Starting an AliExpress dropshipping business in 2025 remains one of the most exciting and accessible ways to enter the world of ecommerce. It offers a powerful model: the ability to sell millions of products to a global audience without ever holding inventory. But while the barrier to entry is low, the path to profit is paved with smart strategy, not shortcuts.

This monumental guide is that strategy. We will walk you through every critical stage, from the foundational legal setup to finding winning products, building a trustworthy store, and mastering the modern marketing channels that drive real sales. Consider this your definitive roadmap to building a resilient dropshipping business.

What can dropshipping business do for you?

“Don’t be afraid to give up the good for the great”
John D. Rockefeller

What is dropshipping and how is it changing the world?

Dropshipping is a powerful business model that does much more than a simple change to a single individual’s life.

Dropshipping literally transforms the modern world and modifies the environment we’re all living in.

This is why we put John Rockefeller’s quote at the beginning of this chapter. More and more people these days are quitting their stable yet unrewarding 9-to-5 jobs in the search of a new, better life of self-employed entrepreneurs.

And, thanks to the dropshipping business model, their dreams come true. Thousands of people quit their regular jobs, wave goodbye to the ordinary life, and embark on their independent business journeys. Maybe, it’s the time for you to start writing your own dropshipping success story?

Dropshipping gives you an easy business start

The simple and easy-to-follow mechanics of dropshipping business means that anybody can launch a profitable venture at any given time.

Look how smoothly it all works:

• You choose a general direction (it is commonly called a niche) for your future business
• Based on this niche, you build or order your own AliExpress dropshipping website
• On AliExpress, you browse sellers’ offers and pick the suitable items for this niche
• You add the images and descriptions of these items on your website and set a higher price for every product
• When a client orders something from your website, you buy the necessary item from the original AliExpress seller, pay this seller the initial product price, and write your buyer’s address in the order form
• The seller arranges the product delivery, and you receive your profit (the difference between the product’s price in your store and the initial price of the same product).

As you can see, if you start dropshipping with AliExpress, you don’t need to make any extra efforts, such as:

❌ Manufacture products, rent production facilities, and spend your time on manual labor

❌ Buy items upfront and bear the risks of investing your finances in undemanded items

❌ Rent storage facilities and employ workers to manage them.

When you’re following this business model, the actual job of producing, storing, and delivering items is the supplier’s responsibility. You, as a dropshipping store owner, only act in the online sphere, and it certainly gives you several considerable benefits.

7 benefits of dropshipping business

It’s easy to notice that dropshipping has lots of huge advantages over all the other types of online business. The most significant of them are:

1. Zero risks

Since you do not need to buy products upfront, or run physical stores and stocks, or employ workers to produce items and manage facilities, there is no risk of having any financial losses.

You simply don’t invest money in any of these areas, and if you spend nothing, you risk nothing.

2. Low startup costs

Many types of online businesses require you to spend lots of money on the pre-launch stage.

With AliExpress dropshipping business, it’s not the case: you can surely order any development services to assemble your store easily, or buy additional automated solutions for effortless store management, or run paid promotions if you like – but it doesn’t mean you must.

3. Immediate access to money

Other types of online business that don’t require you to manufacture your own products, such as joining some affiliate program, or monetizing your blog or website through paid ads, are not fully safe and reliable.

The possibility of getting banned for some reason is quite high, plus, it’s not always easy to actually receive the earned commission. Normally, you get the cash 45-60 days after completing the qualifying transaction, which is not convenient at all.

With dropshipping, there is no risk of losing your money somewhere during the transaction processing. You get the profit immediately after receiving the order payment from your customer.

4. No background required

Many people consider dropshipping as the best solution for beginners in comparison to all the other types of ecommerce businesses. Even the lack of any relevant background and/or technical skills is not an obstacle: everyone can do it.

The story of Alex is quite an illustrative example: the guy started his own AliExpress dropshipping business simply out of curiosity, and, even though he had no specific trading education at all, he managed to make $6,000 in just 4 months.

5. Convenience and flexibility

Much like any other type of online activity, a dropshipping business can be run from any destination on the globe.

Neither your occupation nor your place of living can limit you: Thai students, Canadian housewives, Chezh 9-to-5 workers, Brazilian retired citizens – anyone can start an AliExpress dropshipping business at any point of their life.

Obviously, some managerial tasks need to be performed on a daily basis, but none of them takes much time if you have helpful automated solutions at your disposal.

6. Personal engagement

If you are a fan of space exploration, for example, you can launch an ecommerce store that sells various space-themed items. There are no limits to the opportunities that lie before you: AliExpress offers you hundreds of thousands of items that are suitable for dropshipping, and you can pick any of them to create a wonderful store offer.

Isn’t it wonderful to turn your hobby into a money-making enterprise and profit from something that is your true passion?

7. Incredible prospects

When you are passionate about regular upgrades and improvements in your store, your thoughtful innovations result in the profit growth. The more effort you put into the store promotion, design, and product offer, the better financial results you achieve. The next paragraph explains this idea in detail!

Dropshipping is the business model with an unlimited growth potential

So, dropshipping business model lets you build your own enterprise with the lowest costs possible since you don’t need to invest in manufacturing, storage, shipments, and other product-related issues.

At the same time, thanks to the global nature of the Internet, your business is not limited by any geographic boundaries. You can launch a store while residing in any country on the globe, you can effortlessly reach your potential customers even if they live far far away from you, and with the supplier’s help, you can arrange the delivery of your store products to any possible destination.

What does it mean?

