Without a doubt, dropshipping is the easiest way I know to get started making money online without needing a big wad of startup cash (or a whole lot of time up your sleeve to learn new tricks).
But how much can you actually, realistically earn, just from dropshipping? Just a little bit of pocket money to buy a few new toys each month? Or are we talking day-job-replacing, retire-to-a-tropical-island, drink-mimosas-all-day kind of money?
It really comes down to two factors: How much you earn per sale and how many items you can sell each month.
How much can you earn per sale?
This depends on how much effort you put into researching which items to sell. If you’re happy to make just $1 – $5 per sale, you could easily find a bunch of items to dropship. But this ends up being a lot of work for very little reward. And that’s Just Not Worth It.
Instead you should be looking for products that allow you to earn at least $15 in profit per sale — minimum.
In my free ebook (which you can download below, plug plug!) I show you a method that uncovers these high-profit dropship items. Here’s one of my examples from the book, which earns me $64.30 per sale, after fees.
You can see that it sells for $129.99 + $15.00 shipping on Amazon, or a grand total of $144.99 all together. Now, this is the lowest priced product of its kind in this category. There are a bunch of other similar products that sell for much more than this.
And here’s the price I can get from a dropshipper. Check this out.
That’s $59.00 including shipping, and it’s less than half the cost of the lowest priced product like this on Amazon. If I were to start selling this product on Amazon, even if I made it cheaper than all the competitors in this category, I’d still be doubling my money! Isn’t that insane?
(For anyone who did the math, you’ll notice that $144.99 – $59 is actually $85.99, not $64.30. Unfortunately Amazon like to take their cut, so once we take away their commission and fees, we’re left with $64.30. That’s our true profit. It’s still pretty amazing!)
Wouldn’t you rather have a fat, juicy $64 commission than a measly $5-on-a-good-day? Exactly. So make sure you invest a little time into finding those high profit items. (Grab my ebook below and I’ll show you how.)
That’s the first thing you need to know to figure out how much you can make. Here’s the second…
How many products will you sell each month?
Here’s something really great about my mystery $64.30 product from above: Every month there are 7 – 8 units sold on Amazon. That means there’s the potential for me to earn between $450 – $514.40 each month, just from this one product.
You can figure out how many units you can sell by entering an item’s “Amazon Best Selling Rank” into a tool called the FBA Toolkit. Here’s what it looks like for my mystery product:
My product has a sales rank in the 90,000s (indicated by the elegant yellow splodge in the image above). This means it makes just over 0.5 sales a day. I’m guessing that if I match the lowest priced item on Amazon, I’ll pick up half their sales. That gives me half of 15 sales per month, or around 7 – 8 sales all up.
That’s $450 – $514.40 each month. Easy as that.
How to take it to the big-time
From this humble starting point, all you have to do is find a few more products like this one to sell. If you had 20 items like this, all earning you $500/month, you’ve got yourself a $10,000/month income, my friend.