In becoming an Amazon dropshipper, the man-hours you put into your business will be a bigger investment than any monetary amount.
Financially, there are minimal barriers when getting started. There’s no URL to register, no physical inventory or warehouse to pay for, and you only spend on a product once an order is placed.
Your primary expense is the $39.99 monthly for an Amazon professional seller’s account.
Minimize Financial Barriers to Starting Your Dropshipping Business
Dropshippers often see a 500% annual increase in revenue during their first few years in the industry, while other startups make back just 67% of their original investment after 18 months. It’s easy to see why dropshipping is an enticing career path.
That’s not to call dropshipping easy money. It requires a ton of work, passion, and drive. However, by putting in the effort and working smart, you’ll see growth.
Given Amazon’s vast range of potential customers - 2.5 billion to be exact - the chances of finding buyers are in your favor if you hustle. Within your first month in business, you should have around 10+ listings and garnered enough revenue to cover the yearly cost of your Amazon fees.
You’ll also be comfortable with the various machinations of dropshipping—including your daily tasks and how to purchase and sell items.
With the beginning stages behind you, spending approximately $400 on automation software and $160 on employees will fortify your operation. $560 is a small price to pay compared to how much you’ll be making.
Automation Saves Your Biggest Commodity; Time.
It’s all well and good to put tons of hours into your business, but the hours you spend must be valuable, not dedicated to chasing your tail while performing menial tasks.
In a survey, 74% of marketers claimed that the main benefit of automation technology was time saved.
With the list of helpful automation tools below, you’ll spend your precious time in a way that generates the most profits:
OAGenius Enables Real Amazon Automation
OAGenius is intuitive to all things dropshipping, offering a versatile suite of tools that help manage multiple facets of your operation. With OAGenius, tasks such as product listing, inventory management, price monitoring, and order fulfillment become more organized and less time-consuming as you scale your business.
At $175/month, OAGenius is a frugal investment that pays for itself in time saved and otherwise untapped opportunities.
For an additional $29/month, OAGenius has a product sourcing extension with the following features:
Enhanced product browsing
Price comparison tools
Product filtering
Accelerated buying/selling tools that sync with other inventory management software
They’ve also launched fully-automated ordering for Walmart. With this feature enabled, the software will automatically log into the sourcing site and place any new orders that are rolling in. Best of all, if an item comes back in stock, they place that order immediately.
This is a case where automation really speeds up a dropshipper's daily workflow, giving them a huge advantage over other Amazon sellers.
As a safeguard, the feature will only order items that you confirm as a match. Other security advantages of automation are obvious. Software never gets tired, so it never enters incorrect recipient info or quantity. Plus, you don’t need to trust VA’s with your credit card info, giving you peace of mind in addition to saving time.
Be Informed. Win the Buy Box.
Informed.co is a tool with proven results, reporting an average 63% increase of Buy Box ownership for dropshippers after 2 weeks. It’s through features such as automated price changing, actionable analytics, and compatibility with OAGenius that make this software a must-have for arbitragers.
Given informed.co’s Buy Box success rates, the $150.00/month you’ll be spending will equate to a mere ripple in your financial waters.
Repair Feedback and Improve Product Reviews.
Create customized emails and fully configured campaigns to maximize positive feedback with FeedbackWhiz. They'll automatically monitor all critical events on your Amazon product listings, even when you're offline. That means you'll get alerted instantly about new product reviews, seller feedback, hijacker activity, listing title changes, buy box losses, pricing shifts, and more.
Making sure you have positive product reviews is soundly worth the investment in a tool like FeedbackWhiz. Plus, they offer 50% off your first month to really boost the ROI.
Free Yourself from Return Process Headaches.
Once you're doing a decent amount of sales with your Amazon dropshipping business, you're going to want to make sure you have a solid plan to deal with returns. We've tried a bunch of options in this area, and can confidently say that Reverse DS is the best way to get a competitive edge when handling your dropshipping returns.
Unlike anything on the market, Reverse DS combines cutting edge return software and a full warehouse service to make it all happen. They offer receiving and storage for all incoming and outgoing returns, real-time return tracking, and complete return fulfillment. You can get 14 days free by signing up here.
Sooth Your Password Pain
When you’re utilizing multiple programs to scale your business, spend the $2/month on LastPass to automate your password management.
Passwords account for 81% of business breaches, so you need strong, unique passwords that change every 3 months for each respective account.
Leverage tools such as LastPass’s password generator, first-rate storage, and simplified logins to save yourself the time of having to create and memorize a long list of difficult passwords. You have more important things to do.
Even Leadership Can Be Automated
As the SKUs keeping adding up, shipping snafus and customer service emergencies will be a cold hard reality—especially when doing everything on your own.
You’ll need employees to mitigate potential hiccups.
Thankfully, Hubstaff offers handy employee management tools such as productivity tracking, online timesheets, and time tracking that streamline your leadership tasks.
The pricing is scaled to the size of your team:
1 employee for $5/month
3 employees for $10/month
“5 Star” Feedback Automation
Business Insider claims that a product with one review is 65% more likely to be purchased than a product with none.
With Feedback Genius, you’ll have automation technology that sends e-mails to buyers based on tracking information from FedEx, USPS, and UPS. Touching customers with follow up e-mails is crucial for anyone in sales and increases your chances of obtaining valuable feedback and reviews.
Best of all? Feedback Genius is free to start.
Pro tip: Download our free customer service service templates.
Copy and Paste Your Formula for Success
Spot N Paste’s respective universal copier and paste tools integrate with top dropshipping software.
With one click you can do the following:
Add addresses to Amazon from eBay
Add Amazon items to your cart from eBay
Mark orders as ordered
Save hours of time and pay only $9.99/month.
The Bottom Line on Automation for Dropshipping
The biggest financial drain on your dropshipping operation won’t be the money invested in automation. Instead, it’ll be the profitable opportunities missed because you didn’t invest in the necessary tools.
Comments