While dropshipping is frequently touted as one of the easier side hustles and passive income streams, the reality is that it has its challenges. One way you can reduce the number and intensity of those challenges is by choosing the right tools for the job. AliDropship is one such tool.
AliDropship is a plugin that makes use of the extensive array of low-cost products available on AliExpress. In case you haven’t heard of this, it’s a service provided by Alibaba (which is basically the Asian equivalent of Amazon) that specialises in supplying individual and small batches of items at wholesale prices. What AliDropship does is make it easy for you to market and sell those items.
Important features of AliDropship
As we said above, AliDropship is a plugin – so what do you plug it into? To be more specific, it’s a premium WordPress plugin, intended to help you monetise your website by offering products for sale through it. At $89 for a one-site license, it’s very reasonably priced and more than pays for itself by being extremely simple and convenient to use.
One of the best features of the plugin is the fact that it pulls images, prices, descriptions, customer reviews and all sorts of other information directly from AliExpress for you. All you have to do is browse the available products and select those you want to sell on your site – the plugin does all the tedious design work for you. If you have a more specific vision or the on-site content isn’t as good as you’d like it to be, you can also make changes, including editing the product description and adding new pictures and videos.
Here’s a more complete list of the other features of the AliDropship plugin:
- Imports products and product information directly from AliExpress
- Allows you to edit some of the product details
- Continually updates information from AliExpress
- Allows you to automatically order products directly from the seller, removing the need to manually manage each order
- Allows you to specify the payment methods you’re willing to accept
- Includes custom dropshipping store development feature
- Comes with free plugin updates and lifetime personal support
- Offers every one of over 100 million products available on AliExpress, with no limitations
The plugin comes in two versions – a standalone version and one with WooCommerce integration named AliDropship Woo. You get the choice of which to download after you have purchased the plugin, so don’t worry if you try one and decide that you’d rather have the other – you won’t need to buy the plugin a second time!
For the most part, they both do broadly similar things. They both import products from AliExpress, auto-fill orders, update products and include a pricing mark-up formula. There’s a slight difference in what themes you can use with it – AliDropship have their own built-in themes, but the WooCommerce version has support for Woo’s own themes.
The big difference between the two is the marketing tools. Only the standalone AliDropship version gives you abandoned cart information, email list options, cross-selling features and, most importantly of all, special discounts. Some of these could be replaced by using other products and some are arguably unnecessary, depending on how seriously you’re taking dropshipping (ie. if it’s not your main business and is just a way to get some money out of your blog, abandoned carts are probably not that important for you), but discounts are only available with the AliDropship version.
That doesn’t mean you should completely write-off the Woo version, though. If you already have WooCommerce set up on your site and just want to populate it with AliExpress products, AliDropship Woo is definitely for you. However, if you’re starting a new online store from scratch, the original version is highly recommended.
How does AliDropship work?
Once you’ve installed your chosen version of AliDropship, you will have an extra option on your site’s dashboard. From here, you can import the products you want to sell. Fortunately, there’s a good range of filters you can use to narrow more than 100 million products down to a manageable amount. These include filtering by product category, keywords, price range, volume and feedback score. You can also choose to set the country (or choice of countries) to ship to and the method of shipping.
With the choice narrowed down, you can either import single products or bulk import entire ranges of products. You can then choose to edit the items and how their listings will appear on your site. This includes adjusting the title (which is recommended as the ones that appear on AliExpress are often optimised for appearing on a marketplace site) and, crucially, the price.
The adjustment in price is the pivotal part for dropshipping – its where you make your money. You can, of course, manually enter whatever price you please, but the inbuilt pricing markup feature makes things a lot easier, especially as you can choose to set the formula to automatically apply to any new product you import, removing the need to manually price each item. You can even retroactively apply the formula to previously imported products, in case you decide that your current markup is suboptimal.
The markup formulas are really simple – you won’t need advanced mathematics or PowerPoint skills to use it. You simply set upper and lower limits for the price and choose to either add a set amount to the stock price or multiply the stock price by a given value. You can choose different formulas for different price ranges, too, which is definitely worth doing. While you might be able to double the price of low-cost items, doing the same expensive ones will almost certainly price you out of the market.
With the standalone version of the plugin, you have the option of generating special discount codes. You can choose the coupon code, the number of coupons available, the percentage discount, which products it applies to and the duration of the discount. It makes for a very effective way of encouraging a surge in sales. After all, who doesn’t love a discount?
The abandoned cart feature is quite a cool one. It lets you make up to five email templates to automatically send to customers who get as far as the checkout page but don’t complete the purchase. Pre-made templates are available, but you can edit them to your needs, too.
