In this lesson, you'll learn how to find the products that you want to sell from suppliers. You can trust on a website called AliExpress I'll show you how AliExpress works, and I'll also show you how to find those great suppliers. For now, let's just go to aliexpress.com. This is AliExpress. It's a popular Chinese e-commerce marketplace that sells hundreds of thousands of products. Ultimately, you're going to use Oberlo to virtually import products from AliExpress to your online store.
I'll explain how that works in detail in a future lesson for now, let's just get set up on AliExpress and to do that register for an account it's completely free and it's really easy. Simply click join. And then once you enter your email address and come up with a password, you are completely good to go. Now use this search bar to find each of the products on your list of five that you want to sell.
What you're doing here is finding the best suppliers for the products that you want to sell in your online store. If you have a good supplier, the rest of the drop shipping process is going to be so much easier, good suppliers ship on time. They communicate well and they can even help you scale your business since its suppliers are so important. Let's go over what to look for when you're choosing your supplier on AliExpress. The first thing that you want to look at is order count an order count appears below each listing. Once you've searched for products on AliExpress, the higher the order count, the more people are buying that product. Okay.
That's pretty obvious, but a higher order count also signals that a supplier is capable of dealing with high order volumes without screwing things up. Since you're looking for products with a high order count, go ahead and sort your results by orders. Now let's talk about the next thing you're going to be looking for, which is product price. As you can tell, the same product tends to be priced differently among different suppliers. This is pretty obvious.
The difference in price Isn't very great and it's pretty arbitrary. For example, some products might be shipped differently just depending on the color of the product or where the supplier is shipping that product from. Price always impacts your bottom line. If you pay more to buy a product from the supplier, then you have less money to budget towards ads or to keep as profit. However, the price you see on the results page, isn't necessarily the total price you have to pay your supplier.
When you click into a product, you get a lot more information, scroll down a bit and you'll see the shipping cost. This cost varies depending on where the product is shipped from and what shipping method you choose. By the way, these options also vary depending on where you're shipping your products to. Right now, AliExpress is showing me options as if I'm shipping to the United States. But if I want to ship to customers in say, France, all I can do is scroll up and click right here.
Now I can see localized shipping options and prices. The important thing to note here is that two products might be priced differently. Different shipping costs could even out that pricing differential. So we're filming in the summer of 2020 and the COVID-19 epidemic is having a big impact on drop shipping shipping options. Usually we recommend that customers choose ePacket shipping to ship products from Chinese suppliers on AliExpress to their customers.
In the past ePacket Shipping was one of the most cost effective, fast and reliable ways of getting packages from suppliers to customers overseas. However, ePacket shipping depends on the availability of passenger planes from China to the rest of the world. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, many passenger planes were grounded that had a big impact on ePacket shipping. And as you can see, when you browse around AliExpress, sometimes ePacket shipping isn't even available, or sometimes it costs so much that it doesn't make sense to go with that option.
As you consider alternative shipping options, a good hack is to check out the customer reviews, click reviews, and you'll be able to see with each review, the shipping method that that customer used to buy their product. Even better, Some of these reviews will note how long it took them to receive their product. You can also check a box so that you only see reviews from customers in your country.
That's the country you're selling to and the country that you indicate in your AliExpress account. My country indicated here is the United States. And so I can check this box and only see reviews from customers in the United States to get a sense for what shipping method they used and how long it took them to receive their product. Use this information, to select a shipping option that's cost effective and fast and all else being equal, choose a shipping method that includes tracking that will help you answer potential customer questions later on. But you know what? I, bet you're looking at these drop shipping shipping times and you're freaking out that's okay. I get it. I've had this reaction before.
So why don't we break here? Because it's time that we have a little bit of a real talk about drop shipping shipping times and how they really affect sales.
