AliExpress dropshipping is one of the most popular ways to start a dropshipping business. With millions of suppliers, based in China, on the platform, you’ll have access to affordable products from an endless number of niches. In this dropshipping on AliExpress guide, you’ll learn how you can start selling products from AliExpress from your very own website.
Let’s get started!
How Does Dropshipping from AliExpress Work?
The suppliers on AliExpress can easily ship products directly to consumers, making AliExpress dropshipping easy for business owners.. You can find products at near wholesale prices and sell them to your customers at retail price. All you’re doing if you’re dropshipping with AliExpress is replacing the retail store in a standard supply chain.
Does AliExpress Support Dropshipping?
Yes, you can dropship products from AliExpress.
For many of the suppliers on AliExpress, dropshipping is a growing part of their business model as eCommerce stores buy their products to sell to their customers. That’s why products like AliScraper are allowed to directly connect with AliExpress. AliScraper is an AliExpress product import tool made by Spocket, so that you can sell products from AliExpress in only a few clicks.
You may have heard about legal issues stemming from dropshipping with AliExpress, but those are just internet myths. Buying products from AliExpress and selling them to a different consumer is completely legal and encouraged within the global economy. In fact, when you’re dropshipping you’re doing the same thing that retail stores do, just on a smaller scale.
Instead of buying hundreds of copies of a shirt and storing them in a warehouse, you’re buying the exact number of products that have been ordered by customers. Both you and the retail stores are buying a product from a supplier and getting it to the customer. Your supplier will take care of product manufacturing, storing, and shipping, whereas you manage customer service and marketing.
Why Dropship from AliExpress?
First things first, product prices are at near wholesale cost, allowing you to earn a sizable profit on what you sell. The products you find on AliExpress are often going to cost less than similar products you can find from Amazon or other sources, even if they are the exact same quality.
Second, AliExpress has millions of winning products on their website. Every popular product you can find online is likely available on AliExpress. You can easily find products from Instagram, TikTok, or Amazon on AliExpress using AliScraper’s reverse image tool. As long as you have the AliScraper Chrome extension installed, you can simply right click any image online and click “Search AliExpress by Image.” That way, you can sell the same popular item on your own website.
Additionally, like we mentioned above, dropshipping is a growing source of revenue for a lot of the suppliers on AliExpress, which means they are very accustomed to working with dropshipping businesses and are dedicated to making the process smooth as can be.
Why Would Customers Buy From Me?
A lot of customers just don’t know about AliExpress, and even people who know about it aren't knowledgeable about the products you can find there. If you stumble upon AliExpress during a random Google search it can be intimidating and difficult to navigate, so a lot of people avoid it for that reason.
The biggest reason customers shop from you is marketing and presentation. Often, customers don’t know a product they need exists, until they see it. Without someone marketing the right product at the right time, they’ll never know to look for it, especially if the product is an impulse buy instead of a search-based product. Once a product is found on TikTok or Instagram, customers realize they want it. But it’s rare to find AliExpress running ads for trending products. So, that’s where you come in.
To top it all off, AliExpress doesn't have any guarantees or customer service. Meaning people are basically taking a risk on buying something they might not be able to return or exchange. At least not easily.
This can also be a pain point you can leverage for your dropshipping business.
The Cons of AliExpress Dropshipping
AliExpress dropshipping isn’t exclusively upside. Like almost everything in business there are advantages and disadvantages to using the platform. That’s why services like Spocket also allow you to sell products from North American or European suppliers.
1. Shipping Time
One of the main disadvantages of dropshipping with AliExpress is the shipping time. With most products coming from China, longer shipping times are unavoidable. These longer shipping times can sometimes be too much for a customer, and faster shipping methods are more expensive.
If you’re dropshipping with AliExpress it’s essential to set customer expectations early and often so they aren’t expecting the product earlier than you can deliver it. Many customers are understanding about shipping times, and are willing to wait longer to get a great price, but they need to know in advance that they will be waiting.
In a world where people are accustomed to 1-2 day shipping, long shipping times are frustrating if you weren’t warned about them.
2. Order In Advance
It’s important to note that this disproportionally affects seasonal and holiday stores.
Any business that is looking to run with a particular timeline in mind needs to consider the shipping times when they’re establishing a business plan. A Christmas store dropshipping from AliExpress won’t be able to sell products on December 15th, they have to start promoting October at the latest. Also, with Chinese New Year during the end of January or early February, businesses that rely on special event such as Valentine’s Day are usually not a good fit for AliExpress dropshipping.
3. Imperfect Products
Finally, it’s sometimes hard to separate the good from the bad on AliExpress.
Like we mentioned above there are some imperfect products and mediocre suppliers that appear on AliExpress from time to time. We’ll touch more on how to avoid those products and make sure you’re delivering high quality to your customers.
Finding the Right Suppliers on AliExpress
AliExpress suppliers come in all shapes and sizes, so one of the best ways to start your dropshipping on AliExpress is to find several suppliers to work with and stick with them. This will ensure that you’re never running into supplier issues for a single product while the rest of your store is running smoothly.
