AliExpress has become one of the biggest online marketplaces in the world, with many retailers sourcing inventory directly from manufacturers through the platform. While the marketplace offers tremendous potential for buyers, the challenge is determining the best AliExpress products for your online store.

Retailers want to diversify their suppliers to avoid supply chain disruptions, product shortages and other costly incidents. AliExpress is one way to expand your supplier base. While the marketplace often draws comparisons to Amazon and eBay, it also offers unique benefits and challenges. Before deciding whether AliExpress is right for you, you must understand what the platform is and how to use it. 

Learn more about the marketplace, how to find the best-selling products on AliExpress and through other channels, and how to scale with automated inventory management. 

What is AliExpress, and why should you use it? 

AliExpress is a global online marketplace that provides users with access to a wide range of products directly from manufacturers and suppliers in China. The Alibaba Group-owned company was founded in 2010 and features a huge selection of trending products across dozens of categories and subcategories. That product selection and competitive pricing make AliExpress a valuable resource for retailers looking to source products for resale.

Finding the best AliExpress products for your business offers numerous benefits. One of the most obvious is increased revenue, profit and market share as you resell products that are in high demand. The platform also offers product ratings and reviews, making it easier to evaluate product quality and make informed purchasing decisions. 

When you’re selling highly valued and rated products from AliExpress, you’ll see benefits to your brand reputation. Improved customer satisfaction follows, as happy customers are more likely to continue shopping with you while telling their networks about their positive experience. 

How to find winning products on AliExpress

AliExpress offers more than 100 million products, so your first step is understanding what’s available and how products compare with each other. With roughly 400 million monthly visitors to the marketplace, you have no shortage of competitors also scouring for the best products.

Start this journey by leveraging the powerful tools provided by AliExpress.

The homepage

Don’t overlook the obvious. AliExpress’ homepage offers links to “Top rankings” and “Flash deals,” providing you with a high-level overview of what’s popular — or at least what AliExpress is promoting to anyone who starts at the front of the site.

Official ranking

The AliExpress Official Ranking page details more of the marketplace’s top products based on metrics such as views, sales and growth. These products are grouped by category, as well as a “Picked for You” sorting.

Top sellers by categories

You can easily find simple information about what’s selling well in the marketplace by searching for a product category or subcategory. Selecting a category, such as Jewelry & Watches, provides you with thousands or even millions of product results. From there, sort your results using the “Orders” option to easily identify those in high demand. 

You can further filter results to only include items with free shipping or a rating of at least four stars. 

When you filter for order volume and buyer rating, you gain confidence that these products are hot sellers and delight buyers.  

Search-based recommendations

AliExpress also offers recommendations based on your product searches to help you find potential alternatives or additional products. For example, if you begin searching for an outdoor webcam, the “recommended for you” section of a product page will display related products based on your search preferences. 

The lower section of product pages also includes “seller recommendations” and “more to love” sections with additional products based on your searches.

AliExpress dropshipping center

AliExpress also offers a free product research tool, AliExpress Dropshipping Center. This tool helps you analyze products and find products to sell, and you don’t need to be a dropshipping business to take advantage. 

You can find best-selling items, search for products by image, and set filters for price limits, free shipping and local stock. Hovering over product listings reveals a quick display of ratings and sales. For a deeper dive, look at the “Product Analysis” tab, which can give you an idea of a seller’s logistics, as well as product demand. 

All of these features help you learn more about the best-selling products on AliExpress. But these on-site offerings shouldn’t be the sole basis for your purchasing decision. It’s important to conduct off-site research to validate product demand and determine the potential profitability for your brand. 

Find AliExpress’ best-selling products through other channels

Now that you know how to find the best-selling products through AliExpress directly, you can review other channels. These provide additional information and context as you determine what products could be most profitable. 

Watch Count 

Even if you’re not planning to buy on AliExpress, it’s worth looking at Watch Count. While this tool isn’t an official eBay offering, it allows you to find the number of potential buyers watching any product. A product’s popularity on eBay suggests that it’s also popular on other marketplaces. 

There are a couple of ways to search for products using Watch Count. The first is, through the homepage, searching for products based on keywords or categories. You can filter those results by country, which is particularly useful for selling in specific markets. 

For example, if you search the “Business, Industrial” category for the U.S., you can see the top-ranked products by the number of watchers. Each product will also include the bid/price, time left and a link to similar items. 

Watch Count also has a “Most Watched eBay Items 2.0” version that offers additional search items, such as searching by eBay item number, including only items with free shipping, and setting maximum and minimum prices. The prices displayed in these results often include starting bids, which doesn’t necessarily correlate to current pricing. Instead, click on the “Completed Items” link (or visit eBay directly) and search for the same keyword. Don’t forget to select the “sold items only” box. 

Amazon

If you’re looking to find products to sell on Amazon, then it makes sense to look at the marketplace itself. Amazon offers a huge amount of data to help you identify in-demand products — you just need to know where to look.

Every product listed on the marketplace is given an Amazon Best Sellers Rank (BSR). This tells you how the sales of a specific product rank within its relevant category and subcategory. The Amazon Best Sellers page highlights the top-selling products in each category. While those listings only cover a small percentage of available items within any one category, this method provides a useful and easy-to-access overview of what’s trending in your niche

The Movers & Shakers page can also be informative, as it shows the products with the biggest 24-hour rankings gain. 

Keyword research

An important source of customers is search. If your products aren’t visible to customers searching online for what they need, you won’t close the sale. 

That’s why it pays to research keywords that surface top-selling products so you can use them in your listings and be more visible to customers. Ahrefs and Google Keyword Planner are both tools that make this process easier.

Ahrefs shows you search volumes for any keyword searched on Amazon, which can be an effective proxy for terms you search for on AliExpress. For paid users, try looking at “all keywords ideas” for more inspiration, and consider variations of search terms to uncover insights your competitors might be missing. 

Google Keyword Planner is another option for understanding search volume and product demand, especially if you’re running search campaigns on Google. Take advantage of Google’s features, including filters, to get a better sense of what people might be searching for on AliExpress. 

How an automated inventory and order management system helps you scale

AliExpress offers a high volume of products across popular ecommerce categories. The marketplace’s scale, resources and support, product variety and competitive pricing make it attractive to retailers of all sizes. When you add on-platform and third-party tools to help you find the best AliExpress products for your business, you’re well on your way to success. 

After you find the right products for your business, there’s still much to do before you reap the rewards. You need to create a product-listing strategy, manage orders at scale and track inventory across all of your sales channels. All the while, your business needs real-time data to manage forecasting, inventory, orders and fulfillment. 

Trying to do all of these things with different platforms or manually can be messy and time-consuming. Fortunately, you can solve ‌all of the above with integrated inventory, order management and listings software. 

With an automated inventory management system, you improve visibility and take control of your inventory with real-time insights — all from a single platform. Automation saves time that you can redirect to operations, customer experience and business growth. 

Retailers using AliExpress can use the custom Linnworks integration to take advantage of additional features such as automatic price changes and inventory updates.

Finding the best AliExpress products for your business is an important component of selling in the effortless economy, where you need to be in the right place at the right time, meeting your customers wherever they shop. Discover what modern shoppers expect and find out how to provide a winning customer experience every time.