It is sales and not profit. Profit = Sales - (Ad cost + Product Cost + Other Cost(e.g. Shopify plan and apps))

If you are looking at the admin (back end) of their website, you are seeing gross dollars. Yeah 20% is probably the average commission for dropshipped products but it can be as low as 8-10% or as high as 300-400%, all depending on the niche (jewelry typically has HUGE markups; consumer electronics have very low margins).

If you are looking at a PayPal account dashboard, that's where things get much more "scammy". Pretending that people can't Photoshop things, what you see as earnings may be from multiple websites (or other nefarious self-deposits) and they are making it seem like it is from just the one they are selling.

Plus, there are other expenses besides the Cost Of Goods Sold. There are processing fees, shipping fees and, the big one often, advertising fees. That $5,000/month gross income could easily translate into $500 or more loss when all is said and done.

In the end, you have to do extreme due diligence. You want to be able to have access to their admin dashboard to see things for yourself, access to their analytics, access to the income statements they provide to their accountant that shows the actual advertising expenses, processing fees and any sort of other hidden extras that they may not mention.

Average profit margin of the dropshipping business is usually 20-35%. So you are right, it's not only profit and usually a 5k screenshot means 1k profit

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How can you get that kind of money?
I am surprised

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You're absolutely right. That total is their sales, not overall profit. So even if they're entirely legit and haven't been edited in any way, they still don't give an accurate picture of profits.

I personally hate these screenshots because they give an inaccurate representation of someone else's "success" and usually turn out to be just a way for less scrupulous people online to get a bunch of newbs to message them and pay hundreds or thousands for coaching.

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The Shopify screenshots are total sales. You need to deduct the product price, cost of advertising and cost of fulfilling the orders plus other things from that total.


If you're lucky you might work on 50% profits but that's rare. Most ecom sellers work on 10%-40% profit from the total sales.

Gross revenue does NOT equal Net profit. As others have stated, you must subtract out your costs. You can "make" $10,000,000 a year. If your expenses are $11,000,000 per year - congratulations. You just lost $1,000,000.