The Complete Step-By-Step Guide to Start an AliExpress Dropshipping Business

This is a complete guide to Aliexpress dropshipping business in 2022.

If you’re still confused on how dropshipping business works, the things involved, what you’re likely to encounter and how you make money from Aliexpress dropshipping, then we got you covered.

We published this complete guide to aliexpress dropshipping because of the demand and in this guide, everything you need to know about starting a dropshipping business has been included in this article and all you have to do is grab a popcorn and continue reading.

This guide contains over 3,000+ words and one of the best all in one guide to start a dropshipping business on this blog.

There are many ways to start a dropshipping business and to do that, you need to choose a wholesale store where you can start importing products from, to your store, and it’s AliExpress.

Dropshipping with Aliexpress is one of the most popular ways to start a dropshipping business and other sites like aliexpress for dropshipping includes Taobao, chinabrands, spocket etc if you want to dropship without aliexpress and on our subsequent posts, we will be discussing on them but today, we will focus more on Aliexpress dropshipping since it’s the most popular way people start a dropshipping business.

Important Links (Table of Contents)

1. What is a dropshipping business?
2. Why do people dropship from Aliexpress?
3. Profitable dropshipping niches for Aliexpress dropshipping.
4. Finding a dropshipping supplier in Aliexpress.
5. Choosing a Target Audience for dropshipping.
6. Dealing with shipping time for your customer’s products.
7. How to start AliExpress Dropshipping.
8. Choosing a dropshipping platform.
9. Dropshipping with WordPress (Alidropship Plugin).
10. Alidropship Custom Store.
11. Choosing a Payment Method for your dropship store.
12. How to find hot & trendy products for dropshipping.
13. Conclusion.

What is a Dropshipping Business?

In e-commerce, there’s been a lot of talk about drop shipping.

If you are not familiar with drop shipping, it’s a business model where you, as a store owner, don’t need to buy products in advance. You just add a necessary product to your site (images and price) and when someone purchases it, you buy it from supplier who ships this item directly to your customer.

So, when starting an online business, it lets you easily avoid the hassles of things like developing products, tracking inventory, setting up warehouse space, and maintaining a confusing shipping/receiving infrastructure.

Dropshipping is considered a low-risk business model making it great for new entrepreneurs.

Are you ready to start a dropshipping business?

Why do People Dropship from Aliexpress?

A lot of people dropship from Aliexpress, not because that’s the only store they know, but because it’s one of the best places to start importing cheap products to your store and below are few reasons:

• They sell products at super cheap price.
• A lot of trusted suppliers, which you can trust.

If you’re dropshipping from Aliexpress, then you’re pretty sure of accumulating lot’s of profits and that’s why successful dropshippers make thousands of dollars on a weekly, monthly or yearly basis.

Let me use a product I have sold on my store as an example.

This product is one of the products I dropshipped, and I sold it for $19.99 and if you compare the price of the AirdPod Cleaner to the one on Aliexpress, you’ll find out how much it makes from each sale.

From the snapshot below, I sold it for $19.99.

Dropshipping Store Photo

Now, let’s find out how much this same AirPod Cleaner costs in AliExpress store.

Aliexpress Website

You can see this product costs around a dollar, $1.25 and I was selling it $19.99 on my store.

The profit margin is around $18.74 per sale but you can increase your AOV (Average Order Value) by implementing discounts, just like I did on the first screenshot, so I can get more profit per each customer and probably spend less in ads.

And assuming the store makes 20 sales daily, that means $18.74 x 20 = $374 (excluding ads spent).

People make over 100 – 1000+ sales daily, but you need to start from somewhere as a beginner.

From our examples and illustrations above, you’ll find out why dropshipping business is always preferred and popular among dropshippers.

There are many products to dropship from aliexpress, but we will be covering most of the dropshipping niches we believe to be the most profitable.

Profitable Dropshipping Niches for AliExpress Dropshipping

Before you kickstart your Aliexpress dropshipping business, you need to research on some dropshipping niches that are profitable.

These profitable dropshipping niches are based on experiences from other successful dropshippers and beyond.

There are many interesting niches for dropshipping, but we are going to mention a few in this post.

1. Phone Gadgets Dropshipping

Remember, we made an example of an AirPod dropshipping product which makes good profit.

Well, Phone Gadgets dropshipping is a super profitable dropshipping niche, there are other awesome products around this niche.

The interesting thing is, the price of the AirPod Cleaners on Aliexpress are super cheap and you can sell at any prices you want on your store.

I sold mine at $19.99 because it was meant to be an UPSELL product, I wasn’t running ads for it.

Did it successfully get an order as an upsell? Yes, it did.

