I tried AI dropshipping for a week (raw results)

People are using AI to make thousands of dollars in passive income by dropshipping products online. But is this as easy as it seems? Well, as a businessman who made his millions the traditional way, I'm giving myself seven days to find out if this new strategy actually works. I'll be using AI to find a niche, design the brand, build the store, find the products, and create the ads. And if I don't make $1,000 within that time frame, then I'm giving someone in the comments $1,000 of my own money. But there are three rules that I have to follow. Rule number one is that AI has to make every business decision. Rule number two is I'm limited to a $250 budget, and most of that has to go towards the ads, which means every tool I use has to be free or as close to free as I can get it. And rule number three, I must show you everything step-by-step, including the raw results. Okay, start the countdown. The biggest mistake people make when trying to make money online is not focusing on a specific area. Even Amazon started off just selling books. That's why the first thing on our checklist is to find a profitable niche. I'm going to use the dummy scroll method to do this. This is when you scroll through Instagram reels on a fresh account and engage with every dropshipping ad you see. After this, we should have a solid list of products that people are actually spending money on right now. And from that, finding a niche will hopefully become pretty easy. Check this product out. It's a dog paw cleaner. It's a pretty good idea. It's got a ton of engagement. Right, so I've been scrolling for about an hour or so now. I've got this huge list. As we're under a time crunch, I'm going to feed this big list into ChatGPT and ask it to pick a niche. Okay, so that's a pretty clear answer. Pets it is. So let's tick that one off the list. Next up, we need to let AI build our store. Believe it or not, a couple of years ago, building a professional Shopify store would have cost thousands and take days of trial and error. But now it's easier and cheaper than ever with AI. So let's head over to an AI tool called Build Your Store. I've used this before and it's the only tool I've found that is able to build a Shopify store that lets us sell other people's products without needing our own inventory or doing any of the hard work ourselves. The idea is when your store receives an order, the product is shipped directly to your customer, which allows us to make a profit without any more work on our end. If you want to follow along, feel free to head down to the description of this video and click the top link. I'm going to be explaining everything I'm doing step by step. So it's very easy for you to build your own AI Shopify store too. Okay, so first things first, I'm going to click this button here that says build my free store. And now it takes me to this page where they're asking for my full name, which of course is Mark Tilbury. Also, it needs an email address and to pick a password as well. Right, so that all that's done. Now it wants me to select our niche. Of course, we're going to pick pets. If you're following along, then don't feel like you have to go with pets. That's just what my research suggested was performing well at the moment. So let's press done. Now we need to pick two store banners. This is important as it sets the vibe of the store. Now here, the first image looks a bit cheesy to me. So let's skip that one. The next one. Now that's not too bad, but there are a lot of pet items there. And to be honest, my store might not actually sell those. So it's probably best not to use that one. This next one is perfect. Look, it's nice and clean and it has both dogs and cats, which expands our potential market and also our product option. These bottom ones just look way too busy and not enough focus on the animals. So that leaves this one here. That's nice and cute. So I definitely think it's the right choice for my second banner. So now those are selected. Let's go and click done. Now it's time to create our Shopify account. So all we've got to do is click access Shopify. It's now given me an offer to try Shopify for free for three days and then just $1 a month for three months. But just a heads up, they have been known to change this offer quite regularly. So if you're following along and it's different, then don't worry. They can't offer something like this forever. Now it wants me to enter an email address. So I'm going to use the same one I used for the build your store tool, just so everything is in one place and can easily be linked up and then press create account. Now it's asking me to put our payment details in, but for now, let's press skip as we can come back to that later. Okay. Now it's asking where would we like to sell, but we don't need any of this because we're getting AI to build the store for us. So we're just going to click here where it says skip customized setup, right? Let's keep this open, but head back to the build your store tab. And as we've done the Shopify step, we can click done. Now it's asking to link the Shopify store so that it can start doing all the work for us. So let's jump back to the