Oberlo is one of the best dropshipping services, and it helps thousands of people who own online stores. Even though it’s easy to use Oberlo to import products from AliExpress, users often have trouble understanding its more complicated features.
For example, you might want to know more about the Oberlo order fulfilment process and how to manage it automatically. In this detailed guide, you can find answers to any questions you have about how it fills orders.
How Does Oberlo Work? What Is It?
Oberlo is a well-known dropshipping service that you can connect to your Shopify account. It will help you find the right products to sell from thousands of sellers all over the world in different categories.
You can connect Oberlo to AliExpress, which is its best feature. This will let you buy things from AliExpress directly. Shopify will let you change how your products look in the future. Aside from that, Oberlo can also help you keep track of orders and manage your store’s stock in other ways.
Read: What Does It Mean to Be Waiting for Fulfillment? Here’s all the information you need!
Order Fulfilment Process: A Brief Understanding
Before we talk about how Oberlo handles orders, it’s important to talk about some basics. Order fulfillment is usually a complicated process, and the exact steps depend on the model you’re using. Still, the whole thing can be broken down into a few steps:
Taking care of inventory
First, you need to figure out how to store and keep track of all your products. You can do this yourself or talk to third-party sellers who can do it for you in the background.
Warehouse Management
For the self-fulfillment model, it can be hard to keep track of the warehouse. In this, you need to keep track of the stock, what comes in and what goes out, and a few other logistics.
Taking care of orders
This is the most important part of making sure an order is filled. Here, you need to take care of the customer’s order and see if it fits with what’s in stock.
Packaging & Shipping
How you package and ship your items can make or break a sale. You have to make sure the product is not broken and is in good shape. You have to take care of the order from beginning to end, and you can also let your customers know how it’s going.
Fulfilling Orders
The process won’t end when the goods are sent out. You can also take steps to deal with order returns and exchanges. For a clear experience, it is best to automate this process and set up clear return and refund policies.
Oberlo Order Fulfilment Process: A Stepwise Breakdown
The basic Oberlo order fulfillment process should go like the steps above. Since it lets stores do dropshipping, the steps may be a little different. Here’s what happens when a customer places an order on your Oberlo-powered store and how you can fill it.
Order Received
First of all, let’s say that a customer placed an order on your website or app that uses Oberlo. Oberlo will send you a message as soon as they place an order. You can check the details of the order you placed by going to your account.
Confirmed Order
After looking at the order’s details on your Oberlo dashboard, you can decide whether or not to accept it. Unless there’s a problem with the stock, store owners just accept the order that the supplier gives them.
Here, you can accept or reject one order at a time, or you can process many orders at once. Please keep in mind that we can also automate this process with Oberlo, but some managers prefer to do a manual check first.
Notification to the Customer
During the order fulfillment process, customers can also check on the status of their purchases. As soon as you accept the order, the customer will know about it. If the process is set up to happen automatically, the customer will get a message soon after placing the order.
Processing in the warehouse
The supplier will be told once you accept the order. They will just handle the logistics needed to process the order and make sure the right product is sent.
Packaging & Tracking
Since dropshipping is supported by Oberlo, you don’t have to worry about how the product will be packed or sent. Instead, the original supplier will take care of this part of the order fulfillment for Oberlo.
But if you have the AliExpress tracking service built in, you can easily let your customers know where their package is at any given time. This way, your customers can see where their order is and find out when it will arrive.
Order Delivered
Lastly, the order would be sent to the address given by the customer by the shipping service. You will also get a message on Oberlo when the order has been successfully sent.
If for some reason the order can’t be delivered, it will show up as “incomplete” on your Oberlo dashboard. You can decide to do what needs to be done now, such as trying again for delivery or canceling the order.
Processes after delivery
A lot of store owners think that the last step in the Oberlo order fulfilment process is delivering the order. Well, it can be, but sometimes customers can choose to send the product back or get a different one.
To handle these things after delivery, it’s a good idea to have a clear refund and return policy. To take care of these requests, you can talk to the customer and get in touch with the supplier. If, on the other hand, the customer wants a refund, all you have to do is tell them to send the package to the address you give them and then process their payment.
Pro Tip:
Connecting your AliExpress account to your dashboard is a good way to automate the Oberlo order fulfillment process. To do this, go to your Oberlo account, click on Settings, then click on Supplier, and then click on AliExpress. Just make sure to set up your Oberlo dashboard with the same AliExpress account. Now, you can choose to have AliExpress automate different back-end tasks.
Common ways to fill an online order
Please keep in mind that Oberlo uses a method of fulfillment called “dropshipping.” But if you own an online store, you should know about the three most common ways orders are filled. This will help you figure out which way to go to get better results.
Self-fulfilment
This type of order fulfillment is also called “in-house” because it doesn’t involve any outside sources. You would have to keep track of your store’s stock and ship items to customers. You can use special tools to help you keep track of your orders, but you still have to do all the hard work. Even though it takes more time, it gives you the freedom to change things as you go.
Fulfillment by a Third Party
In this case, you just use third-party services to help you fulfill orders. You can link your inventory with the services they offer for warehousing. They will take care of packaging, shipping, and other logistics so you can focus on marketing your store.
Fulfillment Dropshipping
This is the easiest way to run an online store and send out orders from your customers. You just take care of the front-end services, and the supplier handles the orders directly. The supplier will store, ship, package, and take care of other logistics on your behalf.
Explore dropship-empire: AliExpress’s Official Dropshipping Tool
Since Oberlo is hard to use and costs a lot, you might want to try dropship-empire, which is a better alternative. It is the official dropshipping tool from AliExpress. It is free and very simple to use.
Integration without a hitch
Dropship-Empire works with all of the major online platforms, unlike Oberlo, which only works with Shopify. It works with Shopify, WooCommerce, and Wix right now.
Free and simple to use
Unlike Oberlo, the basic version of Dropship-Empire is free to use. Also, Dropship-Empire has a very simple interface that makes it easy to find and import products from tens of thousands of suppliers in different categories.
Supplier finder
Users of Dropship-Empire can use the Supplier finder tool to save even more time and money. Just pick any product, and Dropship-Empire will choose the best-rated and most profitable supplier for it.
Automatic Handling
With Dropship-Empire, you can automate the whole process of completing an order. It has a lot of great features, like the ability to automatically update order status and sync tracking numbers.
Even more
You can also use Dropship-Empire to access a number of other management tools, such as variant mapping, automatic pricing, stock management, product division, affiliate marketing, and a lot more.
Conclusion
I’m sure that this guide helped you understand how the Oberlo order fulfillment process works. You can see that there are different ways to fill an order on Oberlo. You can do everything automatically or handle orders by hand, depending on what you want.
Also, you can switch to Dropship-Empire if you want to use more advanced dropshipping and store management tools. It is the official dropshipping tool from AliExpress. It works on many platforms and is very easy to use.