Dropshipping Profit: Expectations vs. Reality

What does it take to start an online store and reach 5-figure, or even 6-figure, dropshipping profits every month?

Before we dive into this topic, let’s set something straight. 

“It is perfectly possible to achieve 6 to 7-figures in revenue from dropshipping within your first year”

Now, it may not be easy, especially if it’s your first time. However, it has been done before. Among the main reasons for such success are diving into the right niche, finding a winning dropshipping product, and targeting the right audience.

If you do this right, you’ll start seeing unbelievable results and some pretty rewarding dropshipping profits. So, let’s find out how much you can expect from dropshipping!

Is Dropshipping Profitable in 2024?

According to recent statistics, the dropshipping global market is experiencing exceptional growth. It’s a multibillion-dollar industry that currently has a compound annual growth rate of 23.4%.

To put it differently, the dropshipping global market is expected to reach approximately $301.11 Billion in 2024. By 2025, it is estimated to reach over $500 billion. That’s definitely an enormous leap and a very possible one. 

So, what does this mean for you, the dropshipper? It means that the opportunity to increase your dropshipping profit and make more money will just keep growing as time passes. In other words, we can only go up from here.

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How Much Can You Expect to Make With Dropshipping?

This guide is all about the expectations vs the reality when it comes to dropshipping profits. However, the expectations don’t really matter. 

As we’ve seen from countless examples, it is very possible to make a few thousand dollars a month, a few hundred thousand, and well over millions of dollars within even your first year.

My advice is not to focus on the expectations or to compare yourself with how much others have made. Instead, focus on yourself and your dropshipping store. Try to grow it as much as possible to see consistent dropshipping profits.

💡  LEARN: What Does Shipped Mean In Dropshipping?

What Is An Average Dropshipping Profit Margin?

The most realistic and globally accepted average dropshipping profit is 15% to 20% on most products in your store.

Although, this doesn’t always have to be the case. If you’re dropshipping personalized products, your dropshipping profits can be completely different. 

Ultimately, your main goal is to try and raise your dropshipping profit margins as high as you can without making your product too expensive for your customers.

💡 Pro Tip: You can use a dropshipping profit calculator to instantly find out your average dropshipping profit margin on any product.

How to Increase Your Dropshipping Profits?

There are several incredible ways to cut down on costs and obtain more lucrative profit margins.

1. Compare Dropshipping Suppliers

As you may have noticed, some dropshipping suppliers offer more affordable prices than others. Some offer more expensive shipping while others don’t even charge you for it. 

You need to research several different suppliers for the same product to find the most affordable one.

To do this, you can follow these steps:

• Go to Dropshipping.com
• Click on Suppliers at the top of the page
• Browse through the thousands of available suppliers

You can click on each supplier to open their profile and review important information such as how much their products cost, how long their shipping is additional shipping costs, contact information, and more.

DON’T MISS: How Much Does It Cost To Start Dropshipping In 2024?

2. Upsell and Cross-Sell 

Upselling and cross-selling are simple strategies that entice your customers to buy more products once they’re already engaged in your store. By doing so, your overall return on investment (ROI) increases and so does your dropshipping profit.

💡 Tip: You can use this guide on upsells and cross-sells for dropshipping to learn how to utilize the strategy to its maximum potential.

3. Minimize Dropshipping Returns

Returns or refunds can set you back a lot. They can hurt your dropshipping profits and even cause your payment gateway to ban you from using their services.

You must do absolutely everything you can to minimize returns in order to at least maintain your current dropshipping profit margin.

Use our guide on dropshipping returns to learn how to manage and minimize them.

4. Increase Organic Traffic

One of the things that hurt your dropshipping profits the most are marketing costs. Well, organic traffic is almost completely free, meaning you can boost your profit margins by a significant amount.

Plus, organic traffic that you get from blog posts and social media videos can benefit you in the long term.

If you eliminate paid marketing or at least cut down on it, you’ll notice quite a big difference when you re-analyze your average dropshipping profit.

5. Go Big on Email Marketing

Repeat customers are basically 100% profit aside from your product and shipping costs. You don’t spend any money to attract these customers and convince them to buy.

Why?

Because they’ve already bought from you and they’ve given you their email. So now, you open your email marketing tool and send a few offers to those customers to come back and purchase something again.

Best Dropshipping Success Stories Worth Your Time

Let’s examine some case studies to prove that this can be a reality now more than ever.

1. Kate – $32.000 per Month

Let’s meet Kate, a dropshipper who hit the goldmine after months of struggling to get her dropshipping business off the ground. It took a lot of mistakes before she started seeing a consistent and acceptable dropshipping profit margin.

She may not be making millions, but $32.000 is not exactly a small amount of cash flow every single month. 

What Does Kate Sell?

She built a store around Japanese Anime. Mainly she sells everything Anime-related. This includes themed clothing, accessories, mugs, costumes, and much more. 

