Considering using WordPress and WooCommerce to start your own drop shipping store?
With drop shipping, you outsource order fulfillment to a third-party supplier. And in the drop shipping world, AliExpress is by far the biggest collection of drop shipping suppliers.
However, AliExpress has tens of thousands of suppliers and millions of products, so finding the exact products that you want to sell via your store isn’t exactly a walk in the park.
DropshipMe is a WordPress plugin that aims to change that by connecting your WooCommerce store to a curated selection of ~45,000 AliExpress products, all with edited titles and images.
You can then import any of these products to your WooCommerce store with a single click and start selling them right away.
Keep reading my DropshipMe review to learn more about how this freemium plugin can help you start a drop shipping business based on WooCommerce.
DropshipMe Review: What It Does (And Doesn’t Do)
Before I get further into this DropshipMe review, I think it’s important to spell out exactly what DropshipMe does and does not do.
DropshipMe connects your WooCommerce store to a catalog of curated products from AliExpress. Rather than having to browse through the millions of products at AliExpress, you can browse the curated catalog right from your WordPress dashboard.
Beyond curating the products themselves, DropshipMe also:
- Edits the product title to make sure it’s clear and correct
- Edits the images to make sure they’re high-quality (i.e. you won’t run into weird watermarks that you have to remove)
Once you find one or more products that you like, you can import those products straight into your WooCommerce store as real WooCommerce products (that is, they function just as if you created a new WooCommerce product from scratch). DropshipMe even handles setting up product variations and other little details.
Beyond that, you can also import product reviews as real WooCommerce reviews, including lots of options to filter reviews by:
- Rating
- Language
- Pictures
- Etc.
That’s basically the full feature list.
Now, let’s cover what DropshipMe does not do. DropshipMe does not automatically:
- Sync prices after the import process
- Manage order fulfillment
- Sync inventory
If you want those automatic features, DropshipMe is built to integrate well with a separate plugin from the same developer called AliDropship. AliDropship lets you put your store’s AliExpress product management and order fulfillment on autopilot (learn more about the differences here).
Basically:
- DropshipMe lets you import products and reviews from a curated catalog, but it doesn’t do anything with those products after you import them.
- AliDropship works on an ongoing basis to automatically sync prices/inventory and send orders to AliExpress for fulfillment.
DropshipMe Pricing: Free To Get Started
While it doesn’t use this terminology, DropshipMe basically uses a credit pricing system. That is, you pay a one-time fee to be able to import a certain number of products. There are no ongoing fees to use the plugin – you only pay based on how many products you want to import.
DropshipMe lets you import your first 50 products for free. After that, you can purchase different packages depending on how many products you want to be able to import:
- 100 products – $29
- 500 products – $119
- 1000 products – $199
DropshipMe seems to also have bonus deals going on quite often, which gets you extra credits.
How To Use The DropshipMe Plugin At Your WordPress Site
Now that you know exactly what DropshipMe does, let’s go hands-on and I’ll show you how everything works on a real WordPress site.
When you first install and activate the DropshipMe plugin, you’ll need to enter your API key, which you can get by signing up for a free DropshipMe account (remember – you get to import your first 50 products for free):
Once you enter your API key, DropshipMe will tell you exactly how many products you can still import, which ensures that you always know where you stand:
How To Browse And Import The Curated Products
To browse DropshipMe’s curated set of products, you go to Dropship Me β Import Products in your WordPress dashboard. This interface lets you search for everything from inside your WordPress dashboard, whereas a lot of the other AliExpress dropshipping plugins force you to use a browser extension along with the regular AliExpress site:
As you can see in the screenshot, there are currently 47,435products contained in the curated database. To filter those products, you can:
- Search by keyword
- Filter by category
- Add filters for minimum or maximum price
- Add filters for minimum or maximum number of orders
- Filter products that have a warehouse in a specific location (e.g. China vs the USA)
- Filter out suppliers that use the popular ePacket shipping method, or a number of other popular methods. You can also filter out free shipping.
You can also mix-and-match all these different filters as needed. For example, here’s a look at backpacks that are sold by suppliers with a USAwarehouse and cost between $20 and $30:
So what are the differences between the results that you’d get searching AliExpress directly and the results from using DropshipMe?
Here’s a quick example search for “samsung galaxy case”.
You can see that DropshipMe:
- Returns 56 results
- Has quality product names
- Makes it easy to see your margins
Searching for that same keyword at AliExpress returns 736,771 results. You can also see how the product titles are all over the place. Look at those random numbers and names in each product at the AliExpress website:
That’s the reason why you might want to use DropshipMe – it just makes the process of sourcing products a lot simpler and less overwhelming.
Viewing More Details For A Specific Product
Once you find a product that you’re interested in, you can click the View Details button to see more information about that specific product.
This will show you information like:
- Variations
- Description
- Reviews
If you have the AliDropship extension, you can also get some insights in the Product Analysis tab (I don’t have that extension, so I’m not sure how helpful that information is):
Importing Products
Once you’ve found some products that you want to start selling, DropshipMe makes it easy to either:
- Import a single product
- Bulk import multiple products
First, you’ll want to use the Import settings options at the top to choose how to handle your imported products when it comes to:
- WooCommerce categories
- Prices
- Published status
Then, you can click the Import button to import a single product or use the checkboxes and bulk action drop-down to import multiple products:
Once you choose either option, there’s no further work needed on your part.
Viewing Imported Products
Once you import some products, you can go to the normal WooCommerce Products area to view the products just like you would a product that you created yourself:
If you chose to import your products as drafts like I did, you can then go in and verify all of the details before publishing the product.
As you can see below, DropshipMe does a good job at importing everything, including the product variations and product gallery (I didn’t make any manual changes – this is exactly how DropshipMe imported the product):
How To Import Reviews For Your Products
Once you’ve used DropshipMe to import some products, you can also import real customer reviews for those products to add some social proof to your store.
To do that, you go to Dropship Me β Import Reviews.
First, you can use the various filters on the left sidebar to choose which reviews to import. Some of the helpful things that you can do here are:
- Only import reviews from a specific country
- Translate reviews into your local language
- Filter out low ratings
- Ignore product images or only import reviews with images
Then, you can click the Import button at the bottom and DropshipMe will automatically import all of the reviews that meet your criteria. When it finishes, you’ll see a summary that lets you know exactly what happened:
After testing, I would recommend not using the auto translate option as it doesn’t look very credible.
All the reviews that DropshipMe imports are treated like regular WooCommerce reviews. That is, they’ll show up wherever your theme displays WooCommerce reviews:
And you can also moderate them by using the Reviews box in the product editor just as you would any other WooCommerce product.
Basically, all the review functionality is handled using native WooCommerce features.
Final Thoughts On DropshipMe
DropshipMe delivered on exactly what it promised:
It offers a curated selection of products that are easy to import to your WooCommerce store. What’s more, all of the products have edited titles and images to ensure you can publish them right away.
While I certainly didn’t check every product in DropshipMe’s catalog, I didn’t encounter any of the normal AliExpress issues when it comes to titles or images.
It’s also a lot easier to browse through DropshipMe’s results than trying to filter the hundreds of thousands of results on AliExpress.
One important thing to remember, though, is that you’ll almost certainly want to pair DropshipMe with the developer’s AliDropship plugin if you want to keep your inventory in sync and benefit from automatic order fulfillment. That plugin will cost you an additional $89 on top of whatever you need to pay for the products that you import with DropshipMe.
But when you put those two plugins together, I think you get a really convenient way to set up an AliExpress dropshipping store using WooCommerce.