In 2024 the global order is changing, and you need to be part of that change. And not just making small changes. We’re talking major cash, Ker-ching! And so for that, you need to dropshipping on AliExpress.
AliExpress is the Chinese equivalent of American eBay. It’s a booming online retail business that is actually the most visited e-commerce website in Russia. And, did you know that it’s also the 10th most popular website in Brazil?
So, as you look to up your dropshipping game, you need to be using the right online sales platform. Should you be dropshipping on eBay? Or should you be selling your winning products on AliExpress? We say: why not both?
Of course, if you are new to AliExpress and unsure how your products will sell to a Chinese, Russian, Brazilian, or increasingly diverse global market, having the right product research tool matters more than ever.
And that’s where Ali Hunter comes in. Ali Hunter is a dropshipping product research tool that will help you win the dropshipping game in new and exciting markets. Let’s unpack this must-have dropship tool!
I. What is Ali Hunter?
Ali Hunter is a product research tool that works specifically with the online e-commerce platform AliExpress, helping you manage your product offering in a structured manner.
Rather than going to all the effort (not to mention time and money) of creating a product and putting it online in the hope that it will sell, a product research tool like Ali Hunter allows you to identify winning products from the jump.
Derive important insights into what your ideal customer is looking for before you create your product. Get it? It’s genius, right?
Figure out what the market wants — and then cater to the market. That’s the beauty of how everyday business people, like you and I, are getting rich off of our dropshipping passive income side hustles.
By using the product research tool Ali Hunter, you can check out what is selling on AliExpress and properly do your research on what winning products you want to dropship before you spend too much of your hard-earned time and money!
Ali Hunter is available as an Alihunter Chrome extension from the Chrome Web Store. Simply download and install the extension and away you go!
With the Alihunter Chrome extension, you will be able to view and download product images of all the winning products you are considering selling, as well as the right videos and descriptions for the products you select.
Ali Hunter is regarded as the number one app for Aliexpress dropshipping. With the Ali Hunter app, you also get some amazing features, including AliExpress invoice, ePacket, and supplier summary. This allows you to check if the supplier of the winning products you are interested in is verified, plus you can find out the supplier’s best-selling products.
So, where do we start? How do we know that the winning products we’re looking at are actually winning? Let’s take a look at the best way to find those winning products for your dropshipping empire using Ali Hunter on Aliexpress.
II. How to find winning products using Ali Hunter?
Once you have installed the Alihunter Chrome extension and start browsing, you become one of the several hundred thousand weekly active users. Currently, that number stands at 291 151 weekly active users, and it’s constantly climbing.
The number of active users is important to us, is because it gives us an insight into what the competition is doing. Of course, there are others out there like us, hustling away with our dropshipping–winning products. And where Ali Hunter will give us the edge over our competitors is that it will allow us to effortlessly track our competitors’ revenue.
So our first hot tip to find winning products using Ali Hunter is this: follow the money. When you click on a product you will quickly be able to see what the product is selling for, what the seller rating is (as a percentage), and the total number of sales in a given period.
Ask yourself: are your winning dropshipping products going to be high ticket items with a bigger profit margin, or are you going for volume and turnover with winning products that cost less but sell faster?
Ali Hunter and the Alihunter Chrome extension allow you to find your competitors so you can get a sense of who else is selling that product. It provides you with their last orders as well as their best-sellers.
Imagine being able to walk into a store in a shopping mall and ask the management if you can look at their financial books, see their recorded sales, and check out their marketing strategy. Sounds crazy, right? Well, that’s pretty much exactly what a powerful dropshipping tool like Ali Hunter will do for you on Aliexpress.
And because Aliexpress is different from eBay (or perhaps other online platforms like Shopify that you are more used to) you can get a big picture of what stores are selling, the themes they are using to convert online interest into actual sales, and also the apps they’re using to make the most sales possible. It’s a total game-changer.
The latest trends are also always something you want to keep up with, and even get ahead of. With Ali Hunter on Aliexpress, you’ll learn what’s trending based on order statistics, and soon be able to decide on the right time to sell the right product.
If American Independence Day or Guy Fawkes is coming, maybe you want to be thinking of selling fireworks — or even a cool lawn chair to watch the fireworks on.
Over in England, King Charles is preparing for his Coronation. People go crazy for the British Royal Family, so maybe there’s an opportunity for your winning dropshipping products to feature royal family memorabilia and merchandise.
It’s hard to believe, but Ali Hunter will actually provide you with a list of who else is selling the product you are interested in. This way you can get a sense of the competition while you predict demand and decide how to find winning products using Ali Hunter.