With minimal efforts and expenses, you achieve maximum business efficiency and can thoughtfully invest the money you receive from your first deals into your further growth and development.

A brilliant example of such a smart venture is Zappos, one of the largest USA-based online stores specializing in selling shoes, apparel, and accessories. The business was initially organized under the principle of the dropshipping model, and after a highly promising start, the company founder managed to turn it into a huge ecommerce empire that has gained global recognition.

The success was so thrilling that in 2009, Amazon bought Zappos – the value of this transaction exceeded $1.2 billion. Not bad for a former tiny dropshipping store, right?

By the way, Amazon itself has started as a dropshipping store (kind of). If you check the platform’s history, you’ll find out that during the early days of its running, the website was basically processing queries for books, and redirecting them to the relevant wholesalers and publishers.

This method of organizing the business was a real catch, and the results of this smart management are impressive: Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, has become the first person ever to gain more than $100 billion.

To put it simply, for a dropshipping store owner, the sky is the limit!

And if these stories seem like something ‘far from reality’ for you, here is our own story: everything our company managed to achieve is due to the simplicity and profitability of the dropshipping business model.

Dropshipping made AliDropship one of the industry leaders

We wouldn’t be able to speak about the AliExpress dropshipping business so highly if it wasn’t for our positive experience with this model.

• Thanks to dropshipping, we went from 1 experimental website to 20+ money-making sites in just a couple of years.
• It was dropshipping that let us reach a multi-million dollars monthly turnover.
• Thanks to dropshipping, we grew from a bunch of enthusiastic newcomers into an international company that sets benchmarks for the whole global industry.

The whole story of AliDropship success started from one tiny dropshipping store. We simply created it out of curiosity: we dedicated it to a product type we really like, so it was more of a leisure activity than a ‘real’ business.

It all changed when we started sharing our achievements and failures with the Web.

We described all the ups and downs on the most popular digital marketing forums – today, you can still read what we wrote on Warrior Forum and Digital Point.

Suddenly, we noticed a huge demand for these threads: because of the rare and valuable knowledge shared in these posts, thousands of people were willing to read them. They even became the most popular threads ever in the ecommerce sections of these forums!

We understood that entrepreneurs-to-be were really lacking this kind of information; their limited knowledge was actually stopping them from starting their own successful ventures.

Plus, lots of them said they were even ready to pay for a solution that would simplify all the necessary processes.

That’s how we figured it out: there is a huge demand for a handy technical tool for AliExpress dropshipping business, and there’s an even greater demand for education in the sphere.

So, the cooperation with the dropshipping community began. Lots and lots of entrepreneurs shared their opinions, views, practical notes, and business insights with our team. We, in turn, used their feedback, recommendations, and queries in order to make a semi-automated tool meeting all the incoming requests and requirements.

As the result, we got the opportunity to develop an outstanding product. Thousands of ecommerce fans all over the globe awaited our AliDropship plugin, and it’s safe to say the plugin totally met their expectations.

We kept working on the plugin on a daily basis: as we have created over 20 dropshipping stores to run with our own resources, we decided to use the plugin on every single one of these websites. This way, we can learn what we need to improve in the plugin and how we can modify it for an even greater user’s convenience.

It’s not surprising at all that our stores built with the help of the plugin performed brilliantly. Every month, we process about 5,000 orders across all the stores and invest the profits into the further development of our business.

Providing our current and potential clients with dropshipping tips, marketing strategies, technical details of running a dropshipping store, and other pieces of the business-related knowledge through our blog and forum, we don’t simply educate the new generation of dropshipping store owners. We also look for ways to satisfy even more needs of online entrepreneurs and learn how we can take our own business to a whole new level.

This is why we are continously exploring new growth directions and ways to make starting an AliExpress dropshipping business an almost automated process. Now each and every one of our clients has a lucky chance to get a turnkey dropshipping store pre-loaded with 1,000 AliExpress best-sellers almost in an instant.

We developed tools and processes that allow these stores run almost on autopilot. Add products to your store from our vetted products catalog, run automated PPC campaigns on Facebook, Instagram and more, change design of your store all in one click!

The business means full flexibility: you can conveniently run it from any destination on the globe, combine it with a 9-to-5 job, put on hold if necessary, and even sell for a considerable profit.

Can you resist such a tempting offer to change your life forever?

Why choose AliExpress dropshipping business?

“We made it our mission to make it easy to do business anywhere.”
Jack Ma

AliExpress is perfect for newcomers

In the previous chapter, we were describing the mechanism of dropshipping business while referring to AliExpress as the supplying platform.

In short, AliExpress is a great platform where you can find the best products for your dropshipping store. You don’t buy these items in advance, and you don’t keep them in your own apartment or anywhere else. You simply add the pictures of the desired items on your website, add the necessary description, and set a higher price.

When you receive an order for such an item, you simply pay the original AliExpress seller the initial product price and provide the delivery address of your buyer. The AliExpress seller arranges the shipment, and you don’t do anything: you simply enjoy your profit (the difference between the price you’ve set and the price this seller set).

Many people are wondering: why start dropshipping from AliExpress? What if they take these products from eBay or Amazon instead? Will it make a difference?

So, let’s find out what makes AliExpress the best platform for sourcing items for your dropshipping store!

• Products quantity

Contrary to popular belief, the website doesn’t only contain the offers from Chinese suppliers: here, you can stumble upon numerous goods from the USA, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Russia. In 2020, there were over 100 million items shown on the platform.

Certainly, it opens up incredible opportunities for dropshipping business owners: regardless of their store niches, they can successfully use AliExpress for business and find enough high-quality products to fill their own stores.

