What Does Dropshipping Cost?
Dropshipping is e-commerce’s cheapest model to set up: no stock, no warehouse, no packaging. In exchange, the bill you pay collects in one line more than in any other channel — advertising. 🧮
Short answer: setup runs ₺8-25K; the real expense is the ad tests costing ₺8-15K per product.
Below we cover the setup bill, per-sale deductions, hidden costs and break-even.
The setup bill
Few lines, small amounts.
Line by line
Company registration and accountant ₺8-15K, site platform and theme ₺1-3K monthly, product imagery and video production ₺2-6K, payment infrastructure and legal texts ₺1-3K, product samples ₺1-3K. 📊
Samples are mandatory
Selling without first ordering the product to yourself produces returns and complaints. One sample costs less than the sum of the first two returns.
Per-sale deductions
Here advertising is a bigger line than commission.
Cancellations cost twice
Long delivery breeds cancellations; the product’s value is refunded but the ad money spent on that sale never comes back. That makes a cancellation more expensive than an ordinary return.
Testing and samples
Every new product needs a sample first and an ad test second; together they run ₺10-18K per product. This is paid before any sales arrive and is the model’s true cost line.
Hidden costs
Lines that never appear in the table.
Supplier stock-outs
A product that runs out at the supplier is the product you sold; the cancelled order takes both the ad money and the customer. A daily stock check is a cost preventer.
Payment provider risk
High cancellation and dispute rates can push your payment provider to raise its deduction rate or suspend the account. That risk is an invisible but business-ending cost.
Where to cut, where not to
Here the wrong cut destroys your data.
Cuttable
Expensive themes, unnecessary plugins, uploading hundreds of products, office equipment bought early. None of them produce sales.
Not cuttable
Samples, video content and the continuity of the test budget. A store whose testing is interrupted never learns which product works.
Break-even point
Thought of per product.
The logic
A store with ₺4K of monthly fixed costs and an 18% average contribution margin breaks even at roughly ₺22K of revenue. But the real question isn’t the store, it’s the product: an item that can’t cover its ad cost is losing money whatever the revenue. Channel comparison on the e-commerce sector page.
📝 Field Notes
A seller began saying “I have no costs”; three months later the till was empty. We built the table: registration and site ₺14K, advertising ₺46K, returns and cancellations ₺9K. He had spent ₺69K and sold ₺51K. Seeing the figures, he moved his product price band up and set stop rules on his tests. In this model costs aren’t invisible; they’re simply untracked. 🧮
📖 Quick Glossary
Customer acquisition cost: the ad spend behind one sale. Stop rule: the loss limit accepted in a test. Cancellation: an order abandoned before delivery. Dispute rate: the percentage of complaints made to the payment provider.
⚡ Quick Summary
Setup ₺8-25K; the real expense is ₺10-18K of testing per product. 📊 Advertising takes 25-40% of the sale price. Hidden lines: supplier stock-outs, cancellations, payment provider risk. Not cuttable: samples, video, test continuity. Break-even is per product.
🎯 Next Step
Let’s build your per-product cost and test budget table: quote form · free digital audit. 🤝
Frequently Asked Questions
Sık Sorulan Sorular
If the test budget is spent and the product still isn’t profitable, continuing spends money on hope rather than learning. A loss limit written before each test is this model’s only real cost control; without one, a four-product budget dies on a single product.
Supplier product cost, shipping, payment processing, the returns and damage share, and customer acquisition cost. Advertising alone takes twenty-five to forty percent of the sale price. Margin calculation in the dropshipping margin article. 🧭
Technically yes, but return and complaint risk rises sharply. Selling a product you haven’t seen also lowers ad efficiency from the first negative review onward.
₺8-15K per product is a reasonable band for a meaningful test. Splitting that amount produces no data; an uninterrupted, measurable period is essential.
First separate the cause: delivery time, product quality or expectation gap. Moving to domestic supply fixes the first, and honest content fixes the third.