Perhaps one of the most interesting features of AliDropship is the AliExpress Cash-back system. Put simply, it’s an affiliate link system – you get paid a commission of between 7% and 15% for every purchase on AliExpress from customers that clicked the link on your site. Actually applying it for your direct benefit is a little confusing. You basically have to process every order manually and use your own affiliate links to complete the orders for your customers. This adds a bit of extra work on your part to what is supposed to be a passive income stream, but the level of commission available makes it arguably worth it.
The alternative to this is to set up the plugin to complete orders automatically. Note that you will need to install the AliDropship Chrome Extension on your web browser to do this. However, doing so means that you can fulfil orders in a single click. The alternative is having to manually enter the shipping details of your customer on AliExpress each time. While this gives you the option to use the cash-back system, it also creates a lot of extra work for you, especially if your site generates a lot of sales.
AliDropship Custom Stores
The AliDropship plugin is a very cool and convenient tool, with even more features than we’ve mentioned here, making it basically a must if you’re planning to monetise a WordPress website through dropshipping. However, what if you don’t have such a website and, more importantly, don’t really know how to set one up? WordPress can be a tricky system to use, if IT isn’t really your thing, but that’s no excuse to miss out on AliDropship.
For just such circumstances, AliDropship offers custom stores. The simple explanation of this is that they will build your store site for you. You choose a package that suites your needs by balancing the size of the site against the cost of the package, then discuss your requirements with a personal manager and, once the site is delivered by a crack team of web designers, you can start importing products just as we’ve described above.
The packages start from $299 per year and go up to $899 per year, depending on the size and scope of the site you want. It’s a very reasonable price for everything you’re getting, bearing in mind that setting up your own site gets pretty pricey with buying the URL, buying the theme and paying a freelance web designer to build and maintain it. If you have no web design knowledge and experience and have no real interest in developing those skills, this is a very easy and cost-effective approach to getting into dropshipping.
AliDropship vs WooDropship
AliDropship has some significant advantages over its alternatives. WooDropship has many of the same filters as AliDropshipping, allowing you to sell products from AliExpress while automating orders and pricing. Where the two differ is in the cost to you.
WooDropship is only available by monthly subscription, which cost between $14 and $49, depending on the amount of features you want. The main difference between the subscription tiers is the number of products you can import, with the cheapest option allowing 3,000 and the most expensive allowing 60,000.
By contrast, the AliDropship plugin costs a single payment of $89 with a 30-day money back guarantee in case you don’t feel it’s right for you. For that price, you get a lifetime one-site license with lifetime support and free updates and, most importantly, no cap on the number of products you can import. In other words, even if you’re only starting a small store and only require the $14 package, AliDropship is already cheaper after just seven months and it offers significantly more marketing, management and automation features, making running your store a lot easier.
AliDropship vs Oberlo
If you’ve been looking into dropshipping, you’ve almost certainly heard of Oberlo. Working with Shopify, it’s the heavyweight of the scene. Being so popular, it naturally comes with an extensive suite of features, making it similarly simple to use as AliDropship – arguably even easier. Oberlo is also known for offering great customer support and order tracking. It, like WooCommerce and AliDropship, also works with AliExpress.
So, as it has all the bells and whistles, Oberlo is the natural choice, right? Well, it sadly suffers from exactly the same problem as WooCommerce – unlike AliDropship, it requires a monthly subscription to use. They have a free starter plan for up to 500 products, which is certainly a good option if your ambitions for dropshipping are very modest, but you’ll need to pay up if you decide to grow beyond that limit. Their cheapest plan is even more expensive than WooCommerce’s, at $29.90 per month, while their most expensive is $79.90.
Some final thoughts
AliDropship is an outstanding tool for both professional and beginner dropshippers, providing a great combination of ease of use with high degrees of customisation. The processes for importing and pricing products are extremely simple, but not so simple as to be frustratingly limiting. The ability to edit almost every aspect of a product listing is excellent and allows you to make sure that the product listings match the style of your site.
The AliDropship Custom Stores are an enormous bonus for first-time dropshippers, giving you access to a massive choice of products without a lack of web design skills stunting your growth. If you just want to jump right into the business side of things and want to keep the setup time, cost and complexity to a minimum, this option is certainly for you.
Of course, AliDropship is not without its limitations. It won’t work on absolutely every WordPress theme – though, of course, no eCommerce platform will – and it will only allow orders from AliExpress. That still gives you a choice of over 100 million products, so that’s not necessarily too much of a limitation.
Perhaps the standout feature that most sets AliDropship apart from its competitors is its price. The fact that there is no monthly subscription, as there is with most other dropshipping platforms, means that it very quickly pays for itself.
