The Best Wholesale Dropshippers

Wednesday, January 27th

2021 Wholesale Dropshipper Reviews

Inventory Source

• Cost: Inventory Automation - $50/mo (Standard), $125/mo (Professional), $249/mo (Enterprise)
• Full Automation - $175/mo (Standard), $225/mo (Professional), $399/mo (Enterprise)

One of the biggest headaches for dropshippers, and which is the most important part of dropshipping, is managing inventory and orders. Many dropshippers find themselves drowning in files and file upload processes that differ from marketplace to marketplace and from platform to platform. They also spend a lot of time chasing down inventory data like quantity, shipping weight, variations, attributes, and more.

Inventory Source claims to solve these problems by automating all of these processes. They offer the automations to both the retailers and their 150+ wholesale suppliers.

For inventory automation, suppliers and warehouses provide detailed, categorized product data and inventory monitoring. Through automation tools, suppliers update price markups and product data and then the data is sent, without file uploading, to Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Jet, Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce/WordPress sites, BigCommerce, and more than 20 other platforms and marketplaces.

For order automation, when a retail customer places an order on a retail dropshipper's website, the order goes through an order processing dashboard. It can be automatically processed or go through a verification process first. If multiple products from multiple vendors are part of the order, Inventory Source figures out which orders to send to which suppliers through its direct integrations - again, with no files to manage and upload. Once the order has shipped, tracking information is bundled back into the order and sent to the customer.

Through Inventory Source, wholesale suppliers can connect directly to their own online store, order management system, or enterprise resource planning system to synchronize inventory and orders.

The Inventory Source supplier directory is free to browse with no credit card required. You just create an account and it logs you into the supplier directory. The pre-registration demo video of the supplier directory was confusing and didn't have a voiceover to explain what was being shown in the screen recordings of the service being used. It also didn't show the entire process from start to finish. So, you'll have to figure out most of the process on your own or using the Getting Started guide once you log in.

Once you select a supplier, it's very simple to select an automation plan, review pricing and then complete the order of the products. From there, you list and promote the product on your website and desired marketplaces. Orders pass back to the Inventory Source system and are sent to suppliers for fulfillment. This is one of the best-designed systems available in terms of ease of use and setting up the transaction chain quickly and painlessly.

If you chose Inventory Automation as your plan, Inventory Source will automatically upload your supplier's products and sync inventory quantities to your store. Choose Full Automation if you want the added ability to automatically route orders to your suppliers and sync shipment tracking back to your store. Based on our experience, the latter is well worth it if you are shipping and needing to send tracking codes for more than 20 orders per day, especially across multiple platforms.

Support is team-based via email and live chat 7 days per week, and scheduled calls Monday through Friday from 9am to 5pm Eastern. Depending on the integration plan you purchase, you may even have access to an account manager who is a senior team member at Inventory Source dedicated to supporting and monitoring your account integrations. The account manager also serves to be an advocate in ensuring the tools and services fit your needs and budget.

We were surprised to find only four complaints registered via the Better Business Bureau, and to each of those Inventory Source responded promptly and satisfactorily. One complaint had to do with the customer's email filter being too aggressive in blocking an Inventory Source notification and nothing wrong with the service itself. Other non-BBB reviews included responses from Inventory Source representatives who clarified the actual misunderstandings and resolutions. Their conclusions were largely supported by other customers of the service who had reported good experiences. This tells us that Inventory Source cares about the satisfaction of their clients.

We were very impressed with the ease-of-use in getting started with selling on any of the most popular marketplaces. The file-less synchronization process is a plus for dropshippers who don't want to worry about handling so many files. This wholesale dropshipper has earned our highest rating.

Worldwide Brands

• Cost: $299 for a lifetime membership

A problem that many online retail shops encounter is how to get reputable wholesaler information. There are a lot of unsafe product providers out there who are merely fronts for scams. That's where Worldwide Brands comes in.

