AliExpress Dropshipping Shipping Times
Shipping times have been a fear-inducing topic since the dawn of drop shipping let’s be honest in the face of Amazon Prime shipping it can feel hopeless to compete against two-day shipping, but it’s not drop shippers are building successful e-commerce businesses every day, even while they’re telling their customers that it will take 2 to 3 weeks for their products to arrive.
I know that’s because I’ve talked with so many six and seven-figure dropshippers who have done just that. Based on all the knowledge and insights those drop shippers have shared with me I put together this article to debunk some shipping myths that might be stopping you from starting your business today I’ll tackle several important questions:
First, I’ll tell you how long it actually takes for a drop sharing product to get to customers, I’ll dive into Aliexpress and show you exactly where you can look for this data not only from the supplier but from real customers too, then I’ll give you tips on how to overcome the “where’s my order email” – this is actually a lot easier than you think.
Finally, I’ll tell you how to cut down shipping times by finding Aliexpress suppliers with warehouses in your own country. That’s right US – warehouses, French warehouses, Australian warehouses all of it I’ll let you know how you can ship using local fast shipping methods and find that in Aliexpress.
Table of Contents
Why AliExpress Dropshipping Shipping Times Better?
There is not a single day that goes by that I don’t hear a first-time entrepreneur bring up dropshipping shipping times. A lot of you have asked us in the emails: How long it takes for products to arrive, whether customers will wait that long and what you the entrepreneur can do about it?
Yes, dropshipping shipping times are longer than Amazon’s shipping times (even if you use shopify chrome extension), no that doesn’t stop customers from buying, our interviews with successful drop shippers wouldn’t be possible so today I’m going to be transparent with you about how to handle long shipping times.
First things first – let’s talk about how long drop shipping times actually are. Shipping times depend on a few different factors so let me break them down for you, and in fact let’s jump into Aliexpress so it’s easier to follow along.
Oberlo Google Chrome Extension
Let’s say you found a winning product you’re excited you want to sell the 3d crystal ball, so you look it up on Aliexpress to import it into your store. The first thing you want to check is that you have the Oberlo Google Chrome extension installed, this is a free extension that allows you to import products from Aliexpress directly into your Shopify store.
I press that Chrome extension I’ve got a couple of options
I have show shipping information turned on and when that’s on I have the option a packet selected here country that I’m shipping to is US and currency is USD and I’m hiding items without this option let me just show you what all of this does when I turn everything off and I update the settings then I can’t tell what I’m glancing at the results:
what takes a long time to ship and what ships quickly, however when I click the extension and click show shipping info I can see a lot more:
with these options selected I can now see which products have a packet shipping available to the United States because those results are highlighted in green, what’s more I can see the cost of a pack of shipping as well
ePacket Shipping
ePacket shipping by the way, is a shipping option that was born out of an international trade agreement and the aim of the agreement is to make it easier for e-commerce entrepreneurs like you to ship products from China to the rest of the world.
It is cheap or free, it’s relatively fast and it makes it easy for you to track packages sent around the world ePacket shipping is available to a really long list of countries. On average, ePacket takes 12 to 20 days to deliver products to your customer, but I can give you some more precise data in just a little bit.
As you can see here there are a lot of suppliers on Aliexpress that carry the same product, so that’s why having this Oberlo Chrome extension is helpful, it helps you to narrow down the suppliers only to the ones that offer a packet shipping results.
But there’s another thing to note besides e packet shipping and that’s processing time, you can see processing time indicated in gray at the bottom of each listing:
So when a someone orders an item from your Shopify store, it’s your job then to order the product from Aliexpress (aliexpress best sellers)-afterwards your supplier recieves the order. There’s a time period during which the supplier gets the order, and then they get the product and they wrap it up and they prepare it to ship and then they put it on the plane or boat to ship it. That time in between is called processing time. Shipping time is the time it takes between when the package is being dropped off at the boat or plane and the time it reaches your customer – so total delivery time is processing time plus shipping time. That’s why you want to look carefully at the processing times available for each of your options here, obviously the shorter the better.
Features
Let’s say you find the product you want to sell with ePacket shipping available and a reasonable processing time of let’s say three days – you can click that product to get an even more accurate idea of its shipping time – on the product page below the quantity options you’ll see shipping information and an estimated delivery date:
if you click the drop down menu you’ll see even more shipping options:
Now I see I’ve got three shipping options and the estimated delivery is right here the free shipping with epacket which is what I want because epacket is easy to track and reliable plus it’s free in this case takes 18 days. So this means that if a customer in the US places an order for this products a day and you the entrepreneur fulfill that order with Oberlo, the supplier today the customer will get this product within 18 days.
