The store itself is cheap. $200 to $800 covers a Shopify plan, a domain, an app or two, and a clean theme. Anyone quoting you thousands to "set up" a dropshipping store is selling you the easy part.
Here is the part they leave out. You do not hold inventory, so your cost is not products. Your cost is getting a stranger to click and buy, and that is paid traffic. The first few hundred dollars of ads are tuition, not sales. You are paying to learn which product, which audience, and which angle actually convert before anything turns a profit.
That is why the winners treat product research as the real job. You are not looking for a good product. You are looking for one with a clear buyer, a reason to buy today, and a supplier who ships in days instead of weeks. Slow shipping is how dropshipping stores get chargebacks and die.
Keep the store boring and the offer sharp. A trustworthy checkout, honest shipping times, and one product you can explain in a sentence beats a giant catalog of random items.
The rest, the supplier vetting, the test-budget math, and how to read an ad before you scale it, is in the full plan:
See the full dropshipping business plan →
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