 The Drop Shippers Guide to Sourcing from AliExpress Part 1 of 2. Hey guys, welcome to this video. I want to teach you how to use AliExpress. This is a great guide for AliExpress. If you've been wanting to use AliExpress for this, this is the video for you. So watch until the very end. Now I will tell you this is a two-part video. You're going to want to watch Part 2 also. They're both very short and to the point and they're going to educate you so that you don't have any problems and you actually make some money. So before we get started, if you're brand new, don't forget to subscribe. Hit that subscribe button down there. Don't forget to ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I do one of these videos. And yeah, give me a thumbs up too if you don't mind. Alright, let's get going. First off, let's talk about what drop shipping is. What drop shipping is. Drop shipping is actually selling a product that you don't own. Okay, that you don't own. So essentially you're going out and you're selling a product and you don't have it yet. So when somebody pays you, you pay the manufacturer or the distributor for the product and then they're going to actually mail it out to your customer. Now the advantage to this is that you don't have to stock any inventory. You don't have to put stuff in packages. You don't have to put labels on stuff. You could do this from anywhere in the world too. That's the cool thing because you don't have to be around anything but a laptop here to actually run your business. Now the next question is what is Aliexpress? Okay, there's a good question. Aliexpress is a site that has over 100 million products. Now Aliexpress was founded in 2010 and its parent company is Alibaba where you would actually go and buy some of the same products but you would buy them in quantity. So maybe you wanted 100 or 1000 of something or 10 pallets of something. You would go to Alibaba. If you want that particular product shipped out to your customer individually you would go to Aliexpress. Now what's the difference in the two? Well the difference is one of them you're buying in bulk and you're going to get better pricing. That's Alibaba. This video is about Aliexpress. You're going to pay a little bit more for the product. However, you don't have to ship it out to the product which can be a real advantage for those of you who don't want to buy inventory. Now since most of these companies are overseas they have cheaper labor over there and you can buy some of the same products you'd find in the U.S. for a whole lot less money. Now they're very competitive there too so they're always competing with each other to have the best price which allows you to sell products to your customer at a really fair price. Now the question is does Aliexpress allow drop shipping? Are you allowed to buy something and send it to somebody else? The answer is yes. You're allowed to do it. They do it every day, all day long and you can certainly do that and you can build your business on that. It's really a simple four step product. You're going to add your product to your store. Maybe it's Shopify. A lot of you use Shopify and use Oberlo to integrate Aliexpress with your store. Once you add it there you sell it to your customer. Once you collect the money, step three go ahead and pay the manufacturer and distributor for the product. Step four they send it out to your customer. You're done. It's that easy. You didn't have to touch a product. You didn't have to pack a product. You didn't have to ship a product. Now the cool thing about Aliexpress is it's very easy to use. Years ago it used to be there was some problems with some manufacturers, distributors. They weren't reliable but pretty much all that's been cleaned up now so it's a great site to use. You don't have to pay any fees. You don't have to pay any percentages or anything like that. You can just buy products. It's billed as a retail site. However the average customer never goes to Aliexpress. They just don't do it. They don't go there. And you can go there and you can drop ship products which is really the majority of their business on Aliexpress now. Now the question arises why wouldn't people just go to Aliexpress and buy products. It's not really designed for the average consumer. Most average consumers don't even know about Aliexpress. So your advantage is really your marketing skills and your customer support. When you are selling products from Aliexpress you're maybe running ads on Facebook or YouTube or Google Ads and you're catching them at a time where they're interested in a particular thing and it's more of an impulse buy. So they'll buy from you because this is not a product they've normally seen. So that's why I always try to look for very unique products on Aliexpress. Now I always get people asking me can you use Aliexpress to sell things on Amazon. The answer is yes and no. If you look at Amazon's requirements for shipping out products most of the Aliexpress shippers will not follow that criteria and since they won't follow that criteria I think it's a bad idea to really sell your products through Amazon. Plus the fees are going to eat up most of your profits on Amazon. I just don't think it's a good idea. Now the best thing to do once you have your niche in mind and a niche of course is a very specialized interest that you've identified that would be a good market. Once you've done that I suggest that you find 10, 20 products on Aliexpress and offer those on your store or send them out in emails or run ads or whatever you want to do and you always want to start with 10 to 20 products. The reason being is some of them are going to do well some aren't going to do well and if you start with a whole bunch of products you have a much better chance. And keep in mind it's not like you've got to buy inventory for these products before you know if they're going to sell. All you have to do is offer them to your customers. That's it. So you've got to do and the ones that they land on the ones that they like you can then of course run ads send more emails about those products run specials do whatever you want. And then once you've identified a few that work out there I would suggest that you try to find some more and keep adding to it. The one thing I would be really careful for on Aliexpress is don't buy any brand name anything. It's almost assuredly a fake or a counterfeit product. So never buy anything that has any type of branding or you know logos or anything like that that is identifiable in the U.S. If you do so that you're going to risk actually selling counterfeit items you're actually getting in trouble. So don't ever do that. Make sure it's not a branded item. Don't try to sell Disney stuff or anything like that or NFL or you know whatever it is. Don't try to sell any branded stuff from Aliexpress because