Domestic dropshipping sourcing or product sourcing from the country where you reside has tons of advantages. Faster shipping is one, and easier returns is another. You can match up with the big bad guys of the ecommerce universe, like Amazon by offering 1-2 day shipping.
But it’s not always easy to find a reliable supplier for your winning product in a competitive market like the EU & USA.
That’s where a service like Spocket can be invaluable. Today, we will take an in-depth look at Spocket, its features, the pricing and the advantages it brings to the table for you.
What is Spocket Dropshipping?
Spocket is an ecommerce directory/platform that lists domestic and international dropshipping suppliers with over 60000 products in a variety of niches to choose from.
By domestic, we mean suppliers in the EU & USA. In fact, 60% of Spocket’s product catalog is based in the USA & EU.
This makes it easy for dropshippers to find a supplier for their products, without having to waste time researching on Google or Facebook Groups.
All you need to do to source a product and start selling, is connect your sales platform to Spocket. Everything else is as simple as 1-2 clicks. The entire workflow can be automated.
How does Spocket Work?
If you already know how Spocket works and are ready to roll the dice, then you can search for Spocket from the top right corner of the Shopify app store or the WooCommerce control panel.
Once you have found Spocket, click to download it and integrate it with your store. You will have to complete a simple registration process and select a subscription tier.
That’s it. You are all set to start selling.
But there’s another way, for dropshippers who are not sure whether Spocket is the right choice for their business. We are sure that you’d like to try out the features and see how the whole service works, right?
Spocket makes it easy.
Spocket Free Trial Account
- Head to the Spocket website
- Sign up for a free trial account. You do not need your credit card for this.
- This gives you access to a 14-day trial account.
- Log on the Spocket dashboard and start taking the tour.
Spocket Dashboard Overview
To be honest, Spocket’s dashboard is very easy to use. It is neatly organized and divided into two parts: the product catalog and the order management system.
The product catalog is your one-stop-shop for all the products Spocket has to offer. You can search for products by category, supplier, warehouse location, images, variants, listing price and approximate retail price, to name a few.
Once you have found a product that you like, you can import it and start tweaking.
It’s as simple as that. No negotiations with the supplier, no phone calls, nothing. Just click and import.
Dashboard Tour
Spocket offers a four-step onboarding tour that explains the entire product catalog, order management and how to get started.
We recommend that you try this out in case you have never worked with similar services and platforms in the past.
Spocket Pros & Cons
Before we dive into the meatier details of the service, let’s take a look at the pros and cons of using Spocket. Something like a bird’s eye view of what you are looking at.
Pros:
- Access to verified and vetted US & EU suppliers for dropshipping
- Select product by warehouse location. This makes it easier to find a supplier who can fulfill orders from the nearest warehouse to your customers
- Import products with one click and tweak as per your requirement. No need to negotiate with suppliers
- Automated Inventory Updates
- Automated Order Fulfillment
Cons:
- Spocket is not third party friendly. For example, you cannot connect marketplaces like eBay and Amazon.
- There is no lifetime free subscription, with limitations for beginners, that a lot of the competition offers.
- You have no way to view a supplier’s inventory levels. So, there’s always the remote possibility that you will spend hours finding the perfect product and it turns out to be out of stock.
- Despite the positives, the service lacks many of the advanced dropshipping services that sellers seek these days. For instance, customizing the packaging.
- The 14-day trial which is intended to give beginners a complete tour of the service and the dashboard, is actually limited. It does not give you complete access to all the features.
Spocket Features & Benefits
Let’s take a closer and detailed look at some of the key features of Spocket and the advantages it offers for dropshippers.
1. Easy to Onboard and Use
Spocket takes a cue from modern ecommerce marketplaces and makes everything extremely easy to follow and figure out. From finding the right product to tweaking imports, to creating automated workflows, everything is self-explanatory.
The dashboard gives you a bird’s eye view of the entire service with well-laid out navigation menus and colorful icons that are impossible to miss. Even if someone who’s new to dropshipping software logs on, they won’t have much trouble getting their bearings straight.
Find the right product – We already mentioned the extensive filters that you can use to narrow down on the right product. Whenever you come across a product you like, you can click and add it to your import list. This is a great time-saving feature that lets you select multiple products from different categories and import them all with one click.
Tweak them – The imported products can be tweaked before sending them to your storefront. This is critical, because if you are optimizing for search engines, you can rewrite the product descriptions and image alt data.
Mark up prices – You have the option to set a common price markup rule. The choices are, multiplier, percentage or fixed price. For instance, if you choose a multiplier, and use 1.5x, a product that costs $5 will come up as $7.50 on the storefront.
Automate fulfillment – Once you have imported the products, you can click on automated order fulfillment. This is another time-saving feature that automatically fulfills the orders with zero manual inputs required. The customer data is sent directly to the suppliers while you get the tracking information, again automatically.
Overall, we think that Spocket is one of the most user-friendly services that we’ve come across.
