Zendrop is a leading dropshipping and e-commerce platform in the United States. It helps entrepreneurs launch turnkey online stores, automates fulfillment from China and other countries, and enables selling on platforms like TikTok Shop, Shopify, and others.
In this interview, Zendrop's Chief Product Officer, Alexander Blinov, shares how he successfully reorganized the team, leverages AI in product development, and maintains high performance in the competitive U.S. e-commerce space.
The U.S. market is highly competitive for e-commerce and dropshipping services. In just over a year as Zendrop's CPO, you've achieved remarkable results—revenue growth, new product launches, and expansion to platforms like TikTok Shop. What key product and management decisions made this success possible in the U.S. market?
In my view, the key was focusing not only on external markets and customers, but also on internal processes—team management and product development. For success, the entire system needs to operate like a well-oiled machine. The team has to stay agile, solve problems quickly, and be ready for fast iterations.
When I joined the company, the first thing I did was reorganize the 35-person product and development team. Instead of one large group, we created four focused teams. I also built a dedicated product management team and introduced Scrum with two-week sprints. This allowed us to move forward quickly—not as one big unit, but simultaneously in multiple directions.
Previously, the team was juggling a dozen different projects at once—some extremely complex and diverse. This made timelines unpredictable, with time-to-market stretching up to six months and inefficient resource use. After the reorganization and implementing sprints, transparency increased for leadership and internal stakeholders, errors became less costly, and product development became better aligned with business goals and priorities.
I firmly believe that results should be shown as early as possible—both to users and internal stakeholders. The faster we get feedback, the quicker we can pivot if something's off course.
Gaining the support of the entire C-level leadership was critical. As a new person driving major changes, there's always the risk that people won't trust in you. But in this case, my efforts to communicate the vision paid off. Leadership not only backed me but also helped communicate the changes to the broader team. At the same time, I was given full freedom to act, which became possible because I earned the trust of the entire executive team.
Given your previous experience working in the U.S., what unique challenges did you face this time, and how did you adapt the product to meet the expectations of the U.S. audience?
Zendrop is a high-traffic product—around 100,000 new users join every month. It's a B2B audience, entrepreneurs, but the product employs B2C mechanics. When you're dealing with the mass-market part of the B2B segment, user interactions begin to look very similar to consumer mechanics.
That means we need to adapt our analytics and design a well-structured customer journey. On top of that, Zendrop also works with large companies by providing fulfillment services from China, so it's a hybrid model. That's fairly unique: there aren't many platforms that serve both mass-market B2B and classic enterprise-level B2B.
As for the U.S. audience specifically, they respond well to direct communications. You shouldn't be afraid to sell aggressively: "Buy three for the price of two." Discounts and offers are a part of the culture. The first thing you notice in a supermarket isn't the price tags—it's the yellow signs that emphasize savings. If you're not trying to upsell, it seems strange. I had an intuitive sense of this before moving to the U.S., but it wasn't until I arrived that I fully grasped how deeply embedded it is.
One of your standout initiatives at Zendrop is the launch of Storebuild.ai, which has become a major traffic driver. Tell us how the idea emerged and what made it successful.
The idea came from our CEO. He's deeply immersed in the dropshipping market and regularly communicates with our affiliate partners—the ones who drive traffic. He identified a growing niche around "turnkey online stores" and brought it to my attention. I developed the idea further, conducted a competitive analysis, formulated the vision, product strategy, and structure for the future service.
We moved fast: from ideation to onboarding partners and generating traffic took just six weeks. By then, we had already completed our internal transformation—Scrum was in place, we had focused teams, and transparent product management. That made executing the new project much easier.
A major success factor was the strategic importance of this initiative. Leadership was highly engaged—I brought them into daily working sessions, which became extremely efficient.
Essentially, this is a standalone service, but fully integrated with the core Zendrop platform. Today, it's one of our primary affiliate traffic channels. In the first six months, it brought in about 300,000 new users and is now generating over $250,000 in monthly revenue.
Let's talk about your monetization model changes. What did they bring to the business, and why were you confident that users would accept them?
We implemented one of the best practices in SaaS—usage-based billing: users pay in proportion to the value they receive. If they're not getting value yet, they pay nothing. Once they start getting results, they're happy to pay more because they understand what they're paying for.
We knew this model was effective—it's been successfully used by many platforms. The key was removing the barrier to entry: users got full access for free until they started importing products and making sales. This significantly boosted conversion rates and increased the number of active and paying users. Revenue from subscriptions doubled as a result.
It was a technically challenging project. Changing your monetization model always carries the risk of misjudging user needs and building something people won't use. So we did deep market research and benchmarking, especially around Shopify apps' monetization strategies, even beyond dropshipping and fulfillment.
We studied best practices from various categories of Shopify apps, then crafted our pricing concept and communication strategy accordingly. After the product concept was finalized, we conducted a comprehensive technical and system analysis. That allowed us to define very precise development tasks.
What metrics or product development approaches do you consider essential when working in this environment?
It's crucial to define your users and understand their pain points clearly. We regularly conduct customer development interviews—just talking to users. Americans, in our experience, are very open about sharing their issues and insights, unlike some European markets, especially Eastern Europe, where people are more reserved.
As for metrics, they're pretty universal. We track the entire user journey: from acquisition and initial conversion to engagement, first purchase, and retention. We build the funnel, identify bottlenecks, and focus efforts there.
Which technologies, such as AI or no-code, do you find most promising for today's product teams?
AI has made market and competitor research much easier. What used to take days or even weeks—visiting websites, testing products, speaking with users—can now be done in 30 minutes with ChatGPT, especially its Deep Search feature. The output isn't perfect, but 90% accuracy in half an hour is outstanding. And AI will only get better from here, making product research even faster.
No-code tools are both exciting and controversial. They're excellent for prototyping, testing hypotheses, and gathering early feedback. But they're not scalable, so once you find product-market fit, you need to rebuild properly. Otherwise, you'll quickly hit platform limitations.
AI and no-code reduce business risk. There's a big difference between spending a year on an idea only to see it flop and building something in two weeks to test right away. If it doesn't sell, you tweak it and test again. It's much faster, more reliable, and more likely to result in something the market actually wants.
Being a CPO means high pace, constant decision-making, and pressure to deliver. What helps you stay focused and energized in this role?
For me, the foundation is health and physical activity. Sleep is non-negotiable—I've learned that sacrificing rest for productivity just doesn't work.
I go to the gym, especially for heavy lifting. The heavier the weight, the less stress I feel afterward. It really helps reset my system. I also pursue creative activities—I play guitar and take regular lessons with an instructor. That helps me mentally unplug and recharge, so that when I'm working, I can give my full attention to the job.
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