How To Dropship Products Using A US Supplier
I’m going to be giving you a step-by-step tutorial on how to dropship products within the United States with fast 4-7 day express shipping times. Now you can dropship products within the USA with one-week shipping or less. And best of all, it is absolutely free to do so.
Absolutely no fancy subscription service required. I ain’t got a single affiliate link. Nothing at all. Because simply, to drop ship products within the United States with fast 4-7 days shipping times, all you will be doing is purchasing your products directly from AliExpress. And if you don’t know what AliExpress dropshipping is, it’s one of the beginner-friendly business models that we teach on this website.
AliExpress, if you don’t know, is a website where Chinese manufacturers sell their products super cheaply. With AliExpress dropshipping, what you do is make a super unique hyper viral product and then open up a low-cost online store with a platform like Shopify that’s designed so that newbies can easily create beautiful stores, and then list those hyper viral products in your store, but with big markups. And then when a customer comes and orders one of your products, you then go and order them directly from the AliExpress supplier for a fraction of the price. But instead of giving the AliExpress supplier your address, you give them your customer’s address, and they’ll ship the product out to the customer for you while you keep the difference as profit.
So the reason, therefore, that AliExpress dropshipping is a beginner-friendly business model is because of the fact that you don’t have to purchase any products that you sell until the customer has bought them from you. Awesome, right? Well, what’s not quite so awesome about AliExpress dropshipping is that AliExpress product suppliers are usually based in China. So what that means then is that it often takes 10-20 days for your customers to receive their products because they’re being shipped all the way out from China, and this is less awesome. And while it’s not the end of the world, and plenty of drop shippers still make lots of money dropshipping from China, it does mean you need to warn the customer about this on your product page, and because of that, fewer customers will buy from you. And it means that you don’t really get to take advantage of the biggest day of the year for online stores.
Christmas. Because, of course, since it takes 10-20 days for products to usually arrive in the United States using the fastest, cheapest shipping option currently available, ePacket, the window for which you can advertise your products as being able to arrive in time to be a Christmas present is very narrow. But, with four- to seven-day shipping, you now get to advertise your products as potential Christmas presents for much longer. So how is this possible? Well, what we’re going to do is we’re going to take advantage of something that more and more AliExpress suppliers have been doing within the past year, and that is they’ve been opening up warehouses to stock their products in the USA, which they can then send out to USA customers using USPS four- to seven-day shipping after you order the item from them. And this is really good news for drop shippers moving forward and here’s a big reason why.
Some of you may remember that the USA threatened to kill China’s cheapest, fastest shipping option that I just said, ePacket. Well, at the time, understandably, people were freaking out over this. And when I saw this, I was like, no, it’s okay. Don’t panic yet. We don’t even know if this will actually happen, and even if it does, based on the past, there will almost certainly be a solution. Wait and see.
Well, it’s been over a year, and ePacket is still here. And even if it goes away, AliExpress, in conjunction with China Post, has already done what I suspected that they would do and introduced their own shipping option that is almost a clone of ePacket, AliExpress Standard Shipping.
But of course, that’s not all. A lot of suppliers decided to take matters into their own hands and started to store their products locally within the United States, which means that you get to dropship within the USA, which is great.
Let me show you how simple it is to find suppliers that are offering this as an option. It’s very simple. All you need to do is go to the search bar and type in what you’re looking for. If you don’t have a specific product in mind that you want to dropship, you could type in your store niche to see what USA-based products you can dropship.
Let’s say you were interested in opening a store aimed at dog owners. We can type in dogs and get started with our product research. You want to come to search filters and find this little dropdown menu, and you want to select the United States, and when we do that, AliExpress will now filter the products to show us which ones can be purchased directly from USA-based suppliers.
Of course, you’ll want to treat each supplier like you usually would. You’d want to look for a supplier who is regularly making sales with their product while also having happy customers, which is why I filtered by orders. And when we do that, boom. This here is currently a product that lots of drop shippers are having success with.
This product has been successful for a lot of people for the same reason that the good old LED dog collar was really successful for a lot of drop-shippers. People sell dog teeth cleaning products like toothbrushes and toys by making video ads. They talk about how dogs having bad teeth can lead to lung disease, heart disease, and even death. That, and combined with the unusual shape of the toothbrush that makes people go, “Ooh, I wonder why it’s shaped like that,” creating curiosity and getting people to click and watch the video has helped make this and other dog toothbrushing products very successful for drop-shippers.
But, of course, the important thing is this. The supplier for this product has warehouses in the United States, and as you can see, if we select the USA as the country and select a toothbrush, we can see the price. It is $1.56 to buy it and $4.21 for 4-7 day USPS shipping.
