Hey all - OP here. I know drop shipping sites tend to illicit some curiosity (as well as a lot of skepticism) online, so I'm happy to answer any questions as honestly as I can here in the comments.
As someone who has zero experience in this area, but is curious about it for that same reason, I want to thank you for your voluntary transparency. The piece itself is also well-written and is an overall enjoyable read. I wish you all the best!
Long time reader of the site and nice to see your post on HN. Thanks for sharing everything and good luck with the sale.
Dropshipping can be a great compliment to an existing software business, offering a nice way of increasing customer lifetime value. My wife and I develop & market CattleMax, a web app for cattle ranchers to manage their herds.
A few years ago, we were approached by a manufacturer who asked if we would become a reseller for their animal identification tags. We thought we'd try it out for a few months so we setup a store so our customers could buy from us online. Several years later, business has grown beyond just our software customers and we have launched another dropship store with another manufacturer.
Appreciated, thank you. And congratulations with the success you've had pairing your web app and eCommerce - very original! Best of luck with it in the future.
Shopify and I collaborated to put out a drop shipping specific book which really gets into the nuts and bolts of drop shipping vs. general eCommerce. It's free, and you can read it via the link below. The eBook on my site discusses drop shipping as well, but not in as much granular detail:
I'd also recommend DrewSanocki.com for some solid eCommerce / drop shipping material. (Disclose: He's become a friend of mine). He started a drop shipping business in the early 2000s and grew it to mid to high 7 figures before selling. Writes a lot of great stuff about eCommerce in general:
I was curious about some drop ship info too, so thanks for those links. I was wondering though if it's feasible to bootstrap a site like this with almost $0, or if the money to start it up typically costs a couple grand or so.
Starting with $0 would be difficult. I think having at least $1,000 or $2,000 would be helpful for web hosting, some basic design / logo work, and a small advertising budget.
I started with $1,500 (for my first site, not this one. This one I invested a LOT in early on - not all of it prudently!) so you don't need a ton to begin, especially if you're willing to invest a lot of sweat equity.
Oh alright, thanks. Yeah I figured if I were to do something like this I could do most the website work by myself. I was just hoping that the deals to be made for supply didn't typically come with an upfront cost.
Downloaded your ebook to hopefully get a better look at what it takes, thanks again!
I was also in the dropshipping realm, it's possible to start with very little money (probably not $0 though).
I think bare minimum you need to register a company which costs $10 or so, dropshippers you want to do business with expect you to have that paperwork. That's enough to get you started dropshipping on eBay or something similar. You'd definitely be smart to spend a little more setting up a site with a logo, but it's not hard to get Opencart running and you could create a simple logo with open source editing software.
If you really did a lot of the work yourself I'd say you could get an eCommerce site up an running for $20-30 depending on the domain name and hosting options (many of the lower cost hosts expect you to pay a year subscription up front for the lower cost hosting options, so it would make more sense to pay more in the beginning to get the lower rate).
Yeah that doesn't sound bad at all. Still pretty difficult to think of a niche market or where to find a drop ship friendly supplier. But it's nice to know that if I stumble on that combo it wouldn't take much initial capital.