it's likely going to be a fake. Now shipping can be quite long on Aliexpress for a long time we had E-Packet on Aliexpress and our government changed things and we don't have E-Packet anymore and a lot of people said oh my gosh drop shipping is dead. It's not dead. It's just going to take a little bit longer and the shipping costs a little bit more. I think E-Packet will probably come back at some point. Right now it's just not available. Now the next thing I would look at when I'm at Aliexpress I would look at the number of orders that a manufacturer or a distributor has shipped out. The greater that number of orders the more reputable that company probably is. Not that a company that's shipped out ten orders is not reputable but you don't really know. You don't have enough data to really tell about that company you know if they're going to be good in the long run if they you know have the supply of stuff they need. When you have a company that's sent out hundreds of a particular product you know two things. You know what number one they can send out hundreds of products or thousands of products whatever it is and number two they have the supply. A lot of the people on Aliexpress maybe only have access to a hundred of a product or fifty of a product and if you want to scale your business that's not going to help you out if they've run out of product. I also like to look at the reviews and the star ratings that's super important. If I'm going to buy anything from Aliexpress it's going to have to have a four point five rating or higher. Four point five rating or higher. The closer I get to five the better off I feel but that tells me that that's a reputable seller on Aliexpress and you may be tempted to go with one that has a three point nine or a three point seven because the price is so low well there's probably a reason why it's low and if you're looking at reviews you'll probably figure out why. Now what price range do you look for? I look for products anywhere from one dollar to twenty dollar price range. I think that's a good price range especially if you're selling to a cold market. That way I can sell that product for anywhere from twenty dollars to say you know sixty dollars. If I'm selling it to the general public I'm going to look for at least a fifty or sixty percent profit margin. You're going to need that profit margin. That sounds great but you've got shipping that's going to come out of that if you're offering free shipping. You also have all your marketing fees that are going to come out of that so you need to be able to make a profit and to do so I think you're going to need at least a fifty to sixty percent profit margin on anything you sell. Now I think two things that people don't do that they should do on AliExpress is number one ask a question of the seller up front. This is really important because if they don't respond or they take too long to respond that's how they're going to handle you from that point forward. You'll know you'll know up front okay if you ask a question and they're not responding or they take too long to respond. The other thing I would tell you to do is to order one of the products and have it sent to you. I think that's super important. That does you a couple things you can look at the quality of the product. You can also take pictures of the product for your sales page. Too many people will buy stuff from AliExpress and the pictures they put on their sales page are the exact pictures that were on AliExpress. Generally those pictures aren't that great on top of the fact that everybody else has the same pictures and if your picture looks like everybody else's picture then you're going to be competing on price and that's not the position you want to be in. So I would get the product. I would check it out. I would make sure it is up to your standards whatever those standards are and you can also see how long it's going to take to get to you. You can see where the communication is going to be. Then you can rule out or use a manufacturer or distributor on AliExpress with a little bit more confidence. That's not to say that you shouldn't use a tool to bring in some of that information to your Shopify store. A tool if you have a Shopify store a tool that I like to use is Oberlo. Oberlo is a great tool that actually integrates with AliExpress and will pull over all the pertinent information. Now it's going to pull over the description. It's going to pull over all the photos. It's going to pull over everything but you'll want to take that information and you'll want to make it better. So whatever the description is you're probably going to want to rewrite it. Keep in mind that description was probably written by somebody whose English is not their first language. Okay. So it may not even really make sense but it does have good information and there may be the specs of the product the size the measurements of the product the weight of the product and you're going to need all of those in your product sheet anyhow. So bring all that in add to the description order the product take your own pictures and then you're going to have a whole lot better sales than you would without doing that. Now this is the end of part one but this is not the end of the training. Okay. In the next part part two of this video I'm going to show you how to bring those products over to your website how to integrate those products to your website and how to set them up so that you're going to be successful. So go to part two of this video right after this there's going to be a link in the description below. Watch part two of this video and then you'll have the complete story and you'll be able to sell products and source them from AliExpress. Thanks so much for watching this video don't forget to subscribe if you haven't done so hit that subscribe button down there don't forget to ring the bell turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live. Yeah. And don't forget give me a thumbs up too. Okay. I need that thumbs up. I did prepare a $97 course but you know what? I'm going to give it to you for free. It's in the description below just click the link and learn $97 course 100% yours. I want to get your comments on this have you dealt with AliExpress have you dealt with other drop shippers put that information in the comments section below what luck did you have? Did you have good luck? Did you have bad luck? What happened? Tell me all about it and if you have any questions about starting running and growing an online business please put those in the comments below. Thanks so much for watching this video I'll see you in the next one. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel and click that little bell right here so you can be notified every time I do a new video. Also click on one of those videos there keep watching on my channel.