Shopify tab and copy this URL here on the main admin page and paste it into here and click save and then done. Okay. So now it's time to get that Shopify discount. So we're going to click on access Shopify and that will take us directly to the plans and subscription page. Then I quickly add my payment details and we're doing this so they're ready for when the trial ends, but don't worry right now because it's completely free. And after the trial, it's just one pound or $1 per month for the first three months. So now that's all filled out, I'm going to click subscribe and there we go. That's all set up. So let's head back to build your store and click done. Now we need to install this app. It will allow us to automatically send products to customers without doing anything ourselves. So we're going to go ahead and click where it says install app. It's now showing us the Shopify dashboard. So let's click install and it will install it directly into our Shopify store. Next, we need to pick the store type. Now, as I don't want to spend any of my budget, I'm just going to go with the free store and click continue with basic store. Then I'm going to click skip and then no thanks. I'll launch without the store. This is just trying to upsell us, but we don't need to be spending any money. Now we're going to click here where it says customize my store and the AI will get to work building the store for us. So we can take that one off the list for sure. And we'll check the results later to see what it's created. But for now, let's keep things moving forward and jump to the next step, right? The next thing on my list is to use AI to find some winning products for our store. I feel like a lot of people don't understand how important this step is. The right products are the difference between a store that prints money and one that gets ignored. To make this as easy and efficient as possible, we're going to register for AutoDS. So let's head back to build your store and hit install AutoDS. This AI tool does a heavy lifting for us by selecting products that are proven to sell. It also takes care of pricing, uploading professional photos. And once we start making sales, it'll also ship the products directly to our customers. It's going to ask us again to sign in. Next, it wants to know where we're selling, which is obviously Shopify. Now we need to pick a plan. Every plan comes with the first three days for just 99 cents, which gives us a chance to actually test before committing to anything. The basic plan, to be honest, is a bit too stripped back for what we need. And the advanced plan, well, that's just overkill at this stage. So the starter 500 sits right in that sweet spot. So that's what we're going to go with. Let's click start now for 99 cents and choose our payment method. I'm going to go with PayPal as it's quick and easy. And there we go. So far, the most we've spent is 99 cents. Not bad going. If we head over to the AutoDS dashboard and click on products, then we get a list of all the products that have been automatically added to our store. We've got 10 here, including a cat tree, a dog drinking bowl, and even the dog pool cleaner I saw on Instagram earlier. As you can see, the prices have already been set automatically to give room for profit. Some of them range in price, like this one here, because the item comes in various different sizes and colors. Let's add some more winning products. So let's click here on marketplace and click trending products. This area uses AI to identify products that are selling really well for other dropshippers. There are other ways to find winning products in AutoDS, like the handpicked product section and the ad spy. However, as we're using AI in this video, I'm going to stick with the trending products. We have all these filters that let us narrow down our search, but I'm not going to use any of these for now. All I'm going to do is click on the pets icon. Here we can see all of the pet products, so we can start adding them to our store. Personally, I don't want to sell pet food, so I'm going to stay away from that. I can imagine there being a ton of problems with dropshipping these types of perishable products. This interactive toy looks fun, so let's click on it to get some more info. So we can see how many of these have sold, the profit, interaction rate, reviews, and the sale price. We can see the countries it's being sold in the most just here, and this one's been selling very well in Spain. Here's the sales chart. Now, as we can see from August, this product's been doing pretty well. Actually, it's gone a bit viral. There's even an example of a social media ad that someone has made using the product. To add this product to our store, all we need to do is click import draft. Now it's being moved to our drafts where we can optimize it further before adding it. If you want to save time, you don't actually have to go into the product page. You can just hover over one like this cat tunnel and click import draft. I'm going to go ahead and add some more products that look cool, and we'll pick up after I've looked through all of these pages. Okay, now I've added a bunch. Let's look through the drafts. As you can see, these