Can You Make A Living Dropshipping?

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Are you looking to replace your boring 9 to 5 job with your own dropshipping store and are you wondering if it is possible to make a good monthly income with dropshipping?

Then this article is just right for you! In this article I would like to tell you from my own experience how you can generate a monthly income with your own dropshipping store.

Theoretically, a dropshipping online shop is nothing more than an ordinary online shop. The only difference between a conventional online shop and a dropshipping store is that you do not own the goods that you sell online and therefore do not have your own warehousing.

With a dropshipping store you face the same hurdles as with a regular online shop. Having your own dropshipping shop may even make it a little easier for you to start a successful online business. But there are also disadvantages to the dropshipping principle.

In this article, I don’t want to go into detail about setting up a dropshipping store, or which hosting company and which software is the best. You can find separate articles about this in my blog, which you should of course also read 😉

But I would like to tell you more about it below. So have fun reading!

How long will it take you to make a living from dropshipping?

This question is of course relatively difficult to answer and depends on various factors. It depends, for example, on how long you need to create the shop, how long you need to import the products, or how long it takes until you have optimized the product pages so that they convert well.

It also always depends on your traffic source. For example, if you don’t want to spend money on Google Ads or Facebook (Meta) Ads and want to promote your shop via content marketing or SEO, it can take up to six months for your shop to receive its first organic traffic.

It also always depends heavily on the niche in which you are active. For example, if you are active in the field of pet accessories, you will of course have much more competition than if you create your shop around the topic “accessories for crypto-mining”.

Therefore I recommend you to choose your niche carefully and to find a niche that is not too competitive but have enough interest from potential buyers.

For example, if we assume that your shop is completely finished and you start buying paid ads and thus attracting traffic to your website, it can be relatively quick until you see success and can generate a good income.

Of course, it also depends on the amount you invest in paid ads. Of course, if you only want to invest $500 a month in ad budget, it will take longer than if you have a monthly ad budget of $5,000.

If you want to get rid of paid ads, I recommend that you slowly approach it and slowly increase your daily or monthly ad budget.

However, if you want to generate organic traffic through SEO or content marketing, it may take longer to get enough traffic to generate a significant monthly income.

Content marketing or search engine optimization is relatively complex, since you have to do a lot of keyword research to find the right keywords that are not too competitive, but still have a high search volume.

you have to invest a lot of time in writing texts for search engine optimization. You need a lot of text for the homepage, the category pages, your own blog, and the product descriptions must also be optimized so that Google and other search engines can correctly classify and rank the product using the optimized description.

In my opinion, to generate your first income through content marketing or SEO, you need about six to twelve months. But only if you invest a lot of work in the content of your dropshipping store.

What should you sell to make a living from dropshipping?

In principle, it doesn’t matter what you sell via dropshipping. But in my opinion, you should concentrate on a specific niche and not go too broad.

If you have found a product category that you are personally interested in, you should compare the purchase prices of the products with the retail prices offered by other online shops.

Then you can see how much margin you have. Calculate how many products you have to sell to get a reasonable monthly income that can replace your 9 to 5 income.

However, I can also tell you from personal experience that you should refrain from selling clothing or shoes, as the quality is usually rather poor and clothing traditionally has a high return rate.

Unless you order samples in advance and check the quality of the goods yourself.

You should also be careful when selling electronics. In many countries, a specific test mark is required. If the products you sell in your dropshipping store do not have the necessary quality characteristics, they may be refused entry at customs.

It can also quickly become risky to sell electronics because you have to assume liability for the products. So if there is an accident or a fire caused by your products, it can quickly become uncomfortable. So be very careful here.

What factors come into play?

There are of course a few important factors that will determine if you can make a living from your dropshipping store.

  • How high are the expenses to generate traffic?
  • What is your conversion rate?
  • What is the difference between the purchase price and the selling price.
  • What is the average selling price of your products?
  • How much do you invest monthly for content marketing or SEO?

All of these factors determine the success of your dropshipping store and also determine how quickly you can make a significant income.

How can you reduce your costs?

Reducing costs is one of the best ways to increase your profits. For example, you can switch hosting companies to get a cheaper monthly hosting price.

You can also replace expensive plugins that you may pay monthly or yearly subscription fees for.

Also try to reduce your ad budget or replace it with SEO measures. Once done, content marketing or search engine optimization will last a lifetime.

You can also try to exchange your expensive Facebook or Google ads for cheaper platforms. Bing or MSN offer significantly lower click prices.

Make a list of your monthly expenses. So you can see exactly where you can find potential savings.

How can you increase the sales of your dropshipping store?

There are different ways to increase the sales of your online shop. For example, you can optimize the conversion rate by optimizing the checkout process, optimizing the product page and the content, or testing different call to action buttons.

You can also increase sales by generating more traffic. You can achieve this, for example, with a higher ad budget or by optimizing shop SEO or through targeted content marketing.

For example, if you have an effective conversion rate of 1%, try using various techniques to increase the conversion rate to 2%.

If it is not possible to increase the conversion rate, then your only option is to increase traffic while maintaining the 1% conversion rate.

How much can you earn monthly with a dropshipping online shop?

This question is of course extremely difficult to answer and of course depends on many different factors. You can have a great online store but only make $100 or less a month.

But you can also have a mediocre online shop and make over $5,000.

Everything is possible in the area of online shop and dropshipping. Therefore, you should only run the shop as a side hustle at the beginning and not quit your normal job yet!

Give your shop 6-12 months, even if it’s doing well. After this time you have collected some data and can use this data and facts to make more accurate decisions.

What are the dangers of dropshipping?

Of course, there are also some dangers with dropshipping. You should always take these risks into account and think about countermeasures at an early stage.

Possible dangers of dropshipping:

  • Organic traffic drop
  • Ad prices are increasing enormously
  • Data loss or hacker attack
  • Products no longer available
  • Product price increases enormously
  • Delivery problems
  • Payment service provider refuses to cooperate
  • New competition is emerging with better offerings

As you can see, there can always be problems. An online shop is comparable to a brick and mortar store. One day everything runs perfectly and the next day unforeseen problems can arise.

Therefore, you should already develop the right strategies in good times to counteract sudden changes.

Conclusion

Yes, it is definitely possible to generate your main income with dropshipping. In summary, it always depends on what product margins or profits you make and what expenses you have. Of course, if you have high costs for advertising, this reduces your potential profit. However, if you generate your traffic using search engine optimization or SEO, you will of course make more profit by selling the products.

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