Dropshipping has taken online entrepreneurship to a new level over the past several years, allowing people to sell products without hosting inventory. SaleHoo helps dropshippers find the products they want to sell from a database of over 2 million products. With SaleHoo’s research tools and automation features, you can cut down the time you’d typically spend sourcing products for your online store.
SaleHoo: The Good and the Bad
SaleHoo is a directory for dropshippers to use to find products from their directory of partnered suppliers. If you’re already in the dropshipping business or simply considering it, this is one of the leading products to consider. Let’s dive into its virtues and shortcomings so you can assess whether it’s the right fit for you.
What SaleHoo Is Good At
SaleHoo is quite effective at helping dropshippers quickly find products in one place, supported by an array of features that help you do so easily and with confidence. Here’s a rundown of the SaleHoo platform’s greatest strengths.
Market-guided product research: SaleHoo doesn’t just recommend random products to you when you get started—it offers its market research tool to narrow the available options to the products that make the most sense for your customers. See what people shopping in your industry buy often or want more of. The tool delivers need-to-know information, like sale rates, competition rates, trends, and average selling prices, so that you can determine which products are going to fit best in your online store.
User-friendly dashboard: Even if you’re completely new to dropshipping, you’ll easily be able to navigate the SaleHoo interface. The software’s dashboard is minimal, making it easy to spot what you need. In fact, it’s already set up like an online store—so if you’ve ever purchased something online, you’ll likely get the hang of sourcing products on SaleHoo quickly.
Connectable to Shopify: Shopify is the leading ecommerce website builder on the market, grabbing 29% of the U.S. market share at the time of this writing. It makes sense, then, that SaleHoo allows direct connection to Shopify sites to make sourcing and listing dropshippable inventory a cinch.
Just enable the integration with a single click from within your Shopify store dashboard. Then, you can search the SaleHoo database and add the products you want to include in your store directly from within Shopify. This feature is included on either of SaleHoo’s two Dropship plans.
Supplier contact templates: Contacting suppliers is one of the tougher parts of dropshipping, requiring a good grasp of cold outreach techniques. Whether you need to learn more about a product’s details or want to know whether a product will be back in stock, you’re going to run into situations where you need to speak directly with product suppliers. This can get extremely tedious when you’re juggling multiple vendors.
To make this process easy on all of their users, SaleHoo provides email templates based on some of the most common reasons for supplier outreach. You can tweak the templates with specific questions or language and then reuse them over and over again to save time whenever you need information or answers about products.
Training and guides: From learning how to set up a dropshipping business to answering detailed questions about specific categories of products, you can likely find a resource from SaleHoo that answers most questions you’ll have. The company’s free webinar is a good place to start if you want to get to the basics and explore whether dropshipping is the right avenue for you.
SaleHoo’s free guides are available on its website, covering everything from what types of products to sell to how to avoid common reseller scams. It also has community forums where other users and community experts can answer more specific questions about suppliers, products, managing your business, technical issues, or just about anything else.
Lifetime access: Access to the SaleHoo directory is available with an annual subscription or, uniquely, a one-time payment for lifetime access. The latter only costs a little less than twice the amount of the annual subscription. For anyone planning to continue their dropshipping business and keep updating their product offerings with new items—a good idea for most dropshippers—this lifetime access can save you a lot of money in the long run. It even comes with a 60-day money-back guarantee if you want to try it risk-free before committing.
What SaleHoo Is Lacking
SaleHoo doesn’t have the most robust supplier network in the dropshipping business, which could be a downfall for businesses looking for wide-ranging product catalogs. We highlight a few potential issues with SaleHoo below so that you can consider whether these flaws are deal-breakers for you.
Product catalog: Compared to other dropshipping networks, SaleHoo’s product catalog is actually quite small. Despite offering about 2.5 million products in its database, other top competitors in the business provide access to upwards of 10 million or even 100 million products.
While having a directory this large may not be necessary for every dropshipper, it could certainly benefit those looking for very niche products that you can’t find easily. Consider how specific your product needs are and take the time to make sure there are enough options available on SaleHoo for your dropshipping aspirations.
