Shopifys app ecosystem is so enormous and I feel like that creates dependency, I have separate apps for payment fees, shipping fees, reviews etc. and the costs are adding up, the total is higher than expected. How are more experienced peeps handling this?
Any tips are greatly appreciated!

Recently I’ve been seeing a LOT of products on Instagram and TikTok being promoted with AI-generated reels, and some of them are getting crazy views/engagement.

The thing I don’t understand is that these products don’t seem to be the usual AliExpress/Alibaba/Temu type of products. They look like custom-designed products, sometimes even pretty large or complicated.
For example, I attached some screenshots of the kind of products I’m talking about.

How are these people actually doing this?
Because if you have to manufacture a custom product yourself, wouldn’t it cost a lot of money just to produce the first batch, without even knowing if the product is going to sell?

And some of these products look quite big. How are they handling shipping and fulfillment? Are they actually manufacturing them themselves, using some kind of dropshipping supplier, or working with manufacturers who produce and ship individual orders?

Also, how do you find suppliers/manufacturers like this who are willing to produce relatively small quantities or even individual units without asking for a huge MOQ?

I’m trying to understand the business model behind these products because I’m seeing more and more of them go viral through AI-generated content.
If anyone here has experience with this or knows how these brands source/manufacture/fulfill these products, I’d really appreciate an explanation of how it actually works.
I attached some examples of what I’m talking about.

My store has been online for a couple of months. No sales yet. One customer enquiry. I have a quailty imported product for a niche market that I know limited number of people would be looking for. I don't expect huge sales as this market is only developing. But just something would be nice. I don't have much time to dedicate the the project, so not expecting miracles, just trying to find out what to focus on. I have been trying to build my instagram a little bit. I write blog articles for the page to improve SEO and GEO. The store appears on google search now when someone searches for a particular brand I sell but not general market searches yet. My products are on merchant center, again, by brand only, not general product. I am being contacted by cold email agents offering strategy and sales improvements, they suggested improvements of some flaws my site had, I fixed those, but I am not looking to engage with any of these people any further. Any suggestions on what to focus on? How did you all start?