Dropshipping

The research was done by AI agents that open web pages. Some sites refuse them; where that happened we say so. The small numbers point to the source list at the end. Where a figure is our own sum or guess, it is marked “our estimate” and the basis is given.

The claim

These are examples of the claim, copied from our collection of 29 tweets on this scheme¹. View counts are as collected on 6 October 2026. Dates are worked out from each tweet’s ID number, so they are our estimate. The page judges the scheme, not the people who tweeted.

“Just Hit $76K in 13 Days With My NEW Dropshipping Store”

@AuthenticDom, April 2023, 71,520 views¹

“I recently challenged myself and RESTARTED dropshipping… with a $100 starting budget. Spoiler: I made a profit from day 1.”

@Samuel_Ecom1, August 2023, 126,311 views¹

“I’ve done over $3M dropshipping”

@jackgecom, February 2023, 220,739 views¹

“$2.2m from one dropshipping store in the last 12 months.”

@AnthonyEclipse, September 2026, 6,289 views¹

We quote only the part that states the money. Each of these four tweets goes on to offer something free (a video, a course, or the name of a supplier) to people who comment or reply; three of the four also ask the reader to follow the account¹.

What the 29 tweets say, by our count¹:

• 15 give a sales-type figure in the tweet text. Every amount is sales (“done”, “hit”, “revenue”) or is left undefined. One more account gives a figure only in its bio, as recorded in our collection notes, and one tweet gives a $100 budget. The one tweet that says “profit” gives no amount.
• None of the 29 gives advert spending, product cost, refunds, customs duty or the income left at the end. We read the tweet text only. We did not view the images, videos or threads attached to them, which may say more.
• 14 are posts that ask the reader to like, comment or reply in return for something sent by direct message; 11 of them also ask for a follow. Those 14 hold about 96% of the views we could count (820,229 of 852,492; five tweets had no view count).
• Most of the high-view tweets date from 2022 to 2024. Several costs described below changed in 2025 and 2026.

What the scheme is

Dropshipping is a way to run an online shop without holding stock. You build a store, usually on a platform such as Shopify. You list products that a supplier holds, often in China. When a customer orders, you pass the order to the supplier, who ships it straight to the customer. You never touch the product.

What you keep is the sale price minus four things: what the supplier charges, shipping, the payment company’s fee, and what it cost you to find the customer. For most stores that last item means paid adverts on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok.

The method is real and legal. It is the main way Wayfair, a large listed furniture retailer, fulfils orders: “Our primary method of fulfillment is a drop-ship network”⁷⁵. Wayfair reported $12,457 million of net revenue for 2025, and a net loss of $313 million⁷⁵. So the model works at scale, and size alone does not make it profitable.

The question for a reader is narrower. The tweets quote sales. How much of a sales figure is left as income, and who gets there?

The arithmetic

Step 1: what is left after paying the supplier

Shopify, which earns money when people open stores, puts it this way: “Dropshipping margins tend to sit around 20% to 50%, depending on the supplier and the product category”⁴. Its own example: a store with $20,000 of monthly sales keeps “only $4,000 to $10,000” after paying for the products, and “It’s even less once you factor in costs like website hosting, paid ads, and other fees”⁴.

This figure is the gross margin: the share of the sale price left after the supplier is paid, before adverts and fees.

The 20% to 50% has a narrow origin. Shopify’s article links it to the help page for Shopify Collective, a programme for reselling other Shopify brands’ products at a wholesale discount: “Margins vary by supplier, but typically can range from 20% to 50%”⁵. The article states it for dropshipping in general and gives no dataset⁴. So⁵ is where the figure comes from, not a second confirmation.

For stores that buy from suppliers in China, which is the model most of the tweets describe, the only multi-store figures we found come from TrueProfit, which sells a profit-tracking app for Shopify stores. It puts product cost at about 35% of the sale, a gross margin of 65%, in a press release², and shows 67% in a table on its blog for the week of 27 September to 3 October 2026²⁸. TrueProfit publishes no method. The two sets of figures describe different ways of sourcing, and the sums below use both.

Step 2: what it costs to get one order

Triple Whale, an analytics company, publishes the middle (“median”) figures for more than 40,000 online brands that advertise on Meta (Facebook and Instagram), for August 2025 to July 2026³. Median means half did better and half did worse.

• Advert cost for one purchase: $38.99³
• Size of that order: $73.36³
• Return on ad spend: 1.88, meaning $1.88 of sales that Meta’s adverts are credited with for each $1 spent on them³

“The median CPA across all industries landed at $38.99, and CPM sat at $15.06”³. CPA is the cost per purchase. CPM is the price of showing an advert 1,000 times; Triple Whale reports it rose 13% in a year³.

The figures differ by product type. Median cost per purchase runs from $29.61 for baby products to $51.86 for electronics, and median return on ad spend from 1.44 for health and wellness to 2.35 for sports and outdoors, among the retail categories³.

Littledata, another analytics company, reports that the median Shopify store turns 1.4% of visits into an order⁶. This share is called the conversion rate. Triple Whale’s sample turns 1.53% of advert clicks into orders³.

Limits: these samples are established brands that pay for analytics or agency services. They are not new stores and not only dropshippers. A newcomer’s figures are probably worse, but that is our inference, not a measurement. The 1.88 counts only sales that Meta attributes to its own adverts. Brands also earn from repeat buyers, which a cost per first purchase does not show. Triple Whale also publishes a blended ratio it calls MER (median 0.48); we could not reconcile it with the definition on the page and did not use it³.

Step 3: put the two together

To cover adverts alone, the return on ad spend has to be at least 1 ÷ gross margin (our sum):

At the median, adverts are covered on the first order only if the gross margin is above about 53% (our sum: 1 ÷ 1.88). That holds when the product costs about a third of the price, as in TrueProfit’s figures. It does not hold at the 20% to 50% margins of Shopify’s Collective programme. This is our estimate from sources that measured different groups.

Covering the adverts is not yet a profit. One order at the median figures looks like this (our estimate). It uses the higher margin: TrueProfit’s product cost of 35% of the sale.

Not included, on the cost side: customs duty (Step 7), refunds and chargebacks (payments reversed by the customer’s bank). The same vendor puts payment fees at 5% of sales, above the 3.3% used here². Not included, on the income side: later orders from the same customer. So the median first order lands between a dollar or two of gain and a few dollars of loss.

