When you want to launch your dropshipping shop, you have access to several solutions. Among the best known, AliDropship and Oberlo.
Thanks to dropshipping, it’s now very easy to launch an e-commerce store with a very low budget, in the order of a hundred dollars and generate a return on investment.
AliDropship and Oberlo are excellent tools that both offer features that meet the common needs of e-merchants and dropshippers.
And if you’re like me and want to get the best out of it while spending as little as possible, you’re probably interested in various solutions for create your online store.
Many recommend Shopify, some prefer WordPress…
The first platform is no cheaper than the second compared to what you can hear, Shopify offers advantages that AliDropship does not offer in WordPress and vice versa.
The only common flaw in both is that they only work on their respective platforms… This means that Oberlo cannot be interchanged with AliDropship.
Oberlo only works on Shopify while AliDropship is designed specifically for WordPress and WooCommerce. This means that you must choose one of the two solutions and your choice will certainly determine the platform you will choose to do dropshipping.
What is AliDropship?
AliDropship is an all-in-one service to set up your e-commerce store on WordPress. It’s the best solution currently on the CMS because it is very complete and evolves regularly. This solution comes in the form of two plugins.
The first is AliDropship Plugin to launch your shop directly on WordPress without using WooCommerce. It offers a complete set of different features that make it easy to use and maintain.
In particular, it helps you automate your dropshipping business directly from the WordPress interface.
However, the AliDropship Plugin is also available in a version that works with WooCommerce. This second one is called AliDropship Woo.
This time it’s a plugin that synchronizes with the WooCommerce interface to provide a complete user experience.
Its indeed very difficult, even impossible to do dropshipping only with WooCommerce…
And what is Oberlo?
In the same style, Oberlo is a very popular application for the Shopify e-commerce platform.
The Oberlo application allows you to easily import dropshipping products from AliExpress to a Shopify store by semi-automating the ordering process.
It’s a necessary intermediary between your Shopify store and Aliexpress.
It also offers a product catalogue to make it easy for you to find great items to sell online. Oberlo was one of the first to enter the market, however at the moment there are other similar applications such as Dropified just as effective.
It’s necessary to have a hosting at Shopify to be able to install and use Oberlo because it only works on this platform.
Some statistics…
Before talking about technology, it’s very interesting – to the extent of a comparison – to use some statistics to understand the market shares of these two platforms.
We know that the importance of e-commerce is booming right now, which is perhaps why you’re going for it!
E-commerce has begun to gain in importance over the past five years with the emergence of various solutions to create an online store.
E-commerce sites now represent 45.4% of all websites, which means an increase in online purchases and therefore sales.
The two main players dominating the market are, as you guessed it, WooCommerce and Shopify.
About WooCommerce
At first, WordPress was just a blogging platform until there was an interest in online commerce.
That’s when WooCommerce was born, being a simple free extension to WordPress, it’s very easy to sell anything with it.
This solution is not stand-alone, by working with WordPress, it offers advantages, but also disadvantages, especially for dropshipping…
That’s why a service like AliDropship exists.
And what about Shopify?
This is why various all-in-one e-commerce platforms have been created. There are many of them, but Shopify quickly proved to be the most popular because it was able to play on the growing trend of dropshipping.
It’s for these reasons that you probably know Shopify, which is more widely used to set up an online store for companies, not necessarily under a dropshipping model.
Shopify is not free but manages all the important aspects for you, from hosting to data analysis.
However, this does not give you full control over your website…
To understand a little better what I’m talking about, here’s a small graphic from 2017 summarizing the subject:
Similarities between AliDropship and Oberlo
Product sourcing
Using the two tools, Oberlo and AliDropship, you can easily search for products directly on AliExpress and import them into your online store with a single click, including browser extensions.
When importing your products, you will be able to edit descriptions, names and retouch images if necessary.
Inventory management
There are no stocks to manage strictly speaking when dropshipping, but inventory management is essential.
These two tools offer simple inventory management by automating product availability in the event of a stock shortage.
Sales follow-up
These two tools give you access to a complete dashboard to see in real time the current state of your shop, the sales made and the profits in detail.
You will see what your customers order, the shipping date of the products and the delivery date. Similarly, you have access to metrics on the number of visits and other relevant data.
Price rules
Automating pricing rules is interesting because you import a lot of products at once.
You can easily define rules when importing, such as applying x3 on all prices of imported products. That being said, I advise you not to use this feature, it’s much better to enter prices manually, to reflect on their values.
Automatic execution of orders
With this function, you save a lot of time when placing orders. This is indeed the main goal, to save time.
To do this, you just have to click on a button and then manually confirm the information on Aliexpress, then the whole process will be done without your help and the customer will receive his package without you having spent much time on it.
