How to find good dropshipping suppliers for your WooCommerce store?

Due to having low start-up costs and requiring no warehouse, dropshipping has been growing in popularity among eCommerce business models.

If you choose to set up your store on WooCommerce, it is not challenging to start a dropshipping store. Just follow this step-by-step guide, and you will have a profitable store with low overhead. During this process, it is important to pay special attention to the very first step, finding good WooCommerce dropshipping suppliers.

Why is this step important? How can you find high-quality suppliers for your WooCommerce dropshipping store? What is the best supplier for dropshipping?

Then, please scroll down to find the answer.

Why selecting the right dropshipping suppliers important?

Perhaps you already know much about the advantages of building a dropshipping store. For example, it comes with low investment, business scalability, and product diversity.

That being said, besides a lot of benefits, dropshipping has some problems any eCommerce sellers have to deal with, especially the ones related to the suppliers.

Particularly, a dropshipping store:

Cannot sustain itself without suppliers

With no warehouse, a dropshipping store cannot sustain itself. Every store will have to cooperate with at least one supplier who will be responsible for the order distribution, meaning shipping the products for your customers.

In general, suppliers play an important role in operating your dropship business. The majority of the dropshipping stores will work with more than one supplier to sell many types of products. You might consider trying dropshipping services to manage different suppliers. For example, by optimizing the supply chain, dropshipping agents can check the product quality on your behalf, reduce shipping costs for international express delivery, and improve consumers’ shopping experience.

Lose the brand image when cooperating with unreliable suppliers

You cannot run a dropshipping store successfully if you choose the wrong suppliers. The reason is that poor-performing suppliers, of course, cannot bring happy customers. In case these customers give negative feedback, you will find it difficult to explain to them because you don’t cover any step during the process of offering products. This will also cause bad effects on your brand, making it unable to develop your private label brand.

After all, you may realize that looking for good suppliers is one of the most important steps to build up a successful dropshipping store.

So are there any tips on how to find good dropshipping suppliers for WooCommerce?

Please keep reading to see our tips!

How to find good suppliers for dropshipping

You want to know how to get WooCommerce dropshipping suppliers effectively, then refer to our tips below:

Research your product

For any dropshipping store, first and foremost, it is necessary to decide which types of products you should sell. After that, spend time researching on them.

There are some kinds of information you should collect, including the product’s origin, the manufacturing process, the manufacturing cycle time, and the relationship between price and size/weight.

Once having deep knowledge of the product, you will know how to find the best dropshipping supplier that satisfy your customers and enhance your brand name.

Search on Google

Searching on Google seems the method applied by every online store to find good WooCommerce dropshipping suppliers. But there will be some rules for you to keep in mind:

• Do a thorough search: Some wholesale suppliers are not really good at marketing and promotion, so they won’t appear at the top of the SERPs for the popular keywords. This means you will have to discover a lot of search results, possibly hundreds, to find your expected wholesalers. Besides, try some search queries like resellers, warehouse, and so on.
• Don’t look at the website only: Wholesalers are often known for poor website design. In some cases, a quality website can indicate a good supplier. But many other wholesalers don’t show all the things they have through a website. So don’t let poor websites scare you off.
• Use many different keywords: Wholesalers are almost not SEO experts, so it is not easy for you to find their website with only one or a few keywords. Therefore, depending on your field, you need to search for many more keywords.

Visit reliable directories of WooCommerce dropshipping suppliers

Together with Google, directories also help you find out tens or even hundreds of dropshipping suppliers and products’ names that they are offering.

You want to access dropshipping suppliers free, it is recommended to have a subscription account in some free supplier directories like Inventory Source or Wholesale Central. But nothing good in life is free. These directories sometimes give you outdated information. To get the latest updates, you will have to visit premium directories such as Doba, Salehoo, and Worldwide Brands that require paying an amount of money (around $20/month).

Refer to your competitors

Researching competitors is the way you cannot miss regardless of which products you are selling. You should find a way to see how your competitors run your dropshipping business and which WooCommerce dropshipping suppliers they are cooperating with.

Then, we will show you two ways to check your competitors’ suppliers.

The first one is that you simply order their product. Because this order is covered by their supplier, you can collect necessary information through the invoice or packing.

Apart from placing an order, you can come to visit some marketplaces like Amazon and AliExpress where dropshipping businesses often sell their products. Right here, you can see the supplier of each product.

Attend Trade Shows

A trade show allows you to connect with all the major manufacturers and wholesalers within your business. It’s a great way to have a list of the best dropshipping manufacturers and wholesalers. You also get a chance to delve into the product. This solution will be also effective in helping you select more trending products to sell for your dropshipping store. Therefore, if possible, you should invest your time and money in these shows.

