Chrome Extension For Oberlo

Oberlo is the world’s leading marketplace to find products and suppliers for your online business. It makes it easy to find products to sell online, manage inventory, and ship directly to customers all around the world, allowing you to build a global retail business from anywhere.

The Oberlo Chrome extension is designed to help Shopify entrepreneurs drop ship and fulfill orders. The extension allows you to add products and variants directly from AliExpress.com, process orders with one click, send tracking codes to customers immediately when available, and import product reviews from AliExpress into Shopify product pages.

Chrome Extension For Oberlo

Have you ever wondered how to speed up the productivity of your dropshipping store? To avoid the hustle of importing products one by one?

Meet the Oberlo Chrome extension!

In this article, I will share what it is like to use the Oberlo Chrome extension and how it can benefit your dropshipping store.

What is the Oberlo Chrome extension?

The Oberlo Chrome extension is an ecommerce app that helps you find and sell a product on your Shopify store.

The app is free to install and use. However, some paid features can be purchased within the app, too.

The best part is that you don’t need to go out and source these products; they are all found through their AliExpress database of over 100 million items.

The app works by allowing you to find a product that fits within your niche using keywords, automatically importing the data into your Shopify store.

Creating an instant listing with accurate images, price, and description without any work done by yourself.

Let’s go over now how you can install it as well!

How do I connect the Oberlo Chrome extension to my Shopify store?

Once you have successfully signed up to Shopify, the first thing you’ll need to do is install the Oberlo app that will allow you, together with the Chrome extension, to import products from AliExpress to your Shopify store seamlessly.

Next, to connect your store to Oberlo, follow these simple steps:

1. Go to the Oberlo Admin login page, and click ‘connect a store.’
2. A pop-up will load, type or paste the URL here, and click ‘connect my store.’
3. Once you click ‘connect my store,’ you’ll be prompted to install the Oberlo app.
4. Click ‘install app’ to finish integrating your Shopify and Oberlo accounts.

How do you install the Oberlo Chrome extension?

Installing the application couldn’t be much easier. Just follow these easy steps below, and you’re good to go in no time at all.

1. Head over to the Google Chrome Web Store, then click on ‘Add to Chrome’ in the top right-hand corner of the screen.
2. A little pop-up should appear after this – hover your cursor over ‘Oberlo,’ then click on the green button that says ‘Free.’
3. You’ll be prompted with a message asking you if you’d like to launch Oberlo in English (US) or English (UK).
4. Next, another window will open, asking you if you want to add Oberlo to your new tab page. This is up to you, but it is convenient, considering all of the other functions you’ll be able to access there.
5. Finally, click on ‘Add Extension,’ and you should see a little message appear at the top right-hand corner of your screen that says ‘Oberlo Extension 1.0’. If this doesn’t pop up, then don’t worry – Oberlo should still work fine!

The Oberlo Chrome extension will now be added to your browser bar, and when you’re visiting the AliExpress page, the Oberlo icon will turn blue, indicating that an action is available, like importing a product.

How to import products with the Oberlo Chrome extension

Let’s continue with figuring out how to import products from AliExpress to your store while using the Oberlo Chrome extension.

1. Browse the Oberlo app to find products

Once you have signed up for Oberlo and downloaded the Chrome extension, importing products will be like eating a slice of cake!

Simply go to AliExpress and start browsing for products; if you hover over with your mouse on the product you want to import, the extension will highlight automatically, giving the option to import the product to your Oberlo app.

When you have successfully imported the products from AliExpress to Oberlo, you can then choose to edit these products in the Oberlo app, or instead, in your Shopify store.

Furthermore, before importing any product to your Shopify store, the Oberlo app will give you two options:

• Import products as draft. The product will be imported, but it will be hidden from the sales channel until you set it as active.
• Import products as active. The product will be available in Shopify’s sales channels.

2. Importing the products to your store

When you have browsed all the product categories that interest you, click ‘Start import’ at the top left of your screen next to your username.

• Click ‘Start import’ at the top left of your screen next to your username.
• A new window will open asking if you want to import these products into an existing store or create a new one.
• Select the appropriate option depending on whether or not this is your first time using Oberlo.
• If it isn’t, choosing ‘existing store’ will cause the products to be added to your current shop without overwriting any information you have already.
• Otherwise, clicking ‘create a new store’ will prompt you to enter all the necessary details for your online business, including email address, domain name, and website theme, which Shopify requires.

