How to Connect DSers to Shopify: Setup, Orders, Limits

DSers moves AliExpress products into Shopify and Shopify orders back out to AliExpress suppliers. Shopify's own DSers page calls it "the official Oberlo replacement for AliExpress dropshipping on Shopify." That page is Shopify marketing, not a Help Center article, so this guide takes every setting and limit from Shopify's help pages and DSers's own documentation.

Three settings decide whether your first order reaches the supplier as planned: prices set before import, every variant mapped to a supplier, and knowing that you place and pay each AliExpress order yourself. If you sell print-on-demand products rather than AliExpress ones, the connector and its settings are different: see how to connect Printify to Shopify.

What DSers Automates Between Shopify and AliExpress, and What Stays Manual

Shopify splits dropshipping apps into two kinds, and which kind you install decides how much of the order flow you still do by hand. Its page on fulfilling orders with an app puts it this way:

For AliExpress, DSers fits both descriptions: you order your customer's items within DSers, and DSers fulfills them when it pushes the tracking number. The table shows which jobs it takes over and which stay with you, according to DSers's help center and feature pages.

Before You Connect: Three Accounts and a DSers Plan

DSers's connection guide lists what you need: "access to your Shopify/WooCommerce/Wix/Magento admin panel, an AliExpress buyer account, and Chrome browser for the extension." In practice that means:

• Your Shopify admin — you install DSers and approve it from the store you will sell from.
• An AliExpress buyer account — DSers places orders through it, so it should be the account you pay suppliers from.
• Chrome, only for the extension. DSers recommends it "for one-click product imports and faster order placement," but you can also import a product by its URL.

Which DSers Plan Do You Need?

DSers offers four standard plans plus a Custom Enterprise option. The cheapest plan that covers your largest need is the right one: count your stores, products and supplier accounts, and decide whether you need prices and stock to update without you.

The Shopify App Store listing shows only Basic, Advanced and Pro, priced as estimates in your local currency, so Enterprise is visible only on dsers.com. On paid plans, the listing adds that an "extra fee will be needed if the amount of products exceeds the limit based on the usage level" and that you contact DSers support to apply.

New DSers users get a 14-day trial on paid plans. According to DSers's plans and billing overview, the trial "starts the day you activate a paid plan—not when you sign up for DSers," and fees go through Shopify billing, PayPal or Stripe. To cancel a paid plan, DSers's cancellation page says you downgrade to Basic.

How to Connect DSers to Shopify, Step by Step

The order matters. DSers can't place AliExpress orders until both connections exist, and the most common binding failure DSers documents comes from a second store or account open in another tab.

Install DSers From the Shopify App Store

1. Open the DSers listing on the Shopify App Store.
2. Check the name, DSers: Dropship+AliExpress+AI, and the developer, DSers.
3. Click Install and approve the app in the admin of the store you will sell from.

Shopify App Store listing for DSers

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Bind Your Store, and What to Do If Binding Fails

Once the store is bound, DSers's connection guide says "new customer orders will appear in DSers under the Awaiting order tab, where you can manage and process orders from all your sales channels in one place." Each plan caps how many stores you can bind, from 3 on Basic.

Authorize Your AliExpress Buyer Account

DSers's connection guide is direct about why this step exists: "DSers needs authorization to place orders with AliExpress on your behalf." The authorization doesn't last. Per DSers's AliExpress connection page, it expires every 90 days, and DSers shows a re-authorize pop-up on its dashboard when it is time to reconnect.

The number of supplier accounts you can connect depends on your plan: one on Basic, three on Advanced, five on Pro and ten on Enterprise. Alibaba.com and 1688 accounts are connected separately from AliExpress.

To see the whole sequence on screen, one practitioner's walkthrough from January 2026, by the Henry Cheung channel, covers it: connecting DSers starts at 5:15 and importing products at 11:43. It is one creator's setup, and the plan limits, sync times and order rules in this guide come from DSers's and Shopify's own pages, not from the video.

