Dropshipping With AliExpress: How to Find the Best Suppliers?

When I first started out with my dropshipping store, I wanted to make sure that I had the best AliExpress suppliers possible.

Follow me step by step to see how to find the best AliExpress dropshipping suppliers!

Hint? Don't go for the cheapest option!

Why is it important to find the best AliExpress suppliers for your dropshipping store?

Do you want to make the best dropshipping store possible?

Well then, you first have to understand how to carefully pick the best AliExpress suppliers for your dropshipping store.

Let me ask you this question: do you want the person who handles the production of your products and the shipment to your customers to be reliable or not?

Most people who start with dropshipping pick their suppliers based on price. They go to AliExpress, sort by price and pick the lowest one.

Because this will make you rich, right?

Wrong. Although this may work for you in the short-term, it will definitely haunt you in the long-term.

What if your supplier doesn’t respond to your messages asking where the package for your customer is? What if your supplier cannot keep up when you’re getting hundreds of orders each day?

If you follow the steps below, you will find yourself the best AliExpress supplier for your dropshipping store. Even if you're just a beginner!

So, how do you find the best AliExpress suppliers for my dropshipping store?

Hopefully by now you know how important good suppliers are. They can literally make or break your dropshipping store!

Follow me below to learn the 7 steps to find the best AliExpress suppliers possible!

This way you can bring your dropshipping store to the next level.

Step 1. Sorting the product search results

The search for the best AliExpress supplier all starts with typing in the product you want. After that, do not sort by price, but by orders.

This will show the products with the most amount of orders first. 

Step 2. Exploring the AliExpress supplier

The next step is to click on the first few products that are comparable to what you're searching for. As an example in the above image, the third one has nothing to do with what I was searching for.

The goal with this is to find AliExpress suppliers who have more than 97% positive feedback.

A good bonus is that all the three seller ratings are green.

This was the first supplier that had the most amount of orders.

As you can see this supplier has a 92.8% positive feedback. That's below the 97% range.

More bad news, all the three seller ratings are red.

It seems that in their feedback, the buyers often note that the sold items don’t fully match their description, that there are some communication issues, and the shipping speed is not quite satisfactory.

The second supplier has 97.4% positive feedback and everything (except the top one) is green!

This means that buyers are mostly happy with everything that the buyers from the seller above were not happy about.

Another option to find the best AliExpress supplier is to see if the seller has a top brand badge. This means that that seller is a top brand.

The Top Brands are the best sellers on AliExpress. These are popular brands or authorized resellers of a brand. 

AliExpress sellers get the badge if they have good product quality, a reliable business reputation, and a good after-sales service.

Personally, I have never dropshipped from a supplier with a top brand badge, but you can always have this as an option. Just make sure that they accept dropshipping.

More on how to make sure of that below.

One more quick tip is that you can also use a tool like Dropshipping Copilot to find competitively-priced and reliable AliExpress suppliers:

Step 3. Inspect the product reviews

In the feedback tab of the product page from the supplier, you choose from the steps above.

Read the customer's reviews carefully to understand what exactly is good and bad in this seller’s activity.

Pay special attention to the reviews that contain pictures. With the help of these pictures, you can roughly evaluate the quality of the product and understand whether the buyers' claims are fair.

Sometimes people get annoyed by some tiny details that are not really relevant.

But sometimes, several different customers point out the same difficulties they had during the purchasing process, and that’s something you need to keep an eye on.

For example, if everyone in the reviews is writing that the shoes they bought are not matching with the sizing chart on the sellers AliExpress page.

Step 4. Check the shipping time

On the product page, look at the available shipping terms to understand whether the seller can ship your order to the country where the majority of your potential buyers live.

If you're not sure yet which countries you're going to target, don't forget to take a look at this article as well:
15 Best & Worst Countries to Target as a Dropshipper

First off, click on the shipping option (I put a red bar around it on the screenshot below).

Then you get this as popup:

You can click on the tiny arrow to change the country of delivery.

It's not only important that the seller ships to the country you're targeting, but also that the shipping methods that are available are good.

A tip with picking the right shipping method: don't always pick the cheapest or the one who is free. Like the top one, in the example above.

Firstly, check if the shipping method you want has tracking information available. This is the key to keeping your customers informed and keeping them from complaining about why their package didn't arrive yet.

Secondly, pick the one who is the fastest for the best price. So for the example, from the above I would pick ePacket.

Yes, AliExpress Standard Shipping on this one might be a bit faster, but it's almost double the price!