2. Extensive Product Catalog
Spocket’s product catalog is huge. Clothing, cosmetics, beauty products, pet products, tech accessories, home and garden, footwear, bags and wallets, seasonal products, party products, sports and automotive products, are just some of the categories that it boasts of.
While we are not sure of the exact number of listings, we do know that they update their catalog every single day. So it keeps getting bigger and bigger.
The products are sourced from suppliers all around the globe and you can use Spocket’s razor sharp filtering to quickly find the products you’re looking for.
One thing that we’d like to mention here is that the product images are of high quality and feature Western models. This makes it easier to stand out with your advertising.
Also, it helps prevent the impression that you are a dropshipper.
If you have run a dropship store in the past, then you’d agree that images can often be deceptive. That’s where Spocket shines. They actually let you place sample requests. The sellers on the platform are bound by contract to send out a sample of the product that you like for closer scrutiny.
This is a great feature because it lets you check out the quality, make and size of the products before you invest your time and effort in selling them. This way, there’ll be no surprises later on.
For instance, if you are dropshipping in the EU and choose a product that ships from a warehouse in the EU, then the sample lets you test the shipping time as well.
3. Easy Access to Vetted Suppliers
Spocket’s mission is to make ecommerce easy and profitable for everyone. To that end, they have partnered with a number of experienced suppliers across the US, EU, AU and Asia.
Spocket is continually updating their supplier database as well as their product catalog. What this means is that you can be sure of finding the right products to sell on your website every single day.
That’s not all. Spocket has a stringent verification process for new suppliers. It’s not as easy as some other ecommerce platforms to get listed as a supplier on Spocket.
Spocket will analyze your competency as a supplier on various parameters. The product category, pricing, quality, lead times, production capacity, credit history, legal standing, track record, liabilities, assets, experience, everything is scrutinized.
While this makes it more difficult for suppliers, this is great news for dropshippers. You can be sure that the supplier that you are dealing with is a reliable one. Finding a reliable dropshipping supplier is one of the toughest challenges that dropshippers face.
Even if the supplier may come across as reliable initially, there’s practically no way to know how consistent they will be when you begin to scale, or when it’s peak sales season. With Spocket, you don’t really need to deal with the supplier directly.
Spocket is the middleman and they are responsible for quality control, shipping and order fulfillment. This takes away a lot of the hassles and risks associated with the traditional dropshipping model.
We’d like to mention that 60% of Spocket’s suppliers are from the US and EU. This makes it one of the largest product catalogs for sourcing directly from these key marketplaces.
4. Easy Product Imports
Another part of dropshipping software that a lot of dropshippers struggle with, is product imports. If you are planning to create a 1-5 product store, then manually importing products is not a big deal.
But if you are actually building a multi-product store with 100s of products, imagine the ordeal it will be, if you have to do it manually.
Spocket has a solution for that too. You can easily import products from the Spocket catalog into your store with just a few clicks. You select the products you like and add it to the ‘Import List’.
Then with one click, everything is imported into your storefront. Each list can have unlimited products and up to 25 of them can be imported at one time. This is truly hands off and makes it so easy to set up a store.
That said, products can have images in different dimensions, product descriptions that are too vague, tags that don’t match and SEO Meta details that are out of place. This is more common than you think.
Thankfully, Spocket lets you edit every tiny detail from the import list itself before you send it to the store. This is certainly easier to achieve rather than importing it into Shopify and then having to go to each product listing and editing it manually.
Once you import the products and start selling, Spocket automatically syncs the inventory levels based on real time orders. So, any product that is about to go out of stock, will reflect in your dashboard with a small delay.
You can then take necessary action to avoid overselling and refunds.
The only possible quibble that we have here, is that Spocket does not allow you to view a supplier’s inventory levels in real time. So, we have come across some reviews that mention how dropshippers spent hours sourcing products, which then went out of stock, because the supplier ran out of stock.
But, this is a rare occurrence. On most occasions, Spocket’s automated system stays one step ahead of inventory updates.
5. Automated Order Fulfillment
Automated order fulfillment forms the backbone of a successful dropshipping business. You’d ideally want the entire supply chain to be fully automated from start to end.
Spocket is pretty close to this. Right from the moment you import the products to the store, your role and the need for manual inputs are minimal. When the customer places the order, Spocket quickly processes it and sends the necessary details directly to the supplier to ship out the order.
A copy of this will be sent to you on email, so that you can also keep a track of it yourself.
The supplier then gets a notification of the order and ships it and updates the will automatically reflect in your dashboard without any additional work. It will also be sent directly to the customer, shifting the onus on them to track the shipment if need be. This also saves you time and effort.
We would like to reiterate that, for the most part, Spocket does all of the hard work for you and leaves very little room for manual inputs.
Spocket Pricing
Spocket offers four paid pricing tiers in addition to the free trial account that we mentioned earlier.
