How to Use AStools Deals After You Sign Up: Full Guide

Quick answer: After signing up at deals.astools.app, your tools live under My Account: save products to a Watchlist, organize them into Collections, set price-drop alerts, and run the Profit Simulator. AliExpress account connection is separate, found in your avatar menu, not the My Account sidebar.

Dashboard Overview: What You See After Login

When you sign in for the first time, the dashboard is clean and intentionally short. The sidebar on the left is your primary navigation — it stays consistent across all screens and contains links to every section: Dashboard, Watchlist, Collections, Alerts, Profit Simulator, Content, and Followed Niches.

The main panel on first login shows a welcome overview with four quick-start shortcuts:

• Browse trending — takes you to the live deals feed where you can find products to save
• Save first product — walks you to the trending feed to kick off your Watchlist
• Create a collection — opens the collection creation flow
• Run profit math — jumps to the Profit Simulator with default values loaded

Once you have used any of these, the welcome panel is replaced by a live stats summary: your total saved products, active price alerts, clicks on your public collections this month, and your top-clicked products. See our how to find the best AliExpress deals for more details.

At the top of every page, the nav bar shows your account avatar (top right), which is where the AliExpress connection lives — see that section below. See our AliExpress sale calendar 2026 for more details.

The dashboard is responsive, so it works on mobile browsers, but the full sidebar and table layouts are optimized for desktop use. If you are adding products and running the simulator on a product research session, a wider screen makes a meaningful difference in readability.

What Do You Get After Signing Up?

Signing up at deals.astools.app unlocks an account layer on top of the public trending deals feed: a personal Watchlist, custom Collections, price-drop Alerts, a Profit Simulator for margin math, and a history of any promo content you've generated. This guide walks through each one in the order you'll actually use them. If you haven't picked products to track yet, our July winning products picks is a good place to start before coming back here to save them.

What Do You Need Before Starting?

• A deals.astools.app account (sign up takes a few seconds via email or Google)
• No AliExpress account connection is required for any of the tools below — that's a separate, optional step covered near the end of this guide

Where Do You Find Your Dashboard?

Once you're signed in, go to My Account → Dashboard. On a brand-new account, you'll see a welcome panel with four shortcuts: Browse trending, Save first product, Create a collection, and Run profit math. Once you've used the account at all, the welcome panel is replaced by your real stats: clicks this month, active alerts, and your top-clicked products.

How Do You Save Products to Your Watchlist?

There's no "add" button on the Watchlist page itself — you save products from wherever you find them. On any product page, click Save. A small popover opens where you can toggle "Watchlist" on. The product now appears under My Account → Watchlist, showing its current price (with the original price struck through if it's discounted), an estimated margin, and a verdict badge reading BUY, WATCH or SKIP, plus a direct link to the AliExpress listing.

If you want a similar margin/verdict read while browsing AliExpress directly, rather than through the deals feed, the AliShopping Tools Chrome extension covers that use case.

Right after you save a product, a prompt appears offering to set a price-drop alert for it — that's the fastest way into the next section.

To remove a saved product later, use the delete (trash) icon in its Watchlist row. If your Watchlist grows large, use the search box at the top to filter by title or category, and the Export CSV button to download the full list. For a broader look at tracking price movement over time, see our guide on AliExpress price history tracking.

How Do You Set Price-Drop Alerts?

Alerts are created from the Watchlist flow, not from the Alerts page directly. When you save a product, you'll see a slider to set your alert threshold — anywhere from 5% to 30% off the current price (10% is the default). Pick a threshold and confirm, and you'll be notified if the price drops that much.

My Account → Alerts is where you review and manage alerts you've already set — it lists each one with its threshold and lets you delete it, but it isn't where you create a new one.

How Price Alerts Work

Price alerts are set per product at the moment you save it — but understanding what happens after that is worth knowing before you rely on them for sourcing decisions.

Setting the threshold

When you save a product and see the alert slider, you are setting a percentage-off threshold relative to the current listed price at the time you save. If you save a product at $12.99 and set a 15% alert, the alert fires when the price drops to $11.04 or below. The threshold is fixed at creation — it does not re-anchor if the price later climbs above your original save price and then drops again. If you want to reset the baseline, delete the alert and re-create it when the price is at the new level you want to track from.

How often prices are checked

Price data is refreshed regularly through the backend feed. You do not need to be logged in or have the page open — the checking runs server-side on the saved products across all accounts. When a product's listed price crosses your alert threshold, you receive a notification.

