SaleHoo vs Doba

General Overview

You can’t argue that both SaleHoo and Doba boast large product ranges and vetted suppliers. But that’s where the key similarities end. We understand that you want to make the best decision for you and your business, by minimizing the risk you need to bear and ensuring confidence that you can fulfil the promises you make to your treasured customers. So, at the end of the day, we’re sure you want to know, which is better: SaleHoo or Doba?

To begin, we’ve covered some of the key features of each platform below:

General Overview		Doba
TrustPilot Rating	4.8 “Excellent”	2.8 “Poor”
Vetted Suppliers & Products
Dropship Tool
Directory Tool
Large Product Range
Filter Supplier by Experience
Market Research Tool
100% Satisfaction or Your Money Back
24/7 Personalized Customer Service

Features

It’s clear to see that SaleHoo and Doba do share features, but the main difference is between the level of customer service you can receive and the customer protections each offer. We have done a more in-depth breakdown below to illustrate some of the more specific features that these platforms claim.

Dropship Tool

Let’s cut to the chase and have a look at one of the most important tools that SaleHoo and Doba offer - their dropshipping tools. We have decided to compare their ‘basic’ equivalent plans as these are likely designed as the first point of call for new business owners. SaleHoo offers their Basic plan as a one-fits-all membership for new business owners, and even allows you to have two users if you are working with a business partner. Doba’s Start-Up plan, on the other hand, is a very limited version of their Business plan ($49.99 per month). It might be that as a Doba customer you deem the Start-Up plan too limited for your needs, so you might want to move up to a more expensive plan.

SaleHoo’s unlimited plan for teams is $97 per month and Doba’s equivalent enterprise plan is $299.99 per month, but we won’t touch much on those here as they are likely to be a better fit for experienced dropshippers who are scaling, or already large. However, it is good to be aware of the incremental charges you may potentially make.

Both SaleHoo and Doba’s dropship tools are easy to navigate and sort through items.You can connect each tool to your Shopify store with ease and start importing products to sell. You are able to change most product details, such as name, description and price as you wish. Both plans allow you to import up to 500 items into your online store. This appears to be a sizable amount for most sellers. 

Furthermore, both offer ample search filters to help narrow down your results and select the best items for your store. A useful filter that SaleHoo has is one to sort suppliers based on how many orders they’ve fulfilled. This metric provides a good indication of how experienced suppliers are and how much demand other sellers have for them, and which ones you might want to build a relationship with. But, with that being said, all suppliers on SaleHoo undergo a strict vetting process, so you can be confident that all of them will be reliable. Doba claims that all their suppliers are vetted, too. However, it appears to be very easy to sign up to become a supplier on the Doba site. There is a brief form to fill out which asks minimal questions. It is unclear how rigorous their process is for accepting or rejecting these supplier applications.

Some Doba users have commented on the already high prices of the items listed for dropshipping on their platform, making it difficult to add a profit on top to sell to the end customer. A Doba 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.” Another customer, Brad said, in his SiteJabber review, “Their wholesale prices are too high, not competitive. Don’t use Doba! SaleHoo might be better.” If the items available for dropshipping are already very high, it will be extremely difficult for dropshippers to make money as you won’t have any wiggle room to add your own profits.

Some key differences are that the SaleHoo Basic plan allows you to have up to two users, as we mentioned earlier. This can be useful if you have a business partner, an admin, or someone on your team who would find it useful to be able to access your SaleHoo account. Doba does not support multiple users on their Start-Up plan. It is unclear how many users they support on their higher plans, actually. SaleHoo also offers responsive 24/7 customer service, which can be especially useful if you’re new to dropshipping, or otherwise for any troubleshooting needs.

It is also important to consider what type of protections are offered by each company, so that you can feel confident that you aren’t going to lose money. SaleHoo offers a 60 day money back guarantee, which isn’t yet offered by Doba. Doba offers a free trial, but you need to remember to cancel it before it’s up otherwise you will get automatically charged. It also defaults to charging you for the annual Business plan, which can be pricey for you if you don’t remember to cancel in time. Additionally, some customers have voiced negative opinions about the free trial. Jason said, “do not sign up for their free trial or they will charge your card without telling you before the trial is over,” in his review on Trustpilot. Another customer, Myra said on Better Business Bureau, “This company has wronged me out of $500.00. I agreed to use their service on June 29th 2020 and my card was charged $500.00. I was told I had 3 days to cancel and would receive a full refund. I canceled on July 1st 2020. June had 30 days in it so July 1st was well within the 3 day cancelation period. I sent an email on July 1st requesting a refund...It has been almost a year now and I have not heard anything from this company nor received my refund for the $500.00 that they charged me.

