Online Arbitrage seems like a simple sort of business when you think about it—you merely find products at low prices from retailers then sell high on Amazon.
Considering that many dropshippers pull in 6 to 7 figures, there’s no doubt that it can be a lucrative venture.
However, many drop shipping operations struggle just to get out of the gate. They don’t do the research and aren’t prepared for the various challenges thrust upon them by the industry’s landscape.
Plus, given the ample opportunity for anyone to try their hand as a dropshipper (at only $39.99 a month), competition is at an all-time high.
When an industry becomes competitive, you really need to be operating with optimal efficiency to get ahead of the pack.
That’s why it’s a downright necessity to arm yourself with the best available resources in order to succeed. Namely, you need inventory/order management software, such as OAGenius.
In fact, without said software, your drop shipping business won’t be able to survive in such a competitive environment.
Know Your Stock
If there’s one thing that’s quite clear, Amazon customers get pretty cranky when they don’t get their purchase in a timely manner.
When you’re a seller, reviews mean everything. Bad reviews mean a worse reputation and less interest in your products. Long delivery times caused by ‘out of stock’ items being sold are usually a one-way ticket to poor reviews.
Bad reviews are only the beginning if you can’t manage to fulfill enough of those orders, and have to cancel more than 2% of them, your Amazon account will be at risk of deactivation.
It takes a measured approach to prevent ‘out-of-stock’ items from being sold. OAGenius inventory management technology is specifically designed to combat this costly scenario.
Given that it monitors stocks across supported retail sites and adjusts listings accordingly, OAGenius is the must-have software if you’re a dropshipper.
A good Amazon drop shipping inventory management platform will deplete and relist items depending on whether they are in or out of stock on your sourcing site.
With OAGenius, you won’t have to deal with any stock snafus ever again—nor will you have to manually adjust your stock list. This saves you from wasted time and money, from potential suspensions, and from unnecessary customer service strife.
Keeping Track of Price Changes
Your business is growing and your list of items for sale is reaching heights you could have never imagined.
Also, prices fluctuate non-stop on Amazon. Meaning no one price stays the same. As a dropshipper, you’re constantly competing to offer the most viable prices and for the Buy Box (the ‘Add to Cart’ box responsible for nine out of every ten of Amazon’s sales).
To prevent your prices from either rising too high to sell or sinking too low to make any money, you can use price-monitoring technology.
You can track source site pricing manually when you’re dealing with 5 items or fewer. However, once your inventory begins to mount, you’ll need automation - unless you want to waste valuable hours tracking items without the extra help.
Thankfully, OAGenius has a price-monitoring feature that integrates (via API) with a repricer called informed.co (formerly Appeagle). The price-monitor from OAGenius searches for the most up to date pricing on source site then pushes the updated total cost to the repricer.
If this is set up properly within your informed.co strategy, you will be able to set your minimum and maximum thresholds for any item based on desired profit ($/%), ROI, and more.
By using a price monitor that syncs via API to your repricer you will save hours each week configuring your min and max selling thresholds.
Listings can be listed and repriced within minutes, all with a few clicks of a button.
informed.co provides you with the most competitive minute by minute pricing by utilizing expert strategy and proven analytics.
Managing Orders Without the Headaches
When you start your business, your small amount of daily orders can be handled with the simple use of a spreadsheet.
Once you eclipse those initial stages and start moving higher volumes of items, managing order fulfillment can prove to be one of your greatest obstacles.
OAGenius provides the versatility that allows you to organize orders, calculate profits, automate shipment tracking into the software and Amazon, set order statuses, create customer service notes, and search for orders in seconds.
Plus, individual SKU reports or supplier level reports including profitability, the volume of orders, refund rates and more, are accessible with ease both in the application or via CSV export.
With OAGenius, you will not only save yourself and your employees hours of work and hundreds of dollars in labor expenses/management, but you will also be operating more fluidly and accurately so you can have some peace of mind.
Instead, you can focus on scaling your business and living the life you imagined. Don’t be a slave to the business!
Finding the Right Items
You need to be selling profitable items. Unfortunately, sourcing these products can sap you of time, energy, and profits.
What if there was a tool that would automate this process and allow you to find valuable products 25x quicker than manual sourcing? That’s what you gain when you have OAGenius’s product sourcing extension.
You can bulk-scan source retailer pages, identify profitable products in an instant, and compare to the same item on Amazon instantly. You can filter for items by desired profit, sales rank, and ROI.
The sourcing extension is great for both FBM/MFN (fulfilled by merchant) online arbitrage dropshippers and traditional FBA (fulfilled by Amazon) retail arbitrage sellers.
Once you start sourcing your products with OAGenius, you’ll wonder how you ever did without it!
Conclusion
As you start to grow your business, you’ll realize quickly that doing things manually isn’t going to cut it. It’s time consuming, inaccurate, and inefficient.
Your success and survival as a dropshipper depends on how well you manage the business. It is a necessity to invest in powerful and accurate software automation.
The only questions you have to answer are “how quickly do I want to scale my business?”, and “do I want to be set up for success on day one or do I want to undo bad habits and process at a later date?”
Arbitrage is a lucrative business, but if you don’t do it the right way, you won’t get the results you desire.
