#doba review 2023
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Doba Review - Is Doba worth joining?
If you've ever tried to dropship, you know that there are several obstacles you may run into. First of all, there are some services that offer dropshipping from places like India and China. These are sometimes great, but it's not uncommon to find that some of these suppliers and manufacturers are not reputable, or they take forever to ship to your country because of how far it is.
Then you have the process of finding suppliers yourself.
That's why we want to complete a Doba review. Doba is a tool for linking merchants to suppliers, especially those that dropship.
Not all suppliers do the whole dropshipping thing, and even when you find some that do, it's tricky streamlining your process without some sort of automated website plugin or app.
However, Doba seems to solve all of these problems. In this Doba review, I'll guide you through what Doba offers, while also going through the benefits, pricing, and customer support options.
What is Doba?
Likewise with all outsourcing, Doba permits you to source items exclusively, without burning through cash on mass buys. At the point when a client comes to your site and makes a purchase, Doba informs the provider and just conveys the items requested.
Remember that outsourcing frequently expects you to either take a cut in your own edges or incrementally evaluate for your clients, since there's very little leeway when you're not accepting in mass. In any case, there are a lot of specialties where the items depend more on apparent worth than evaluating you can cross-reference online in no time. Thus, I would suggest searching out those apparent worth items (like adornments or furniture) to have more accomplishment with outsourcing.
All things considered, this Doba survey will show you how the help works effectively by minimising expenses and coordinating you with providers that convey the items you need to sell. Doba has a commercial centre of providers that are checked and prepared to collaborate with your internet based store.
Here's how it would work if you wanted to start a dropshipping store with Doba:
Start searching on the Doba marketplace and find the products you want to sell in your store.
Create an export of those product listings to transfer all of the details (like pictures, prices, and descriptions) to your online store.
Make a sale to one of your customers, then pay Doba for the product. This is a crucial step in dropshipping, since you're not paying upfront for anything.
The supplier gets a notification to ship the item directly to your customer.
The profits from your sale are deposited into your account.
The Doba process is really quite similar to other dropshipping apps on the market. The main difference is how Doba interviews and examines each of the manufacturers and suppliers to ensure that your online store isn't getting screwed over with long shipping times or unreliable suppliers. Keep reading to learn what else we found out from our Doba review.
Doba Pros and Cons
Doba is an attractive, efficient, and easy-to-use product. It can help you find the educational resources you need to keep transactional fees and shipping fee costs low. The website is very easy to navigate and understand, plus, there’s a free trial option to get you started.
However, not everyone will be well-suited to this drop shipping service. It’s not the lowest cost option around, and there are various unhappy reviews online. Here are the pros and cons you need to consider before you determine whether you can make Doba work for you.
Pros 👍
The website is easy to navigate and understand
Everything is very user-friendly and efficient
Educational resources mean you can learn how to grow fast
Drop shipping service and business tools included
Lessons available on how to export data etc
100s of shopping cart options to choose from
Easy to customise your inventory for quick reference
Low inventory alerts stop you from over-selling
Free trial makes it easy to test the waters before you invest
Phone number available for customer support
Cons 👎
It’s a membership site, and becoming a member isn’t cheap
Doba is one of the more expensive options for dropshippers
Money back guarantee is difficult to claim
Products are expensive and difficult to compete with on marketplaces
Not everyone has the best opinion of Doba
How Does it Work?
Find products, build inventories, and add product information to your selling platform.
On Doba, you’ll most likely start by finding products and suppliers. You’ll then be able to build your own inventory lists, export product data, keep track of the orders you’ve received and add more products to sell when you’re ready.
1. Finding Products and Suppliers
There are 3 different ways to browse potential products and suppliers on the new Doba site:
On the dashboard of the ’search products’ tab, hot products and top selections are displayed to give you some inspiration. There’s also the option to view new arrivals, or products which offer free shipping, among other categories.
You can view a list of suppliers in the ‘find suppliers’ tab and order the supplier list based on available item count, fulfilment rate, average order processing time and more. You can click into each supplier to learn more about them.