With Ali Hunter giving you a great head start, you can then find the same (or better) winning products that you are interested in selling for an even cheaper cost or better supplier than your competitors. Again, that’s the beauty of capitalism and marketing your product online on Aliexpress: you can learn, earn, and grow, all in real-time.
Speaking of which, Ali Hunter also has a ‘live orders’ feature that allows you to calculate the most recent best-selling items and how much they earned, immediately. So you’re looking at data that is up to date.
III. Should I Use the Free or the Paid plan?
Whether you should use the free version of Ali Hunter or jump onto one of their paid plans is entirely up to you. The free version comes with a 7-day free trial which allows you to access all of its features for free. However, after the 7th day, you will automatically be charged.
It’s worth noting that you will be routed to the ‘Shopify Approve’ charge page before starting your 7-day free trial. This page does give you the exact date on which your free trial will end, as well as the amount you wish to be charged.
If you are totally new to dropshipping, or even just Aliexpress, then it might be worth experimenting with the 7-day free trial and seeing how you find it.
Suppose you are already selling winning products online. In that case, you probably already know the value of a good product research tool and what kind of intel you can glean from it before you embark on your next dropshipping adventure.
If this is the case, Ali Hunter offers four paid options: STARTUP ($19/month), GROWING ($29.9/month), PROFESSIONAL ($49.9/month), and ENTERPRISE ($99.9/month).
All four options offer the same functionality, it is just the number of times that you can use that function that increases, the more expensive the pricing plan you select.
Let’s spend a hot minute unpacking that for you, just so that it makes sense:
Let’s say you want to use the function ‘Find seller on Shopify’ (extension). This makes use of the Alihunter Chrome extension we’ve been talking about so far, and because Shopify is predominantly a Western e-commerce platform (with headquarters in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada), using the function ‘Find seller on Shopify’ makes a lot of sense as now you can see not just who’s selling the product you are interested in on Aliexpress, but in Shopify markets too.
With the STARTUP plan setting you back $20/month, you can perform this action 20 times a month. With the ENTERPRISE plan costing you more like $100/month, you can ‘Find seller on Shopify’ 250 times.
For GROWING that number is 50, and for PROFESSIONAL that number is 120.
So as you can see, the more you spend on your monthly pricing plan, the more times you get to use a specific function. The more winning dropshipping products you have, the more functions you are likely to use as you look to add to your collection of products.
With the paid plan, you can also jump up to a higher-paid option simply by activating a charge on your credit card.
What we can also learn from this example is that Al Hunter can also start to work as a Shopify spy tool. While ‘spying’ on someone may sound a little bit sinister, this is really just the name that people in the dropshipping industry use to describe product research tools.
‘Inspector’ is another name, with the Koala Inspector extension being the number one Shopify spy app. And we’ll show you how apps like Ali Hunter and Koala Inspector can work really well together in just a minute. First, let’s consider the pros and cons of using Ali Hunter.
IV. Pros and Cons
Like any online product research tool, Ali Hunter has its pros and cons. This list, while not exhaustive, is based on our experience working with it, combined with objective online reviews we gathered online.
Pros
- Engaging User Interface (UI) that is easy to use
- ‘Add to Collections’ – this feature allows you to handily bookmark a product for later, or add it to your wishlist
- Responsive chat support
- Affordable
- Reliable support team
- Relatively new to the market (less likelihood of product saturation)
- Accurate sales tracking
Cons
- The free version doesn’t include all the data in some of its functionality
- Quality issues (not all of the listed products on Aliexpress are all that great, meaning you have to sift through the rubbish products)
- Shipping times (Because it’s measuring sales data on Aliexpress, it is susceptible to the overall performance of this e-commerce store which is less reliable in some countries than others)
V. Conclusion – From Zero to Hero
Should you be dropshipping on eBay? Or should you be selling your winning products on AliExpress? As we said in the beginning, we say: why not both?
We’ve outlined the dropshipping possibilities you can explore with Ali Hunter above. As you build your winning product empire on Aliexpress, we believe that combining Ali Hunter with Koala Inspector can undoubtedly be your superpower.
Koala Inspector is simply the best Shopify spy store analysis tool, so in a world in which we find superpowers beefing about over the price of a barrel of oil, or whether TikTok is an invasion of US government privacy regulations, with Ali Hunter and Koala Inspector working together, the real superpower is all in your hands.
Simply apply the Alihunter Chrome extension for all your Aliexpress product research, and then switch over to Koala Inspector to verify those products, and/or find cheaper or more reliable versions on Shopify and you’re good to go.
In 2024 it pays to be playing on all e-commerce platforms. Whether it’s Aliexpress, eBay, or Shopify, working with both Ali Hunter and Koala Inspector will ensure you have winning products wherever you sell them. And that’s the game changer you need in 2024, for real.