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Product Sources, Plugins and other resources for Dropshipping with WP



Product Sources, Plugins and other resources for Dropshipping with WP



So you want to start dropshipping, that’s great! But where are you going to source your products and how can you make the process easier? A beautiful thing about dropshipping is the fact that you have unlimited options for sourcing products because you’re not limited to a single store or network and there are fancy plugins at your fingertips that will make your life easier. The world of ecommerce is yours.

Let’s dive into some of my favorite sources and plugins for dropshipping products and along the way, I’ll give you some tips that will help you avoid the risks while being the middle man.

Here is the quick short list of tools I recommend in this post.

Honey
Alidropship
Spocket
Dropified
Inventory Source


Understand the rules and risks


First, it’s important to think about a few things. When you source your products from other businesses, you don’t want to get caught in a situation where your customer or your source has a bad transaction because of how you run your business. So here are a few things to consider.

  • Always make sure your source can provide gift receipts.

    You don’t want your customer to get angry when they see an invoice for a lower price, so to solve this problem, always use gift receipts when shipping your orders. If your source doesn’t provide gift receipts, either don’t use them as a source or get their permission directly to dropship from them. If they know what you’re doing, they may want to work with you so that they can make more sales and they’ll agree to hide the price.

    tip: In order to ask if you can source their products, you’ll probably want to call them because emails from dropshippers can come across as spam, and you can bet they’re getting lots of emails from other dropshippers.

  • You’re the person who should deal with returns and refunds, not your source.

    If the customer wants a return and/or refund, don’t give the customer your sources phone number. You need to call your source and explain you’d like to return and/or refund. The source wildl explain the process. You’ll need to pass the information about the process to your customer.

  • Don’t make things difficult for your source.

    You decided to dropship, so you need to be responsible for tracking prices and stock, don’t ask your source to track these things and send you the updates. If you’d like to make your life easier, use dedicated dropship suppliers who provide plugins for your website or find other plugins that automatically updates your stocks and prices. We’ll go over these plugins later.


Get rewards for dropshipping
(and personal shopping)

Everytime you send a dropshipped item to a customer, you can get cash back as gift cards and rewarded. Use Honey for this. Honey works with lots of retailers including Aliexpress, Amazon, Overstock… lots of places.

Honey is a browser extension that activates when you’re on a partner site. It finds coupons for you and automatically applies them to your orders and it gives you rewards when you shop with one of their partners.

When honey finds a discount for an item you’re dropshipping, that’s money back into your pocket. When you get rewards after the purchase, that’s more money back into your pocket.

We’re kind of hacking the system, getting rewarded for your customers purchases… which is perfectly ok.

This link will get you all set up with Honey and give you a bonus of 500 gold .

Get Honey +500 gold here

What stores/suppliers are great for dropshipping? Here’s a list.


Which stores should you dropship from?… well, to be honest, more than I can list here.

Here’s a quick list of the most popular online places that you can use to source your products:

AliExpress
Alibaba
Amazon
Ebay
Etsy

Walmart
DH Gate
Overstock
Wish
Banggood

Gearbest
Costco
Target
Wayfair
… and the list goes on

Any online store or supplier that provides gift receipts can be used to source dropshipped products.

Your options are really unlimited.

If you want to source your products from these suppliers and upload them to your site manually, then manually fulfill the order when a customer buys, that’s a great place to start because you’ll get experience with the process and you’ll understand the details.

However… once you start adding more than 20 products to your store and you start getting orders, things might get a little harder to manage.

So let’s talk about that.

Potential problems

Finding products that convert

You’re going to be spending a lot of time testing how well products convert. And while you’re testing, if you’re starting from scratch, it’s going to take a lot of time to discover that most of the products in your store aren’t converting well.

Adding products takes time

Adding each image, description, price and other product attributes one by one is going to be time consuming . This really isn’t that big of a problem, but there are ways to streamline this process so it frees up your time so you can be focusing on more important things, like marketing.

Stock Management is Tedious

There are several reasons why keeping track of stock is important. But you’ll find it’s a pain in the butt. You’ll need to keep track of all the products you’ve listed on your site by getting the stock quantity info from your source and update product quantities on your site, one by one. Depending on your niche, this could be a daily process. Yikes.

Price Tracking is Tedious

You need to keep track of your sources prices because by not keeping track, you could lose money.

For example, maybe you’re selling a life sized gummy bear which costs $200 from the source and you’ve listed as $220 on your website. A customer purchases that gummy bear from your site and when you go back to your source to ship it, surprise, the price is now $225. Maybe your case would never be so drastic, but it’s always a good idea to check your pricing to make sure you’ve got profitable margins.

So while you’re checking stock levels every day, you want to also look at pricing.

You’ll always need to Fulfill Products

Fulfilling orders really isn’t such a big deal until you start making lots of sales. You’ll need to manually copy and paste your customers address into your sources website when sending the item to your customer.

Again, it can be time consuming.

