Oberlo Review: A Free App for Automating Your Dropshipping Process for Your Shopify Store

By admin, 1 September, 2017

The rave of the moment in ecommerce world is Dropshipping – it’s on everyone’s lips and everyone wants to get on the ship. What’s it about this ecommerce model that’s attracting so much attention and pulling people to it? Firstly, it’s the apparent ease of setting up: with a small initial investment and research, you’d be running your own dropshipping store in a matter of hours. Secondly, it’s the promise of less work: Whenever an order comes in you; you send it to your dropshipping suppliers who package and send the order to your customer. This particular feature of the model means – you don’t have to carry any inventory in order to set up and run your own store.

What is Drop Shipping ?

Drop shipping is a form of ecommerce sales model where the seller does not handle the packing and delivery of products to the customer but rather is being handled by a wholesale dropshipping company who handles the order fulfillment part of the transaction.

How Does Drop shipping Work ?

Imagine a customer visits a Shopify store and makes a purchase, the shop owner receives the order, and either manually or automatically sends the order to the wholesaler who gets notified about the new order, and begins the process of order fulfillment. The dropshipping wholesaler packages the order and delivers to the customer. Easy right? This process can be time consuming and quite daunting if done manually. Imagine a seller with multiple suppliers, an increasing number of orders per day, and many products listing from their suppliers in their online store. Imagine that this seller does all these tasks manually – now you see how tedious this process could be. The seller would have no time for other things: this takes away one of the benefits of online drop shipping and certainly sucks.

Why you need an automation App like Oberlo

Now enter automation. With the right app such Oberlo, most of the process can be automated freeing the seller’s time to focus more on other important aspects of their business such as building an awesome website, handling and resolving customers complaints, and providing 5-star customer experience. Built specifically for Shopify – which is by-way the most popular ecommerce platform out there – think of it in the same vein, you would think of WordPress when starting a blog, and integrating seamlessly with Aliexpress (The largest online collection of Chinese Wholesale Suppliers, Oberlo is an app that will free your time and also help you manage your shopify store more efficiently. The apps seeks to make importing products to your store a breeze, while also having Oberlo package and ship the products to your customers.

So let’s take a look at the features that make this piece of software every Shopify store owner’s favorite:

Oberlo: key features

Ease of Importing Products from Aliexpress

Almost everyone drop ships using suppliers from Aliexpress and this app makes seeking out and importing products from suppliers to your store super easy. With a simple click of a button, you have access to thousands of suppliers, their product images, product descriptions and details and pricing all at the dashboard. All you need do is click and you have the products imported into your store.

Manage Products from a User Friendly Interface

If you’ve ever seen a WordPress dash board, you would appreciate how beautiful and the detailed thinking that went into building an app that’s easy to use. Even if you’re not a fan of WordPress, the interface for managing products is intuitively designed. Which means you can easily carry out any task from the dash board without much hand holding. With a neat menu on the left side which enables you complete various task such as search products, set featured products, import lists or view products on your store, and the best part? Each of the products in your store is neatly organized, with details about the sales and earnings of each item. It basically offers you a quick view of how each product is performing.

Automate Your Order Fulfillment Process

One cool feature of Oberlo is that you don’t have to worry about order fulfillment. In fact, this is one of the features that set it apart from other apps that provide the same solution. And many Users are raving about this feature. This is how it works: Once an order comes in for a product, the seller will simply locate the product in your inventory and click the Order Product button. Now this is where it starts getting really exciting; once a seller clicks that button, Oberlo takes over from there – they will package and ship the items to your customer. These delivered items are branded with your brand – which means your customers do not know you’re dropshipping. Cool right?

Automatic inventory and Price Updates

You don’t have to worry about whether an item is still in stock or whether the price of an item has changed. All of these are automatically handled for you. In case of a change in price – you would be immediately notified to make the necessary adjustments in your pricing too.

Other Important features

  • Product customization: After import products into your store, you can edit, change titles, descriptions, images and literally any other thing you may wish in order to personal the product to fit in with your store messaging.
  • Shipment Tracking: Know where your orders are at every point in time using the integrated order tracking feature.
  • Easily change suppliers: Oberlo allows for a quick switch between suppliers. So you’re able to always get the best deals available.

Oberlo Pricing

Oberlo offers a 3-plan pricing model that allows you choose the plan that’s suitable for your business.

  • The Starter Plan: It’s a free life time plan that allows for 500 products, 50 orders per month, daily product updating, automatic order fulfillment, pricing automation, a chrome extension and sales report. This plan is great for you if you’re just starting out with little orders coming in.
  • The Basic Plan: At $29.90/ month you get an increased product setup of up to 10, 000, 500 orders per month and everything from the starter plan plus shipment tracking and order fulfillment monitoring.
  • The Pro Plan: At $79.90/ month you get product setup of up to 30, 000, unlimited orders per month, everything from the Basic plan plus multiple users.

Oberlo Customer Support

The company takes customer support serious, this is exemplified in their running of full blog that provides information, strategies and inspiration to their users. They’re active on Social media, you can contact support through chats and emails and the response is quite within minutes.

Conclusions

If you’re a Shopify store owner and source your suppliers from Aliexpress, then implementing Oberlo as your drop ship management app will greatly improve your performance and ease the task for you. Setting up and configuration is quite easy and with a dedicated support you can get through it in no time.

If you have any questions concerning this Oberlo review, feel free to comment below.