How do you handle returns when you never touch the product?

You decide in advance who pays, and you say so before the sale. Most suppliers will not take a return, which means the store is the returns department whether it planned to be or not.

Why the answer is what it is

Three workable policies: refund without a return on low-value items, a local address that receives returns for anything worth reselling, or an exchange rather than a refund. What does not work is a policy written to sound generous and applied reluctantly.

What this looks like in practice

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.

A dropshipper who survives past the first year almost always stops dropshipping — they start holding stock for their best sellers, because that is where the margin is.

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’.