 If you're consistently using Aliexpress for your dropshipping business, then you can be setting yourself up for failure with extremely long shipping times, 13 hour shifts time, some of the worst possible quality items, and because of those last two, consistent chargebacks. At least that's what people want you to think. I'm not saying that Aliexpress is the best dropshipping supplier, but those misconceptions are honestly a thing of the past. Thing of the past. Now, I'm not saying that it still doesn't exist. Aliexpress still has a ton of different suppliers that have some extremely long shipping times, some very bad quality items, and some products that can ultimately get you chargebacks. But this day and age, not every single supplier does that. You just need to know what to look for in a supplier, which don't worry, we're going to cover that a little bit later on. But for now, Aliexpress is really, it's not a bad platform. It's gotten a lot better over the years, but it's not necessarily the best one. It's not the most sustainable one. Ultimately, if you keep using Aliexpress for your main supplier for pretty much all of your different dropshipping products, then you really can be setting yourself over failure because with Aliexpress, there is a lot of issues with things like price changes and stock changes. So these are a few things that can really affect your business in the long run. Aside from that, a lot of suppliers on Aliexpress don't necessarily specialize on a particular type of product. A lot of them just do a little bit of everything. Tell me you heard that too. So quality can be a little bit all over the place as well. And Aliexpress really is mainly a supplier from China. While some of their suppliers do have warehouses around the entire world, others do not. So because of that, you're still putting your business at risk for some pretty long shipping times if you don't choose the right ones. Or let's say if one of your local suppliers runs out of a particular item, then they're going to source it from one of their other ones, even if it's overseas. Like I mentioned, Aliexpress isn't a horrible platform to use. It can get you by. It's pretty good to actually start testing out different items, specifically because there's so many items on there to choose from. So if you want to test out a few different items, Aliexpress is a pretty good place to go on and start looking for new items or start purchasing a few new items to be able to test the market and just see what sells. But again, it's not going to be the most sustainable. The prices aren't going to be the best because primarily most of the people that are on Aliexpress, most of the suppliers, they're dropshippers themselves, except these are dropshippers that are going to be located in other countries like in China. So their prices can be cheaper than some of the other suppliers that you find. But at the end of the day, you are going to be paying a little bit more, depending on the product that you're sourcing. So instead of using Aliexpress, I'm going to give you a few different suppliers that you can choose from to actually help you get started and start off on the right foot. These are all some of the most reliable suppliers that you can source from with some of the best quality items. And on top of that, as a little sugarcoat, they also have some extremely fast shipping. Now, before we go on to those suppliers, there's a few things that you need to know prior to selecting one. So this is a quick checklist of just simply four different items that you need to look for in every supplier, prior to making them one of your primary suppliers. So the first thing you need to do is look for good reviews. You need to look for good reviews from the supplier themselves and from their products. So one of the easiest ways to do this is simply look up a business under TrustPilot and see what people are saying about them. Remember, don't get turned off by negative reviews because at the end of the day, everything is going to have negative reviews. People are more inclined to leave a negative review than to leave a positive one. If people have one tiny negative experience, they can potentially try to blow that up out of proportions. So if you see a few negative reviews, don't stress about it too much. Things happen. Just make sure that there's a lot more positive reviews versus the negative ones. Now, that's for looking at the supplier reviews. Now, as for the item reviews. So on this part, you need to be a bit more picky. So when you look at your different reviews, when you're looking at the product reviews, one, make sure that they're not too generic. So if you see some reviews that simply say, I loved it. This is a great product, great, fantastic. Then be a bit weary. A lot of the times people pay for reviews and a lot of these reviews are placed by bots. So they're going to leave very generic reviews. So what you want to look for are some specific reviews. Oh, my wife loved this glass vase and they put up a picture of the glass vase. Or my mom loved the necklace that I gave her and they show a sample picture as well. These are the types of reviews that you want to look for. Now, having pictures isn't necessarily mandatory, but it can definitely be very helpful. For one, it can show you that these are actual people purchasing the item. And two, it can help you gauge the quality of the item simply by looking at it through some real pictures. So the second thing that you need to do is you need to make sure that they have a lot of reviews, not just three or four or even 20 or 30. You want to make sure that these suppliers have over 50 reviews at a minimum. Make sure that, again, they're all legit, vet through all of them, read through most of them, make sure that most of them are positive. If you just have 10 or 20, that's not enough for you to actually make a decision. 