Running a (dropship) store

Tl;Dr: A simple store is easy and cheap, making it real costs at least lots of time

I setup a quick Printify Dropship shop called 3rdtime.printify.me to sell Impeachment related shirts to help spread the word, and to maybe benefit one of my Kids a little bit financially. The idea was: use our current situation for a little bit of good, at almost no cost to me or Kid1.

Functionally, it works great. Practically: I haven’t sold even 1 shirt.

So why hasn’t this worked like i thought, what do I want to do about that (if anything), and what kind of future shop would I even run?

A bit of terminology first: a Dropship shop is an online store where customers can purchase things, pay for them, and get them shipped to them without any intervention by me. Sounds too good to be true, but it actually makes some business sense. The Dropship company (Printify in this case) makes money by doing all of the commerce work, and I handle all of the ‘marketing’ work. Since they work at scale (they’ll let anybody open a shop), it costs them almost nothing to operate the store, so they’re happy to keep it around on the off chance that I do something with it. And when something does sell, me (or the store owner) gets a small amount of profit – basically a couple bucks.

Imagine that there was a moment in time where you could move quickly and ‘catch a wave’ of public interest – you could make a bit of money over a short period. It probably wouldn’t be sustained, just a little extra sometimes. I think this is technically called a Side Hustle – in this case there’s almost no hustle.

EXCEPT THAT: Turns out I have almost no ability to market things. On the internet, most marketing is done through ‘Search Engine Optimization’. I actually have reasonable skills in this area, but the super simple drop-ship shop I setup has zero SEO capabilities – it relies solely on your ability to market by posting to social media (like this poorly read blog), or Facebook, Bluesky or many of the other social media (Instagram, Ticktok, oh my god there are so many). And I’m pretty much not on any of those.

I was hoping that I could ‘wrap’ the Printify shop with a small site that would help boost it’s SEO. Nope – the printify shop won’t work embedded, or even with an Iframe.

I could setup a bigger eCommerce app/platform/service thing, and I have played around with a BUNCH: Shopify, WooCommerce, Prestashop, a bunch more. All of them are designed for a much larger investment of time and energy, and I basically think it’s not worth it. Definitely not for my somewhat silly slogan: “Impeachment. Third Time’s the Charm” (which is available Red, Blue and Black! See what I did there?

But I have other little fiddly ideas – how about selling a magnetic ‘I’m taking a video of you’ banner for your bike, like PassPixi.

So the question now is: How much time should I invest in setting up (virtual) shop, literally? And what would the structure of that shop be?

I think my goals would be:

• Low/No cost upfront or in terms of maintenance and operational costs
• SEO Friendly – make it possible to do the basics (sitemap.xml, meta tags, etc)
• Possibly add on some kind of publication (blog thing) to help with SEO stuff

All signs point towards:

• Setup a new word press blog
• Figure out which of the E Commerce suites has low overhead costs
• …
• Profit (a tiny amount)

I generally do have some time on my hands, but I think I’ll step back from spending too much time on this (it was basically all day yesterday) and do what I set out to: enjoy my life a bit more.

It’s good to write it out, helps me sharpen my thinking.