Aliexpress is one of the best marketplaces for dropshipping merchants to source products. Not a long time ago, Aliexpress launched a tool called the Aliexpress Dropshipping Center. This tool is built to help make dropshipping easier.
If you don’t know much about this center, that’s ok, because, in this article, I will break down what Aliexpress dropshipping center is, how to use it and what the benefits behind it are for you.
What is the Aliexpress dropshipping center?
The Aliexpress Dropshipping Center, a.k.a the Aliexpress Booster Program, is a set of tools that can help dropshipping merchants to find hot products, and analyze the potential of products.
To make the process of learning about these tools easier for you, I walk you through how to get access to the Aliexpress Dropshipping Center first.
How to add the Aliexpress dropshipping center to your Aliexpress account?
There are two ways you can have access to this center.
Dropship long enough that Aliexpress notices you. When you become kind of a dropshipping veteran on Aliexpress and places a decent number of orders, Aliexpress will recognize that you’re dropshipping and send you a notification about this center.
Sign up for the dropshipping center. If you are new to Aliexpress and know of this center early, you can submit an application to get access to it in this link. You must have an Aliexpress account first, and then, all you need to do is log into your Aliexpress account, click a few buttons, and you’re in!
How do I access AliExpress dropshipping center?
Once you have signed up for the Aliexpress Dropshipping Center, go to your Aliexpress profile, and you will find it in the Menu tab at the top of your profile. Or, you can get access to it by sign in to AliExpress. After signing in, you will be directed to the dashboard at once.
How to use the Aliexpress Dropshipping Center?
There are two main tools in the Aliexpress Dropshipping Center that you can use to make dropshipping easier.
Find products to sell:
Hot selling products:
This tool is great for doing product research as it shows you what products are best-selling on the market at a given moment.
Type in your keyword and you’ll find out which products are trending to sell
It’s worth keeping in mind that what this tool is showing you is hot products on Aliexpress, not in your region, so while you’re exploring best-selling products here, use the Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends at the same time. These Google tools will help you find out if there’s a demand for the hot products on Aliexpress in your region of selling.
Search by image
Other than typing, you can also search with product image
If you have a picture of the products you want to sell (maybe the trendy items in your region), you can find suppliers for them in the Search by image tab.
Sponsored products
Aliexpress suppliers do pay to get their products advertised on the platform. In this Sponsored products section, you can find suppliers for whatever product you want to sell. If a supplier spends their money on advertising, that’s a good sign telling that they’re serious about doing business. You can search for the product category that you want to sell.
Recommended: 9+ Best Dropshipping Product Research Tools For Winning
Product Analysis:
You can check out the daily sales volume of products overtime
When you find a product that you want to sell, but you’re not sure how it was performing, you can get that insight by analyzing that product in the Product Analysis section. Move your mouse over any point on the line, and you will see the exact sales volume of the product at that moment.
As you can see, there are up and down in sales of this product
It’s worth remembering that this data is from just that one product from the link you insert. There might be other suppliers who are selling the same products and doing great too.
Bonus: How to use Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends to check the potential of a certain product.
As I mentioned in Section 4.1, you should use Google keyword and Google Trends, alongside the Aliexpress Dropshipping Center, to find out what the actual demand for a product in your area is. There’s no point selling a product that is best-selling on Aliexpress, but has no demand in your area.
Just in case you have not acquired much knowledge of the Google Keyword Planner, it is a tool that provides you with data of monthly searches for a certain product on Google. You can filter the results and get the search volume in your area only.
Google Keyword Planner is a very powerful tool if you know how to use it
The Google Trends is another Google tool that can show you how a product performs in the past. It will allow you to find out if the demand for that product is growing, or declining.
You can easily check out the trend of products with Google Trends
How to use the Google Keyword Planner for product research:
Here’s how you can access the Google Keyword Planner and use it for free. Keep in mind that you need to follow the following steps strictly to avoid being asked for your credit card info by Google (In case you don’t plan to use Google Ads and just want to use its keyword tool).
Step 1: Log into your Gmail account.
Step 2: Go to the Google Ads dashboard via this link.
When this dialog shows up, choose any of the options, but click on the Switch to Expert Mode button.
Step 3: Click on the Create an account without a campaign option.
Step 4: Select your country, time zone and currency. These pieces of information can’t be changed later, so make sure you choose correctly.
Step 5: Explore your account.
You will be directed to the dashboard of your Google Ads account. Click on the Settings icon on the top right corner and choose the Switch to Expert Mode option.
Step 6: Go the the Google Keyword Planner.
Click on the wrench icon at the top right corner, and click on the Keyword Planner option, and you will be directed to the Google Keyword Planner tool.
Step 6: Discover new keywords
In this Discover new keywords section, you will find out the monthly search volume of a certain keyword.
Step 7: enter keywords for the product that you want to do research on and click the Get results button.
Step 8: Explore the results
There are a few things that you need to pay attention to when the results show up.
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Change the location to your local area. The default location is the US, which you selected in Step 4. The monthly for the entire US will be much bigger than that for your local area. For this example, I choose New York City.
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Choose the length of time that you want to get results for. It can be last week, last month, last six months, etc.
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This is the most important piece of information. It is the average monthly search volume for Airpod cases. The volume is 10k-100k that means there from 10,000 – 10,000 searches for this product per month. Unfortunately, Google requires its users to spend a certain amount of money on Google Ads (abou $100-$200) before they can get exact numbers from the Google Keyword Planner. There might be 15,500 searches for airpod cases last month, but if you don’t spend first, you won’t get that exact number. I personally think this is no problem, because when you do research on the market size, the low end of the volume (10k in this case) is enough to tell if a product has demand in your local market or not.
You can keep doing this research for any product that you find on Aliexpress until you form a list of all of the ones that you want to sell.
How to use the Google Trends:
There is a distinct difference between the Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends. While you can get search volume out of the Google Keyword Planner, you will get the relative popularity of search query out of the Google Trends.
That relative popularity is rated on a scale of from 0-100. You can see that over the past 12 months, demand for airpod cases is going flat, but there was a surge on Dec 22 2019. The reason might be Apple’s product-releasing event.
Here’s how you can use this tool; it’s very simple.
Step 1: Go to Google Trends
Step 2: Search for a keyword
Step 3: Analyze the results
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This is the product that you search for.
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Make sure that you change the location to your local region.
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Choose the length of time for which you want to get results.
If the product that you’re planning to sell shows a declining trend, or there’s not really much demand, it’s better to just find other products that have larger demand.
Final words
If you’re running a dropshipping store (or planning to start one) and on a tight budget, it can be challenging to afford a product research tool. If that’s the case for you, the Aliexpress Dropshipping Center is a great free tool for you to do your product research.
Does AliExpress do dropshipping?
Does AliExpress allow dropshipping? Yes! AliExpress makes it easy to find products to sell in your ecommerce store without having to worry about inventory or shipping. You can start dropshipping today, for free, by using Oberlo to find and add AliExpress products to your store in only a few clicks.
Is AliExpress dropshipping dead?