10 or 20 is still too new. That means that this business probably hasn't even been around that long. So you want to make sure that the suppliers that you're working with all have positive reviews and that they have multiple reviews. Again, minimum 50 or more. The third item on the checklist is actually one that I just covered, which is make sure that you look for reviews that have images. And the last one, the fourth thing that you should do on your checklist is reach out to the supplier. For one, you want to make sure that they have good communication. Now, good communication can consist of a few things. One, that you can speak to them clearly. And two, that they actually get back to you in a timely manner. You don't want to reach out to a supplier that's going to get back to you a week from the time that you reach out to them. And on top of that, have bad communication skills, either they're rude or you simply can't understand them because of the language barrier. Before we get started, let me know down in the comments below which AliExpress alternative is your favorite? What supplier do you always go to source the majority of your products? Let me know down in the comments below and also let me know what you love about them. I would love to hear your thoughts on this and see what everyone's using. So instead of using AliExpress, what should you be using? Well, the first supplier that you should be considering is none other than AutoDS. So without a DS, not only do you get some of the best and most training dropshipping products, you also get some of the most training products for print on demand. So without a DS, you're pretty much getting two businesses under one platform. Now, not only that, but AutoDS also has tons of benefits that you can take advantage of for your dropshipping store. Check some of these out. So to start, you have the marketplace on here. You're going to have some of the best selling items out there, period. Not only that, but you're also going to have some pretty quick shipping times. So check this out. Some of these take two, three, even one business day to get to your customer. This isn't the time that it takes for the company to ship it out. This is the time that it takes for your customer to receive the item. So as you can see, some of these shipping times are pretty quick. Aside from that, you have a few different categories to choose from. But this is what I like to do. So there's a few different suppliers under AutoDS. You can select from AliExpress, Amazon or AutoDS suppliers. Now, the AutoDS suppliers are all suppliers that have been thoroughly vetted for one, to ensure quality and two, to ensure their shipping speeds. So once you select the AutoDS suppliers, then you're going to have a few unique options to say the least. So for one, you're going to see a few that are AutoDS suppliers with discounted prices. This means you're going to be getting some of the best pricing on these items. Aside from that, this is my personal favorite one. And that's the ones that have customizable branding. Now, when you have customizable branding for your item, that means that your product is going to ship with a custom thank you card. That thank you card is going to have your logo on it. So that way it can add a nice little personal touch for your customers. Now, let's say I'm checking out some of the items on the marketplaces and one of them catches my eye. Specifically, this one, I've seen this humidifier tons of different places. And I think it's a pretty cool item. Thing has a nice wall factor and there's a lot of market demand behind it. So what am I going to do to import this to my store? Check this out. This is the easiest thing that you can do. So once you click into it, you're going to see a little bit of different information. But what we're looking for is this import draft button. All we got to do is just click on that. If you have multiple stores, then you select your store. Otherwise, it will go to your default store. And all you do is click on import draft. And then that item is going to be in your draft section. Once that item is added to your drafts, then here you can customize everything that you need to. So the title, you can change it to whatever you need. If you need help coming up with a title, you can optimize it directly on the page as well with AI. Not only the title, can you optimize with AI, but you can optimize the description as well. Back to the products page, though. On here, this will vary depending on the store that you're using. So if you have eBay, you'll be able to see the different categories. If you have Shopify, you'll see the different collections and so on. You also have the options out of a few different tags. These tags are going to help you keep track of what items are selling and what items aren't. It pretty much helps with analytics. And you're also going to be able to choose your shipping method. So you're going to have cheapest, cheapest of tracking and the fastest. Always go with cheapest with tracking simply because it's going to be, for one, the cheapest and two, you're going to have guaranteed tracking. If you choose the cheapest while you are going to have some of the cheapest prices, you aren't necessarily going to always have a tracking number. And as drop shippers, we all know that that is essential. And if you choose the fastest with tracking, sometimes these shipping speeds can be pretty slow, but then they can charge you a lot. So it can get kind of messy. So I highly suggest you avoid that unless you know for sure that your supplier has clear tracking. What I mean by that is sometimes they're going to offer five to seven day tracking for $10, then they'll offer some other service that's going to be maybe 20 to 30 days for about the same price. It's weird. I don't know why some suppliers do that. So to clear things up and avoid any unnecessary problems, just go ahead with the cheapest with tracking. Now under the variants tab, this is where you can choose the different variants. You can edit them. You can change the pricing. You can change whatever you need on here. You can even delete some of the different variants. So let's click into one of these. Now, as you can see, our buy price is $45. Then we have an option for fees with a percentage and a dollar amount for fees. So whatever we're being charged, we can add that on here. So let's say eBay charges us an 8% final value fee. Just go ahead and put that here. 8% and it'll automatically calculate the rest of the numbers for you. Let's leave this one at zero. So on top of the 8% fee, how much do I want to make as a profit? Let's say I want to do 40% get rid of that. So with an 8% fee that we have to account for, we want to make a profit of 40%. Technically, we're going to want to increase our prices by 48%. So what's going to happen here is we're going to be taking this into consideration and selling our product at $68.48 with a profit of $18. Now, you can do that individually or you can select all of them at once. Click on