And, probably the most useful option, you can view Doba’s product catalogue in the ‘search products’ tab and by selecting which category of products you are interested in.
The left-hand sidebar allows you to type in the search term directly, or filter products by category, supplier, supplier location, shipping times, price range and/or minimum order quantity.
You can then prioritise what comes first in the results from the dropdown box next to “sort by.” This gives you a lot of options to further customise your search and find what you’re looking for with ease.
2. Keeping an Inventory
Something else Doba allows you to do is build your own inventory list of products that are of interest to you. Think of your inventory list as similar to a ‘wishlist.’ It’s easy to add products to the list by selecting the ‘add to inventory’ button under relevant products.
This provides a useful way to store, revisit and manage products you might be interested in dropshipping.
I’ve created an example inventory list for you to see, with a small selection of [phone products]:
You can then upload the inventories to your online store later on.
3. Exporting Product Data
Doba allows you to export product information from your inventory list into a zip file so you can access it offline, or add it to a spreadsheet. It’s easy to do this by selecting each product you want to download individually. Otherwise, you can check ‘select all’ and then download a zip file containing information about all the products in your inventory list. The download button is easy to locate to the far right of each product on your list, or when you multi-select products you can find the ‘download all’ button at the top of the list.
If you export the data to a spreadsheet, you can compare information in the columns easily, which may be useful if you are deciding which product to go with out of a range of similar ones provided by different suppliers.
There are also a lot of third-party formats you can export your product data to, so that you can easily upload product information to sites such as Amazon or Shopify to expand your business opportunities.
4. Keeping Track of Orders
There’s also an area for keeping track of the details of your orders, including the order status, dates, suppliers, buyers, locations and amounts.
The Best Features
At the time of this article, Doba has partnered with hundreds of suppliers and offers over 2 million products for you to try out for your store. Choose from several categories, including automotive, apparel, books, electronics, and sports.
The most unique parts of Doba involve pricing and the marketplace. It's really easy to find millions of products in the Doba marketplace, some of which ship from the USA so your customers don't have to wait long. In addition, the pricing for many of the products is low enough that you can compete with companies on Amazon and pass along some savings to your customers.
As for the more technical features that come with Doba, here are the tools that I feel stand out the most:
A Direct Integration Into Your Online Store
I'm pretty amazed at how quick and easy it is to search around the Doba marketplace to locate something you want to sell. Once you select a product and decide to move it to your store, there's an option to immediately push the product information to your online store. What's great is that there is already a description, title, pricing, and pictures. Many of these are pulled from the manufacturer (so they aren't the best quality,) but you at least get the product details for rewriting later. I've noticed that most of the items have plenty of pictures, although I would still try to take more real-life photos of the products after setting up a site and choosing my product collection.
Another great part about the direct integration with your store is that you can bulk import and export large product lists. Doba compiles a list of all items you'd like to sell, then eventually you can click on the Export button to bring that product list into your store.
No Need To Store or Ship Your Products
But what happens to all of those products that you import into your online store? How is a sale processed and when should your customers expect to receive their orders?
Yes, Doba integrates with your online store, but it also has the unique advantage of actually storing, packaging, and shipping your products.
This is the beauty of dropshipping. It's a system where the supplier is responsible for all of the production logistics. Your main focus is to run an effective online store and market the products so that both you and the supplier get more sales.
So, with the direct integration to your website and all of the storage, packaging, and shipping being handled by Doba, it makes for a fluid process and leaves you open to expand your store to the best of your ability. We also learned in our Doba review that the company does a wonderful job of keeping costs as close as possible to wholesale pricing. This is usually not the case when it comes to dropshipping companies.
Advanced Searching and Filtering
The advanced searching and filtering comes as a great surprise, since I've tested several dropshipping marketplaces that can be nightmares when it comes to finding your products. Doba has so many products to choose from that it has implemented a fast, beautiful filtering process. For instance, I was able to select sporting goods, go camping, then search for cooking gear. The filtering is similar to Amazon, where they seem to have every product category you could imagine.
