AliExpress Dropshipping Review: Is it a Good Choice?, For many innovative companies, AliExpress is an important part of a complete drop shipping strategy. It’s affordable, easy to use, and versatile, with countless great products to choose from. The question is, how do you know if AliExpress is right for you?
Today we are going to give you a complete understanding of AliExpress.
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What is AliExpress?
AliExpress is a huge marketplace offering a wide variety of products from all over the world. You can purchase products in bulk or one by one. Because AliExpress sellers are usually overseas manufacturers, you often get very competitive prices. There are even Alibaba for companies that want to have shares of gigantic product numbers.
For customers, AliExpress can be a good alternative to marketplaces like eBay and Amazon when they want to buy new but affordable items. You can find a wide variety of items, from women’s jewelry and clothing to electronics and home decor.
For business leaders, AliExpress is also a great place to find items you want to sell online. AliExpress.com is the perfect solution for dropshipping, which is the art of selling products. With a tool called Oberlo for Shopify, you can find millions of products that you can directly ship via AliExpress for your eCommerce store.
AliExpress stands out among consumers and business owners because it is cheap, easy to use, and convenient. However, this is not always the best choice for everyone.
Aliexpress customer reviews
Take a look online and you’ll notice that AliExpress doesn’t have the best reviews. Lack of customer support and Aliexpress product quality issues are two very common complaints.
The Better Business Bureau has revoked AliExpress’s license due to how bad customer reviews were. Consumer issues often involved things like receiving damaged products or the wrong product. Another common issue was difficulty getting refunds.
The most common problems we see in a lot of reviews include:
- Delivery Issues: Since you are purchasing items from overseas, there is no guarantee that the delivery time will be excellent. Oftentimes, getting online purchases can take months instead of days or weeks.
- Product Quality Issues: Although AliExpress products are often sold at low prices, they can also have quality issues. Many people complain that their products are either broken or just poorly made, resulting in low star ratings.
- Wrong Products: AliExpress sellers don’t seem to put much effort into making sure the right product gets to the right buyer. Countless reviews say that they received the wrong product. Many products are completely different from what the customer ordered.
- Refunds: If you have completed an order on AliExpress and are having problems, it can be very difficult to get your money back. This makes it more difficult for business owners to provide adequate support to their customers. Many consumers end up feeling cheated.
- Missing Items: Sometimes buyers complain that they don’t receive their items at all. When this happens, it can be difficult to get a full refund. This means that you are left with the feeling that you have not paid for anything.
AliExpress Reviews: Pros and Cons
Many reviews on AliExpress are negative, but there are also positive ones. For example, the marketplace really makes it easier for business owners to get started in the digital world.
Pros of AliExpress
- Low startup costs
For businesses, AliExpress offers a fast and affordable way to start selling products online. You can choose from a wide range of potential products for your customers. You don’t have to pay anything until your customers start ordering things too. This means that there is minimal risk if your startup idea doesn’t work out the way you hoped.
AliExpress allows businesses to launch without having to invest a ton of money in inventory. All you need is a Shopify plan with Oberlo plugin to get started and a domain name. If any product you decide to sell with AliExpress doesn’t attract customers, you can always replace it with something new.
- Flexibility
Companies investing in AliExpress products do not need to have a brick and mortar store, which greatly reduces their overhead costs. You can sell anywhere and grow your portfolio whenever you want.
Nothing to worry about, so you can always just change the items you offer to your customers if something doesn’t seem to work for your brand. If your store is down or you decide you want to take a different approach to selling, there’s nothing stopping you from completely changing your business plan. You are not attached to anything.
- Minimum overhead
In addition to making it cheap and easy to start a business, AliExpress also ensures that you have minimal overheads to worry about as you advance your store. You can sell thousands of products without investing a single cent in inventory or inventory management.
You don’t have to pay for real estate or warehouses, and you don’t need employee salaries as you don’t have to worry about paying people to pack and pick your orders. At the other end, everything you need is already sorted for you.
- Versatility
One of the main pros of AliExpress for both businesses and consumers is how many diverse products it really has to offer. This incredible market is filled with every product you can think of, from electrics to fashion and beauty products.
Versatility means that you have nothing to stop you from opening any store you choose as a business owner. As a consumer, you also have many great shopping options to choose from, often at lower prices than elsewhere.
Cons of AliExpress
- High competition
For AliExpress companies, dropshipping is not a completely new thing. This means that no matter what niche you decide to sell in, there will be plenty of other companies just like you competing for the same market share. It’s so hard to make your business stand out from the rest.
With the different players in the game, the key to building the best dropshipping business is to make sure you can brand your company. There are tons of dropshipping organizations that don’t do marketing and branding.
- Little control
Working With Us AliExpress, neither consumers nor business owners have much control over the people they are going to work with. While you can choose a supplier, you can’t force them to speed up delivery if they don’t arrive on time. You also don’t have control over how your suppliers pack and fulfill orders – you just need to trust them.
The only way to make sure you don’t lose money is to do your due diligence and learn as much as you can about providers and their policies before you start investing. As a business owner, remember that if your supplier turns out to be a bad apple, you will be at fault.
- Delivery time
Shipping time is an issue that comes up again and again on AliExpress. Customer orders are shipped from anywhere in the world, so the time it takes to receive a product can be astronomically long.
Sometimes you can look for suppliers who offer faster shipping options. However, the more you ask in terms of shipping, the more expensive your purchases become. Make sure you take the time to weigh the pros and cons of investing in faster shipping options.
- Low profitability.
For business owners, AliExpress does not offer the best margins. You can buy relatively cheap items in the market, but your customers will expect you to sell those items at a low price as well. The quality of the items you purchase will determine the reasonable amount you can charge.
Remember that since the market is quite competitive, you will need to make sure that your prices are similar to those of your competitors, especially if you are selling the same products. This can make it very difficult to generate a significant source of income.
- Complicated returns and refunds.
As mentioned above in the customer reviews section, when there is a problem with one of the items you sell or buy through AliExpress, it is not easy to fix the problem. The return process is very complicated. It can be months before you can return the product to the supplier, and then even more time to wait for a refund.
Many people end up complaining that they never get a refund. If you’re selling products, you’ll need to manage the return cost yourself and wait for your supplier to eventually refund you.
How does AliExpress work?
For consumers, AliExpress is a fairly simple concept. On AliExpress, you can search for any product. The site has divi articles divided into different categories to help the client navigate through the options. Each category has a different subgroup of divs to make searching faster, easier and more intuitive.
Each product comes with a detailed card with photos and descriptions of features. If a customer sees a product they want to buy, they can click on it, enter their credit card details, and proceed with the payment. Usually you get an idea of the delivery times and the tracking number in the cart.
AliExpress accepts a variety of payment options, from prepaid cards to credit cards, PayPal and Western Union. The preferred payment method is AliPay, a system similar to PayPal but based in China and part of the Alibaba group.
In terms of reliability, it’s easy to find customers who think AliExpress is a scam or it’s dangerous to buy from it. There is not as much buyer protection as other marketplaces and not every seller is vetted to provide you with a high quality product.
Whether you are buying from AliExpress as a business or as a consumer, it is important to find the right suppliers. While there are several good suppliers, you may come across various companies that are not as reliable.
In particular, buying counterfeit products is a criminal offense in which case both the seller and the buyer are at fault, so it is important to be careful.