Is dropshipping actually passive income or not?

Been thinking a lot about building something that pays out without me babysitting it every day, and dropshipping keeps coming up as the answer. The pitch sounds simple: you just forward orders to a supplier when someone buys, they ship it, and you keep the margin. No inventory, no packing boxes, no warehouse. Is it actually worth getting into, and can dropshipping realistically turn into passive income, or is that just how it gets sold to people?

The inventory and shipping part is genuinely hands-off, that part of the pitch is true. What gets left out is that removing the logistics work doesn't remove the business work, and the business work is where most of the hours actually go. Product research never really stops, ad accounts need constant attention once you're running paid traffic, and suppliers have a habit of running out of stock or changing prices at the worst possible moment. Early on it runs more like a demanding job than anything resembling passive income.

The stores that do get closer to hands-off usually get there by automating the repetitive stuff, order routing, price syncing, tracking updates, so the daily grind shrinks over time even though it never fully disappears. Worth reading up on whether dropshipping counts as passive income here https://easync.io/articles/dropshipping-passive-income/ . It breaks down which parts of running a store can realistically be automated versus which parts still need a person, and lays out a rough timeline for how the workload shifts as a store matures.