Proactive Inventory Alerts
The inventory alerts are set up by you, the store owner, by stating a threshold of when you would like to get an alert when inventory gets too low. So, you might have a pair of socks that runs out frequently. You would tell Doba to alert you when the socks are down to five pairs. Once you get the email, you could remove it from your store so that no one gets mad at you for selling an out of stock product.
Bulk Inventory Exporting
When you start curating a collection of products to sell in your store it becomes obvious that you need a way to organise all of these items. Your inventory is showcased in a nice list that you can rearrange and manage to see things like quantity and in-stock items.
Not only that, but the inventory area of the Doba dashboard has a tool to bulk export all of the products in the list to your online store. There is also the option to send this bulk export list to any marketplace of your choice. Therefore, you might sync all of your products with places like Amazon or Etsy.
Data Reports with Full Customization
All of your sales data is stored on the Doba dashboard, meaning that you as the business owner can always access this information by simply logging online. However, this is a completely different interface than your online platform.
It would be useful to have all of the sales data in a platform like Shopify or Bigcommerce as well. That's why Doba includes a custom data export feature to avoid the hassle of working with spreadsheets and trying to import those spreadsheets into your ecommerce platform.
Here's how it works: you can navigate to your data export page, then select sales information or maybe an inventory feed to export. After that, you choose your online store's ecommerce platform and the proper formatting. The export file is then automatically generated. So, it doesn't matter if you have Volusion, Magento, or Shopify–Doba exports to all of the big dogs. During our Doba review, we realised just how great the system integrates with other platforms.
The Elite Seller Report
The Elite Seller Report is like Doba's newsletter. It has wonderful information about deals, trends, and discounts. There's a curated product list and suggestions for which items to choose to get the most profit. You can even look at supplier scorecards to decide who to work with.
A Scorecard for All Suppliers
If you've ever tried dropshipping through places like AliExpress, you know that finding reputable suppliers isn't exactly the easiest task. Sure, once you find a great supplier on sites like that it becomes much easier. But you often have to guess and check to see which suppliers follow up, deliver on time, and make quality products.
Doba is a whole different story, because each supplier has a report card with detailed performance data from the past. This way, you can make a decision based on what research Doba has already done for you. Think of Doba as your personal gatekeeper who makes sure that you don't get stuck with a supplier that flakes out.
When you look at the performance data from a supplier you can check everything from fulfilment rates to processing times and return policies to shipping carrier options. It truly is one of the most valuable assets for a dropshipping operation.
A Curated List of High-margin Products
Dropshipping is great because you don't have to spend any upfront capital to buy wholesale products–and it's not required for you to spend time or money on packaging and shipping.
That being said, there are still so many products to choose from. You need to find products that fit your brand image, and it's important to find items that are high quality and will yield you a profit.
You could complete this research yourself, but Doba makes it so much easier by providing a list of high-margin products for you to sell.
In short, you can contact Doba to have the in-house sourcing experts construct a list just for your company. They then return with the most in-demand, high-margin items in the niche that you sell.
Doba Pricing
In terms of pricing, the benefit of going with Doba is that the individual product pricing gets pretty close to what you would expect from a wholesale purchase. Therefore, you can be competitive with other companies that are also selling similar products. For instance, I started looking for camping gear on Doba and stumbled upon some camping cookware sets. Currently, the pricing from Doba is listed at $10.09 without any shipping costs. Not only that, but it's shipping from the USA and most of these sets sell for $25 to $40 on Amazon.
As you can see, there's an advantage to having a Doba membership. But that's the catch–you have to pay for a monthly subscription. Now, for a thriving business, this isn't going to be a problem at all. $29 per month for access to wholesale-like prices can be made up with a few sales each month. However, some startups might find this expensive.
Anyway, let's take a look at the pricing plans:
Basic – $29 per month gets you a $0.99 per-order fee, access to millions of products in the marketplace, access to hundreds of suppliers, a community Q&A, Doba Deals in a weekly email, live training webinars, and email support.
