How To Start Dropshipping in the USA in 2026: Where To Start, Find Suppliers, and Launch Without Inventory

Ask ten operators what dropshipping in USA retail looks like and nine will describe a store from 2019. Cheap overseas supplier, marked-up listing, paid traffic, and a customer who waits three weeks and hopefully forgets.

That store is mostly gone. The reason is duller than reputational cleanup. The economics were switched off underneath it in stages, over about eighteen months.

Here is the timeline. The $800 de minimis exemption let low-value parcels enter the United States duty-free with almost no paperwork. It was suspended for China and Hong Kong in May 2025.

On August 29, 2025, the suspension was extended to every country. On June 24, 2026, two CBP interim final rules suspended it indefinitely across all shipping modes. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, it leaves the statute entirely on July 1, 2027.

The effect is easy to state and expensive to absorb. Every parcel that used to slip through now needs a customs entry, an HTS classification, and duty.

So the arbitrage store lost its margin and its delivery time in the same eighteen months. What replaced it looks a lot more like retail: a curated program of domestic brand partners, fulfilling from inside the country, under terms the retailer approved and can enforce.

This guide walks the whole path. What the model looks like in 2026, the registration and sales tax groundwork, how to find dropshipping suppliers in USA markets without losing six months to the wrong route, and how to run a multi-partner program without hiring a person for every partner you sign.

Key Takeaways (TL;DR)

• The arbitrage era ended with de minimis. The $800 duty-free exemption has been suspended for all countries since August 29, 2025, and CBP has given no indication it will return. Overseas parcel dropshipping now carries duty, brokerage, and clearance delay on every order.
• Domestic partners are an operating advantage, not a preference. US-based fulfillment means two to five day delivery, domestic return addresses, and no customs exposure on the order your customer is waiting for.
• Sales tax is the first real complexity. Economic nexus thresholds apply state by state, and partner warehouses in multiple states can create physical presence you did not plan for.
• Supplier sourcing is a process of elimination. Direct outreach gets the best terms and does not scale. Directories and trade shows surface names and leave you every integration. Open wholesale marketplaces are fast and bring back the quality problem that damaged the category.
• The network is only half the job. Catalog ingestion, inventory sync, order routing, SLA tracking, and payouts are what consume a team as partner count grows.
• Carro covers both halves. Hand-matched brand partners from a large and growing catalog of products, plus the operating layer that runs them. Pricing scales with your sales volume, and enterprise programs are custom quoted to match scope.

How To Start Dropshipping in the USA in 2026: at a Glance

The whole program, in the order you actually do it.

Steps one to three take a week. Steps four to eight are the actual business.

What Dropshipping in the USA Means in 2026

The word still covers two businesses that have almost nothing in common.

The first is the reseller store. Products sourced from an overseas marketplace, listed with supplier photos, sold on paid traffic, fulfilled in three weeks. It competes on price against every other store selling the same item from the same factory. The moment shipping times enter the comparison, it loses.

The second is a retail program. A store with an established audience adds complementary products from brands it selected, fulfilled by those brands from US warehouses, sold under the retailer's own checkout and customer service. The retailer never owns a unit. Everything else about the operation looks like retail.

Here is what separates them in practice:

The second model is what serious operators mean when they talk about dropshipping in USA ecommerce now. It sits much closer to a marketplace than to a reseller store, which is why the difference between marketplace and dropship models is worth understanding before you pick a structure.

The distinction matters commercially. In the reseller model, assortment is a commodity, because anyone can list the same SKUs tomorrow.

In the partner model, assortment is a set of relationships you negotiated and a catalog your competitor cannot copy by opening the same supplier app. That is a defensible position, and defensible positions are rare in ecommerce.

The Three Things That Changed

• Customs stopped being someone else's problem: per the CBP rules published in the Federal Register on June 24, 2026, every shipment that used to cross under de minimis now needs a customs entry, with HTS classification, duties, and processing fees attached. Sub-$800 parcel volume entering the US fell by roughly 54% after the suspension took effect. That is the sound of a business model being unplugged.
• Delivery expectations hardened: two-day shipping stopped being a differentiator years ago and became a floor. A three-week transit time now reads to the customer as a warning sign, not a trade-off they accepted for a lower price.
• Brands got comfortable with distributed retail: the brands that once refused anything but wholesale now run dropship programs, because the model gives them incremental distribution without the discount, the buy-in negotiation, or the inventory sitting in someone else's warehouse. That shift is why curated US supply exists at all.

