Selling & flipping · debunked
Dropshipping generic products from overseas suppliers
Build a store, run ads, have a supplier ship direct, keep the difference. The difference is eaten by the ads, the refunds and the customer who finds it cheaper.
- Who pays you
- Shoppers pay your store for a product; you pay a supplier a lower price to ship it directly to them. In practice, most of the shopper's payment goes to the ad platform that sent them, and the rest goes to refunds.
- Outcomes
- 0 receipts. Nobody's reported back on this one yet. Receipts open when accounts launch.
The pitch
Pick a product from an overseas marketplace, set up a store in an afternoon, run social media ads, and pocket the gap between your price and the supplier's. No stock, no shipping, no warehouse. The pitch is usually delivered by someone selling a course about it.
Where the money actually goes
- Ads. The customer has to be found and persuaded, and the platforms charge whatever the market will bear. Customer-acquisition cost for a generic product routinely exceeds the gross margin on it.
- Refunds and chargebacks. Delivery takes weeks, quality is unpredictable, and the customer can see the same item on a marketplace for a third of the price. Refund rates are high and chargebacks get stores shut down.
- Competition. Every product that works is copied within days by hundreds of stores running the same ad to the same audience.
- The course. The reliable money in dropshipping is in selling dropshipping courses.
Money flow test: who pays you? A stranger, once, for a product they could have bought cheaper, after you paid more than your margin to reach them.
What to do instead
Retail arbitrage and reselling put you in control of stock and quality, and the margin isn't ad-dependent. If you want e-commerce, sell something you make or something you can source better than the internet can. See Resell clearance-aisle products online.
Published 1 Aug 2026