3. Checking the products that you just imported

When your listing has finished importing;

• Click on each product individually
• Go down to the ‘Details’ tab at the bottom of your screen. Here you have two options:
  • If you’re happy with how your item looks on your store, then click ‘Save’;
  • Otherwise, if you want to change some details about it, then select ‘Edit.’
• You can also choose whether or not private listings are visible by checking this box.
• To update these details, click ‘Save,’ then continue to the following product.

4. Updating the product images

After you have uploaded all your new products, if they’re on white or black backgrounds, they will need to be updated with a photo of your own so that customers can see what they look like and make an informed buying decision.

You can use any image editing software such as Photoshop, Gimp, or Pixlr Editor, etc.

This denotes that it has been updated, meaning customers don’t have to worry about accidentally purchasing out-of-date goods, which is essential for businesses who want their reputation to remain intact.

For more information about product images when dropshipping, check out our full guide here!

5. Categorizing the products

When your products have been imported and updated, you should decide which category they fit into:

• Go to the left-hand side of your screen where you will see a list of all the different categories in your store.
• Click on each one in turn, and when you find the right match for your item, click ‘Add’ in the bottom right corner so that it moves across to that section.
• You can add a product to more than one category if there’s more than one way customers could look for it.
• This increases its visibility when people search by keyword or browse using tags, which customers do when they’re not sure exactly what they’re looking for.
• You should take into account that if you have many products, it might be worthwhile creating subcategories for them to avoid cluttering the main categories.

6. Tags and product titles feature

You can assign up to 5 separate tags (keywords) per product; however, the total character count including spaces must not exceed 35, which is a good average.

Here’s how you can add these tags:

• Click on either the ‘Tags’ or ‘Product Title’ box at the bottom of your screen.
• Type in the name for your tag.
• Press enter when you finish.
• Then carry on to the next one if there’s more than 5.
• If your store only has a few items on it, you don’t need to worry about overloading them with keywords, but if it has thousands as some successful stores do, then this is important because there’s no way they’ll all be found using the name of the product alone.

The pros of using the Oberlo Chrome extension

I’ve tested the Oberlo Chrome extension for a while, and I can tell that some of the most significant benefits of this app are:

• Start for free. One of the primary benefits of the Oberlo Chrome extension is that it is free for up to 500 products.
• Product pricing. This app lets you create pricing rules according to your needs.
• Detailed explanation. Don’t worry if Oberlo doesn’t work despite the installation process just explained above! Head over to the help center to troubleshoot your issue.
• Available in multiple languages. Whether you are running a global store or targeting just a specific market, Oberlo will be able to support you. The app is available in languages like English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, or Portuguese.

The cons of using the Oberlo Chrome extension

Even if the Oberlo Chrome extension has simplified the way dropshippers use the app, there are certainly a few issues you may want to consider before installing it:

• No WordPress integration. Currently, Oberlo doesn’t integrate with WordPress, and there is no chance for it to work on other ecommerce platforms than Shopify.
• Only one marketplace choice. With Oberlo, you can only import products from AliExpress; this can be a limitation, restricting this app from expanding its full potential.
• Top features are only available on the premium plan. Features like bulk orders, shipment tracking, and AliExpress cashback are available only in the pro plan at $29.90 per month.
• Technical issues. According to the Chrome app store reviews, the extension seems glitchy sometimes.

Are there Oberlo Chrome extension alternatives?

There are many platforms that you can sell on; some offer you advanced functionality and others provide a means for customers to buy products from your store.

We advise people who are just starting with importing and dropshipping to choose a tool that offers a simple but practical set of features. It will be easier for you to learn how to use something if it’s not too complicated.

If you feel like Oberlo doesn’t fit your needs, then we have two well known Oberlo alternatives:

• Spocket
• AliDropship

Spocket is a great Oberlo alternative if you want to ship products from the US and the EU within two to five days shipping times; you may want to consider Spocket, and what is good about Spocket is that they have a free plan, so you can get started for free.

Some of the key features Spocket offer are:

• Invoice packaging, meaning your customer will get a package with your store name, contact details, and logo – this is huge!
• Return policy. Spocket is one of the few dropshipping suppliers that allow your customer to return products in case they’ve arrived damaged or are malfunctioning.

For more information about Spocket, check out this article here!

Another option that you can go with is AliDropship.

Here are some of their great features:

• Import reviews from AliExpress (it is important to add reviews to your dropshipping store so that you can have established social proof).
• An active community to exchange information.
• Add-on purchase options in case you want to boost your store performance, for example, by adding a sales pop-up or a countdown timer.

Note: You may want to use some additional add-ons, however, keep in mind these are optional, but they can help you drive sales and run your store more efficiently.

