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Best Dropshipping Tools for Ecommerce Businesses
By Rodney Laws | Ecommerce
Dropshipping is one of the most exciting innovations in ecommerce since Amazon and its contemporaries changed the way we shop online forever.
The flexibility and low-investment nature of dropshipping makes it a model anyone with a bit of retail knowledge and a great eye for products can make a success of themselves with.
Of course, we all know a project can sometimes only be as good as the tools you have at your disposal. That’s not different when the tools are digital.
To make sure you’re running your business as efficiently as possible, betting on the right product trends and making the customer experience as smooth as possible, we’ve put together a list of the best dropshipping tools available right now. Read on to find out more:
| Tool Name | Supported Platforms | Key Features | Price |
| Oberlo | Shopify | The leading dropshipping ecommerce tool – slick, great price points and easy to use. | Starter – Free
Basic – $29.90 Pro – $79.90 |
| Spocket | WooCommerce | Quick access to products for a more Western audience | Starter – $19 / Month
Pro – $49 / Month Empire – $99 / Month Unicorn – $299 / Month |
| Sell The Trend | N/A | Insight into the hottest products on the market now and how to promote them | N/A |
| Zendesk | Oberlo | Versatile customer service done your way | Lite – $0
Professional – $15 Enterprise – $49 |
| Answer The Public | N/A | Fantastic insight into the exact questions consumers are asking | Free – $0
Monthly – $99 Annual – $79 / month |
The platform you choose can make or break your ecommerce store. There are a few standout options on the market available for dropshipping specifically. Let’s explore the very best.
Shopify is one of the leading ecommerce tools and a must-consider for any dropshipping store owner.
Developed exclusively for Shopify, Oberlo is one of the most recognisable names in dropshipping, and with good reason.
Oberlo is a Shopify app or marketplace that helps you find products you can dropship.
Once you’ve effortlessly integrated Oberlo into your Shopify store you can browse its marketplace for products to sell and add them to your store in an instant. This creates a clear pipeline for your business where consumer orders will be shipped directly from the supplier.
Shopify and Oberlo are phenomenal tools for dropshippers that focus primarily on making the whole process easier. If you’re a Shopify user who appreciates the ease and user-friendly nature of the platform (particularly as a beginner), this is the perfect place to start your dropshipping journey.
Oberlo has three pricing plans — a Free Version, Basic Plan and Pro Plan which all feature increased useability, functionality and features depending on the price.
WooCommerce is a brilliant free tool that dropshippers looking to run a WordPress website should heavily consider.
Unlike a Shopify store — where hosting is free —— you will need to pay for hosting to get your dropshipping store online. Other than that, it is a simple service that gives you a great platform to bring your dropshipping dreams to life.
WooDropship offers much of the same integration with AliExpress as Oberlo (through AliDropship) — adding products to your site and allowing you to start placing orders. It automates the shipping process to make including items on your store a much more streamlined process.
It’s automated price updated feature makes sure you’re always up to date with AliExpress price alterations — helping you keep track of profit margins and make sure orders remain profitable.
Oberlo might be the bigger name in the dropshipping community — but a significant number of store owners will nail their colours to the Dropified mast.
While it is slightly more expensive than some of the tools we’ve already covered (including no free plan), it is a versatile tool that does all the basics you could want from a dropshipping platform very well.
Everything integrates seamlessly with Dropified and the essential auto-updating price, profit margins and availability sync makes it easy to keep a store going. It also features its own store with products shipping directly from the US.
Want to manage several stores in different niches? Dropified allows you to do that from one account. And you can even learn how to manage your store better with the helpful training center videos.
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Orders are the heart of a dropshipping business. If you aren’t getting orders, your store is heading nowhere fast.
These tools make the order process easier for both you and your customers.
Note: some of these tools will have their own suppliers, while others will connect to other dropshipping websites.
Compatible with both Shopify and WooCommerce — this nifty little tool gives you an alternative way to source products for your store.
Unlike many of the product sourcing and order processing tools we’ve covered so far, Spocket has their own selection of dropshipping product suppliers — 60% of which are based in the US or Europe.
That means you can offer much faster delivery times for your store.
If you’re looking for variety in your store, this machine learning powered discovery tool will make it easy for you to get samples of your product, and get full orders out across the world almost instantly. An excellent addition to your store that helps at both ends of the process.
A multi-channel inventory management system —— Ecomdash combines traditional ecommerce methodology with dropshipping automation functionality.
This tool can be integrated with a number of high profile platforms including Amazon, eBay and Shopify to manage orders seamlessly.
Features include setting supplier prioritization to route orders automatically, SKU mapping for an accurate tracking of your products, and the automatic updating of your sales channels with shipping and tracking info.
Ecomdash takes lots of little things all ecommerce store owners need done well and puts them in one simple, constantly updating, package.
