Thieve dropshipping reviews
Thieve is user submitted and voted items from AliExpress. We also moderate what gets posted to make sure it's on style and do a bit of research on products before they get posted. It's founded by Tim Scullin, and is a community curated shopping site with the best direct to factory products. The team also develop tools for a growing community of dropshippers (people who buy ‘direct from factory’ for resale).
Thieve is an ecommerce product that provides a daily updated, curated list of the best finds on the direct-to-factory site AliExpress – the retail side of Internet wholesale dealer Alibaba. Thieve products are hand selected by a group of creatives around the world, including bloggers, photographers, and designers. Because of the enormous economies of scale in production, along with the savings in middleman costs, wholesale manufacturers can sell products direct to consumers all over the world at much cheaper prices than are typically paid in-store.
How to know What to sell with Theive Supply?
You’ll need to find winning products (tried and tested or new trends) and then list them on your very own Shopify store, which is a do it yourself platform for creating a web store that accepts payments in real time direct to your bank account.
There are many places to find new trends including Twitter and Instagram. A good website for curating products is called Thieve.co which is a community of shoppers that like to use a Chinese drop shipper called, Aliexpress.
Take note, there’s lots of junk on Aliexpress so it might be beneficial to buy the product yourself for evaluation purposes before attempting to sell the product. Quality control can make or break your business.
How Thieve.co makes money?
So far, what I’ve gleaned is that Thieve is actually an affiliate marketing engine. Basically they draw users in with their thieving mechanism (and implied promise of free goods) and present them with a hand-selected array of goods. You can think of these goods as “featured” as users are drawn to inspecting each one for the initial purpose of vetting it for stealability, but are also cleverly being driven to vet the item for ownership.
Once the user has put the time in to actually think about the item, they are much more likely to go through with a purchase down the line than an arbitrary user who was not part of the site. Thieve of course has really big buttons to lead you directly to the site to buy the chosen item and they encourage the likability of the item by hand-selecting and bubbling up info on highly-rated items with relatively low cost of entry.
I’m not exactly sure what the details of the AliExpress affiliate marketing program are but we can do some simple, conservative math to see how the business model breaks down.
Let’s say that, conservatively, the program pays out 2% commision on an item (Amazon pays out some categories at less than 2%, but most are above and I’d bet they intelligently choose categories that pay out higher rates, see Amazon affiliate schedule). That means that for a single item that’s won, they would need to have that item bought at least 50 times to break even.
That may seem like a lot of times, but even if we assume that only 2% of users will click through to the site (WordStream claims that’s the avg of AdWords click-throughs) and that only 1 in 8 (12.5%) of those (or 0.25% overall) actually buy the item, then they only need ~20k views overall (per item steal) to break even.
Of course, these are pretty conservative conversion rates as the users are already on the site to get an item, the items that are picked are likely high quality, and they’re likely getting items that are also good deals. As such, if we bump the click-through rate up to even 4%, Thieve could start breaking even at around 10k views which isn’t too bad at all.
Add onto this the fact that Thieve is promoting its Chrome extension as part of the steal process, they could be raking in addiitonal commisions without losing any overhead to purchasing items for the winners, making it a straight profit scheme.
Where this starts breaking down a little bit for me is the long-term feasibility of a company like this due to 1) the non-scalability of giving out prizes to each member of a crew and 2) the actual value proposition of using such a service.
For 1) it starts to break down because for every additional member of a crew (which I believe is just inviting a friend to join), they are increasing their requisite totalViews proportionally. So with a crew of just 3, they’ve now increased their requisite views to break even from ~10k to ~30k. You could imagine a few crews growing to 50+ and how this might break their ability to break even. Of course, they might be banking on the network effects of these invites such that every member invites someone so while you do have a larger pocket of people getting these prizes, the overall pool of people who are engaged with the platform may have increased even more, slowly allowing Thieve to not only keep pace but make room for profits.
This is all well and good, but the success of 1) is also predicated on the success of 2). It doesn’t matter how many people you have on the platform if they aren’t active and the only way to even approximate assurity that people will stay with the platform is to provide a useful service for them. I’m sure that Thieve has a great system in place for bubbling up featured items/great deals, but there are tons of sites that already do this well and that aren’t relegated to only AliExpress (see: Honey, SlickDeals).
So in the present state of things, I see them getting a big bump from their PH submission but will start to see dwindling numbers until they are able to change some of their mechanisms to include more outlets, provide more promotions, and/or include ways to save money (a la Honey) so that the perceived returns for users amount to more than a sweepstakes every now and then. If they do this fast and well enough, they might be able to convert a good amount of this user surge to lasting users. It’s always good to have the ball in your court.
So, that’s my take on how Thieve.co makes money. My personal take on the purchase of any good is that if you didn’t know that you wanted the good until you saw it, then you don’t actually need that good. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t buy it, but it’s a useful thought process for determining worth.
Thieve dropshipping features reviews
Release checklist
- The image, name, and the price of the product match the redirected product.
- Products are redirected to the same product on Aliexpress.
- Keyword search is shows matching search results.
- Correct products are displayed in each product category
- Products are listed in the correct order based on
- Validations for input boxes
- Test notifications based on each notification preference
- Error handling is proper and relevant page is displayed on errors
- Every click performs defined actions.
- Price conversions are correct for different currencies.
- Typography and Layout of the content
- Spelling and grammar
- Terms of service and privacy policy etc are in place
- Usability and performance testing
- Social media buttons redirect to correct pages.
Product Metrics
Mitigation Plan
Theive Aliexpress Benefit
Ahh it’s the one question I get asked all the time, how do I find winning products? Well the secret is no one really knows. You simply need to follow the latest trends, monitor new products and seek inspiration from other successful stores out there.
You can then replicate this on your own store. Some of the easiest ways to find trending products include searching the best sellers category on Aliexpress, movers and shakers on Amazon and using my personal free favorite called, Thieve.co which is a community of Aliexpress shoppers that share new products.
If you want an even better tool then Sell The Trend offers a free 7 day trial to their premium site and offers over a million trending products with done for you targets, ads and more.
You can also find a successful Facebook store and under ‘Info and Ads’ on Facebook, you can view all their latest advertisements to see what they are promoting and get inspiration.
Lastly you can use platforms that share winning products with you. One of the most popular platforms currently is called Intelligyence which is a desktop platform for Windows or MAC and costs $19.95/mo.
Unfortunately you will have to find your own winning products. This is the hardest part about drop shipping and if done correctly will explode your bank account with commissions (if you have traffic too).
You’ll need to find a suitable supplier for your product on your platform of choice. I’d recommend buying the product yourself to test delivery time, quality and for peace of mind. These can be offset as business purchases.
Once satisfied you can add the products to your Shopify store. Make sure you don’t copy and paste product descriptions. Write your own and sell the product to your visitors. Why do they need it, why should they buy from you?!
