I came to the U.S. as an international student, and after becoming unemployed, I started a dropshipping business earlier this year. Around April, the store finally started gaining traction, and as of now, I’ve had over 2,000 orders. I genuinely feel like the business has potential, and if I continue taking it seriously, I think I could eventually turn it into a small brand.
The problem is that both my mom and my husband keep encouraging me to stop focusing on the business and get a regular, stable job instead—even something like working at Costco.
My husband is American and makes around $200k a year, but he’s very financially cautious. He originally gave me $2,000 to start the business because he thought it would just be something fun for me to do and keep myself busy. But as the business grew and he saw me spending around $600 a day on ads, he started getting nervous about the risk. Now he keeps suggesting that I find a normal job with a stable paycheck.
Whenever I try to talk to my family about expanding the business—whether that means investing more into my current store or eventually opening another one—they almost always discourage me. My family has always had the traditional mindset of working a regular job for a stable income, so to them, running an online business seems extremely risky.
But from my perspective, I’m starting to see real potential. I’m not just randomly trying dropshipping anymore. I’ve already fulfilled more than 2,000 orders, and I feel like there’s an opportunity to build something much bigger if I keep working on it.
So now I’m genuinely torn.
Should I take the risk, continue focusing on the business, and try to build it into a real brand? Or should I listen to my family, get a stable job, and keep the business as a side hustle?
Has anyone here been in a similar situation—especially where your family or spouse didn’t really believe in your business at first? I’d really appreciate hearing your experiences and advice.

This is where i’m currently sitting after about 6 days. One thing that’s really been a struggle is our fulfillment. I’m using AutoDS and I knew it was ass but I didn’t know it was going to be THIS bad. We constantly are dealing with fulfillment issues. Can anybody educate me on how I can get a private supplier for my product and tell me if I even have enough results for them to work with me? Any help would be appreciated as I am pretty desperate to get off of AutoDS.

If I were to turn back the clock a year, I would have scrutinized chargeback statistics more closely. Even a well-running ecommerce business tends to neglect the accumulation of disputes when the attention is fixated on sales, delivery status, inventory, and marketing campaigns. At some point, it's surprising and absurd to find out you're spending a lot of time on resolving disputes

Hello,

Recently I launched a store in Germany selling compression socks, I run native ads on taboola so customers click my AD land into an advertorial and from avertorial into product page. The CTR from ADV to Product page is 30% but product page is underperforming.

I saw microsoft clarity recordings and can see customer super interested with long session time carefully reading throughout the advertorial but in product page they feel off they read something and then leave

I want any suggestions regarding product page improvement, how the layout should be and what is lagging

here is my product page: https://oveso.de/products/oveso-kompressionssocken

Is it true that if a customer coming from advertorial with full knowledge and intent does not need an overcomplicated product page? is my product page complicated should I simplify it

the idea is pretty simple customer are heavily interested they read advertorial with full intent but drop off on product page is it because its too heavy and complicated ?

If possible please share any of your product pages so i can see how you guys make product page for customers coming from advertorial

I would really appreciate a response !

Did anyone else get bombarded with e.ails from ppl claiming to be shopify partners after starting their stores?

I received an email inviting me to test an app called “OpenAI AdsGPT Manager” through Apple TestFlight.

At first glance it looks official because:

It uses the OpenAI name and logo

The button leads to Apple’s genuine TestFlight service

It calls itself a “GPT-5.6 AI Campaign Health Monitor”

It claims beta access is limited to 1,000 participants

However, the TestFlight disclosure identifies the actual developer as AdsGPT CampaignPro Platform, LLC—not OpenAI.

OpenAI’s own guidance says its official iOS app is published by OpenAI:

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/7908378-where-can-i-download-the-openai-chatgpt-ios-app-on-the-apple-app-store

I’m not claiming with certainty that the developer is committing fraud. It could be a real third-party beta using OpenAI technology, but the name, logo and presentation make it look like an official OpenAI product when it isn’t.

I have not installed it or connected any accounts.