Starter Plan –The starter plan is ideal for beginner dropshippers and is priced at $24.99. It lets you source up to 25 products and gives you access to email support only. However, you do not get access to the exclusive catalog with this plan.
Pro Plan – The Pro Plan is priced at $49.99 per month and is aimed at small business owners. This plan lets you source up to 250 products. You also get access to email support, chat support, 25 products from the exclusive catalog and branded invoicing.
Empire Plan – The Empire plan is priced at $99.99 per month and comes with 10000 products, 10000 exclusive products from the catalog, access to chat support and branded invoicing.
Unicorn – The Unicorn plan is priced at $299.99 per month which you can request supplier and product sourcing. Bulk order check out.
Spocket’s pricing is pretty reasonable considering the convenience, the automation, the features and support that you get.
The Primary Benefits of Spocket at a Glance
To sum up what we have covered so far, here are the primary benefits of Spocket at a glance.
- Affordable Solution – For $49.99/mo, Spocket gives you access to a library of exclusive products 80% of which are in the EU & USA, automated order fulfillment, branded invoicing and top rated customer support. We think that it is one of the most comprehensive and cost-effective solutions in the market at present.
- Automated Order Fulfillment – Spocket automates most of the manual work involved in order fulfillment. You, therefore, don’t have to worry about manually checking stock levels or updating them on your store frequently to prevent run outs. It saves you a significant amount of time, effort and money.
- Easy to Use – Spocket is designed for dropshippers of all skill levels. It’s easy to use and automates the entire supply chain process.
- Vetted EU & USA Suppliers – With 80% of their suppliers based in the EU and USA, Spocket is one of the largest marketplaces to source products from, if you are targeting the US and EU for your dropshipping business.
- Branded Invoicing – Spocket lets you send invoices directly to your customers from your dashboard with a customizable template of your choice. This makes it easier for them to pay and also saves time and effort on your part.
Spocket Alternatives
Despite all the positives associated with the service, what if it does not work for you for some reason? Are there alternatives that you could try?
Yes, there are. Here’s a look at the top alternatives to Spocket.
1. Sourcingbro – Private Dropshipping Agent
We are not trying to toot our own horn. But Sourcingbro is one of the best alternatives to Spocket.
Unlike Spocket which is a software service, we are a small team of professionals with extensive experience in different roles across the ecommerce supply chain. In a nutshell, we are one of the leading sourcing agents in China who can also handle complete order fulfillment for you.
If you prefer a hands-off approach to dropshipping that lets you focus on sales and marketing instead, then we have you covered.
Here’s a look at the key features of Sourcingbro.
- Personalized Customer Support – Sourcingbro is your partner on ground. This means that we keep a vigilant eye on the complete supply chain for you. You don’t have to rely on slow email or chat support. A member of our team will be available to answer your queries and grievances at all times.
- Choosing swift and reliable ecommerce solutions – From standard dropshipping to a private label dropshipping brand and picking the fastest and cheapest logistics service, Sourcingbro can offer reliable and fast solutions for you.
- Automated fulfillment – We handle complete order fulfillment from pick and pack, until delivery to the customer. We offer Delivery duty paid services, which is hassle free.
2. Oberlo – Popular Aliexpress Sourcing software
Oberlo is a fairly popular dropshipping automation software that allows you to connect your Shopify store with the Aliexpress marketplace.
It offers tons of products to choose from and automates the entire order fulfillment process for you. Oberlo also offers a wide range of features like automatic order tracking, product filters, and supplier management.
Here’s a look at the key features of Oberlo.
Sourcing from Aliexpress – Aliexpress has millions of products to choose from. With Oberlo, you can search, click and import an endless variety of products.
Automated Inventory updates – Oberlo offers automated inventory updates, regardless of how many suppliers you source from.
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3. Modalyst – Single Platform for Multiple Sales Channels
Modalyst is a massive ecommerce platform that lets you connect to thousands of suppliers across the globe with millions of products to choose from.
Unlike Oberlo, it does not limit you to sourcing products from Aliexpress. You can source products from suppliers all around the world.
Here are the key features of Modalyst.
Single Click Product Syncing – Modalyst allows you to sync products from suppliers in a single click. You can also use the mass import feature to import thousands of products within a few minutes.
Unlimited Products – Modalyst is designed for businesses that want to scale at will without having to deal with bandwidth issues. There’s no limit on the number of products you can add to your store.
Digital Inventory – There’s no need to keep track of your inventory manually. Modalyst is web based and lets you keep a digital record of all products and their quantities.
Multi-Channel Selling – With Modalyst, you can sell on all major sales channels including Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Shopify, and more.
Spocket Review: Conclusion
Spocket is a powerful software that automates a lot of order fulfillment tasks for you. The basic plan is free, and the paid plans are affordable as well.
Over 80% of their suppliers are based in the EU & US. That too, vetted and verified suppliers. We feel that if you are looking to source domestically in the US & EU, then Spocket is a no-brainer.
However, be aware of its limitations too and make an objective decision.