The break-even advert cost per order, on a $73.36 sale after the $2.43 card fee and before overheads, is our sum:

TrueProfit’s own totals point the same way. In a June 2026 press release it said its analysis of more than 1,000 Shopify stores, dated August 2025, found that across dropshipping businesses “advertising spend accounts for roughly 45% of revenue, COGS 35%, shipping 6.5%, transaction fees 5%, and other operational costs around 8.5%”². COGS is the cost of the goods. Those rounded shares add up to 100% of sales (our sum), which would leave nothing; the release itself says: “That leaves the average store with a thin margin”². The same release calls a net margin of 10% to 20% “a strong benchmark”². Net margin is the share of sales left after every cost.

TrueProfit’s two sources agree on gross margin: 65% in the press release and 67% in the blog table²²⁸. They disagree on what is left at the end: about nothing in the press release, 15% in the blog table, which is drawn from stores that actively use its app²²⁸. TrueProfit publishes no method for either, and it has a commercial interest in showing that stores which do not track costs lose money. The reading that fits both: the average store keeps little or nothing, and stores that survive and track their costs keep around 15%.

Step 4: the sales needed for a given income

Sales needed = profit wanted ÷ net margin. Orders use the $73.36 median order³. Visits use the 1.4% median conversion⁶. Advert spend is what is left for adverts once the other cost shares in² (55% of sales) and the profit are taken out: 25% of sales at a 20% net margin, 35% at a 10% net margin. All rows are our estimates.

The advert money is spent before the customer’s payment reaches the seller. So a $10,000 monthly profit means putting up roughly $12,500 to $35,000 a month first.

Step 5: the tweets’ numbers on this basis

• “$76K in 13 Days” is $5,846 of sales a day¹. At a 10% to 20% net margin that would be $7,600 to $15,200 of profit for the 13 days. At the rounded average cost shares in² it would be little or nothing. The tweet text gives none of the costs, so we cannot say which. All of this is our estimate.
• “$2.2m … in the last 12 months” is about $183,000 of sales a month¹. Adverts would take between about $550,000 of that over the year (a 25% share, which goes with a 20% net margin) and about $990,000 (the 45% average share)². Both are our estimates.
• “$100 starting budget … profit from day 1”¹. At the median cost per purchase, $100 of adverts buys about 2.6 orders and $188 of sales (our estimate from³). On the one-order figures in Step 3, that leaves about $4 before overheads, or a loss of about $12 after them. At a 20% to 50% gross margin it is a loss of about $12 to $69 after card fees (our estimates from²,³ and⁴). So a small profit on day one is within reach of a median result when the product costs about a third of the price. At thinner margins it needs a cost per order well below the median (see the break-even table in Step 3), or sales that needed no adverts. A first day says little about later ones: nothing we found shows day-one profit to be a usual or lasting result.

Meta’s help page adds a capital point. It says an advert set (a group of adverts that share one budget and audience) settles down only after “about 50 results in the week”⁹. If the result counted is a purchase at $38.99, that is about $1,950 a week for one advert set (our estimate). Advertisers can count a cheaper event, such as adding to basket, so this is the upper end.

Step 6: the smaller fixed costs

The tools are cheap, which is the true part of the pitch.

• Store. Shopify’s Basic plan is $39 a month, or $29 if paid yearly, with card fees of 2.9% + 30 cents. A store that does not use Shopify’s own payment service pays an extra 2% of each sale on Basic. The trial is three days free, then $1 a month for three months¹⁰. These are the US prices, read through a reader service; opened directly, the page showed euro prices to our server (Basic €32 a month)¹⁰.
• PayPal. PayPal Checkout costs 3.49% + $0.49 per US sale, plus 1.5% for buyers abroad. When a seller refunds an order, “the fees you originally paid to receive the payment are not returned to you”¹¹. On a $73 order that is about $3.05, or 4.2% (our sum).
• Order tools. DSers has a free plan and paid plans from $19.90 a month¹⁵. Zendrop has a free plan, then $49 or $79 a month¹⁶. AutoDS showed $26.90, $39.90 and $66.90 a month to one of our agents. Its page offers an “Annual (25% off)” option, and we could not tell which set those were; on later visits the prices did not load at all¹⁴.

Our estimate: store plus tools comes to roughly $40 to $120 a month. The percentage fees and the adverts are what use up the margin.

Step 7: customs duty, which most of the tweets predate

For years, parcels worth $800 or less entered the United States free of duty. That ended for all countries on 29 August 2025. The order says the exemption “shall no longer apply to any shipment of articles … regardless of value, country of origin, mode of transportation, or method of entry”¹⁹. The allowance is known as “de minimis”. US Customs confirms it covers post as well, and that parcels “will not be released from CBP custody until all requirements are satisfied”¹⁸. A trade law firm reports the suspension was continued by executive order on 20 February 2026¹⁷. Another law firm reports a trade court upheld it on 13 August 2026²¹. A Federal Register notice says “the statutory repeal of the basis for de minimis will take effect starting on July 1, 2027”²⁰.

We did not establish the duty a typical parcel from China now pays. The Federal Register notice, read in part, describes a 10% surcharge that a February 2026 proclamation imposed “for a period of up to 150 days”²⁰. Counted from then, that window ended around late July 2026 (our estimate). The notice’s new process for postal parcels took effect on 24 July 2026 and is meant to apply all other duties to them²⁰. So 10% should not be read as today’s rate. We did not work through the current rate for post or for couriers.

The European Union made a similar change: “From 1 July 2026 until 1 July 2028, a customs duty of EUR 3 per item in a consignment the intrinsic value of which does not exceed a total of EUR 150 shall apply”²². In plain words: €3 for each item in a parcel whose goods are worth €150 or less. Shopify’s help page reports that France adds a €2 handling fee per item from 1 March 2026²³. On a product sold for $15 or $20, €3 per item is a large share of the margin.

What people who tried it report

Nobody has measured how many dropshippers make money. Shopify says so: “There’s no dropshipping-specific failure rate”⁴. In its place it gives the general US figure, that 34.7% of all businesses started in March 2013 were still open ten years later⁴²⁵.

