Making money online and being your own boss has never been easier. The key to any online business endeavor is finding a gap in the market and filling it. Once you have that nailed – you can turn your daily musings into a money-spinning blog, Instagram snaps into paid advertisements, or start a successful dropshipping business while having your breakfast in bed on a Sunday morning. The latter is slowly but steadily becoming one of the most exciting online business opportunities around. So what exactly is it?
Dropshipping is a superb way for anyone with a knack for entrepreneurship to fill such gaps, and make money online without having to invest lots of money in inventory upfront. Essentially, dropshipping is a retail fulfillment method which allows stores to sell products they don’t physically keep in stock. Once a store sells a product, only then it purchases the product from the wholesaler and has them ship it directly to the consumer. It’s less hassle to run an e-commerce business when you don’t need to deal with physical products. Dropshipping will also eliminate the costs of running a warehouse, packing, shipping, and continually managing stock levels.
It sounds too good to be true, but as amazing as dropshipping sounds, it has its challenges. It can be a hassle to find products with reasonable prices and dealing with suppliers is just frustrating. A super handy tool Oberlo aims to alleviate these pain points and allow people to run their dropshipping stores with ease. Instant product importation, auto product syncing and orders auto-fulfillment are just a few features the app offers to manage for your online store.
Oberlo is changing the dropshipping game one feature at the time. So, what makes this app such an absolute gem?
Table of Contents
Instant Access to AliExpress
Considering most of the dropshipping business stems from AliExpress or Chinese manufacturers, it’s refreshing to see a tool that provides easy access to the thousands of AliExpress suppliers and effortless importing of products to your online store via the Oberlo app. It’s like going shopping – browse, select, import and start selling to your customers instantly. No need to worry about product images, details and prices – the app ensure all your items from AliExpress are accompanied by the latter every time. Their ePacket feature also addresses the widely discussed issues with shipment times. Most items on AliExpress ship from China and customers face up to two weeks waiting time before they can get their hands on their purchase, which poses a lot of challenges for dropship sellers. Oberlo acknowledges the increasing demand for faster delivery times, and so their ePacket feature allows imports of items with the fastest delivery times only.
The magic of order fulfillment
What makes Oberlo stand taller than the rest, is the effortless order fulfillment function, which makes dropshipping what it should be – easy and thoughtless. The item purchased on your Shopify website will automatically sync up with Oberlo. All you, as the kickass entrepreneur have to do then, go into your Oberlo dashboard, find what order needs fulfilling and just click the “Order Product” button. The app takes over and fulfills the order for you – it goes into AliExpress, finds the item purchased on your site, fills out the shipping details and rests on the page waiting for you to approve it by pressing the “Buy” button. Your role is then complete, but the order fulfillment magic does not end there. Oberlo also takes care of the packaging and shipping, automatically alerts your consumer of when the item was shipped and provides them with a shipping tracking number to keep an eye on their order.
Suppliers, inventory, and prices
Users can easily switch suppliers with a click of a button, without having to go through a traditionally painstaking divorce process faced by traditional retailers. Oberlo keeps an updated inventory of your stock, ensuring you don’t sell an item that is out of stock and tracks the changes in prices. If your supplier drops or increases the price, the app will notify you in case you want to adjust your margins.
Oberlo Costs
The best thing about Oberlo is that it’s free to use!
Packed with incredible benefits the free Starter plan will get your business up and running in no time. The plan supports 500 products, 50 orders per month, automated order fulfillment, product syncing and more. The basic plan is in high demand, which will set you back less than $30 a month and supports 10,000 products, 500 orders, and in addition to everything else – offers shipment tracking and order fulfillment monitoring. Pro will take care of 30,000 products, unlimited orders and will allow multiple users to run your widely successful store for less than $80 per month. Exceeding your plan limit is not ideal, but it won’t affect your order process, and you may upgrade or cancel your plan at any time.
Oberlo is a great invention to make selling easier for the business owner. Anyone planning to start a dropshipping business should seriously consider using Oberlo. Although there are other tools of the same kind out there, none have managed to hone in and relieve the pain-points dropshipping brought with it. This tool makes dropshipping faster, simpler and widely accessible – just the way it should be.