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AliDropship Review: Is It the Best WordPress Dropping Plugin?

Last Updated on August 31st, 2023

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Are you interested in starting dropshipping with AliExpress on WordPress? In this AliDropship review, we’ll give you a look at a tool that allows you to create a working dropshipping store without the need for an eCommerce plugin. AliDropship will help you find and import products, keep important product details synced and fulfill orders on AliExpress with the click of a button. Keep reading for a deeper look at the features and a hands-on tour of how everything works.

Quick note: there’s also a separate version of AliDropship that’s designed to work with WooCommerce. We’ll also be reviewing the AliDropship WooCommerce version, so you might want to check that out if you’d actually prefer to work with WooCommerce.

AliDropship Overview

AliDropship - Start AliExpress Dropshipping Business On WordPress

AliDropship aims to handle every part of the process of setting up an AliExpress dropshipping store. For starters, it allows you to import products from AliExpress with a single click. Thanks to AliDropship’s Chrome extension, you’ll actually browse the real AliExpress website and then choose exactly which products to import. Beyond that, AliDropship comes with a built-in image editor to help you clean up product images. Once you import some products, AliDropship offers dedicated WordPress themes that help you control how your store looks. You’ll also be able to set up pricing automation rules so that you can control your markup/margins. 

AliDropship will also automatically sync products to keep information consistent. For example, if a product goes out of stock at AliExpress, AliDropship will make sure it’s out of stock at your store, as well.

Finally, once you sell some products, AliDropship lets you fulfill orders with a single button click. Beyond that, it can also track those orders and automatically send email notifications to your customers to keep them updated on the status of their orders. For the price part, the AliDropship plugin is, fortunately, a one-time payment plugin. This is actually a steal as it includes both the plugin for WordPress and WooCommerce for only $89. AliDropship also offers hosting for 1 year which costs $48 and Sellvia Monthly Plan which is good for $39.

AliDropship Key Features

Every plugin has its own key features that make them stand out from the countless number of plugins in the market. Here’s some of them

  • Import is now made easy because of its one-click feature
  • WooCommerce compatible. This feature is ideal for business owners who wants to enhance the functionality of their online store
  • Life-long free updates and support after buying the plugin
  • Allows to search desired products easily on AliExpress.com and add them easily to your website
  • Advanced pricing markup formula

Pros

  • One time payment for a plugin. No subscription plan needed
  • Easy and quick to install
  • Import of products are straightforward 
  • Niche store that is readily made

Cons

  • Unfortunately, AliDropship only provide forum support
  • If you host several sites, you need to pay $48/year which can be pricey in the long run.

AliDropship Installation & Setup

Before anything else, install and activate AliDropship at your WordPress site. Through the WordPress plugins repository, you’ll get AliDropship as an addition to your sidebar where you can manage all of your efforts. 

Choose an AliDropship Theme

AliDropship offers 7 different themes for the standalone version, all of which are free. If you want to use the standalone version of AliDropship (which is not the WooCommerce version), you’ll definitely want to use one of AliDropship’s dedicated themes, as these will make sure your store looks great.

Dropshipping Themes For AliDropship-Based Stores

From there, select the desired theme that you want for your site.

Import AliExpress Products

After selecting the desired theme, there are two ways on how to improve products from AliExpress.

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First, AliDropship integrates with the DropshipMe service that we’ve previously reviewed (it’s from the same developer). DropshipMe is a curated set of 50,000 products that all have been edited to create high-quality descriptions/images. Learn more in our DropshipMe review.

On the other hand, you can get the AliDropship Chrome extension and browse the AliExpress site. That’s what we’re opting for this review. Once you install the extension and sync it to your site, you can proceed to the regular AliExpress site and look for products that you want to import. For now, you will see an AliDropship toolbar at the top. You can either import a product straight to your store with the default AliExpress details.

AliDropship - toolbars

By clicking the Edit button, it will now open a popup window that allows you to configure all the product details, including:

  • Description
  • Images – you even get a built-in image editor that lets you crop, blur, add content, etc. This is really helpful for cleaning up the messy images you’ll sometimes find on AliExpress.
  • Pricing
  • Variations
AliDropship - edit

Now, once you use the extension to import products, those products will show up in the Products area. If you didn’t get the chance to edit, it will show up in the Import List instead, which means they are not ready to go live yet. However, if you use the Edit popup within the extension, you can directly publish products (as you’ve already edited all the details).

AliDropship - products

When you edit a product, you’ll get a new Product Options box that lets you adjust all the details, much like how WooCommerce works

There are some excellent options here, like the ability to create cross-sells to promote other products and any other Product Options to create an appealing sale display on your site. 