titles don't look very appealing. This one has New Year 2026 in the title, which has absolutely nothing to do with the product we're selling. So before we add them to our store, we need to optimize the titles and the descriptions. I mean, check out this description. It's just copied and pasted from the supplier and doesn't look great at all, but I don't want to do this manually as it will take way too long. So let's use the optimize title with AI option. We don't need to use the enhance with AI button as this will create a full product page and build your store has already done this for us. So let's just optimize the title and description. We can use the dropdown menu to adjust the tone and temperature. I'm just going to keep it on a professional tone and a balanced temperature. As you can see, it's removed that 2026 mentioned in the title, and now it actually makes sense. And we've got a professional description too. We could optimize this further, but as this video is all about using AI, let's leave it there for now and click save and import. Now this will move from drafts to products. There we go. It's been imported. And as you can see, it's now at the top of my product. If I want to check this out on my store, all I have to do is click here on the sell ID and it will open up my product page. So you can see, we have the optimized title, clean images, bundled pricing, shipping time estimates, and the reviews are specific to the product. So it only takes a couple of minutes to find a product with AI, optimize the title and description and add it right to the store. So let's take winning products off our list. Now I've got all these drafts to go through, but to save time, let's use the bulk edit feature. So I'm going to click here to select all 15 drafts and click here where it says bulk AI rewrite. We're going to go ahead with title and description again, and now it's doing it for all those products rather than having to do it one by one. While it's doing all of this, let's move on to the next item on our list, using AI to build the brand. Customers decide whether to trust the store in about three seconds, and right now ours isn't passing the test. That's why we need to use AI to build the brand. So I'm going to head back to build your store and click done. We don't need to do this part right now, so we're going to just skip it by clicking on generate my first video, then just go back to build your store. I'll keep that tab open as we'll be making video content a bit later on. Now it's given us the option to secure a free dot store domain name. This is just like a dot com name, but it's specifically made for online stores. This is something we definitely want to get as websites on dot store domains get more clicks, which of course means more sales. When you think about it, this makes sense because when someone sees a dot store domain, they know right away they're visiting an online store. I guess that's why some of the biggest brands and celebrities like Mr. Beast, Speed, Lando Norris, and Emirates Airlines are using dot store domains. So let's go ahead and secure, I don't know, maybe Happy Paws dot store. Oh no, this one is already taken. It shows how popular these names are with online stores. No worries, let's go over to ChatGBT and get some other ideas. I'm just going to ask it to generate dot store domain names for my new Shopify store in the pets niche. I wanted something along the lines of Happy Paws dot store, but the name is already taken. Okay, let's see what's coming up. There you go. So we've actually got a lot of options. I like this one, pawthrive.store, but how about we try thrivingpaws.store instead because I think that has a better ring to it. I know AI is meant to make all the decisions, but I think you can let me off this one as it's sort of AI inspired. Yep, that's perfect and it's available. Okay, so now the domain is registered. We just need to connect it to our store by clicking this button. Then we're going to click on connect existing, then put in thrivingpaws.store and click next and there we go, but we're still missing a logo. So let's go back to ChatGBT and type in, I picked thrivingpaws, give me an idea for a logo, give it to me in a detailed prompt form so I can use Nano Banana. You can use ChatGBT for the actual image creation, but from my experience, Nano Banana is the best when it comes to image generation. So let's head over to Nano Banana and paste in our prompt and submit. Okay, so this is what it came up with and to be honest, I quite like it. Let's download it and then upload it to the website. All right, so we have our logo uploaded. Let's go ahead and click on done and there we have our Thriving Paws logo. Let's just make it a little bit bigger. I think that's okay. That looks pretty good. It also goes well with our banner and the overall look of the store. So with that, we can tick off brand creation from our checklist. The AI has also finished rewriting all the new product titles and descriptions. So let's bulk add all of them to the store. Then we can go back to build your store and click done. Let's remove the store password quickly before checking it out. Toggle this off and save the changes. Now we