The eCommerce market is huge. In 2019, the global retail eCommerce sales amounted to $3.53 trillion and the market is poised to grow to $6.54 trillion in 2022. These numbers just go to show how popular online shopping is in the world.
One of the factors that precipitate this growth is the advent of dropshipping. This business model is often associated with zero investments and huge profits but it takes some time and effort on the business owner’s part to get it up and running.
Thankfully though, there are some great tools and plugins that make dropshipping easier.
AliDropship and WooDropship are two of those tools, which have helped many dropshippers worldwide to get their dropshipping businesses to thrive.
In this comparison post, we’ll look into the features of both plugins, how they stack up against each other, and conclude with our favorite of the two.
- AliDropship vs WooDropship: What They Are And How They Work
- AliDropship vs WooDropship: Features
- AliDropship vs WooDropship: Support
- AliDropship vs WooDropship: Pricing
- AliDropship vs WooDropship: Similarities & Differences
- AliDropship vs WooDropship: Pros & Cons
- AliDropship vs WooDropship: Which Is The Better Plugin?
AliDropship vs WooDropship: What They Are And How They Work
AliDropship
This is a WordPress plugin that helps you create a dropshipping business and streamline the component on your store.
Its creators are developers with over a decade of web development. They are successful dropshippers who have been running many of their own dropshipping stores and believe that anybody can build and start a similar venture and change their own lives.
Once you buy a readymade store or use it with your own dropshipping business on your shopping cart enabled WordPress theme, you can access, import, and sell thousands of AliExpress products.
AliDropship works exclusively with AliExpress, but it’s not owned by the Alibaba group; its parent company is Sunshine Digital Marketing LLC.
It also provides a variety of powerful features from marketing to management, automation, free themes, and more.
If you prefer to use WooCommerce, the plugin has a WooCommerce version but it lacks the marketing features like discounts, abandoned carts, cross-sells, and email lists.
Whether you’re a newbie or expert with a multi-million dollar turnover, AliDropship plugin has the solution you’re looking for.
Some of the benefits of using it include unprecedented profit margins, ordering a custom store instead of building your own from scratch, expanding your business anytime, 100 percent ownership of your store, and free personal support.
One-click import, process automation, unlimited product choice, free updates, number of tools, one-time payment, and more.
WooDropship
WooDropship is also a plugin for dropshipping that helps you import products to your store easily from AliExpress. It transforms your store to have a similar look and feel of an AliExpress website and allows you to fulfill all your customers’ orders in one click.
The freemium dropshipping software is one of the easiest for newbies to start their dropshipping business with, thanks to the easy import from AliExpress, automatic order fulfillment, built-in image editor and product customization.
You can also set your own prices for arbitrage of the products you sell, which can span more than 3,000 on your store.
To get started with WooDropship, you’ll need to sign up and connect your store by allowing the plugin access to your store so you can add products easily, or buy a custom dropshipping store.
Once you’ve connected the plugin to your store using the WooDropship Chrome extension, you can add products, edit their titles and descriptions, remove watermarks, and other edits. After editing, you’re now ready to get sales and fulfill your customers’ orders using AliExpress.
AliDropship vs WooDropship: Features
There’s a handful of useful and powerful features that AliDropship and WooDropship plugins offer. Let’s dive in and check out these features in more detail.
AliDropship
AliDropship is a WordPress solution that lets you create fully-fledged online stores so you can generate stable profit. Here’s a breakdown of the features this plugin has to offer
Search and Import
With AliDropship, you can use the integrated filters to find and add your desired products on AliExpress to your store.
Pricing automation
The plugin has an advanced pricing markup formula you can use to apply pricing rules to any of your store’s items.
Auto-updating
AliDropship’s auto-updating system works alongside AliExpress to ensure your product information is up to date with to-the-minute data.
One-click import, process automation, unlimited product choice, free updates, number of tools, one-time payment, and more.
Automatic order fulfillment
With AliDropship, you don’t have to worry and struggle about manual ordering of products. Once you click the Order button, you can confirm the order quickly on AliExpress.
ePacket shipping filter
This tool allows you to give your customers free and fast delivery as it’ll make it easier to find products.
Auto order tracking
AliDropship checks orders for any updates on order tracking and sends automatic email notifications to your customers.
