It's definitely become more challenging to build a successful eCommerce and dropshipping store
over the last couple years, but it doesn't mean it's impossible. In fact, online ecommerce sales
is expected to grow by 385 this decade so there's still a lot of room for new stores to enter this
space by using alternative suppliers and avoiding aliexpress you're able to build
not just any dropshipping ecommerce store but a profitable and growing brand and shopify store
that's still able to generate a new income stream for you and a new income stream
means more options in life so in today's video i'll be sharing the alternative to aliexpress
what they are and how to use them by guiding you on screen right here plus i'll be giving away
software to a lucky subscriber to help build their business so stick until the end for more details
so the first aliexpress alternative i recommend in building a great shopify and e-commerce store
is the distributor model there are two ways to approach the distributed model and it's easiest if
i just jump on screen right here and show you you can either drop ship or run it as a warehousing
setup here's an illustration that i found pretty useful that explains are both drop shipping and
warehousing pretty well you have a drop ship supplier then the customer orders from your
website then the online store passes that order onto the supplier and then the supplier ships
that order directly to the customer simple as that that's drop shipping the warehousing retail model
works with online store orders direct from the supplier okay so we would order directly from
the supplier then the supplier sends the products to an online store warehouse uh usually that's us
and then the supplier sends customers orders from the warehouse supply and then finally the consumer
places orders from the online store so to start you either need contacts in the industry or begin
to build an ecommerce brand from scratch so to give you an idea of how this all works initially
i built a traditional dropshipping store back in 2017 and then approached established brands
within my niche to become a stockist essentially to resell their products onto our customer base
that we built but if you don't already have the brand and store set up already you'll probably
find it a little difficult to have a brand allow you to distribute the products so in that case
i recommend building a store from scratch first and that leads me to the second alternative and
method spoken is a great alternative to aliexpress and it's growing pretty rapidly too if you haven't
come across it yet as a quick summary it's one of the largest drop shipping marketplaces that
specializes in product suppliers from the us in europe and that's exactly what makes pocket
so unique it focuses on quality supplies and products outside of china and prioritizes fast
and simple shipping which as we all know is so important when it comes to building a reliable
and long-term drop shipping store spocker aims to enable generous profit margins between 30 to 60
because there's a stack of amazing features to help us build a successful drop shipping store
it is really simple to use you're able to select where it ships from and there is a focus from
eu in the us so let's just click the us in this specific case which is going to filter out all
the suppliers we want fast u.s shipping and if you really need to focus on cheap shipping there
is also an option right here to enable filtering for your shipping under five dollars you can see
immediately there is a lot of options here a lot of quality products too and you can also filter
through niche so let's just click accessories just to give you an idea and then if we scroll
down here there is plenty of different products with really fast shipping one to three days
directly from their u.s warehouses too and you're able to also request product samples you
can click order samples right here and test out samples without really even asking the supplier
which saves you a lot of time so the processing time here is one to two days
shipping time is one to three business days within the us worldwide it's eight to 14 business days
pretty fast stuff and that's just one of the perks one of the biggest perks to spock it and
probably one of the most popular features one of the favorite features is branded invoicing
so all you need to do is upload your logo add in a few details here and you can send automatic
invoices directly with your shipment with all your orders and to your suppliers too really clean it's
really simple to use and that is a huge perk to using spock it again just adds to the professional
vibe right the other few added benefits to using spoken over aliexpress is automatic currency
conversion for all the products that you stock there's also of course automatic fulfillment
and automatic restock when you connect it to your stores and speaking of which when you connect
spock it to your stores there is integration with a lot of different platforms so of course
you have shopify big commerce wix squarespace etc etc and you're always able to use aliexpress
if you wish to do so i think a combination of both spoken suppliers and aliexpress is a great setup
and a great approach to creating a drop shipping store nowadays but another feature that i do
want to show you is of course that bulk checkout confirmation order so you're able to essentially
bulk check out orders and purchase absolutely everything and manage all the orders within
you know one click of a button essentially and that is another big feature of spock it now when