Notification channels

Alerts fire through the channels you have enabled in My Account → Settings → Notification preferences. You can turn Email and In-app delivery on or off separately for the Watchlist Alerts category. Both are on by default. If you are getting too many emails, turn off email delivery and rely on the in-app inbox instead — you will not miss alerts as long as you check the dashboard occasionally.

Managing alerts

My Account → Alerts lists every active alert with its product name, your threshold percentage, and the current price. You can delete alerts you no longer need from here. If a product's price drops below your threshold and fires the alert, the alert does not auto-delete — you manage the cleanup manually from the Alerts page. There is no bulk-delete yet; you remove them one at a time.

What alerts do not cover

Price alerts track the listed price on the product card in the deals feed — they do not track shipping cost changes, coupon availability, or seller-specific promotional pricing that sits outside the main price. For a broader look at price movement over time, see our guide on AliExpress price history tracking.

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Using Deals for 11.11 Prep

The AliExpress 11.11 Global Shopping Festival is the biggest single-day sale of the year. Prices move significantly in the weeks leading up to November 11 — often inflating first, then dropping on the day — which makes the deals dashboard a practical preparation tool if you set it up in advance.

Add products now, before pre-sale inflation starts

Sellers routinely raise baseline prices in October to make the 11.11 discount look larger than it is. If you save products to your Watchlist now — before prices climb — the price recorded at save time becomes your reference point. When 11.11 hits and a seller shows "50% off," you will know whether that is 50% off a price they quietly inflated from $9.99 to $19.99 in October, or a genuine deal from a stable price.

Set alerts at aggressive thresholds

For 11.11, set your alert thresholds higher than usual — 20–25% instead of the default 10%. The genuine 11.11 deals tend to be deep (30–50% off stable prices), and you want the alert to fire on the real drops, not on the routine 8–10% fluctuations that happen year-round.

Organize by category in Collections

Create a Collection called "11.11 Targets" and add everything you want to track for the sale. This gives you a single screen to review when the sale opens — no hunting through your full Watchlist. You can make the collection private (just for you) or share it with a buying partner via a public link.

Check trending products in the feed

The trending deals feed refreshes with active deals. In the days before and during 11.11, the feed will surface products with significant discounts — products that fire a lot of alert thresholds across the platform tend to show up there. Combine your Watchlist monitoring with browsing the feed on November 11 itself.

Use the Profit Simulator before buying

11.11 deals can still be bad deals if the margin math does not work after AliExpress shipping, your platform fee, and ad cost. Before adding a large quantity order based on an 11.11 price, run the Profit Simulator with the sale price plugged in as your cost price. A 30% product discount that only moves your net margin from 8% to 12% is real, but it is not a game-changer. A 40% drop that moves you from 5% to 22% margin is worth ordering aggressively.

For TikTok-trending products that tend to spike around the 11.11 season, our TikTok viral products October 2026 roundup covers what is moving this cycle.

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How Do You Organize Saves Into Collections?

Go to My Account → Collections and click New collection. Give it a name (up to 80 characters) and an optional description (up to 300 characters). New collections start private by default.

Inside a collection, use Edit to change its name, description, or visibility — a three-way toggle between Private, Shared, and Public. If you make a collection public, a Share button appears that copies a direct link you can send to anyone, no account required on their end to view it.

You can also create a new collection on the fly from any product's Save popover — just type a name in the "+ New collection" field and the product is added to it immediately.

How Does the Profit Simulator Work?

Go to My Account → Profit simulator. Seven inputs let you model a product's real economics: Cost price, Sell price, Units/month, Ad spend (% of revenue), Return rate (% of orders), Shipping cost per unit, and Platform fee (% of revenue). The simulator loads with reasonable starter defaults so you can see how it works before plugging in your own numbers — click Reset defaults any time to get back to them.

Click Run simulation and you'll get a monthly net profit figure, a Profitable/Loss badge, your margin and ROI percentages, a break-even unit count, and a full cost breakdown (cost of goods, ads, platform fees, shipping, and returns) so you can see exactly where your money goes. For the underlying math without needing an account, see our standalone dropshipping profit margin calculator guide.

Where Do You Review Past Generated Content?

My Account → Content is a history of promo content you've generated for products — Facebook posts, TikTok captions, product descriptions, or blog intros — with a preview of each and the date it was created. It's a review-and-manage screen, not where content generation itself happens; use the delete button here to clear out entries you don't need anymore.

Where Do You Check Notifications?

