When we were toying with the idea of dropshipping business, we realised how hard it can be for novice users to dive into huge stockpiles of suppliers and products on the internet. Many would just abandon the idea without ever taking this first step. So we realised it will be a game changer to find the right suppliers and products for you most conveniently.
Alibaba group's retail marketplace AliExpress, makes it super easy for you to list products and select suppliers based on their existing trackrecord, without having to take on any inventory yourself or needing to worry about managing shipments. The costs are extremely low as compared to developed markets and you can easily pay your chosen supplier and have him ship directly to your customer.
AliExpress has an established and huge marketplace with wide array of products and merchandise for you to list on your store. Most of the suppliers are based in China and neighbouring regions serving as manufacturing hub of the world, prices are extremely low.
Ever since dropshipping phenomenon has taken affect, growing number of merchants on AliExpress realise that increasingly more of their customers are resellers. Merchants are super friendly in understanding your needs and can take individual instructions for your order fulfilllment like not including actual sales price in receipts etc.
AliExpress makes Dropshipping a breeze with toughest task of products and suppliers readily made available to you to choose from.
AliExpress does not require you to pay any fees to setup and start selling. You can start selling online today without making any financial commitment with them.
AliExpress merchants make their product pictures and relevant information available for you to list on your website. While some of it is good, some might need proofreading depending on how good a customer experience you want to extend to your customers.
Order fulfilment is as easy as 1, 2, 3. You take an order on your website, duplicate that information in your existing AliExpress account to place order and you're done!
Let's go by one by one here on how these different steps work and you will find its exactly as I've explained above; everything is super easy and you quickly get a hang of it once you try it couple of times yourself.
Like a grocery store business, you don't compete on price or any special products. Your skill is to identify and reach your customers before anyone else does and then retain those customers.
Perfect retail arbitrage.
Reaching customers, bringing them to your store and giving customers a better user experience is all that defines retail business. You build your brand gradually and earn customer loyalty and once you do that you have competitive advantage over any other supplier, large or small, near or far.
After getting you familiar with the whole idea of how simple AliExpress dropshipment is, let's get you started on your store setup with MTC before taking you on to placing your first order.
Choose Your Market Nice and Products Listing
You first need to decide on your niche. List down what you think are the hottest products to sell and what is it you'd be more passionate about. Browse different AliExpress categories and daily sales specials to get further ideas.
Now that you have your niche chosen, start by listing a few products from within that selection. Let's take an example of running shoes here.
Once I search running shoes, as you can see the number of products and suppliers that come up is huge and the decision to make can be mind boggling.
Let's quickly narrow that down to few key selections that not only protect you from any trademarks violations or copyrights infringements and some filters I've come to use most often over time. Feel free to add or edit to it as you deem appropriate:
Right side of copyrights: I will steer clear from choosing any known brands, their counterfeits or A/B copies. The choice is made easy as AliExpress offers plenty of unbranded products in large number of niches.
Free ePakcet delivery: If you can find, choose supplier that offers ePacket delivery as free shipping. As I mentioned previously, AliExpress suppliers come from China and other neighbouring regions so ePacket offers quickest and most affordable delivery mode to the United States. Choose a similar option for European and other destinations.
Sort products by Orders: Once you goto a listing page on AliExpress, you will see different filters you can sort items with. Choose Orders (clicking on upper arrow) to sort items showing most ordered first. This filter not only tells me those products are selling high, the supplier also readily comes up as perhaps the most trusted source among fellow others. This in my opinion is a strong filter to quickly get to your target.
Cheaper products with higher potential: Initially starting off with your Dropshipping business, I would only recommend choosing lower price point products. If you have browsed through AliExpress product selection by now, you will readily notice that this is the range AliExpress is probably most filled with and that's great news for you!. These products are less risky for you and if you choose strategically, you might wind up with a product that has a significantly higher profit margin for you like 50-60% higher than your purchase price.
Product images and marketing content: Most AliExpress suppliers publish their own product imagery and marketing material that you can readily use to showcase that product on your website. To add to your due diligence, do a google image search if you want and make sure image(s) supplied are indeed from your manufacturer.
Accommodating and professional seller: You can contact your seller at anytime by choosing contact merchant option on the product page on AliExpress or going to seller's store and finding his contact info there. Leave him a message right there on AliExpress and see if he follows up.
Listing Products Onto Your Dropshipping Store
We at Mosaic offer you turnkey solution for your Dropshipping store. You can either choose to purchase our AliExpress to Magento extension and install it in your new or existing Magento store, or you can hire us to setup everything for you including Magento installation on your server, theme setup, AliX to Mage setup, shipping and payment processors for discounted price of $469.
In order for your brand building and superior customer experience, here are some useful areas for your to work on:
Write out your own tailored product and features descriptions.
As you would notice, AliExpress sellers are not native or fluent in English and lot of the descriptions they write is converted from foreign languages using some automated tools like Google Translate etc. Writing your own content will not only let you tailor your message to your traget audience, it will help with you long term SEO efforts as well as Google gives high rating to content which is not duplicated.
Be upfront to your customers about delivery timeframes
Make sure you convey to your customers that delivery timeframe will be around 20 days mark. Check with your supplier to learn about estimated delivery timings and choose a not-so-conservative and not-so-optimistic timeframe to convey to your customers as average time for delivery. It is extremely important to do that so be sure to show it to your customers at various steps.
Setup post-sale emails
As you've learned that average delivery times are on the higher side, you are bound to receive lot of queries about where products are. Be sure to setup email templates to readily respond to your customers checking for updates on your AliExpress order. Mosaic Technology Consulting (MTC) offers extension for email triggers on various steps and lets you customise order email templates as well as separate service.