Edit: For clarity.
But if you really want to see how prevalent it is, take a look at r/dropshipping. There's tons of posts trying to sell courses, or Shopify themes, or a new commerce platform, etc. There's an entire "get rich quick" industry that's aimed at targeting other "get rich quick" dropshippers.
/s
source: I know someone with a proper addiction to this stuff. Think 6-digits “invested” in “life-changing material”...
;(
There is a lot of scams in there though. Telling the difference is not easy.
I keep thinking I’ll come across as a failed developer who now has to teach for ad money because he can’t do anything else anymore.
2. Before your youtube channel becomes popular to get noticed in a good or bad way, it will probably take a long time. Teaching code, being good at coding and being popular on youtube are 3 skills that dont necessarily overlap.
3. If you do get noticed, the (financial) benefits of it far surpass any developer job. And usually it actually help you to get dev jobs anyway.
Why? Youtube is a vast wasteland of videos, if people think that then your videos simply won't get many views, if people do find you insightful you will.
Unless you're specifically worried about the lack of low views maybe upload some random videos of you wandering around maybe even talking about random things first (because there's a trillion videos on youtube of people doing this already) so you get used to it.
I think most will struggle compared to a 6 figure salaried developer consistently bringing in paychecks.
His last php course I think he made 300k+. His latest css framework by my calculations netted him over a million.
His in previous refactoring to collections I think he made between 100-150k.
He recently down turn off all ads on his radioshow because he doesn't need the money.
Taylor Otwell has made millions from laravel ecosystem saas type sites.
Jeffrey Way doesn't disclose figured but based on user count and monthly revenue he must be pulling in at least 500k.
It's out there if you want it. Start a radio show, get opinionated, sell others on your vision. Then offer products to support your new vision.
Until I realized it was incredibly cynical, selfish and self-centered.
Not everybody has the same motivations, and this is not a zero sum game.
I love coding.
And I love even more teaching other how to code and help them get to where I am.
If you know a stock is going to appreciate in value and you tell everyone about it, they are going to buy it and cause the stock price to rise. If you didn't buy any and they did you will miss out on the appreciation. Alternatively, if you buy enough of the stock and don't tell anyone that will also cause the price to rise in value and other people will miss out on the appreciation.
Teaching someone else how to be a better programmer does not diminish your market value as an engineer in any meaningful way. It most likely increases it. Disclosing your winning trading strategy will make it so you can't profit off it because your trading costs will rise to such a level that the trade is unprofitable.
Key things if doing the real version of this.
1) In person supplier visits to vet them (yes, you need to fly to china
2) Amazon reviews are everything to these guys. So ad copy that is not too overblown (disappointment), amazing customer service etc. FBA.
3) Stick your own brand on the product and try to build that in a niche.
Lot's of seedy stuff also, but it does make really good money when its working for sure. These guys live in total fear of their accounts being banned / blacklisted (usually by competitors filing fake reports on them).
I don't sell course because i really doubt I could make much money by doing that when I can just keep dropshipping.
I never bought any course but I had a startup so I am familiar with sales and how you make conversion happens.
At the risk of being nitpicky, it sounds like you may be talking about your markup, not your margin.
Markup = ( SalePrice - YourCost ) / YourCost
Margin = ( SalePrice - YourCost ) / SalePrice
If your gross margin is 100%, it means you got the product for free:
Margin
= ( SalePrice - 0 ) / SalePrice
= SalePrice / SalePrice
= 1
= 100%
Markup
= ( SalePrice - 0 ) / 0
= SalePrice / 0
= Infinity or beyond [1]
Or buy for $25 and sell for $100: Markup is 300% and gross margin is 75%.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_by_zero
But what if your SalePrice is also 0? I asked our Lenovo Smart Display about this: "Hey Google, what's zero divided by zero."
She replied "No one knows. It's possible that zero divided by zero is some unknown number mathematicians have yet to discover. Maybe they'll name it after you!"
You could be selling very cheap items once a month.
Name checks out.
what kind of products do you dropship?
wait here it is:
https://www.cringely.com/2009/03/14/parrot-secrets/
This guy had found a niche for an online business.
I can't help but wonder how many competing cookie-cutter copies of the businesses were started the day that article was published.
I don't mean how many people write about tech, I mean how many people write about tech - and the who, and the why... and the why not.
Then go to that advertisers profile and checkout their all running ads on their page, you can easily Google how.
Most newbies fall for sunk cost fallacy.
So a 60-100% margin tells us nothing.
Keep in mind the ones buying either don't have time (to look up on Amazon if it's selling for cheap there) or are impulsive buyers.
I think people get very angry about dropshipping because there is this self-help industry around it...but what that really reflects is that platforms for acquiring customers have totally changed: costs are nothing, you don't need huge scale to contact customers, etc.
But it is a legitimate business model, people have been dropshipping for decades (shock: most Asian manufacturers have little to no interest in working out how to market to Western consumers), and you can make billions doing this if you want - Wayfair is a dropshipper, Wish is a dropshipper, you can do this if you want.
I'm working on an e-commerce automation platform called Openship and one of our first users wasn't even into dropshipping. She sold her own brand coffee but wanted to sell coffee accessories like french presses, grinders, etc. Her buyers would get these add-ons with the coffee. She would ship the coffee and dropship the other items. Those add-ons would cover her ad costs and she eventually private labelled those items too. That is how you effectively use dropshipping to test and build out your catalog.
Aren’t restaurants calling DoorDash and GrubHub out over exactly this “ghost kitchen” practice though?
Parent was referring to DoorDash pretending to be affiliated with the real restaurant you but from. That's not really dropshipping.
Dropshipping would be setting up a ghost kitchen storefront but not even having a kitchen, just redirecting orders to Chile's or whatever.
Actually, that's the part I'm struggling to understand. Why isn't drop shipping automated? And what's stopping consumers from bypassing drop shippers altogether?
Situational awareness and a narrative of trust. The number of advertisements on facebook these days promoting some retail site where every single product can be found on aliexpress for less money _and_ free shipping is staggering. The only reason you would buy from them is 1) You don't know what's on aliexpress because you don't know about aliexpress, 2) You don't know what's on aliexpress because you don't trust rando chinese factory sellers without western-friendly spin.
Though in my experience most AliExpress sellers are friendly and willing to refund or work through issues anyway. I've had fewer bad surprises on there than Amazon.
The part you left out is highlighted:
> They just want to Google $THING and buy it from a website that they've heard of....
People google stuff (or search on Amazon), land on Amazon or some other online retailer, and buy it.
You might be surprised how much stuff is drop shipped via Amazon sales, and that can be direct shipment or to an Amazon warehouse then FBA.
And yes, paying $25 for a $3 rack rate good is close to standard. If you walk through a Target or Walmart, you will see tons of stuff that can be purchased on Alibaba for about that ratio.
There might be a few bros out there doing well at this, that is, actually selling things to consumers, but mostly it's selling inessential products to indifferent consumers at tight margins. There's nothing wrong with dropshipping as a business model, per se, but there's a lot of hype and shadiness going on in these circles.