Advanced – $69 per month for everything in basic, along with eBay data export, an Elite seller report, and live chat support.
Pro – $249 per month for everything in the previous plans, an Amazon data export, batch order upload, custom data export, street price data, and direct phone support.
Enterprise – For this plan, you have to contact Doba for custom rates, but it has some interesting features like the API integration, shared FTP data transfers, a lower per-order fee, unlimited exports, a dedicated client success manager, and merchandising services.
A free 14-day trial is available for you to test out. However, Doba does pull that old move of asking for your credit card to gain access to the free trial. Then it has a disclaimer that says it's mainly to help service customers better–which we all know is nonsense.
Regardless, I've tested out the free trial and you can definitely stop payment before the trial is over. Doba has a Cancellation link right in your Account settings.
Doba Customer Support
The customer support, as outlined in the pricing, depends on the plan you decide to pay for. For instance, one plan gets you email support, while a step up provides live chat support. If you go up even one more plan there's phone support. Finally, the Enterprise plan members gain access to a dedicated client success manager.
Other than that, retailer and partner API documentation is provided for integrating with the system and allowing you to customise the way you sell. The Doba company is located in Utah, and the main support and sales emails are listed on the Doba website.
I also like that Doba provides a beautiful Resources page for users to read whitepapers, infographics, business guides, and much more. It also seems like Doba is active on some social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. So, you might be able to learn some things from those or get in contact with the company through social media.
Who is Doba Best For?
Doba is a powerful tool for dropshippers who want to sell products fast.
If you’re a marketer with lots of experience, but you don’t have much time to build a company online, then Doba products could be right for you. To be successful with Doba, you will need to know the basics about wholesale prices, and how to encourage sales through the right shopping carts.
It’s also important to understand how you’re going to make your business stand out. If you want to sell through big sites like Amazon and eBay, there are a lot of prices out there that might be difficult for you to beat.
If you don’t know how to stand out on Google, and you don’t have a lot of experience with dropshipping, then Doba.com might not be right for you. The membership fees can make it hard to make money with this middleman company if you’re not experienced.
It’s also worth noting that although Doba is excellent for product sourcing, you’ll still need to know how to sell products quickly and effectively. Doba’s strengths are in things like usability, and how easy it is to link to things like PayPal. You also get the benefits of being able to easily export product information and enjoy time-saving integrations with shopping carts.
If you know how to get the best results out of your dropshipping supplier, then Doba is an excellent choice. It has a good rating with the BBB (better business bureau) and it’s not a fake site or scam. You can really find dropship suppliers to help you build your business.
To succeed, you just need to know how to use those dropshipping suppliers to sell items at a higher price. If you know how to make the most of your inventory list, and you can sell through your own website, rather than online marketplaces, then Doba could make you a decent profit. Like most leading tools, such as Salehoo, it’s best to start with a free trial and see how you feel before you do anything.
What are People Saying about Doba?
We had a look at some of the major review sites to see what customers think about Doba. The company has a 2.8 rating on Trustpilot and on the Better Business Bureau they have a 1.18 rating.
After reviewing the customer opinions found on various forums and online communities, we’ve extracted what we believe to be the general opinions held about Doba.
General Opinion #1: Doba prices are too high, which makes it difficult to compete with prices on eBay or Amazon, or to make a profit.
A customer in their Trustpilot review said “Doba is a site with tons of suppliers, so it's the suppliers that are setting the prices for products. The suppliers’ prices are not much better than eBay or Amazon.”
Bernard says in his SiteJabber review, “You will never get out without regretting your money and time. All their items are on sale on eBay or Amazon. You will never sell even 1 item because you can't list it at a competitive price.
“90% of the "wholesale" prices on Doba are exactly the same or higher than the retailing prices on Amazon. The remaining 10% of the products are just slightly lower than the going prices on Amazon. If you consider Amazon's fees including the dropshipping fee on Doba, you'll notice you're losing a lot of money, fast,” Michael said in his Trustpilot review. “Find a real dropship wholesaler with real wholesaling prices.”
