How I Would Start a Dropshipping Business in 2026 with $1,000

If I lost everything tomorrow, every store, every student, every dollar, and I had to start over with just 1000, here is exactly what I do. What's up everybody? Anton Crilley here, and if you're new here, welcome. If you've been here before, welcome back. I've been building drop shipping stores myself since 2009, and since 2013, I've helped over 15,000 students to do the same. They've done tens of millions of dollars in sales, and my company, Drop Ship Lifestyle, is the only program to ever be voted best e-commerce course by Shopify. What I'm going to share with you isn't theory. It is a proven framework, and it's exactly what I do if I was starting with $1,000 and a clean slate in 2026. If you're brand new to drop shipping, or if you've tried it before and it didn't work, stick with me here, because what I'm about to share with you is not what most people teach. Before I walk you through my $1,000 plan, I want to be really clear about what type of drop shipping it is we do, because there are many different types out there, and to be honest, most of them don't work. The version most beginners try is find cheap products on AliExpress, build a Shopify store, or try to sell them on eBay or Facebook Marketplace, try to get traffic, and then eventually get sales for $10, $15, maybe $30. Then realize there's no money left over after they pay for the cost of goods, and especially after they pay for advertising. This model is brutal, and I'm assuming a lot of people watching this right now might have tried it in the past, or at the very least heard about it and got a bad feeling, and don't worry, that bad feeling is correct. Your intuition led you to the right place. What I do and what I teach is completely different. We sell high ticket products from US suppliers that are in stock in local warehouses. They ship to the customers, typically within 24 hours, get delivered within two to three days, typically have an average order value of $1,000 or more, that results in a net profit per sale of $300 or more, and just so you know, most drop ship lifestyle members aren't looking to build a eight-figure company. They're looking to get one or two sales a day and make $300, $600 profit a day from a store that can be managed in maybe 30 minutes or so. That's the model, and let's talk about how to build it with $1,000. The first thing that I do, and honestly I can't stress this part enough, is choose the right niche. This is where a lot of beginners rush, and then really do pay for it later. So when I'm looking for a niche, I want it to meet a few criteria. Obviously, I want it to be high ticket. I prefer an average order value of $1,000 or more. I want it to be something with low competition at the product level. I want it to be evergreen, meaning not seasonal or trending. I want it to sell a week over a week, month over month, year over year. So the work that I put into my business actually compounds over time, and I want it to be something where the customer has no brand loyalty, where they can care less about the name on the product. And by the way, if you want actual examples of great niches for 2026, I recently posted a video showing my top 10 niches for this year, and I'll link to that in this video description. But for now, I can even just look around me. I obviously have a standing desk in front of me that I'm sitting at. I have a rug underneath me. I have a bookshelf back there. I have that leather chair. The other one's a little bit further over by that TV. I spent I think $12 or $1400 on each of them. So again, I'm not losing my knowledge here. I'm losing my money. So I could easily find opportunity all around me. I could sell horse saddles. I could sell home gym equipment. I could sell literally anything that meets that criteria I shared with you earlier. So for the purposes of this first store that I'm going to rebuild, knowing I want it to be high ticket, let's go with a high ticket niche that I know meets all that criteria perfectly. And let's say it's going to be Murphy beds. That's going to be my new business, how I'm going to rebuild. That's going to be store number one. And I know it might seem like I kind of went through that quick, but that's because if I had this video, be a full niche election training. It would be over an hour long. If you want that, that's module one of Dropship Lifestyle X. So check it out there. So once I have my niche idea, next step is to do market research to make sure it actually meets my criteria. Now I'm not going to go out there and use a bunch of expensive softwares if I'm starting with $1,000. And honestly, they're not necessary. I can get the data I need from literally google.com and Google shopping and Google trends. But what I really want to check for this niche is can I find at least 20 potential suppliers that I could reach out to to sell on my store. And so many people get this wrong where they think I'm just going to sell this one product or one product type. No, I know I want at least 20 brands because let's say only half of them authorize me to sell their products on day one. If I find 20, I still have 10 brands. I still have all their products. I still have more than enough to build a profitable store. But let me actually do a screen share here and let's see if we can find 20 brands for Murphy beds, my new store. So if you're not familiar with this website, it's WayFair.com. There are multi-billion dollar company that primarily drop ships. So I'm using them for my initial research here. And I'm just going to search for Murphy bed. Now just know I'm not going to sell for this company or be related to them in any way. I just want to see how many brands I could find on their website for the Murphy bed section. So I'm looking at that now and I'm going to scroll down here in the sidebar. And what I'm going to do is look for the brand list. So here we