Oberlo, launched in September 2015, is an application created for the Shopify e-commerce platform that simplifies the drop shipping process for e-commerce store owners or drop shippers.
Oberlo is a legit drop shipping site. It is not a scam because they will never steal your money or credit card details. And Oberlo is a very popular website with lots of positive feedback from users.
Before I go on on this Oberlo review, I would like to explain here that Shopify is a hosted platform for eCommerce that allows its users to create their online store and also sell their products online.
With Shopify, you can accept credit card payments from your customers electronically, organize the products you want to sell, customize and personalize how you want your storefront to look like and also track the orders of your clients and respond to them as the case may be. It is popularly known as a total e-commerce solution for those who are interested in e-commerce.
So, Oberlo acts as a middle man between the market place of the supplier and the front end of the drop shipper’s e-commerce store. This application helps in the importation of products from supplier marketplaces to the e-commerce store of the drop shipper, it also helps with the management of changes in the inventory of the supplier and also in the pricing of the supplier. With Oberlo, especially if your eCommerce store is hosted through Shopify, you can import and sync the product from AliExpress including the pictures, the description of the product and the price of the product with your own store all within a few minutes.
Under different circumstances, you would have to visit the AliExpress website and search for what you want, after which you would have to separately download the pictures and copy out the prices and description of the product. Then you would have to proceed to your store and start uploading these products. You would also have to keep checking back with AliExpress to ensure that they still have the product in stock and the price is still the same. These are the things you can easily manage with Oberlo as you can carry out all of the aforementioned procedures without leaving the application and within a very short period of time.
Oberlo works solely with AliExpress and Shopify and AliExpress is a great place to indulge in drop shipping because of the large range of products available on their platform. With AliExpress, you can also start your drop shipping business without having to spend a dime and you also don’t have to contact the suppliers of those products before uploading them to your site.
When you use Oberlo and engage in Drop shipping, as amazing and easy as it sounds, there are some downsides to the business. One of which is in the case of returns and refunds. After your customers have received the product from AliExpress, they might find faults with it like inferior quality products, used products and broken products. Now, if the client is right according to your refund and return policy, you will have to be prepared to foot the bill of that refund until the AliExpress supplier either agrees or disagrees with your own complaint.
WHAT IS DROP SHIPPING?
Drop shipping is a term used to describe an eCommerce process where the owners of the online stores sell products to their customers without having to stock those products. Store owners do not have to keep inventory and the delivery of the product is carried out by the main manufacturers of that product. So basically, an e-commerce store owner uploads a product to his or her site, a customer comes along and places an order for the product. The store owner then attends to the order by placing an order for the same product from the supplier of the product who then delivers it directly to the customer.
A drop shipper does not need to have a warehouse to keep an inventory of products on their website. They also have total control over the pricing margins of the products on their website
As a drop shipper, you would have access to a whole of products because you don’t have to buy them first and you don’t even have to register your business details when you are starting out but it does have a few disadvantages in that you have to take out time to pick out the right suppliers because the success of your company or online store depends heavily on these suppliers because even though you don’t have to bother about the responsibility of product delivery, stock inventory and other e-commerce intricacies, working with a bad supplier that supplies fake products will spell out bad business for you. As a drop shipper, you can also create and manage your business from anywhere in the world so long as you have your laptop with you.
Most people associate drop shipping with Chinese suppliers and these Chinese suppliers can be found in most supply market places online like AliExpress where they upload the products that they produce with the wholesale prices of the items. AliExpress was created by Jack Ma shortly after he created the popular e-commerce website, Alibaba and Alibaba were built basically to help Chinese suppliers supply their products to the rest of the world, so from Alibaba, e-commerce store owners can purchase products at their wholesale prices in bulk and store them up in their warehouses. AliExpress, on the other hand, was specifically to aid drop shippers because they do not buy the products directly so AliExpress helps them ship the product to their customers. AliExpress also gives normal individuals who do not drop shippers the opportunity to buy stuff from the platform for their selves.
So, when you want to engage in drop shipping say with AliExpress, all you need to do browse through their products until you come across something you would want to sell in your own shop. All that is left is importing that product to your store from AliExpress, putting up a clear description and setting your own price margins. This is where Oberlo comes in. let us discuss Oberlo in more details below.
FEATURES OF OBERLO REVIEW AT A GLANCE
- Drastically reduces the amount of time it would originally take to add products to your online store from AliExpress.
- Over 300 reviews that are positive on the Shopify app market place.
- Quickly and effortlessly ingress products into your online store.
- Presently being used with over six thousand five hundred stores hosted on Shopify.
- Auto shipping of drop shipped products directly to customers.
- Oberlo has 3 payment packages, the Starter package which is free costing $0 per month forever, the Basic package costing $29.9 per month and the Pro package costing $79.9 per month.
- Auto-sync of inventory and price details with your online store.
- Has been used to generate over $35 million in sales since inception.
- Handles the auto fulfilment of orders for all packages.
- Automatically synchronizes your AliExpress orders tracking numbers with Oberlo.
- Allows users to place up to 1000 orders of supply at once and pay just once.
- Automatically syncs the pricing on your store depending on whether you put a fixed price or a percentage product price mark up.
- Sales report presentation.
- Customize the imported product to your preferences in your store.
- Aids in dispute management by working with suppliers to resolve issues like refunds and returns.
- Product filtration with ePacket which aids you in importing only products with the quickest time of delivery.
- Tracking of shipments available only to the Basic package and Pro package subscribers.
