Spocket: Dropshipping

I tried to give Spocket another try, but it’s just not going to work out with us. I can’t afford to keep continuing to refund customers due to sellers not shipping orders in a timely fashion.

The platform is ok if you have no issues but once a supplier doesn’t ship, Spockets response time is outrageous. I will no longer be using this platform once we receive a resolution on this last order. It’s too inconsistent and hurting our business.

It is the worst dropshipping app I ever used in my life, with limited choices in terms of products, we add horrible customer support when you have problems...I demanded a refund for the first time in January 2024, and after 15 days with no feedback, I wrote my first testimonial on the Shopify app store, they contacted me to delete the testimonial in return for my refund...so I was so naive to believe their words and deleting my testimonial...after 4 long weeks of communication, emails, and messages...they sent me a falsified document showing that they sent the refund amount...and by contacting my bank I discovered that this document is just bullshit, and the bank confirms that there's no refund is sent to my card or account...sadly the pocket team was lying and they refuse then to give any proof documents ...I have all conversations, emails and screenshots....i recommend other dropshipping apps

Here's the truth about Spocket.

All these other positive reviews are from people who just started using the platform and like what they see so far but ultimately have no idea about how things actually work here.

I've been using Spocket daily since 2019 and during this time, I have accumulated extensive experience using the platform, interacting with their support team, understanding the nuances of its integration with Shopify, as well the entire dropshipping process Spocket facilitates, such as placing orders, processing times, supplier considerations, and the shipping of products to customers. This is what I can tell you.

First, a heads-up: most dropshipping platforms are bunk. The industry is riddled with false promises of dropshippers making bank off their online stores when the reality is less than 1% will find success in this industry. Be sure to manage your expectations if you’re just going in for the first time.

While Spocket is one of the better dropshipping platforms I’ve used over the years (and I honestly HATE saying that), it is still riddled with issues that will undoubtedly hinder your ability to succeed and will also surface unexpected roadblocks throughout your journey. This will make the likelihood of your success as a droppshipper considerably low.

I’m going to focus primarily on my experiences regarding supplier issues, as this is the backbone of operations and has persisted as an ongoing problem for me since the beginning.

Any experienced dropshipper knows that your business is only as good as your suppliers. Their processing times, shipping times, product quality, and return policy will all impact your success and bottom line. If the supplier disappoints your customer in any of these areas, you will suffer the losses—not them and not Spocket.

While suppliers need to apply to be part of Spocket, I’ve encountered very little quality control in terms of supplier worthiness. There are often discrepancies with supplier inventory and variants from the numbers displayed in the product catalog vs what the numbers display once imported to your store. A product may appear to be in stock and have multiple variants available only for you to discover AFTER the import that the product has no stock or limited variants. I’ve had instances where a supplier has claimed to have products in stock up until the point when a customer places an order on my store and I go to fulfill it, whereupon suddenly I am informed the product is out of stock or unavailable and I am forced to refund my customer’s order and suffer reputation damage in the process.

Additionally, you’ll find suppliers who have many products listed, however, nearly all of them have essentially low stock or limited variants or tags such as “DELETE” or “DISCONTINUED”. This makes browsing the product catalog and researching products to import extremely time-consuming and unreliable. The fact that Spocket allows suppliers to list numerous products without ample inventory is a key example of a lack of quality control in regard to facilitating the dropshipping process. Check out the supplier “Black Jasper” (which is a Spiral Direct reseller) to see what I mean. They currently have a large selection of products available to import, however, you’ll notice 95% of them have little to no stock or variants available.

Here's an example:

As of the time of writing this, I have a customer who placed an order on my store on October 17, 2024. I paid the supplier and requested fulfillment less than 2 hours after the customer placed their order. The supplier advertises their processing time at 1 business day and a shipping time of 4-7 business days. A week passed and the supplier had not even processed the order, let alone shipped it. Then another week passed. I reached out to Spocket to inquire why my order hadn't shipped. As usual, they strung me along ensuring they were looking into it without ever following up. Now, finally almost a month later, on November 11, 2024, they informed me the supplier couldn't fulfill the order. My customer had to wait a month for me to notify them their order wasn't coming and then I had to refund them. Spocket was happy to keep my transaction fees though and only refunded me for the base cost of the product. A refund I won't see for another 10+ days if I'm lucky. How can you cultivate satisfied customers when you have to deal with this BS?

The supplier in this instance is “Orange Poppy” and they do not provide returns, refunds, or cancellations which grants them complete impunity in the instance something goes wrong - and mark my words, it does. I've encountered this issue on several occasions with this supplier and brought it to Spocket's attention many times. They always say they're going to look into it to ensure it doesn't happen again, but it always does and at this point, I believe it always will.

Spocket profits off both suppliers and retailers. They win either way. You as a Spocket Dropshipper stand to lose the most because even though Spocket says their suppliers are "vetted" they clearly are not. Additionally, they suffer no consequence for failing to process or ship orders once you pay for them.

