How to Find AliExpress Best Suppliers for Dropshipping: Tips and Good Practices

As dropshipping is the kind of business model that requires no inventory on your side, you can rely on suppliers to dropship products to your customers. However, you also lose full control over your supply chains, which may expose your dropshipping business to some potential risks such as low-quality product offers, inventory issues, delayed or lost packages, and communication challenges. In this case, you can look for the best suppliers on AliExpress (an enormous marketplace) to mitigate these risks as you can as possible.

Whatever your dropshipping experience is, you can learn how to look for AliExpress suppliers that best suit your business with this comprehensive blog.

What Is AliExpress

AliExpress is an online marketplace based in China that serves buyers throughout the world. As a leading eCommerce platform, it sells more than 100 million products on its website at competitive prices.

Pros and Cons of Finding Suppliers on AliExpress

You may wonder whether AliExpress is the right place for finding suppliers for dropshipping, for this, the content below can help you make up your mind.

Wide Selection of Products

As one of the biggest marketplaces across the globe, AliExpress provides dropshippers with access to a vast selection of products from numerous suppliers. You can find a diverse range of items, including electronics, clothing, home goods, accessories, and more.

Competitive Product Pricing

Due to the direct connection between consumers and manufacturers or wholesalers, AliExpress generally offers competitive product prices. Suppliers on the platform often offer products at lower prices compared to local retailers or other online platforms.

Now you know the benefits of collaborating with suppliers on AliExpress but finding the best AliExpress suppliers does take effort. Let’s move to the next section to learn tricks on how to locate top-notch suppliers.

Little Control over Inventory

As suppliers hold and manage inventory for your dropshipping business, you have limited control over your supply chain. When your supplier runs out of stock or can not deliver goods on time, it will result in inconvenience for customers and potential disruptions in fulfilling orders.

To ensure that your supply chain is always in good condition, you can stay in touch with multiple suppliers in case of a stockout or discontinued items from your current supplier.

Increased Competition

Since dropshipping has been around for a long time and is easy to start from scratch, many entrepreneurs choose to sell as a dropshipper. What’s more, AliExpress is a widely-used platform where numerous merchants source products. All that means when you find out a trending product on AliExpress, there will be many other competitors who sell that product.

If you want to differentiate yourself from the competition, you need to brand your own business. To build a brand for your dropshipping business, you can check this article.

Tips for Finding the Best AliExpress Suppliers

To tell the truth, AliExpress is a good platform for dropshipping, but you will find that there are quite a lot of suppliers selling the same product item or category, which makes it difficult for you to distinguish which supplier is the most reliable. Don’t worry, with the following tips, you can find out the best AliExpress suppliers.

Assess Supplier Reputation

Even though you partner with third-party suppliers to manage your virtual inventory and ask them to ship products to customers on your behalf, you are responsible for every aspect of your dropshipping business. This requires you to assess their reputation to ensure that you can take minimal risk.

For one thing, you can check the product purchases for one supplier. This will show you how the supplier is preferred and trusted by customers. When you search for a specific product on AliExpress, you can see pages of suppliers that sell that product. You can sort them by Orders and results will be ranked by order volume.

For another, you can check the supplier’s profile on AliExpress to learn about their credibility. You can first check their years in business. Make sure they have been on AliExpress for more than 1 year because new suppliers may not have enough experience. Then you can check their badge and positive feedback percentage. If you see there is a "Top Brand" badge and the percentage is 95% and above, the supplier could be included in one of your choices fo suppliers.

Inspect Product Performance

Besides looking into the supplier’s reputation, you can research the supplier’s product through the AliExpress product data including the product cost, rating and customer feedback. You can easily access them in AliExpress to have a knowledge of how the product of the supplier is performing.

For all of the three parameters mentioned above, you can check them on the product details page.

Communicate with Suppliers

Reaching out to suppliers directly lets you know the communication speed and quality between you and suppliers. When you turn to suppliers for addressing any problems or concerns you may have, those who respond to you promptly and provide clear and helpful information can be your top option. This not only gives you a good communication experience but also makes you improve your business management efficiency.

Figure Out Shipping Details

As shipping options affect your business costs and target market, it is essential to inspect shipping details like shipping method, shipping time and shipping costs and more.

You can go to AliExpress to set the "Ship to" country based on your target shipping destination and then check the corresponding shipping method, estimated arrival time and costs available. Through careful analysis and comparison, you will know if the supplier provides cost-efficient and time-saving shipping options.

Check the Return and Refund Policy

Reliable sellers often have clear policies in place to protect the interests of their customers. Before you determine which suppliers to partner with, be sure to look at their return and refund policies to have an idea of their protection level for buyers.  

When you find the seller's return policy, read it carefully to understand the conditions and requirements for returning an item or eligible refunds. Check details such as the time period for returns or refunds, whether the seller offers free return shipping, and any specific requirements for returning the product or asking for a refund or associated fees and charges.

How to Find the Best AliExpress Suppliers with DSers Easily

AliExpress indeed provides you with detailed information about its sellers that you can utilize to compare and analyze. However, that work takes up a lot of your time and energy. To streamline your manual work and speed up the process, it’s recommended that you use DSers, the AliExpress official dropshipping app, to find the best AliExpress suppliers. In the following part, you can learn how DSers Supplier Optimizer makes it easier to spot quality AliExpress suppliers that have better performance and lower risks.

Check A Sorted List of Suppliers for One Product

Once you have determined the product that you want to sell, you only need 2 steps to search for the suppliers who are selling the exact same and similar product, then compare and choose the most desirable supplier that fits your dropshipping business.

Step 1: can Copy the AliExpress product link

Step 2: Paste it into the Search box and click the Search button

In detail, the screen will show you pages of lists of suppliers and display useful data including product cost, sale numbers, shipping price, shipping time and product rating for each supplier product on the Product card. You can sort the suppliers by each of those criteria according to your business need. Also, you can compare the data of each supplier easily.

Filter Suppliers Based on Your Selected Shipping Options

Whether you want to cut down your shipping costs or want to specify a shipping option that you want, you can leverage the "Shipping Details" filter to find out the suppliers that meet your chosen shipping options.

The steps are as simple as clicking on the "Shipping Details" checkbox and selecting your desired shipping of origin, shipping destination and shipping provider. The page will refresh and only eligible suppliers will appear on the page.

Quickly Replace Your Existing Suppliers with Better Ones

In the ever-changing eCommerce world, it is necessary to frequently update your business resources such as suppliers. If your current supplier does not match your new business strategy, you can replace it with your desired supplier in a few clicks and seconds.

DSers allows you to use either product image or product URL to search for suppliers for a specific product. With every detailed information you need for a supplier listed on the page, you can easily compare the data of every supplier and make informed decisions while choosing a better supplier for your product.

Conclusion

Supply chain management is a crucial part of dropshipping, so dropshipping with a reliable supplier could contribute to your dropshipping success. As we have written in this article, as you decide to search for the best AliExpress suppliers, you need to review a lot of factors. One good solution to this is to use DSers Supplier Optimizer to reduce your search workload and speed up the process.

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