One thing to note here is that due to Covid-19, this has changed a lot, so if you're interested in learning more about the current state of ePacket and if you can still use it for dropshipping, then check out this article here.

Step 5. Look at their guarantees

If you followed the steps above, you most likely found the best AliExpress dropshipping supplier already, but it doesn't hurt to follow these next steps just to be sure.

One thing to look at is the seller's guarantees. With most sellers, the on-time delivery is set on 60 days, but some do less than that.

For example, you will see this under the "Buy Now" button on their product page:

Or it might be fewer days, like this one:

What this means is that if the item is not delivered to your customer within these days and you cannot come to an agreement with your supplier, you can open a dispute.

I had one supplier who just kept claiming the products were on their way as normal, even though it had been more than 60 days. And the last time the tracking information updated was a month prior.

For now, on all my disputes, AliExpress was on my side, and I had my money back in no time.

If you're interested in learning more about the AliExpress disputes, I suggest clicking here.

Step 6. Messaging the AliExpress supplier

There are a few reasons why you should message your potential supplier.

First of all, you can see how active they are. If you get a dispute claim from your customer, you'll want your supplier to react fast as well, right?

Secondly, you can ask them if they accept dropshipping and what they do with returns.

Wondering how to deal with returns when dropshipping from China? Then don't forget to check out our other article here as well!

A good tip is that messaging the AliExpress sellers always takes some time, so what you can do is find more than one good supplier and just send the same message to all of them at the same time.

Then all you have to do is compare answers and reaction time; maybe some don't even reply to you.

But what questions should you ask these suppliers?

Well, we collected the 13 best questions to ask in the article I've linked below:

14 Questions to Help You Find Awesome Dropshipping Suppliers

I suggest you check it out after finishing this article so you know what kind of questions you can ask your potential dropshipping suppliers.

Keeping contact with your supplier is also good later on for your profit margins. You can ask them for a discount when you're getting consistent sales.

Step 7. Ensuring the quality of the products is good

Now that you have found a supplier, or maybe even more than one, it's time to ensure that the quality of the product you want to dropship from that supplier is good.

Some people suggest to order the product even before you start selling it on your store, but I think differently because what if the products you ordered look good, but you can't get them to sell?

What I do is I carefully follow these steps above to find the best AliExpress dropshipping supplier possible for that product. Especially the step where you need to look at the product reviews – that one is really important now.

You will ask your self while reading the reviews, are these people happy with their purchase, or did something go wrong?

The best reviews are reviews with pictures. You can get an idea of how the product quality is by looking at these pictures.

But when you start getting sales for that product, I suggest ordering it for yourself first before you start scaling.

This way you can see how long the delivery actually takes, the quality of the product, and also the packaging used for shipping.

Bonus: When the product feels good, and you decide to keep it in your store and scale it, you don't have to throw it away; you can use that product to make your own pictures and videos for advertising!

An even better option is ordering the same product from 3-5 different suppliers and then comparing them. Maybe a different supplier has a much better quality and price.

Most common questions when using AliExpress dropshipping suppliers

Below you will find the most common questions people have when working with dropshipping suppliers on AliExpress:

Dropshipping with AliExpress: do you want to learn more?

If you’re interested in dropshipping with AliExpress (or maybe you’re already doing it), I've got some great articles for you so you can kickstart or grow your dropshipping store!

I also got a huge article for you that will help you create your own Shopify dropshipping store in 2024!

Reading this article will surely help you to get started and stay motivated while beginning and continuing your dropshipping journey!

Shopify Dropshipping: A 20-Step Guide to Starting Your Store

But that's not all!

If you're interested in learning more about AliExpress dropshipping, like what it is and how to be profitable, then you're in luck!

I've also got a complete AliExpress dropshipping guide.

AliExpress Dropshipping: A 20-Step Getting Started Guide (2024)

Also, if you don't have a Shopify store yet, you can click here to get a free 3-day trial + pay $1/month for the first 3 months!

Conclusion

So, there you have it: every step you need to take to find yourself the best AliExpress suppliers for your dropshipping store!

Suppliers are like your business partners. They can make or break your business. So, please, pick them carefully.

Even though it may seem so easy to just pick the cheapest supplier out there, you now know that it could end up being the complete opposite.

You will thank yourself in the future if you take the time now for selecting your suppliers.

If you're curious to learn a bit more, check out this article about AliExpress agents!

And if you're interested in finding even more suppliers, check out this article on finding Alibaba dropshipping suppliers!

If you have any other steps you take before selecting a supplier, or if you have any questions, let me know by commenting below or contacting me directly by pressing the "Contact Us" button at the top!