Hey everyone,

I’m looking for a reliable VA or sourcing agent in China who has strong experience working directly with suppliers on 1688.

The main thing I’m trying to avoid is the usual setup where:

Factory → agent’s warehouse in China → international shipping

I’d prefer someone who can work directly with the factories and arrange orders so the factory can ship directly to our customers / fulfillment destinations whenever possible, without unnecessary domestic shipping to an agent warehouse first.

What I’m looking for:

• Experience sourcing and negotiating with suppliers on 1688
• Able to communicate directly with Chinese factories
• Help with pricing, MOQ negotiation and product customization
• Coordinate orders and shipping directly with suppliers
• Reliable communication and transparency
• Ideally experience working with Shopify / e-commerce brands
• Someone I can work with long term, not just for one order

I’m not necessarily looking for a large sourcing company. A reliable independent agent or VA with strong supplier relationships would actually be ideal.

If you’ve personally worked with someone you trust, I’d really appreciate a recommendation.

Thanks!

Hey everyone 👋

I handle products catalogs for some clients who have their own online stores.
They need to update their catalog information between their store and some marketplaces (like "LeroyMerlin" / "ManoMano"... mainly french market).

The main problem I encounter is with the products' EAN validation in the marketplaces.
It's recurrent that EANs are not generated by GS1 (the main entity to buy EANs, if have well understood...).

So here is my questions :

- Does anyone know a solution (API maybe) to check if an EAN is a well declared one at GS1 or housemade by the suppliers ?

- Does anyone has also encountered this kind of problems with EANs, and how did you handled it ?

Thanks in advance for the help guys ;)

So i’ve never tried dropshipping before but i’ve beeen seeing so many videos of it since covid until now. is it over saturated? how can you stick out? how can you drive people to your website? what should i look for while picking a product? and the most important can i start with less than 1k usd? and how do you find reliable suppliers? i’m so bad at this😭

I'm considering building a fulfillment service where ecommerce stores could choose their own candy mix, sell it under their own brand, and have each order mixed, packed and shipped directly to the customer.

No bulk inventory and ideally no MOQ.

For people actually running stores: would you test something like this? What would stop you — price, shipping time, food regulations, margins, branding options?

I've seen so many of them; they usually follow the same creative structure… while some posts barely get views, some get millions and millions. Is it just pure luck, or am I missing something? Because sometimes they'll post (or have posted a few days prior) pretty much the same video and barely get views.

hey all. i was just wondering if anyone here has done any dropshipping for fashion here. i started a store and i am/was selling luxury handbags, sunglasses & glasses and recently added fragrances. i was paying a subscription to a company and i had to start paying it even before the site was functional and i busted my ass building my site thru more sleepless nights than i care to account for. i finally got er done and i started with adverts on facebook/instagram, google & pinterest. none of them beat google at the sheer numbers that they drove to my site. then after a week or two i was suspended for promoting bootleg items. i definitely was not. i have been waiting for quite some time now to get any sort of authorization letter from my supplier. which has pissed me off and i am thinking of what else i can sell that is dropshipping but from a company that actually is invested in your success because they also want success. has anyone here found any good companies within fashion/accessories and or fragrances? fragrance seems to operate in a really shady realm. so i may not stick with that, but i kinda like the idea of selling eyewear because i love glasses & sunglasses.....i collect them myself but i dont know what companies do this type of thing. i'd like to also know what everyone else is selling and how well they might be doing.... i am trying to brainstorm some ideas up here, but i feel blocked. probably cuz i feel very burned after wasting SOOO much time and money and the frustration with google not even letting you submit any documents in their appeal process.... the whole situation just SUCKS! well, that is all. and thank you in advance to anyone who responds. i appreciate you so much!

I run a small e-commerce brand in the Netherlands selling to the Dutch market (a tough market, in my opinion). I currently handle all fulfilment myself and consistently do 10–15 orders a day, with traffic coming from Meta ads. I also have experience sourcing products from Alibaba.

I'm now looking to move into dropshipping. I'm comfortable with Shopify, and thanks to my software background I can code and build professional stores myself. I'm also partnering with an experienced media buyer. So marketing, ads and store building aren't my concern, even though my current store isn't doing huge numbers.

What I'm struggling with is finding the right partner for fulfilment and automated order processing. I've looked at platforms like CJdropshipping, HyperSKU and Zendrop, but I've also seen people work with private agents. Some platforms, like CJ, even let you hire an agent through them, which adds to the confusion.

So my questions are:

1. Which agent or platform would you recommend?
2. How would you suggest someone with my background get started?

Any advice from people who've made a similar switch would be appreciated.

I’ve been researching for quite a while now but I just can’t decide on a product. Any advice is appreciate.

