Selling on Aliexpress with a BigCommerce store is easier than you might think. As one of the top three online consumer marketplaces on the planet, AliExpress draws plenty of business for North American drop shippers selling a hugely wide range of products. Cheap sourcing and smooth order processing enabled by various app extensions make selling on Aliexpress a tempting and highly profitable business model for many BigCommerce users.
What’s so great about AliExpress for BigCommerce users?
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- You don’t have to maintain any inventory. It’s a great option if you’re just starting out and don’t want to make a big investment in your stock upfront.
- You can often get paid by your customer before payment is due from the manufacturer.
- Plenty of manufacturers selling on AliExpress also offer drop shipping arrangements with resellers.
- You can find plug-in extensions for help at every stage: sourcing products, vetting manufacturer/sellers, syncing orders, payment processing and product feed software.
Although it recently announced a new built-in integration with Walmart.com, BigCommerce doesn’t have a lot of these built-ins. As with most marketplaces and selling channels, you’ll need to get an extension to work with AliExpress direct merchants as your product source.
What to look for when selecting extensions for selling on AliExpress from your BigCommerce store
Sourcing products
The AliExpress Dropshipping Center is the best place to look for suppliers of products you may want to carry. The Center also features some turnkey solutions where they’ll create a store for you, or you can clone an existing store that uses Aliexpress. But, you will be using your BigCommerce store so that’s not a concern.
You can filter lists of suppliers to find the right combination of source products and service options, like ones that offer e-packet delivery. You’ll have to do some due diligence to make sure the source is not selling knockoff products that violate copyright or trademark laws.
Importing product listings to your store
Most app extensions will enable you to import products directly from the AliExpress Product Catalog to your BigCommerce store. The better ones will have a complete attributes list set up that’s ready to transfer. This would include product details like Category, Name, Price, Description, and, MetaData and a complete set of product images. Some also come with filters for importing certain kinds of products based on AliExpress Category name or keywords.
Pricing Rules
AliExpress product sales are highly price-sensitive. A good extension will have a pricing rules tool that lets you set minimum and maximum prices dynamically throughout the day.
Order Placement & Syncing
A good order placement extension will let you order from AliExpress with a single click. It should automatically fetch all relevant product details from your BigCommerce store feed into AliExpress for order fulfillment. Not having to re-enter all the order data each time is a big time saver.
API Compatibility
Make sure the extensions you choose have API compatibility with AliExpress APIs, to ensure that all automated order processing and logistics go through correctly every time.
- Aliexpress Workbench Program: Join the Aliexpress DropShipping Workbench program and automate your DropShipping business with Aliexpress reliable suppliers.
- There is also an AliExpress Chrome extension that comes with the major apps, which makes product list importing even quicker. Add the Chrome Extension from the Chrome Web Store: Aliexpress DropShipping Assistant.
You can find apps for all these uses in the BigCommerce extensions store for as little as $10 per month, but with these, you shouldn’t expect a high level of service. They only serve up the basics, with little customer support should you require troubleshooting.
The main advantage of selling on AliExpress with BigCommerce is about marketing. It’s about your ability to use your own storefront, your own customer service team, and your own product descriptions to differentiate yourself from the dirt-cheap sellers of the same products in the same marketplace. Your imagery will be more attractive, your descriptions more enticing, and everything can be more English-grammatical compared with the majority of sellers listing directly with AliExpress.
Shoppingfeed currently offers the AliExpress shopping channel to our users in the EU. While not yet available to North American users, we expect to be adding AliExpress at a future date.
With these tools and your own marketing knowledge, your BigCommerce store can source products from AliExpress, while you start raking in the profits.