I added it as an upsell for the first product which I blurred, and it got an upsell order after 8 orders (the 14 under “items sold” means, my customers ordered more than 1 quantity).

This product is good to sell because majority of people in the US have an iPhone or when running your ads, you can target iphone users making the work easier for you.

2. Pet Dropshipping Store

If you watch a lot of videos on YouTube and Facebook or make a research, you’ll find out the US are obsessed with pet items. Infact, they go as far getting a pet in place of a child if they don’t want to start having kids WHILE others just get a pet because they love them.

And surprisingly, there are numerous interesting pet items to dropship and you’ll make lots of sales.

You need to know the kind of pet items they’re likely going to fall in love with and promote it and here’s an example.

This product is a Pet Pumpkin Brush and here’s a link to the TikTok Video → https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMFdSdUM5/ the video has over 8M Likes and 92M Views, and you can check their store on the their BIO and you’d see other pet items they dropship.

They sell this product for $19.99 on their store but it sells around $3 on Aliexpress.

If I were to sell this product, I would sell it $24.99 or more because I will need to spend on ads, the store that sells it for $19.99, although they’re making a profit but they’re already viral on tiktok and they don’t spend on ads.

We will recommend you head over to Niche Scrapper and register. They will always provide you with winning products and hot dropshipping products at the moment.

3. Home Gaming products

Home gaming products are high in demand despite the fact that gaming products are saturated in the market. Thus you can add it in your best dropshipping niches.

The best thing about gaming products is that a client studies the product before purchase. Hence, there’s a good chance for a guaranteed sale without returns.

Home gaming products are numerous. This gives you an edge on steady sales at regular intervals. Some of the most popular home gaming products include; Xbox, PlayStation 4 Pro and Nintendo Switch among others.

4. Lightening niche product

Lightening products are broad. Your greater pulls of clients are from different sectors in the economy.  In the construction, stages, subways and even homes among others, this niche cannot be declined.  The best thing is that items in this niche are demanded in bulk and in groups.

According to the overall market, home lighting, LED and environmental lighting, commercial lighting, outdoor lighting, is the potential dropshipping niche products.

This store sells a product called “Rhythm Recognition Light” and the bar raises or falls according to the beat of the sound being played around it, you can checkout the TikTok video here → https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMFdS7vKK/ and it has 3.3M Likes and 52M Views.

This product have a potential of each customer getting 5x quantity per sale because they need more than 1 to enjoy the beauty of the product, that’s why it’s important to offer quantity discounts, out of 10 orders, 7 customers can purchase more than 1 if you offered discounts.

Meanwhile this same product is sold for $7 on Aliexpress. Again, they’re viral on TikTok and they don’t spend on Ads, if I’m to sell it, I will add an extra $5 to the $19.99.

5.  Home décor

Home decor is also a potential drop shipping niche idea that grows fast. In 2018, the categories of home appliances, furniture, gardening, and DIY rose rapidly in eBay.

According to Euromonitor’s data, home and gardening ranked fourth in the market value of global consumer goods in 2013-2023.

The best thing about this niche is that it has about a thousand unique options to choose from. From wall decorations, ornaments and accents, candleholders, frames, flower vases, pillowcases and other fabrics, the collection is huge.

If you search TikTok, you will find lot’s.

6. Wearable devices

Wearable devices are far becoming very popular in the market today. This is due to the fact that they are generally attributed to fitness and health trackers. As technology is evolving, so are trends and norms. The attitude to healthy lifestyle habits has made this niche a very lucrative spot to tap from today.

Wearable devices niche is one of the best dropshipping niches that is evergreen.  In the market today, the demand for them is large. The plus is that there are tons of options to choose.

Well, where can you get these niche products? Generally, you can consider dropship from China. There are many good quality products in best price. Besides, you can easily find something new and creative items in Chinese market. If you can’t visit China trade show. There still are good online marketplace for wholesale and dropshipping, such like Aliexpress.

7. Men & Women Beauty

This is another multi-billion dollar niche in e-commerce, beause we all have a face and looking forward for ways to look elegant.

This niche was the one I promoted that got me sales in dropshipping, and in case you’re wondering the type of product I sold when I talked about Phone Gadgets Dropshipping.

It was under Men & Women’s Beauty. So, there are alot of options out there for you to choose from.

Finding a Dropshipping Supplier in Aliexpress

Before you fully start your dropshipping business, you need to find and choose reputable aliexpress dropshipping suppliers.

Suppliers are those sellers on Aliexpress who sell affordable products.

It’s not hard to choose a supplier.

You need to be careful while doing this, because there are suppliers that can frustrate your dropshipping business and make your customers request for refunds.

It doesn’t mean they’re bad, but they’re not steady and equal to the task.

