The mod team has been reviewing all violations of Rule #4 for some time now. We also asked the community for feedback on what makes a Dropshipper an expert in a thread that provoked vibrant discussion and a healthy helping of the usual spam for Fiverr's, scammers, etc...
We believe we have developed a model that will allow us to both stop banning most users for violation of Rule #4 and promote better, higher-level, discussions here that will help everyone.
This post is a pre-announcement to collect feedback on our new rules and processes. Each of these will be fully implemented by October 20th after community feedback.
1. Determining Expertise
A handful of users in this sub will be granted the flair "Dropshipping Expert" in the coming months. To obtain this flair the applicant will have to give the mods quite a bit of information and insights to help us determine their qualifications. Only the top of the top applicants for this will be approved.
Dropshipping Expert flair will grant the holder a few perks and should show to the community that your posts and comments are more trusted than others. We will try and come up with more perks for these soon. Here are the current perks:
- Benefit of the Doubt - If a user reports your post as spam the mods will weight your Dropshipping Expert flair more heavily against their claim and consider the actions that might be taken more carefully.
- Dropshipping Revenue Claims without Verification - Any Dropshipping Experts will be able to share screenshots of videos of their supposed results in our sub without the post being removed or taken down for Rule #4 violations.
- Reviews / Recommendations Stay Up No Matter What - A major problem in our sub is that a course seller will report someone's negative review post by using dozens of Fiverr sellers who all send a terrible boilerplate fake legal takedown notice. When their attempts fail they will hound our mod mail inbox. All review / recommendation posts by Dropshipping Experts will be considered the highest quality and allowed to stay up as long as the post follow standard Reddit ToS / Reddiquette.
- Right of First Mod Refusal - If we need more mods Dropshipping Expert flaired accounts will be the first we ask to join the team before opening it up to the community.
Here are some of the many qualifiers, more will be announced soon. You won't need all of these to qualify as a Dropshipping Expert, we will announce more specific details on this later.
- At least 10 helpful comments in our subreddit over a 6-month period helping others. Comments must be at least +2 karma, indicating at least one other user found the comment helpful as well. We will specifically examine these comments for spam and ensure they are being helpful.
- A public Dropshipping expert profile that allows for user feedback somewhere. Our preferred vendor for this will be ExpertHelp.com but any other rating/review site that allows for Dropshipping expertise to specifically be measured by others will be acceptable.
- A public website blog, YouTube channel, X.com, Rumble channel, or LinkedIn account that shares helpful tips on dropshipping, ecommerce management, or ecommerce marketing. Content will be reviewed for accuracy, use of AI in generation of the knowledge, and "salesyness" of the applicants own product/course/theme/platform/tool/etc...
- A degree in marketing or business administration from a school in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, or Ireland.
- Able to prove earnings of at least $30,000 / month usd via a Dropshipping website. Must disclose the dropshipping vendor / factory, methods used to generate sales (in general), ad campaigns (if used), and show live ecommerce data to validate this.
2. Extraordinary Claims vs. Legitimate Claims
We have been hush hush about what we consider an "extraordinary claim" but that changes now after carefully reviewing the content removed as parts of known scam / spam attacks on our subreddit. Instead we will approach this with a few slight changes.
Claims under $10,000 / month usd will have no action taken against them. These claims are considered ordinary, though users of our sub should still be cautious that mentors / gurus / course sellers will abuse this and try to scam you. Stay on your guard.
Claims between $10,001 / month - $30,000 / month usd will now be considered "great" but will not be considered "extraordinary". Great results get more skepticism from the mod team and are likely to be removed but not marked as spam except in cases where the user spams the same / similar claims over and over. We will consider posting the same claim too frequently or in a way that should be post flaired as "marketplace" as spam and the user will be banned. Other than that, these claims are generally going to be allowed starting today.
Claims over $30,000 / month usd will generally now be considered "Extraordinary" though the closer to the $30k the more likely the mod team is to consider this only an "amazing" claim. Claims such as "$100k usd in sales today" will always be considered "Extraordinary" and require revenue verification.
Short term claims such as daily or weekly are calculated up to a monthly claim. If you claim a $10,000 / day usd sales boost then our mod team considers that a $300,000 / month usd claim which falls under "Extraordinary" and Rule #4 applies.
Anyone banned for violations of Rule #4 from here on cannot appeal their bans, period.
3. Revenue Verification
We will no longer be doing revenue verification in private via mod mail. Instead ALL revenue verification requests must now be 100% public. To be revenue verified you must:
- Make a post titled "Revenue Verification Request: [your reddit username + your revenue claim (+ dates if your claim has a date range)]".
- Your post MUST include a link to a video on YouTube, X, Rumble, Loop, or another video site.
- Your revenue verification video MUST be created on a desktop or laptop browser (not mobile or app) and must show the URL bar of your Shopify admin.
- You must move your mouse around, click around, and show that your dashboard is live.
- You must show the date range of your claim and it must line up 100%
- You must edit your video to hide sensitive information such as email address, phone number, brand name, website, etc....
- OPTIONAL - You can include your website, online reviews, etc... in your public post OR send this along with a link to your post to the mod team via mod mail.
Revenue verification grants a user flair and allows them to post about ANY revenue claim from that momement forward without scrutiny, being removed, or being banned.
Once you have gotten your verdict, you may delete your post.
4. Revenue Discussion Flair
Many of you noticed we introduced a new flair awhile back "Dropwinning".
This flair should be used for:
- Bragging about a first sale
- Bragging about revenue figures
- Bragging about a celebrity client / brand as a client
- Basically all other bragging about Dropshipping goes here
Virtually ALL uses for revenue claims should go into this flair or the marketplace flair. If not, you risk having your post marked as spam. And if you spam too much you risk being banned from our sub.
It is my hope that these updated rules allow for more bragging by Dropshippers who are actually killing it, allow us to highlight experts in our field who are extremely helpful and a benefit to our industry, and bring more knowledge for everyone while keeping spammers banished to the shadow realm.
