What dropshipping actually is
How it works, what it costs, and the parts most guides leave out.
The short version
You list a product you do not own and have never touched. A stranger buys it from your store or your eBay listing. The order goes to a supplier, who packs it and posts it straight to your buyer under your own branding — the box gives no clue that you were never anywhere near it. You keep the difference between what your buyer paid and what the whole thing cost you.
That is the entire mechanism. No warehouse, no unit to rent, nothing to count at the end of the month. Every tool, ours included, sits on top of the same three-party relationship shown below.
Two things move, in opposite directions: money goes from your buyer to you to the supplier, and the parcel goes from the supplier straight to your buyer. You are the only party who touches both, which is also why you are the one who has to get the numbers right.
Where the money actually goes
A £20 sale is not £20 of profit, and treating it as such is the most common way a new seller talks themselves into a loss. Four things come off the top before anything is yours: what the item cost, what it cost to get it to your buyer, the cut the marketplace takes for hosting the sale, and the cut the payment processor takes for moving the money. What survives all four is the only number worth looking at.
Here is one order, worked through in full. The numbers are round and the order did not happen — it is an example, built the same way the arithmetic on our homepage is: to show the shape of it, not to promise a figure.
Anyone who shows you the top line and calls it your income is showing you the wrong number. Anyone who shows you the bottom one is being straight with you.
What makes it hard
Three ordinary things cause almost every failure here, and none of them are exotic.
All three are boring. All three cost real money. And all three are exactly why this is software rather than a spreadsheet: something has to watch continuously, because a person checking once a day is checking too late.
What it is not
The pitch and the reality are not the same product. Here is the gap, stated plainly:
| The pitch you'll see elsewhere | What's actually true |
|---|---|
| "Passive income" | A retail business where someone else does the warehousing |
| "Set it up once and forget it" | You still price it, sell it, and answer messages |
| "Free money" | Real costs on every sale: the item, delivery, marketplace fees, payment fees |
| "Guaranteed profit" | Profit only on products that clear the numbers — most don't, and that's fine |
Treated as a small business, it is a perfectly sensible way to sell online without holding stock. Treated as a shortcut, it fails — quickly, and at your own expense rather than anyone else's.
The only way to know whether a specific product actually clears all of this is to look at real numbers on a real item, not a pitch. Start free — the free plan holds ten products and takes no card, and every one of them shows you its own cost, delivery window and margin before you import it.
The free plan takes no card. Import a few products and see the real numbers on them.
Start free