Product customization
You can edit your products’ titles, images, descriptions, prices, variations, and more at any time or add your own items to the store.
WooCommerce support
The WooCommerce version of the plugin allows you to enjoy the wide variety of Woo extensions and themes.
Unlimited products
There’s no limit as to how many products you’re able to sell on your dropshipping store.
Product variations
You can include multiple sizes, materials, colors, and other variations of your products on your store.
Built-in image editor
AliDropship’s native image editor allows you to edit your images on AliExpress before moving them to your store. You can also use the WordPress admin panel to make changes to the products directly.
Built-in themes
This plugin has a wide array of themes designed professionally so you can simply set it up, swap it out, and customize to your liking.
Product reviews
This feature lets you import reviews from customers directly to your site and engage with them to encourage more sales.
Discount coupons
You can offer discounts like percentage or dollars off, free shipping, and run sales or promotions by offering coupon codes to your clients.
SEO product tags
With this tool, you can optimize your product pages for search engines using meta tags that are product-specific, descriptions, titles, and keywords.
Abandoned cart
This feature is designed to deal with the cart abandonment issue, which is common to online stores and happens for several reasons. AliDropship will send you follow-up emails to help you recover sales that you’d otherwise have lost altogether.
Email lists
AliDropship also collects your customers’ emails including details of users who left their contact data on your site even though they never followed through with their purchases.
Live statistics
To get detailed data about your traffic sources and visitors, you can easily connect your Google Analytics to AliDropship plugin and see all the important data you need.
Inventory management
AliDropship allows you to manage your entire inventory closely, while tracking your stock counts. When inventory runs out, you can then stop selling products.
One-click import, process automation, unlimited product choice, free updates, number of tools, one-time payment, and more.
Payment gateways integration
The plugin supports major payment gateways like Stripe, PayPal, PayU, 2CO, and many others.
Intuitive user dashboard
AliDropship plugin has an all-in-one dashboard that helps you make the right decisions for your business as you monitor and control all important store activities such as sales, traffic, orders, and more.
Free updates and support
When you buy the AliDropship plugin, you can get life-long free updates and full after-sales support with continuously updating options and features.
Cash-back system
As an added bonus to your main dropshipping revenue, the plugin also lets you earn up to 12 percent commission on each purchase.
AliDropship Woo
This plugin is compatible with WooCommerce themes, which means you can pick and modify the look and feel of your dropshipping store easily.
Established stores for sale
You can own an already successful business by investing in a store with increasing sales and repeat customers. AliDropship makes this possible by giving you a fully automated, risk-free business complete with stable passive income.
It also offers a solid social media following and efficient advertising campaigns on Facebook and Instagram that’ll be transferred to you after purchase.
Hosting
Need hosting for your WordPress-based dropshipping store? AliDropship also offers a hosting solution that’s optimized for the plugin with high performance and fast site loading speeds.
With this hosting package, you get a free website setup, free SSL certificate, and a control panel that’s easy to manage. Also included in the hosting is a free anti-DDoS guard, up to 2,000 Mbit per second, high-end hardware, and advanced security at no extra fees.
Add-ons
AliDropship isn’t just a plugin; it also contains powerful add-ons for better performance. They’re easy to install and use to propel your store’s sales and customer experience.
Expert services
The team at AliDropship comprises expert developers and dropshippers, so if you’re struggling with how to set up something, or it’s hard to set up your store, you can select one of their website services done in-house by their team.
Themes
AliDropship offers perfect, professional, and sales-ready theme designs for your dropshipping business to use in order to boost conversions and offer the perfect shopping experience.
Premium products
Each week, you can get bestselling products with winning marketing campaigns automatically without having to search for them, make product descriptions, or find customer reviews.
One-click import, process automation, unlimited product choice, free updates, number of tools, one-time payment, and more.
You no longer have to invest time creating marketing or promotion materials or perform testing on products and advertising. AliDropship does it for you.
Import packages
Thanks to the import package, you can add hot products to your store and choose from more than 50,000 dropshipping bestsellers with top-rated items handpicked by the AliDropship team.
A package code ensures you get access after purchasing the imports package and when activated, you can get bonus imports besides the hot products database to import from. Import packages come in Lite, Pro, and Elite packages in one-time payments.