AliDropship - product options

Beyond that, you also can import product reviews, including an option to translate all reviews into your site’s language and add other restrictions. These options will allow you to improve your sales better. 

AliDropship - reviews

There’s also an interface that allows you to bulk import reviews, which you can access by going to AliExpressImport Reviews. That’s pretty convenient if you have a ton of products.

Here’s what it looks like on the front-end once you publish the products. 

AliDropship - frontend interface

Another convenient feature that AliDropship has is, it adds this front-end button that allows you to quickly edit basic product details from the front-end.

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How to Configure Default Settings

On a real site, you’ll probably want to configure the settings first. But we suggest starting with importing products first, then configure the settings. By doing this, it saves you time by editing the products one by one.

To set your store’s settings, you’ll head to the Settings menu in the AliDropship section.

Here, you’ll get settings for everything from prices to payment methods, SEO, notifications, and other important settings to help you with your dropshipping journey. 

AliDropship - general settings

Let’s hit the following highlights. 

The Pricing tab allows you to set up markup formulas, as well as automatic price rounding. The neat thing about this is that you can automatically apply these formulas to your store. 

AliDropShip - price markup formula

The Payments tab lets you configure the payment methods that are available to shoppers. You can choose from a ton of different payment processors, including the big names like:

  • Stripe
  • 2Checkout
AliDropship - payments

For the credit card, you can also enable:

  • PayPal
  • Cash on delivery

The Shipping tab allows configuration where you will ship the product, as well as which shipping methods are available. The plugin includes some helpful descriptions of the AliExpress shipping methods if you’re not familiar with how things work. 

AliDropship - shipping

And here’s a quick summary of the other tabs:

  • Notifications – lets you configure the automatic email notifications, like order confirmation emails and “order shipped” emails.
  • SEO – lets you configure basic title/description settings, including an option to create a formula for AliExpress products.
  • Coupons – lets you choose whether to activate the coupon section on the checkout page and create coupons (if you do).
  • Accounts – lets you choose whether or not to allow shoppers register accounts.
  • Taxes – lets you add and configure taxes.

How the Order and Fulfillment Process Works

Now that you’ve set everything up let me show you how the order and fulfillment process works from both your perspective, as well as the perspective of your shoppers.

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1. Customer Purchases Product on Your Site

Side note – We thought that the UX is done quite well. From the slide-out cart to the AJAX checkout, your shoppers get a smooth shopping experience.

To get started, your shopper adds a product to their cart.

AliDropship - add to cart

The theme used which is the “Da Vinci” theme, uses a multi-step checkout process (no page reloads required, though – it’s a nice AJAX system), so they will first enter their shipping details.

After that, they will now choose the shipping method

AliDropShip - checkout

Now that the shipping method has been chosen, it’s now time to choose their payment method and complete the order.

AliDropship - secure checkout

From there, a confirmation screen will flash and that’s it. Now, it’s your turn to process in that order. 

2. You Handle Fulfillment on AliExpress

Next, you need to actually order that product on AliExpress and ship it to your customer, which AliDropship makes really easy.

If you go to the Orders tab in your WordPress dashboard, you’ll see the new order, along with its fulfillment status.

AliDropship - orders

When you click on an order, you’ll get a much more detailed screen, along with the option to Place Order Automatically

AliDropship - order details

If you’re logged into AliExpress, AliDropship will automatically go to AliExpress and fill in all the relevant details, including picking product variations and entering your customer’s address.

AliDropship - fulfill order automatically

All you need to do is click the Confirm & Pay button at AliExpress to finish the order – AliDropship will do the rest. 

Dedicated Reporting Area

Finally, AliDropship gives you a dedicated area where you can view reports for your store.

One nice thing here is that you can connect AliDropship to your Google Analytics account to bring in traffic data and analyze your store’s conversion rate. 

AliDropship - dedicated reporting area

Wrapping Up

Overall, AliDropship was impressive because of the depth of its functionality. From importing products from AliExpress to configuring your store itself, you get a lot of control.

Additionally, there are nice little touches, like the well-designed AJAX checkout page. Regarding the eCommerce functionality, it was a pleasant surprise to see how polished everything was.

Finally, automatic order fulfillment is a great feature and will make it super easy for you to fulfill any orders that you get. All in all, if you want to create an AliExpress dropshipping store on WordPress, definitely give AliDropship a look. Also, take note that we’ll also be reviewing the WooCommerce version of the plugin, so that’s another option if you like the functionality but want the benefits of using WooCommerce.

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A team of WordPress experts that love to test out new WordPress related software, WordPress plugins and WordPress themes.