Last year I took a gander at all the eCommerce solutions on the market, and came away with a clear winner. Shopify. It is the most robust, has the most options, and better scaling than all but the bespoke solutions. One of the reasons for its clear superiority is the app selection available, which is where I found the Shopified App (now called Dropified after a recent re-name), the premier dropshipping solution on the market at the moment. None are more broad reaching as Dropified.
If you are looking to start a business I cannot overstate how great dropshipping is. Either as a core strategy or a supplementary one, dropshipping can increase profit, and extend the reach of your store front. Doing it by hand is time consuming, which is why a number of firms have released an app that automates the process. Dropified is one of the better known ones, and in terms of vision, certainly the most broad. Dropified allows you to pull in products from a wide variety of sites, and drop them into one handy location, i.e. your Shopify store. Unlike Oberlo, which focuses on product integration from Aliexpress, the Dropified app can pull from Alibaba as well. Alibaba is the, well, I was going to say big brother, but it’s really more of a gigantic brother to Aliexpress. In addition, as you move through the packages the list of sites you can pull from only grows.
I realize that I have not fully explained what dropshipping is, so I’ll outline it here. Dropshipping, at its most basic, is buying products from manufacturers who hold said items in a warehouse for you. You place an item for sale on your site, and when someone buys it it is automatically sent from the (usually) Chinese warehouse direct to your customer, with you never seeing it. It is fairly low cost to set up such a business, and the profits tend to be fairly high as well. You do need some capital to buy up items, and of course there is an art to designing a store front. Finding a niche is the key to a successful dropshipping business, finding products that appeal to that niche from the sea of Alibaba et al is no easy task, but can be well worth it.
I am going to be taking a look at Dropified in a series of categories, just to make this easier. So let’s start with a look at the aesthetics, how the app and extension feel to use.
Dropified App Appearance, Professionalism, & Overall Usability
Dropified, as a product, consists of two parts. An app and a Chrome extension. I use Firefox mostly, so that’s not great for me, but I realize that Chrome is very popular these days. The App contains all the back end info you could need, allowing you to change previous listings and keep track of all of the stuff you are selling, when combined with the native tools offered by Shopify you will never find yourself wanting for data. The extension adds an overlay to Aliexpress and Alibaba, letting you click on items to add to your store, displaying useful information on the item itself, such as shipping info, a must when deciding what to stock, as it does not do to have an item listed that takes literal months to arrive. Personally I find the extension a little cluttered, but I know that others would love to have this level of detail available at a glance.
I hope to see a little more streaming in the future, though in saying that Dropified is an excellently designed product, providing a certain kind of entrepreneur all of the tools they need to succeed. I also expect to see more and more functionality added throughout the year.
Dropified Flexibility & Scalability
The fact that you can pull from Alibaba and Aliexpress is impressive. Oberlo, as I mentioned before, focuses on only Aliexpress, and thus is for the small to medium sized business. Dropified can start big, with the Alibaba wholesalers, and grow from there, which is nice. Their package list is focused on a growing business. As you move through the packages you gain access to a few more features, though the vast majority of features are present in even the Lite package, with the exception of 1-Click Order confirmation, exclusive to the Elite package. The primary thing you are buying is access to other retailers for the purposes of dropping items into your store front. In addition the Elite package allows you to set multiple users, a must for any business scaling, and even multiple store fronts, a new feature to me, and one with limited but obvious uses.
Overall I was left impresses. If the product was a little cleaner overall it would be the best there is. I can forgive it the occasional poorly designed GUI thanks to the massive amount of features contained therein. There is no other firm on the market right now that can match the scope of the Dropified app, and if there is one thing I can get behind it is a firm with ambition. Their product scaling is only going to get better as we move forward through 2017.
Dropified App Cost & Value
This is somewhat tricky. The value of the Elite Package speaks for itself, thoguh I will be explaining exactly why I like it so much, but the value in the Lite package is a little more suspect. If you are just starting your dropshipping business you do not need a wide variety of sites to pull from, nor do you need much in the way of features, so a $9 monthly price seems like a bargain. But Oberlo, the app focused on Aliexpress, offers a very similar feature set for free. When we move though the packages at the Dropified App the value becomes more obvious. You gain a few choice features in the Pro package, such as access to the US product database and way more automation options. Not to mention a vastly expanded list of stores to pull products from. The Elite package goes one, or more like 4,5,6, better, with its 1-Click Orders, even more automation options and access to multiple user accounts. The stores you can pull products from goes up again, and I would list them here, but the list is really huge, click the link to get a good look at the differences in the packages.
Overall, while the base package leaves me a little cold, especially from the perspective of a new store owner, the higher packages scream value so loud as to deafen me to the competition. The Pro package is $27 per month, while the Elite Package is $47 per month. That Elite package is a little over half the price of Oberlo’s top package. When I first looked at Dropified, around a year ago, their pricing was no where near as good as this, the Elite used to be $94 per month, so it seems that some market competition has done some good here. The only issue overall for me is the restriction of the auto order fulfillment tools to the more expensive packages, though seen as I don’t particularly like their Lite package this is a minor issue.
Click here to look over the details on the differences between the packages plus get a free trial.
Dropified App Recap & Review
Ups and downs, but mostly ups. That is how I would describe the Dropified App. The only negatives are the Lite package, which is too Lite in my opinion to be better than their competitors. The cluttered nature of the extension overlay, though that is just personal preference. Those out of the way, the Pro package is perfectly priced, the feature list is vast and applicable to a variety of situations, and the Elite package is so, so good that I cannot find the words to express how impressed I am with it. Add in the discount to the Elite package, down to $27 at the moment, and the 14 day free trial on the software and you have to give it a go.
If you are looking to start a dropshipping business you already know the options available, the big two. Oberlo and Dropified. I have looked at both, and found them aiming at slightly different sides of the market. If you are looking to start small and grow, Oberlo is your man, its focus on Aliexpress is perfect for smaller business. If you know you want products from as wide a range of retailers as possible, not to mention the excellent pricing, then go with Dropified.
If you want to take advantage of all the current discounts you can click here.