- Access to Orders Fulfillment reports enabling effective monitoring available to only Basic Package and Pro Package subscribers.
- Access to the use of multiple users with different access levels into your online store available only to Pro package subscribers.
HOW OBERLO WORKS
To sign up with Oberlo, you could either sign up via their official website at www.oberlo.com or via the listing for Oberlo in the Shopify app market place at www.apps.shopify.com/oberlo. After signing up, you would have to install the application which is a pretty candid process. All you need to do is click the installation link which you would find on your Shopify home page and the application will start installing on your Shopify store. When registering with Oberlo, even if you are choosing to subscribe to the free starter package, you will be required to fill in your credit card details.
Immediately your sign up and credit card details are verified and approved, the application will be installed and you will be able to access it through your Shopify store. Once your Oberlo application is activated, you will be redirected to the dashboard. If you have never used Oberlo before, you can always make use of the “Get Started” area that helps you go through primary chores like your first product installation, setting your pricing rules, Importing of products… etc. You can also utilize the plethora of video tutorials available to learn how to get started with Oberlo.
One of the main reasons why you are using Oberlo is to drop ship products so to import products to your store, click on the “Search Products” option on the Oberlo application and search for the products you would like to upload to your store. You can search via keywords and also via categories and these search results can be filtered by different factors, the price, the score and also the volume sold in the last 30 days. You can also import products when using the chrome browser to browse through the products they have on at AliExpress by using the Oberlo Chrome Extension to import them. Every time you finally find the right product you want to import to your store, you can add it to the import list.
When you check out your imports list page, you will be able to modify different aspects of all the products you have added before finally showcasing them on your online store. The aspects of the imported products that can be modified are the names of the products, the inventory of the products, the type of the product, the tags of the products and the description of the products too. You also get to choose which of the product images you want to import and you can also add the item to a collection of items. When you are done with all the modifications, you can upload all the products to your store all at once or one by one depending on what you want.
When you have successfully imported products from the supplier market place to your online store, you can find all of them on the “My Products” page where you have the ability to delete a product from your store and disable the auto tracking so that you don’t get notifications about the product in the case of stock change and price change. On this page you can also override a product you don’t want in your store anymore by replacing it with another new product. You can also view all your imported products in Shopify by clicking on the “Open in Shopify” link found on the “My Products” page. You also get to preview how the changes you have made a look from the front end of your store by duplicating the page and reloading every time you make a modification. Oberlo also has a notifications area where you get to view all your notifications and an orders page where you get to see reports on all the orders that you have.
Oberlo has three different pricing packages, the Starter package which is free costing $0 per month forever with a product upload limit of 500 products and an order limit of 50 orders, the Basic package costing $29.9 per month with a product upload limit of 10000 products and an order limit of 500 orders and the Pro package costing $79.9 per month with a product upload limit of 30000 products and an unlimited order limit. There are also other differences between these plans as I have already listed under the “Features of Oberlo at a Glance” subheading. If you want to use the professional plan, you can as well utilize the first 30 days of the free trial version and you can always switch between any of the plans at any time you want.
This application is one that I am pretty impressed with basically because of the features they offer. The benefits of Oberlo cannot be overemphasized especially if you are one to handle large amounts of imports to your e-commerce store.
RELIABIALITY AND SUPPORT
Oberlo has a lot of outlets that enable their users either contact them when they have issues or get answers to their challenges from the numerous tutorial materials including videos and articles that are available on their website and application. You can access some of these materials at their website at www.help.oberlo.com and also on their application when viewed through the Shopify platform. If you don’t find the solution to your challenge in any of these materials, you can always reach Oberlo at www.ask.oberlo.com/t/support to ask any questions and get a support representative to attend to you.
Oberlo has always been known to promptly respond to all customer complaints and challenges gently walking their users through the challenge until a solution to the problem is achieved.
Oberlo reviews by users:
- Lanre Says:
Using Oberlo always saves me a lot of time and looking back at it now, I don’t think I would have grown this much with the amount of progress I have made with my online store business without the use of Oberlo. This application most definitely made my life and business easier.
- Cherry Says:
These days, people do not trust reviews anymore because it is very easy to conjure up something that someone did not say and claim they said it. That was what I thought when I first read the reviews about the application but after using it, I must confess that they even deserve more than a 5-star rating. I have now incorporated it into my second website and e-commerce has never been so easy for me. Everything they say the application does, it does and that is just great so I do not regret my investment into this application. It is definitely worth it.
- Gerald Says:
Since I started using Oberlo, I have come to know speed and efficiency and they keep doing upgrades on what I considered a perfect application already. I have never had to wait for too long to get a response from their support and that has also become faster over the months I have used Oberlo. I am grateful I heard about these guys, they are doing a great Job.
- Alliser Says:
This application is nothing short of excellent. I only started using it a few weeks ago and it has really made uploading and importing products very easy and faster too. When I also tried to reach their support agents, I was replied almost immediately and they are so professional.
- Zara Says:
I have used a lot of drop shipping applications but this is the best one I have tried so far. I have even noticed an improvement in my sales since I started using the application because I have been able to add more products to my site so my store now looks more credible and trustworthy. I also love that the starter package is now free so I can leverage on this package and upgrade when I can afford it. I can’t say how much I am thankful to have learnt about this app from my friend.
Now that we know what Oberlo is about and what it is used for, let us explore other applications that could be used in the same fashion as Oberlo or in areas where Oberlo cannot be used.
Do you have experience with Oberlo? Good or bad, kindly use the comment section below to give us your brief Oberlo review.
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