Running a dropshipping store requires a fast, automated process that can happen in the background.
Spark Shipping is perfect for just that — working with all major vendors to route orders to the most suitable supplier, synchronise your inventory and track your orders in detail.
Best of all Spark Shipping is known for its integration with other multi-channel management solutions (such as ChannelAdvisor) meaning if you want to build on your store and back end processes you don’t need to abandon it and it’s benefits.
Reviewing and managing your website’s performance is an essential step in improving its overall performance and user experience.
Here are some tools that give you precious insight into your store’s performance and highlight key issues:
A phenomenally powerful and popular tool that gives you a holistic view into the inner-working of your website and the success of your marketing channels.
Putting aside valuable insights into organic traffic, social media campaigns and email newsletters for the time being, Google Analytics is an essential dropshipping tool. It’s great for getting a full picture of who uses your website, what they respond positively to and how you can make simple changes to improve their experience and attract more like-minded consumers.
An essential tool for ecommerce of all kinds, Google Analytics lets you drill down into your store’s visitor data, allowing you to segment your audience, and decipher not just how they found your store, but what exact steps they took on their customer journey.
From helping you restructure your product pages to recognising what your most profitable landing pages are, Google Analytics is a website performance essential.
Designed specifically with dropshipping in mind — ZIK Analytics is an excellent tool for eBay dropshippers to find products and learn about the dropshipping landscape.
This tool helps you optimise your listings and boost website performance. Best of all, it gives you invaluable insight into what your competitors are up to. With ZIK you can learn from the sellers that dominate the market.
Their competitor research tool is robust and gives you an idea of what products are selling best for them. This gives you key knowledge of the most important factor in dropshipping currently — which products are hot on the market right now.
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By now, everyone knows how important digital marketing is to the success of an ecommerce store — and this is no different whether that’s traditional ecommerce or dropshipping.
Here are some great marketing tools for aspiring dropshippers and seasoned professionals:
Google Trends won’t help you post to Facebook or become a must-follow Instagram account — but it will give you an idea of what products people are talking about and might be a great focus for your dropshipping store.
This is no ordinary SEO tool. With it’s easy to use interface Google Trends gives you a clear indication of what seasonal topics, products and niches people are interested in in raw data terms. There’s no subjectivity — just a case of noticing what buzz is sustainable and what’s a fad already on the way out.
It’s also a great tool for edging out the competition and monitoring their ranking position and popularity online.
In terms of marketing, Google Trends can be used to find related topics and do “content freshness” — essentially create new content to boost your store and stay on-trend.
Sell the Trend is a unique tool comprised of many lots of smaller tools.
A newer tool for dropshippers to play around with — Sell the Trend is an incredibly comprehensive product research tool that doesn’t just give you key insights into the popularity and sales history of certain products, but also provides example Facebook ads that will help your products get noticed.
Rather than subscribing to a whole host of product research tools, Sell the Trend gives you everything you could want in a neat package.
In terms of a marketing tool, Sell the Trend is a more dropshipping and ecommerce-focused version of Google Trends. Not strictly designed for marketing but incredibly useful either way.
Email marketing is still crucial to ecommerce — and something any good dropshipping store needs to invest in.
When it comes to professionalism and bulk delivery, there are few better tools than Omnisend.
With Omnisend you can send up to 15,000 free marketing emails per month — more than enough for any good dropshipping store just starting out. There’s not much more to it than that. And what more could you want from an email tool?
Coupled with something like Zoho Mail to create a professional-looking email address, this is a quality tool that will help you get significant exposure in consumer’s inboxes.
Omnisend is very user-friendly for new dropshipping store owners — but helpful alternatives such as MailChimp exist if you prefer a slightly more guided interface.
Marketing can be exhausting and repetitive. That’s why any good dropshipping store owner that values their time but wants to create a comprehensive social media profile should make a great social marketing automation tool one of their first investments.
Buffer allows you to create a unique schedule for sharing content on all of your social channels — such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest.
Sure, there are lots of great social management tools that allow you to do just that. However, Buffer thrives in the simplicity of its interface and processes. You can freely edit, move or delete posts from your social queue at will without hassle.
With a great free plan and more comprehensive paid plans you never need to worry about working late filing social posts ever again.
Staying in touch with your audience is critical to keeping them on side.
The advent and growth of the social proof phenomenon is point enough that customer service is one of the most essential components of ecommerce, and key to making your store stand out and retain consumers.
For fans of Gmail and Google Cloud services looking to integrate them into their customer support — G Suite is the perfect fit.
Unlimited custom email addresses with the added benefit of a familiar Gmail email interface? Sounds good to me. If your business makes heavy use of Google tools such as Calendar or Docs it makes sense to use this seamless tool.
