 Most dropshipping tutorials out there are setting you up for failure. The reason is because they tell you how you can start dropshipping, but they don't necessarily tell you how you can continue. You messed up everything. In particular, they tell you to start off using AliExpress as your supplier, which don't get me wrong. AliExpress is great. It's perfectly fine to get started with, but they're not the ones that you want to continue with if you really want to succeed in dropshipping. That's why this video is going to be focused on how you can start your dropshipping business without AliExpress. In this video, I'm going to cover why you shouldn't be using AliExpress and I'm also going to give you a few alternatives that are beginner friendly. These alternatives will give you a few more benefits than AliExpress does. One of those benefits being faster shipping times, which is ultimately going to end up being the secret ingredient to our success. I'll explain more throughout the video. What's going on everyone, Mark here with AutoDS and if you don't know who I am, I am a dropshipper as well as a content creator over here at AutoDS. I've been quite a few years working on my personal dropshipping journey and I like to make content revolving around dropshipping just so that way I can help all of you get your businesses up and running and help you avoid all of the different mistakes that I made when I first started, which trust me, there was a lot. So if you haven't done so already, please make sure you hit that subscribe button and ring that little bell notification so you don't miss out on any future videos. On this channel, we cover anything and everything dropshipping related starting from some of the best tips and tricks to help you get started in the game all the way to some of the best products for maximum profitability. So if that's something that interests you, then just make sure you hit that subscribe button. Now, everything that I'm going to be talking about in this video is going to be available to you in an easy to reference cheat sheet. On there, I'm going to have all of the different links to all of the different suppliers I'm going to be covering as well as all of the different tips that I will be covering throughout the video. Now, if you want access to that, all you have to do is go ahead and comment down below hashtag start dropshipping plus your takeaway from this video. So just let me know what you learned or what your takeaway is from watching this entire thing. Once I see that you want to come into that, then I'll go ahead and reply back with a link to the cheat sheet. Let's go ahead and start talking about why you should not be using Aliexpress at least not in the long run. So Aliexpress is great to test out different products. They have practically an endless supply of different items on there, but they all range with different quality and different shipping times. So this inconsistency is something that could potentially be a problem for us down the line. The reason is because one customer might end up receiving a great product with perfect quality while another might be receiving one that's mediocre quality or the same customer might order two of the same products and end up getting one that's great and one that's not so great. Now picture yourself behind the eyes of your customer actually opening up your package and you hold both of them up in front of you and one of them is great while the other one is kind of broken or it's all scratched up or it just doesn't work. It's going to leave a bad impression, right? As a customer, you might not want to go back to that same store. Of course, immediately, the first thing that's going to happen is your customer is going to end up contacting you and telling you, hey, look, this product is all right, but the other one is not so good. So at that point, you have to start processing the refund or the exchange, contact your supplier, and it just becomes a lot more of a hassle than it really should. Aside from that, shipping times also vary. So one day your customer might order one product and they'll get it within a week, but then that same customer might come back to your store and order another product and get it within a month. Those inconsistencies really resonate with the customer and it doesn't leave a great impression on them. Now, of course, there are ways to combat this. You can always check out the seller's reviews, check out the product's reviews, make sure everything is up to par, make sure everything looks good, and just make sure that they overall have some pretty good and high reviews. Typically, when I look for my products, I look for at least a four-star review, minimum four stars. Now, as mentioned earlier, AliExpress is great to test out different items. You can test it out when you're trying to figure out what products you want to sell or what niche you want to get into. But when you finally decide on a niche, it's not necessarily going to be the best option for you because you're going to be limited to certain products. When you're using AliExpress, the best thing that you can do to be able to actually grow your business is use AliExpress to test out the different products, order them, take a few samples, see how they are, make sure that they're good quality before you actually decide on using one of these suppliers or one of these sellers within AliExpress and actually sending the items to your customers and make sure the shipping times are acceptable. Now, when you find a product that actually starts selling and you start getting consistent sales on that same product, then that's when you want to start looking into some more reliable suppliers. So you want to start looking for suppliers that have some faster shipping times that could potentially give you some better prices. And if you can find the option, find suppliers that can actually print your brand name or your brand logo or your company logo anywhere on either the package, the item itself, or even on just a simple thank you card. Things like this can really make a world of difference with your customer and actually have them come back. Now, from all of the different alternatives that I'm about to give you, this is probably going to be the best one because it has the most features with everything built into one system. And I'm talking about the AutoDS private suppliers and warehouse. So the AutoDS private suppliers and warehouse have probably one of the fastest shipping times, potentially even rivaling Amazon. So if you take a look over at our screen right now, we're currently signed into our AutoDS account. Now, if you don't have an account, but you do wish to sign up, you can start your trial period right now for just $1. So here what we're doing is we're looking at the marketplace. Once we're on the marketplace, we're going to check out the suppliers and we're going to switch this over to AutoDS suppliers. Once