Drop shipping

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated Shopify shops stocked from AliExpress, promoted on YouTube · Also known as Dropshipping; Shopify dropshipping; AliExpress dropshipping

What it is

Drop shipping is a way of running a shop without holding any stock. The seller lists products on a website, takes the customer's money, then orders the same item from a cheaper supplier, often a Chinese seller on AliExpress, and has it posted straight to the customer. The seller keeps the difference. Online, the phrase came to stand for a promise: anyone with a laptop could get rich this way, as long as they first paid for a course explaining how.

Where it came from

Shops had sent goods straight from the maker for decades through mail-order catalogues, and Amazon used the method early on to sell books it didn't stock. The online hustle version took off in the mid 2010s. Shopify let anyone build a web shop in an afternoon, AliExpress sold cheap Chinese goods to individuals abroad, and apps such as Oberlo copied AliExpress listings into a Shopify shop with one click. Young men on YouTube then posted videos claiming large monthly earnings and sold courses on how to copy them.

Why it mattered

For a lot of young people it was the first concrete plan for leaving an ordinary job through the internet. It needed little money up front, which made it attractive and also meant thousands of people sold the same gadgets at once, so most shops spent more on adverts than they earned. The people reliably making money were often the ones selling courses. It became the standard example of online guru culture, and later schemes such as Andrew Tate's Hustler's University taught it. It also explains why so many adverts on social media sold the same odd gadgets.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Plenty of people online wanted a way out of ordinary work, and drop shipping shows that wish turned into a market of its own. The most reliable product in it was the course on how to sell gadgets, which sold better than the gadgets did.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.