AliExpress is the largest online store for dropshipping products.
It’s an online market place like Amazon, where you can buy or sell anything. It’s like Amazon, but in China, and most of the items come from China and Hong Kong.
Even so, there are a lot of AliExpress sellers with warehouses in other countries, such as the UK, Germany, and even the US. You can find out by reading their profiles or what they say about their products.
AliExpress has millions of products and thousands of companies that sell them for very low prices. Because of this, you should know what a market like this means. When there is money, bad things happen.
And where there are cheap goods, there are also fakes and things that aren’t very good.
There are both good and bad items on AliExpress. It’s the best place to find great deals on products and items you can dropship.
Let’s talk about some tips for buying safely on AliExpress, how to find good quality products, and how to spot people who try to scam others by selling fake goods.
We will also talk about some tips to help you find suppliers who can help your business succeed instead of make it a huge failure.
How to Buy Things on AliExpress
We can now say that ratings can be made up. Even though that’s true, we also need to remember that you can’t make up thousands of reviews.
Also, you can’t leave a review on AliExpress for any product if you didn’t buy it. So, it doesn’t make sense for sellers to make up reviews, since they would have to pay AliExpress transaction fees just to make up a review.
The first thing you need to do is look at how other people rate the seller. To do this, click on a product you’re interested in and look at the top of the list of products.
Here, there is a place where the seller’s overall average is written down.
- Item as Described
- Communication
- Shipping Speed
There are five stars for these three. They are also rated as Below Average, Average, or Above Average.
Overall, the score should be at least 97%, if not more. This means that out of every 100 orders the seller fills, three customers are not happy. You can lower your standards if you want to, but don’t say you weren’t warned.
Next, don’t do business with sellers who have ratings that are two steps below Average. This means that this seller isn’t good at what he does.
Next, click on the word “Average” or any other rating. This will take you to a page with a lot of information about how this seller has done. Read the negative comments and decide if they are true or if you can still live with them.
Since AliExpress is a marketplace for people all over the world, you will see comments in languages other than English. Do your due diligence. Copy and paste them into Google Translate, then read them.
No matter how good the product looks or how cheap it is, if the seller isn’t doing a good job, you should run away. We can promise you that it will cost you a lot.
How to Check if an AliExpress seller is safe
The second step is to find out as much as you can about the seller. If you are looking at a list of products, look in the upper left corner of the screen to find the store name of the seller.
Now, go to Google and look up this seller to find out what kind of online presence they have. If the seller has Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, it’s likely that they mean business and want to do business with you. Look for customer comments on these social media accounts.
Red flags go up when a seller doesn’t have any social media accounts. Avoid these sellers because they probably only sell on AliExpress and don’t care what their customers say.
When a business has a social media presence, it leaves itself open to criticism. If they don’t mind being criticized, they are serious about what they are doing.
If the company has its own website, that’s much better. You can check out the company’s website and see if you can buy things from there. You want to find a seller who is active in the online world in general, not just on AliExpress.
SheIn, an international brand that sells on AliExpress, is a good example of this. It has its own website where its products are actively sold all over the world. You can also tell that a lot of thought went into making the site because it looks very professional.
Read AliExpress’s policy on refunds and returns.
Check to see what the seller’s return policy is. There must be at least one. If the seller doesn’t take returns, look for a different one.
Even if the seller lets you return things, that doesn’t mean you should go all in. Make sure that the terms of the refund are fair. How will you figure out what’s going on?
First of all, how long will it take to ship from China to your country? It doesn’t make sense if it takes 60 days and the seller only accepts returns within 30 days.
Second, how will the seller give you your money back? Some sellers on AliExpress will only give refunds through PayPal. Can you accept money in this way? If not, look for a different supplier.
Pay on AliExpress only.
The site has a buyer protection program, and if you’re not happy with what you bought, you can file a valid dispute as long as you did it on the AliExpress platform.
If a seller tries to get you to leave the site and do business outside of AliExpress’s payment system, they are likely trying to scam you. This kind of seller doesn’t want to pay their transaction fees, and if they don’t ship your item, you can’t get your money back.
Even if you file a dispute, AliExpress can’t help you, which is the worst thing that can happen. You can’t prove you bought something from this seller.
Read the Buyer Protection program’s Terms and Conditions and follow the platform’s rules.
Check how many items have been sold.
How many items had already been sold? When you look at a list of products, you should also see if they are in stock and if they are popular.
People will never tell their friends to buy something bad, of course. Because of this, you should never buy a popular item from a seller who has only sold a few of them and has bad feedback.
Just below the product title, you can see how many of that product have been sold.
You can also see how many people have rated the product and how many people have rated it.
Read about the product on AliExpress.
This is how people are always tricked. They think that what they see on the picture will be what they get.
If you are new to dropshipping and still learning the ropes, you are doomed to fail if you think this way.
You see, just because the picture shows a woman with pants and a shirt doesn’t mean you will get both. There’s no doubt that only one is being sold. Either the shirt or the pants.
If you read the description, you’ll also learn some interesting facts, such as:
- The item doesn’t have a battery.
- Has no box
- Colors may be different.
Be careful, because this will tell you if a gadget doesn’t work with a brand, even if the name of the product says it does. A charger, for example, might have a long name like “Samsung, Apple, Motorola, and Asus charger.”
And if you look at the description, you’ll see that it doesn’t work with Samsung. So why put that brand name on the title at all?
SEO is the answer. Some sellers do this so that when someone searches for Samsung chargers, their product will show up on the list. This is, at the very least, unethical, and you shouldn’t buy from sellers like this.
You should also avoid things that aren’t real. No seller on AliExpress will ever say that, say, the Nike item he is selling is a fake.
Instead, the seller will use terms like OEM, which stands for “Original Equipment Manufacturer.” If you read this, you might think he won the lottery. No, he did not.
Consider it. Do you really think Nike will let you sell its products on your own if you are the original equipment manufacturer?
No, that would be breaking the agreement. The company will be sued, and Nike won’t buy from them again. So, it’s not worth taking the chance. So, a seller who says he is an OEM for a brand is not an OEM; he is a liar and a pirate.
A watch for only $5? You have to be kidding!
Even though you can find really cheap trendy products for this price, you should keep in mind that they will be of very low quality. You need to understand that even though manufacturers make a lot of products, quality costs more.
The raw materials are more expensive, the processes are more strict, and experts are paid to check the quality of a product before it comes off the production line and is sold.
Good things cost a lot of money. And cheap products don’t care about quality at all because they’re all about quantity.
If a product is too cheap, you’re probably selling low-quality items that no one will ever recommend and no one will like. If you do this, you will have a lot of trouble with people asking for refunds.
You should also expect that people will say bad things about you online. Customers who are upset are more likely to leave reviews and long, angry comments on your social media pages.
Don’t take the chance. Forget about making a lot of money and always think about quality. People won’t mind spending money on a product if they know it will last for a long time.
Summary
Now that you know how to stay safe on AliExpress, all you have to do is put them into practice. Don’t put your safety and security at risk just because you want to open your store as soon as possible.
There are a lot of fraudsters, scammers, and people who sell low-quality goods on the internet. It is also a place where people who don’t know anything about customer service can sell their goods.
As was already said, AliExpress can be a gold mine if you want to find products to sell that you can ship to your customers for you. But be careful and keep yourself safe.
People who get frustrated with their drop-shipping business are often the ones who didn’t carefully look for good partners. So, they lost money, and now they say that AliExpress is a scam or that the whole business of dropshipping is a scam.
Don’t be tricked. Your failure is caused as much by scammers and fraudsters as it is by your lack of effort.