The figures that circulate have no data behind them that we could find:

• “Only 1–5% of dropshippers build a profitable, sustainable business.” TrueProfit’s blog states this as fact and attributes it to its founder²⁸. Its press release presents the same figure as data: “Based on TrueProfit’s analysis of over 1,200 dropshipping stores, only 1–5% of dropshippers ever reach consistent profitability”². The same blog page also says “About 5–10% of Shopify dropshippers break even or turn consistent profit”²⁸. No method or counts are published for any of the three.
• “Advanced dropshippers … consistently reach $10,000 to $50,000+ in monthly net income”, while others “remain stuck in the $0–$2,000 beginner range”, says the same press release, again without counts².
• “Beginners make $1,000 to $2,000 a month” comes from a blog post by Zendrop, a fulfilment company. The post gives no data source or method, according to the summary we read²⁴. Shopify repeats it as “Zendrop data”⁴.
• “90% fail” traces to vendor blogs citing each other²⁴²⁸. TrueProfit’s blog credits “data published by Branvas” for “80% - 90%” of stores failing or being abandoned in the first year²⁸. Branvas’s own audit, described below, says it could not calculate a survival rate⁶¹.

We do not use any of these as statistics.

The nearest measured figure covers all Shopify stores, not only dropshipping. The Globe and Mail analysed more than five million stores in 2022 and reported “just 34 per cent of stores surviving a full year on average”, with a median life of 143 days for stores opened in 2021²⁷. Shopify’s reply, printed in the article: “the churn analysis is drastically different from our own and the conclusions drawn are false”²⁷. A store leaving Shopify is not the same as a store losing money, and the data is four years old. One of our agents opened this article; another was stopped by its paywall.

Journalists who tried it as beginners. A Vice writer in 2020 “spent close to £200 setting up a site and advertising my products, and never saw any return”³⁵. A writer for The Outline in 2019 “brought in just $122.93 in revenue, most of it from myself”³⁶. Both were short trials by writers, not serious attempts. They show what a casual start with $100 to $250 looked like then.

People who did well are covered under “The upside” below.

Sales and cash are different things. Wired in 2020 describes a store selling $10,000 a day whose supplier stopped shipping. The owners could not refund every customer “because they’d spent the money on more Facebook ads”³⁴. We give this as a pattern, not as one person’s story: a store can have high daily sales and no cash.

Success stories are hard to check. Branvas, a company that sells jewellery dropshipping services, tried to check 50 widely shared “success story” stores from 2019 to 2022. “Of the 50 stores we set out to verify, three met the inclusion test”⁶¹. The rest could not be identified. Branvas says it “could not responsibly calculate a 50-store survival rate”⁶¹.

One small survey. A 2024 bachelor’s thesis from a Finnish university surveyed small dropshippers: “most respondents reported investing more than $1000 to establish their dropshipping businesses”⁷⁷. The author calls the data “indicative rather than representative”⁷⁷.

We could not read Reddit forums; they blocked our agents on every route we tried. Most first-person accounts we did read date from 2017 to 2020, before advert prices rose and before the customs changes. We found no income report from 2024 to 2026 backed by payment records.

What the rules allow now

Dropshipping is permitted on most of the main platforms in one form: you are the seller of record (the business named as the seller on the customer’s order), you buy from a wholesale supplier or maker, and you carry every duty of a shop.

• Shopify supports it, and warns: “you could be held liable for products that don’t meet the safety standards in any jurisdiction you’re selling where those products are shipped”²³.
• Amazon: “Drop shipping … is not acceptable unless it is clear to the customer that you are the seller of record”⁵².
• eBay allows supply from a wholesaler, but “listing an item on eBay and then purchasing the item from another retailer or marketplace that ships directly to your customer is not allowed”⁵³.
• Etsy: “Drop shipping is not allowed on Etsy, with the limited exception of Craft and Party Supplies”⁵⁵. Sourcing from wholesalers or white-label makers (makers of ready-made goods sold under the seller’s brand) “violates our marketplace policies on reselling, and may result in penalties up to and including account suspension”⁵⁴. One tweet in our collection, from early 2024 by our estimate, describes “Etsy dropshipping” of products found on AliExpress¹. Etsy’s current help pages do not allow that; we did not check what the rule was when the tweet was posted. Etsy’s full legal pages refused our agents, so this rests on two help pages.
• TikTok Shop’s US seller terms, updated 22 January 2026, do not mention dropshipping either way⁵⁶.

Money can be held back. Both big payment services reserve the right to keep part of a seller’s takings for months.

• Shopify: “A reserve is a temporary hold on a portion, in some cases a full amount, of transactions processed through Shopify Payments”¹². Its listed triggers include late delivery, a raised refund or chargeback rate, and a sudden jump in sales. Its examples are 10% of each sale held for 120 days, or a fixed $1,000 for 120 days¹². A chargeback is a payment reversed by the customer’s bank; Shopify charges $15 for each in the US, returned if the seller wins¹³.
• PayPal may hold a balance “for up to 180 days if reasonably needed to protect against the risk of liability”⁵⁷. It “may place a reserve on your business account at any time”, and names delivery times, time in business and dispute rates among the factors⁵⁷. Sellers with a dispute rate of 1.5% or more and over 100 sales in three months pay a higher fee on every dispute⁵⁷.

A new store whose sales suddenly jump, with parcels taking weeks to arrive, matches the listed triggers. The seller still has to pay the supplier and the advert platform meanwhile. One tweet in our collection says “I’ve done millions $ in Dropshipping revenue through Paypal WITHOUT any issues” (@Samuel_Ecom1, 102,571 views)¹. That may be so. PayPal’s terms do not promise it to anyone⁵⁷.

Adverts depend on customer feedback. Meta surveys buyers after they click adverts and says: “If you source goods from suppliers or operate a dropship business, it’s important that you maintain quality control”⁵⁸. Third-party articles give score thresholds for a delivery penalty and an advertising block, and payment-industry blogs report a tighter Visa limit on disputes from April 2026; we confirmed neither at source⁵⁹⁶⁰.

The seller is legally the shop.

