Shopified App Versus Oberlo: Here’s the Real Story

Earlier this year, Oberlo published an article on their blog comparing their service to Shopified App. At Shopified App, we focus heavily on customer satisfaction via a great product, so it’s rare that we spend any time looking at what our competitors are doing.

But after receiving numerous messages from our users — many of whom believe the article paints a misleading picture — we decided it was time to clear the air.

We believe the Oberlo article is inaccurate in numerous ways, and it twists facts to make our company and product look bad by comparison.

Our users have seen through the fluff, and many are astonished Oberlo would write such an off-base piece.

To clear up the confusion, we’ve outlined three big areas where the Oberlo article misleads readers, along with the real facts as we know them.

Oberlo suggests Shopified App is a copycat.

The Oberlo article implies we were imitating their idea and product.

In reality, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Our company was born out of a desire to provide a much-needed service to Shopify store owners, not move in on a market we felt needed more than one service.

Here’s the real story:

Shopified App was created on October 19, 2015, without the knowledge that Oberlo existed.

We went a different route than most and chose to release Shopified App to a private group of 700 drop shipping store owners.

With their feedback, we built our feature set according to what they needed. This allowed Shopified App to develop according to a drop shipping owner’s point of view.

Because of how we developed our initial product, Shopified App was — to our knowledge — the first with the following features:

• ePacket ID
• Auto insert Order ID after placing order
• The ability to pay for more than 10 orders at a time on AliExpress

After several months of perfecting our app based on feedback from this private user group, we launched publicly in March 2016.

We’re proud to have built a product that gives drop shipping stores exactly what they need to make their lives easier, and we’ll continue to refine the app based on their input.

Their article implies we can’t be trusted due to a lack of reviews.

Oberlo’s article points out that there are no reviews of Shopified App in the Shopify app store.

And that’s true, but for a reason they fail to mention:

We purposefully made Shopified App an unlisted Shopify app.

Let’s explain more…

One marketing advantage Oberlo has over Shopified App is that they chose to be listed in the Shopify app store.

This gives them a built in marketing channel, and for the majority of apps, we think this is a great idea!

But we (purposefully) chose not to go this route.

By keeping our app unlisted, we’re able to maintain greater control over the user experience, including billing and user sign up.

That makes our job harder on the marketing front, but again, our focus is on building the app drop shipping owners need with as few restrictions as possible on functionality. For that reason, we decided an unlisted app was the way to go.

Because we’re not in the Shopify app store, we don’t have an easy mechanism for collecting public reviews.

However, the positive response from our community of over 7,000 users is overwhelming.

We showcase just some of our positive reviews on our website.

Oberlo also criticizes us for using affiliates to promote our product.

Yes, many of the biggest influencers in the drop shipping industry use (and for the most part, love) Shopified App.

Some of them enjoy it enough to promote it to their readers and followers, and we do have an affiliate program they can enroll in.

These owners are more than just affiliates__

__they’re at the core of our user feedback, which is our number one tool for product updates, changes, and refinements.

We work hard to make our app better and better, and we’re proud to have earned — and will work to continue earning — their approval.

They want you to think they’re lightyears ahead of the competition.

Shopified App and Oberlo are similar apps that cater to similar needs.

You should choose the one that’s best for you!

But here’s one thing that really annoys us:

Having another company say something about our service that’s just not true.

Simply put, Oberlo is not way ahead of us in functionality.

Here are features (to our knowledge that Oberlo does not offer) that Shopified App has a huge advantage in:

• Edit your product before you upload it to your store
• Bulk edit products within Shopified App
• Easy access to vendor ratings
• Filter by AliExpress top sellers
• The ability to import products from over 30 product sources (Amazon, eBay,etc.)
• Product boards for product research
• Bulk edit existing products in your Shopify store
• Ability to add multiple suppliers for each product
• More than one option to place order (step-by-step, auto, auto shipping, order all)
• Filter orders by country and product
• Advanced variant mapping
• Pinterest sorter tool
• Products feed for creating dynamic product ads in Facebook
• Two Built in image editors for modifying product images
• Manage multiple Shopify stores in one interface
• Much lower cost for Shopified App once your store grows past 500 orders per month (roughly 17 orders per day). For that volume, Shopified App costs $47 per month, whereas Oberlo, which costs $79.90
• Want subusers in Oberlo? You’ll need to pay almost $80 per month! With Shopified App, this is available with the Elite Plan at no additional cost.

As you can see, the list of differences gets pretty long!

Obviously, we don’t use Oberlo every day, so there’s a chance we may be missing something else.

We’ve put together this comparison table that shows how the 2 platforms compare:

In Conclusion

Yes, Oberlo has a lower price point for new or smaller stores.

But once your orders and products grow, Shopified App becomes a clear winner in terms of feature set and value.

Shopified App forged a different path than many other Shopify apps, and this brought both advantages & disadvantages for our company.

We’ll continue to refine and improve our service, no matter what other companies imply.

We’re proud to have built something thousands of store owners use daily to save time, improve customer experience, and streamline their businesses.