto memorabilia, cushion covers, mobile phone accessories.

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I did find some products that managed rather consistent sales. Could you guess which ones?

It was the watch (yes, this particular one), and the mobile phone cases. The others had some random sales now and then, but proved way too costly.

So in the 5 months that I tested dropshipping, while I did bring in more than $3,000 in revenue, but my cost of advertising and product cost proved higher than the revenue generated.

Show me the numbers

Here are some screengrabs from my instance of Google Analytics for that 5 month experiment.

Here you can see the spikes of activity followed by a few lull periods of consolidation, finding products and going again. Whenever advertising activity stopped, there was hardly any traffic to the site. 

If you want to make dropshipping work longer term, a content strategy definitely needs to be in place alongside paid traffic acquisition. 

Below are the top products sold over that time period, almost all of it comprising the watch (I called it ‘On My Time’) and a particular phone case I called ‘Bling It’. 

Dropshipping as a side hustle

At the end of the day, it all boils down to math. Can you find a product that is very cheap, but has a high perceived value? The difference between the cost and the perceived value would be your margin. 

Can you then bring in customers and optimise your conversion rate to a good enough level to make a profit within that margin?

That would require some time and possibly audience targeting skills.

In the end, dropshipping was a bust for me. But as a concept, it does work. And I hope it works for you if you choose to explore this side hustle. 

Will I give it a go again? If I can find a super attractive product at a great price, and if I can think of some great content around for sustenance, then never say never!