Side Hustle to Success: Sophomore Addy Sullivan has a passion for her four dropshipping businesses

At 12:30 a.m. on a Wednesday night, sophomore Addy Sullivan’s eyes were glued to “The Bachelor” — nothing could distract her from her favorite show.

Until her phone buzzed: Cha-ching.

Puzzled by the unfamiliar notification, Addy sighed with annoyance and turned to check what app had interrupted her show.

Shopify: You have one new order from your store.

Addy sprinted around her room, exhilarated. She’d just received her first order from her dropshipping business.

“I get chills when I think about it,” Addy said. “Somebody from anywhere in the world clicked on my ad, pulled out their credit card and bought a product that I built a store around. It’s just crazy to think about.”

Dropshippers sell products that they don’t physically keep in stock through the use of advertisements and websites. Addy currently has four dropshipping websites that respectively sell moving picture frames, Stanley cups, moon-shaped lamps and cutting boards. 

“What’s really remarkable about dropshipping is how complicated it really is,” Addy’s father Ryan Sullivan said. “She has to manage supply chains, logistics, source products based on what’s popular and try to get ahead of what a trend might be.”

Addy first saw the idea of trying dropshipping while scrolling on TikTok. According to her, teenagers are passively making tens of thousands of dollars every single week through their businesses. The dropshipping marketing plan intrigued Addy due to the get-rich-quick claim and she began to research how to start a business of her own — watching YouTube videos for guidance.

“When she came in and told me she was going to do it in my mind I said ‘she’s crazy,’” Ryan said. “But I never want to tell her not to try something so I really just let her go and I’m so glad that I didn’t.”

After five hours of changing fonts and links on her Shopify website Addy was almost ready to start retailing her products to consumers — but she still needed to find a website with suppliers, people that stock her products, on it.

Addy found the website DSers, a branch of AliExpress, through researching potential products. She launched her first round of websites with DSers as a partner, then another round and finally another. After 50 hours of work making advertisements and product listenings for TikTok and Facebook Addy had 10 websites each selling different products. Only one out of the 10 sites was successful, selling a Stanley cup. 

Addy’s friend, Anna Cicero, has kept in touch with Addy since her first sale and usually Addy sends reactions to Cicero about her achievements.

“Addy sent [me] a video of her sitting in front of her phone with her computer in the background and she’s just shocked [due to her first sale],” Cicero said. “Her grin was as big as the whole room. I could tell how much she loved it and just how much effort she put into it because of that first sale.”

Ecstatic from the sale but discouraged because of the lack of success of her other nine products, Addy turned to what she believed was the driving factor in her first sale — advertisements. She focused purely on making new ads through her multiple business TikTok accounts and pushing out Facebook ads until Cyber Weekend came in early December.

“[Cyber Weekend] is something we talked about around the house,” Ryan said. “So she was ready for it, she spent a couple of weeks really thinking about where she wanted to go, how she was gonna place ads for that week.”

Addy finished the online shopping weekend, only one month after her initial sale, with quadruple the size of her normal sales and thousands of orders to fulfill.

“I just saw all of these notifications from Shopify about new orders and I couldn’t even scroll through all of them,” Addy said. “This was the point where it got life-changing for me. I realized that I can do hard things and I can do them well.”

Addy hopes to continue her business through high school and focus on entrepreneurship as a future career — using her skills of communication and strategy from dropshipping.

“Every single day after school she does her homework and then she does dropshipping,” Cicero said. “It’s a commitment for her and she’s just so excited to see her hard work paying off.”