Drop Shipping From Aliexpress — The Difference Between Alibaba And Aliexpress | TBS #271

Let me explain it here.

1) Alibaba

Alibaba is a website where you can buy wholesale and factory products in large quantities directly from manufacturers. Alibaba’s target audience are businesses who want to import large quantities of items directly from manufacturers in China at wholesale prices.

Usually you can’t order just one or two items, you have to order in “lots”, which means you have to buy dozens, hundreds or even thousands of items. The more you order, the cheaper it gets.

Alibaba isn’t meant for consumers, it’s meant for businesses.

2) Aliexpress

Aliexpress is a retail website owned by Alibaba where you can buy products at wholesale prices for your own use. It is targeting consumers, it’s more like the Amazon of China.

On Aliexpress you don’t have any minimum order quantity, which means you can order just one or two items for your personal use.

You’ll find many of the same products on Alibaba and Aliexpress.

As I said at the beginning of this post, Alibaba and Aliexpress are both awesome resources for entrepreneurs and e-commerce store owners. However, they fulfill two completely different purposes.

Alibaba is awesome if you want to import Chinese products at wholesale prices in large quantities, keep your own stock and resell.

So if you’re interested in private labelling and branding your products and having full control over the fulfilment process and packaging, then importing from Alibaba and having your own stock is the way to go. Alibaba great for that and it’s very cheap.

However, if you want to adopt a drop shipping fulfillment model, then Alibaba isn’t the right resource for you. In that case, Aliexpress is the way to go since there’s no minimum order quantity on there. But you still get the wholesale prices from Alibaba, which makes Aliexpress such a viable resource to build your own drop shipping business.