The short answer is: technically, yes. The more useful answer is: you probably shouldn't, and here's a clear-eyed look at why.
AliExpress is one of the first places new dropshippers look because it's familiar, it connects to Shopify through tools like DSers, and the product variety is vast. For many categories, it works. For English-language books sold to US customers, it runs into a stack of interconnected problems that compound on each other in ways that are hard to work around.
What "Possible" Actually Looks Like
You can, in practice, import AliExpress book listings to Shopify, set prices, and start taking orders. The infrastructure to do this exists. But let's trace what happens from there.
You'll quickly find that your catalog is limited to what AliExpress sellers happen to carry - a narrow slice of the full English-language book market, weighted toward top bestsellers and popular titles. If your store is niche-focused (which is the strategic advice most Shopify ecommerce coaches give), AliExpress probably can't supply your core catalog at all.
The product pages you build from AliExpress listings will be thin. Missing ISBNs, incomplete descriptions, potentially wrong editions. You'll either publish those thin pages and hurt your store's credibility and SEO, or you'll spend significant time manually enriching each listing - which defeats much of the efficiency dropshipping is supposed to offer.
The Fulfillment Experience You're Delivering
When a customer orders a book from your store, they're going to wait 14 to 30 days. The book will arrive - if it arrives in good condition and is the correct edition - after a journey that included international transit, customs clearance, and domestic last-mile delivery. Some percentage of those shipments will arrive damaged. Some percentage will be unauthorized reprints that look subtly wrong. Some percentage will simply be delayed beyond even the extended estimates.
Each of those outcomes requires you to navigate AliExpress's dispute process on the customer's behalf while the customer waits longer for a resolution.
The Counterfeit Exposure
The grey-market reprint problem on AliExpress is not a minor footnote. Publishers and rights holders actively pursue unauthorized reproductions, and downstream retailers are not automatically shielded from liability just because they didn't manufacture the counterfeit copy. If you're selling books through your store and some of them are unauthorized reprints from AliExpress, you're carrying legal exposure you may not be aware of.
What Building on a Solid Foundation Looks Like
BooksCloud offers 2M+ titles from 30,000+ publishers - legitimate, publisher-grade editions. The app integrates directly with Shopify, handles metadata, fulfills from within the US with USPS Media Mail, and charges a flat $7 shipping fee per order. You pay nothing to install it and nothing until you make a sale.
One reviewer put it well: "One of the easiest apps ever to integrate with Shopify. Game changer for anyone who wants to add books to their store."
The difference between building on AliExpress and building on BooksCloud isn't a minor operational preference - it's the difference between a store that will consistently frustrate customers and one that can actually grow.
The Honest Bottom Line
AliExpress wasn't built for book retail. It doesn't have the selection, the data infrastructure, the quality controls, or the fulfillment speed that a professional English-language bookstore requires. You can build something there, but what you build won't be competitive, won't be legally clean, and won't deliver the customer experience you need to develop repeat buyers.