This applies to applications similar to Oberlo, but the same applies to AliDropship.
ePacket shipping filter
Finally, a final similarity between the two tools is their ability to apply filters during product sourcing, particularly by shipping method.
Products that take forever to arrive are due to slow delivery methods that are found everywhere among Chinese suppliers.
However, there are solutions for working with European suppliers, one of them is Spocket.
Fortunately, with Oberlo or AliDropship, you can easily find the products offering shipping. ePacket (or Ali Standard Shipping), to get the best delivery from China.
Both tools are great, but there are some notable differences and that’s normal, one is not for the same types of e-merchants as the other.
Differences between AliDropship and Oberlo
Personalization
Since it’s important to have a store that is different from its competitors, AliDropship offers e-commercial themes.
In fact, WooCommerce gives you access to thousands of free themes – which are actually WordPress themes but adapted for sale – different that you can customize according to your preferences. Oberlo, works with the Shopify themes.
You have to know where to look and not fall into the trap of themes that sell as « ultra optimized for conversion » and display prices that defy logic.
If you’re looking for a good Shopify theme, I suggest you take a look at ThemeForest because the prices are very affordable and the themes are of exceptional quality.
Besides, you can find the presentation of a theme that I personally use for an e-commerce, Wokiee.
Prices
AliDropship offers unlimited access to the number of products you can import from AliExpress. Once you have purchased the plugin, you can import and sell any type of product without limit.
Oberlo gives you access to a limited number of products for sale per month. The basic plan allows you to import 500 products (which is enough) but to order up to 50 products per month.
While premium plans allow you to order 10,000 and 30,000 products respectively.
The difference here is that AliDropship is much cheaper for you in the long term because it’s a lifetime purchase unlike Oberlo which is on a monthly billing basis.
And this is in addition to the Shopify subscription, which costs you a minimum of $29 per month, or $348 per year and not including other expenses. AliDropship, on the other hand, does not offer a free trial or monthly subscription. You only have a one-time payment of $89.
This one-time fee gives you access to all features, updates and lifetime support with AliDropship. There are no hidden costs, which is more than appreciable!
Cashback Aliexpress
If you don’t know what cashback is, it’s a very interesting technology that allows you to recover some percentages on your online purchases, especially on Aliexpress.
AliDropship gives you the opportunity to get AliExpress cashback through their dedicated program. Normally, to get cashback on AliExpress, you need a specific plugin like DSers Pro.
AliDropship provides this feature without installing any additional plugins.
Thus, any order you place on AliExpress for a customer entitles you to a small additional commission of up to 12%.
Marketing
The AliDropship plugin has been designed to meet the requirements of beginners who are trying dropshiping for the first time.
They went a little further through their add-ons by offering the following marketing features:
- Discount coupons – this allows you to make sales and promotions by offering discount codes on your products. This usually leads to more sales.
- Abandoned shopping cart – a feature to retrieve some of the abandoned shopping carts by sending emails to customers who have not finished their order.
- Product review – having comments and opinions on certain products encourages future visitors interested in buying on your store.
These are only 3 examples among many others…. On Shopify, you would have to install plugins that are often not free to use in order to have the same features as Recart for abandoned cart.
With AliDropship, we have a global coherence and therefore, much less problems of compatibility, translation and other fantasy.
The disadvantages
Setting up
The main problem with using WordPress to build a dropshipping store is its need to have the technical skills to set up a WordPress store with AliDropship.
It’s not that complicated, of course, but I know from experience that for some people it’s an impossible task.
Unlike Shopify which offers an extremely simple way to set up your store. This is why this solution is the preferred solution for beginners.
Safety and security
I prefer Shopify when it comes to securing his shop. Shopify has full control over your shop, which directly increases its security and protection against vulnerabilities.
With AliDropship, you have to wait for a patch and an update, which can take a few days in case of major security vulnerabilities discovered.
Obviously, both platforms are extremely secure.
Control
As I said before, Shopify controls all the stores on its platform from A to Z, which means that in the event of a crash (or worse), your store and many others will be inaccessible.
This problem already happened to me a few weeks ago.
In addition, Shopify may decide to close your store without notice if they decide that it does not comply with the terms and conditions of use.
With a WordPress store, this problem is not necessary.
You keep – apart from hosting – total control of your store. This means that if your host closes your site, you can easily restart it with another hosting provider.
So finally, which solution to choose?
It depends on several criteria that are more or less important to you. I recommend Shopify to beginners because it’s very easy to use, you can quickly set up a shop and start selling.
However, if you already know the online business world and want total control, AliDropship is an excellent solution because it will certainly cost you more in initial investment, but in the long term you’re a winner.
And WordPress is really the must if you want to do SEO.
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