can go ahead and view the store. Wow, this looks pretty cool. I like the moving banner at the top because free shipping on orders over $50 should encourage people to make larger purchases. The banner also looks very clean and there are plenty of shop now call to action buttons which will take you straight to the product pages. Let's click into the catalog page to have a look at all the different products. There are certainly plenty to choose from and they all have pretty good photos. The AI seems to have done a pretty good job optimizing the titles for all of these. I'll check out the individual product pages later on, but based on what I've seen so far, they should be very good. So that's all checked off. I'll tell you what, let's order a few of these products so we can test them out in person. So I'm going to head back to Autodesk and create some sample orders. I think it's worth the cost as I want to make sure the products reflect what I'm promising on the website. I'll check back with you in a few days when they arrive. Right, so it's been about three days and the products have finally arrived. So let's check them out. Okay, so first up we've got this interactive ball, sort of a dog toy. Well, I suppose it could be for a cat too. Let's have a look at it. Right, so we've got some instructions. They don't really tell you a lot. A charge lead, bit of string and a ball. To be honest, the color looks quite good. It does actually pop, but it does feel a bit cheap. So apparently string goes through here. Oh, there we go. Something's happening. There's a light on the bottom there. It does look a bit cheap, doesn't it? I don't really know what that is supposed to... Oh, blimey, there it goes. I don't think we can be selling that. That's not really for me and it hasn't even stopped yet. So next is our dog paw cleaner. Now I've got high hopes for this one because this was one of the products I found when I was scrolling on Instagram. So let's have a little look. Well, that looks pretty good straight away. It certainly feels better quality. So that's cool. It's got good instructions by the looks of it. Yeah, with diagrams and that's quite good. A little bit in there. If your dog doesn't like it to start with, it shows you how to get your dog to use it. So that's pretty good. Now I think this could be our main product to focus on or hero product, if you will. Let's see how it works. Charger is just on there. All very simple. Let's see if we can switch it on. It's all got silicon in here, look, for scrubbing your paws or your pet paws. And let's go for a switch on. There you go. As you can see, quite quiet. That's pretty powerful as well, to be fair. Different speeds. Do you know what? That is a very, very good product. Finally, let's take a look at the AirTag dog collar. Now I think this is a really good idea if you want to keep track of your dog. So it comes with a screwdriver there. So there you go. That's where the AirTag goes, just on here. And you just unscrew that to put the AirTag in there. And once it's in there, it's actually waterproof as well. So you haven't got to worry if your dog goes in the sea or in the local pond or something like that, like they do. It comes in various sizes, also various colours as well. I do actually quite like that colour. It looks really good. Easy to clip on and off. Easy to adjust. Looks good quality, doesn't it? I'm really, really happy with that. I think that's going to sell really well. So very, very happy. So that's the products reviewed. And now we need to create the product advertisements. This is such an important step because if nobody knows about the store, then we're not going to make any sales. It's as simple as that. We've got three different options when it comes to advertisements. Option one is to make our content and post it on social media. Now, lots of people do this without showing their face. The most important thing is demonstrating the product, solving a problem. This would be pretty easy for us because we've got the products right here. So it'd be a simple case of seeing what's popping on social media and replicating some viral videos. However, this could take a couple of weeks to understand what content works and for those videos to start gaining traction. So it's not really a viable option for this challenge. Option two is to pay an influencer to make some videos. I did this last time I did a dropshipping challenge. However, lots of people in the comments said that finding influencers wasn't very easy. I was lucky enough to know a few lads who made gym content called the Grey's Brothers, but I understand that not everyone has influencer friends, so we won't go down that route for this challenge. The last option is to use paid ads. Normally, I'd only go down this route once I've proved that the videos can get organic views first and then from there I'd put some ad spend behind them. So if you don't want to waste money on ads, then I wouldn't recommend copying me. I'm just short on time, but luckily I've saved most of my budget for this so I can afford to lose some money while I test which ads work. But before we can start running the meta ads, we need some content. Now something that performs