I’m fully prepared you get flak from the usual users on here selling their dropshipping services/courses and YouTubers — the point of this post to provide info to those thinking about starting Aliexpress>Amazon dropshipping and provide a save space for discourse.

Before I begin, what I say below pertains particularly to that specific pathway of dropshipping that many companies try to sell you on (like AutoDS, YouTubers, Amzscout)- I’m not going to be discussing the other pathways like Shopify>”Ad-promote entirely to get sales” or parroting the often said dropshipping is dead.

The key issue on selling on Amazon is how saturated nearly every product catalog category is and how many branded items there are that are “duplicates”.

In other words, for folks not getting it, when you look at what’s on aliexpress or others, you’ll see 20 listings for the same item — maybe a couple of those are “legit”, the others make slightly more 5-10% simply by arbitrage (which of course is what you’re also trying to do).

Then you go to Amazon, you basically do the same thing. For any product with decent margins you’re going to find from China, you’ll always find 5-20+ “brands” selling it. Most of these brands are simply resellers like yourself, but they’ve legitimized themselves, likely FBA-route if it’s a good product (which you can’t compete with) and “gated” their product best they can so you would have to request approval to them in order to sell the same thing, which if course they won’t approve, why would they?

You’ll then MAYBE find a couple generic listings where you can technically list your product under them but they’re not going to make much if anything at all and it’s not a winning proposition for the time it takes to do this, and frankly you’re not providing much of a value proposition to Amazon and they don’t want your duplicate items on their market so they’ll likely axe you at some point.

The only way to win, is to find a good product early enough, preferably outside of Aliexpress, and go the harder route through brand registry and “brand it up” like they all do, if you really believe in it— you go ahead and put down capital expenses to buy it in bulk and FBA it before your competitors do, but you’ll find that your competitor workflows are really quick and they’ll swoop in to undercut and get any piece of that pie and in months you’ll have 10+ branded sellers in your product niche and eventually Amazon who you can’t compete with if your margins are good. But hopefully you’ve made some decent money in that timeframe and have some albeit lower residuals that keep coming.

I just want folks to understand the realities of what selling on Amazon is really like these days rather than a pipedream being sold. Simply doing “trending products” from Aliexpress to Amazon isn’t going to do it.

FWIW, I’ve got nothing to sell you, I’m just a full-time software dev who looked into this the past few months as a venture like most on here and wanted to give feedback. I’ve got a busy Saturday planned, so don’t expect a whole lot of replies but I look forward to seeing any discourse.