Avoid Drop Shipping Trendy Products

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Avoid Drop Shipping Trendy Products

Why should you avoid dropshipping products with a limited lifespan in 2020?

I’ve been reflecting on my mistakes since I started dropshipping. Unfortunately, I’ve made quite a few of those. Some of these mistakes were so bad that they caused my one successful online store and business to fail miserably. And unfortunately, I was reflecting on these mistakes because I’ve recently received a string of emails from several of my clients at SaleSource, which indicate that they are making these mistakes in their stores.

Rather than have you go through the painful and expensive process of learning these mistakes yourself, I thought I would share with you the most important one that I made in the past so that you can check to make sure that you aren’t doing them and if you are, you can stop making them.

They are selling products with a limited lifespan.

I focused on selling products with a limited lifespan, and I was unprepared for it. So my first online business consisted of importing second-hand video games directly from trade stores and dealers in the USA and reselling them back at home, in the UK, for a big profit.

It’s very different from the types of stores and online selling strategies (i.e., how to drive traffic to your Shopify store) that we teach at SaleSource. I pivoted and changed what I sold and how I sold it for various reasons. One of them is because of the way that I started selling items. I was no longer stuck to only being able to sell them within the UK, but my original store was, for a time, very successful, and it made me a lot of money, or at least it did for a few years.

My store’s bread and butter were importing and reselling video games for Nintendo DS. Back in the day, you could buy a Nintendo DS game in the United States and then play it on a UK Nintendo DS. This, however, was unusual; most other video game systems have not allowed you to do this. Blocking you from doing that is called region-locking.

Nintendo has historically usually chosen to block people from doing this to charge higher prices in smaller markets like New Zealand and force them to pay those prices. So it surprised no one when Nintendo released its successor, the Nintendo 3DS, a few years later and removed the ability to play international games.

By doing this, not only did Nintendo remove the ability for the Brits to play cheaper imported games, but they also removed my ability to keep making money from items I was selling.

The story does have a happy ending. I ended up pivoting and selling a different type of item in a related niche. I ended up selling modding devices that allowed you to play imported foreign games on your systems, even if they were region-locked, so I’m sorry Nintendo, but you can’t stop us.

Nevertheless, I was not prepared for the pivot. In the in-between time of selling different types of items, I had to get a job to tide me over, so my advice is that if you’re out there looking to start a new store, ask yourself: Does my product have a limited lifespan? Is it based on a trend?

For example, these were once hot relevant products:

Obama Toilet paper

Now, however, they are not.

So, if you’re selling a product with a limited lifespan, that’s okay. It can still make you a lot of money but keep in mind you will eventually need to pivot and conduct extensive Shopify product research to find winning products to sell in your store.

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