really well on social media is called UGC, otherwise known as user-generated content. These are amateur videos that look like they're filmed by real customers, which makes them perform well as they just feel authentic. As this video is all about using AI, let's use a tool called Create UGC to get some AI avatars to interact with our products. So let's go to the tab I left open before and click get your first video now. Now I'm just going to enter my name and click next. Let's go with the scale package. Don't worry, we won't have to pay for this right now as we get a free trial to make our first three videos. So let's click start trial for free. So now I'm onto the dashboard. Let's head over to this new video button. Now all I have to do is go to our store and copy the link to the product that I want to make the video for. So let's start with the dog collar. Now if we scroll down, it gives us three options. A reaction video, the product in the person's hand or the product in the person's hand, but even better quality. So let's go with the last one and press continue. Now it just wants me to double check the title and description. This all looks good as we've already used AI to rewrite this for us. It's also manually selected this image here, which is probably the best one. So I'm going to keep it as it is. Now I have to pick an avatar. Ideally, I want someone that looks like they have a pet and will be scroll stopping. So I think this woman will be best here. Now it's generated three different scripts, but none of them seem to have understood the main purpose of the collar, which is that it's got an AirTag holder. They're overly focused on it being water resistant. So let me just adapt this first script to say no more worrying where my dog is. This collar has an AirTag, which means I can keep track of him at all times. Right. That should do the trick. Let's have a look at what it generated. This collar has an AirTag in, which means I can keep track of him at all times. Grab one for peace of mind now. That's not bad. Actually, the collar doesn't look a hundred percent like my product though. So I'm going to repeat this process a couple more times and get some videos that are spot on and then set up the ads. Okay. So after some trial and error, I managed to get some ads that I'm happy with. I think this AIUGC tool is great for quickly generating lots of different ad variations and seeing what works in terms of hooks and overall ad direction. Before tools like this existed, you had to pay content creators to make lots of different variations, which can get very expensive. So although the AIUGC content isn't a hundred percent there yet in terms of quality, it is a big help in the early stages of growing the store. Then you're able to allocate money into content creation you know will work based on data instead of just shooting in the dark. I've gone ahead and set up two Meta ads with a $20 daily budget. So let's take advertising off the list and check back in a couple of days to see if we've made any sales. Okay. So it's the last day of the challenge and we made some sales. It doesn't seem like the dog collar was very popular as that didn't sell at all. I actually ended up turning that ad off completely to save money because it just wasn't working. However, we did manage to sell 17 of these dog paw cleaners and randomly one of these pet magic brooms. Interestingly, it was the same customer who bought a paw cleaner, which shows the store was good enough that they came for one thing, but decided to check out the other products too. That lands our total revenue at $402.41. But of course, not all of that was profit. The paw cleaners cost me $16.77 each and the broom was $18.92. So $169.85 went towards product costs and shipping. I'm not counting this towards my $250 budget as I didn't have to spend any money until I made the sales. So that money effectively just came straight from the customer, not my own pocket. And then Autodesk shipped all the orders for us. So we didn't need to worry about anything. Over the three days, I also ended up spending around $150 on Meta ads. And I also had to pay $1 for Shopify after our three day free trial ran out. So our total cost came to $320.85. That leaves us with a profit of $81.56. So clearly I failed the challenge. However, I'm actually really surprised at how much we achieved in just seven days and how much this store has made with minimal effort. And AI pretty much did everything for free. Imagine if I actually went back to the store and spent some more time optimizing it and let it run for a month or so. I'm sure there are so many things I could do to increase sales. I think given a bit more time and a human touch, this store could definitely make $1,000 in profit every month. However, a deal's a deal. So I'm giving away $1,000 of my own money to someone in the comments. Just let me know what store you'd start if you were doing this challenge and I'll split the money between three of the best comments. If you want to see more ideas for making passive income, I've got another video right up there, but don't click on it just yet. Make sure to subscribe if you want to grow your wealth. Okay, I'll see you over there.