What a pain to have Aliexpress invoices for its dropshipping business, right? Discover Ali Invoice, a plugin that makes invoicing much easier.
Keeping proper accounting records requires having both purchase and sales invoices. For the latter, this is not a concern since solutions allow them to be generated automatically.
Whether you’re on Shopify, WooCommerce or whatever!
The real difficulty lies in the purchase invoices. Aliexpress doesn’t generate any, and to tell the truth, they don’t really care.
Fortunately for dropshippers and consumers, there is a browser extension that will synchronize to your Aliexpress account.
Like Ali Invoice to generate purchase invoices on the fly… and in 2 clicks!
Why use an Aliexpress billing plugin?
Your company must keep track of Aliexpress purchase invoices, even when you are a self-employed entrepreneur.
It allows customs to know the amount of goods you have imported in order to determine customs taxes and import VAT.
Now for a company it is necessary to have purchase invoices, it is not new for you if you manage one!
The usual technique is to ask each of your suppliers for an invoice for each order. On paper, it sounds very interesting but in reality it’s more complicated.
The most serious sellers do it without any problem, but there are also many who are not used to issue invoices.
Then you either end up with an incomplete invoice or a blank invoice to fill out yourself. The most reliable alternative is to use a specially designed solution.
Until the day when Aliexpress will decide to edit invoices for each order… We can wait a long time!
Ali Invoices is not free…
Before going any further, I want to tell you that using Ali Invoice is not free. There is indeed a demo version, but some parameters are blocked. The final invoice will be incomplete.
There are 3 price formulas:
- 20$ for 3 months
- 40$ for 1 year
- 60$ for lifetime use
Anything that saves time is good to take, even when it pays off. Of course it’s not cheap, but if your budget allows it, I advise you to take the license for life.
That way no more problems.
Note that the plugin has evolved a lot since I know it and the price hasn’t changed. So compared to 2 years ago, you get a better product for the same price.
How to retrieve Aliexpress invoices?
Download Ali Invoice
The first thing to do is to install the plugin on your Google Chrome browser. It’s not a Shopify app or a WordPress extension, it’s just a little script.
It’s super convenient because you’ll see, you’ll be able to do everything from your Aliexpress account!
To install it, use the button above (you will receive the license and download link by email) or go to the Google Web Store.
Search for Ali Invoice and click on Add to Chrome:
Everything will be done automatically. If you bought the plugin, enter your license and your email address and valid. Otherwise, you get a free demo with some limitations.
Billing configuration
Before the Ali Invoice plugin is fully operational, it is necessary to spend 5 to 10 minutes in the settings.
We will see section by section how to go about getting invoices from vendors.
The first section Seller’s Company Info simply contains the information of the company Alibaba (which is behind Aliexpress if you didn’t know it) :
Everything is already filled, well almost. You just have to indicate the URL of the Aliexpress logo to display it on the invoices. To find it just type “aliexpress logo” on Google and copy the link.
The rest is good and ready to use.
The second section, Your Company Info, is directly relevant to you since it is where you will enter your company or microenterprise information.
Nothing very complicated… The name, the address, the postal code. Also indicate your SIRET number and possibly your VAT number. It’s always good to have.
The third General Options framework requires one or two changes :
- As for the date format – by default in YYYYY-MM-DD it could be changed, depending of your country
- And the prefix of the invoice number – optional.
The fourth section is more important if you want to add additional information to your invoices such as the name of the seller or the invoice download format:
The next two boxes concern data if you want to edit an invoice including all products over a period of time (for example from September 1st to September 30th).
There are a few boxes to check…
- Order ID, time & date
- Store name
- Payment info
- Partial refund
It goes like this:
In the end, all this remains very quick to do.
Download invoices
Once the settings are finalized, go to the order page on your Aliexpress account. A new window has appeared above the orders:
This frame is there to create a global invoice including the selected products or over a given period. This is convenient for, for example, sending to customs.
I still advise you to download each invoice individually and archive them on a cloud, it’s just as well and it doesn’t take much time.
Moreover for each command, 2 new buttons also appeared on the right. The first one to view an invoice, the other one to download it:
At the end of each month, you will now be able to retrieve each invoice, save them and be in good standing!
Conclusion
I am aware that the fact that Ali Invoice is a paying service is a problem for many dropshippers. When you launch your first store, you avoid unnecessary expenses.
Unfortunately there are not tons of Aliexpress billing solutions. I searched the Web Store and there are several other extensions like AliBilling.
The trick is that it’s as profitable and even more expensive!
Maybe there is a totally free alternative. You would have to search thoroughly to be sure.
But Ali Invoice offers a significant time saving, that’s why it is so popular 🙂