Why Domestic Partners Changed the Math

Three operational realities follow from putting your suppliers inside the country, and each of them shows up in a number you already track.

1. Delivery windows: a domestic partner ships in one to two business days and delivers in two to five. The customer sees a normal shipping promise at checkout instead of a disclaimer. Conversion improves because the shipping estimate stops being the reason people abandon.

2. Return handling: returns go to a US address, arrive in days, and get processed under a policy your customer can read in plain English. Cross-border returns are where thin margins go to die, because the freight cost of getting one item back frequently exceeds the item's margin, which is why so many overseas sellers refund without recovery and absorb the loss.

3. No customs exposure: no brokerage fee, no HTS classification per line, no clearance delay you have to explain in a support ticket. The order moves from partner to customer inside one country.

There is a fourth benefit that shows up later.

Domestic partners tend to have better product data, because they are already selling those products themselves on their own storefront. You are ingesting a maintained catalog rather than reconstructing one from scraped images and machine-translated copy.

How American Shoppers Actually Behave

Assortment decisions get made against margin spreadsheets.

They should be made against how the customer buys, and US buying behavior has three patterns worth designing around.

A. They Want Free More Than They Want Fast

This surprises retailers who assume speed is the whole game.

A FedEx and Morning Consult study found 75% of consumers prioritize free shipping over fast shipping, and research cited by Red Stag puts it higher still: 95% of online shoppers prefer free shipping with standard delivery over paid expedited, and more than 80% will complete a purchase with a four to seven day window if shipping is free.

Speed still matters at the edges. A Fabric consumer survey found 76% of US shoppers expect free two-day shipping on a $40 order, and 63% say they would pick a different retailer next time if shipping took longer than two days. Domestic partners clear that bar without you paying for air freight. Overseas parcels never clear it at all.

B. The Free Shipping Threshold Is an Assortment Lever

Here is the number that should change how you think about catalog gaps: 81% of Americans say they will add items to a cart to reach a free shipping threshold, and 62% abandon when shipping is charged.

That behavior only pays you if there is something worth adding. A store with a narrow catalog watches customers hunt for a filler item and leave empty-handed. A store with complementary partner products watches the basket grow.

This is the mechanism behind the AOV numbers Carro retailers report, and it is also why "which categories do my customers buy alongside my core range" is a better sourcing question than "which categories have the best margin." Our guide on increasing average order value on Shopify covers the rest of the mechanics.

C. Returns Are a Category Decision, Not a Policy Decision

US retail returns totaled $849.9 billion in 2025 according to the National Retail Federation, with online return rates sitting above 20%. The spread by category is enormous: apparel runs 20% to 30% and some segments hit 50%, while electronics sit around 8%.

Meanwhile 82% of consumers say free returns matter when choosing where to shop, up from 76% in 2024. So the return cost is largely yours, and the way to control it is to pick categories deliberately and to demand a domestic return address from every partner. A 30% return rate on apparel fulfilled from a US warehouse is a manageable cost.

The same rate on apparel shipped from overseas is a business model that quietly loses money on every third order.

D. One More Shift Worth Watching

Adobe Digital Insights reported that traffic from AI sources to US retail sites grew 393% year over year in Q1 2026, and that AI-referred traffic converted 42% better than non-AI traffic in March 2026.

Those visitors arrive having already been told what to buy, which puts a premium on structured, accurate, complete product data. Scraped supplier copy does not survive that filter well. Partner feeds that arrive normalized do, which is a quieter argument for curated supply than any of the delivery numbers above.

The Groundwork: Registration, Sales Tax, and Nexus

This section is the one most guides skip, and it is where the avoidable problems live.

None of what follows is legal or tax advice. Take it to your accountant, and take it early, because the cost of fixing sales tax registrations retroactively is meaningfully higher than the cost of getting them right at launch.

Business Setup

Register the entity, get the EIN, open a business bank account. Most US dropship retailers operate as an LLC, and most sell through a Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or Adobe Commerce storefront.

Carro requires a Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, or BigCommerce store, USD transactions, and a Stripe-approved country, so the practical setup question is which storefront you are running rather than whether your model fits.

You will also need resale certificates. When a brand partner ships to your customer, you are buying the product for resale rather than for use, and the certificate is what keeps that transaction from being taxed twice. Every partner you sign will ask for one, and states have different forms.

