1. Adding Products To Your Store
Importing products to your Shopify store is the first step in your e-commerce business process and is crucial for its success This can be a timely task. Once you have your selected item you’d like to dropship, you need to edit the title, product description, and sometimes the images, and arrange everything to ensure it becomes profitable.
Assuming you are running a diverse store and not a one-item landing page, you have more than one product to add to your online store. Adding items to your stores can be time-consuming when done one by one, therefore drop shippers turn to different Shopify apps for a quicker and simpler solution.
Dropshipping apps include importing solutions such as basic product importers that you paste in your product URL or item ID for an automatic grab of details, which saves you loads of time on manual insertion. They also have bulk import options which can upload numerous products at once in the same way, or through CSV file, scheduled imports that let you select the time and date of when you’d like those products added so you don’t need to sit around and make yourself available at that time, and many more. All of these can help you achieve an automated dropshipping store.
2. Product Monitoring For Store Safety
Without a monitoring system to scan your supplier's products to see if there are any price or stock changes, you can find yourself in tricky situations. If you get an order and the product is no longer available, you lose your sale and profit.
And what if the price has gone up and it is no longer profitable? You either will have a sale with a loss or need to cancel your customer's order. This will not only leave a bad impression on your customers but can seriously damage your brand, especially as a beginner.
This is another crucial aspect of automated dropshipping that has been taken care of by third-party platforms in order to assure safety for dropshipping businesses.
Whichever dropshipping app’s monitoring system you will use and connect your store to, will scan and track your product's price and stock changes and automatically update those changes to your store to avoid those problems mentioned above.
3. Automatic Order Fulfillment
Once your store is up and running and you are getting multiple orders a day, manually processing orders is a tedious time-wasting task.
Going back and forth between orders, your supplier's pages, and filling them out one by one gets old. Having a one-click order option or additional order management help will save you so much time and allow you to focus on finding more best selling products to add to your store and improve your store marketing strategies.
4. Tracking Number Updates
Customer satisfaction from a seller's point begins before the product even arrives at the buyer. Before a customer can enjoy their purchased item, their item is shipped. There is no instant result as with shopping retail in-store. A huge factor in making sure we have happy customers and returning buyers is providing fast-tracking.
Imagine yourself now having tens of orders a day and having to follow up with every single individual product and its supplier, order, and tracking number, to be able to update the buyer. Sounds like a nightmare! Well, once again this is why we have apps to connect to our stores to run all of this behind the scenes for us.
5. Hiring A VA
VA = Virtual Assistant. A virtual assistant is a self-employed worker who focuses on providing clients with assistance on the administrative side of their businesses. Instead of working from their workplace, they usually work from their home office.
There are several benefits to hiring a virtual assistant rather than an in-person employee. First, you have a much wider talent pool of candidates since they can be anywhere with a solid internet connection. Second, you can hire candidates from countries with lower wages than what they would cost in a more developed nation. Third, you can hire them only for what you need. This could be an ongoing relationship or a one-time job.
For dropshipping businesses, they can help primarily with tasks related to data entry, order fulfillment, and customer service, among others. Since now there are such advanced automation technologies, the main involvement you will seek from a VA is customer service for your customers.
6. Dropshipping Suppliers
Products are the name of the game, clearly. Your dropshipping success comes from the items you choose to sell. This means, that working with the right suppliers is crucial for the longevity of your store!
There are plenty of suppliers you can dropship from, but since we know how important it is to have price and stock monitoring, a good importing solution, and of course the very beneficial automated orders feature, another very important factor when choosing an app to work with is the suppliers they support.
