How Dropshipping Ruined Online Shopping

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It’s especially ruined Etsy. I can’t buy much from there anymore because it’s mostly drop shipped crap incorrectly labeled as hand made.

My mom is obsessed with Temu and it was obvious all of our Christmas gifts were bought from there. Everything was so cheap and broke within a few weeks. I dont even want to think about how 99% of this crap is going to end up in a landfill. Its disgusting consumerism and it should be illegal to sell this crap.

Something that also has happened is that these factories will find actual hand made high quality products that are doing well on Etsy or another site and then make cheep replicas and even use the same picture. Which is even worse because you get all the normal issues mentioned in the video but also now the actual person who created this product is having their business stolen and being labeled as a drop shipper when they are not

My own creative work got dropshipped out from under me. I design 3D printable toys which are available as free downloads. Some company started printing them and put them on AliExpress (without attribution or permission of course). Now multiple different stores have popped up, all rebranding my designs and aggressively marketing on social media. I've tried to take down some of them but they keep multiplying and I don't have the resources to lawyer up. I've effectively written off the idea of regaining any ownership of my own designs. It sucks because I could probably be supporting myself full time on the income from selling these designs and developing new ones... if that money were actually going to me.

The absolute guts of YouTube to show me an add of a guy selling a dropshipping course in the middle of your segment on dropshipping courses is baffling

It's disheartening to see genuine handmade products buried under mass-produced items, truly sad

One of the biggest problems with dropshippers & these unethical manufacturers is that they will often find an actual handmade small business, purchase a bunch of items from that business, mold them / recreate them, and then mass produce them. That's when you'll see the original small businesses' photos being stolen and used as product photos on aliexpress, shein, temu, etc. And it makes consumers think that the original handmade business is dropshipping their product because they were Stolen from!!

What we really need is stronger consumer protection and a massive crackdown on large-scale consumer fraud.

what's funny about handmade jewelry is that it's SO EXPENSIVE to get legit handmade jewelry, that nobody would buy it. I have a few friends that make jewelry and most of them are backed up with work for about 6 months, and if they charged an amount that would make them paid fair, nobody would buy it.

I hate how Etsy isn’t how it was before. I can’t trust that everything is a small business edit: fixed the typo since there was such a discourse over it

It's not often that I get recommended a 40 minute video from someone I've never seen and I watch the entire thing, but here I am! Man, am I thankful to be running a small- not even small, tiny- business with my grandma where we make ceramics and sell them at a touristry resturaunt and gift shop in another town, because the landscape of online selling is looking more and more nightmarish :(

The fact you could buy a 3 dollar ring at 100 dollars with no way of knowing, and the seller can just make a new account to avoid refunds is crazy.

i'm an etsy seller myself and it's super depressing to see how much mass produced crap gets boosted in the searches while all my hard work is buried underneath, especially knowing that etsy themselves don't give a shit thankyou so much for making this video!

I remember when etsy first announced they would allow mass-marketed items and not be exclusively handcrafted small businesses. People were rightfully pissed. But etsy didn't care.

Something I’ve found is emailing the Etsy seller to see if they can customize the product. If you get a response and they can, probably an actually small business.

2:27 it is doing something new: selling uncertified electronics that can and will burn your house down.

The Etsy thing kills me. I've been struggling financially lately, but have also been wanting to invest in higher-quality items. So when I got some Christmas money I decided to finally treat myself to some jewelry. I spent hours choosing the perfect item on Etsy, hoping to get something high-quality that would support a small artist. The item I got ended up being a cheap piece of junk sold for $60. I went back to Etsy again thinking I'd be more discerning this time around, and bought my girlfriend a guitar strap that I thought was handmade. As soon as it arrived I could tell that it was also a dropshipped item. It's infuriating and I wish this shit wasn't so rampant

The problem is that Etsy does nothing to protect legitimate sellers and allows drop shippers to spoil the market and create unfair competitiveness. They don't care as long as they pay the charges.

This sort of shopping experience is even starting to affect irl shopping. Recently there were two art/craft fairs near each other in my area so I went to both. Obviously not everything sold was hand made but much of it was original designs by that seller (like fan art stickers). I saw a pair of earrings at the first market and then at the second, exact same pair (they had a very unique design). Who knows where they came from but people are literally selling at small local markets shit that they did not design or produce.