Item stock: It’s important to be able to rely on your product catalog maintaining stock of the items that resonate with your customers. However, SaleHoo seems to have trouble with several outdated suppliers that don’t update their product listings. You can always contact suppliers for estimated stock dates, but there are no promises they’ll get back to you and it could take a while to see a reply if they’re not actively selling.
SaleHoo also isn’t the most transparent with its directory, as it doesn’t allow you to browse any of its vendors or products before joining. This could be a significant drawback for dropshippers seeking highly specialized products that want assurance of their availability before committing to the SaleHoo service. Without a free trial, that can be tough, but you can always take advantage of SaleHoo’s money-back guarantee if you find that key products are rarely available.
Options for small-order dropshippers: Not all dropshippers need to order in bulk to fulfill their customers’ orders, especially if they’re just starting out and don’t yet have high daily order numbers. Many of SaleHoo’s vendors require a minimum order amount to avoid costly shipping charges. This can take a serious chunk out of a new dropshipper’s profits if they need to place an order for just one or two products from vendors with minimum requirements.
SaleHoo Pricing & Options
SaleHoo offers three versions of its product. Directory is the brand’s flagship offering for connecting with suppliers, but SaleHoo also offers SaleHoo Dropship for users who want to connect the SaleHoo catalog to their Shopify account.
SaleHoo Educate is an additional product for dropshipping beginners who want to learn the basics of spinning up a dropshipping operation on Shopify or Amazon.
We’ll break down each service below with their pricing options and explain who each one is best for.
SaleHoo Directory
SaleHoo Directory is where most people want to start with SaleHoo. Its other two products are optional, but this is where you’ll unlock the ability to search for and research products for your dropshipping business, reach out to vendors, and get exclusive vendor deals.
The most impressive part of the SaleHoo Directory is the Market Research Lab. This tool gives you suggestions of products to put in your store based on factors you set, like your industry or preferred product categories, pricing, competition, and other factors. You can easily compare products side-by-side and access sales trends to see what’s already selling well.
The downside is that you can’t preview any part of the directory before paying, as there’s no free trial or demo. But, SaleHoo does offer a 60-day money-back guarantee if you find the available inventory lacking.
SaleHoo Directory costs $67 per year. Or, if you know you’re in it for the long haul, pay just another $60 more ($127) for lifetime access to the platform.
SaleHoo Dropship
SaleHoo Dropship connects the SaleHoo product and supplier database to your Shopify store dashboard, allowing you to browse SaleHoo products and add them to your customer-facing inventory from one place.
You don’t need a SaleHoo Directory plan to use it, but it could be helpful to have both to access product research tools and vendor connection features. We suggest pairing SaleHoo Dropship with lifetime access to SaleHoo Directory if you believe you’ll use SaleHoo Dropship long-term.
SaleHoo Dropship connects with the AliExpress database. Once you find a product you want to add, simply click it and it will be added to your store without any extra steps. You can set a specific profit margin for all products and SaleHoo Dropship will automatically adjust your pricing to help you reach your goal.
SaleHoo Dropship has two plans: Basic and Premium.
Basic runs $27 per month, but is discounted to $270 annually when you commit to a one-year subscription. This plan includes one-click importing from the AliExpress database of products, personal support, and access to the members’ forum.
Premium has the same pricing model, running $97 monthly or $970 for a full year. On top of the Basic features, this plan also includes access for up to three Shopify stores and a dedicated onboarding account manager.
SaleHoo Educate
SaleHoo Educate is a course database designed to get new dropshippers up to speed with the latest practices and trends. Essentially, these courses teach the basics of owning and growing an online store on either Shopify or Amazon, and then scaling the business to new levels of income.
To be clear, SaleHoo Educate probably won’t be necessary for people who have already spun up a dropshipping business before, especially if they’ve had success in the past. However, new dropshippers will learn a lot of helpful tactics to get them started on the right foot.
The classes are fully online and self-paced, so you can complete them in your own time. SaleHoo Educate currently offers one course each for Shopify and Amazon, with each course priced at a one-time fee of $47.
Summary
We hope our SaleHoo review provides some clarity about whether this product can be the right fit for your dropshipping business. While its product catalog is more modest than other directories, we do think that its connections to Shopify and AliExpress give users a simple way to add the products they need to their stores. And SaleHoo’s baked-in market research tool means you’ll never be in the dark about sales trends and emergent product lines to consider adding to your store.