Solving these problems

I recommend solving these problems to free up your time for marketing, because that’s how you’re going to make sales, by marketing. Not by updating your stock quantities.

Normally, how would you solve all these issues? You could simply go to Upwork and hire some people to do it for you.

Or you can use a few tools that would solve all these problems for you at a fraction of the cost. This is what I suggest doing.

There are tools out there that can automatically fulfill your orders, automatically update your stocks and prices and automatically import products, images and descriptions from the largest online marketplaces and dropship suppliers to your site with one click.

Let’s talk about these tools. I had trouble deciding on list order, these are all awesome tools. We’ll start with the least expensive.

Alidropship


As the name implies, alidropship is a plugin that’s dedicated to Aliexpress.

Between the plugin and a chrome extension, you’ll be able to visit the aliexpress website and select any product you want and import those products to your woocommerce store with one click. Pretty slick. It’s similar to Dropified, but of course, dropified works with more marketplaces.

Product stock status and prices are automatically synced and calculated based on rules that you set.

The upside to this plugin is that it’s so easy to use, it gives you insight during product research on aliexpress and if you’re only using aliexpress to dropship from, it’s really a perfect solution. On top of that, unlike the other software on this list, Alidropship is a one time payment. No monthly fees equate to a much less expensive option.

Downsides, you’re limited to Aliexpress and unlike the other tools I’ve listed on this page, it’s a plugin that can potentially take a toll on your websites performance because it’s doing lot in the backend of your website. They’re constantly updating the plugin, improving the performance but I’ve seen site speeds decrease when alidropship is active.

You can try it to make sure your site speeds are ok using the 30 day money back guarantee.

If you’d like to try it out, check it out here.


Spocket


Spocket is an online platform that offers high converting products from thousands of EU/US product suppliers who all welcome dropshippers. The software allows you to auto import products to your shop, updates stock and pricing information automatically in your shop and when a purchase is made, the order is fulfilled by Spocket with a click of a button

Spocket ties into your woocommerce store via a plugin. The plugin will give the software access to your site via an authorization code. When you want to add products to your store, you can simply visit the Spocket section of your wordpress site and it will redirect you to the Spocket website interface.

One downside is that you’re limited on the product selection. But again, the limited product selection is a list of products that have a proven record to convert well. So less time doing product research gives you more time to run marketing campaigns.

There’s a 14 day free trial, so test it to see if you like it. Pricing starts at $19/month.

You can visit Spocket here.


Dropified


Dropified is a tool that you can use to import products from stores like aliexpress, ebay, amazon, wayfair (basically all of the stores I’ve listed in the first section of this post plus a lot more).

However, you are only limited to fulfilling orders automatically and syncing prices and stock between your woocommerce store and aliexpress and/or ebay. Of course, making a tool that would sync stock between all the stores listed above would be quite a remarkable development task. I don’t think you can find a tool like that. If you can, let me know.

Dropified connects to your woocommerce store via an api key. Then you’ll install a chrome extension that when active, gives you the option to import any product from any of the marketplaces on it’s list (aliexpress, amazon, ebay, wayfair, overstock… lots of marketplaces.)

The great thing about this tool is that it saves you time if you’re sourcing from these bigger online marketplaces. These sources usually have low prices which are easy to profit from. Using the other tools I’ve mentioned above, you don’t have the options to source from most of these big online market places.

You could choose to only source US based products from aliexpress and ebay using Dropified so that everything will stay synced up for you and you’ll have speedy shipping times.

Again, the product research is left up to you.

Dropified has a 14 day free trial, then starts at $49 a month.

Check out Dropified here.


Inventory Source


Like Spocket, Inventory Source has lots of dropshipping suppliers to choose from, and integrates with Woocommerce to allow you to auto import products, auto sync prices and stock quantities and automatically fulfills orders for you.

Inventory source links to your woocommerce site via an api key which allows information to be transferred from your woocommerce site to inventory source and vice versa.

There are several differences between the two, but a big difference is the fact that you’ve got more products to choose from because inventory source allows you to choose from the products that the suppliers offer.

Spocket pre-selects products that are already proven to convert. So with inventory source, it’s up to you to test products. However, you’ll have a lot more products to choose from.

Aa cool thing about inventory source, after automatically fulfilling orders, it sends tracking information to your woocommerce store automatically.

The pricing starts with a free account to access suppliers. $99/month to auto sync inventories and $150/month to auto sync and auto fulfill orders. It seems like a lot compared to the other tools here but imagine how much you would pay an employee each month to do everything this tool can do.


Check out Inventory Source here

Final Thoughts


Which software is the best to use? Good question. They all have their pros and cons.

I suggest thinking about what kinds of products you want to sell in your shop, then looking through the different product sources of each tool and decide where you want to source your products.

In any case, all of these tools are a lot of fun to use. Your dropshipping business is your bowl of ice cream and the tool you choose is going to be the cherry on top.

You’re in for a treat.

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