Let’s look at the bad qualities of a bad supplier:

• They ship low quality products to customers.
• Products take ages before they reach your customer.

Choosing a supplier is not hard as it seems, since you’re going to dropship a lot of products to your store (or just a few) it won’t be hard selecting a supplier.

As a beginner, you don’t need to go around contacting each of them.

Let’s look at the basic things you’ll look out for before clicking that import button to import the product to your store.

• Make Sure the product has a good number of positive reviews.
• They have a good number of orders.
• They have a good response rate.
• If possible, for each product you want to dropship, order the product first and see the quality. But it’s not always possible if you’re going to be dropshipping a lot of items, so that can pass.

The key points listed above are the things you should acknowledge before you hit that import button (I’m coming to that).

Don’t be a victim, since you’re building your store brand, you need to do things legitimately, if you want more orders in future from previous customers.

Choosing a Target Audience for Dropshipping

Choosing a Target audience In dropshipping business plays a major role in your dropshipping business plan.

This is very vital and shouldn’t be overlooked.

If you don’t take it serious, you may end up like a certain man who used $500 to promote a product to a wrong audience, and do you know the outcome?

Zero Sales, Zero Profit!

It’s better to spend $500 and get sales but still in loss if you’re starting because you’ll learn a few things from it and progress the next time. Their are also cons and pros in dropshipping.

That’s why it’s important to know the kind of products that works for specific countries.

But USA is usually a general target for dropshipping, so there’s no much work needed, but when running your ads, it’s recommended to target the category of the product you’re dropshipping it falls under.

Dealing with Shipping Time for your Customer’s Products

One of the things you’ll encounter as a dropshipper in Aliexpress is the delivery time, at which a product is delivered to your customer.

You wouldn’t want a product to take months before getting to your customer.

This is where Target Audience plays a common role.

The country your customers stays in, will determine how long the product gets to them.

In some countries, Aliexpress suppliers makes use of a shipping method that takes over a month plus before they get their products and they alot offer the shipping method that arrives faster but costs more money.

If you don’t let your customer know how long the delivery is going to take or an estimated time, they will eventually request for refund, and incase a delivery takes longer than the estimated time you gave them, PLEASE reach out to the customer before they reach out to you.

There are shipping methods on Aliexpress you can choose to deliver the items which determines how long it will take before arriving.

This is why it’s important to introduce or add shipping methods at your checkout page.

Your customers can know the estimated time for delivery for the shipping method they choose.

Recommended shipping methods for USA are USPS, Aliexpress Selection Standard etc

I usually tell them their order will take 10-12 days in the checkout, for example: Standard Shipping (10-12 Days Delivery)

For US, the shipping on Aliexpress for fast delivery is usually $3, and I charge my customers $2.99 for shipping on checkout and I offer Free Shipping when they order above $50-$100 depending if I have a 1 product store or general store.

Introduce shipping methods on checkout page with delivery estimates and let them decide. For me, it’s always just 1 method anyways (Standard Shipping (10-12 Days Delivery).

This helps to reduce refund rate and to appear legitimate among other online e-commerce dropshipping stores.

How to Start Aliexpress Dropshipping

After getting to know the basis of aliexpress dropshipping, the most important aspect of it, is getting started which includes the following:

• Choosing a dropshipping platform.
• Setting your dropshipping store.
• Importing products from Aliexpress to your store.
• Choosing a payment gateway to accept payments on your store.
• Promoting your dropship products.
• Find hot & trendy dropship products to import to your store.
• etc

All of these, we are going to look into them one after the other, and if you follow our guidelines carefully, you’re be able to setup your dropshipping business store and start dropshipping right away.

Choosing a Dropshipping Platform – WooCommerce Dropshipping

This is where you make most of the decisions and we will help you make a better decision based on experience and usage.

There are many dropshipping platforms you can get started with, but we are going to recommend the best and budget friendly platform to start with.

Dropshipping with WordPress or aliexpress dropship for Woocommerce is the best affordable way to start dropshipping and we will recommend a very good WordPress dropshipping platform.

oPTION 1: WooCommerce Dropshipping Using Alidropship Plugin

Alidropship plugin is one of the best wordpress dropshipping plugin, it has a lot of features with free and paid professional themes to choose from.

They automate your dropshipping business till success.

One of the features I love about this plugin, is the ability to import reviews to the products on the store just like it’s on Aliexpress. This helps for clarity and shows the store is trusted.

Here’s an example:

The “74 Customer Reviews” you’re seeing right there, didn’t come from my store, HELL NO! 😄

I imported them from Aliexpress using the AliDropship plugin, thereby making my store look more legit and trustworthy.

And the Alidropship plugin allows you choose whether you want to import reviews with only 5 stars or 4.5 stars and so on.