Chrome extension
This AliDropship plugin lets you import AliExpress products directly to your store, search lower-priced products identical to what you want, view store ratings, and seller trustability.
It also shows data such as price changes for products over time,real-life product photos from customers, filter products with ePacket shipping, and import what you want straight to your store.
Profit calculator
This is a tool offered by AliDropship that lets you see the potential earnings you can make with dropshipping.
WooDropship
Import products
With WooDropship, you can also import products quickly to your store from AliExpress in one click. This saves you time and you get to decide the pricing of the products.
Inventory and Price sync
This feature enables you to sync your store with AliExpress’ store making it easier to manage your inventory and pricing. The plugin integrates with AliExpress so your store is in sync such that any changes in inventory like stock shortages or price hikes can be adjusted accordingly and displayed on your site.
Price setting
WooDropship also allows you to set your own pricing so you can make profits. You can also calculate taxes, shipping, and other charges besides your margin to get the total price for each product. To test your pricing models, you can also bulk edit your pricing.
Product details
Once you add products from AliExpress to your own store, you can edit the product title, description, and pricing so you can easily set the profit margins you want for the products.
Adding product information gives it a higher chance of being bought by customers because they need it to make purchase decisions. This includes images and other variants you can add accordingly.
Native image editor
Each time you add products to your store, you’ll find watermarks that are just meant to protect the original image from copyright infringements.
If you see watermarks on some images of the products, WooDropship can help you remove those using the built-in image editor that gets rid of these marks so that you can have a premium looking store with legit products, not just another dropshipping store.
Order fulfillment
WooDropship offers a simple order fulfillment process that sends your customers’ orders directly to them in one click. Products are automatically added to the AliExpress cart and auto-filled details of the customer appear in the same cart in a matter of minutes.
Chrome Extension
This is the web browser extension version of the plugin that saves you time instead of sending you to the web app every time. It also imports products right from the AliExpress store to your own store and has features that let you:
- Add products to your WooDropship Import list
- Sort out products using the ePacket delivery feature
- Put orders on AliExpress in one click
- Automate price and inventory syncing with AliExpress
Affiliate Program
WooDropship lets you earn more by partnering with them. You get a $25 commission for every store and $20 for each plugin you sell. Some of the benefits you accrue by joining the WooDropship affiliate program include:
- A wide range of products to take advantage of, which are tested for yielding great outcomes
- Customer support round the clock so you never have to face any issues with the platform
- Easy payouts via PayPal with a minimum of $50 and 48 hours approval so you get paid on time for your work
- Tracking your progress through the WooDropship Affiliate dashboard that shows you the clicks, conversions, and sales metrics. You can also generate affiliate links using the UTR generator
- You can get approved less than 24 hours after you send your affiliate application, which is free of cost
- Marketing materials for promoting your affiliate is available for you to bring potential sales to WooDropship’s website
To join the affiliate program, sign up, and then start marketing the products and making sales from your link. You’ll get paid for each successful sale you make from your link.
AliDropship vs WooDropship: Support
AliDropship
Support is available via a help center, Dropship insights, forum, and affiliates center for affiliates, social media pages, FAQ section, online contact form, a blog, and page with success stories for inspiration.
WooDropship
WooDropship support is offered through a help desk, online live chat (typically replies within an hour), and email.
AliDropship vs WooDropship: Pricing
AliDropship
There are different pricing structures based on what you want from AliDropship such as hosting, add-ons, services, themes, and so on.
The AliDropship plugin itself costs $89 – a one-time fee that gets you two plugin versions – one for WordPress and another for WooCommerce. If you add hosting, depending on the hosting you go for, you can get a free WordPress CMS setup, installation of the plugin, and SSL certificate.
One-click import, process automation, unlimited product choice, free updates, number of tools, one-time payment, and more.
Hosting offers four plans: Silver $48, Gold $86, Gold Plus $129, and Platinum $220. All plans offer a control panel, unlimited bandwidth, IonCube Guard Loader, PHP 7.2, and free SSL.
You can get AliDropship expert services whose prices vary depending on the service you want, whether that’s development, marketing, or hosting. Also included are themes, premium dropshipping stores, add-ons, and more.
