Rakuten, an Alternative of AliExpress for Dropshipping

ECommerce has become much more popular in these years. People are willing to buy stuffs like daily accessories on the Internet, this motivates people to build an online store and try to earn money. You can easily find what you want when you type the product name in the search bar. Ask your friends or family a question, what product can only be bought in real retail shop but can't be bought on the Internet? Haha, probably none...


Above photo is from <https://www.flickr.com/photos/priceminister/>

Why is dropshipping business so popular and famous in the world?

The Internet market is so huge. Nearly half of online store owners wouldn't make a product by themselves and then sell it. Why? It's because they just want to make money instead of building a brand. Therefore, dropshipping comes! Dropshipping store owners choose <AliExpress> as their product source and start promoting the products. At this moment, there're millions of people shopping on the Internet right now, so you won't be afraid there's no audience shopping in your store. You may ask, why do people buy the products from those dropshipping store instead of buying from AliExpress directly? It's because dropshipping store owners provide excellent customer services. They solve every after-purchase problems raised by customers while AliExpress store owners don't provide this kind of warm customer services, so people love buying from them.

You can know more about dropshipping using AliExpress by reading my article: <Dropshipping eCommerce with AliExpress and ePacket>

Any alternatives of AliExpress for dropshipping?

AliExpress provides you the cheapest product with cheap shipping service. Ideally you can make large profit from its products. But think in this way, you have lots of dropshipping competitors because most of them are using AliExpress too. So you can only stand out of them by well-planned and higher cost of store promotion activities. But are you really willing to pay much for promotion with uncertain ROI (Return Over Investment)? Assume you have limited budget, it's suggested to spend effort and money on the product itself. Just think out of the box! If you have no advantage on the importing cost, how about you spend some extra money to have higher quality of products? Here is a suggestion for you: <Rakuten>. Below photo from <https://commons.wikimedia.org/>

It's the largest online shopping website based in Japan. What? Japan? I don't know Japanese language and how can I buy products from Rakuten? Easy, Rakuten has announced another platform for overseas, it's <Rakuten Global>. You can use it to buy things if you know English. Any difference between the Rakuten Japan and Rakuten Global? Tell you, yes. The difference between the Japan one and the Global one is some products are shown on the Rakuten Japan ONLY, about 5 - 10% of total products from my experience. So what if you want to buy a product that only exists on Rakuten Japan? Google translation is your friend, you can also find me to help you because I know a little bit of Japanese language.

Why Rakuten?

You may wonder why I recommend Rakuten to you. Honestly, all products on Rakuten is relatively expensive than that on AliExpress. But product from China and product from Japan, which one has higher quality? Product from Japan definitely because Japan has better quality assurance guideline (even they manufacture products from China), every fail product is filtered out. Also in Asia, people love travelling to Japan and love their products because of their high quality. Also, many people loves Japanese culture like anime, cosplay, lolita, etc. This is a big market and it's believed that selling stuffs related to Japanese culture is a big trend in coming years. Don't you see many cosplayers on the street? Don't you see there are many people learning Japanese language? This proves that Japanese stuffs are famous and popular.

Think about this question, who will purchase cosplay accessories from China? People just want to have elegant and beautiful fashion accessories and they are willing to buy expensive but charming one instead of buying some bad design stuffs. People are going to buy attractive fashions and show it to their boyfriends or girlfriends, they are not going to tell their lovers that they had bought a bad quality but cheap fashion from dropshipping store, right? Remember this, people will only go shopping in your store again if they have got an excellent product with great customer services.

Another advantage of using Rakuten is plenty of coupons and discounts. It always organize many events to attract people to buy more on it. Its homepage shown below has many discount-related banners and announcements including "free shipping when you get certain amount of Rakuten points", "3 times or above of Rakuten points will be given if you buy stuffs on or before a period of time", "extra discount for certain products" eyc. You can use Rakuten points to exchange coupons. Rakuten encourages people to shop more, more orders more discounts, you can have lots of joy on Rakuten! Therefore, if you do more dropshipping using it, you can make much profits by their coupons and discounts.

To be honest, it's suggested that you can do dropshipping with AliExpress if your niche is daily accessories like kitchen gadgets, home storage box, etc, those you don't care the appearance and you just care its functionality. Then AliExpress is better than Rakuten. If not, Rakuten is better, especially fashion niche. Therefore, dropshipping using Rakuten can be a solution. In case you need assistance for navigation in Rakuten, feel free to leave a message here and I can help you for free. Also, welcome to discuss anything about dropshipping here or you can advise other product source platforms which is better than AliExpress and Rakuten!