• United States. Under the Federal Trade Commission’s mail-order rule, when a supplier ships late, the question of who is responsible is answered: “The seller is. This is because the person soliciting the order, not the agent fulfilling it, is the seller under the Rule”⁴⁶. The page shows a penalty of up to $53,088 per violation⁴⁶. The rule is used. In a 2024 complaint the FTC alleged that GOAT, an online marketplace that is not a dropshipper, sent some orders later than promised without offering a refund. The case was settled, and on 6 October 2026 the FTC announced more than $100,000 in further refunds to customers⁴⁷. That case concerns only that company.
• France. The consumer regulator checked 215 dropshipping sites in 2022: “116 se sont révélés en anomalie” (116 were found in breach)⁴⁸. It issued 26 warnings, 67 orders to comply and 22 criminal reports⁴⁸. The regulator chose which sites to check, so this is not a random share of all stores. It also reported that writing false reviews (“faux avis”) was described by some sellers as usual in the trade “et même conseillée lors des formations” (and even advised in training courses)⁴⁸.
• Netherlands. The regulator fined one store owner €90,000 in 2025 for not telling customers that goods ship from China, and added: “Dropshipping in itself is not prohibited”⁴⁹. The fine concerns only that company.
• United Kingdom. The advertising regulator ruled that an advert for a “London” branded store that shipped from Asia “misleadingly implied that the advertiser was based in the UK”⁵⁰. The ruling concerns only that advertiser.

Who makes money from it

Several parties are paid when a newcomer starts, whether or not the store ever makes a profit.

The platforms. Shopify takes its monthly fee and a share of each card payment¹⁰. The advert platforms are paid first; adverts were about 45% of sales in the one multi-store breakdown of costs we found².

Referral payments. A person who sends newcomers to a tool is often paid for it.

• Shopify: “Earn up to $150 USD per qualified referral”, and its page names “Course Makers” as a group it wants⁶³.
• AutoDS: “Get paid 20% monthly for every referral”, with “1500+ Affiliate partners” and “20M+ Affiliate commissions paid” by its own count⁶⁴.
• Zendrop: “Earn $25 USD for every signup through your affiliate link!”⁶⁶
• Ship To The Moon, a sourcing agent: “Earn 2% of every qualifying account deposit made by users who registered through your affiliate link”⁶⁵.

So a free introduction to a supplier or a tool can earn the person who makes it a payment on each newcomer. Some tweets in our collection offer to pass on the name of a supplier or agent¹. We did not see what is sent and do not know whether any of those introductions is paid.

Courses and coaching. Of the 29 tweets, 14 ask the reader to follow and comment to receive something free, and none of those 14 states a price or says what follows the free item¹. We could not open any X profile, so we did not see what the accounts link to. So we looked at two course sellers’ own websites, found by search, as examples of what is on offer. We did not match either site to an account quoted on this page.

Supreme Ecom’s site runs from a free webinar up to paid coaching. Its home page shows a course at $997 with “Split Pay Available”⁶⁸. The course page says: “You can buy the Blueprint on its own for $597. If you add the membership, the Blueprint drops to $527, plus $29.99 a month”⁷⁹. We do not know why the home page figure is higher. Above the course sits a 90-day mentorship sold by application, with no price published⁶⁷. The mentorship page carries the words “GUARANTEED $10,000 in 90 Days”⁶⁷. We found no terms for that guarantee on the page, and it does not say whether the $10,000 is sales or profit⁶⁷. The site’s terms say payments “are non-refundable under any circumstances”⁶⁹. The discount page lists nine tools; six of the links carry a referral code or a tracking address. That these pay a commission is our inference from the link format. The page says the discounts are “Available to anyone — you don’t have to be a paying student”⁷⁰. The site’s headline figure is “$10,260,829 | Made by Clients”, which the page does not describe as profit⁶⁸.

EcomLiberty’s site offers one coaching programme under the heading “Here’s How You Could Be Making 10K/Mo In Profits In As Little As 90 Days From Now” and publishes no price⁷¹. Its small print says it does “not guarantee any specific income, revenue, or results” and that the results shown “are not typical”⁷¹. Its questions section promises that anyone who does not reach $10,000 of profit a month by the end of the coaching will “get a FREE extension until we hit that number”⁷¹. It also says the coaching is for “people that have some capital to invest”, because advert spending comes on top⁷¹.

The services that host courses take a cut as well: Skool charges $9 a month plus 10% of sales, or $99 a month plus 2.9%⁷³.

Tools that estimate other stores’ sales. One tweet in the collection, from the tool ShopHunter, reports “$334K a week” for a store and marks it “Estimated”¹. ShopHunter’s site says it works from traffic, advert counts and buying behaviour to estimate a store’s sales⁷⁴. Figures like this are modelled sales. They are not records and not profit.

What sellers of success stories sell. On Starter Story’s list of dropshipping success stories, three of the five highest earners are a mentoring business, an importing app and a print supplier⁶². The figures there are supplied by the founders; the list shows no verification⁶². In Wired’s 2020 article, a founder of a dropshipping community described “a course for $6,000” that teaches buyers to sell the same product “with 40 other people”³⁴. A seller profiled by Business Insider, warning readers against paid courses, said: “It’s a lot easier to sell a course than it is to do drop shipping”³⁹. The article adds that he posts his content free and also offers “a dropshipping bootcamp for a fee”³⁹.

One regulator case concerns dropshipping courses directly. In September 2024 the FTC filed a complaint against Ecommerce Empire Builders, which sold dropshipping training and ready-built stores, and announced the case a week later⁴¹⁴². The complaint says the course cost $997 to $1,997 and the stores $10,000 to $35,000⁴¹. It alleges: “Defendants understate the actual costs required to run and maintain a dropshipping business, especially ongoing marketing costs. After accounting for fixed costs needed to run and maintain EEB-built ecommerce stores, Defendants’ online stores often lose money—even the stores Defendants tout as success stories”⁴¹. These are allegations; no court tested them. The case ended in May 2025 with an agreed order: a permanent ban on selling business opportunities and “a monetary judgment of $9,786,124, which is partially suspended based on the defendants’ inability to pay the full amount”⁴⁰. The FTC’s headline for that release reads “FTC Action Ends Ecommerce Empire Builders Online Business Opportunity Scam”⁴⁰. The word is the FTC’s and applies to that operation. The case concerns only the company and owner named in it, not dropshipping and not any account quoted on this page. We did not find the company’s reply.

