Oberlo Review – The Perfect Solution for Drop Shipping Businesses?

A lot of business people are interested in drop shipping, because it looks like an easy way to do business. In reality, however, contacting suppliers, finding the right prices, and keeping your website up to date is actually a whole lot of work. The result is that the tiny margin you end up with may not seem worth it. Luckily, there are options out there to make things more manageable for you, one of which is Oberlo. Oberlo, unlike others, has not create a full ecommerce solution. Rather, it offers a type of extension or app, which can be added to Shopify stores, and a few more stores like it. The goal is to make it easier than ever to create a dropship account, and Oberlo is then also responsible for the packaging and shipping.

Pros

Cons

Features

Templates

Oberlo is not a full eCommerce platform, so the issue of templates is slightly different than it would be in other systems. That said, Oberlo does want to help you set up a professional looking store, so they have some text templates that you can use. These include:

App Market

Oberlo does not have its own app store. Rather, it expects its customers to work with the Shopify platform (Oberlo does work with a number of other platforms, but Shopify is considered to be the best one), and they have a wealth of apps available that integrate perfectly with Oberlo. The reason why Shopify is so highly recommended is because it makes it easier than ever to create an online business. The apps they offer are designed to refine a social media strategy, improve sales and marketing, and essentially help you grow your business.

There are both free and paid for apps available through Shopify, all of which are listed on the Shopify App Store itself. This is, in fact, one of the most popular marketplaces for apps on the internet. They offer countless solutions, easily divided into categories, so that you can get exactly what you need. The categories are:

Oberlo has looked at a number of those apps in greater detail and made some recommendations in terms of which ones they recommend.

eCommerce

Oberlo is very different from all other store builders and eCommerce platforms because it focuses specifically on drop shipping. Dropshipping means that you do not hold any physical items. Rather you order through other suppliers, who send the products out as if they were yours. Your customers, in other words, will not even realize that it is not your own stock that they are receiving.

As previously mentioned, there are a number of key challenges in setting up drop shipping accounts:

  1. It is difficult to obtain a substantial profit margin, as you have to increase the prices of the original supplier.
  2. It can be hard to find a supplier that you know you can trust.
  3. The payment methods can be very complex, as you have to accept payment from your client and send this through to the supplier.
  4. You have to find a way to make it impossible for your customers to know that they have actually ordered from a different supplier.

On the other hand, the fact that you can run your store from any location in the world, and that you don’t have to worry about overhead costs, such as warehousing costs, makes it an attractive way of doing business. What Oberlo has done is create a huge dropshipping forum, where you can communicate with other members and provide each other with hints and tips to make your business more successful.

Pricing

Oberlo offers a 30 day free trial on all its plans, which you should use before you decide to sign up for the paid plans. If you are unhappy with the system at any time, even after you sign up for a proper plan, you can cancel it. Additionally, if you go over your limits, you will simply be billed for it, meaning that your order process will continue. It does, however, remove the dropshipping component, which means that you will have to conduct a manual process to send your orders out.

Oberlo’s pricing is surprisingly affordable, giving you three different plans to choose from:

  1. Starter, which is completely free! This allows up to 500 products, 50 monthly orders, automatic order fulfillment, daily product syncing, a free Chrome extension, pricing automation, and sales reporting.
  2. Basic, which costs $29.90 per month and allows up to 10,000 products, 500 monthly orders, everything from the Starter plan, order fulfillment monitoring, and shipment tracking.
  3. Pro, which costs $79.90 per month and allows up to 30,000 products, unlimited monthly orders, everything from the Basic plan, and multiple users.

The Pro plan is likely to further develop, with new features to be added. One such feature is support for more than one sales channel, where all your orders will be managed. The verified suppliers function is also being developed, which gives you the peace of mind that your suppliers will fulfill all the orders the right way.

Support

Since Oberlo is not a full eCommerce platform, you may expect that their customer support is also quite limited. Actually, they have a fantastic blog where you can keep up to date with inspirations, strategies, and updates. They also have an email newsletter, and their social media platform is really well used, so you can always ask questions. In fact, they are incredibly responsive when it comes to Facebook messages.

Oberlo also has the amazing dropshipping forum, where you can speak to others who are in the same type of business as you. Furthermore, Oberlo staff also monitor and partake in this forum, so you can get lots of help on important topics, such as building your brand and expected earnings.

Last but not least, there is a large knowledge base available on the website. You can search this for popular topics about how to use the system. Should you have a question that is not answered in there, you can submit a question and an Oberlo team member will reply to you in due time.

Conclusion

So, should you have Oberlo or not? If you run a dropshipping store, then the answer is yes. It takes just a few minutes to install the system and you can even use a free account if your store is not that large yet. All the complexities of dropshipping will be automated for you instantly, leaving you to the important business of making money.

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