it comes to that giveaway spock it is giving away an annual membership for one lucky subscriber and
commenter so i'll give you more details on how to enter that giveaway at the end of this video but
yeah if you're interested in setting up your own store via sprocket make sure that you do comment
and make sure that you do watch to the end of this video for more details the next alternative
is drop shipping through dhgate i find that dhgate has smaller selection of suppliers but their lead
and delivery times are overall faster and i'm recommending it as an alternative because often
you can find unique products and suppliers not listed on aliexpress so let's type in bags as an
example and then there is an option right here to click single piece shipping so single piece
shipping is essentially drop shipping you're able to order a single piece item and ship it directly
to your customer as you can see there are plenty of options here for a single piece often though
you do need to talk to your supplier more so than aliexpress but it's totally worth it to create
that supplier relationship the other option that you do have is if you click us three-day delivery
right here they have local warehouses in the u.s with an estimated arrival time of only three days
this product category is limited though so it's a little frustrating when it comes to the product
selection but if you do want fast shipping and a unique product selection dhgate is a great
option for that and you can either integrate it through a couple apps on shopify or you can
manually just get a virtual assistant to manage an excel document right and whenever you get an order
send that excel spreadsheet over to your supplier and get them to fulfill it the other alternative
which may surprise you is amazon fba which is essentially selling on the amazon marketplace
i personally never got deep into amazon fba but i'm recommending this as an alternative because
you're able to take advantage of the huge number of people using amazon and sell on the platform
which is really helpful especially if you're not great with facebook ads or
digital marketing amazon fba is a form of drop shipping technically you're able to
get a third-party film company to deliver the item as soon as an order is placed on the amazon
marketplace the difference here with drop shipping is you're buying the inventory in bulk and send
it to the warehouse in advance rather than the supplier managing it for you so say you want
to list phone cases on amazon one of these results could be your listing indeed so what you do is you
buy a bulk order of let's say 3 000 phone cases just like this one here let's just say a clear
phone case set up an account from a supplier from dhgate send the entire order to the amazon
warehouse pay the fees and then begin to list them on the amazon marketplace as you see right here
personally i think one of the best things about amazon fba is practically all customer service
is managed by amazon not you and ask any ecommerce business owner and you'll realize all of their pet
peeves is customer service so it'd be so nice for amazon to manage customer service entirely that
said i think there's quite a few cons actually with amazon fba you should be wary of for example
there are so many fees including storage fees fba and seller fees when you do make a sale so profit
margins are unfortunately razer thin also from the research i've found fba is incredibly saturated at
this point in time it's even more difficult than drop shipping simply because it is so competitive
and saturated on the amazon marketplace as you can imagine but i think the worst part of amazon
fba is you're not truly building a business and a brand for yourself you're building and helping
the amazon marketplace and eco ecosystem i've always always recommended building your very own
brand that you own because you retain full control and you're not at the whim of the amazon algorithm
and you have the choice to expand or even sell your brand later down the track if you choose to
so guys they are in my opinion the best method to build a profitable drop shipping or e-commerce
store this year without even using aliexpress yes it may not be as easy or simple if you were to use
aliexpress but good things never come easy anyway so if you put in the hard work and build out your
ecommerce business and brand the right way you'll build a new income stream and assets you're proud
of faster than you'd even imagine investing all my days weeks and even months into building an
e-commerce business years ago really has changed my life for the better and given me opportunities
i never could have imagined so naturally i absolutely love the e-commerce business model and
hope this video helps push even just one of you to build an e-commerce business and change your life
thanks to spock it they're giving away a free full year subscription to spock it like i said
to get you started in finding the best products suppliers and kickstarting your ecommerce store
all you need to do is sign up for a free spock account in the description box below and then once
you've done that come back to this video and then comment the code word ecom growth and we'll select
a winner and upgrade your spocket account for free so thank you to spocket for sponsoring this video
and hosting the giveaway for our audience and helping our audience you know have that chance
to start their own e-commerce business if this video has helped you please do drop this video
a like subscribe for more tech and business content and as always thank you for watching