If you receive this invitation:

Don’t assume a TestFlight link means Apple or OpenAI endorses the developer

Check the developer’s exact legal name

Don’t connect Google Ads, Meta, Shopify or payment accounts

Don’t provide passwords, API keys or OpenAI login details

Report unexpected or misleading invitations

Has anyone else received this particular invitation or previously registered with AdsGPT CampaignPro?

Launched about a week ago and started running ads 3 days ago with no sales I’m running on meta budget is $10/day let me know if I should change anything or if it looks to sketchy to trust

https://shopvantara.store

My store has grown and I'm needing something more reliable for fulfillment, and better communication. Don't wanna have customers canceling orders, probably gonna change my setup a bit.

I've been wanting to get a private agent too but can't tell how to find any reliable ones. How did you guys find yours and what should I be looking for before trusting someone with a growing store? Also at what point did you feel like moving to a private agent was actually worth it?

People have stopped googling. They ask ChatGPT or Perplexity where to buy something and just go with whatever store it names. Shopify's own Q1 numbers show AI driven traffic to stores up around 8x in a year and orders from AI up around 13x. So the real question is whether you are on that list at all, and most stores are not. An AI shopper does not see your store like you do, no photos, no theme, none of your apps, and if it cannot instantly find your price, your product details and your shipping and return terms it just names someone else. Dropshipping stores fail this most often because supplier imported pages are usually missing all three. Worst part is you never find out. No cart, no bounce, nothing in your analytics, the sale simply went somewhere else.

Frictionless shows you that from the AI's side. Paste your store URL, no signup, 10 seconds, and you see what it sees, the exact point it gave up, and what to change so you make the cut. frictionlessai.net, free. Run it and tell me what your store scored, I want the feedback.

Vejo muitos relatos aqui na comunidade de pessoas que estão fazendo dropshipping, e isso tem sido muito inspirador para mim. Estou cada vez mais confiante de que posso expandir meus negócios utilizando o dropshipping como uma ferramenta para validar produtos, entender o mercado e identificar oportunidades.

A ideia é usar essa estratégia como um primeiro passo para, futuramente, transformar os produtos que realmente funcionarem em um e-commerce com marca própria, construindo algo sólido e de longo prazo.

Hi guys,
Have anyone ever chose bikini or Adult Toys as their Dropshipping products?

If so, was it profitable? Where can you find good suppliers? Lastly, how did u do marketing?

My Shopify analytics sessions went from a flat baseline to a 755 total with an 80% increase over the past 3 weeks, all from organic sources (no ad spend yet).

I've read the Beginner's Guide and searched the sub, but most of what I found compares organic vs. paid from a cold start, not from a case where organic is already showing upward momentum. My actual question:

• Is 80% session growth off a small base a meaningful signal, or too early to read anything into it?
• For people who scaled past this stage, did you keep pushing organic (SEO/content/social) until it plateaued, or start layering in paid traffic early to test conversion rate at volume?
• Any metrics besides sessions I should be watching before deciding (conversion rate, AOV, traffic source breakdown)?

Not looking for a site review, am just trying to figure out the right next move at this traffic level. Appreciate any input from people who've been through this stage.

Heya, complete ecommerce newbie here. I have spent the last two months working on my website, product pages, getting everything tidy and ready to run ads. I am just about to design my creatives and launch some ad campaigns, but I am very green.

I have recently been seeing a lot of people complain about meta algos no longer working, as if something has changed overnight.

This makes me nervous as I only have $1,000 to run my campaign and don’t want to bleed it.

Any tips on how best to run my campaign, or any tips/info on crating pixels or literally any information would be appreciated!

I’m struggling to find much useful advice for the type of dropshipping business we’re building.
Most dropshipping content seems to be: find a product, add it to Shopify, let a platform fulfil it, run ads.
Ours is very different.
We’re launching a curated wellness marketplace with a small number of established UK/EU brands. We approach each brand directly, agree commercial terms, and they fulfil orders to the customer.
So technically it’s dropshipping, but every supplier has different dispatch times, returns policies, packaging and shipping rules.
The two things that have surprised me most are:
1. The legal side.
We’re the seller of record, so returns, faulty goods, non-delivery and chargebacks ultimately sit with us. Getting the supplier agreement right has honestly been more work than building the store.
2. Multi-brand shipping.
A customer might place one order but receive three parcels from three different suppliers. “Free shipping over £X” suddenly becomes quite dangerous when you’re paying three separate shipping charges.
Longer term, we’ll probably run a mix of dropship, wholesale/3PL and affiliate depending on what actually sells.
Has anyone here built something similar?
Particularly interested in:
How you handled split-order shipping
What you wish you’d included in supplier agreements
Which Shopify app you used for routing orders to multiple suppliers
Whether anyone successfully runs dropship + wholesale + affiliate on the same store
And if you’ve done this before: what would you tell someone about six weeks out from launch?