have a brand list and I'll tell you WayFair does private label a lot of products but they're still drop shipping them meaning we can sell for basically all of them also under the actual brand names. But looking down here, let's do a quick eyeball test. This is probably 30 brands listed right there. And then if I go into this brand drop down, let's see. Yeah, they have it's well above what we need. So I'm going to say good again, you know, and you might think Anton, can you really move that fast? The truth is you can. Now it doesn't mean that you should just pick one niche within what was that two minutes. But I have enough confidence now and what I'm going to show you next is the store is going to cost me a dollar a month for the first three months. So it's not like I'm putting a bunch of money into this thing when I'm first starting it. In fact, for me personally, if I was starting over with a thousand dollar budget, since I have the experience, again, I'm not losing that, I would most likely launch a network of stores together. But for you, I'd recommend starting with one if you're trying to replicate what it is we want to accomplish here. So it's time to build the store. But what does building a Shopify store, especially a high ticket Shopify store look like in terms of expenses in 2026? Well, there's expensive ways to do it and there's inexpensive ways to do it. And being, I only have a thousand dollars, I'm going to do it the inexpensive way. So I'm going to sign up for my free Shopify trial. It's going to give me three days for free and it's going to give me my first 90 days for one dollar a month. So I have 93 days basically give or take depending on what month I sign up where my grand total of Shopify fee is $3. So not really digging our budget there. Next thing I need a domain name, that's going to cost me $15 a year. And then for theme selection. So if I really did lose everything, let's say I lost my hard drive files too, I would lose our custom Shopify theme. So what I would do as a starting point is not use a paid one, I would just use dawn and be good there for email marketing. I don't need to spend any money on that because Shopify messaging is included with Shopify. I could send out 10,000 emails a month. So really my total here was $15 for a domain name and then $3 for my first 93 days of Shopify, which is more than enough time to make money. So so far out of my $1000 budget, I spent $18. Not bad. And at this point, I would have a quality store. Again, that I built myself because I'm not outsourcing it with that budget and I would have 20 plus suppliers to reach out to. So that brings us into step four of this process, which is actually to get approved, meaning get authorized to sell for these brands. So this is what really separates us from what most dropshippers try to do. When most people are trying to find products to sell, they go on Google and they find like supplier directories that they pay for access for and then basically, you know, get the ability to sell for a middleman that marks up products to almost no profit. So I'm not doing that in this step. I'm literally going to use my cell phones. I don't even want to sign up for a phone service. And I'm going to call all of the suppliers I found on my future competitor stores like Wayfair. And I'm going to tell them I'm calling from my store.com. I want to sell your products for x, y and z, whatever reasons they are. They're going to authorize me. I'm going to upload their products. And this isn't going to take long, by the way. I'm going to do all this in about a week, probably less. So I'm going to have a niche. I'm going to have a store. I'm going to have real products uploaded to it. And then I can move on to where the money is actually going to go. This is going to be step five of the process. And this is going to be getting traffic. So once everything else is set up, it doesn't really matter if nobody finds it, right? If we can't turn, you know, we can't find visitors and then turn them into customers, there's no point. So for me, I am a huge fan of Google shopping ads. You probably already know that. But even before I turn on my campaigns there, I am going to get set up on Google product listings. I'll put a screenshot of what that looks like up on the screen right now. But basically, it is an entire free section of Google where you can appear. And I'll say that again, it costs $0. It's free. And you'll start appearing for the products you sell when people actually search for them. So I'm going to get that going first. And then I'm going to launch my first Google shopping campaigns. So if you're following along, at this point, we have about $982 left in our budget. And what I would do here is take $900 of that remaining money. And I would put it into ads because with our ads, specifically our alpha beta Google shopping campaign setup that I teach in module six of Dropship Lifestyle X, with that, We want at a minimum, a bare minimum, a 10. 10X return on ad spend. And what that means is for every dollar we put into ads, we want at least $10 back out in revenue. So at a minimum, for my standards, what I would be getting here is $9,000 in revenue off of that $900 in ad spend. And just if you're wondering about profit margins, it would be give or take about $3,000 in net profit, what I actually get to keep. So basically, for this first round of ads, I'd be taking my $900 and turning it into $3,000 of profit. Now, that's not going to do much for me in the long term, but it is a very solid starting point. And I'll talk about how I'd be reinvesting that money to do bigger and bigger things and rebuild my life. But first thing I want to do is talk about a mistake a lot of people make, which is, let's say you were in this exact scenario, the last thing you want to do is take that $900 and give it to Google and basically tell it to spend as fast as possible. Because Google, especially