How to Dropship on Amazon: A Step-by-Step Workflow for 2026

Quick answer: Dropshipping from AliExpress to Amazon means listing a product on Amazon, buying it from an AliExpress seller when an order comes in and having that seller ship it to your customer. In practice that means testing each AliExpress seller with an order to your own address before you list, moving to the Professional plan once you list in bulk, and pricing from a margin floor that covers Amazon's referral fee. If you would rather sell the same Amazon and AliExpress products through an eBay store, our pick is Ecomli, the non-API extension we make: it finds products, builds the eBay listings and keeps them in line with supplier stock and price. Ecomli does not list on Amazon.

This guide walks through the Amazon workflow step by step, the fee math on both marketplaces, and how the eBay route with Ecomli compares, so you can pick the one that fits your budget and the hours you have.

What Amazon dropshipping involves

When you dropship, you never buy stock up front. A customer orders from your listing, you buy the item from a supplier, and the supplier ships it straight to that customer.

Three practical decisions come before you list anything:

• Supplier choice. You need suppliers who ship with tracking, hold a steady price and pass a test order to your own address.
• Delivery promise. Your handling time and shipping settings have to match what the supplier can actually do, not what you hope it can do.
• Returns. Returns come to you, so you need a return address and a plan for items that cost more to send back than to refund.

If you already run an eBay store, much of this will feel familiar. The differences sit in the fee structure and the shared catalog. Our breakdown of what automated dropshipping covers maps the same loop end to end.

Setting up an AliExpress supplier

Most of the work sits in the supplier setup, before your first listing goes live:

1. Place a test order to yourself. Check the outer packaging, the label and everything inside. It is the only way to know what your customer will see.
2. Check the shipping method. Pick an option with tracking and a delivery estimate you can live with, then set your handling time and shipping template to match it.
3. Keep a backup seller. The same AliExpress product is often sold by several stores. A second seller who has passed the same test saves the listing when the first runs out.

How to dropship from AliExpress to Amazon, step by step

Seven steps take you from an empty seller account to orders you can fulfill without surprises. Take them in order, since each one narrows the decisions in the next.

Step 1: Choose a selling plan

Amazon has two plans, listed on its selling fees page. Individual costs $0.99 per item sold with no monthly fee. Professional costs $39.99 a month and adds bulk listing and pricing tools, automated pricing, Amazon Ads, B2B selling and API integration. The break-even is about 40 sales a month, but bulk listing usually decides it. Without it you create products one at a time, and a catalog of 300 items turns into weeks of clicking.

Step 2: Pick products with proven demand

Guessing is the expensive way to build a catalog. Start from items that have already sold, then check whether you can source them at a margin that survives Amazon's fees. On AliExpress, look at the seller's rating, the order count the listing shows, the shipping options with tracking and the delivery estimate to your customers' area. If you want to cross-check demand with a research tool first, our roundup of product research tools beyond Terapeak covers what each one measures.

Step 3: Set up the supplier

Place a test order and choose the shipping method, as covered above. Record the supplier's product link, variant and cost next to your own SKU, so you can reorder quickly and spot price changes.

Step 4: Match or create the listing

Amazon works on a shared catalog. Where a product already has a page, you add your offer to it and compete on price, delivery speed and seller metrics. Where it doesn't, you create the page yourself and control the title, bullet points and images. Which case you land in depends on the product.

Write titles the way a buyer searches: product type, key attribute, size or count. Use the bullet points for specifics such as dimensions, material, what's in the box and compatibility, and fill in every structured attribute the category offers, because shoppers filter on them. Buyers scanning a results page decide on the main image before they read a word, so crop supplier photos tight and make sure you have the right to use them. If you list on eBay too, the ranking signals differ, and our explainer on how eBay's Cassini search engine ranks listings covers that side.

Step 5: Price from the floor up

Set a margin floor before you set a price. Take the supplier cost including delivery, add Amazon's referral fee, add an allowance for returns and refunds, and you have the number your price can never drop below. Amazon charges the referral fee as a percentage of the total price or a minimum amount, whichever is greater, and the percentage depends on the category (the table below has examples).

Your cost base moves, which makes this matter more than it would with stock you own. A supplier can raise a price on Tuesday, and your listing will keep selling at Monday's number until you notice. On Amazon you need a monitoring or repricing tool connected to your seller account, or a disciplined daily check. The same logic applied to eBay is in our guide to repricing rules that defend a margin floor.