• Low prices

Surely, the original seller’s price means a lot for a dropshipping store owner. It’s in your own interests to find a high-quality product that costs as little as possible: the lower is the initial AliExpress seller’s price, the higher your profit is.

For example, you can take a $0.82 product, increase its price 3 times, and sell the same item in your store for $2.5. It won’t be too frustrating for your buyers to purchase this item, because the price is still relatively low; at the same time, your margin will be quite a considerable one.

Now, let’s suppose an identical item on Amazon costs $3. To get the same profit margin as in the previous case, you need to set your own price at the level of $9. Obviously, for your store visitors, this might turn out to be quite a high price, which is why the conversion rate can drop considerably.

AliExpress is famous worldwide for its low prices: if you compare them to the cost of identical Amazon products, you’ll notice that Amazon sellers typically charge much more for the absolutely same items. In this regard, the best choice of the supplying platform is quite obvious, right?

• Worldwide shipping

Both eBay and Amazon have a number of shipping restrictions with regard to the buyer’s location or the type of the delivered product.

AliExpress sellers, in turn, can arrange the product delivery to any destination on the globe. Given that many of them also have warehouses across the globe (in the USA or Germany, for example), it’s possible to reduce the shipping cost: for you, it will mean lower expenses, and for your buyer, it will mean a higher level of customer satisfaction.

Many entrepreneurs are worried about the long AliExpress shipping times: in the world of the same-day delivery, it might seem that 2-weeks-long waiting for a product makes no sense for a customer. Still, we can give you at least 5 reasons why AliExpress shipping time won’t hurt your dropshipping business!

• Sellers’ ratings

One of the best features of AliExpress is an easy-to-understand system of evaluating the seller’s business practice. Every seller has a profile that shows how long ago the store opened, how many ‘followers’ it has, and what its rating is.

In other words, real-life buyers who have a previous experience of ordering something from this seller leave their genuine feedback and describe the quality of the client-to-seller communication, the speed of delivery, etc. It’s really helpful as it lets you easily understand if you can trust this seller with providing supply for your AliExpress dropshipping business.

• Product reviews

As we already mentioned it before, AliExpress is quite an open platform that makes it possible to leave and to evaluate authentic feedback.

This is true not only for the seller, but for the particular items, too: every product description contains a ‘Feedback’ tab that contains the product reviews from previous buyers.

Reading through these reviews, you can get a better understanding of the product features (whether it is true to the pictures, whether its sizing matches the chart, whether it looks presentable, etc.). If you’re not sure whether you really want to add this item to the product list in your store, customer reviews can help you make up your mind.

• Positive attitude

AliExpress sellers are happy to deal with dropshipping store owners. The reason is simple: they understand that such buyers are loyal clients who are ready to establish a partnership for a long-term period.

This is why AliExpress sellers are so cooperative and welcoming: both in their profiles and in the items’ descriptions, they commonly mention that they can make special arrangements for the buyers who do dropshipping.

Usually, these arrangements include an earlier package dispatch, an easy refund procedure (if requested), and the absence of any stickers, written notes, or other in-package elements that would disclose the original Chinese manufacturers.

Quite often, it is even possible to ask an AliExpress seller to include your own promotion materials into the package, to use branded wrapping paper, etc. Obviously, it requires some extra expenses (you need to provide the supplier with printable designs and pay for the local production of these elements), but if you can afford such measures, they will surely help you build your brand image.

AliExpress makes dropshipping easy and profitable

If you’re using AliExpress items as the basis for creating the product range in your store, the whole mechanism of processing orders and getting your revenues is really simple.

First, you visit AliExpress and choose the items that you would like to see in your store.

Then, you import the desired products on your own website. The easiest way to do this is to install an additional piece of software that would automatically transfer the necessary details to your store. A good example of a technical solution that can be used for this purpose is the AliDropship plugin: this tool conveniently imports all the pictures, descriptions, reviews, and ratings for a chosen item, plus, it can effortlessly import several products at once.

Moreover, the plugin has the feature of applying a price markup formula: in order to get profit from every sale in your store, you need to set a higher price for every product on offer – and the plugin makes it possible to complete this task just in a couple of clicks. As the result, your store gets completely ready to welcome buyers and to accept their orders.

After launching your AliExpress dropshipping business, you start receiving orders from store visitors. The buyers add some of these products to their shopping carts and send you the payments. The payments go straight to your account, and you have full access and full control over the earned money: that’s one of the biggest advantages of the dropshipping business model over affiliate programs and website monetizing techniques.

Now, you have money on your account, and you can spend it to actually buy the necessary product for your client and arrange its delivery. You go back on AliExpress, contact the seller whose store you used to import this exact product and place the order. In the order details, you write the name and the physical address of the client who has bought this item from you and remind the seller that you are doing dropshipping.

After this, you only need to pay this seller for the purchase. The seller’s price is lower than the price you’ve set on the same product, which is why, after processing this payment, you get some ‘extra’ money: this sum is your profit from the transaction.

The AliExpress seller will do the rest of the job: it’s the supplier’s responsibility to put the ordered items together, assemble the package, and send it to your buyer’s address.

So basically, everyone is happy with the deal:

• Your buyer receives the item he/she ordered

Considering the buyers’ benefits (and therefore, their desire to buy from dropshipping stores), many newcomers to the dropshipping business worry about two factors: long delivery time and the opportunity to buy the same item directly from AliExpress.