Economic Nexus

Since South Dakota v. Wayfair in 2018, a state can require you to collect sales tax based on your sales volume into that state, with no physical presence required. Thresholds vary, and $100,000 in sales or 200 transactions per year is the most common shape, though several states have dropped the transaction count and use revenue alone.

Two practical consequences.

First, you will cross thresholds in states you never thought about, because ecommerce sales distribute themselves across the country whether or not you targeted them. Track state-level revenue from month one, not from the point where someone asks.

Second, your storefront can calculate and collect this, but only if it is configured to. Automated tax calculation is standard in the major storefronts and worth turning on before you need it.

Physical Nexus From Partner Warehouses

This is the part specific to multi-partner fulfillment, and it is the reason "talk to your accountant" is not a throwaway line here.

Inventory held on your behalf in a state can create physical nexus in that state. Whether a dropship arrangement triggers it depends on the facts, including whether the goods are ever your property and how the state defines consignment and agency. States take different positions, and the answers have shifted as more retail moves to distributed fulfillment.

The point for a retailer planning a partner program is structural. Every supplier you add is potentially a new fulfillment origin, and every fulfillment origin is a question your accountant needs the facts for. Ten partners shipping from nine states is a different compliance profile from one warehouse in Ohio, and the complexity grows with partner count rather than with revenue.

Keep a live record of where each partner fulfills from. It costs nothing while you have three partners and it saves a reconstruction project when you have thirty.

Marketplace Facilitator Rules

If you sell through a marketplace as well as your own storefront, marketplace facilitator laws generally shift collection and remittance for those orders to the marketplace. That does not remove your obligations on your own storefront, and it does mean your total reported sales and your taxable sales will not match. Your accountant will want both figures separated cleanly, which is easier to do from the start than to unpick at year end.

Product Compliance

Some categories carry federal requirements no dropship arrangement transfers away from you. Children's products, cosmetics, supplements, electronics with FCC obligations, anything with a Prop 65 exposure in California. If your partner mislabels, the customer complaint and the regulator arrive at your address, because your name is on the checkout.

Screen categories against compliance requirements before you screen them for margin. It is a shorter conversation at that stage.

How To Find Dropshipping Suppliers in USA Markets

Most guides answer this with a list of directories and wish you luck. That hides the actual decision, which is not where to find names but which sourcing route you can still be running at partner number twenty.

So start with the route that survives that question, then check it against the alternatives.

1. Start Here: Curated Partner Networks

An account manager introduces brands that fit your category, audience, and price point. You approve or decline each one. The connection, catalog sync, order routing, and payouts run through the same system for every partner you sign.

This is the only route that hands you both halves of the problem at once. Vetted supply, and the infrastructure to operate it. Carro's account managers hand-match retailers with brands from a large and growing catalog of products, and the retailer approves every partner before a product reaches the storefront.

• What it gets you: a partner live in days rather than months, product data that arrives structured instead of scraped, and a catalog you can grow without adding an integration to maintain each time.
• What it costs: a platform fee, and the discipline to actually curate. An introduction you accept because it was easy is a partner you will later remove.
• Where it breaks: nowhere obvious, provided you keep approving partners against real criteria instead of accepting everything on offer. The routes below all break somewhere specific, which is the point of reading them.

Option 2: Direct Outreach to Brands

You identify brands whose products fit your audience, find the right person, pitch a dropship arrangement, negotiate margin and terms, agree data exchange, and go live.

• What it gets you: the best commercial terms available anywhere, a direct relationship, and full control of the arrangement. If a brand matters enough to your assortment, this is worth doing regardless of what else you run.
• What it costs: months per partner. A cold pitch to a brand that has never run dropship means educating them on the model, getting their operations comfortable, agreeing who owns returns, and building whatever data connection their systems support. Six to twelve weeks is normal for a partner that says yes quickly.
• Where it breaks: at partner five or six, when acquisition and onboarding start eating the same person who is supposed to be merchandising. Direct outreach is an excellent way to sign four anchor brands and a poor way to build a catalog of two hundred. Run it alongside a network, not instead of one.

Option 3: Trade Shows and Wholesale Directories

Industry trade shows and wholesale directories surface names you would not have found otherwise. Category-specific shows in particular put you in front of established US brands that appear in no dropship app anywhere.