Worldwide Brands has been in business for over 18 years as a premier provider of a curated and certified directory of wholesalers who stand ready to drop ship products for online retailers. Their directory contains information on millions of products (over 17 million products to be exact) provided at wholesale prices by thousands of real manufacturers and product providers.

They publish a trustworthy directory of wholesalers for online retailers to search and save in their Worldwide Brands account. Worldwide Brands scrutinizes every drop shipping provider so as to only recommend the best wholesalers. Their website has recently been redesigned with a new video and navigation to focus on the following areas of drop shipping:

• How drop shipping works
• Real vs. fake dropshippers
• Wholesale product selection
• Protection from wholesale scams
• Wholesale provider directory

In addition to the world's largest directory of certified wholesalers, WorldWide Brands provides a wealth of educational material to help you succeed. Much of it is available for free, making a visit to the website almost required for those interested in wholesale dropshipping. They have 20 videos narrated by their CEO Chris Malta, free eBooks, and helpful information at every turn.

With Worldwide Brands, remember you're only buying access to carefully cultivated and maintained information. They do not manage the relationship between the dropshipper (you) and the supplier (wholesalers). Therefore, they make no guarantees that the suppliers you contact will ever respond, nor that the deals you make with suppliers will be profitable. That is all up to you as the drop shipper and your ability to manage your business well.

However, you will never be charged setup fees, annual fees, monthly fees, or restocking fees with Worldwide Brands, simply because they are only providing the information on reputable wholesalers. The lifetime membership is a good value in the sense that you're paying only one flat fee for someone else to do all the hard research into every company. They also promise that there will be new suppliers every week and that their directory helps you stay out of "crowded" niches of products that everyone else is selling. You can more easily find just the right product for your target market.

In order to build the largest selection of wholesale products you can find, their research staff visits industry leading tradeshows, talks directly with manufacturers, and run them all through a strict qualification process. They go the extra mile to make sure you work with only the best dropshippers, wholesalers, and liquidators out there.

Even though Worldwide Brands is located in the USA and focuses mainly on suppliers also based in the USA, they do have a number of international suppliers as well. If there's a product you can't find, they will do the research to find it for you and add it to the directory.

The free preview is a nice addition over the prior version of their website, which used to require you to buy full access just to get a peek at what's in the directory. Even though the live preview is redacted and some of the features are disabled, you can still do searches for real products and suppliers and see photos and category names.

Worldwide Brands charges a one-time lifetime $299 fee to access their directory and offers it with a money-back guarantee. The refund policy is a generous 60 days from the purchase date, but does have some strings attached. First, you need to email them to express your concerns in writing. Second, if you receive a refund, then later purchase a membership again and request another refund, they will not issue it. Also, if during the 60-day period you have contacted over 50 suppliers and are found to be doing business with any of them, you may be forfeiting any refunds. Given the complexity of maintaining such a comprehensive directory, we think these terms are very fair.

Worldwide Brands has a longstanding reputation in the dropshipping community. They provide rock-solid information and can help you find the best wholesale suppliers to do business with. If you want to succeed in the world of Wholesale Dropshipping, the information you find here will prove invaluable.

Salehoo

• Cost: $67 for unlimited access for one year plus a 60-day money-back guarantee

With Salehoo, you have a research tool, online community, and supplier directory to support you in your endeavor to be successful as an online dropshipping retailer. Their directory has 2.5 million products to choose from, supplied by over 8,000 select wholesalers. That's not as many as other wholesale directories, but is enough to get you started.

There are basically three steps to getting started.

1. Choose profitable product ideas with the Salehoo Market Research Labs search tool.
2. Find suppliers to dropship your selected products.
3. Get in touch with the suppliers and negotiate your costs.

There is unlimited training available to help you get going quickly. If you decide Salehoo just doesn't cut it for you, there is also a money-back guarantee redeemable within the first 60 days from when you first registered. You'll just need to email your receipt to their support email address with the reason for cancellation.

The market research search engine is fairly simple to use, with filters for determining sell rate, average price, competition, data source, and product type. Once you've narrowed down the list, you can select an item and see the relative competition (low, medium, high), the average sale price, the listing count and sell rate on eBay, and other vital information about potential suppliers.