Conclusion

As you can see, the Oberlo Chrome extension is a great tool to have at your disposal as it streamlines the process of importing products from AliExpress onto your online store.

It makes everything about importation easier and saves you a lot of time. If you’re looking for a way to promote your business, this is it! 

You can create a site that sells hundreds or even thousands of different items, attracting more visitors and increasing revenue.

Furthermore, with their vast range of supported suppliers, you have many different options for product diversification, so nothing is stopping you from selling your products with the help of the Oberlo Chrome extension.

If you’re looking for more Chrome extensions that you can use for your dropshipping store, check out this article here!

best chrome extensions for ecommerce

Although we are focussing on Google Chrome as a browser, many of these extensions are available for other browsers as well, such as Firefox.

Generally speaking, browser extensions are programs that allow you to customise your web browser by adding special features to them.

These extensions have been designed independently from the respective browsers. Therefore, you’ll have to proactively find them and install them in order to use them.  

There are countless numbers of these extensions, all offering different features. And some of them can be particularly useful for your business .

How to install browser extensions

To find and install them, you can simply download them from stores like the Chrome web store.

It is very easy to manage all your downloaded extensions. Each browser includes what is called an extension manager to do this.

How to manage extensions on Google Chrome

On Chrome, you can manage your extensions from the URL: chrome://extensions/

You can also access this from your browser’s menu. To do this, simply click on the menu button at the top of the browser (those 3 vertical dots), then click on “More tools”, and then on “extensions”. From there, you’ll be able to see and manage (active, deactivate, or remove) all the extensions you’ve installed.

Considering you probably haven’t installed any extensions yet, you can access the Chrome web store from here as well by clicking on the hamburger menu button on the top left of this page. The link to the Chrome web store will be at the bottom of the menu that pops up here.

Please note that extensions should not be confused with plugins, which are programs external to web browsers.

That being said, let’s get to our recommendations!

In this article, we’ll present six different Chrome browser extensions:

• SimilarWeb – The competitive analysis extension
• Google Lighthouse – The SEO extension
• Ghostery – The marketing extension
• Buffer – The social media extension
• User Agent Switcher – The extension for an adaptive site
• Streak – the CRM manager

Which Chrome browser extensions are needed for online shops?

#1 SimilarWeb – The competitive analysis extension

KPIs for accurate competitive analysis.

In November 2014, SimilarWeb launched its extension for browsers such as Chrome, Mozilla, Safari and Opera. Since then, it has become one of the most indispensable tools for competitive analyses.

And for good reason – SimilarWeb gives you a rather complete performance overview of almost any website.

With one click, you get an overview of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as:

• Global, national, and industry ranking
• Monthly traffic as well as its source (direct, referrals, social networks, email marketing, ads, etc.)
• The Top SEO Keywords – Perfect for your SEO/SEA strategies
• The top country – Where are visitors coming from?
• The Top Social Networks – Perfect to help you know where the most effort is needed in terms of influencers, partnerships, and/or your own content
• Similar websites  – Ideal for discovering unknown competitors
• Audience engagement (bounce rate, average time spent on the site, etc.)
• Monthly visitors
• Much more

The most visitors to Amazon.fr come from the 5 countries indicated above

SimilarWeb gives you the opportunity to figure out your competitive positioning in your market, but also to improve your performance and review your strategies (e.g. SEA, SEO, etc.).

It’s worth noting that there is a free version and a Pro-version, which obviously includes the full features.

#2 Google Lighthouse – The SEO extension

The SEO audit of your site

We talked about this tool recently in an article about Google Lighthouse features.

This is an SEO audit tool for your website that can be very useful especially for developers interested in performance and web quality.

If you install the extension on chrome, it will look like the picture below:

By clicking on “Generate report”, the analysis of your site, based on the 5 following elements, will begin:

1. Performance score
2. Progressive Web Application
3. Accessibility
4. Best Practices (Best Practices)
5. SEO

Performance score

If you get a score of 100% this means that your page performs better than 98% of the other pages indexed by Google Lighthouse.

The extension will focus on the loading time of the different elements of your page in a specific order.

From one report to another, your score may vary. This is perfectly normal because for every report you run, different advertisements or scripts can be loaded, network conditions may vary, different antiviruses may be used, etc. All these factors could lead to a small difference in your scores.

Progressive Web App (PWA) Score

The score varies from 0 to 100 and the PWA analysis is based on 14 elements that your site must respect. With each check, Google Lighthouse automatically checks 11 of the 14 items in the checklist.

Is your site safe and reliable? Do you use HTTPS? This is one of the elements taken into account for the calculation of this score.