Still, with the right managerial efforts, you can completely forget about these fears. In many cases, the delivery time doesn’t matter at all: commonly, there is no other way for a client to source an identical item in an offline store, which is why ordering from you is the only option for this buyer (this is why you should be really thoughtful about the product offer!).

At the same time, if you provide top-class customer service and professionally answer any questions with regard to the product’s features etc., you can successfully compete with AliExpress – there are lots of reasons why buyers prefer tiny niche stores to giant marketplaces.

• Your supplier benefits from a secure deal

When a random buyer contacts an AliExpress supplier, this seller has to answer numerous questions with regard to the product quality and its special features. It might be quite time-consuming given that AliExpress sellers typically have thousands of items in their stores, and they have to communicate with dozens of clients daily.

Moreover, the seller can’t be sure that the buyer is a trustworthy individual who won’t leave a negative review and demand a refund for no obvious reason. In other words, negotiations with every new customer are somewhat risky for the AliExpress sellers, and chances are, some of these negotiations will have an unsatisfactory outcome.

This is why the sellers are so willing to deal with dropshipping store owners: suppliers view these entrepreneurs as their own loyal clients with a long history of beneficial partnership. Simply speaking, you provide them with completed order forms, and only ask to send a specific product to a certain address. Obviously, you make the sellers’ lives much easier: they still get their deserved profit, but they need to make much less effort to earn the money.

• You enjoy the profits received with almost no effort

Indeed, all you need to do is take a customer’s order form and transfer it to the relevant supplier. You don’t have to produce the items yourself, you don’t need to care about any manufacturing issues, there is no need for you to keep stock, and it’s not up to you to arrange the packages’ delivery.

Still, you get a healthy profit for any completed transaction. The money fully belongs to you, and you have a full control over your expenses, the business management, and the store running.

As you can see, AliExpress dropshipping business model is highly beneficial for every participant. But, you’d be surprised to learn that you, as a dropshipping store owner, can make this venture even more rewarding and convenient for you!

A range of helpful tools is designed for AliExpress dropshipping business

One of the main reasons to use AliExpress as the source platform for your dropshipping business is the existence of numerous supportive tools that are compatible with this website.

Thanks to these tools, you get the brilliant opportunity to run your AliExpress dropshipping business in a semi-automated way as these solutions process the majority of tasks that are normally present in the daily dropshipping routine.

Consider this: in order to start your own dropshipping store in the most efficient and technically great way, you need the following 3 components:

• An ecommerce platform that provides the basis for your store creation, maintenance, and functioning
• A technical solution that makes it possible for you to import products from AliExpress automatically and to edit their pages quickly and easily
• And a supplementary tool that helps you process the incoming orders and transfers the necessary order information to the relevant AliExpress seller

It wouldn’t be really convenient for you to use 2 or 3 different plugins to cover all these points – first and foremost, the data exchange between several separate solutions can be quite a complicated process, plus, you may also experience some troubles with regards to these tools’ compatibility.

Add to that the need to promote your store which means using more additional tools and sorting out their compatibility to your primary tools – looks like quite a quest.

That is what our teams has been working on for several years now, turning basic AliDropship plugin into an entire ecosystem with turnkey solutions all acceptable in one place – your dashboard.

AliDropship team does much more than simply sell its product to entrepreneurs all over the globe.

It doesn’t matter how long ago you ordered a service from the team: at any point of your dropshipping journey, you can easily contact the support team and get the answer to any of your store-related queries.

Basically, all these aspects make AliDropship the perfect platform to employ in your dropshipping store. If you don’t have one yet, then our OFFER is exactly for you: you can get a turnkey AliExpress dropshipping store absolutely for FREE when you suscribe to Sellvia  ($39 a month only)!

How to start AliExpress dropshipping business?

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”
Mark Twain

 

Step 0: The Foundation – Legal & Financial Setup

Before you dream of products and profits, let’s build your business on solid ground. Addressing the legal and financial setup from day one is what separates successful long-term businesses from temporary hobbies.

Choosing Your Business Structure: For entrepreneurs in the US, the two most common starting points are Sole Proprietorship and an LLC.

Sole Proprietorship: This is the default structure. It’s easy to start but offers no personal liability protection, meaning your personal assets are at risk.

Limited Liability Company (LLC): An LLC creates a legal barrier between you and your business. It’s the recommended path for protecting your personal assets as you grow.

Step 1. Choose what to sell

Now it’s time to talk about how to start a business with AliExpress. First, you should make a decision: what will you be selling?

Niches are specialized market segments, or a range of goods that consists of particular product types. Teen apparel, baby products, home improvement goods – all these are niches.

Some beginner entrepreneurs think it’s best to import and sell as many items as possible no matter what kind of goods they are. However, practice shows that niche stores are much easier to launch and develop. Picking products that have something in common will let you achieve good financial results because:

• You will create a store brand

A store’s name can actually give potential customers a clear idea of what it sells or what activity it promotes. When your AliExpress dropshipping business belongs to a certain niche, it’s much easier to come up with an easy-to-remember name. In contrast, it’s extremely difficult to come up with a good name for a store that sells everything.

• You will be able to optimize the store

Simply speaking, the same 2-3 words that describe your store specifics can (and need to) also be used as the main store keyword. If you have such a keyword, you can efficiently put our search engine optimization checklist into practice!

• You will divide the items between categories

When you come to a store you will see certain product types on certain shelves. Retailers don’t organize their goods randomly. Keeping products in categories makes it easier to find particular items or look for related goods. The same goes for your AliExpress dropshipping business. It is not only a smart step in terms of the shopping experience, it is also an essential part of search engine optimization because you can optimize each category page for corresponding search queries.