• What it gets you: discovery, and credibility with brands who would rather meet a buyer than read an email.
• What it costs: everything after the handshake. A name on a badge is not a catalog feed, an inventory sync, an SLA, or a return policy. You leave with a contact and a stack of work identical to Option 2, minus the cold outreach.
• Where it breaks: the integration debt piles up quietly. Each partner arrives with a different data format, a different update cadence, and their own idea of what an order confirmation looks like. Fifteen partners sourced this way means fifteen things to maintain, which is the same failure mode that appears in marketplace EDI programs when every connection is handled bespoke.

Option 4: Open Wholesale Marketplaces

Sign up, browse a catalog, import products, start selling. Fastest route to a live product page by a wide margin, and the reason so many stores look identical.

• What it gets you: speed and volume. You can list a thousand SKUs before lunch.
• What it costs: the things that made the category disreputable. Suppliers are unvetted or lightly vetted, so quality becomes a lottery you run at your customer's expense. Margins are thin because every other subscriber has the same catalog at the same cost. And the assortment is not differentiated in any way, so your product pages compete on price with stores that have no brand to protect.
• Where it breaks: the first quality incident. A customer who receives a poor product does not blame an anonymous supplier they have never heard of. Our guide on how to evaluate supplier product quality covers the diligence that open marketplaces leave entirely to you.

The Four Routes, Side by Side

Read down the first two columns and the answer is already visible. A retailer needs vetted partners and the operational layer to run them, and only one row delivers both.

What Is the Best Dropshipping Platform in the USA?

The honest answer to what is the best dropshipping platform in the USA depends on which half of the problem you have already solved.

If you have twenty signed brand relationships and no way to run them, you need an operating layer. If you have a storefront and an audience but no supply, you need a network. Most retailers have neither, which is why the question keeps getting asked.

Carro is built on the assumption that these are one problem.

The Network Half

Carro's account managers hand-match retailers with brands on category fit, audience alignment, and price point, drawing on a large and growing catalog of products from vetted partners. Introductions are curated, not listed, and the retailer approves every partner before a single product appears on the storefront.

That approval step is the difference between adding SKUs and adding assortment. Anyone can add SKUs. A catalog that grows by ten thousand unvetted products has more listings and no more revenue, plus a support burden it did not have last month.

Brands participate because the arrangement gives them incremental distribution without wholesale discounting or inventory commitment, which is why the available supply includes established names rather than only the brands with nowhere else to go. Our roundup of the best dropshipping suppliers in the USA shows what that pool looks like in practice.

The Operations Half

This is the part retailers underestimate until they are living in it, and it is the reason they outgrow the other routes.

Running partner number three is a merchandising task. Running partner number thirty is an operations job with five moving parts:

1. Catalog ingestion: every partner's product data arrives in a different shape. Titles formatted differently, attributes named differently, variants structured differently, images at different resolutions. Someone normalizes that, or your product pages look assembled from spare parts.

2. Real-time inventory sync: a stock file that arrives daily is a stock file that is wrong for most of the day. Overselling a partner's last unit costs you a cancellation, a refund, and a customer who learns your availability cannot be trusted. Carro syncs inventory and pricing in real time, with webhooks that fire when a supplier's stock changes.

3. Automated order routing: a basket spanning three brands becomes three supplier orders. Carro identifies which partner holds each line and creates the order in their system, so nobody opens the order and splits it by hand. That manual version is fine at fifty orders a week and impossible at five hundred. The mechanics are covered in detail in our guide to EDI for dropshipping.

4. SLA and fulfillment tracking: each partner ships independently, so a multi-brand order produces several parcels arriving on different days. Fulfillment has to be tracked per supplier rather than as one order-level flag, or you tell the customer their order shipped when two thirds of it has not.

5. Supplier payouts: invoices generate automatically once a ship notice is accepted and payouts run through Stripe. Reconciling thirty supplier invoices by hand every month is work that scales directly with partner count, and it lands on finance rather than operations, which is why it survives most platform evaluations unexamined.

Absorb those five and assortment can grow without headcount growing beside it. Leave them manual and your partner count is capped by how many people you are willing to hire, which is a much lower number than your demand supports.

How To Start Dropshipping in USA: The First Week

Here is the concrete path. Read each step as a manual process removed, not a feature acquired.

