Drop Shipping From Aliexpress — How To Avoid Problems With Customs | TBS #308

When you’re drop shipping products from China to other countries, your products will end up with customs. Just like anything that’s imported, customs will evaluate and clear incoming shipments.

There are different regulations and laws regarding customs and importing of products that vary depending on the country.

The USA has different importing rules than the EU.

If you’re running a drop shipping business, you should inform yourself about certain things upfront to make sure your products aren’t held by customs. And I’m not saying this to scare you. Usually, there’s little or no problems with customs, but you still want to make sure your items aren’t held by customs because your customers could get fed up.

Here are three things you can do to make sure your products won’t be held by customs and customers don’t have to pay additional fees.

1) Inform yourself about local customs and regulations

Before you start drop shipping to any given country, do a Google search or call the customs directly to see which products require additional import duties and what the maximum order value is.

In Germany, and the rest of the EU, shipments with a total order amount of under 22 Euros usually don’t have any import taxes.

And that’s the Aliexpress order amount by the way.

It’s not what you charged the customer on your own store.

Make sure you research the maximum order value after which your customers will have to pay import duties. As I said, it varies from country to country but it’s usually easy to find out with Google.

2) Make a test purchase and ship to your destination country

If you are a citizen of the country you’re planning to drop ship to, simply make a purchase in your own name and ship the item to your address. Make a few different orders with different order values and see if the packages arrive or if you get contacted by local customs.

In case the shipments arrive without any problems, that’s a good indicator that the packages will reach your customers as well.

If you don’t live in the country you’re planning to drop ship to, find a friend or anyone you know in that country, and place the order in his or her name. Then check back with your friend if the package arrived or if customs reached out with additional import duties or taxes.

3) Scale up slowly and only after the first orders arrived

When scaling up, don’t do it too fast. I’ve had a student who got successful really fast and then a bunch of his items were held by customs which was a pain in the ass. If you have a winning campaign, scale up slowly and monitor customer responses.

Wait for a while until the first customers confirm that their shipment arrived via email or by dropping you a comment under your ad.

Once the first 10 or so orders arrived without any problems, you can scale up your advertising campaigns because it’s likely that future shipments won’t be held by customs and there’s little risk.