Can You Really Dropship For Free?: A 2 Week Journey

Synopsis
Looking at dropshipping for quite some time I decided to ask myself is dropshipping for "free" possible and if it is, is it even worth it? I have decided to gather around 1k to 2k instagram influencers by hand in a google sheet, dm or email all of them with an affiliate offer, and see how many accept and if the ones that do have a profitable audience. If they do, I will release the sheet I used, but not which influencers accepted (you can find that out yourself). This will be 2 weeks in length or longer if necessary.



Who Am I?
I have been a lurker in this forum since I was 12. I tried CPA (sucked at it), content lockers, youtube reposting, theme pages, you name it. I was either too young to keep at it until it worked, absolute garbage at doing it, or both. I waited until 2018 (13 or 14) to actually make an account to access the downloads for courses and when I realized 99% of courses were absolute garbage, I read every thread I could. You can go back and see my very noob like questions if you'd like. I would personally rather not view whatever I used to post, but now since I finally returned I decided I would like to be an active member until I reach whatever the next stage in my life is. Being 17 and stuck in a nonsense lockdown in the US, I cannot return to school. That gives me an insane amount of free time which I have used to make a decent amount of investment money without a job (will probably get one soon). Now I have decided before I start my ecommerce journeys that I actually am interested in pursuing, I decided to make this one as a proof of concept. It may work or it may not. All that really means to me is a few dollars lost, a lot of time for a week or two wasted, and an amount of knowledge I can use for future ventures. The history behind my username is because I was and continue to be an intense Harley Quinn fan (even though every new movie and show deteriorates her character even further)




Expenses
$10 a month for Loox (product reviews)
-currently on free trial
$29 a month for Shopify
-currently on free trial
$14 for the domain via Shopify


That's it.

I will be creating every ad with photos and videos I find on the internet and editing them together myself. I could hire someone but I am a semi useful editor (or atleast I think so) and that would ruin the purpose of making this as cheap as possible.
Again, If this succeeds, I will release the product I used, possibly the ads depending on how i feel that day, and the list of instagram influencers. This is not one of my long term journeys. This is just to test how easy or hard it can be to start for no adspend. In the future I plan to start a youtube and an ecommerce journey but that will have to wait for now. I am just hoping I will not lose my mind from manually pulling these pages. I am not using a scraper because if I use my own two eyes I can see which pages are actually good or total shite.






NEXT UPDATE MONDAY: 4/12/2021

This is exciting! I'm not sure but I saw a youtube video from E-com king(not to advertise), its the same way on running a dropshipping store for free. I did not intend to do it as I believe that you still need to use cash to run the store. It seems I'm wrong. I will follow your journey brother!

Goodluck mate
Following

Early Update

Got quite stressed because the person who is helping me accept payments with their info and such as a partner flaked on me and now I have to get things in order tomorrow. Going to take max two days I say with hope. 6 days left on my trial. Still collecting emails and usernames. About 200 right now. Would be more if I hadn't had to worry about payment issues. Going to try to make the site look slightly better because my experience is more in WordPress than Shopify so it doesn't look beautiful but it looks okay. Trying to do what I can. Possibly a new logo. I'm not going to go all out with this though because the point of this journey is keeping things cheap and being time efficient because chances are if you don't have enough money you may not have enough time either and I want to be practical. I think I need to customize my product page more but as for everything else I'm comfortable with it. For now, I'm going to gather more emails and users, design different ads to test, and start messaging by Wednesday. On Wednesday, I will have 3 days to get as many yes answers and live ads on accounts as possible to maximize sales. I will most likely not make much cash from this but the ideal goal is to make enough to start running facebook, instagram, youtube, etc etc ads if I am going to make this long term (this store isn't long term, that'll be the next journey).

replica2001 said:

This is exciting! I'm not sure but I saw a youtube video from E-com king(not to advertise), its the same way on running a dropshipping store for free. I did not intend to do it as I believe that you still need to use cash to run the store. It seems I'm wrong. I will follow your journey brother!

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Yeah I skimmed through that. Going to fully watch it soon. I did not intend to do it either but honestly, I have the time so why not. We'll see how this turns out! Thanks for following

Letsseeificanwin said:

Goodluck mate
Following

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Thank you for the good luck!




I may switch the theme away from debutify and just copy all of what I already have and use a different one. For what i have in mind I don't think this theme looks too great but my mind may change who knows.


NEXT UPDATE UPDATE WEDNESDAY: 4/14/2021

Day late with the update. Got a massive headache and had to deal with some personal things along with the payment issues. Should be getting that fixed today. I still only have about 200 usernames. Doing this by hand I realize that 1k usernames is probably insanely overkill with going by hand for each one and quality checking each page so I will try with the 200 and if I get zero responses or ads posted I will do another 200. The next update will be at the end of my trail. I am going to send all the messages soon. I already created all the ads but being somewhat sick with a headache is making completing things slightly difficult so I don't think ill be doing anything more to the site. I hope it's fine how it is. I have to set up the affiliate system and send the dms. After that its very likely i am going to pass out and wake up a day later and see the responses. Going to try to stay optimistic. I know not many are concerned with a journey like this but for those that are I will try to reveal as much of the stats and such that i can so you can see if this strategy is even practical. My next journey after this will be an ecom one with around a 1k budget in about a month maybe two after this one ends. We will see.

Stay tuned.

Good luck, following

Updates stalled for a week while I wait for my check to pay for the free trail. The point was not to but since im a minor I dont have much control over certain things and didn't have access to my laptop after being dragged for a wedding a day after my last update. Had no access to anything. Please forgive me but the next update will be on a tuesday because that should be the day after the check comes in from my old job.

Good luck, following. I drop shipped on Facebook for awhile and made a good bit of money, however, Facebook is super flakey with their policies. That adventure was short-lived. Looking forward to your results.

Rmc1225 said:

Good luck, following. I drop shipped on Facebook for awhile and made a good bit of money, however, Facebook is super flakey with their policies. That adventure was short-lived. Looking forward to your results.

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Thank you. I am still waiting for this check so this journey may get cut short but im trying. We'll see. I might have to create an entirely new store. Next update in a week because of this.

Closing Journey.

I got a job to save the money for a real journey and also was never given the check to continue this journey. Apologizes. I really wanted this to work with my time but i couldnt control getting the job either because it was kinda gotten for me by a parent.