A neighbouring product. Other FTC cases concern companies that ran Amazon or Walmart stores on a customer’s behalf, which is not dropshipping as described here. In one, Click Profit, a March 2025 complaint alleged a “management fee” of at least $45,000 and stores that mostly earned little⁴³. These are allegations; no court tested them. The FTC’s case page, last updated on 25 August 2025, reports a proposed settlement and shows the status as “Pending”⁷⁸. We did not find the company’s reply. The case concerns only the companies and people named in it.

The FTC’s general advice on coaching offers: “if they promise guaranteed income, large returns for little work, or say they have a ‘proven system to make money,’ it’s likely a scam”⁴⁴. That is general guidance, not a finding about anyone on this page. UK advertising guidance says earnings claims should “state the level likely to be attained by an average respondent, not a level based on a minority of unrepresentative high performers”⁵¹.

Not everything is sold. Sellers give away webinars and tool discounts, and one account in our collection promotes a government training programme in Pakistan¹. The method can be learned, and the accounts opened, for close to nothing. The money at risk is in the adverts and in the unpriced coaching tier.

The upside

Some independent operators make real money from dropshipping. The best-checked evidence we found comes from a broker.

Seven stores for sale. Empire Flippers is a broker that sells online businesses. Each of its listing pages says: “All businesses are fully reviewed and vetted by our team of advisors before being listed on the marketplace”³⁰. On the day we read it, it listed seven dropshipping businesses²⁹:

The broker treats the profit figure as a yearly one: its listing pages define the price multiple as “listing price ÷ annual net profit”³¹. We did not confirm that twelve full months were measured for every store. Two listings show growth over windows of 7 and 9 months²⁹, and one listing’s own text gives an average monthly profit of $26,254, about $315,000 a year, against a headline of $369,458⁸⁰. The figures are checked by the broker, which earns a commission on sales, and are not audited accounts. Seven stores whose owners chose to sell are winners, not a sample.

The seven, by how they find customers (margins are our division):

Four of the seven run on paid adverts. They show $61,527 to $698,301 of profit and keep 15% to 22% of sales^30313282. The three that do not rely on adverts keep 25% to 43%³³⁸⁰⁸¹.

What the individual listings add:

• The largest: launched in September 2022, it sells customisable designer lighting and works with 8 to 10 makers. “A team of three virtual assistants based in the Philippines works a combined 50 hours per week”³⁰. Virtual assistants are remote helpers paid by the hour.
• A fast one: launched in early 2025, with a team of five. The listing says it “has successfully identified winning products from hundreds of tested advertising campaigns”, and that “they are currently being withheld 10% of their funds for 120 days due to elevated chargebacks”³¹.
• The one that leans on Facebook: it sells head shavers and replacement blades in French-speaking markets. “66% of subscribers place a second order”, and the “overall repeat customer rate was approximately ~40%”⁸².
• The Google one is described as “a high-average-order-value business”, meaning each order is large³².
• One that stretches the definition: the fourth store sells “compounded GLP-1 medications and Hormone Replacement Therapy”, which are prescription treatments, through a telehealth partner and partner pharmacies⁸¹. The broker files it under dropshipping because it holds no stock. It is far from the model in the tweets, and a reader may prefer to count six.
• The smallest: founded in 2021, it sells men’s fashion through an Instagram account with over a million followers and more than 20 further accounts, about $4,000 a month of profit (our division). The broker adds: “This business does not have any Google Analytics history. Empire Flippers has not been able to assess the traffic as a result”³³. Its profit was down 14% over 12 months²⁹.
• The stated risk on the advert-driven listings: “An increase in Paid Traffic pricing could make the ads unprofitable”³².

Six of the seven listings show profit rising over the latest 7 to 12 months, and one shows it falling²⁹. The sellers state 1 to 30 hours of owner work a week, with paid staff on the larger stores^{30313233808182}. These are sellers’ own figures in a sales listing.

Asking prices were 1.4 to 2.8 times one year’s profit²⁹. That is roughly in line with other online stores shown on the same listing page, priced at 2.3 to 3.1 times profit (our division)³⁰. So the multiple shows how buyers price small web businesses in general. It is not a sign that dropshipping profits are unusually short-lived.

Other documented outcomes.

• Wired in 2020 described a full-time operator, three years in and working with partners: “his Shopify records show he’ll clear about $90,000 (£69,000) in personal profit” that year³⁴. This is one of the few figures a reporter checked against records.
• The same article describes a store with “$750,000 of sales, and around $100,000 of profit … in just 11 months”³⁴. That is about 13% of sales (our sum). The figure is the owner’s own statement, and he closed the store afterwards³⁴.
• The Outline quotes a seller who “ended up doing about $200,000 in sales” from one product over eight months, before others copied it³⁶. That is sales, with no profit figure.
• $1.7 million of sales in a year for a seller who started in 2017, “according to documentation emailed to Business Insider”³⁹. That is sales, not profit, and the figure is for 2020. The same seller, who warned readers against paid courses and said he posts his content free, also offered a bootcamp for a fee³⁹.
• Shopify’s own showcase includes a store owner with “$19,000 in profit in just two months” after three failed product lines, and two partners who, “After a year of trying and making no money”, reached “$500,000 per month in 2019”³⁷. These are self-reported, were read through a summarising tool, and mostly give sales.
• The BBC in 2020 reported a seller who “made over $20m”³⁸. The article does not say whether that is sales or profit and describes no proof, and it notes that the seller has posted videos on how dropshipping is done³⁸.
• Gymshark’s founder began in 2012 by dropshipping supplements, “and it took him six weeks to make his first sale”, then switched to making his own clothing⁷⁶. The company became valuable after it left the model. This is from Wikipedia citing the BBC; we did not open the BBC article.

What the top tenth looks like. No source ranks dropshippers by income. Two of the figures that are multiplied do have a measured spread, across 426 Shopify stores of all kinds⁶⁷:

A top-tenth store converts 2.5 times as many visitors as the median store (our sum), which cuts the advert cost per order by about the same factor. Order size matters as much: an advert cost near $39³ is most of a $59 order and a small part of a $283 one. Two tweets in our collection argue for expensive (“high ticket”) products for this reason¹. Shopify notes the other side: expensive products “tend to require a larger ad budget before someone decides to buy”⁴.