• Your store visitors won’t get confused

When customers visit an ecommerce website, they actually expect the store to stick to a certain niche and see products that have something in common. If you go to a sports apparel shop, you don’t expect to find evening dresses there. But what if you do? In this case, most customers will feel lost and can even start questioning the store’s credibility thinking the owner doesn’t care what he sells.

• You will identify your target audience and the best marketing strategy

If, for example, if you mix up spare motorcycle parts with underwear and cat toys in your store, there is literally no way to identify your target audience segment, find an appropriate advertising channel, and create an appealing message. These products are too different: they have nothing in common, which is why you simply won’t find a community that would respond positively to such a confusing product mix.

Long story short, a clearly identified dropshipping niche is essential for the financial success of your AliExpress dropshipping business. A general dropshipping store that sells everything at once won’t be profitable; for a dropshipping store owner, it’s much wiser to concentrate on some specific set of products.

So, what do you need to do in order to find ‘your’ niche?

• Think of your personal interests and hobbies

The best way to find a niche for a profitable AliExpress dropshipping business is to choose something you know really well.

This is exactly what we have learned from our personal experience, launching a store about something you like or know well lets you be convincing and engaging in your marketing messages: when buyers see your social networks content or read the products’ descriptions, they can instantly say if you really know what you’re selling, and it surely affects their purchasing decisions.

Plus, it means you won’t give up easily in case an obstacle arises: since you’re a fan of your own niche, you’re highly motivated to keep going. Finally, it’s simply pleasant and rewarding to be running a business dedicated to your true passion!

This is why the first step towards finding your precious dropshipping niche is writing down all your hobbies, interests, and passions – most likely, you will turn one of them into a super-profitable niche for your store.

• Create a keyword out of every idea you’ve written down

As soon as you have the list of your favorite things ready, it’s time to think about how you can turn them into well-defined niche ideas.

To do this, use this algorithm of identifying the main store keyword: with its help, you can transform a vague idea or preference into a 2-3 words phrase that precisely describes a well-detailed niche.

With the ready list of keywords, you can proceed with choosing the right niche for your dropshipping store.

• Check every niche with the help of our niche research tool

Free AliDropship niche research tool is a revolutionary instrument that lets you automatically evaluate the potential of any niche you like.

All you need to do is answer 11 simple questions related to this exact niche. Every question contains an instruction that explains how exactly you can calculate the required parameter, so it won’t be difficult for you to answer any of the questions.

After you answer all the 11 questions, the AliDropship niche research tool shows the final result: it rates the niche on a scale from 1 to 5 (5 is the best possible result) and gives some general recommendations on managing and promoting a store if you choose to build it around this particular niche.

So, you simply need to evaluate all the niches you’ve included in your list and pick the one that gets the highest rating. As the result of this testing, you will eventually find a niche that is both interesting for you and appealing from the financial point of view.

Step 2. Pick the best technical solutions for your AliExpress dropshipping business

In order to get a smoothly running dropshipping store that effortlessly performs all the necessary business functions, you need the following:

• A convenient content management system (CMS)
• A technical solution that will help you import products to your store and automatically perform the majority of daily business tasks

There are many competing solutions on the market.

Let’s look at them in more detail.

WordPress CMS

CMS is a solution that lets you create and manage content for your website. It doesn’t matter what your website type is: it might be a blog, or a general online store, or a dropshipping website, or anything else. Whatever you do online, you need to be able to create the website content easily and manage it with no extra effort.

During the creation of a dropshipping store, the choice of the right CMS has paramount importance: if the CMS has a limited functionality and is difficult to understand, it might negatively affect your business operation.

This is why our team members always use WordPress as the most convenient CMS – as you can see from our own dropshipping experience, we prefer this platform for several  crucial reasons:

✅ It has a brilliant reputation: WordPress enjoys recognition on a worldwide basis as a universal multipurpose CMS, and it is one of the most popular platforms for online stores

✅ It meets the safety standards necessary for the industry and makes it possible for you to make your dropshipping store secure

✅ WordPress is free (unlike its closest rival Shopify) – you don’t have to pay anything to use its functionality with no limitations

✅ Due to its user-friendly interface, it is easy to install, convenient for daily use, and flexible in terms of your store customization

✅ WordPress has a wide range of features and functions: it provides lots of opportunities in terms of SEO, supports multimedia files, and allows installation of additional plugins and applications

✅ It gives you 100% control over your store: if you own a self-hosted WordPress website, you fully own all the content placed there, and it’s up to you to decide what you will do to it.

But, even though WordPress is an awesome CMS, it lacks some functions that are specifically required to run an online store. The thing is, WordPress was initially created as a platform for blogging: this is why the system does not, for example, have an integrated gateway for accepting payments, or a solution that would track and process orders.

This is exactly the reason why your WordPress-based dropshipping store (and this is applicable to many other CMSs) needs to be complemented with the additional solutions that we’re going to talk about below!

AliDropship ecommerce platform

As we have already said, AliDriropship solutions are created and constantly improved by the people who have a considerable experience of running dropshipping stores on their own. This way, they know exactly what they need to run an AliExpress dropshipping business efficiently, and they collect the feedback from like-minded entrepreneurs all over the globe to understand what people want from the perfect dropshipping solutions.

You, as an owner of an AliExpress dropshipping business, will heavily benefit from partnering with our platform because:

✅ You get a turnkey store almost immediately

✅ You get access to our catalog of pre-vetted products with fully optimized product pages

✅ User-friendly dashboard to manage and promote your business

✅ Your store runs almost on autopilot with our automated tools

In fact you get a plaug-and-play business the very same day accompanied by an entire ecosystem where every feature and every promotion tool is accessible in one click.