Importing AliExpress Products Into Shopify

Importing has three stages: prices, the Import List and mapping. The first is the one people skip, and it changes what every imported product costs you.

Set Prices Before You Import

The supplier price you import depends on where the order ships. DSers's importing guide notes that "AliExpress suppliers often set different prices for different shipping destinations," which is why it asks you to set Price for ship to country before you import.

Pricing rules turn that supplier cost into your store price. Set them in Settings › Pricing Settings in DSers. Per DSers's pricing rules guide, "all pricing rule calculations in DSers run in USD first," and the result is then converted to your store currency.

Import List First, Then Push to Store

1. Import the product from AliExpress by its URL or with the DSers Chrome extension. DSers says the product, "with all details: title, images, variants," syncs instantly to your Import List.
2. Edit it in the Import List, which DSers's publishing guide calls "a safe staging area where products live until you're ready to publish."
3. Hover over the product card, click Push to Store, choose your store, and pick Also publish to Online Store or Set product status as Draft.

For a first product, the draft option is the safer one: DSers describes it as the way to "review before going live," so you can check the product page in Shopify before customers see it. The daily import limit is 500 products on Basic, Advanced and Pro, and 3,000 on Enterprise.

Mapping: How DSers Knows Which Supplier Gets the Order

"Mapping is how DSers translates between your store and your suppliers," in the words of DSers's mapping guide. For most products you never touch it: per DSers's variant mapping page, pushing a product from AliExpress through DSers creates the mapping for you, and it "tells DSers where to send the order after the customer buys" without changing your storefront.

Where mapping earns its keep is when a supplier fails. DSers offers two modes:

• Basic Mapping — per DSers's backup supplier guide, "one default supplier plus one backup supplier for each variant."
• Advanced Mapping — matches by SKU and ship-to country and supports up to 10 suppliers per variant, BOGO, bundles and multi-country routing. DSers's plans overview lists Advanced mapping (BOGO/Bundle) from the Advanced plan.

A backup supplier is only useful if it was vetted before you need it. When and how to line one up is covered in the ongoing supplier monitoring checklist.

How an Order Moves From Shopify to AliExpress and Back

Each order passes through five stages, and two of them are yours. Per DSers's order sync page, "DSers auto-syncs new orders from your store the moment they come in."

Does DSers Place AliExpress Orders Automatically?

This is the limit to plan your day around. DSers's tracking sync page states it plainly: "You need to manually place supplier orders and complete payment on AliExpress/1688 Dropshipping." The automatic option exists, but for other suppliers, as DSers's feature page explains:

Bulk Order Processing submits many AliExpress orders in one go, once each variant is mapped to the correct AliExpress SKU and a shipping method is applied. DSers's bulk order page offers two methods: the API, which it recommends to "keep the default API option for faster processing of larger batches," and the Chrome extension, which takes longer but can apply coupons.

If hands-off ordering matters more to you than the AliExpress catalog, that is an Alibaba.com sourcing decision; how dropshipping from Alibaba works is covered in the Alibaba-to-Shopify guide.

What Shopify Shows While DSers Fulfills an Order

When items are assigned to DSers's fulfillment service location, the Shopify rules for every such app apply. Shopify's developer documentation for fulfillment service apps says "each fulfillment service has a dedicated location," and that "fulfillment services can accept or reject requests to fulfill orders." Four things follow, all from Shopify's app fulfillment page and order processing settings:

In Shopify adminOpen in your store

1. Settings
2. General

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The missing button surprises most merchants. Why Shopify blocks it, and what you can still do on such an order, is in why you can't mark a Shopify order as fulfilled.

Reverting is the other trap, because the supplier order keeps moving. When a manual revert is possible at all is answered in whether you can revert a Shopify order to unfulfilled.

When Tracking Reaches Shopify and Your Customer

DSers syncs tracking from AliExpress 5 times per day, so a new number can take up to 5 hours to appear in DSers and up to 1 more hour to sync to your store. Unless DSers is waiting on other items' tracking (Fulfill items in bulk, or BOGO and Bundle mapping) or you have set a delay under Sync Tracking Number to Store for Fulfillment, plan on up to six hours between the supplier adding tracking and the number showing on the Shopify order.

