One of the most frequently asked questions that I get from many people is if it’s worth investing this time and age in Dropshipping. Especially now, in 2025, it has become a very competitive side hustle that, depending on your ideas, time, and budget, you may want to start an online dropshipping store or essentially look for other side hustles.
I’ve built many dropshipping stores over the last few years, some fairly simple and others more complex, and having seen so many different analytics and how each website was getting traffic was really interesting. I’ve seen what the most successful dropshippers did, and what mistakes the people who were bringing zero sales made.
Now, in 2025, you may wonder if it’s even worth starting with dropshipping. Well, there are many great examples out there that seem to be very successful, and as there’s always room for new products and websites, anyone can succeed – so why not be one of them?
But while creating a passive income or enjoying thousands of sales each month is possible, it’s not that simple – not by far.
The biggest difference with dropshippers who started making lots of money in a short period of time, they’re usually the ones who spend lots of days researching the right product(s). For them, research was the most important investment, and they didn’t even care about the website’s design, how long it would take to design it, or whether it would be simple or complex. They didn’t care about platforms, servers, or anything that comes in between; They only cared about the products.
This is very important because even if you have the most beautiful dropshipping store the world has ever seen, it won’t really matter if no one cares about what it provides.
Most bloggers and gurus have made Dropshipping sound like such an easy business opportunity. By focusing specifically on all the positives, they usually don’t tell you about all the problems that come with it. Finding a product that actually sells, for one, is the most crucial thing you’ll have to do. And believe me, seeing what I saw, sometimes the weirdest products tend to bring the most sales.
I’ve known dropshippers who constantly looking for companies that make new products that haven’t gotten any popularity – but many people are searching for them. This way, they have almost no competition and they’re free to advertise it as they like. Nowadays I see them buying the product, testing it, taking a few pictures and short videos, and posting and advertising them on TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest.
TikTok can literally bring thousands of sales each day if you promote a short video that’s interesting and redirect visitors to your dropshipping store to buy it. TikTok is fairly cheap when it comes to advertising, so it’s usually a preferred way to spend a few bucks and see what works and what’s not.
You could start promoting products that you’ve never bought or tried, but you’ll be depending on the visual content that the company has created – and most of the time, they lack in quality or their resources are way too few (I mean, you can’t do much with 7 pictures and 2 videos, can you?).
But let’s just say that you found that product that you truly believe it will sell. You’ve done your research, checked the competition, and where people go to find this kind of product. What’s next? Well, that would be finding a fast and trustworthy merchant.
The merchant is responsible for shipping the products to your clients, and if they’re not fast enough, they don’t update their listings often (resulting in products being out of stock), and they take lots of time to reply to your questions or problems, then you have a problem. This is, once again, where research takes a crucial place, as you want to find as much information as you can for each merchant before using them.
Once you have a plan, you need to start creating your dropshipping store. Creating a website on your own without any previous knowledge or coding skills is fairly easy and fast, and you can use platforms such as Shopify or Squarespace.
Those are two great and very popular choices because they let you build and design a dropshipping store by choosing a template, adjusting it, and moving things around with their drag-and-drop builder. Both platforms offer various plans that you can get depending on your needs, and you can even design your website first (completely for free) and then publish it.
If you want to build something more complex, you can go with WordPress.
Hostinger has some very cheap yet stable and fast hosting plans that will automatically install and setup everything for you. Once you’re logged in to your new WordPress website, make sure to install WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads (both plugins that you can search for), depending on your needs and personal preferences. Those are the best for selling physical or digital products online.
Other great alternatives for WordPress include BlueHost, NameCheap, and DigitalOcean.
But finding the perfect product and creating a website is not the most difficult thing: Promoting it and getting many sales is. Nowadays, most dropshippers will use multiple ways to promote their products, including creating short videos for Instagram and TikTok and longer versions for YouTube and having an appearance on the most popular social media platforms.
Pinterest is one of the best choices for any store owner and one of the platforms that can essentially generate thousands of sales. You can start by signing up for an account, switching to a business account, adding all of your information and a link to your dropshipping store, and creating as many Boards as you can. These Boards should be related to your product and have SEO-optimized titles and descriptions – meaning that you’ll have to strategically place the right keywords.
Let’s say for a moment that you’re selling socks. If you have plenty of different socks with lots of colors, shapes, types, or even patterned socks, then you can create as many Boards as you can and place each sock pair to the right one. Some of them may include, “Minimal Socks“, “Black Socks“, “Patterned Socks“, “Socks for Women“, “Socks for Men“, “Socks for Kids“, and so on.
The more pins (or products) you publish on these boards, the better.
If you want to appear on YouTube or have your store promoted on the first page of Google, you can use Google Ads. You can also promote your boards on Pinterest or Facebook too.
To promote your products even further, you can invest some time in writing SEO-optimized blog posts. Blogging is still among the best practices to gain organic traffic from search engines like Google and Bing, while it is also discovered more easily by AI Chatbots such as ChatGPT (which actually uses Bing as its search engine).
You should also focus on retaining your visitors and clients somewhere, and a great way to do so is by having an email list. You can offer discounts or free resources to encourage your visitors to subscribe, and you can then keep them updated by sending newsletters with new products, sales, exclusive offers, and anything that will result in new sales.
If you want to go even further, you can create your own affiliate program, which is an amazing way to increase your sales by letting other people do the marketing and promotion and earn a small commission for each sale they generate. You can learn more about affiliate marketing here, and you can take a look at the most popular affiliate platforms and programs that I’ve used over the past few years.
Something else that you keep in mind is that ratings play a very important role in changing someone’s mind about a product or website. If you have any friends or colleagues who have already purchased and tried the product, ask them to leave a review. If someone completes an order through your online store, once they get it, send them an email asking them to review the product or your online store.
With all of that in mind, starting dropshipping in 2025 can be a very smart way for a more profitable future, but it’s also important to consider all the other factors and dangers that come with it.
If you’re comfortable investing lots of your time and a few bucks and have found a product that you believe will result in lots of sales, then go for it. If not, the answer is clear.
Uh, oh! Legal stuff! Yikes.. Yet important! Affiliate Links Disclaimer: Many of the links on my articles are affiliate links. That means if you click on one and make a purchase, I might earn a small commission, and I'll keep doing what I'm doing, reviewing everything with absolute honesty. Sounds good? Good.