we have our chosen supplier, the AutoDS suppliers, we can either scroll down and start looking at all of the different options or we can just go ahead and choose by category. So you have a few different categories over here. So for this example, I'm just going to go ahead and switch it over to the pets category. Now, if you start scrolling down, you're going to see quite a few different items. So some of these actually ship to your customers between 11 to 14 business days. But let me make it clear really quick that that is not the amount of time that it's going to take for your supplier to actually ship out the item. That's the amount of time that it's going to take for your customer to actually receive the item. Now on the corner over here, we actually have a little button that shows fast shipping. We can go ahead and click on that and then we'll see different shipping options. So as you can see, now they start to go down between four to six business days. There's going to be different categories on here that actually ship even faster. So I switched it over to all categories and if we scroll down, then we can see that they actually go down to even two to four business days. So you see what I meant when I mentioned that some of these listings can even rival Amazon. Two to four business days for shipping is extremely fast. And trust me, when it comes to your customers, one of the biggest things that they're going to look for is quicker shipping times. In this day and age, they want everything literally the same day. Whenever I'm shopping on Amazon, a lot of the times I actually look for same-day shipping. Now, I'm fully aware that that doesn't really work with anything other than Amazon because Amazon is really one of the only places that has the capabilities to be able to offer same-day shipping. And realistically speaking, a lot of people actually understand that. So if you tell them that they're going to have to wait about two weeks for their product, for the most part, they're going to be okay with it. But if you start telling them that they're going to have to wait a month or a month and a half for their products, that's when they're going to start getting a little bit iffy about it. And then they're going to start thinking, maybe I should start looking for some alternatives because a month from now, I'm probably not even going to want this product or I'm totally going to forget about it by then. Now, I also went ahead and I looked up a couple of different products to be able to show you a different feature that you can get from the AutoDS private suppliers and warehouse. And that is the customizable branding. This is something that can really leave an impression on your customers and it actually gives it a bit of a personal touch. So a lot of times when a customer opens your package and they see this, they're going to look at it and they're going to think that it's not necessarily a company that's shipping out these products, but potentially yourself or the company owner or the brand owner, whatever it may be. And what I'm referring to is going to be the custom thank you cards. So these custom thank you cards come printed with your logo on the back. The front is already pre-written, but if you look over on your AutoDS suppliers and you see this right here where it says customizable branding. That means you're able to actually print this thank you card with your logo on it. And as you can see, there's also an option for a bag, but that feature is currently not available just yet. So just make sure you stick around in the near future when that does become available. Being able to brand almost anything on your packaging or your product itself really does make a difference in your customer's eyes. A thank you card can make it seem a bit more personal while at the same time it makes it look more professional because instead of just receiving a blank box with nothing on it, and just a product, they receive a little bit extra. Now one last benefit that I do want to touch on when it comes to the AutoDS system is the fact that when you sign up for AutoDS you can automate your entire business. So you can automate your product importing so instead of having to copy over all of the product descriptions, the titles, the images, the variations, literally everything. You simply just go ahead and click on add product over here. If you're not using AutoDS and let's say we're going with only the alternatives that I'm about to mention a little bit later. All you have to do is simply just go ahead and copy over that link. Go back to your add products and you can either do multiple products or you can do single product. In this case, I'm just going to do a single product and all you have to do is just paste the link on there and then publish the store or add it now. If you publish the store it's going to go straight to your store as is. So everything is going to be the way that you see it here. It's going to have the same description, the same prices, the same variations and everything and it'll be ready to purchase. Now that's not my recommendation because at the end of the day you don't want to sell it for what you're purchasing at because you're going to end up losing money. What you want to do is just go ahead and click on edit now and then you can either make all of the necessary edits on the spot or you can come back to them later check out your draft section and make any edits through there. Now, as far as some other alternative suppliers for your drop shipping business the first one we're going to cover is going to be CJ drop shipping. CJ drop shipping has quite a variety of products and they also have different shipping methods. So you have quite the options to choose from looking over at the neck pillow that we just added to our store on auto DS. We can see that if you scroll down a little bit it has a few different shipping method options over here. So you can go with the ordinary CJ packet and if you scroll down you have a few other options. Now some of these obviously do range between 20 to 5 to 30 days which completely want to avoid because at that point just don't even sell that product. But as you can see you also have a few other options such as DHL which has three to seven business days or the first one that I mentioned the CJ packet ordinary and sensitive which can be between 8 to 15 days. Now just like AliExpress when it comes to any of these other suppliers I always recommend that you check out the reviews for both the supplier and the product. One thing that I didn't mention with auto DS is the fact that you're not going to see all of the different reviews but you can always rest assured that the products are going to be of high quality because all of the private suppliers that we have over in our auto DS system are thoroughly vetted for optimal quality. Now going back to CJ drop shipping as we can see here the reviews for Heyang Industrial Co show