Step 1: Connect the Storefront

Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Adobe Commerce connect natively, which means the connection is a login and an authorization, not a project. Retailers running headless or custom setups use the API and webhooks, including a notification that fires the moment a supplier's inventory changes.

The reason this step comes first is that it decides how much work every later step costs. A native connection means partner products, inventory, and orders move through an existing pipe. A custom build means you are maintaining that pipe forever, and you will be doing it while also trying to merchandise.

Manual process removed: a bespoke integration per partner.

Step 2: Define the Gaps Worth Filling

Look at your search data, your zero-result queries, and the products customers buy alongside your core range. Complementary categories that raise basket size are worth more than adjacent categories that only add listings, and the difference is visible in your own analytics before you talk to a single supplier.

Write the brief down. Categories, price bands, the customer you are serving, and the standards a partner has to meet. That document is what your account manager works from, and it is also what stops you accepting an easy introduction in a category nobody asked for. Our guide to finding products to dropship is a useful companion here.

Manual process removed: guessing which categories to test with inventory money.

Step 3: Get Matched With Brands

Account managers introduce partners that fit the audience and the price point you defined, drawing on a large and growing catalog of products from vetted brands. You review each introduction and approve or decline it.

This is where curation stops being a marketing word and becomes a decision you make repeatedly. Decline the partner who cannot commit to a ship window. Decline the one whose product photography would drag down your category pages. The catalog you end up with is the sum of those small refusals.

Manual process removed: months of cold outreach per relationship.

Step 4: Sync Catalog and Inventory

Product data, pricing, and stock levels flow in and stay current without manual uploads. Partners connect by EDI, API, SFTP, or CSV depending on what they can actually produce, which is why a five-person brand and an enterprise distributor can both be live in the same week.

The important word is continuous. A daily stock file is accurate at the moment it is generated and increasingly wrong for the rest of the day, and the way you find out is a customer buying something that is not there. Real-time sync with change-triggered updates removes the oversell before it becomes a refund and an apology.

Manual process removed: spreadsheet uploads, stale stock counts, and the cancellations that follow them.

Step 5: Automate Order Routing

Orders reach the fulfilling partner directly. A basket spanning three brands becomes three supplier orders, split by line, with no human deciding who ships what.

Picture the manual version, because it is where most partner programs quietly break. Someone opens the order, works out which brand holds which line, splits it by hand, and emails each portion separately. That takes minutes per order and scales linearly with volume, so it is survivable at fifty orders a week and impossible at five hundred. The mechanics are covered in detail in our guide to EDI for dropshipping.

Manual process removed: someone opening every multi-brand order and forwarding parts of it by email.

Step 6: Track Fulfillment and Returns

Ship notices return courier and tracking per supplier, and returns run through the platform with dedicated events, so both sides are notified as a request is accepted or rejected.

Per-supplier tracking matters more than it sounds. Each partner ships independently, so a three-brand order produces three parcels arriving on different days from different carriers. A system that marks the whole order shipped when the first parcel leaves will misinform the customer about the other two, and no amount of careful notification copy fixes a status that is plainly wrong.

Manual process removed: chasing tracking numbers and mediating returns over email.

Step 7: Manage Payouts and Partner Performance

Invoices generate automatically once a ship notice is accepted, and payouts run through Stripe. Partner performance sits in one place: dispatch time, rejection rate, and exception volume by supplier.

This is the step that decides whether month six is enjoyable. Reconciling supplier invoices by hand is work that scales directly with partner count and lands on finance rather than operations, which is why it survives most platform evaluations unexamined. Review the performance numbers monthly and partner management turns from reactive into a commercial conversation you can have with timestamps instead of impressions.

Manual process removed: month-end reconciliation across every supplier you added this quarter.

What Week One Realistically Covers

Steps one through four. That is a connected storefront, a written sourcing brief, your first approved partners, and a catalog syncing on its own.

Steps five through seven are what makes month six survivable, and they are also the steps nobody thinks about while they are excited about assortment. If your plan crosses a border, the same program looks different elsewhere: our companion guides cover dropshipping in Canada, where cross-border cost is the binding constraint, and dropshipping in Europe, where market fragmentation is.

What the Model Produces

Retailers running this model through Carro report up to 4.5x year-over-year sales growth, up to 350% higher AOV on carts with Carro products, and up to 3x catalog growth in under a year, without holding a unit of inventory. The AOV number is the one worth sitting with, because it comes from the same customers buying more per order rather than from acquiring more customers, which is the cheapest growth available to a retailer.

