By Murphy October 21, 2019
What you don’t know about Aliexpress and Dropshipping agent cost Actually 90%(it is not official number but give or take) of aliexpress seller work like trading company. Cause most of the factories do not have budget to keep a sales team. And ali seller became more and more professional at online marketing giving time. So it is a win-win corporate for ali seller to work with factory.
To register a seller at aliexpress. you have to choose a product category, say clothing(there is a official category page in Chinese, you can google translate to English), you have to give Ali 10000 RMB annual fee. If you sell over 15,000 USD you have 50% back, and 45,000 USD you can have all the annual fee back. There is a official link for your reference. And aliexpress will charge seller 5% of the selling. So the cost of Ali seller as below:
product cost + staff salary + office(warehouse) rent + shipping fee + 5% * sell price + marketing fee(aliexpress ads, similar to amazon CPC).
While the Dropshipping agent could be many kinds, they may have their own B2B trading company, or they also aliexpress seller and the same time, or they corporate with factory in specific products. They can save the 5% which Ali seller can not. The category of products they can source is far more than the aliexpress seller cause they don’t have to pay category annual fee as ali seller. As long as they have a connection to the factory they can do better price than Ali seller. And they normally can do a lot value-added service like get you new sample, fulfill products, private label and etc.
pros and cons of aliexpress and dropshipping agent
shipping time: dropshipping agent is far better than aliexpress as they may have their own channel to different counties. And processing time normally better than aliexpress.
safty: Aliexpress is better as a platform they can protect both seller and shopper. To deal with agent you can have to choose who you can trust for the safe of the long term.
price: dropshipping agent normally do better price than Ali. But they have order minimal limit. As no profit to handle a few orders.