Step 6: Place the supplier order and add tracking

When an order comes in, buy the item on AliExpress with your customer's name and address as the delivery address, and enter the supplier's tracking number on the Amazon order once it's available. Manual ordering is the step that quietly caps a store. Twenty orders a day at three minutes each is an hour of copying addresses, so plan for tooling once volume grows.

Step 7: Handle customer service and returns

The customer bought from you, so questions and returns come to you, not to the supplier. Set up a return address, decide in advance when you'll refund without asking for the item back (usually when return postage would cost more than the product), and build that cost into your margin floor. Categories with sizing, such as clothing and footwear, tend to see more returns.

The margin math: Amazon fees vs eBay fees

Referral fees are the largest deduction on most Amazon sales, and they vary by category, so choosing a category is a margin decision. Here are Amazon's published US rates for a few categories next to eBay's standard fees, as of Sep 2026.

Work an example through. A Home and Kitchen item sells for $34.99 on Amazon. The 15% referral fee is $5.25, which leaves $29.74. If the AliExpress cost including delivery is half the sale price, you keep about 35% of the sale before returns, advertising and your plan fee. On eBay, the same $34.99 sale in most categories carries a 13.6% final value fee of $4.76 plus the $0.40 per-order fee, leaving $29.83 before the supplier cost. eBay charges its fee on the total the buyer pays, including shipping and sales tax, so the real figure runs a little higher. Check the current rates on eBay's selling fees page and Amazon's fee page before you price.

Those numbers are healthy and fragile at the same time. A small supplier price rise, a couple of returns or a week of unnoticed drift across forty listings eats into them fast. That is why monitoring belongs in the plan from day one. Our figures on typical eBay dropshipping profit margins show the same sensitivity on eBay.

Two costs get left out of most beginner math. The first is advertising. Sponsored placements are optional, but in a crowded category they are often how a new offer gets its first sales, so decide on a test budget before launch. The second is currency. If your supplier bills in one currency and your payout arrives in another, the exchange rate moves your cost without any change to the product price. Neither is a reason to avoid the model. Both are reasons to set the margin floor higher than the fee table alone suggests.

Amazon or eBay for Amazon and AliExpress products

Most people who ask how to dropship on Amazon want the same thing: to sell products they don't stock, sourced from big suppliers, with as little manual work as possible. An Amazon storefront is one way to do that. An eBay store is the other, and it is the one Ecomli is built for. Ecomli is our product, so read the comparison with that in mind.

Four other things change between the two marketplaces:

• Fee shape. Amazon charges a plan fee plus a category referral fee. eBay charges insertion fees past your free allowance, plus a final value fee and a per-order fee.
• Catalog behavior. eBay listings are yours alone. Amazon offers can share a product page, so you compete on price, delivery speed and seller metrics as much as on the listing itself.
• Search. eBay's Cassini and Amazon's search reward different signals, and the same title rarely wins on both.
• Concentration risk. One marketplace is one point of failure. The same supplier catalog can serve both.

If you're weighing dropshipping against holding stock at Amazon, our comparison of Amazon FBA vs dropshipping lays out the capital difference, and the roundup of multi-channel listing software covers tools for running several marketplaces.

How to do this on eBay with Ecomli

Ecomli is a non-API browser extension for eBay dropshippers. It works through the eBay seller account already signed in to your desktop Chrome browser, so there is no API connection to authorize, and it uses Amazon and AliExpress as suppliers. Here is the same workflow on eBay:

1. Find products with sales behind them. Product Hunting researches a competitor eBay seller's sold history or current listings and matches the products to Amazon or AliExpress. It can also search Amazon keywords, Best Sellers and category pages, or collect the products from an AliExpress store link. Filter by price, reviews and ratings, Amazon FBA or AliExpress Choice. A match is a lead, not proof of profit.
2. Build the listings in bulk. Send picks to Create Listings. Ecomli reads each supplier product, applies your markup (AliExpress items are priced from the exact per-variant item and delivery cost), writes optional AI titles and descriptions from the supplier facts, applies your description template and fills eBay's listing form in your seller session, up to 10 listings at once. Our AliExpress import workflow shows this step in detail.
3. Screen before publishing. Safety Shield checks products, AI copy and the eBay draft for flagged brands and restricted items. It is a checkpoint, not a guarantee.
4. Hold the margin floor. Stock Monitoring checks supplier stock and prices for your Ecomli listings and updates the eBay price and quantity, or ends out-of-stock items, using your markup and out-of-stock rules. A failed supplier read leaves the listing unchanged.
5. Order within your limits. Starter runs Auto Ordering batches in your browser. On Pro, you click Auto Order and Ecomli places the supplier order in your own browser. On Scale, you can also turn on optional server ordering, so Auto Ordering places the supplier order from Ecomli's servers, as long as each order is within your buying limits (a maximum purchase price and a maximum loss). The Auto Ordering page has the details.
6. Get tracking onto the order. Tracking Conversions converts supported AliExpress and Amazon TBA tracking into eBay-compatible tracking with Aquiline and adds it to the eBay order after its automatic checks. Aquiline credits are an add-on.
7. Prune what doesn't sell. On Pro and Scale, Auto Pruner ends dead listings in one click by your rules, such as zero views or zero sales over 15, 30, 45 or 60 days.

