I see dropshipping listed as a passive income model. Apparently, I was doing it wrong when I went through that phase.

Back in the mid-2000’s, I bought a domain name on eBay. (It was really quite a few domain names, but one main one.) My website was: signsseen.com. The person who sold me the domain had two suppliers to get me started. These suppliers were my “dropshippers.” But, if this was passive income, I was doing it wrong. What was I doing wrong?

1. I provided an 800 number for customers. I would answer questions and make sure the right items were ordered. When I added additional “dropshippers,” it became more critical to provide expert advise on what the customer’s needs were.
2. When an online order came in, I reviewed every order. I wanted to make sure everything would work correctly together. (i.e. They might order the letters that didn’t work with the sign they ordered.) If it didn’t, I would contact the customer to make sure their order would do what they thought it would. Selfishly, I didn’t want to have to deal with returns. If I would have had a website connected directly to my suppliers, I would have created headaches for myself when the customer wanted to return their incorrect orders.
3. At best, I would have only been a partial dropshipping business. I stocked a custom LED sign and other items purchased in bulk and resold. While these products were largely self-explanatory, I had to go to UPS/FedEx/USPS to ship these items. Yet again, a very UN-passive business model.
4. When a customer requested it, I sold in bulk. I needed to call the supplier for special pricing and custom shipping charges. Depending on how the deal was put together, I was sometimes waiting 30 days to get paid by the customer. Passive? Absolutely not.
5. I understand website maintenance falls into the much more passive category. I likely was doing this wrong, too. I had multiple websites to cater to specific users. Besides some one page sites, I also owned signswork.com and portasigns.com. Each of these sites had unique SEO traffic. When pricing needed updates on products carried on multiple sites, this did not feel like a passive business.
6. I didn’t use Shopify or any of the other store hosting available now. I had my own server with OS Commerce. The site would be hacked, and I kept an offshore tech team on standby for help. They would bail me out when the site was having problems. And, if I had time, I would create some custom apps to make the sites more customer-friendly.

With all of the tools available, dropshipping is nearly unrecognizable compared to what I accepted 15 years ago. If the right opportunity/product presented itself, I wouldn’t need FULL passive to think it was a pretty good deal. As I prepare to move closer to my kids, I could “push” the less passive responsibilities onto them. I will see what passive doors open in the coming months.