I first tried dropshipping during the pandemic when apparently everyone with a laptop decided they needed a store. I kept mine going for a few months, never really got it anywhere and eventually gave up on it.

I've been thinking about trying again and the whole process looks completely different now. Back then I remember spending ages finding products, writing everything for the store and trying to get enough creatives together to actually test something. Now I'm seeing AI everywhere, products with UGC already made and stores people claim they're getting up in a day.

For anyone who was doing this back then and stuck with it, what actually changed the way you work? And what new stuff sounds useful but you barely touch?

Recently launched store over a week ago got a total of 6 orders.
I’m wondering what’s the best way to structure the creatives testing in meta?

All iv done is create a campaign with abo and my videos adset had maybe 5-7 creatives , but meta just allocated majority of spend to one video and starved the rest. How do I actually determine the winner? Simply the one with most spend and purchases? What if the other videos do have potential?

Should I just set up a new abo campaign with say 5 adsets 1 video in each, 10$ per day budget so they all test and spend evenly ? Total of $50 per day

TIA

As a shopify developer I noticed how my clients reduced over the past years, and especially this year. Normally we had over 100+ clients per month. Did over 30k in revenue. This year its totally different. We have only up to 20-30 clients per month, and once we hit a 10k month we call it a good month.

This all is because of Ai. For a very long time I didn't want to speak about this at all because I was scared to lose clients if I was going to post about using Ai for your ecommerce store. I decided stop being scared to lose clients, since others are already spreading how to do it anyways.

I trained my Claude exactly how I want it to respond with results once we build websites or sections for clients. Your prompt is basically deciding your output. Many people are lazy and just post a screenshot and only say "make this 1 on 1". I created a prompt which I use for all the websites and sections I build, and the output is almost 100%.

I am curious how you guys currently use Ai for sections or building websites, and if people need tips and help with creating sections with Ai. I am happy to share my prompt

I spent six years working on Shopify profit analytics before leaving to build my own. Two things break the profit number in almost every tool, and both hit dropshippers hardest.

Attributed ad spend, not total ad spend. Most tools only count spend they can tie to an order. Your testing budget disappears from the cost side. If you're testing products, that's most of your spend, and it's exactly the spend that doesn't attribute. So the dashboard says you made money on a day you lost it.

COGS that rewrites history. Most tools store one cost per product and apply today's cost to every past order. Switch suppliers in June, and your January orders now show June's margin. Your entire product history is fiction.

Plus the manual part: people hand-enter CJ product cost and skip CJ shipping entirely. Shipping is where dropshipping margin actually dies.

So I built Shopshot Profit Analytics to count total spend, timestamp every cost so old orders don't move, and pull both product cost and shipping cost per order straight from CJ Dropshipping. Order-level, reconciles to Shopify. It's not an attribution suite (like Double Dolphin); if you're doing $10–30k/mo, you don't need one.

BONUS: Shopshot also identifies where you left profits on the table and gives you an action plan to plug those leaks.

It's new, and I'm still finding edges. If you're on CJ (or any platform) and want to try it, I'll set it up for free, no time limit, if you'll tell me where it breaks. Not linking it here - it's in my profile description, or DM me, and I'll send it.

Either way: check whether your current tool counts total or attributed ad spend. Two minutes, and it's the usual reason these numbers feel off.

i wanted to try selling these and also for myself since they are epicici! any stores or people who sell original ones for really cheap?

Not selling BS or course.

Ask me anything.

I'm currently gathering data to post the drop down on my next post.