Step 3. Find the best dropshipping suppliers and the best products to sell

Okay, so, at this point, you have a website that you can further optimise and customise with regards to your needs and preferences.

But, before you start turning different settings on and off, you need to take a vital action: choose the products you’re going to sell in your store.

At first sight, it might seem to be a confusing task: AliExpress has over 100 million products, and you only need to choose 50-70 items from all of them! (Obviously, over the course of time you will update your product offer and add more items, but at the beginning, it’s wiser to start with a limited product range).

Your product choice decisions should be based on this idea: the best finds for your dropshipping store are the items that bring you the highest profits.

It means they should meet the following criteria:

• Demanded by customers
• Unusual and difficult to find in offline stores
• Moderately priced (ideally, with free worldwide delivery)
• Visually appealing and containing a detailed description for the buyers’ convenience
• Well-reviewed by previous buyers

This detailed manual explains how exactly you need to evaluate this or that item, and what products you should avoid. Read it carefully and put our recommendations into practice: this way, you will find really awesome products from trusted sellers!

If you sign up for our offer your store will be packed with 1,000 AliExpress proven best-sellers as a BONUS!

Step 4. Launch your online store

Now that your store is ready it’s time to launch!

Still, there are lots of details that you can set up and improve in order to reach the highest business efficiency!

AliDropship-based solutions give you lots of ways to deeply customize your store and create a memorable, unique, and user-friendly shopping destination.

We are more than happy to help you out and to guide you through all the settings – your dashboard has an in-built Academy where you can learn how to:

• Manage your store  – products catalog, orders processing, payments etc.
• How dropshipping works and how you can make the most of this business model
• How to promote your store

You will see all these steps on-screen, so simply follow the explanations and repeat the demonstrated actions.

After this, your AliExpress dropshipping business can welcome its first buyers!

Step 5. Promote your store

It’s not really reasonable to assume that everyone will just start buying from you as soon as you launch the store.

So, if you want to start selling right after accessing your dashboard, you need to pay careful attention to store marketing and promotion.

There are several marketing channels that can be used to promote your dropshipping store, the thing is to figure out which ones will work best for your niche. That’s what we’re going to cover next.

How to promote your AliExpress dropshipping business?

“Don’t tell me how good you make it; tell me how good it makes me when I use it.”
Leo Burnett

1. Identify your target audience

Before you start choosing marketing channels, take a moment to think about your buyers.

It’s vital to understand who exactly will visit your store and what people are most likely to buy your products because this knowledge heavily influences:

• What channels you’re going to use for promotion: are your potential customers heavy social meadia users or maybe they prefer making a decision after reading in-depth content in blogs? That makes a lot of difference as to how you will reach them.
• Your choice of social networks, forums, and all the different Internet places where you will post your promo messages;
• The tone of your advertisements and the arguments you will use to motivate these people on making a purchase;
• Your pricing markup and all the pricing policy decisions related to making discounts, cutting or increasing prices, and introducing special offers;
• The changes that you make in your product range when you decide to import new hype items or to get rid of outdated offers

In other words, knowing who your potential buyers are helps you understand how to sell your goods to them, how to communicate with them and how to manage your AliExpress dropshipping business in the long-term period.

2. Social media marketing for AliExpress dropshipping business promotion

No matter what niche you have chosen for your dropshipping store, you can successfully promote it in a range of social networks.

We strongly recommend trying various opportunities for social media marketing because it has the following beneficial features:

• Affordability

When it comes to promoting anything on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram, people mostly assume that they will have to pay quite a lot for these ads. But, it is not always the case – you can always start with free promotional methods, and it will let you easily understand which network suits your business goals better.

• Rapid growth

Every possible parameter that describes the usage and performance of social networks is growing steadily. In 2025, over 5.4 billion people worldwide use social media, which is roughly 67% of the global population, and this number is projected to surpass 6 billion users by 2028.

As to market leaders, Facebook has been on top for the past years and cut %32,6 of the market pie in 2024. Instagram has followed with %20,3, which is about 2 billion active users.

Quite logically, such data heavily influences the entrepreneurs worldwide: for example, 96% of US fashion brands have an Instagram presence. No surprise whoever your target audience is you can be sure they use social media one way or another.

Now, let’s discuss the possible ways to carry out these promotions.

• Free SMM promotions

As we have already mentioned, it is quite possible to run efficient promotions on social networks with no costs at all.

For example, take a look at these Pinterest promotion guidelines: setting up an account, connecting it to your website, and filling it with suitable pictures will cost you nothing! At the same time, with the help of this basic free account, you get the opportunity to interact with a large and open-minded community of users.

Pinterest is not the only social network that allows free promotions with high efficiency. If you prefer using Instagram for reaching your business goals, you can also try any of the free ways to efficiently interact with your potential buyers through this platform. Even the basic actions like writing an informative bio, adding hashtags, or trying videos, stories, and galleries can make a difference.

Facebook, quite surprisingly, makes it possible to promote your store for free, too. Even though entrepreneurs sometimes think they must engage in paid Facebook ads, it is not strictly necessary to do this at the beginning of a new business journey. Basic free Facebook promotion strategies, such as sharing your page posts with thematic groups and pages, help your business get some exposure, and let you learn more about the special distinctive features of your target audience.

