This is the one question no dropshipper will ever answer.

I remember reading an article a long time ago...

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.

Cringely is amazing. He runs his whole persona under a name that directly confessed how bad his thinking his, yet has somehow made a long career as a pundit.

Not saying he's a big fish in a small pond, but how many people consistently write about tech topics like he does?

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.

Actually sometimes a dropshipper will be willing to say what sold really well last year (if they're seeing poor sales on that item during the current year).

It's not hard to figure that out, make bunch of fake Facebook accounts in different age groups and disable ad blocker, you'll get bombarded from ads on store.

Then go to that advertisers profile and checkout their all running ads on their page, you can easily Google how.

My sister does this and she was a hairdresser so she mostly operates in the beauty product sector but also has had a lot of luck with things from IKEA this year.

The generic product area like clothing or whatever is probably ok. Got to protect the secret sauce though.

The actual products almost never matter because they change all the time. Some only have a sales period of a few weeks. What dropshippers do is to automate data gathering and number crunching to figure out the next products to focus on.

Yes that's why you need to keep spying on competitors using fake fb accounts and establish a protocol of quickly testing and dropping the duds without investing feelings into it and scaling only the winner.

Most newbies fall for sunk cost fallacy.

That's what I'm curious about. With that margin I'd guess CPG with a re-branded product. Most retailers are lucky to see anything north of 50% gross margin. I would have imagined a drop shipper having closer to 20%.

Margins on electronic components like resistors are huge. But you have to sell loads of them to make some money.

So a 60-100% margin tells us nothing.

Actually many times I sell products which are available elsewhere for 1/2 the price like on Amazon or wallmart but it doesn't stop people from US buying those products. Not everyone has time or smartness to acquire perfect price info of the market.

You sell everyday product which look cool and might also be available on Amazon or wallmart but people don't buy it.

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.