How To Choose The Best Shipping Option If You’re Dropshipping From AliExpress

Choosing the best shipping option seems like it would be a simple proposition. Just find the quickest delivery for the best price possible. Done!

If we were talking about ordering something from Amazon you would be right. However, dropshipping with AliExpress is an entirely different beast. It’s incredibly difficult, and time-consuming to find the best shipping option with AliExpress, for reasons we’ll discuss.

Thankfully there are tools which can help immensely. We’ll talk about one of these, and how you can use it to quickly and easily find all the information you’ll need to pick the best shipping option.

What Shipping Terms Are We Talking About?

When you’re evaluating shipping for AliExpress products you need to look at:

• Shipping costs
• Delivery window
• Ease of use
• Tracking availability
• Supplier reliability

Each one of these is extremely important. Long shipping times and/or uncertain delivery windows from unreliable suppliers can upset customers. High shipping costs can dissuade customers from purchasing. And tracking availability is important since most customers want to know where their package is, particularly when shipping takes longer than they’re used to.

You might find a supplier that offers reasonably fast delivery and fair prices but doesn’t include package tracking. Or maybe you find all three but discover the supplier isn’t reliable and doesn’t ship as quickly as they promise. Again, normally you would think all you would need to do is balance all of these factors, but AliExpress is anything but normal.

Why Is It so Difficult to Choose Shipping on AliExpress?

It’s hard because all of the shipping terms above are listed separately for each product, and can be different for every product AliExpress offers.

For a point of reference, let’s consider Amazon again. You shop, you choose all the items you want and throw them in your cart. When you check out you choose one shipping option which applies to every single item you’re purchasing. Easy.

Now imagine if instead, you had to choose separate shipping options for each product, and the options you had to choose from were different for each one. Not nearly as simple.

Unfortunately, that’s the situation dropshippers find themselves in when purchasing products for resale off of AliExpress. Once you enter the country of delivery you’ll be presented with an information screen that’s unique to each product. In theory, all of the information you need to choose shipping options is presented there, but frequently it’s difficult to read, incomplete, or otherwise inscrutable.

AliExpress offers hundreds of millions of products, each with its own shipping options that may or may not be easy to understand. And even if you can nail down your shipping terms it’s difficult to know if the product your customers will receive is up to the quality standards they expect. It’s the perfect storm for wasting time and developing ulcers.

There’s A Much Better Way

If your store uses WordPress, download and installs the free DropshipMe plugin. DropshipMe is an excellent tool to help stock your store, offering thousands of pre-vetted, high-quality AliExpress products that can be instantly imported into your site for sale, along with quality product descriptions and premium photography.

More to the point of this article, it also supplies you all the information you need to set up shipping for each product, all in one easy to read information panel. The plugin designers have done all of the hard work of parsing out the AliExpress shipping terms and they’ve translated it all into a standardized description that makes it easy to compare products.

With DropshipMe, you’ll be able to tell, with a glance, where the item can be shipped from, what shipping services and payment terms are available, and how long the delivery is. If ePacket shipping is available, that will be listed. In most cases, ePacket will be your best choice because it offers fast, reliable ship times for the lowest prices.

DropshipMe’s developers also rigorously test the suppliers that ship the products they recommend. You can be certain when you add a product to your store that has been curated into the DropshipMe product collection, that the attached supplier is reliable and will follow through with their shipping promises.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to change the fact that every product and every supplier offers different shipping terms. By using DropshipMe you at least know with certainty what the relevant shipping terms are and that the supplier in question is honest and responsible. This feature alone makes DropshipMe an essential add-on to your WordPress dropshipping store.

But Wait…There’s More!

Along with thorough information about shipping terms, DropshipMe provides a wide range of other useful product data.

The plugin will show you how many orders a product has received in the last 30 days, the recommended price you should charge and the expected profit margin, and a host of proprietary information that springs, not from AliExpress, but from the DropshipMe team’s rigorous product analysis. This is intelligence that’s only available through DropshipMe.

Most of these parameters are difficult to find through AliExpress directly, but the plugin makes locating them simple. And the proprietary analysis it offers makes DropshipMe invaluable in your effort to find reliable products that ship quickly, at a fair price.

Add DropshipMe To Your Store Today

DropshipMe is free to download an install, and you can import dozens of products into your store at no charge. Add it and explore what it can do. In no time you’ll realize just how powerful the plugin is and you’ll find yourself wanting to base your entire strategy around the products available through the service.

Paid accounts allow you to add even more products to your store at an extremely reasonable monthly cost. The plugin scales with you and the pricing remains fair no matter how large you grow.

You can download the DropshipMe plugin here. You owe it to yourself and to your business to take a look at what it can do for you.