Dropship Tool Comparison		Doba
Plan Name	Basic	Start-Up
Price	$27.00 USD/month	$24.99 USD/month
Number of Users	1-2	1
Easy to set up
Pricing Change
Variant Change
Image Selection
Shipping Options Selection
Title Change
Product Organization
Collection Creation
Description Edit
Vetted Suppliers & Products
24/7 Personalised Customer Service (Email and Chat)
100% Satisfaction Guarantee of Your Money Back

Here are some screenshots of each dropship tool for you to get a bit of an idea about what they each look like.

Screenshots of SaleHoo

Screenshots of Doba

Directory Tool

We can see why you’re tossing up SaleHoo and Doba, they’re the only two dropshipping companies out there that also feature dropshipping directories. But how do they differ from one another? We know that Doba’s directory is a recent addition to their offering, whereas SaleHoo’s directory has been around quite a bit longer.

SaleHoo has gathered over 8,000 strictly vetted suppliers. It is not advertised how many suppliers the Doba directory has, but suppliers can easily sign up so it is uncertain how strict their criteria is for listing suppliers. SaleHoo has a range of dropshippers, wholesalers, manufacturers and liquidators for a range of online selling requirements. Having suppliers that are not exclusively dropshippers can give you more flexibility to develop your store and products from a more customised approach. For example, you could work with a manufacturer to get your own line of activewear produced, rather than dropship pieces that already exist.

SaleHoo encourages their customers to reach out if they can’t find a suitable supplier for the products they want to sell. Their team will then perform a custom search in order to locate one. They will even consider finding and adding a supplier to the directory to meet your specific needs. Additionally, SaleHoo’s directory includes a market research tool, SaleHoo Labs, as part of their directory tool. With Labs you can identify which items are selling well on Amazon and eBay and how much competition each product has. Ideally, you will want to select a product that is trending with low competition - then you won’t have to contend with lots of other sellers.

Directory Tool		Doba
Dropshippers
Wholesalers
Manufacturers
Liquidators
8,000 + Vetted Suppliers
Supplier Requests
Market Research Tool
100% Satisfaction Guarantee or Your Money Back

Screenshots of SaleHoo

Screenshots of Doba

Price

A great way to compare the pricing offered by each company is to have a deeper understanding of what they each offer. We hope that this article has provided you with some of this understanding, which will enable you to more easily weigh up the pricing differences.

Both SaleHoo and Doba have pricing tiers for their main tools. Both offer monthly and annual plans, where the annual plans end up being better value, but at a higher upfront cost.

SaleHoo offers two monthly membership options. The $27 monthly plan is for new sellers and allows for scaling because it has extensive features such as 2 user accounts and up to 500 product imports. Their $97 monthly plan is for larger teams with 3 sub-users and the option to integrate with 3 online stores.

The $24.99 monthly Doba ‘Start-Up’ plan is a limited version of their $49.99 a month ‘Business’ plan, but it may be suitable for when you are starting your online business. They also offer an enterprise monthly plan for $299.99 per month. It is unclear how many sub users you can get on each of their more expensive plans.

SaleHoo offers a 60 day 100% satisfaction money back guarantee, which is not currently offered by Doba. Doba offers a free trial, but it is important to keep a check on it because it will automatically bill you if you don’t explicitly cancel it within the free trial window. Jason, mentioned in his Trustpilot review that “they will charge your card without telling you before the trial is over,” so it will be up to you to monitor when your free trial ends as Doba does not appear to notify you about this.

SaleHoo offers a lifetime membership price of $127 for their Directory tool. A lifetime membership option is not currently available from Doba.

		Doba
Dropship Montly Price	$27 or $97 for 3 dropship stores	$24.99, $49.99 or $99.99
Directory Annual Price	$67	$179.88, $359.88 or $2999.88
Directory Lifetime Price	$127	Not Available

Customer Service

Reliable and responsive customer feedback can be really important when you’re running an online store for several reasons. The first is that you want to be able to resolve any issues quickly so that you don’t let your customers down. The second is that you want to know that there are representatives to support you whenever you have any concerns, need some advice or have any requests, in general.