• Paid SMM promotions

Last year, we conducted a tiny research among our readers and followers. We asked them to specify the promotion methods they are using for the benefit of their stores, and to tell which of these methods show the best results. If you take a look at this poll results, you’ll notice that paid Facebook promotions are voted to be both the most popular and the most efficient.

Facebook

This is why we have written several comprehensive articles that explain how to carry out these promotions in the most smooth and profitable way. For example, this article is dedicated to the most common technical troubles you might have while setting up these ads – and to the ways of solving these issues.

We created numerous detailed guides, video lessons and webinars that cover the strategies and all how-to’s of Facebook paid promotion. You can follow them step-by-step or use our Automated promotion tool which we’ll cover later in this guide.

Instagram

As you can guess, Facebook is not the only social network that allows highly efficient paid promotions. Our experience of using Instagram proves that it opens up a bunch of opportunities, too. In our job, we use 2 types of paid Instagram promotions: shoutouts and paid ads, and each of these options works finely.

This step-by-step guide explains the meaning of shoutouts (the act of placing your store ad in someone else’s well-known account for money) and goes through all the elements of a perfectly planned shoutout – from picking the promoted product to finding the appropriate account and creating a catchy ad.

Of course, it is never a good idea to just stick to 1-2 advertising methods and never experiment with anything else. The more strategies you try, the sooner you find out the unique marketing mix that works best for your unique AliExpress dropshipping business – and this is why we strongly recommend taking a look at supplementary advertising solutions.

Automated promotion

If you want to carry out your social media promotion with the maximum efficiency, minimum work and humble ad spend then this tool is for you! Our team has been developing this opportinity for quite a while now, testing it on our own paid campaigns and now it is available to all of our clients!

Now you can have your products promoted on autopilot on 5 major platforms – Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Google and Amazon – completely hands-free! No need to set up campaigns manually, adjust them daily and whatch your budget burn in minutes. Our AI-based solutions now do it all for you: all you have to do is click the “Launch campaign” button.

And you know the best part? Aside of this being absolutely autopilot it brings GUARANTEED SALES! These campaigns have guaranteed ROI of 3+, can you believe that? All that comes with a fixed daily budget starting from $10 daily.

4. Implementing SEO for your store promotion

Search engine optimization is a vital element of running any type of online business. Naturally, dropshipping store owners also benefit from it heavily, and here is why:

• It is free

Lots of the marketing techniques we’re describing in this article don’t cost you anything. It makes the life of a dropshipping store owner much easier, and it is especially important for newcomers who can’t afford any significant expenses. The major tools that are necessary for SEO (Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner, MOZ Explorer, and SEMrush) are free – in order to get access to their basic functionality, it’s enough to simply register within these systems.

• It makes your business visible

Surely, this is the main reason for entrepreneurs to engage in these activities and make SEO-friendly stores. The whole concept of search engine optimization means that you adapt to search engines’ requirements while you’re developing and running your online business. Playing by the rules of Google means researching the most popular search queries in order to find the most promising keywords related to your business.

By integrating these keywords in texts across your website, you increase Internet users’ chances to stumble upon your store, and this, in turn, positively influences the number of orders and the volume of profit you get.

• It works in the long-term period

Most certainly, if you pay enough attention to SEO at every point of building your dropshipping business, you benefit in a long-term period. Some entrepreneurs quit their SEO efforts quickly because they see no immediate changes – still, SEO mostly has a cumulative effect: the more you work on it, the greater result you get in several months.

5. Content marketing

Your content marketing strategy mostly describes what you are doing with your blog. You might think that a blog section is not really important for online stores in general and dropshipping stores in particular (people come here to buy stuff and not to read, right?), but actually, it serves lots of purposes, such as:

• Traffic generation

In our list of best free traffic sources, you can find numerous mentions of blogging. It’s quite understandable: indeed, blog posts cost you nothing if you write them yourself (and there is nothing impossible about it).

Besides, through writing a blog post, you can attract website visitors that are already interested in the products (the people who were looking for something on Google and stumbled upon your highly useful article), establish yourself as a decent seller who knows everything about the products on offer (through covering the most important industry details in your posts and answering the comments professionally), and maybe, even gain an audience of loyal readers who love your writing style and share your beautiful writings with others.

• Rankings improvement

As you have already guessed it from the previous chapter, freshly written articles dedicated to relevant topics are a blessing in terms of SEO. By relying on the keywords and phrases commonly searched by Internet users, you create articles that are easy to find.

The readers, interested with the topic you’re covering or wondering about some specific aspects, will leave their comments – which, in a certain way, will also create some additional content on your website, and improve your rankings even more.

6. Email-marketing

If you want to get in touch with the people who haven’t ordered anything from you yet, or to remind your previous buyers about your store, emails can work out finely.

You can think of lots of reasons to send these emails, for example:

• Notify the recipients about new product arrivals
• Announce sales and special offers
• Share the newest blog posts
• Show exclusive discount coupons
• Recommend products selections (a range of products related to the same category that people can buy from your store on favorable terms)
• Congratulate the readers with the upcoming holidays

It might be a good idea to combine several of these ideas in a single email: for example, you can wish your readers a merry Christmas and provide a pre-holiday discount coupon. Or, showcase a thematic selection of items, and announce a sale on this product category.

How to collect the emails of your potential customers?

The main challenge you face here is the following: how to collect the emails of your potential customers? In our own dropshipping experience, the following methods show the best results:

• Pop-up messages

In your dashboard you can find tools that will help you set up this marketing instrument. You can customize these notifications in order to show various messages: for example, we commonly offer a 10% discount coupon in exchange for a subscription.

