How much money do you need to start dropshipping?

Very little to open and a great deal more to find out whether it works. The shopfront costs a few hundred dirhams a month; the testing budget is where stores actually fail.

What decides it

Budget in three parts rather than one — the store, the traffic to test it, and a reserve for refunds on orders a supplier will not take back. The third is the part nobody plans for and the one that closes stores, because it is spent after the revenue has already been counted.

The part that gets skipped

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.

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

Where an app fits

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’.