Is Dropshipping a Scam?

I shared a little about dropshipping in my origin story, so I felt it'd only be natural for me to share my experiences on it and elaborate more on whether you should or shouldn't proceed with dropshipping.

What is dropshipping?

A dropshipping store basically acts as a middle man between the supplier and the customer. The customer makes an order, and you simply get the supplier to send the product straight to them, never having to see the actual product. 

The reason the suppliers are willing to sell you the products for incredibly low prices is because you will be doing the marketing and promotion of the product. And that is where the bulk of your spending is going to go to. 

A little background: 

I started dropshipping a little over a year ago and managed to generate about $3,000 in revenue but ended up with a net loss of $1,000. Despite this, If I had to, I would do it all again(with better cash flow management this time). 

The internet is riddled with dropshipping courses and 'gurus' trying to snatch your money with their thousand dollar courses. And no, I didn't buy any of these courses. 

Because of how saturated the dropshipping industry is, there are hundreds of thousands of videos on Youtube teaching people like you and me about the A-Zs of dropshipping(btw you can find this for practically any online business model). Because of this, all my knowledge on dropshipping and online businesses was obtained through watching Youtube videos and reading blogs/articles. 

This led to me being able to make a sale almost every single day for a month, until I had some cash flow technical issues. 

Benefits of dropshipping

Dropshipping requires very little capital to begin with and you can decide to stop at any time, without being left with any excess supply which you can't seem to get rid of. This means that dropshipping has extremely low risks as compared to a traditional brick-and-mortar or E-commerce store. 

Downside of dropshipping

Because you have to do the advertisements and 'branding', the margins which you need with dropshpping products is disgustingly high($20-$30 for a $5-$10 product). When the product doesn't sell after you've put in hundreds or even thousands of dollars into advertising, you'll just have to suck it up and leave. On top of that, dropshipping has extremely long shipping times(3-5 weeks) as products are mainly shipped from China. Hence, customers will tend to lodge complaints and make your life miserable. 

If you've noticed, I'm quite heavily opposed to dropshipping. I can deal with the advertisements(which are constantly getting more expensive) but it's biggest downfall is the shipping times. Hence I would recommend a business model almost exactly the same as dropshipping, except it has faster shipping times - Print on Demand(POD).

Check out how to start a POD store here!