Building a B2B dropshipping marketplace from scratch

Starter draft. Facts here come from the canonical CV and nothing else. The reasoning — what was considered and rejected, what the constraints were, what went wrong — is missing, and that is the part a case study exists for. Run /new-case-study to interview and deepen this before it ships to anyone.

Context

DropX is a B2B dropshipping marketplace: suppliers on one side, merchants selling on their own channels on the other. I co-founded it and lead product.

Egypt is a cash-on-delivery market, which shapes almost every product decision below in ways that are not obvious from a European vantage point.

The challenge

Merchants wanted to sell without holding stock. Suppliers wanted distribution without building a sales operation. Neither side could reach the other, and the fulfilment layer between them — nationwide delivery, cash collection, returns — did not exist for anyone operating at small scale.

What I built

I own the product end to end: supplier onboarding and KYC, the product data model, the order lifecycle, an internal operations console, BigQuery analytics, and the financial and pricing model.

Two pieces carried the most weight.

Order confirmation over WhatsApp

Cash on delivery has a structural loss: an unconfirmed order that gets refused at the door costs the courier fee regardless. Confirming before dispatch is the control, and doing it by hand does not scale.

I designed and shipped an automated confirmation flow on the WhatsApp Business Cloud API. Median confirmation time fell from ~47 to ~23 hours, and roughly a third of daily confirmations are now fully self-serve.

Two settlement paths

Money reaches DropX two different ways, and the order lifecycle handles both:

• Cash on delivery — the end customer pays the courier; reconciled against courier settlement cycles.
• Merchant-prepaid — the customer already paid the merchant on the merchant’s own channel, so the order is held in a payment-verification state until the merchant settles by InstaPay and uploads proof, then released to fulfilment on review.

The second path exists because without it DropX ships goods against money it does not hold. It is a counterparty-risk control, and the review step is deliberately manual at current volume.

Outcome

• Concept to public launch in January 2026
• ~31K unique orders and EGP 25M+ (~US$500K) GMV in six months
• ~17% month-over-month growth, peaking at ~8K orders/month
• Nationwide cash-on-delivery across all 29 Egyptian governorates via two courier integrations
• ~19K shipments from a 34-supplier, 700+ SKU catalogue

What I’d do differently

Proof-of-payment review is still manual. It was the right call at launch volume — automating a flow before you understand its edge cases builds the wrong thing quickly — but the next step is matching InstaPay references against bank records automatically, and I would start collecting the reference data needed for that earlier than I did.