What margin should a dropshipping store aim for?

Enough that the gross margin on an order is at least three times what it costs to win the customer. Below that the store is working and not earning.

In more detail

In practice that means gross margins in the high fifties or better on anything you intend to advertise. Thin-margin lines can exist, but they have to be reached for free — search, repeat customers, referral — never bought.

What to do about it

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.

The mobile app angle

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’.