You already know about two good options to start your dropshipping business: AliDropship and Shopify. Which is better for you? Let’s compare them! Welcome to the dropshipping blog. My name is Ella, and today we will show you the difference between two dropshipping tools for your dropshipping business.
This article will be very useful for those who want to start their own dropshipping business or want to try a new tool. So, a lot of dropshipping stores use Oberlo because this solution is popular among newbies and those who decided to use Shopify. These two corporations, I mean Oberlo and Shopify, are well-known due to their good marketing strategy. Sometimes you won’t even know about other good solutions to make a reasonable choice. That’s why I’m trying to give you more information.
It’s totally understandable why people choose Shopify. It’s a powerful platform made for e-commerce businesses with nice designs and easy customization. However, though AliDropship is less popular than Shopify, it has its advantages which you might love more. Well, let’s move on to the first thing to compare! These two solutions use different platforms.
AliDropship is based on WordPress, though Oberlo uses the Shopify platform.
What does it mean? We have already compared the pricing difference in one of our previous articles, so you can read the detailed calculations there. We just want to mention that the WordPress platform is free and the AliDropship plugin costs only $89, and it’s a one-time payment. You won’t have to pay any extra commissions or fees for your products or transactions with AliDropship. But you will still have to pay some credit card transaction fees if you add any credit card payment gateway.
They charge people 2 or 3 percent normally, and this can’t be changed, unfortunately. This is the way the banking system works. As for the Shopify platform, It has different plans with their extra fees and restrictions. The “Basic” package of Shopify is $29 per month (plus a credit card transaction fee). The “Shopify” plan costs $79 per month (plus a credit card transaction fee for each transaction).
Purchasing the “Advanced” Shopify plan is $299 per month (plus a credit card fee, of course). Finally, the “Enterprise” package starts at $2,000 per month. Shopify has its own payment gateway, and they will charge me 2% more for using any external gateway. The Oberlo app costs nothing if you have fewer than 50 orders per month, for example. But we are sure that it’s not the number of sales you really deserve.
So the Basic Plan costs $29.90 and the Pro Plan is $79.90. Do you see this enormous difference in cost? One-time payment without recurring fees versus monthly payments and fees or commissions.
Both Oberlo and Shopify cost a fortune in the long run.
As I mentioned before, AliDropship doesn’t charge any extra commissions or fees from you, but you still have to pay credit card transaction fees to banks. What are Shopify’s transaction fees? There are two different fees: the one that Shopify charges on your turnover (ranging from 0.5% to 2%), and another one for the payment gateway (such as Paypal, Stripe, or Authorize.net).
net). The Shopify fee can be avoided by using Shopify Payments (only available in the USA, UK, and Canada). The credit card transaction fee is an additional fee of around 3% plus 30 per transaction. Well, if Shopify with Oberlo is so much more expensive, why do people still use it? There are reasons for that!
You don’t need to have any special technical knowledge if you use Shopify. Shopify relieves you from choosing your hosting provider because hosting and payments for it are already included in your plan.
A domain is not included, so you can buy a domain through Shopify ($13 per annum) or redirect an existing one. However, buying a domain name and choosing your provider is not as difficult as you might think. You can do it yourself in a few minutes using AliDropship instructions.
Still, the offer with no headache of buying and setting up everything yourself is quite attractive, isn’t it? Your drop shipping website based on Shopify and Oberlo solutions is kind of owned by Shopify. You are renting it while paying monthly fees. There is always a risk that someday your online store could be shut down without any reason. They could just close it and text you that your business presents a level of risk that they will not be able to support with Shopify.
I saw these situations myself. Check the links in the descriptions. People lost their stores, their time, and their money. You will probably probably be fine, but I want you to be warned that this might happen. However, when you use WordPress, it’s under your control because it’s a standalone website.
It’s totally your business because you are the only one who has access to your data.
You can install AliDropship or WooCommerce with AliDropship Woo and work with your dropshipping store any way you want. Nobody will take it away from you. Both solutions provide similar functionality for a successful dropshipping business, such as importing products from AliExpress, customizing them, tracking shipments, and filtering products with ePacket.There is a little difference in functionality: the AliDropship Original version (they also have a WooCommerce version) still doesn’t have wishlists for May 2018 and Oberlo doesn’t support importing reviews from AliExpress.