The supplier directory is also quite intuitive, with filters by supplier type, location, minimum order amount, shipping methods, and other criteria. You can save individual suppliers to a curated list, add a note, and then contact the supplier directly to negotiate your deal. However, a few users complained that they found products for which there were no suppliers that carried them, or that the suppliers didn't dropship to all the locations they wanted. If there's a supplier you're looking for but not able to find, Salehoo support will assist you.

With the seller training module, you get an eCommerce glossary, video tutorials, and online selling guides. There is also training on dropshipping, finding products, and choosing suppliers. With the seller community you can get ideas from other successful retailers.

Salehoo has an A+ rating and accreditation with the Better Business Bureau, and an astonishing 98% positive review rate. There were no complaints filed as of the writing of this review.

With their great positive review rate and features, Salehoo is a company that anyone who's new to wholesale dropshipping should consider doing business with.

Sunrise Wholesale

• Cost: $29.95 per month or $99 per year
• 7-day free trial

Sunrise Wholesale takes the drama out of listing products by providing you with a simple point-and-click wizard that walks you through the entire listing process. You can sell any of 15,000+ products and have them drop shipped right to customers.

If there are any product returns or refunds to be handled, Sunrise Wholesale does that for you automatically. They provide you with daily inventory and email alerts whenever your inventory drops below a certain threshold.

Their Amazon selling and research manager tool helps you post products to your Amazon Seller Central. From there, information about your products, such as price and quantity, get automatic updates right on Amazon. When you get an order, you just click a button and the order will be fulfilled and a tracking number sent to the customer. Sunrise Wholesale also provides analytics tools to see which products are trending on Amazon and at which prices. Sunrise Wholesale's Amazon Manager also gives you a report that shows inventory wholesale prices compared to Amazon prices and fees so you can see whether every single listing is making a profit.

Many of the same features that exist for Amazon also exist for eBay, making the process of listing and selling on eBay much easier than if you were to attempt it on your own just through the eBay website. With Sunrise Wholesale's eBay listing wizard, you get all kinds of customization options that will help you perfect your listing and see how the competition is faring.

For listing on your own website using Shopify or Bigcommerce, there is a free app installation for each Sunrise membership you purchase. We assume this means you must purchase a separate Sunrise membership for each shopping cart platform. Your store is then hosted on your own website/domain with automatic product updates, design templates, apps, credit card purchasing, and automated fulfillment with tracking numbers. There is also an analysis tool and exporting of your product catalog to CSV or XML feeds that other websites can operate from.

The Better Business Bureau lists Sunrise Wholesale with an A+ non-accredited rating. There were no customer reviews listed with the BBB. However, another business review website listed three reviews complaining about bad customer service and rudeness from customer service representatives. One reviewer also complained that prices weren't competitive and that the shipping cost to fulfill the order made the final sale price higher than retail.

We loved the ease-of-use factor with Sunrise Wholesale. They have everything that the typical wholesale dropshipper will want for organizing and activating their listings with the most prominent marketplaces and one's own website. The only thing that gave us pause was the non-BBB complaint about customer service quality and the rudeness with which the customer was treated.

Doba

• Cost: Basic - $29/month
• Advanced - $69/month
• Pro - $249/month

Doba gives you, the online retailer, access to hundreds of suppliers that have been carefully vetted according to their performance and technical capabilities in their respective markets. Their suppliers are also evaluated on cost, processing and shipping times, and fulfillment rates, plus many other criteria visible on a supplier scorecard.

With Doba you can see a filtered search list of trending products and then add them to a list of favorites. Then you can place and track orders from one screen. Doba supports product listing export and import to formats for popular ecommerce platforms like BigCommerce, Shopify, Magento, Volusion, and others.

Pricing is broken out into four tiers: Basic, Advanced, Pro, and Enterprise, with a $0.99 order fee for the first three and a low, unpublished order fee for Enterprise customers. Each greater plan adds upon the features of the lesser plan, including more data formats and convenience features the more you pay.

