Doba Review

Monday, August 2nd

2021 Wholesale Dropshipper Reviews

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broken out into four tiers: Basic, Advanced, Pro, and Enterprise, with a $0.99 order fee for the first three and a low, unpublished order fee for Enterprise customers.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.