And don’t forget that if you use Shopify, your business has to be registered in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, or Singapore. AliDropship doesn’t make you do it. All solutions help you to import products from AliExpress, which is essential for our business. However, Oberlo has limits on the number of products you can import to your store and the number of orders per month depending on the plan you choose. When you use the AliDropship Plugin on WordPress, you don’t care about the number of products or orders.
It is not limited. Shopify provides you with both paid and free themes. So you can pick any of them to see which design fits your store the best. Their price range varies from free to $180. It’s always better to choose best-sellers or best-rated ones.
There are three built-in themes for AliDropship’s original plugin. They are always free. Our stores are based on the DaVinci theme, for instance. Someone might find it a bit old-fashioned, but it converts the best of all and that’s why we use it.
The Rembrandt and Michelangelo themes look like this.
The design layout is nice. All of the themes are mobile-friendly and integrated with the AliDropship plugin. You can switch between themes without losing your data. You can also download the AliDropship Woo plugin if you use WooCommerce on WordPress. There are plenty of themes for Woo, too: Storefront, Shopper, and Flatsome are the most popular.
To increase conversions in your store, you might like to add more functionality by setting up different addons. All solutions have their own add-ons. Some of them are free. They help with your integration with other services and search engines or encourage your store visitors to make more orders, for example, by returning your potential clients to your store if they didn’t buy something after putting something in their cart.
Shopify makes you pay around an extra $10 monthly for almost each of these solutions, but they have a really large choice of them because they let third-party developers create add-ons.
This is an advantage of the Shopify system. By May 2018, AliDropship had seven essential add-ons, the majority of which were also compatible with the WooCommerce version. Some of them are free, while others require a one-time payment. The three most important are: abandoned cart, social rabbit, and recent sales pop-up. Oberlo gives you an opportunity to choose products from selected suppliers proven to be trustworthy, but they have a bit higher prices.
This marketplace is called Oberlo Supply. But do you really need this option if you use the AliExpress marketplace? You can find reliable suppliers on AliExpress with AliDropship extra features showing additional ratings for all the suppliers.
Plus, you can check AliExpress reviews. Also, you can search for similar but cheaper products before importing the one you like by just clicking this button.
When you use Shopify, you don’t need to know a lot about the technical parts of an online store. It’s really easy to customize. If you are afraid of the technical part, it’s worth paying. However, you won’t need much experience to set everything up on WordPress.
Just carry out the instructions from the knowledge base or ask AliDropship support to help with some of the settings.
You’d like to launch your online store but don’t want to spend tons of time manually uploading products? There are some turnkey solutions for you! You can always buy someone’s store on the market if you want to use Shopify. Or you can get a custom store that the AliDropship team will build for you. There are three packages to choose from.
The price depends on the number of products and some other features you might need. And you will be able to import even more products by yourself. The price starts at $299. They have already created over 7,000 dropshipping stores for people just like you. As you can see, both systems are worth trying.
They both have nice features, and you can make a choice based on your needs.
The fact that I’m not going to hide from you is that most of our stores work on AliDropship as we found it more reasonable in the long term. For instance, the most profitable of our stores makes more than $30,000 per month. It’s about $360,000 per year of net profit. If we used Shopify, we would pay over $8,000 in commissions and fees.
We strive to create a system that performs in the most financially effective way.
That’s why we didn’t think that spending some time learning WordPress was too much. It took me less than a week to learn the basics and to start operating a store. I believe you can do the same if you really want to save your money and maximize the profit you can get! But if you don’t want to spend time on it, you can always take another option and get a ready-made store.
Did you like this article?
There will be more video reviews and marketing tutorials that we are going to share with you for free! See you in the next article!
No spam, notifications only about new products and updates.
Our leading digital agency offers everything you need to get started, including website design, graphic design, book publishing, writing, convert files, legal services, video and animation services, and social media marketing tailored specifically to your needs. Request A Quote now and let’s get started today!
Premier Digital Agency
