How much does CJdropshipping charge?

There is no monthly fee, and that is the point

CJdropshipping charges nothing to open an account, nothing to keep it open and nothing to fulfil an order beyond the cost of the order itself. At 20 orders a month you pay $0 in subscriptions. At 2,000 orders a month you still pay $0.

That is the structural difference against Zendrop at $79/mo and Spocket at $39.99/mo. Those platforms charge rent; CJ charges rent inside the unit price. Which is cheaper depends entirely on your volume, and below roughly 60 orders a month it is not close.

What one order actually costs

The number that matters is landed cost — product plus shipping to the customer’s door, as one figure. On the standard worked example used across this site:

• Product cost: $8.40
• CJPacket shipping to the US: $4.60
• Landed cost: $13.00

On a $49.95 selling price that leaves $35.20 of gross profit after payment fees, and a break-even ROAS of 1.42. Put your own quote into the break-even calculator — the CJ figure, not the AliExpress item price, which excludes shipping and misleads everyone at least once.

The free thing worth using

Sourcing requests cost nothing. You send a product URL, and within about 48 hours CJ comes back with a quoted landed cost per unit including shipping to your market.

That is genuinely useful before you commit to a product, because it tells you whether the margin exists at all. It is also the only reliable way to price a product AliExpress carries badly.

Where the money actually goes

Three lines account for almost every surprise on a CJ invoice:

Shipping method. The gap between the cheapest and the fastest line on the same SKU is commonly $3-$5 a unit. That is 8-14% of a $35.20 gross profit, decided by a dropdown.

Packaging. An insert card at $0.05-$0.20 a unit is cheap and worth it once a product works. A custom mailer at $0.15-$0.45 needs 500-1,000 units, which is real money spent on a product that still has roughly an 80% chance of failing.

Unit price drift. CJ prices are not fixed. Re-check quarterly on anything running behind paid traffic.

What CJ does not publish

Photography, video production and warehouse storage are quoted per request rather than listed on a public rate card. This page will not invent a number for them.

Ask for the figure in writing before you agree to the service, and treat any guide that quotes a precise price for CJ photography as guessing. The same rule applies to storage: if you are pre-buying stock, get the monthly cost per cubic metre in writing first.

Compared with paying a subscription

At 20 orders a month, CJ costs $0 in fees and Zendrop Pro costs $3.95 per order. At 200 orders a month, CJ still costs $0 and Zendrop is about $0.40 per order — at which point the subscription is no longer the deciding factor and interface and catalogue are.

That crossover is the entire Zendrop-versus-CJ argument, and it is worked through in Zendrop vs CJdropshipping.

What to do

Do not open a CJ account to browse. Open one when you have a product doing five to ten orders a day on AliExpress, file a sourcing request on that exact SKU, and compare the quoted landed cost against what you pay now. If CJ is $1 more per unit but cuts delivery from 14 days to 4, that is usually the better trade — the full comparison across every supplier is on the supplier comparison.