If you're worried about having to refund orders for out-of-stock items, you can set a custom alert to let you know when inventory of a product is getting low. That way you can log in and remove the product or set it as out-of-stock.

Should it turn out that Doba's product data formats don't meet your needs, for less than $20 per month as an Advanced user, you can get a custom data format export. This feature is included with the Pro plan.

With Doba's Elite Seller Report, a monthly newsletter for members, you will get an exclusive look at the hottest selling products in the Doba inventory. You'll also get emails about trending products, seasonal products, discounts, and new suppliers per category. For a fee that depends on how many products you want curated, you can have Doba's product experts produce a list of high-margin, in-demand products in your niche.

Doba even has a program for large enterprise retailers. It provides fuller visibility into all products across all suppliers, API access and custom data formats for niche product management, more personalized and attentive customer support, integration of your existing drop ship suppliers into a Doba catalog exclusive to you, and the lowest order fees.

The Doba website offers a sampling of the types of products you could offer on your retail ecommerce store. About half of the products shown seem to be off-brand in nature, but the other half are top brands. Several of the off-brand products seem to be of a less-than-premium quality and variety, especially in the electronics category. If you're keen on selling only quality products you'll want to do careful research into the reviews and returns on other major retail site for each product you think you might sell.

There is a 14-day free trial so you can get familiar with the service before deciding whether it will meet your needs. It's a good idea to have your ecommerce shop already set up so you can maximize the trial's usefulness in a short timeframe. The sign-up price is a monthly or annual subscription rather than a one-time lifetime membership. That may be a non-starter for some beginning online retailers who are keeping a close eye on costs as their stores gather customers.

Doba only does drop shipping of single items. You can't buy more than one unit at a time. And Doba only ships to US addresses. The monthly fee is somewhat expensive compared to other similar services.

The Better Business Bureau has rated Doba as A+ with more positive reviews than negative. Some of the negative reviews were by people who didn't fully understand the terms of service or who thought drop shipping was a trivial process and didn't fully research the marketplace before committing to selling products. Others seemed to have more legitimate complaints about having to cancel over the phone rather than online and being charged full price up front in spite of a promise of a free trial. But several were old reviews, so those issues may have been addressed.

One reviewer provided lengthy and informed commentary on how they did their own exhaustive research. They found that it was more profitable to go it alone in sourcing wholesale suppliers than to use Doba once all the fees and their denied refund were accounted for.

The Doba service does offer some nice features as far as enablement of drop shipping listings through provided files, though they're not as comprehensive or easy to use as other services we've reviewed here. As other Doba customers have discovered, you may find that researching and selling through major platforms and marketplaces with suppliers you find on your own may result in a better profit margin than you can get from Doba's suppliers, once you've account for Doba fees.

National Dropshippers

• Cost: Between $19.99 and $299 depending on term/type of membership (monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, annual, lifetime, or ecommerce).

National Dropshippers makes the process of running a drop shipping business easier on its members. It offers a service that handles the order fulfillment process with images and descriptions already in place to sell the products. You can take orders either online or at a brick and mortar store and then National Dropshippers' suppliers will ship the items directly to your customer. The return address on the shipping labels and tracking never gives away the fact that you are a drop shipping business.

National Dropshippers offers a 7-day, no-risk free trial to get you started. This seems like it is not nearly enough time to get enough orders and to ship them and deal with returns to know whether the service will work for a business.

Memberships are sold monthly ($19.99), quarterly ($44.97), semi-annually ($59.94), annually ($89.88), and lifetime ($199), each longer term granting you progressive savings over shorter term access. There is also a convenient ecommerce membership option for $299 plus $19.99 per month where National Dropshippers will set up your online store with up to 14 storefront templates to choose from. Each order incurs a $2.49 dropship fee, which is cheaper than per item or per warehouse as with some other wholesale dropshippers.