WooDropship
WooDropship offers beginner-friendly pricing ranging from free to premium.
The Free plan is only available as a seven-day trial with 1500 product variants, 10 orders per month, and you don’t need a credit card to sign up.
The Lifetime plan costs $97 – a one-time fee – and offers unlimited orders per month and unlimited product variants, while the Monthly plan costs $19.99 per month, with 5000 product variants and 100 orders per month.
All plans offer Order Auto-fulfilment, daily products sync, pricing automation, in-app image editing, and a provision for team members.
AliDropship vs WooDropship: Similarities & Differences
AliDropship | WooDropship | |
Search and import | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Built-in editor | ✔️ | ✔️ |
In-app image editing | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Order auto-fulfilment | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Inventory sync | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Pricing automation | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Team members | ❌ | ✔️ |
Profit calculator | ✔️ | ❌ |
Add-ons | ✔️ | ❌ |
Affiliate program | ✔️ | ❌ |
ePacket shipping | ✔️ | ❌ |
Payment gateways | ❌ | ❌ |
Free trial | ❌ | ✔️ 7 days |
One-time fee | ✔️ | ✔️only for the Lifetime plan |
Hosting | ✔️ | ❌ |
Pricing | $89 one-time fee for plugin Hosting plans: Silver $48, Gold $86, Gold Plus $129, and Platinum $220 | Free, monthly $19.99, lifetime $97 (one-time) |
AliDropship vs WooDropship: Pros & Cons
AliDropship Pros & Cons
Pros
- Simple importing of products from AliExpress
- Easy to install
- One-time fee for plugin
- Offers add-ons, hosting, expert services, and other features
- No subscription pricing
- Ideal for beginners and power users
- Offers premium dropshipping stores that are tested for success
- Chrome extension available
- Native Ecommerce themes
- Automatic order tracking
- Pricing automation and order auto-fulfillment
- You can sell over 100 million products
- Free support
Cons
- Two plugin versions
- One domain per plugin
- Powered by WordPress so it needs hosting
WooDropship Pros & Cons
Pros
- Quick product import from AliExpress store
- Native image editor (can remove watermarks)
- Simple order fulfillment process
- In-app editing for images
- Customizable pricing rules
- Automated pricing
- Inventory and price sync
- Chrome extension available
Cons
- Doesn’t offer many other features
- Free trial only available for 7 days
- User interface could use some improvement
- No profit calculator or other unique features
AliDropship vs WooDropship: Which Is The Better Plugin?
If you’re considering getting a plugin for your dropshipping store, there are several factors to consider before you implement it.
AliDropship is a robust plugin powered by WordPress that can transform your site into a dropshipping store that offers AliExpress products. It has two plugin versions so you can create fully-fledged sites with high-profit potential and a ton of features that’ll make it easy to customize or start running a successful business.
AliDropship is also a one-stop-shop for all your dropshipping needs and it’s affordable too, except you’ll need to get hosting for your site.
You can use its Woo plugin if you already understand WooCommerce and have experience in it, or you have a WooCommerce-based online store and need to fill it up with AliExpress products quickly and without much effort.
The original AliDropship plugin is good for you if you’re starting out in eCommerce and have no solid experience in it, or you’re creating a brand new store from the ground up.
If you need a full-scale solution with all the features in one platform without having to search, install, or pay for extra themes and plugins, it’s a good option to take.
WooDropship on the other hand comes in two parts – as an app and Chrome extension. It works only with WooCommerce and has limited automation features but they still help make the process less time-consuming.
It’s easy to use, has no steep learning curve, which makes it good for beginners, and the pricing isn’t too bad either.
However, with WooDropship, there’s limited support and training, unlike AliDropship, and its user interface could use some improvement.
For this round though, we recommend AliDropship as it has lots of features that WooDropship lacks, and still offers most, if not all the services that WooDropship does, and some.
It also offers excellent support and help resources for troubleshooting and training purposes, and you only pay a one-time fee for the plugin.
Tom loves to write on technology, e-commerce & internet marketing. I started my first e-commerce company in college, designing and selling t-shirts for my campus bar crawl using print-on-demand. Having successfully established multiple 6 & 7-figure e-commerce businesses (in women’s fashion and hiking gear), I think I can share a tip or 2 to help you succeed.