If that is the lever you want to pull, our 20 strategies to increase average order value on Shopify goes deeper on the mechanics.

The FairGround is the clearest illustration of curation and automation working together rather than as alternatives. Their team described the operating reality directly: "Automating inventory and product tagging makes it easier to scale. It allows us to manage a curated selection of products effectively, keeping control over what goes live while growing the business."

Curation without automation caps you at the number of partners one person can manually maintain. Automation without curation gives you a large catalog nobody wants. The programs that grow have both.

How To Evaluate Any US Dropshipping Supplier

Hold every option in this guide against these four criteria, including the ones you like. They are the diligence that separates a program built to scale from one that breaks at partner number five.

Two notes on using this.

Measure these per partner, not as a program average. A network where twenty-eight partners hit their SLA and two do not is a network with two specific problems, and averages hide exactly the information you need.

Second, the criteria are also a negotiating position. A brand that cannot commit to a ship window is telling you something useful about their operations before you find out from a customer.

Everything You Need to Know About Dropshipping in USA

Why Carro Is the Right Move

Three things separate Carro from every other route in this guide.

1. Curated partners, not a directory: account managers hand-match brands on category, audience, and price point from a large and growing catalog of products, and you approve each one. Nobody is dropped into your catalog because they paid for a listing.

2. The operating layer comes with the network: catalog ingestion, real-time inventory and pricing sync, automated order routing, per-supplier fulfillment tracking, and automated payouts through Stripe. Adding a partner does not add an integration to maintain.

3. Assortment growth without headcount growth: that is the whole commercial argument. Retailers report up to 4.5x year-over-year sales growth and up to 350% higher AOV on carts with Carro products without buying inventory or hiring an operations team to keep the partners running.

Carro is built for US retailers and marketplace operators on Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, or BigCommerce who have an audience and a catalog gap, and who would rather expand assortment than expand payroll. It is the wrong fit for anyone looking for the cheapest possible overseas SKUs, and that is deliberate.

Pricing scales with your sales volume, and enterprise programs are custom quoted to match scope. There is no upfront inventory cost. The first partner you add tests the model. The tenth is where the operating layer starts paying for itself.

Book a demo with Carro

Your Plain-English US Dropshipping Checklist

Everything above, stripped back to what you actually have to do. Work down the list in order.

Before you sell anything

☑️ Register your business and get an EIN

☑️ Open a business bank account, separate from your personal one

☑️ Get your resale certificates ready, because every partner will ask for one

☑️ Book an hour with an accountant and ask two questions: which states do I need to collect sales tax in, and does it change if my partners ship from different states?

☑️ Set up your store on Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, or BigCommerce, selling in US dollars

☑️ Turn on automatic sales tax calculation in your store settings

Deciding what to sell

☑️ Look at what customers search for on your site and find nothing

☑️ Write down 3 to 5 categories that would make people spend more per order

☑️ Write down the categories you will never sell, and why

☑️ Decide the minimum standards a supplier has to meet: how fast they ship, how they handle returns, how good their product photos are

Finding suppliers

☑️ Sign up with a curated partner network like Carro, where account managers introduce brands that match your categories and customers, from a large and growing catalog of products

☑️ Say no to any introduction that does not fit the brief you wrote

☑️ Ask every supplier four questions: how many days until you ship, how often does your stock update, where do returns go, and can I have your product data in a usable file?

☑️ Approve two or three partners to start with, not twenty

Getting live

☑️ Connect your store to Carro so product data, prices, and stock update on their own

☑️ Check a handful of products on your live site to make sure titles, images, and prices look right

☑️ Place a test order and watch it reach the supplier without anyone forwarding an email

☑️ Confirm the customer gets tracking, and that a two-brand order shows two shipments rather than one

Once orders are flowing

☑️ Check each supplier once a month: are they shipping on time, are they rejecting orders, are their stock levels accurate?

☑️ Let payouts run automatically through Stripe instead of reconciling invoices by hand

☑️ Add the next partner only when the current ones are running cleanly

☑️ Repeat, and notice that partner ten takes about as long to add as partner two

If more than three boxes in the "getting live" and "once orders are flowing" sections feel like they would need a spreadsheet and a spare afternoon each week, that is the work Carro exists to remove.