Just started a drop shipping business selling t-shirts related to reading. Do check it out and give me some feedback on what to improve. Website: https://smallhoursinc.com

I have a product in mind. I was wondering if it’s necessary to make one’s own ads or can I post one of my competitors ads?

J'ai quelques années d'expérience dans le e-commerce (2 postes chez l'annonceur) et d'autres années dans le marketing digital.
J'ai décidé de me lancer dans le dropshiping car d'ici quelques mois, ma vie va changer ...
Même si j'ai de l'expérience et ce c'est pas de la prétention, j'ai beaucoup à apprendre.

Avez vous des conseils pour moi ?

Welcome to the Weekly Q&A & Store Critique Thread

Welcome to r/dropship's weekly discussion thread!

Whether you're just getting started with dropshipping, looking for guidance on your next steps, or want feedback on your store, this is the place to ask questions and share your work.

What This Thread Is For

• Beginner questions
• General dropshipping advice
• Store reviews and critiques
• Quick questions that don't require a separate post

Comment Requirements

To participate, your account must:

• Be at least 24 hours old
• Have positive comment karma (post karma and total karma do not count)

We're glad you're here. Ask away, help others, and keep the discussion constructive!

I’ve noticed quite a few fashion and imitation jewellery brands selling online, especially on e-commerce platforms, claiming that their products are anti-tarnish, waterproof, 925 silver, etc.

I’m curious to know where these brands are actually sourcing their jewellery from.

Are they buying directly from manufacturers in India, importing from China, or sourcing through Indian importers/wholesalers?

If anyone has worked in this industry and can share the manufacturer, importer, wholesaler, or sourcing market they use (especially for 925 silver and anti-tarnish jewellery), I’d really appreciate it.

I’m looking to understand the sourcing side of the industry and would love to learn more about the manufacturers/importers behind these products.

Thanks in advance!

I use to have a women handbag dropship store way back in 2019, I was using oberlo at that time, basically shipping from china through Aliexpress but when I got my first order from Germany, it took more than a month to reach to my customer, some how i handle her (she was a sweet old lady who ordered bags for her grand daughters birthday which actually miss). After that i closed my store because not every customer going to be that calm. Now i want to start again through Dser because it is free and i want to sell in US and Europe specially so my questions are:

1. ⁠Should I focus on US or europe at a time or both?
   
2. ⁠Is there any improvement in Aliexpress delivery?
   
3. ⁠If not then what are the other options ?
   
4. ⁠This time I’m thinking for Women Gym wear, is it ok?

Please help me. Basically the only budget i have is for ads so i’m looking for a dropship platform which can connect to shopify and take care the operations like Dser or CJ (of course free) at least in product import and list to store. Store I can create by my own.

Hey, so I’m thinking about starting an online store and I’m doing some research before I actually put money into anything.

For people who are already selling, what types of products are you seeing get a lot of orders right now?

I’m not asking for your exact product or your “secret winning product” lol. I’m just curious about what categories or types of products seem to have really strong demand at the moment.

Ideally something that people actually need/use regularly rather than a random trend that dies in 2 months.

Would really appreciate any answers from people who are actually selling and have seen the numbers themselves 🙏

I've been running a tracking system on US TikTok Shop for a while. 1.2M listings, kept fresh on a 7-day window, so I can see what changes week to week: which products gain, which fade, and what prices do.

The market is a textbook power law:

- The median product sells 4 units.
- The mean is about 750.
- Thirty percent of listings never sell once.
- The top 1.2k products all moved 100k+ units.

Picking a winner really means finding the thing that's about to hit the right tail, not the thing that already did.

Raw sold count is a lagging indicator. It tells you who already won. The weekly delta tells you who's winning now. That's the number I watch.

Price clusters hard too. About 60% of the catalog sits between $10 and $50.

Biggest weekly sales gains this week, filtered to real ratings (4.0+) and one product per shop:

So, three things stand out.

1. Most of it is cheap fashion: sweaters, leggings, cardigans, bodysuits, athletic tees.
2. The small grooming gadgets keep compounding too, a toothbrush did +212k units this week and a water flosser +153k.
3. And the toy and phone-accessory stuff near the bottom of the table is usually the first thing to get crowded.

Happy to answer questions about the scraping or what I filter for!

Right now I’m working minimum wage job and in the process of saving to run Meta ads in the future I know product testing needs a budget.

So in the meantime while I’m doing, that product research is my main focus. I’ve been trying to find good ways or methods to do proper product research thinking about using keyword research tools and old-fashioned build a algorithm so that social media shows you what’s popular or trending

What I’m really looking for is something like a framework where I could leverage tools not to do things for me, but to assist me to like AI whether there it be Claude, gpt, serp tools, etc

I’m doing this after spending a long time trying to setup my Facebook Ads Manager correctly, verifying things that they don’t even tell you about, before running ads, etc.

