How do you find a supplier you can trust?

By ordering from them as a customer, repeatedly, before you sell anything. Everything that will go wrong for your buyer — packaging, timing, what happens to a return — happens to you first.

Why the answer is what it is

Ask three questions in writing before committing: what is the real dispatch time rather than the advertised one, who pays for a return, and what happens when a line goes out of stock. A supplier who will not answer those in writing has answered them.

What this looks like in practice

Returns are where the model is tested. If your supplier will not take a return, you are the returns department.

Dropshipping’s hard part was never finding a product — it is that you do not control delivery, and delivery is what a customer remembers.

The margin is thin by design, so the whole model depends on cheap traffic. When advertising gets more expensive, dropshipping stops working before anything else does.

Where a mobile app comes into it

An app is worth building once people buy from you a second time. Most dropshipping stores never reach that point, which is why the honest answer here is usually ‘not yet’.