Your notifications (price alerts firing, restock pings, and similar updates) show up in the notification inbox, reachable from your dashboard's "Active alerts" stat. Unread items are marked, and you can mark one or all of them as read.

Where Do You Manage Settings and Your API Key?

My Account → Settings covers two things: a card to save a Cerebras API key (used for AI-assisted features — grab one at cloud.cerebras.ai if you don't have one), and a notification preferences card where you choose Email and/or In-app delivery separately for three categories — Flash deals, Watchlist alerts, and Restock notifications.

How Do You Connect Your AliExpress Account?

This is the one step that trips people up: AliExpress account connection is not in the My Account → Settings page above. It's a separate page, reached from the account menu in the top-right corner of any page (click your avatar), not from the My Account sidebar.

From there, click Connect AE, and you'll be redirected to AliExpress to authorize the connection. When you're brought back, you'll see a confirmation and, once connected, your seller ID and token expiration date. If you ever need to unlink it, that same settings page has a Disconnect button.

None of the tools in this guide require the AliShopping Tools extension to be installed — they're two separate products that both work with AliExpress data, so use whichever fits where you're working (the deals dashboard here, or the extension directly on AliExpress product pages).

Troubleshooting

• "I can't find where to follow a niche/category." There's no way to follow a niche from the interface yet — the Followed Niches page (My Account → Followed niches) itself works and lists what you follow once that's possible, but the follow action isn't available yet. An empty Followed Niches page is expected for now, not something you're missing.
• "I can't find AliExpress connection under Settings." It's genuinely not there — see the AliExpress connection section above, it's in the top-right avatar menu instead.
• "My alert didn't fire." Alerts only trigger on the specific condition you set (e.g., a price drop of at least your chosen percentage) — check the threshold you picked in My Account → Alerts.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to connect my AliExpress account to use the Watchlist or Simulator?

No. Watchlist, Collections, Alerts, and the Profit Simulator all work without connecting an AliExpress account. Connecting AliExpress is a separate, optional step covered above.

Can I make a Collection public without anyone needing an account?

Yes. Once a Collection's visibility is set to Public, the Share button gives you a link anyone can open and view without signing up.

How many products can I save to my Watchlist?

There's no fixed cap on how many products you can save. The Watchlist page itself loads your most recent items first; use the search box to find anything further back.

Can I set an alert for something other than a price drop?

Right now, the alert you can create yourself from the interface is a price-drop alert (5-30% off). Other alert types may appear on your account depending on activity, but there isn't a manual way to create them yet.

What happens if I disconnect my AliExpress account?

Your Watchlist, Collections, Alerts, and Simulator history are unaffected — those are tied to your AStools Deals account, not your AliExpress connection. Disconnecting only removes the link between the two accounts; you can reconnect any time.

Can I track the same product across multiple price points?

You can save the same product more than once with different alert thresholds if you want layered notifications — for example, one alert at 10% off and another at 25% off. Each saves as a separate alert entry. That said, if you are tracking a specific product for 11.11 preparation, a single high-threshold alert (20–25%) is usually cleaner than multiple overlapping ones.

Is the Profit Simulator connected to my Watchlist prices?

Not automatically. The Profit Simulator is a standalone calculator — you enter the cost price manually. There is no one-click "load Watchlist product into simulator" yet. If you want to run the math on a saved product, note its current price from the Watchlist row and enter it as the cost price in the simulator.

How do I know if a deal is actually good or just looks good?

The verdict badge on each Watchlist item (BUY, WATCH, or SKIP) gives you a quick read. BUY means the product scores well on the platform's margin and demand signals; SKIP means the numbers do not support it at the current price. That badge updates when price data refreshes — so a product you saved weeks ago with a WATCH badge may have shifted to BUY or SKIP since. Always re-check the badge before acting on a price alert. For a deeper read on how the scoring works, see our guide on how the Winning Score works.

Can I see the price history of a product in my Watchlist?

The Watchlist shows the current price and the original price at the time of saving. For a full historical price chart showing how a product's price has moved over time on AliExpress, see our guide on AliExpress price history tracking.

Does the AliShopping Tools Chrome extension work separately from the Deals dashboard?

Yes — they are two separate products that complement each other. The AliShopping Tools extension (extension ID agiaehdeifaihlndhnhcmopjpjijnfap) runs on AliExpress product pages in your browser and shows you competition, trend, profit, and risk signals in a panel directly on the listing. The Deals dashboard at deals.astools.app is a web app where you track products over time, set alerts, and run deeper profit modeling. You can use either independently, or both together for the most complete picture.