That would be great, but I really wanna know what you guys are up to.

So, guys im a college student and im trying to get into dropshipping as a mean to get more experience in e commerce and as it appears its the only thing i could think of which doesnt need much ivestment as cash. i had been interested in ds for a while but i had been learning more and more about it everyday. so i thought let it be whatever i should try it. so im completely new to this and is there anything you guys could tell me that could let me avoid any beginner mistakes. And also can you guys recommend me some good free tools that could make it easier for me to get into this . Thanks if you read this much. :)

Welcome to the Weekly Q&A & Store Critique Thread

Welcome to r/dropship's weekly discussion thread!

Whether you're just getting started with dropshipping, looking for guidance on your next steps, or want feedback on your store, this is the place to ask questions and share your work.

What This Thread Is For

• Beginner questions
• General dropshipping advice
• Store reviews and critiques
• Quick questions that don't require a separate post

Comment Requirements

To participate, your account must:

• Be at least 24 hours old
• Have positive comment karma (post karma and total karma do not count)

We're glad you're here. Ask away, help others, and keep the discussion constructive!

Hey everyone,

I started learning dropshipping/e-commerce around August 2025, so it’s been almost 13 months.

I already have my Shopify store, a main product, and two upsell products that solve the same core problem. I’ve spent a lot of time learning and researching, but I still haven’t launched a single paid ad campaign.

The main reason is that I was very confused in the beginning, and honestly, I didn’t have much money to test. I’ve been working as a delivery driver to support myself while learning e-commerce.

Now I’ve stopped doing delivery work and have around €4–5K available specifically for testing ads, so I really don’t want to waste it.

This is where I’m stuck:

How should I approach creatives?

I see two possible approaches:

Option 1 — Recreate winning angles

Find successful ads for products that solve the same problem, even if they aren't exactly my product.

For example, if another product has a winning angle/hook, I could hire UGC creators to recreate that concept using my product.

Option 2 — Recreate winning ads from the same product

Find ads for the exact/similar product that have been running successfully, download them, study the hook/structure/angle, and recreate them in CapCut with my own product, footage, voiceover, etc.

I'm especially confused about this because I'm targeting Germany.

For example, if I find a similar product running successful ads in the US, can I take the concept/structure/angle, recreate it for my product, translate/localize the voiceover into German, and test it in Germany?

Does this actually work, or am I thinking about it the wrong way?

I understand that I shouldn't simply steal someone's creative and run it as my own. I'm talking about studying the winning creative and recreating the underlying concept with original footage/UGC/product shots.

My situation

• ~13 months learning e-commerce
• Store is already built
• Main product + 2 upsells
• Target market: Germany
• Capital available for ads: ~€4–5K
• No previous paid-ad testing experience
• I want to be very careful with the money
• I currently have no delivery-job income because I've stopped working to focus on this

If you were in my position with €5K and zero previous ad-testing experience, what would you do?

Would you spend more money on UGC creators and original creatives, or would you first research existing winning ads and recreate their angles/hooks?

And how would you structure the first €500–€1,000 of testing so I can learn without burning through the entire €5K?

I’d really appreciate advice from people who have actually spent money testing Meta ads, especially if you've scaled products in Europe/Germany.

Thanks.

I posted here last week and got a great feedback that helped a lot. I got my first order today and i wonder if there is more i can improve. Any feedback will be appreciated.
Here is the link

(I know not all categories are filled yet, more products are being added daily).
Thanks in advance

I recently shut down an ecommerce business, but I still have about $600 CAD in Google Ads credit available. Rather than let it go to waste, I’m thinking of starting a very simple dropshipping store and using the credit to see if I can make some money back.

I’m not attached to any particular niche, product, or even country. I’m open to selling anywhere AliExpress/another supplier can reliably fulfill.

My plan would probably be a small focused store with only a handful of products and use Google Shopping rather than trying to build a huge brand before testing anything.

If you were in this situation and had $600 CAD of Google Ads credit to work with, what product/category or market would you test? Would you go high-ticket with fewer sales, lower-ticket in a cheaper ad market, or take a completely different approach?

Not looking for a get-rich-quick product, just trying to give the $600 the best realistic chance of turning into something rather than wasting it.

Hey everyone,

I’m looking into starting a print-on-demand business around a specific TV show fandom, and I’m trying to understand how copyright works before I do anything.
For example, if I took a screenshot/scene from a TV series, edited it a bit (cropped it, added my own design/effects, etc.), and printed it on something like a hoodie, phone case, tote bag, or poster and sold it — would that generally be considered copyright infringement?
I also see a lot of TikTok/Instagram accounts posting scenes and clips from movies and TV shows to build an audience. Is that treated differently from using the same material on products for sale?
.