edit and do the same thing through here. Then you have your different images. Here you're going to have also an image editor so you can add some text if you need to. You can remove or add images as well. And once you're ready for your product to go live on your store and you want people to start making the purchase, then you simply click on save an import and it'll be live in your store within seconds. So as you can see, without a DS, you pretty much have an all in one system where you can automate your entire process. Not only does it take care of your product importing, but as a supplier, not only do you get some of the best suppliers, but you also get tons of benefits like product importing and even fulfillment services. So once the order comes into your store, it gets automatically redirected to your supplier. Once the supplier fulfills the item and ships it out, they're going to update out of DS with a tracking number and out of DS will automatically update your marketplace with it. So all you have to do is focus on finding more winning products, focus on more product research and focus on scaling. Not like I said, not only do you get some of the best drop shipping products, but you get tons of different print on demand products as well. Some that are simply customizable by slapping an image on the front or the back of the shirt, and a few others that can get pretty complex like these over here. These are fully printed. You can print on the entire thing. So this hoodie over here, you can print on everything from the top of the hoodie all the way to the bottom of the sleeve. The options here are endless. So as you can see, out of DS isn't just a supplier or an AliExpress alternative. It's a complete all-in-one drop shipping platform that can help you scale your business to complete new heights. So if you're on the fence about trying out of DS, if you've been thinking about trying it, then just check us out over on our website, autods.com, and you can sign up for our trial right now for just $1 for two weeks. Now, the second supplier on this list has to have some of the fastest shipping period, and that's Amazon. Now, I know a lot of people are thinking, I can't drop ship from Amazon because my account can potentially get flagged or restricted. Well, there is a great way around that. Remember how I said autods is one of the best suppliers and all-in-one drop shipping platforms? Well, we also have a service called Fulfilled by Autods. So if you do want to use Amazon as one of your suppliers, then this is one way that you can completely mitigate the risk of having your account banned. So what happens with Fulfilled by Autods is let's say we want to sell these lights right here. Let's go with this one. So we want to sell these lights right here, right? All we have to do is go ahead and cut this link or copy it, go back over to Autods, add a single product, and put in the link. Then we click on Edit Now, and everything from that Amazon product page is going to be automatically imported to our draft section where we can make any adjustments. So we make all of our adjustments and we save and import and it goes live on our store. Somebody comes to our store, they make a purchase. So what's going to happen? Autods is going to go to your Amazon account and make the purchase through there, right? No, Autods actually has a lot of different Amazon buyer accounts that it can use through the Fulfilled by Autods service. So that way, your Amazon account is never touched. Amazon is never going to know that you're using them to drop ship their products. So once you have Fulfilled by Autods setup and you start importing all of these different products from Amazon, you're not going to run any risk of having your accounts banned. So with that being said, I love Amazon as a supplier. From one, you can find some pretty cheap items on there. Two, they have some of the fastest shipping period. You're going to find either next day or two-day shipping at the most three days. Now, one great example for products that you can drop ship from Amazon has to be things like these sunglasses. Like, look at this. You get one pair of sunglasses. So you get a total of two sunglasses for $8.99. And you get them with next-day shipping. This has one-day shipping. Something like this can easily be sold on a drop shipping website that specializes in sunglasses. And you can easily double or even triple the price. Amazon also has some pretty good customer service. So if you ever have any issues with any order, you can contact them and they'll help you out fairly quickly. Not only that, but communication through Amazon is also never going to be an issue. Every single person that I've ever spoken to on there has always had very fluent English, even if they're not located in the US. And the third and last supplier on this list is DHK. Now, while DHK can be similar to AliExpress, there is some significant differences. For one, DHK is pretty much its own supplier. So everything that's sold on DHK is shipped by DHK. Not only that, but they have global warehouses all belonging to the same supplier, DHK. So you're always going to have some pretty quick shipping no matter where you're drop shipping to. And one of my favorite things about DHK is the fact that you always find some sort of promotion or some sort of coupon going on. Simply by signing on to the website, you're going to get prompted for your email and you're going to be offered a discount. Not only that, but look up here. You also have the new buyer coupons, which there's always something going on there. So there's always a way to save money if you use DHK. So those are our picks for the top AliExpress alternatives. Which one was your favorite? Let me know down in the comments below. I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Also, if there's any other recommendations that you all recommend for us to check out, leave them down in the comments below as well. We would love to see what you're all suggesting and where you're sourcing your products from. Huge thank you to everyone, especially if you made it all the way to the end. As always, if you watched it this far, that means you enjoyed this video. So make sure you smash that like button. Make sure you hit that subscribe button and ring that little bell notification so you don't miss out on any future videos. Once again, huge thank you to everyone for watching. My name is Mario with Out of DS. Catch you all next time.