Categories for products include:

• Apparel
• Cell Phones
• Cookware
• Kitchen Accessories
• Knives/Multi-Tools
• Luggage
• Motorcycle
• Outdoors
• Perfumes
• Pet Supplies
• Security
• T-Shirts

These categories don't seem to cover the broader range we expected for the membership prices charged. The products that are available to browse on the public website are limited to off-brand items that are somewhat unrecognizable by the majority of customers as they are not commonly found on store shelves.

The website, in general design terms, is not awe-inspiring and seems to have been designed sometime in the early 2000s. While that could mean that National Dropshippers is not keeping up with the latest trends, it could also mean that they are focusing their resources on low prices and good dropshipping experiences in the physical world as well. Still, it seems to decrease the perception of trust they would rely on to attract dropship sellers and suppliers.

National Dropshippers support is via phone, online form or email, but they lack tutorials and videos to help people help themselves when they run into problems or have questions.

National Dropshippers currently enjoys an A+ BBB rating and no negative or positive reviews with the Better Business Bureau but is not yet accredited. A search of negative or positive reviews online didn't produce much either. That could mean either that they are so good that nobody complains, or that they are not well-known or popular enough to make a showing in online reviews.

Owing to the sparseness and outdated feel of their website, National Dropshippers isn't rating very high in this review. It may seem trivial to some, but the design of a website helps convey its trustworthiness to newer audiences of dropshippers and will cause them to look elsewhere. The categories are also not broad enough to give the sense of value and variety most dropship retailers are searching for. Also, the lack of tutorials to help new dropshippers is a problem that cannot be overlooked.

Wholesale 2B

• Cost: Various pricing based on platform

Wholesale2B has a million products on offer with automation of product uploads, inventory synchronization, and fulfillment of orders. You can hook it up to your website, eBay, Amazon, Shopify, BigCommerce, ECWID, or WooCommerce. There's also a data feed option in case you have a need to use a third-party commerce engine that Wholesale2B doesn't support directly.

You can sign up for free to browse all the dropship products until you're ready to activate a plan and start selling. When we signed up for the free account, the confirmation email contained the password we selected, which is a bit of a security concern.

For pricing, we found the Wholesale2B pricing plans a bit confusing at first, especially from the perspective of someone who has never done drop shipping and is looking to get their feet wet. To see the particulars of any plan, you need to first sign up for the free account and then click into each plan's page to review everything it includes and how to use it.

Here are some of the prices we found:

• Dropship on eBay - $24.99/mo ($99.99/year)
• Dropship on Amazon - $37.99/mo ($287.00/year)
• Dropship Website - $39.99/mo ($299.99/year)
• Dropship Datafeed - $24.99/mo ($149.99/year)
• All eBay, Amazon, Website, and Datafeed plans together discounted to $82.99/mo ($599.99/year)
• Dropship for Shopify App - $29.99/mo (no yearly plan)
• Dropship for BigCommerce App - $29.99/mo ($215.99/year)
• Dropship for ECWID App - $29.99/mo ($215.99/year)
• Dropship for WooCommerce - $29.99/mo ($215.99/year)
• DIY Plan - $67/year

The site presumes a prior knowledge of how dropshipping works and assumes that the customer will know which platform they're going to use and how to operate it so as to know which exact plan to buy.

Also, the fact that everything is parceled out into so many plans instead of all-inclusive like their competitors makes it hard for experienced retailers to operate on disparate platforms without overpaying. Some retailers may find this a la carte approach more useful than others.

The sample product directory showed very few name brands but quite a lot of off-brand products mixed together. If you're searching for a niche in which to sell the higher-quality off-brand products, this appears to be a good supplier directory for that purpose.

On the Better Business Bureau website, Wholesale2B got a dismal C- non-accredited rating with 5 total customer complaints. Wholesale2B attempted to answer some of the complaints but the customers responded with notes saying they were still dissatisfied with the attempted resolution.

Wholesale2B looked okay at first glance, but their complex and disjointed plans coupled with the concerning reviews we saw at the Better Business Bureau website caused us to rank this service low.