Fake Dropshipping Gurus: How to Spot Them and What to Avoid

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These days, we’re all inundated with success stories. Everywhere you look, there’s another inspiring story about someone who became a millionaire doing some simple or obscure thing.

This wouldn’t be an issue so much, if many of these people weren’t trying to sell you something. Look closely at many of these self-proclaimed success stories. You’ll find that they often tell you that by just buying their product, you can be exactly like them.

It’s sneaky. You can think you’re above tricks like this, and yet, thousands of people fall for them every day.

Dropshipping has quite a few people like this. Because we’ve seen it around (and even fallen for it ourselves a time or two), we’re creating this guide on how to spot fake dropshipping gurus.

Don’t feel like reading? That’s okay – just click the play button below to listen to us talk about fake dropshipping red flags instead.

They don’t have years of sales to back up their claims.

Spotting Fake Dropshipping Gurus Tip: For someone’s success to be legitimate, they need to be able to provide evidence that they’ve had years of growth and sales. They need to be able to show you that they’ve kept at it and developed expertise over time.

Maybe you’re looking at someone’s course or something right now, and they’ve included a screenshot as “proof” of their success. They’re telling you that they can back up their claims.

We’re going to burst that bubble right now: it’s easy to take a single screenshot.

We’ve been dropshipping for years, and we can tell you that we’ve had our ups and downs. It would have been too easy to take a screenshot of our best month, then tell you that’s what it’s always like.

For someone’s success to be legitimate, they need to be able to provide evidence that they’ve had years of growth and sales. They need to be able to show you that they’ve kept at it and developed expertise over time.

Showing you a screenshot or two of a short span of success is just like showing you they got a good grade on a test one time instead of showing you a fully fleshed-out resume. You wouldn’t hire the person who did that, would you? We know we wouldn’t.

Also, it’s not difficult to have a short span of success. Like we mentioned, we’ve had our ups and downs, but we didn’t try to capitalize on each high. We wanted to build a solid and respectable foundation with years of sales before we talked about it as if we knew anything.

Read Also: Dropshipping Do’s and Don’ts to Reach $2,342,061.36 for a Single Store

They haven’t sold a website.

Spotting Fake Dropshipping Gurus Tip: The reason a successful sale of a website is so important is that it’s the ultimate test of the person’s skills and patience. In order to sell a website, you have to go through months (if not years) of that site’s history.

This part goes beyond just planning to sell a website. Intentions don’t necessarily mean anything – documented actions do.

The reason a successful sale of a website is so important is that it’s the ultimate test of the person’s skills and patience. In order to sell a website, you have to go through months (if not years) of that site’s history. You need to figure out the profit of every single transaction that’s been made on that site, as well as the expenses it takes to keep it going.

Then, when someone actually chooses to buy that site, it authenticates your efforts. It shows that someone looked at it, then decided it was legitimate enough to invest tens of thousands of dollars in.

Compare this with people online who will tell you that they’re the expert because they contacted an influencer once and made $5,000 in sales (not even from profit). It’s a simple matter to see why more effort and expertise goes into actually selling that business instead of contacting influencers or other flashy tricks.

Read Also: Is Buying a Shopify Dropshipping Store Worth It? Dropshipping Store Case Study

They make it a point to show off their lifestyle to you.

We describe people who do this as “digital nomads.” What they’ll do is show you desirable snapshots of the life they’re living, whether it’s beaches, tropical environments, and sports cars.

Then they’ll tell you that you can have all this, too, if you just do exactly what they did. It will always sound easy, so you’ll find yourself thinking that if you just buy into what they’re peddling, you’ll get there.

Here’s the thing: extravagant lifestyles are one of the easiest things to fake. Consider Instagram for a moment. It’s a site designed to curate content, to put on display little flashes of people’s lives that simply look good.

There’s no real substance to it. Do any research online, and you’ll find tons of articles showing you everything Instagram influencers have to do in order to get that one perfect shot.

In fact, living like a digital nomad can be even cheaper than living in the US. We could retire to a country like Thailand right now and post all these pictures of us looking like we’re living the good life…all while making less money than ever.

We’re not saying that everyone who shows you some of their wealth is faking it. We even do it occasionally, because you need to be persuasive to catch people’s attention. However, someone who’s actually successful won’t need to rely on peacocking at you to prove it.

Wrap Up

We’ve fallen for these tricks ourselves. Our point in writing this post is not to poke fun at people, but to highlight the red flags so you never fall for it again.

Hopefully, if any of the red flags we mentioned pop up in your life, you’ll see them right away so you can avoid the delusion.

Dropshipping businesses can be truly successful, as well as great assets in your virtual portfolio. In fact, a large part of our income is from our dropshipping sites. You can even see what our real profit margin is like here.

So we’re not saying it’s impossible to achieve success this way. Rather, we want you to be aware of the people out there who will play on your emotions just to make another sale.

A genuinely profitable dropshipping business will be able to prove it to you with more than a couple screenshots and pretty pictures. They’ll have years of consistent sales as evidence for their claims.

If you want to see more of what we mean, click here to sign up for our completely free Online Assets Playbook. When you’re finished with that, you can try out our Instant eCommerce Assets full course, where we show you all our methods for building a strong and profitable foundation for your online businesses.

Learn how to Build $1,000,000 in Online Assets Using High Ticket Dropshipping

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