When looking for a supplier on AliExpress there are 3 main categories to pay attention to: Supplier Reviews, Shipping Times and their Products
All of this information and much more can be found on a suppliers store page.
Supplier Reviews
Supplier Reviews are often referred to as Feedback on AliExpress, and can be found under the ‘feedback’ tab of a store’s page. This page shows every review that a supplier has gotten for their products on AliExpress. These pages are often a conglomerate of thousands, or tens of thousands, of reviews, all in one place.
Conveniently, feedback on AliExpress is split into three categories:
- Item As Described
- Communication
- Shipping Speed
For customers, Item as Described is the most important, but for business owners like you, all three are equally important.
Unlike Amazon, AliExpress is a world where the overwhelmingly positive stand out. 4.5-5 stars are essentially the only acceptable ratings for a store you want to dropship with. Fortunately, using Spocket’s AliScraper tool, you can choose to “hide” products based on their star rating. That way, you’ll only find proven products with reviews and excellent ones at that to help you select the highest quality products for your online store.
If a store has less than that, or doesn’t have thousands of reviews, you can try using them as a supplier, but we’d suggest you order some test products first to make sure that they’d get five stars from you.
Shipping Times
The Shipping times offered by a store can mostly be determined on a product by product basis. Opening up products on AliExpress will let you see the estimate for how long that product is going to take to get to your country. These estimates can be pretty broad, but it’s essential to keep them in mind.
Generally it’s important to make sure your supplier offers a method of shipping called ePacket. ePacket shipping is the most economical and fastest way to ship products from China or Hong Kong to North America. If your supplier offers ePacket shipping, you’re going to have a much easier time determining shipping times and rates for your store.
Products
Finally it’s important to shop around within any given supplier and ensure that they have the kinds of products that you’re looking for, and that they have a lot of those products in stock. The last thing you want is to get a lot of sales and then have your supplier let you know they can’t fulfill all of your orders.
How to find dropshipping products from AliExpress
Once you have a good supplier on AliExpress, narrowing down specific products is easier, but there are still important things to mark off the checklist before committing to selling a certain product.
Expert tip alert! As a rule of thumb, you can use Aliscraper to identify items that have ePacket and ship to the USA (or your preferred country). From there, an easy but efficient hack would be to sort by Orders, and only choose highly rated suppliers and products with 4.5 stars and above. Keep an eye on those reviews!
ePacket Availability
This is important enough that we’re touching on it again.
ePacket is the best way to ship products and is going to remove a lot of headaches for you. If a product doesn’t have an ePacket shipping method it’s a big mark against its viability for dropshipping as other shipping methods are less consistent when it comes to both time and cost.
US Warehouses
Even though AliExpress is a marketplace from China, there are a lot of suppliers on there that have warehouses in the US that they can ship products from. Now, products on AliExpress that can ship from US Warehouses are relatively rare, and one product being available from the US doesn’t mean that all of a suppliers’ products will be.
Like we mentioned above, the long shipping times is one of the biggest weaknesses of AliExpress dropshipping, products shipping from US Warehouses avoid that weakness, so they’re fantastic if you find products you’d like to sell.
Product History
On AliExpress, there are two main aspects to seeing a product's reputation, the amount of times it’s been ordered and its reviews.
If a product has a lot of orders that tells you that it’s popular and that it’s already selling. This is a fantastic way to ensure you’re adding winning products to your store. Additionally a lot of orders means more customer reviews.
Product reviews on AliExpress are very similar to store reviews in that they need to be overwhelmingly positive. It’s common to see products with 5/5 stars and those are the products you want to add to your store.
If you find a product that you’ve fallen in love with that doesn’t have a lot of reviews, you can order a sample and see if it’s the right fit for your store. Afterall, managing quality control on your end will result in fewer customer complaints and will be easier to market.
Product Description and Photography
Product presentation comes down to 2 categories on AliExpress:
Descriptions and Photography
Product descriptions on AliExpress are always going to need some editing so that they match your business story and voice. Additionally, some of the information included in these product descriptions, like serial numbers or gender, are better suited for selling to business than selling directly to consumers.
That said, even if you’re completely rewriting the product descriptions it’s great to find informative and detailed descriptions of the products you’re selling. The better the original product description is, the better the foundation is for your tailored description.
Product photography on AliExpress is important because not all products are photographed equally. Products with great photos are going to pop on your store and will offer great material for ads and website banners. Products that don’t have good photos will make your store look worse.
When it comes to photos, you can always buy a sample product and take your own pictures, but when you’re just starting a business and looking to keep costs down that can be difficult. It’s fantastic when a product comes with awesome images for you to use right off the bat.
Finally there are a lot of suppliers on AliExpress that add their name to the top right or left hand corner of a product photo, which looks unprofessional on your store. Those logos can be removed with a bit a free background remover, Photoshop, or via image cropping. Alternatively a lot of suppliers offer versions of the product photos without their logo if you look in the product description, or email them asking for a copy.
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