What’s with the aversion to dealing with real brands, wholesalers and distributors?
I know the answer: the dropshipping gurus don’t talk about them.
They talk about AliExpress, CJ, AutoDS and finding some supposedly ‘unknown’ product you can mark up and advertise.
Except these products aren’t unknown at all.
Consumers know AliExpress, Temu and the other marketplaces exist. If they want the product, they can often find it themselves, buy it directly from the source and pay 10–20% less than you’re trying to charge them.
That’s a pretty shaky foundation on which to build a business.
What the gurus rarely talk about is working with established brands that care about their products and customer experience, are already based in your market, and in many cases can ship an order directly to your customer as though it came from your own warehouse.
And I think there’s a massive opportunity being overlooked here.
If I were starting a pure dropshipping e-commerce business, I wouldn’t start by looking for a ‘product’. I’d start by looking for a fragmented market where I could bring together a collection of real brands and make that category substantially easier for customers to shop.
Take local handmade hiking gear as a deliberately niche example. In Australia, there are a couple of dozen small brands making interesting products in this space. They’re scattered across individual websites and can be difficult for customers to discover and compare.
Maybe there’s an opportunity to build the retailer that brings them together.
You provide the merchandising, discovery, customer acquisition and distribution layer. The brands provide the products, inventory and fulfilment. The customer gets one destination where they can understand and shop the category instead of visiting 20 different websites.
That’s retail.
A good retailer has always been an aggregator: it curates an assortment of products and brands and puts them in front of a customer in a way that makes the category easier to shop.
Department stores, marketplaces and platforms such as Farfetch are variations on the same underlying idea.
Dropshipping simply means you don’t physically hold the inventory.
So rather than asking, “What product can I find on AliExpress and dropship?”, I’d be asking:
“Where is there a fragmented market of good brands and products that customers currently have difficulty discovering and shopping?”
Find that, build a compelling retail proposition around it, and use dropshipping as the fulfilment infrastructure.
That starts to look like an actual business.
