In the past few years, dropshipping has become a popular type of entrepreneurship with young adults. This is because dropshipping is relatively easy and cheap to set up.

Dropshipping works as follows: a customer orders a product in your online store, after which you send the order through to your supplier. Thereafter, your supplier sends the order directly to your consumer. Operating your business in such a fashion has several benefits: you don’t have to keep stock, which completely eliminates your risk of stock keeping and warehousing costs. Also, you only do the sales side of the business, making good margins on your products. However, competition can be fierce, because dropshipping suppliers usually don’t supply their product to you, but to multiple dropshipping companies. This can cause price wars and reduce the profit margins of the dropshipping websites. Another challenge dropshipping companies face is the long delivery times. As you can imagine, having a package sent from Asia to Europe can take a while.

To young people, setting up a dropshipping company is very interesting due to the low capital costs involved. You can start from scratch, and build it out to a million dollar company. This is what many young entrepreneurs have done successfully. Although this accomplishment in itself can be very intriguing, some of them have decided to extend their success by creating courses dedicated for young entrepreneurs to start their own successful business. You have probably seen an ad of such a course on your Instagram or Facebook: a young person in a big villa with a pool, describing how you should start your own business.

Even though the idea of helping young entrepreneurs build up their business, this is not what they are doing. They offer a short course, which covers the basics of business. Of course, youngsters who don’t know what they want to do, but do know that they want to become rich, are attracted to these courses. In some instances, the course is sold for $1000 or more. You can imagine that when they sell a few of these courses, the “successful dropshippers” have a lot of additional income. It is an ultimate form of an information good: they create the course once, and sell it as many times as they can to young adults who are easily influenced by the promise of becoming rich.

To me, these untruthful marketing of these courses are deceiving and dangerous. What are your takes on this?