This product that my customer ordered is listed as a “Premium Product” in Spocket’s product catalog. If you don’t know already, a large majority of Spocket’s products are listed as “premium”. This is because you are limited to the number of premium products you can import to your store based on the tier of your subscription plan. By making a large majority of products “premium”, Spocket forces you to upgrade your plan but this is unjustified as frankly, there is NOTHING premium about these products, which can be easily seen from this experience and the countless others I've had. They offer no advantage in quality, processing time, shipping time, supplier support, or otherwise.

If you visit a supplier page in Spocket you'll see a star rating system that shows the supplier's fulfillment rate. It's important to note that this is not a dynamic rating system but basically an image of 5 stars that is completely static. This fulfillment-rate-star-rating system does not change based on whether the supplier actually fulfills the order or not so if you're thinking of using that system to determine the reliability of a supplier, just keep that in mind. It's a useless feature.

Since starting my store, I’ve had around 40 products that I had imported become deactivated by their corresponding suppliers. That’s 40 redirects I’ve had to make to product pages, considerable hours spent writing & optimizing product pages wasted, and marketing efforts & money wasted advertising products that are now unavailable.

I receive email notifications from Spocket pretty much weekly informing me of products that are now out of stock on my store or deactivated altogether. As you can imagine, this makes building and maintaining a sustainable product inventory very challenging and time-consuming. Imagine you're laying bricks to build the foundation of a building but every week someone is removing the bricks you've placed. How can you build upwards in these conditions?

While Spocket as a dropshipping platform has decent functionality and UX, it is not optimized for your success as a retailer. It is a tangled web of disorganized product catalogs, shady supplier practices, frustrating customer service, misrepresentations by the platform, and comes with a high risk of losses to your revenue and profit margins as a result.

While some might be the exception, 99% of Spocket dropshippers will not find the success they are looking for because the platform does not enable productivity due largely to supplier challenges including product quality, cost, availability, and reliability in addition to false representations made by Spocket themselves. To remain competitive online, your profit margins will be unsustainably low and any supplier errors will come out of your pocket. It is simply not a feasible goal to expect to create a sustainable dropshipping store with Spocket until some of these fundamentally flawed issues within the platform can be resolved. And after 5 years, I doubt they ever will be.

Do not install this app. Even when you sign up for the free version, they will start charging you for a paid version and WILL NOT STOP!! I have been trying for a month to get them to acknowledge that I do not owe them and they keep harassing me.

Do yourself a favor and use a different app.

After the response from the company, I have to add this to my review.

Over the last 2 days I have been called over 10 times by this company. Several of those calls were made before 7:00 in the morning. None of these times did the company leave a message. This type of harassment is exactly why I left the original review. The company can say whatever it wants to about its customer service, but I have experienced the "service" first hand.

My original review stands. Do NOT install this app. If you do, you will regret it.

STAY AWAY
My nightmare with Spocket began 6 months ago. I liked the idea to have a subscription with spocket because It was a good option to add more products to my existing online store, that has been in the market for many years with a policy of same day shipping and great reputation, until spocket showed up. What a nightmare.

The first problem that I had and kept having during my subscription, was the delay in shipments, the suppliers take more than what they say, which caused me a lot of chargeback fees and a lot of bad reviews. I still, after requesting the cancelation of the subscription, have 2 pending orders, one of those has a delay of more than 1 and a half month and the other more than 1 week delay, and this has happened many times.
The second mayor issue happened when Spocket sent me, after 20 days without shipping an order, an email saying that I had to pay extra $70 dollars to ship the product, because the supplier was saying that. And Im talking about a little fanny bag. When I complained, first they cancelled the order without my consent, and then I complained for that and they told me, that if I wanted to reopen the order and ship it, I had to pay extra $70 dollars. After many chats with ramdom customer service people, finally, they reopened the order and ship it.

The third problem and maybe the worst. One of its suppliers, that I picked to sell more than 100 products in my marketplace, is a complete scam. I had to refund and received returns of a lot orders because the photos of the products does not correspond in quality and design with the products delivered. After checking out everything I discovered that the photos of the swimshorts are renders made on a computer and are not photos of real products. (all this was shared on time with customer service, that is more like a psychologist who listen you but does not solve anything).