• Unique content

In our promotions, we advertise some unique content in order to lure people into visiting the landing page. To get the opportunity to read/view this content, the visitors need to leave their email addresses.

• Sign up forms

Sign-up forms are typically located at the bottom of the website pages, or at some noticeable spot in the blog section. They motivate store visitors to subscribe to your emails because they want to receive notifications about special offers or blog updates.

• Buyers’ emails

Yes, the people who have already bought something from us are an important target audience segment, too! They already know our store and our brand, and they already have a positive experience of buying from us. This is why they respond positively to the notifications about the new product offers, discounts, items selections, etc.

As you can guess, the interests and queries of the existing customers are quite different from the ones of new store visitors. This is why, in order to reach the highest click rate and open rate possible, we try specific approaches for every particular group of email readers – it helps us achieve the highest open rate and click rate possible. We single out the following segments:

• Clients

These people already know your store and they show interest in your products – since they have already ordered something from you, they find your store worthy of their attention. In our experience, the emails sent to this audience segment show the best results in terms of open rate and click rate. It is a good idea to tell this audience about your new product arrivals and give them a discount: it will encourage them to make another purchase.

• Online store visitors

The visitors who have browsed your website pages and then left without making a purchase are the people who are still not sure if they really want to order something from you. In order to make them more comfortable and to help them make this decision, you can send them an exclusive discount coupon code, or show the selection of bestsellers (it will serve as social proof).

• Leads

By leads, we mean the people who have visited your website and subscribed to your blog or a newsletter. Your goal is to encourage these people to visit your store again and, ideally, make a purchase, so any type of an email will be a good choice.

Surely, the manual process of sending mass emails to several different groups of people is time-consuming and sometimes complicated. This is why we normally create follow-ups –  automated email sequences.

To store them and to arrange the mass mailing, we use MailChimp – an email marketing platform that will be sending emails and generating incoming orders for weeks, months, and years to come. Your assistance during these mailings won’t even be necessary!

Email marketing tips

Here are some additional email marketing tips we want to share:

• Create a content plan

Plan forward whenever possible: you can definitely find out the dates of some large-scale events like Black Friday or Easter in advance, so you can plan the emails and prepare their content whenever it’s convenient for you. Mark these and similar events in your emails calendar, so you won’t forget about any important dates, and you won’t be in a rush before the big day.

• Surprise your readers

If your emails look totally like one another, it’s boring. Diversify your letters as much as possible in order to keep the attention of your audience. We, for example, take turns with the emails content: we mix entertaining letters with blog update notification emails, product offer update emails, and letters that combine several information elements.

• Check everything

Before you approve the email or the follow up sequence to be automatically sent to your subscribers, make sure you didn’t make a grammar mistake, or picked a non-identified font, or forgot to include the link that leads the reader to your store, or something. Send a test email to yourself and read it from different devices to make sure everything looks and works as planned.

• Track the performance

Even though the emails will be sent automatically, without your direct involvement, you need to keep an eye on them and check if everything is going well. It is totally fine to pause your automated follow up emails, optimize them, and start sending again if you see that the performance indices are too low.

• Don’t be too noisy

Annoying emails that come too often do more harm than good. Limit yourself to 2-3 emails per week, and your readers won’ unsubscribe from the emails due to their poor content, low quality, and invasiveness.

• Keep learning

Every email platform has a bunch of useful technical features that you can use in order to make this part of the business easier. Plus, bloggers and email marketing specialists commonly share their views on the catchiest headings and the most appealing letter templates, so it’s a good idea to learn what’s happening in the industry.

Exclusive! How to efficiently promote AliExpress dropshipping business on autopilot?

Did you know that you don’t need to become a marketing PRO to promote your store? If you become AliDropship client you get access to an entire ecommerce ecosystem where all the marketing tools are in-built to your dashboard.

Being experienced ecommerce store owners ourselves we know what works best in ecommerce store promotion, so we’ve assembled all the best practices into handy marketing tools that are available to all our clients within their dashboards.

Whether it’s email-marketing, SEO or blog content, choose the tool you need and unpack it for your use. No need to craft strategies and immerse yourself in the area of unknown, just follow simple instructions that the tools provide and it’s all done!

How to run and grow your AliExpress dropshipping business?

“The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.”
Vidal Sassoon

 

Manage your business in one place

As soon as you get your dropshipping store from AliDropship you get access to your dashboard where you can manage your store almost hands-free.

• Product import

Your dashboard provides you with access to our vast catalog of pre-vetted AliExpress products that already come with perfectly optimized product pages, all you have to do is choose the ones you want to sell and import them to your store in one click.

• Order fulfillment

Processing and order fulfillment is semi-automated. You need to do just a couple of clicks and your order will be processed by our system, just monitor its status in your dashboard and get the profit when it’s completed!

• Email notifications

Your clients can receive the most important email notifications automatically: the relevant letters will be sent when you accept the incoming order, and when the order status changes.

• Customer support

Customer support is crucial in ecommerce, and when all the processes in your business are automated dealing with customers becomes smoother. You have all the information regarding orders in your store handy and available anytime.

• Analytics and growth

Your dashboard makes it easier to analyse your store performance and finding possibilities for improvement. You get easy to understand data with clear numbers that show you what is performing well and should be scaled and what is underperforming and should replaced or repurposed.

No complicated third party services, it’s all available in your dashboard and delivered to you in a user-friendly format. Just take it and scale it.

I want to finish this guide with the quote from Jeff Bezos, Amazon Founder, and CEO:

“I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.”

TRY NOW. IT'S FREE