With helpful prices scaled to the size of your business, G Suite is a great starting point for businesses that need a simple way to analyse their customer interactions through email and provide the best support service possible.
However, some would say customer support has evolved beyond emails and direct calls. What if you want to complement your dropshipping store with a high quality live chat function?
Tidio is one of the most impressive live chat tools on the market. This adaptable plugin (it’ll work on both Shopify and WordPress among many others) is a brilliant tool that merges marketing automation, bots and live chat functions to improve your customer service output and boost sales.
With a free option and a ton of customisation options to tailor Tidio to your branding specifications, this is an excellent tool for new dropshipping stores looking to make their customer service second to none.
Dropshipping is a unique business model that attracts a huge number of different customers — and each of those customers will have services and support preferences.
Luckily for dropshipping store owners, Zendesk offers all the customer support platforms and functionality a new or existing store could want to flesh out their customer base or expand their services.
This customer service solutions suite includes live chat, call centre phone systems, a knowledge base and a customer support ticket system — all integrated into the same package and easy to use.
With a package this complete, dropship store owners can both react to customer queries and questions in a timely manner, and provide them with the content they need to answer questions themselves — without taking precious time away from you or your employees.
For those not in the know, SEO is the unrivaled key to online success in all online businesses, including dropshipping ecommerce.
Comprehensive, well-done SEO can often be the difference between a dropshipping store taking off with a passionate audience and one that fails to capture attention.
Whether you’re just starting out with SEO or an experienced analyst looking for the best possible tools, these are some fantastic options.
There are too many reasons to list why Ahrefs is one of the most popular and well-respected SEO tools available.
Ahrefs has expanded to become one of the most multi-purpose SEO tools on the market, whether you’re looking to link build or analyse traffic to your store.
It’s most well-known feature is its Site Explorer. This allows you to analyse any website (including your own) and get vital SEO information such as DR (Domain Rating) and number of backlinks. Basically, it’s the best look at what’s beneath the SEO hood of your website you can get.
With a world class UI and exceptional insight into data, there are few better places for a growing dropshipping store to turn for a look into both their own insights and the market at large.
If you’re just looking for the right keywords to prioritise on your website then a tool like Ahrefs can be a big investment. That’s where a tool like Keywords Everywhere comes in.
This free Chrome and Firefox tool pulls search engine data from a whopping 16 different websites and delivers the results in a neat little package for you to analyse.
Search volume, cost per click and competition level — it’s all here for you to analyse and put to use in your content.
There are lots of tools out there that give you insight into the keywords that could give you mountains of traffic to your website. But few offer the comprehensive overview and access to low-hanging fruit that Keywords Everywhere does.
It’s great to know what keywords are popular amongst your potential audience — but it’s even better to know exactly what questions they’re asking Google.
Answer The Public is a keyword research tool with a difference. It pulls data directly from Google to give you a comprehensive overview of your keywords as well as any related queries. This is essential information that can craft future pieces of content and the products you build your store around.
Answer The Public isn’t such a brilliant tool just because it gives you insightful data about keywords — but because it puts exact queries in front of your face (incredibly detailed diagrams and all).
We all like free stuff right?
Free tools don’t always get the best rep due to their lack of cost, limited features or perceived inferiority in comparison to industry leaders.
However, there are a number of free tools that can help simplify and streamline running a dropshipping business. On top of the great free tools we’ve already covered, here are some brilliant pieces of free dropshipping software.
In our previous section on SEO we covered a couple of different keyword research tools. While any of these could be used, Keyword Planner is a great free and easy option to use.
This Google tool allows you to tap into Google’s massive keyword database.
Okay, it’s not quite as fleshed out as many leading keyword research tools. But as a free option? There’s not much better than it around. Plus, everything you’re getting is straight from Google.
Not quite a tool — but something all dropshipping store owners should be using to their advantage
The Best Sellers section on Amazon is a great way to get insight into the popularity of specific products on other marketplaces.
A great little research hack — Best Sellers lets you browse through product categories and subcategories to see what’s popular with shoppers at the moment. While it won’t tell you exactly how many units have been sold, it’s a simple little way to learn what public opinion surrounding the product is before you invest in selling it or use it as a key promotional item.
If Google Analytics doesn’t quite gel with you, then Clicky Analytics might be a better tool choice.
This simple tool is feature-rich — including all the basic Google Analytics data alongside real-time stats. Don’t tell the Google Analytics purists, but we think Clicky might just have a more user-friendly and better looking interface, making it much easier to file those end of the month reports for your store.
If you love Clicky, you can upgrade to one of the paid plans which also includes features such as heatmaps to get a clearer picture of what is and isn’t working on your site.
There are literally hundreds of exceptional digital tools out there for dropshipping stores to take advantage of — with even more being released every day as the model becomes increasingly popular.
These are all brilliant tools to get started and define what works for you and your approach to dropshipping.