A realistic good result (our estimate). For a competent person: a few hundred to a few thousand dollars spent on product tests over the first three to six months, with little or no profit. If a product then works, 10% to 22% of sales as profit. On that basis $10,000 of monthly sales gives $1,000 to $2,200 a month, and replacing a $4,000 monthly wage needs about $18,000 to $40,000 of monthly sales. We build this from the 15% to 22% kept by the four advert-driven stores at the broker^30313282, the “strong” range of 10% to 20% in², Shopify’s own unsourced line that “Dropshipping is also scalable with average profit margins between 15% and 20%”³⁷, and Shopify’s statements that “It can take between six and 12 months to turn a profit from your store” and “It will realistically take at least a year to build a business that generates an average full-time income”³⁷. No dataset says what share of newcomers get this far.

What it takes to compete

The documented winners share features that the tweets do not mention.

Many paid failures first. One broker-checked store found its products “from hundreds of tested advertising campaigns”³¹. Shopify writes: “Most entrepreneurs run a few failed stores before finding the best one”³⁷. Each test costs advert money.

Money to put up. At the median, one advert set that reaches Meta’s 50 purchases a week costs about $1,950 a week (our estimate from³ and⁹). Adverts and suppliers are paid before customers’ money arrives, and a payment service can hold 10% of it for 120 days¹²³¹. Our estimate of what a serious attempt needs: a few thousand dollars the person can afford to lose on tests, and working capital (money to pay suppliers and adverts before customers’ money arrives) of thousands more if a product starts to sell. TrueProfit’s blog puts the starting figure higher, at “at least $5,000–$10,000”, without data²⁸.

An edge on at least one number. The sum in Step 3 breaks even at best at the median. Winners beat the median somewhere.

The broker’s seven stores show where. Only one relies mainly on Facebook adverts, the channel most of the tweets teach, and it has a subscription and about 40% repeat customers⁸². The others use Pinterest adverts, Google adverts on expensive items, adverts on a platform the listing does not name, wholesale buyers, search traffic, or their own audience^303132338081. None of the seven is described as winning on cold Facebook adverts for one-off orders. The edges, as a list:

• a cost per order well below $38.99, from better adverts or a channel others are not using; one listing calls its approach to Pinterest adverts “a key competitive advantage”³¹;
• customers who come back: a subscription or refills, so the first order does not have to carry the whole advert cost⁸²;
• a larger order, above $283 for the top fifth⁷, sold through search adverts to people already looking for the item³²;
• conversion in the top tenth, above 3.5%⁶;
• a specialised product with direct links to makers³⁰;
• buyers who are shops, placing repeat wholesale orders⁸⁰;
• customers who cost nothing to reach, which in one case meant an audience of over a million followers³³.

Time and help. The broker-checked stores first made money between 2021 and 2025, and the two largest advert-driven ones employ three and five people²⁹³⁰³¹. Shopify’s own account says “it takes at least a year of full-time work to recreate the average full-time income through dropshipping”⁴.

Running it legally. Honest delivery times, a real seller address, refund rights, product safety and customs paperwork are the seller’s job²³⁴⁶⁴⁸. The French regulator noted that some sellers, often the least experienced, gave up dropshipping when asked to comply⁴⁸.

How to tell early which side you are on. These are our suggestions, built from the figures above.

1. Before spending, write down the price, product cost, shipping, duty and fees for one order. Work out the sales per advert dollar you need to break even: price ÷ what is left of it after those costs. If the answer is above about 1.9, the median Meta advertiser would lose money on your product; medians for retail categories run from about 1.4 to 2.4³.
2. After the first few hundred dollars of adverts, compare your real sales per advert dollar, and your real cost per order, with that break-even figure. The comparison that matters is profit per order, not sales.
3. Check your conversion against the spread: 0.5% is the bottom fifth and 1.4% is the middle⁶.
4. Set the test budget in advance and treat it as the price of finding out.
5. Ask where your edge is. If the answer is “the same product and the same adverts as everyone who took the same course”, the sum at the median applies to you.

What we did not verify

• The tweets. We did not check any revenue claim in the 29 tweets, and found no evidence for or against any of them. We did not open the tweets on X or view their images, videos or threads. X profiles refused our agents, so what each account sells or links to comes from our collection notes, not from our own reading of the profiles.
• What follows the free offers. We do not know what is sent by direct message, or whether a paid offer follows.
• Any distribution of dropshipper income. None exists that we could find. The share reaching $1,000 or $10,000 a month is unknown.
• TrueProfit’s data. Only a press release and a blog page were read. The sample (given as 1,000+, 1,200+ and 5,000 stores in different places), the method, and whether the shares are averages or medians are not published²²⁸.
• Whether the benchmarks fit newcomers. Triple Whale and Littledata measure paying customers of their own services³⁶. WordStream’s $0.60 average price per click covers campaigns set up to bring visits, not purchases, so we left it out of the sums⁸.
• Exact wording of pages read through a summarising tool: PayPal fees¹¹, Shopify reserves and chargebacks¹²¹³, DSers and Zendrop prices¹⁵¹⁶, Littledata order size⁷, Shopify’s acquisition-cost article²⁶, the Zendrop income post²⁴, Shopify’s success stories³⁷, ShopHunter⁷⁴ and the UK advertising guidance⁵¹.
• A community page on Whop that our agents read⁷². It showed a member count and a rating, but no price and no posts, and we could not confirm who runs it, so we left it out of the page. On 8 October the site refused our reader.
• AutoDS prices. The three prices in Step 6 were seen once and could not be seen again¹⁴.
• Customs. The US duty rate on a typical parcel from China, how suppliers pass it on, the trade court opinion and the 2027 statute were not read at source. Who pays the EU’s €3 in practice was not established.
• Tax. Sales tax, VAT registration and income tax for dropshippers were not researched. Nor was the risk from selling branded or copied goods.
• Platform enforcement. We found no figures for how many stores or advert accounts have been closed. Etsy’s legal pages, TikTok Shop’s shipping rules, Meta’s score thresholds and Visa’s limits were not read at source.
• The broker listings. We read the listing pages, not the accounts behind them or the broker’s vetting policy, and do not know whether any of the seven sold. Whether each profit figure covers twelve measured months was not confirmed. The channel of the largest store’s adverts is not named in the text we read.
• The margin for a typical store. Shopify’s 20% to 50% comes from its Collective programme⁵, and the 65% to 67% for China-sourced stores comes from one vendor with no published method²²⁸. We found no independent measurement of either.
• Older acquisition costs. Shopify’s only figures for very small brands are from 2021: an average cost per new customer of $21 for arts and entertainment, $127 for health and beauty, $129 for fashion and $377 for electronics²⁶. They are five years old and count all marketing costs, so we left them out of the sums.
• Selling without adverts. One tweet in the collection describes “AI organic dropshipping”¹. We found no measured data on how often unpaid reach produces sales, beyond the broker listings above³³⁸¹.
• Refund and return rates for dropshipped goods, and supplier prices, were not obtained.
• The regulator cases. We read FTC press releases, one case page and one complaint, not the court orders. Whether the Click Profit settlement has been approved by the court was not checked beyond the FTC’s case page⁷⁸. The FTC proposed in January 2025 to extend its business-opportunity rule to coaching⁴⁵; we did not check where that stands. We searched for no regulator action against any account in the collection by name, and found none.
• Seller sites. The price of the mentorships, the terms of the “GUARANTEED $10,000 in 90 Days” wording on Supreme Ecom’s mentorship page, and the footnotes that site says back its totals are not confirmed. An earlier draft of this page quoted a sentence about that guarantee which we could not find on the page when we re-opened it, so it was removed. We did not match either seller site to any X account.
• Recent first-person results. No income report from 2024 to 2026 with payment proof was found. Reddit was unreachable.