Brad said, “Their Wholesale prices are too high, not competitive,” in his SiteJabber review. “Don’t use Doba! SaleHoo might be better.”
Another example is a comment on the Warrior Forum: “I tried Doba last year and there was no margin for profit there.”
Finally, people on Doba's Facebook page have left similar comments:
General Opinion #2: Customer service is lacking.
There were a variety of complaints about Doba’s customer service found on various forums.
Here’s an example, once again on Facebook, where Chantale is complaining on Doba’s company page that she’s had trouble:
People complain on Facebook; it’s unavoidable. Any business will face this occasionally. The concerning thing is that the comment has not been responded to by a Doba representative. That, paired with all the other comments we identified, pieces together a bigger picture.
Update: Further examples of this have since appeared in the comments below this post. For example, this comment from Sharon, “...their customer service is horrible. I was supposed to receive an orientation phone call as part of my account subscription and never did. Then they charged me for a full subscription 1 day before my supposedly 'free' trial was supposed to end. When I contacted them about the early charge, they refused to reverse it and the rep gave me a FAKE email address to get in touch with the management team.”
Alex, in his Trustpilot review said, “I’m extremely displeased with the assistance I couldn't receive from doba.com ! I have been trying to reach them for a week.”
Another disgruntled customer, Bertrand, said, “There is no customer service. Nobody returns your emails or calls,” in his SiteJabber review.
Jannette echoed this in her SiteJabber review, saying, “Have sent emails and live chat messages 15 times, no answer to either one. There is no support or contact phone number listed.”
This is quite disappointing to see, because customer service can be so vital to running a smooth online store and knowing that support is never far away if you run into any issues. You may like to check out what SaleHoo customers have been saying about them.
General Opinion #3: Many have claimed that they’ve been charged during the free trial period, and that it’s extremely difficult to cancel.
Firstly, we have the “do not sign up for their free trial, they will charge your card without telling you before the trial is over” complaint from Jason, on his Trustpilot review.
This was supported by many other customers who have written below about being charged before the trial period was over.
In his SiteJabber review, Betrand said, “I signed up for the free trial for the $29 plan. The next day I could not log in. I tried to change my password over 10 times and did not get the email to reset the password. I emailed them over four times but no response from them. The following month, I got a bill from my credit card company for $69.99 which I did not sign up for.”
Tarziz said, “After the trial you cannot log back in your account to cancel the trials and stop them to reach your credit card” in his Trustpilot review.
Because Doba doesn’t offer any sort of money back guarantee, it may be difficult to recover billing charges that occur.
General Opinion #4: People have commented on problems with listed inventory inaccuracy and order fulfilment
A customer on Trustpilot mentioned that, “A supplier updated their stock of a product at midnight to QTY of 112. I had placed orders for dropships of 60. By the morning at exactly 6am the product was gone with no avail QTY. I took a screenshot of this. So the supplier QTY is not truly real-time.”
“I paid for their service by the month, placed 15 orders after selling the products on eBay. These orders were never shipped and resulted in negative feedback from buyers due to their scam site,” Jannette said in her review. “I have lost 3785.26 out of my pocket for orders placed through DOBA that were never shipped.”
Doga said in their SiteJabber review, “I tried ordering this item for days, everytime it said "transaction failed" and cancelled but proceeded to withdraw funds from my bank account anyway! When I asked to get my 400.80$ back because my item was never shipped, they never replied to anything!”
We also found a full length independent review from a customer who has been using Doba for a year to give you an insider view on their experience.
Doba Review: Conclusion
If you're tired of super slow shipping times with dropshipping, Doba might be for you. If you hate the high pricing that often comes with dropshipping, you should seriously consider Doba. It might be a little too expensive for startups, but most of the time you should be able to make up the monthly costs. Overall, the Doba platform has so many products and reasonable prices that it has to be one of, if not the best, dropshipping solution out there.
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