the item as described it has a 4 out of 5 stars which is alright the service is 4.5 out of 5 which is actually pretty good and the shipping speed which is 4 out of 5. Now what I like to do from here is simply just contact the supplier. I like to contact them send them a message ask them a little bit about the product ask them a little bit about the shipping times and I want to see how quick they reply back to me on top of that I also want to see how good their English is because as you can tell this more than likely is going to be a Chinese company which for the most part any of our suppliers are going to be Chinese suppliers and that specific reason is why you want to actually contact them before you make a purchase because you want to make sure that you can communicate with them if there's any issues or if there's any problems or if you simply have any questions either you or your customer because remember that our customer service is going to reflect our suppliers customer service so if a customer asks us a question about a product that we don't know the answer to what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and reach out to our suppliers now when we reach out to our suppliers if they don't get back to us within the first two or three days that's how long it's going to take us to reply back to our customers and by that time our customers are either one going to forget about the product or the inquiry and two they're already going to have gone to a different supplier or a different store and more than likely already made that purchase now that is the review for the store itself but if you scroll down a little bit you're also going to have the description and a couple of different tabs on here you're going to see buyer review this particular item only has one review but it does say that it has good quality so this has Buone Calidad Segundo Especifical that pretty much means great quality typically you do want to look for products that have more reviews than just one but as a quick example this is what you're going to obscene and another thing you have to look out for is you're going to have a lot of reviews in different languages especially if your suppliers ships worldwide now CJ drop shipping is great if you're not necessarily niching down so if you have a generic store which sells a little bit of everything you can use suppliers such as CJ drop shipping but I do recommend that you find multiple suppliers that sell the same item and make sure you order a sample from those different ones so that way you can just make sure that the quality and the shipping is consistent I always suggest to have multiple suppliers for the simple fact that if one runs out the other one can cover your butt and actually have the item shipped out now CJ drop shipping as mentioned earlier is a wholesale Chinese supplier but did you know that you can actually use retail suppliers meaning you can go to any regular store or you can shop online and any regular store such as Walmart and actually drop ship those items a lot of the times using suppliers like this you can find some really good deals and with companies like Walmart you also have things like price match guarantee now price match guarantees you can go ahead and source your product today but tomorrow if you notice that it's at a 5% discount or a $5 discount then you can simply just reach out to Walmart and have them refund you the difference on top of that price match policies when it comes to different stores of the same category so let's say Walmart and Target if they're both selling the same product but Target hasn't at a discount you can also reach out to Walmart and have that price adjusted using a retail supplier like Walmart is awesome also because shipping times on Walmart are really fast on top of these companies also have absolutely fantastic customer service so if there's any ever questions any concerns you can reach out to them and guaranteed you can almost always expect a reply within 24 hours now let's say you decide to niche down then you can find certain suppliers that revolve around that niche so for example if you decide to niche down for home goods you can always go to Wayfair Wayfair has tons of different home products and they also have their My Way program now the cool thing about the My Way program is on top of getting different benefits such as cash back or different rewards you can also get things like shipping discounts and my personal favorite you get access to exclusive items so by becoming a My Way member you can get access to different products that the general public are not going to have access to so that in itself can actually give you a competitive advantage Wayfair also has international shipping so you can use Wayfair to drop ship in different countries so if you don't want to just drop ship in the US you can also use Wayfair to drop ship in different countries such as the UK Germany and Canada now the last option that I'm going to give you as an alternative is going to be banggood an awesome thing about banggood is the fact that whenever you sign on you're always going to have some sort of discount so you're always going to be prompted with either a new user discount or just some other free shipping discount or whatever else it may be but just remember that with banggood there's always some sort of discount going on now banggood is also a Chinese supplier so again my recommendation to you check reviews reach out so that way you can make sure that the customer service and the replies are adequate and as always try to order a sampler to just to make sure that the quality is up to par now the cool thing about banggood is the fact that everything that's sold on banggood is sold by banggood so banggood doesn't necessarily have different sellers within its network everything is going to be from banggood itself and because of that they can also ship worldwide so you're not going to be limited to just the UK or Canada or the US you can ship literally anywhere in the world because they do have worldwide warehouses and that's how you can start a dropshipping business without using AliExpress hopefully you found this video informational hopefully you found an informative hopefully you found it helpful if you did please make sure to smash that like button and while you're there just also make sure you hit that subscribe button and ring that little bell notification so you don't miss out on any future videos or content remember if you want all of this information in a written format all you have to do is plus your take away from this video once I see that you went ahead and did that I'll go ahead and reply back with a link to the cheat sheet huge thank you to all of you for watching especially if you made it all the way to the end truly means a lot once again my name is Mario with auto DS wishing you all nothing but success in your dropshipping venture and we catch you all next time