with new accounts, especially with new campaigns, it needs time to learn. So what I would do, if I had this $900 total budget, is I would start it at $10 per day, again, between the alpha and beta campaigns on Google shopping to spend. That's going to give it, literally, if I didn't up it, three months worth of budget at my $900 total budget. And again, over those three months, if I didn't change it at all, which I would, I'd be left with $3,000 in that profit at the end of that time. But here's how I would scale and how you should scale too. So long as you're seeing that above 10X Tron AdSpend, you should increase the daily budget. Again, I'd probably be doing this within the first two to three weeks, because that's usually when Google really learns and gives you data, you need to make those scaling decisions on. But let's just say for some reason it took me, it wouldn't. But let's say it took me three months to learn this. Well, what would I do then once I had this $3,000 budget? I would take that and I would increase my ad spend. I would take that $3,000 and I would use that as my new monthly budget. So instead of spending $10 a day, $100 per day. Another way to say that, of course, is spending $3,000 per month on ads. Now that $3,000 a month on ads, what should that equate to? Again, at our minimum, 10X Tron AdSpend, that should equal $30,000 in revenue. And once I do this, that $30,000 in revenue should turn into about $10,000 in net profits. And again, we're not getting there overnight. We're getting there by scaling efficiently and only scaling when the return on ad spend is there. Now, I don't want this video to be too long, but one more thing that I'll mention is if I was actually starting with this $10 a day budget, I would not include all of the products from all of my suppliers on day one. Instead, what I'd be doing is reaching out to the suppliers I was authorized to sell for, asking them what their top selling skews are. And then in my alpha and beta campaigns, I'm Google shopping. I would only include those best sellers. So instead of having to test a whole bunch of different stuff, I'd have my money going towards what worked. So before I wrap this up, I want to share three mistakes that I really want you to avoid. I see beginners make them all the time. And again, if you're starting with probably $1,000 or so, because you're watching this video, I don't want you to waste money doing something that's not going to work and then be starting with even less. So mistake number one is picking a niche that is too broad. You know, going back to the beginning of this video, I said I would build a Murphy bed store. That is a specific niche. It's not, you know, a little broader. It's not bedroom furniture. It's not even broader than that. Home goods, any type. Because the broader we go, the lower our conversion rates get. And that makes return on ad spend shrink. And if your return on ad spend is too low, you can't scale. So you want to be niche specific in what you try to sell. And that doesn't mean sell one product or for one supplier. It means you want to pick one niche and have the goal of becoming the authority or one of the authority stores for that niche. It's going to make your return on ad spend much higher. It's going to give you a much more solid business. And it's going to give you a real chance to compete. Picture it this way. If I built a Murphy bed store, I'd probably be competing with a handful of legitimate websites that specialize in that, rather than trying to compete with wayfar selling all things home. Mistake number two is giving up on supplier approvals too fast. Now, supplier approvals, it's an ongoing thing. One of the reasons I recommend finding at least 20 brands you could sell for is because most likely, maybe half of them or so will approve you in the beginning. The rest will say, come back to us once you have X amount of traffic or X amount of revenue. And that's totally normal. But the mistake I don't want you to make is build your store and then start contacting brands, get some nose, and think this isn't going to work and give up. It won't work if you do give up, right? You have to be persistent. You have to actually talk to these people. They do want to work with legitimate stores that are going to bring them revenue. And it's your job as the business owner to get through to the decision maker and get those authorizations. So please don't slack on that and don't give up before you actually get the approvals that are going to make all the difference. Now, mistake number three, I did allude to this earlier, but it's spending way too much money on ads too fast. Even now, when I build a store, without having lost everything, I still start with small budgets. Now, I start with about $30 a day. But for somebody new, again, $10 a day, if I only had $1,000, $10 a day is what I do. People get excited. They want to see huge revenue numbers fast. But again, Google, it's algorithms, needs time to learn. So even though you have big goals, that's great. You're going to have a much better chance of getting to your goals and not burning a bunch of cash. If you start with a smaller daily budget. All right, so that's my $1,000 plan, guys, between niche election, market research, web design, supplier approvals, and getting traffic. That is exactly what I would do if I only had $1,000 to get started. And if you want to build your own store that can generate one or two sales a day, if you implement this, you have a good shot at doing that. And if you're selling products with an average order of value of $1,000 or more, you have a good chance of making $300 or more in that profit per sale. Now, this is the starting point. If you want my full system in Drop Ship Lifestyle X and XA, be sure you go to my website, dropshiplifestyle.com, where you can learn more. And with that being said, I will see you in the next video. Thank you, everybody.