And of course, if we go and add $1.56 and $4.21 together, we can see that it costs just $5.77 to dropship this winning product with fast shipping within the USA.
How To Add These USA-based Dropshippers To Your Store.
With AliExpress dropshipping, I always recommend that beginners open their stores with Shopify, which is what I’m going to focus on in this article. And one of those reasons is that there is a free exclusive app for it, Oberlo. This app does cool things.
It semi-automates your store, and as I’m about to show you, it makes adding products from AliExpress into your store super simple.
But we need to make sure that we add the USA drop shipper and not the China drop shipper. So here is how we do that. Once you’ve installed Oberlo and added its Chrome extension to your browser, come to the product you want to add and then click the Oberlo icon inside your browser. Select to import this product to your store and then click the Open Import List button.
Related article: best dropshipping suppliers for beginners
Now, this doesn’t immediately add the product to your store. Oberlo lets you make some changes first inside its Product Importer tool first. You can change things like the title and select which pictures you want to use for your product listing. The most important change we need to make is the variants tab.
According to Oberlo here, this product has 12 variants, which might seem strange, because this product only has six variants. You can buy the individual toothbrushes in their different colors, or you can buy all five as a bundle.
You see what Oberlo has done is it’s added in the blue toothbrush being shipped from China, and also added in a blue toothbrush being shipped from the USA, and a green and pink toothbrush being shipped from China, and then another one being shipped from the USA, and so on. And so all you need to do is go in and un-tick all the variants that have China in the Ships From column inside of Oberlo, and then tick which USA toothbrushes you’d like to add to your store, and then go ahead and click the Import button.
Now when a customer comes and if they buy one of these toothbrushes from you, Oberlo will know that you don’t want to purchase it from China. You want to buy it from the USA-based warehouse instead. And of course, like usual, you can go in and edit the product page once it’s been added to your store. And then when a customer comes and buys one of these from you, just come to the Orders page inside the Oberlo app and click the Order Product button.
What Oberlo has done is it’s taken control and it’s adding this product to my cart in AliExpress and it’s adding in the customer’s address automatically, far quicker than any human manually could.
Related article: How to automate your dropshipping store
As you can see, it’s selected the correct shipping, USPS 4-7day shipping. All I need to do to complete this order is to click the Place Order button.
It’s very simple to dropship products from the USA with fast shipping times. But there are some important things that are good to know first, such as that when you’re dropshipping products from the USA, you can be far more aggressive with your pricing strategy. Usually, if you were dropshipping products from China, I’d recommend that you take the base product price plus the shipping price and then triple it to get the price that you offer to the customer to give yourself a big profit margin. But, with American drop shippers, if you do it right, you don’t have to price so aggressively. You can have smaller profit margins and yet still be highly profitable. And of course, the reasons for this are pretty obvious:
- One, Since customers won’t be hit with a long shipping warning time, your conversion rates will be higher. You make less money per sale because your margins are lower, but because you make more sales, it helps to balance it out.
- Secondly, this is very important, you’re going to find that with smaller shipping times, it’s a lot easier to have repeat customers, currently, right now, the number-one way that Chinese AliExpress drop-shippers are getting people to come back in and purchase again is that immediately after the sale, they hit them with a discount coupon code that lasts for a short period of time, usually less than 24 hours.
This of course encourages your customer to come back in, and buy again while they are a hot lead. And it is really important that you get the customer to come back in and buy again right now, because it’s going to be a whole lot harder to get them to come back in and become a repeat buyer with the long shipping times, whereas while I still highly recommend that you use this coupon method to get customers to come back into your store immediately, regardless of if you’re using USA-based drop shippers or not because it’s extremely effective, you’re going to find that it’s going to be much easier, you’re going to have a much easier time using follow-up marketing tactics like emails and advertising campaigns after the customer has received their item because of the fact that they will have had a great experience from you because they received their items fast.
But there is something else that you also need to know before you use USA-based drop-shippers, and that is that not all USA-based suppliers on AliExpress have 4-7 day shipping times. For some of them, due to longer processing times, it will be longer.
For example, if we come back to those search listings and click on a product instead, a dog chew toy, we’ll see that their shipping period is longer.
It’s 4-13 days. Usually, the customer gets their product on the lower end of that scale, but the moment you use a supplier like this, you do need to update your product listing to warn the customer that it could take up to two weeks, which will have an impact on your conversions.
Conclusion
Let’s say that you wanted to dropship a product, and not just to the USA, but to the rest of the world as well. Well, you could import both China and the USA drop shippers into your store with Oberlo and have the USA shipping option available for people in the United States but also import the China products and allow customers to be able to select them as a worldwide shipping option.