DSers's tracking sync page says that "when DSers pushes the tracking number to your store, it will automatically trigger a shipping confirmation email to be sent to your buyer," while DSers's shipping confirmation email settings page lists Activate Shipping Confirmation Email Sent by Shopify, the master switch that lets DSers trigger Shopify's shipping confirmation emails, as off by default. Check that switch, and turn the email off or delay it if you prefer, in Settings › Fulfillment Settings › Shipping Confirmation Email Settings in DSers. In Settings › Fulfillment Settings, under "Fulfill items", DSers's fulfillment settings page says "Fulfill items in bulk" is selected by default, so the order turns Fulfilled once every item has tracking.

None of this moves the customer conversation off your plate. Shopify's dropshipping overview is explicit about who answers when a parcel is late:

What Syncs Automatically, How Often, and What It Overwrites

What DSers keeps in step, and how quickly, depends on the item and the plan. All figures are DSers's own, from its help center.

Two rows deserve a second look. Per DSers's automatic price update page, "Auto-Update only follows your primary supplier's cost changes," and it overwrites prices you edited by hand.

Stock is a paid setting that, per DSers's inventory sync page, updates your store "once every 24 hours." DSers's out-of-stock guide warns that the alert means "you can't fulfill orders for that item."

Stock sync also depends on where the product sits in Shopify. DSers's fulfillment services page says it "only synchronizes inventory of Shopify products in locations including dsers-fulfillment-service, Shop location and locations you create manually." A product assigned to another app's location is outside that list.

If products from a dropshipping app show as out of stock on your storefront, Shopify says the app's location might be missing shipping rates; not all dropshipping apps need this setup. Setting those rates is covered in giving an app's location its own shipping rates.

Where DSers Help and Pricing Pages Disagree

DSers's pricing page, the plans overview in its help center and its inventory page differ on several points, and the four below matter for this setup; all three were read on November 5, 2026. There is no way to tell from outside which page is current, so the move below works whichever one is.

What to do: if automatic sync is the reason you pay and you are a new DSers user, start the 14-day trial on Advanced and check that the price and inventory update settings can be switched on before the trial ends. Plan your stock buffer around one update a day, the slowest figure DSers states.

DSers Setup Checklist, in Order

Step one picks the plan and steps two to four connect the accounts; steps five to seven prepare products before any customer can buy; step eight proves the whole loop on a real order. Your progress is saved in this browser, so you can come back after the first sale.

When DSers Stops Syncing: Symptoms and Fixes

An order sits in Awaiting fulfillment for days. A pop-up asks you to relink or re-authorize. A customer emails for tracking that Shopify still doesn't show. Find your symptom in the table; causes and fixes come from DSers's help center.

Two of these fixes have their own pages: DSers's guides to relinking a store and to orders stuck in Awaiting fulfillment, where DSers explains: "Due to Shopify requirements, DSers can only fulfill orders containing DSers-Managed items."

If the order timeline notes that the fulfillment service declined a fulfillment request, the order is back in Unfulfilled, and the service can include a note explaining why. What a declined request means for the order and how to ship it another way is in what happens when a fulfillment service rejects a Shopify order.

Disconnecting a Store or an AliExpress Account

Disconnecting a store and disconnecting an AliExpress account sound alike and do very different things in DSers.

• Disconnecting an AliExpress account keeps your products and mapping, but per DSers's supplier disconnection guide, "automatic order syncing stops for orders placed through that account." DSers recommends doing it only after that account's orders are complete.
• Cancelling a paid plan means downgrading to Basic, which keeps the free plan's limits of 3 stores and 3K products.

The Bottom Line

DSers removes the copy-and-paste from AliExpress dropshipping: products, orders and tracking move between Shopify and AliExpress without retyping. What it doesn't remove is the purchase itself, and planning around that is what keeps orders on time.

Frequently Asked Questions