Sources

1. Does It Pay collection of 29 tweets on this scheme, collected 2026-10-06. File: raw/2026-10-06/batch3/dropshipping-tweets.json. Counts are our own; tweet dates are worked out from tweet IDs (estimate).
2. TrueProfit, “TrueProfit Addresses the No. 1 Reason Dropshipping Stores Fail” (press release). https://markets.chroniclejournal.com/chroniclejournal/article/globeprwire-2026-6-9-trueprofit-addresses-the-no-1-reason-dropshipping-stores-fail-not-knowing-their-real-profit. 2026-06-09. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through r.jina.ai. Vendor data; the underlying dataset is not published.
3. Triple Whale, Facebook ads benchmarks. https://www.triplewhale.com/blog/facebook-ads-benchmarks. Updated 2026-08-17; data August 2025 to July 2026. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through r.jina.ai (direct fetch returned 403).
4. Shopify, “Is Dropshipping Worth It in 2026?”. https://www.shopify.com/blog/is-dropshipping-worth-it. 2026-08-15 (date as reported by the fetch tool). Read at source on 2026-10-08 through r.jina.ai.
5. Shopify Help, Shopify Collective for retailers. https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-sales-channels/shopify-collective/retailers. Undated. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through r.jina.ai. This is the origin of the 20% to 50% figure in⁴.
6. Littledata, average ecommerce conversion rate (426 Shopify stores). https://www.littledata.io/average/ecommerce-conversion-rate. 2026-10-07. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
7. Littledata, average order value. https://www.littledata.io/average/average-order-value. 2026-10-07. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through a summarising tool.
8. WordStream, Facebook ads benchmarks 2026. https://www.wordstream.com/blog/facebook-ads-benchmarks-2026. 2026-09-14. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through r.jina.ai (direct fetch returned 403).
9. Meta Business Help Centre, about the learning phase. https://www.facebook.com/business/help/112167992830700. Undated. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through r.jina.ai.
10. Shopify pricing. https://www.shopify.com/pricing. Undated. Read at source on 2026-10-08 (US prices through r.jina.ai; euro prices when opened directly).
11. PayPal US business fees. https://www.paypal.com/us/business/paypal-business-fees. Updated 2026-10-01. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through a summarising tool.
12. Shopify Help, Shopify Payments reserves. https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/payments/shopify-payments/payouts/reserves. Undated. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
13. Shopify Help, the chargeback process. https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/payments/chargebacks/chargeback-process. Undated. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through a summarising tool.
14. AutoDS pricing. https://www.autods.com/pricing/. Undated. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through r.jina.ai; plan prices did not load on later visits.
15. DSers pricing. https://www.dsers.com/pricing/. Undated. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through a summarising tool.
16. Zendrop pricing. https://www.zendrop.com/pricing/. Undated. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through a summarising tool.
17. Sandler, Travis & Rosenberg, “De minimis suspension remains in place”. https://www.strtrade.com/trade-news-resources/str-trade-report/trade-report/february/de-minimis-suspension-remains-in-place. 2026-02-24. Secondary.
18. US Customs and Border Protection, e-commerce FAQs. https://www.cbp.gov/trade/basic-import-export/e-commerce/faqs. Undated. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
19. The White House, “Suspending Duty-Free De Minimis Treatment for All Countries”. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/suspending-duty-free-de-minimis-treatment-for-all-countries/. 2025-07-30. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
20. Federal Register, indefinite suspension of the de minimis exemption for mail shipments. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/06/24/2026-12669/indefinite-suspension-of-the-de-minimis-exemption-for-mail-shipments-and-new-postal-informal-entry. 2026-06-24. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through r.jina.ai, in part.
21. Troutman Pepper Locke, “The $800 free pass is gone”. https://www.troutman.com/insights/the-800-free-pass-is-gone-cit-confirms-president-can-eliminate-de-minimis-tariff-exemption/. 2026-08-18. Secondary.
22. Council Regulation (EU) 2026/382. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32026R0382. 2026-02-11. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through r.jina.ai.
23. Shopify Help, legal considerations for dropshipping. https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/compliance/legal/dropshipping. Undated. Read at source on 2026-10-08. Secondary for the French fee it reports.
24. Zendrop, “How much do dropshippers make”. https://www.zendrop.com/blog/how-much-do-dropshippers-make/. 2024-12-16, updated 2026-07-08. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through a summarising tool.
25. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, survival of establishments born in 2013. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2024/34-7-percent-of-business-establishments-born-in-2013-were-still-operating-in-2023.htm. 2024. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through r.jina.ai.
26. Shopify, customer acquisition cost by industry. https://www.shopify.com/blog/customer-acquisition-cost-by-industry. 2024-07-29; data from 2021. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through a summarising tool.
27. The Globe and Mail, “Shopify has a growing problem with customer retention, Globe data study shows”. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-shopify-customer-retention-problem/. 2022-10-22. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
28. TrueProfit, dropshipping success rate. https://trueprofit.io/blog/dropshipping-success-rate. Last updated 2026-09-23; margin table for the week of 27 September to 3 October 2026. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through r.jina.ai (the table loads by script and is absent from a direct fetch). Vendor data.
29. Empire Flippers, dropshipping businesses for sale. https://empireflippers.com/dropshipping-businesses-for-sale/. Live listings page. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through r.jina.ai.
30. Empire Flippers, listing 88863. https://empireflippers.com/listing/88863. Live listing. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
31. Empire Flippers, listing 92870. https://empireflippers.com/listing/92870. Live listing. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
32. Empire Flippers, listing 95128. https://empireflippers.com/listing/95128. Live listing. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
33. Empire Flippers, listing 97467. https://empireflippers.com/listing/97467. Live listing. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
34. Wired, on dropshipping and Instagram adverts. https://www.wired.com/story/dropshipping-instagram-ads/. 2020-05-01. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through r.jina.ai.