Her dropshipping store is absolutely bombarded with anime fans who love to spend too much time browsing her countless product listings.

How Did Kate Succeed? 

Kate employed the following strategies to make sure her dropshipping business starts growing:

• She knew research was important, so she used Google analytics and Google Trends to discover which products gain a lot of traction.

• She took advantage of social media platforms alongside Facebook and Instagram marketing to promote her online store.

• Kate also made sure to discover who exactly is her target customer before spending her money on ads.

2. Marc Chapon – $180.000 in Three Months

Marc Chapon is a dropshipper who quickly learned the basics of dropshipping from online blogs, courses, and YouTube videos. 

BONUS: What’s The Best Course To Learn Dropshipping?

Chapon explains that the more you learn about dropshipping before you start, the less money you will waste. That’s the main reason why the minimum dropshipping budget is the lowest out of so many online businesses.

What Does Marc Sell?

Marc’s first big success in dropshipping business was with a pet product store. He states that choosing a dropshipping niche should be based on something you’re passionate about. 

As a result, he knew a lot about dogs as a dog owner himself and chose the pet products niche. 

In less than a year, Marc started getting monthly revenues of over $60.000.

How Did Marc Succeed?

Here are the most important tips we can learn from Marc’s journey to sky-rocket our own dropshipping stores.

• Choose a niche you know well and are passionate about.

• Understand your product and your audience well. Once you target the right customer, you will see highly satisfying dropshipping profits.

• Take advantage of branded dropshipping strategies and make your store stand out.

3. Maria Jones – $1K per Day

Maria Jones is another successful dropshipper whose story was featured on Sixads. She quickly found success by scaling her store from nothing to $1k every single day. To sum up, that’s about $30.000 every month.

Maria first got into dropshipping by starting an incredibly unsuccessful jewelry dropshipping store. After facing the harsh reality of zero dropshipping profit and lots of money spent on Facebook ads, she did this: 

1. Maria started doing real research on which products work currently.

2. She diversified and used other sales channels other than Facebook.

3. She used Pinterest to consistently find products that sell well and have an acceptable average dropshipping margin to make her money back quickly.

4. Lastly, Maria took advantage of some of the best Shopify dropshipping apps to scale her store.

What Did Maria Sell?

As mentioned above, Maria first started selling jewelry. However, it quickly backfired due to a lack of knowledge and research. 

But still, she didn’t give up on the niche and just started to learn more about how to do proper product research.

As a result, Maria still dropships jewelry to this day and is quite successful at it considering her average dropshipping profit is $1k per day.

How Did Maria Succeed?

Maria Jones mainly pulled through by learning how to find out what people want to buy instead of guessing like she used to do before. As a result of this alone, she was able to scale her store to over $30.000 per month, or about $360.000 per year.

4. Sebastian Ghiorghiu – From $1000 to $8M in 6 Y.

Sebastian Ghiorghiu went from $1,000 to $8 million in just 6 years, making him one of the wealthiest dropshippers in 2023.

He began by identifying a profitable niche and choosing high-demand products, generating $35,000 in revenue. Instead of relying on Instagram, he focused on Facebook ads and started a YouTube channel, sharing his success using Shopify. By optimizing his online store for search engines, he attracted more customers.

Creating a course on dropshipping further boosted his income to $70,000-$80,000/month, and he eventually built a dropshipping brand, reaching an income between $500,000 to $2.3 million.

Now, at 24, he runs a Google Ads agency, dropshipping stores, and a successful YouTube channel.

5. Harry Coleman – $5 Million Dropshipper

Harry Coleman, now one of the wealthiest dropshippers, started with a nail products store but later transitioned to a more diverse general store model with three dropshipping stores.

Achieving an impressive $5 million in revenue in 2018, he emphasized the importance of identifying successful product niches, creating compelling advertising copy, and using Facebook ads to reach a broader audience.

Through experimentation, he increased sales from $1,000 to $2,000, eventually reaching an impressive $10,000 per day.

6. Alex Philip – $2 Million Dropshipper at 15 Years Old

Alex Philip, a 15-year-old millionaire, began selling Pokemon toys on Amazon at 11, accumulating over $2 million by the age of 15. In 2017, he started dropshipping, focusing on a strong marketing strategy instead of the store’s appearance. Sourcing products from Chinese suppliers, he drives traffic to his Shopify store.

With guidance from Julian Hall, he learned about enhancing conversion rates, optimizing his store, and executing profitable Facebook ad campaigns.

Alex advises young dropshippers to focus on learning, not just making money, take risks, and hire a virtual assistant to manage their business.

Summary

What’s the most important thing to remember from this guide on dropshipping profits? 🤔

Do not let expectations blindside you. The reality will be what you make it. 

If you work hard, learn more about dropshipping, and never give up, what’s to stop you from making hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars in the future?

Remember, the future of dropshipping is going places, big places!☝️