Accessibility Score

This accessibility score is a weighted average of the various accessibility audits of the

extension. Not all the elements taken into account have the same impact on the final score. Some will influence your score more than others.

If your page does not meet one of the elements considered by the audit, you will then get a score of 0.

Best Practices Score

The extension will review the technical elements of the page. The technical elements taken into account are those that are now becoming the norm, such as the use of Javascript or a correct image ratio, etc.

SEO Score

With this score, you’ll get an idea of how well your site is optimised for search engines. Do you use <h1> <h2> tags to structure your text? Does your page have a meta description? These are just some of the elements that factor into your SEO score.

First part of the analysis of Amazon.co.uk with Google Lighthouse

# 3 Ghostery – The marketing extension

What tools do your competitors use to “retarget” their visitors?

In actuality, Ghostery is an extension to protect your privacy.

The extension allows you to block ads, but also all data tracking tools used by companies to guide their ads, analyse your interactions online, etc.

It removes cookies that track your information without your permission.

You may be wondering how this can help you as a retailer?

Well, imagine you could get insights into how your competitors track their visitors as well as which providers they work with!

Let’s look at a concrete example. Let’s assume that Nike is one of your direct competitors.

Let’s go for a ride…

As you can see, the tool shows us that nike.com uses:

Analysis tools

• SOASTA mPulse
• Segment
• New Relic

Social media tracker

• Facebook Connect

Other sites might show you more tracking tools or ad networks on the page.

By checking out your competitors’ pages you can see what strategies they’ve implemented and you might even discover some new tools.

#4 Buffer

The social media manager

Buffer is an extension that allows you to save time by sharing your posts on all your social networks from a single platform.

With Buffer, you can create an account that syncs up with all your social networks.

The free version of the application allows you to connect up to three accounts (i.e. three different social networks). If you opt for the paid version, it can even go up to 25 accounts and give access to five members of your team.

With Buffer, you can plan and share your posts on social networks quickly and easily.

You can personalise and plan all your positions on networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google+.

Are you reading an article that you want to repost immediately? Just click on the extension icon to share it in just a few clicks.

If you prefer to share your posts at a later date, that is also possible.

Analyse your results

The analytics function allows you to know everything about the engagement and interactions generated by your posts.

You’ll know quickly and simply how many likes, shares, and comments you’ve received and will therefore have an overview of your best/most popular posts.

# 5 User-Agent Switcher

Test your site on different browsers and devices (mobile responsive design)

The User Agent Switcher extension allows you to test the display of your site on different devices and browsers.

You can quickly view the design of your website in different browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Explorer, etc.), devices (Android phone / tablets, iOS phones / tablets, etc.), and operating systems (Linux, OS, Windows).

This helps you to get a clear picture of what your website looks like on those different devices and allows you to make the user experience as optimal as possible.

# 6 Streak – CRM tool in your mailbox

You probably receive a lot of emails every day and this can be difficult to organise.

Streak is an extension that can make managing your customer relationships easy, especially if you are a company that does not (yet) have a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.

A CRM system is often used to maintain, manage, and keep track of communication with your customers, so this goes beyond your private inbox.

With Streak you can sort, adjust, and manage your emails directly in your inbox.

Manage your leads

The first handy option Streak has is to see if someone has opened your email.

This gives you insight into the times when your emails are read the most, so you can take this into account and make adjustments in order to get the highest possible percentage of people to open your emails.

For example, if you notice that your open rates are highest for emails sent on Thursday mornings, you might want to make this your standard time for sending out similar emails in the future.

Project management

With Streak you can create a “pipeline” with which you can manage different projects.

Below you can see an example of what the extension looks like:

In the example above, the app is used for sales and support, but you can also use it for:

• the organisation of events
• the follow-up of (potential) customers
• the recruitment of  new employees
• the management of commercial relationships

You can add different columns such as notes, assigned person, customer name, etc.

You can also set reminders to keep track of your projects and tasks.

Plan and personalise emails

With Streak you can also schedule and adjust emails. An email that looks like it came from your personal email address looks better than an email that was clearly sent to several people at once.

Conclusion

Browser extensions are very easy to install and use. More importantly, they can actually facilitate your daily activities.

We have proposed 6 different extensions that can help you in different areas:

1. SimilarWeb – Website ranking and analysis
2. Google Lighthouse – SEO ranking
3. Ghostery – Competition analysis
4. Buffer – Social Media manager
5. User-agent switcher – Responsive design helper
6. Streak – CRM tool in your mailbox

Conclusion

Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.

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