35. Vice, “Can you get rich from dropshipping?”. https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7wxgk/can-you-get-rich-from-dropshipping. 2020-11-09. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through r.jina.ai.
36. The Outline, “How I made $100 by starting a sketchy online store”. https://theoutline.com/post/7715/how-i-made-100-dollars-by-starting-a-sketchy-online-store-and-you-can-too. 2019-07-24. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through r.jina.ai.
37. Shopify, dropshipping success stories. https://www.shopify.com/blog/dropshipping-success. 2025-09-30 (date as reported by the fetch tool). Read at source on 2026-10-08; the individual stories through a summarising tool (secondary).
38. BBC News, on dropshippers. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53759932. 2020-08-15. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
39. Business Insider, profile of a dropshipper with $1.7 million of sales. https://www.businessinsider.com/dropshipper-made-17-million-this-year-shares-e-commerce-tips-2020-9. 2021-03-26. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through r.jina.ai.
40. Federal Trade Commission, “FTC Action Ends Ecommerce Empire Builders Online Business Opportunity Scam”. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/05/ftc-action-ends-ecommerce-empire-builders-online-business-opportunity-scam. 2025-05-09. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
41. Federal Trade Commission, complaint against Ecommerce Empire Builders (E.D. Pa., case 2:24-cv-04949). https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/2423027ecommercebuilderscomplaint.pdf. Filed 2024-09-18. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
42. Federal Trade Commission, “FTC Announces Crackdown on Deceptive AI Claims and Schemes”. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/ftc-announces-crackdown-deceptive-ai-claims-schemes. 2024-09-25. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through r.jina.ai.
43. Federal Trade Commission, Click Profit release. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/03/ftc-acts-stop-click-profit-online-business-opportunity-has-cost-consumers-least-14-million. 2025-03-18. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
44. Federal Trade Commission consumer alert, “How to spot and avoid business coaching scams”. https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2026/04/how-spot-and-avoid-business-coaching-scams. Published 2026-04-24; the page shows 18 May 2026. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
45. Federal Trade Commission, proposed rule changes on earnings claims. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/ftc-proposes-rule-changes-new-rule-deter-deceptive-earnings-claims-multilevel-marketers-money-making. 2025-01-13. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
46. Federal Trade Commission, business guide to the Mail, Internet or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/business-guide-ftcs-mail-internet-or-telephone-order-merchandise-rule. September 2011; penalty figure as shown on the page. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
47. Federal Trade Commission, redress payments to GOAT customers. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/10/ftc-issues-redress-payments-consumers-impacted-goats-deceptive-shipping-refund-policies. 2026-10-06. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through r.jina.ai.
48. DGCCRF (France), “Dropshipping : des manquements dans la moitié des sites contrôlés”. https://www.economie.gouv.fr/dgccrf/dropshipping-des-manquements-dans-la-moitie-des-sites-controles. 2023-11-23. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through r.jina.ai (direct fetch returned 403).
49. ACM (Netherlands), fine for a dropshipping store. https://www.acm.nl/en/node/27771. 2025-05-08. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
50. Advertising Standards Authority (UK), ruling on “Muse London”. https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/person-s—unknown-g24-1265365-person-s—unknown.html. 2025-04-09. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through r.jina.ai.
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53. eBay, drop shipping policy. https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/posting-items/setting-postage-options/drop-shipping?id=4176. Undated. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
54. Etsy Help, production partners. https://help.etsy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000336547. Undated. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through r.jina.ai.
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58. Meta Business Help Centre, customer feedback. https://www.facebook.com/business/help/108127923199330. Undated. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through r.jina.ai.
59. Birch, on Facebook feedback scores. https://bir.ch/blog/facebook-feedback-score. Undated. Secondary.
60. Justt, on Visa’s monitoring thresholds from April 2026. https://justt.ai/blog/visa-vamp-threshold-changes-april-2026/. 2026. Secondary.
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63. Shopify affiliate programme. https://www.shopify.com/affiliates. Undated. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
64. AutoDS affiliate programme. https://www.autods.com/affiliate/. Undated. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
65. Ship To The Moon affiliate programme. https://www.shiptothemoon.com/affiliateprogram/. Undated. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
66. Zendrop affiliate programme. https://www.zendrop.com/become-a-zendrop-affiliate/. Undated. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
67. Supreme Ecom, mentorship page. https://www.supremeecom.com/mentorship. Page titled 2026. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
68. Supreme Ecom, home page. https://www.supremeecom.com/. Page titled 2026. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
69. Supreme Ecom, terms of service. https://www.supremeecom.com/terms-of-service. Undated. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
70. Supreme Ecom, app discounts. https://www.supremeecom.com/app-discounts. Undated. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
71. EcomLiberty. https://ecomliberty.org/. Page titled 2026. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
72. Whop, a community page. https://whop.com/ecom-mafia/. Undated. Read earlier in this research through a reader; the site refused the reader when re-opened on 2026-10-08. Not used for any figure on this page.
73. Skool pricing. https://www.skool.com/pricing. Undated. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
74. ShopHunter. https://shophunter.io/. Undated. Read at source on 2026-10-08 through a summarising tool.
75. Wayfair Inc., Form 10-K for fiscal 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1616707/000161670726000027/w-20251231.htm. 2026-02-19. Read at source on 2026-10-08.
76. Wikipedia, “Ben Francis”, citing BBC News of 2018-10-01. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Francis. Secondary.
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