We had a look around the internet to see what SaleHoo and Doba customers are saying about the service that they have received.

SaleHoo offers 24/7 chat and email support, which many customers consider responsive. SaleHoo frequently receives positive comments about their customer service, many of which can be found on their Trustpilot page. Katherine, in one such review on Trustpilot said, "I had a lot of questions before signing up. The chat with John was awesome. He worked really hard for me. I asked a lot of questions and he gave me really thorough and prompt responses. Great customer service!” Another customer, CVerdon, said on his Better Business Bureau review, “SaleHoo offers sales help and support that far exceeds other e-commerce support companies.

Recently, in November 2021, Kay said in her g2.com review of SaleHoo that “Customer Service is excellent - rapid and responsive!” Doba has had a few positive comments on their customer service, such as from Joel, who said in his Trustpilot review that he was “extremely pleased with the assistance I received from doba.com.”  However, there were numerous unhappy reviews that mentioned customer service, such as from Alex, who recently said “I'm extremely unpleased with the assistance I couldn't receive from Doba.com! I have been trying to reach them for a week,” on his Trustpilot review. Another customer said, “Good luck with emails, they never respond.” In August 2021, Melanie said in her Better Business Bureau review, “They give you only three days to cancel your account after signing up, and during those three days, they DO NOT ANSWER phone calls or emails, and no one comes to the front desk to help you if you go into the office. They literally do not allow you to cancel.

Customer Service		Doba
Chat Support
Email Support
Telephone Support
Fast Responses
24/7 Customer Service

SaleHoo vs Doba Customer Reviews

We believe that the best way to evaluate a company is by discovering what their customers are saying about it. It’s more illuminating to let customers speak for themselves than to provide our own thoughts so there is no bias. For this reason, we spent quite a bit of time having a look around the internet to see what reviews we could find about each platform. We have tried to identify recent reviews (i.e. circa 2020 and above) as we think these will be the most accurate.

SaleHoo has a 4.8 rating on Trustpilot, a popular review site which weights reviews based on how recent they are. Doba has a 2.8 rating. On the Better Business Bureau (BBB), SaleHoo has a 4.48 rating and Doba has a 1.18 rating.

SaleHoo consistently receives five-star reviews on TrustPilot (91%). In her SaleHoo review on Trustpilot, Michelle said that “I have had several interactions with SaleHoo over the past 6 months and each time my questions have been answered very quickly and to my satisfaction. Their customer service is top-notch and they practice what they preach. It's refreshing to interact with a business who has the best interests of clients in mind.

In November 2021, Paul, said in his g2.com review, “I previously had difficulties in reaching the right drop shippers for my site. With SaleHoo, it is smooth sailing! They give all the info on a platter, and I can pick the right drop shipper before contacting any of them. The real benefit is not only the info that SaleHoo gives but also the opportunity to deal with professional suppliers who are all vetted. It is easy to do great business if you can trust people.

In 2020, user Additc, wrote a full length review on Doba after using their platform for a year.  He mentioned that when his business ran into an order issue, “We then contacted Doba immediately using their chat system for them to ship out a new order. The operator tells us that she placed a request for us and that they will contact us back in 1–3 business days to give us instructions. We relay this information to the customer. Then, we don't hear from Doba after a whole week (meaning there's been no contact between us and the customer, either.) The customer complains, naturally.

Another Doba customer, Ashley said on her Better Business Bureau review to, “Please don't use them; their suppliers are delayed from the holiday. Yet, they make their customer seem as if it's their fault. They are basically making a profit on canceled orders from companies that use them and won't refund them.

In June 2021, Irmg said on their review on Facebook, “Ordering through Doba can take up to 5 business days and longer before you get a tracking number that your items have shipped. We have lost several sales because of DOBA's slow response. Customer service is poor unless you can reach one helpful person. It's like all they want is your money while providing zero help. Avoid them is my recommendation.

		Doba
Better Business Bureau (BBB)	4.5	1.18
Trustpilot Rating	4.8 “Excellent”	2.8 “Average”
Sitejabber	4.8	1.35
g2	4.9	No Reviews
Facebook	4.2	2.8

Top Alternatives

We can see the appeal of both SaleHoo and Doba as they offer supplier directories as well as dropshipping tools, which sets them apart from other competitors. However, it’s true there are other dropshipping alternatives out there. We have included some related articles below to help you compare some of the other options available to make a more informed decision.