I even requested refunds in some of the issues that I had and I refunded the customers, but the answer from customer service was always in circles, and always saying that they were going to send my request to financial, but never ever financial contacted me, and of course, never received a refund.
My nightmare was almost every week, I got a lot of bad reputation and I never reported spocket or had a bad review, Because as a business owner I know how horrible is a bad review, and I never leave bad reviews. But after the last 1 month delay and a horrible review from a customer to my business I took the decision to tell my experience with a 1 star review. Immediately as magic somebody contacted me and offered me 3 free months to delete the message. Clearly I felt offended for the offer, I was not requesting to continue the subscription I was just cancelling this nightmare. But then they offered me refund me the value of 3 subscriptions to delete the comment. And my question was, but who is going to delete the comments of my customers on my social media?, this is insulting.
But after a lot of time expressing my disappointment with this company I gave up, and I accepted to delete the comment if they cancel my subscription and refund me the value of 5 monthly $49 subscription. That was not going to repair all the damage this company made to my business, at least they were going to cancel my subscription.
They waited on the phone to confirm that I deleted the comment, and after I did it, they confirmed me that they were going to refund me the value of 5 monthly subscriptions.
Ok, the nightmare continued when I walked up in the morning and they refunded 4 times $19 dollars, but not only that, they were saying that refunded to expired credit cards. So they do not only bribed me, waited for me to do my part of the agreement, but also they did not comply with their part of the agreement.
I dont know how this company is still in the market, and by the way guys, NOBODY is going to be rich or have a decent income, selling overpriced products, that are not shipped, that the photos are not the same as the delivered products, the customer service does not work at all, and do not maintain their word and any other marketplace sells the same products for less money.

This is my experience, and has been a nightmare since week 1. And it keeps going and going, because, they made me delete my review, they have not delivered the delayed products from open orders, but also they sent the supposed refund (to delete the comment) for less than half of what they promised to an expired credit card.
Never again Spocket.

By the Way, the following is the last message the person from financial sent me today, how charm:
"Ok thank you Andres. We do have sufficient evidence that we have provided you a full refund via Stripe. So we have maintained our end of the agreement, and we were, in fact, offering to go above and beyond. We will now engage our legal team as well if you feel that is the best course of action." Kaylee

To be clear, I have explained many times that they are "refunding" the money, which is not the amount we agreed, to EXPIRED CREDIT CARDS, that no money is going to enter my account, but they keep saying the lie, because their interest is the DELETE THE COMMENT.

I don't want to have business with a company that is damaging my reputation, but also is charging to damage my reputation, but also every time one of my customers place an order I can not sleep because I dont know if they are going to ship the order on time, or if I have to pay extra to ship it, or if the product has poor quality, does not look like the photos, or any other problem. A nightmare in progress!!!

To be clear I was bribed to delete a comment, and they never pay their part of the agreement. The never pay me any compensation for the reputational damages to my business. I have a check with the amount they told me sent, I need to know the address to send it now.

Customer support is practically non-existent. It is a decent system unless you have ANY issues (which you always will with dropshipping). Unless you have an upgraded plan, the only way to reach support is through email which they do not respond promptly to. Very disappointed.

Out of sync inventory management with shopify and suppliers, lost orders, poor supplier management, limited women's fashion products for US market with no product descriptions, extremely slow and ineffective customer service, inferior and cheap outsourced technical team that takes days to investigate and fix technical issues, and no escalation channel for urgent customer and live paid order/shipping issues. If you want to mess up your brand, hurt your revenue and push your customers away with embarassing situations on the orders, this is the dropshipping app to go for. We have spent thousands of dollars in marketing to draw customers and improve conversion rate, and as the orders have started coming through, we are facing challenges in almost every other order. We are giving this feedback so that the owner/management wake up and address their issues, compare their product with oberlo and other apps, make it better! They have potential, but have got lazy and over confident along the way. We have tried Oberlo, Spocket and other dropshipping apps, there is huge potential for new apps in the US dropshipping market to compete and grow. Smart dropshipping app creators should take the hint and build something nice for this market.

This is a good app for anyone looking to start a dropping shipping business on Shopify. As they state, there are hundreds of products to choose from for your store. The customer service and support teams are very friendly and easy to work with. HOWEVER, BUYER BEWARE; here are some important considerations based on my personal experience. Product stock notifications and COMMUNICATIONS with suppliers ARE HORRIBLE, which means THERE’S A PERPETUAL PROBLEM WITH PRODUCTS BEING OUT OF STOCK. Over the two+ years of working with Spocket, I had to cancel more than 70% of the orders placed through the app. The reason was because items were out of stock or the supplier was no longer selling on the app, and there was never a communication regarding these status changes. Because of that, my customers ordered with an expectation to receive, only to become dissatisfied and upset with my company when I had to cancel their orders. Moreover, these scenarios cost my business significant money for credit card processing and cancellation fees. If your goal is to simply show an abundance of products on your site, then this app may be right for you. If your goal is to make money in product sales with happy, satisfied customers, then I caution you to stay away.

The worst costumer support ever!
They didnt fulfill my orders, thet dont answer my emails or messages.
Dont even think about it!!!
Info@ninelivescats.shop

I can no longer work with this company. I had, for the third time in a row, an order come in for a product that doesn't exist but yet still showed in stock on my website. I paid for a whole year as an annual, I'm hoping I can get something back.