After killing 3 winners and scaling 2 losers in a row, I built myself a daily decision rule. Sharing it.
Been dropshipping on Shopify for ~8 months. My biggest leak wasn’t bad products or shitty creatives — it was me making emotional calls on which products to scale or kill.
I’d look at Day 2 ROAS, panic, kill a product that would’ve been a winner. Or I’d “give it one more day” on a clear loser and burn another 80€.
So I forced myself to write down rules and stick to them. Here’s what’s actually worked:
Kill if:
• Day 3, ROAS < 1.0, spend > 3x product cost
• CTR < 0.8% AND CPC > 1.50€ after 50€ spent (creative problem, not product)
• 0 ATC after 30€ spent (offer/price issue)
Scale (20% budget bumps, not 2x):
• 3 consecutive days ROAS > 2.5
• CPA stable or dropping
• Don’t touch winning ad sets — duplicate instead
Test more:
• ROAS between 1.2 and 2.0 → not dead, not a winner, needs new angles before judging
What changed for me: I stopped checking ads 10x/day. Check once in the morning, apply the rule, move on.
Got so tired of doing this manually I ended up building a small tool that pulls my Shopify + Meta data every night and outputs Scale / Kill / Test per product. Still in beta, looking for 2-3 more dropshippers to test free — happy to share more in comments if anyone’s interested.
Curious what rules you guys use. Anyone running stricter kill criteria?