Most of these tasks run in your desktop browser while it is open, and buyer questions and orders outside your buying limits still need you. Plans start at $29 a month with 1,000 monthly product imports and unlimited active listings, and the Ecomli pricing page shows what Pro and Scale add. For the full eBay version of this guide, read how to dropship on eBay, and compare tools in our eBay dropshipping software rankings. The automation overview on our home page shows how the loop fits together.

The first 90 days: an operating rhythm

New stores fail on rhythm more often than on strategy. A workable first quarter on either marketplace looks like this:

• Weeks 1 and 2. Open the account, choose the plan, verify one supplier with a test order, and list 30 to 50 products you have actually looked at. Resist listing 500 items you haven't checked.
• Weeks 3 to 6. First sales arrive. Watch which categories convert and which sit, and prune listings with no views after four weeks.
• Weeks 7 to 12. Add more products in the categories that convert, tighten margin floors on the rest, and add a second marketplace only once the first runs smoothly.

Track four numbers each week. Net margin per category tells you where to expand. Sell-through rate (units sold divided by listings live) shows whether your catalog is working or just large. Your defect and late-shipment numbers show whether the supplier's delivery estimates match reality. Time spent on manual order entry tells you when your tools have stopped keeping pace with growth.

Two habits separate stores that grow from stores that stall. The first is measuring margin by category rather than for the whole store, since a healthy average can hide a category that loses money. The second is refusing to let manual work grow with order volume. Every hour spent copying addresses is an hour not spent finding the next product that sells.

Frequently asked questions

Is $500 enough to start dropshipping?

It can cover a small test if you keep fixed costs low. On Amazon, the Professional plan is $39.99 a month, or $0.99 per item sold on Individual. On eBay, your first 250 listings each month carry no insertion fee, and Ecomli's Starter plan is $29 a month. The rest of the budget is working capital: you pay the supplier when an order comes in, often before the marketplace pays you out, and you need a buffer for refunds and supplier price changes. No budget guarantees sales, so start with a small catalog and expand what sells.

Can I dropship directly from AliExpress?

Yes. You order the item on AliExpress with your customer's name and address as the delivery address, and the seller ships it to them. Choose a shipping option with tracking and check the delivery estimate against the handling time on your listing. On eBay, Ecomli reads AliExpress products for your listings, prices them from the item and delivery cost, and on every plan places supplier orders within your buying limits.

Do I need a Professional selling plan on day one?

Not necessarily. Individual costs $0.99 per item sold, so below about 40 sales a month it is cheaper than Professional at $39.99. Most dropshippers move up early anyway, because bulk listing, automated pricing and API integration are Professional features, and those are what make a larger catalog practical.

How do I handle a return when I never touched the product?

The buyer ordered from you, so the return comes to you. Many sellers use a domestic return address and refund low-value items without asking for them back, since return postage can cost more than the product. Build the expected cost into your margin floor so returns are a line item rather than a surprise.

What happens when a supplier's price changes after my listing is live?

Without monitoring, nothing happens, and that is the problem. The listing keeps selling at the old price and your margin shrinks. On eBay, Ecomli's Stock Monitoring updates listings it created from the supplier's current price using your markup, or sets the quantity to 0 or ends the listing when the supplier item goes out of stock. On Amazon, a monitoring or repricing tool connected to your seller account does that job.

How many products should I list when I start?

Thirty to fifty is a sensible first catalog. It is wide enough to show which categories convert and small enough that you can still check every listing and supplier yourself. Once a category proves itself, grow that category first.

Can I run Amazon and eBay from the same supplier catalog?

The same AliExpress seller can serve both stores, with prices and titles tuned per channel. Plan the tools per marketplace: Ecomli runs the eBay side, listing Amazon and AliExpress products on eBay and keeping them in line with supplier stock and price, but it does not list on Amazon, so the Amazon storefront needs its own listing tools or Amazon's bulk upload.

Sources

• Amazon: Selling fees and plans
• eBay: Selling fees

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