You can also choose to import reviews with ONLY pictures i.e a customer gave a review and uploaded a picture of the product (that’s the option I went for).

Think about visiting a store, and you see a lot of reviews, you will be like, oh wow, people love this product, I should get 1 for myself, at that point, the only decision you have to make is getting the product and not whether the store is legit or store.

That is why, if you’re selling a product, service, courses etc, then social proof, reviews matters a lot in buying decision.

You can also earn money (12%) from Aliexpress on affiliate commissions via your Alidropship dashboard for every order you get on your store using the Aliexpress Cashback.

So, that’s extra income.

The Alidropship plugin costs $89 and it’s a One-Time Fee, when you purchase it, you use it forever.

I’ve partnered with AliDropship to offer our readers discount, Use Coupon code “WOO25” for 25% off at checkout and buy it as $66.75 📌

Read the guide on How to Set Up Your Dropshipping store after getting the plugin.

OPTION 2: AliDropship Custom Store

If you don’t want to stress yourself into installing the plugin and setting up your dropship store and importing products to your store, you can order your custom store and they will help you set it up, design, add hot products to your store, add payment methods and lot’s more.

They will build you a perfect custom store that will work on autopilot and bring you profit for the years to come.

These are the pricing, when you visit the page, and scroll down, you will see the comparisons.

As for the Sellvia option, since you will be using Aliexpress to dropship, you don’t need to add it, the Sellvia allows you to dropship from their US Warehouse, making it possible to deliver to people in US within 1-3 days, the downside is, you can only dropship products in their US warehouse and may not contain as much hot products you will find in Aliexpress.

Sellvia is a $39/mo and I wouldn’t recommend you add it, especially if you’re just starting and they have less interesting products.

This Custom Store Comes with the following:

• AliDrop Plugin
• Free Domain Name
• Niche Research
• Professional Friendly Design
• Choice of products
• They can import upto 50+ products
• Unlimited Orders Monthly – no limit
• Professional Analytics
• Payment Gateway Integration (depending where you have an account)
• Free Alidropship Store Theme
• On-site SEO
• Social Pages
• Store creation time (10-15 business page days)

They have the option for you to add hosting to your order (+$48/yr), if you’re going to purchase hosting yourself, then you don’t need to add the addon.

The pricing starts from $299 and it’s a one-time fee.

Again, we’ve partnered with Alidropship and you can use Coupon code “STARTER10” for 10% discount.

Choosing a Payment Method for your Dropship Store

If you need a payment processor to start accepting payments on your store.

The two popular gateways for international dropshipping are Stripe and PayPal, there are a couple others too.

PayPal isn’t available on all countries and if your country isn’t in the list of accepted countries that can send and receive then you can watch the video I recorded below.

How To Create & Setup a PayPal Account That Sends and Receives Payment in Nigeria

The next in line which happens to be Stripe is only available to US citizens and if you’re a non us or foreigner, then you’ll need the following to get a verified stripe account.

• LLC (Limited Liability Company).
• EIN/Federal Tax ID.

You can read our free guide on setting up a verified stripe account here or watch the video below.

How To Create & Activate Stripe Account Legally For Non-US Citizens Without SSN

How to Find Hot & Trendy Products for Dropshipping

Niche Scraper is everything you need to run a profitable online dropshipping store. It supplies you with Aliexpress winning products.

This is where things get much easier. With Niche Scraper, you will get access to HOT products that are already proven to sell. This is one of the main worries every dropshipper out there has when choosing a product and Niche Scraper takes that worry away.

Will it sell or not? In this case you can be sure that Niche Scrapper got you covered by showing you live ads on Facebook, targeting suggestions and video ad examples.

Niche Scraper also gives you the ability to spy on ads, analyze a store and copy their style, get their video ad maker tool, and lot’s more.

Conclusion

Congratulations, you’re few steps to starting your own successful dropshipping store. Aliexpress dropshipping business is for everyone and you should probably try it out.

In a nutshell, Aliexpress dropshipping business has numerous advantages over conventional e-commerce business. It’s a perfect solution for entrepreneurs that would like to start their own businesses and work from home. The model is simple and easy to understand.

The variety of products is huge and this way the possibility of reaching out to many clients worldwide is great.

It’s popular because people can create profitable businesses without having actually buy the products.

All you need to do is setup your dropshipping store, add the products, add the prices and pictures, the payment gateways and start selling.

Aliexpress is a great place to start dropshipping business. You can try it yourself or hire someone else to start your store for you. There are many guides out there that are full of useful tips, hacks and techniques that can make your Aliexpress store grow faster and better.

I hope this article has provided enough details and information you will need in order to get started with your first dropshipping store. Best of luck!