Contact the Manufacturer

This is one of the best ways to find out suppliers. After defining which product you will sell, you can call the manufacturer and ask them for a list of their distributors. After making a few calls to the top producers in your line of business, you will quickly identify the top WooCommerce dropshipping suppliers in that market. Then, you can contact the wholesalers to learn about dropshipping policies before setting up a partnership.

Order samples from the supplier

No matter which kind of business model you choose, you will want to know if your customers feel satisfied with your product or service. Apart from reading reviews or referring to competitors, you can directly order the product from the supplier to see the quality of service.

With this method, you will get a lot about the supplier, and more importantly, gain the same experience as your customers. Ordering from the supplier will let you know how their WooCommerce shipping services are, how the products are packed, how long it takes for the delivery, and so on.

Identify fake suppliers

Last but not least, it is necessary to avoid fake WooCommerce dropshipping suppliers that have sprung up out there and tend to be quite gimmicky. If you are a newbie, you are likely to become a victim. Therefore, it is advisable to consider some tips that help you distinguish between a legitimate wholesaler and a fraud.

Require incurred costs

Real wholesalers won’t charge you pre-order fees or any others while you place orders from them. If any wholesalers require you to pay a certain fee, such as a monthly membership or service fee, then chances are that they are fake wholesalers.

Sell directly to consumers

To get a true wholesale price, you will need to apply for a wholesale account to prove yourself to be a legitimate dealer and get the approval before taking the first order. Therefore, it is noted that any wholesaler that provides their products for consumers at wholesale prices is just one retailer offering items at a bargain price.

Besides finding the way to get good WooCommerce dropshipping suppliers, you may be also interested in the articles below:

WooCommerce Vs Shopify for Dropshipping

Top 5 Best WooCommerce Themes for Dropshipping

Where to find the best dropshipping suppliers for WooCommerce

What are the best drop shipping companies?

Right now, we will take you to the three best places to find out good WooCommerce dropshipping suppliers.

AliExpress

As a brainchild of Alibaba, AliExpress is one of the most famous places to hunt for WooCommerce dropshipping suppliers in Asia. If Amazon is the biggest eCommerce sales platform in Europe and America, AliExpress, which has millions of mainstream and uncommon items belonging to over 40 niche markets, including electronics and smart home appliances, is considered the best B2B online marketplace in Asia.

Based in China, the largest factory in the world, AliExpress allows people to access a variety of goods and get them from Chinese suppliers at very affordable prices. In case your customers are living in Europe or America, it may take a bit more time to deliver while the shipping fee will be also a bit more expensive.

Many dropshippers around the world love Aliexpress because of its user-friendly interface. Besides, the eCommerce platform uses English as the main language and USD as the payment method, making it convenient for many international customers. More than that, AliExpress allows users to register for free.

SaleHoo

In the list of top-ranking supplier directories, we cannot miss the name of SaleHoo, which is one of the largest platforms connecting wholesalers and dropshippers. This directory has up to 8000 reliable dropship suppliers and 1.6 million branded products sold at low prices that help dropshippers optimize profits.

The majority of products on SaleHoo is to serve the markets of United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. If you want to find dropshipping products for European and American customers, SaleHoo should be your first choice.

To have an account on SaleHoo, you will have to pay $67 per year, which is considered a reasonable price for setting up a dropshipping store. Besides, SaleHoo gives you a 100% money-back guarantee for two months (60 days).

Worldwide Brands

Established in 1999, Worldwide Brands is one of the most long-standing directories in the world. With 16 million products and 8000 suppliers, this directory is preferred by many dropshipping businesses. Here there will be a great number of low-priced products and a broad selection of product categories to choose from.

What makes Worldwide Brands different from other platforms is that all dropship suppliers are verified. All your interests will be protected by World Brands when any problems arise.

Worldwide Brands no longer offers monthly and yearly packages. Instead, this is the best choice for those who love the one-time payment. With $249, you can gain lifetime access to Worldwide Brands.

To start a dropshipping business smoothly, you also should consider 10 best dropshipping plugins for Woocommerce site. By incorporating online marketplace development services, you can further optimize your dropshipping operations, ensuring a seamless integration and enhancing your platform’s functionality.

For a final word,

In near future, dropshipping will be one of the trending eCommerce industries. If you intend to follow this business model, don’t ignore its key points, one of which is suppliers or wholesalers.

We have shown you above how to find dropshipping suppliers. Hope that this will help you a lot.

To start with the dropshipping model, you will need a reliable supplier. There are many criteria to decide on the best dropshipping supplier. But in general, the success of your dropshipping business depends on the prices, shipping time, customer support, and product diversity. The right dropshipping supplier will provide you with a great number of high-quality products at reasonable prices.

If you have any other tips, please let us know. Thanks so much!