How to Automate Your Dropshipping Business
Building and scaling a dropshipping business isn’t the easiest thing to do. It’s even harder when you are trying to do it all by yourself.
Automating your dropshipping day-to-day is how you make sure you are not drained and stuck on grunt work. When you automate, you have time to expand your e-commerce business, attract more customers, and generate more revenue.
Before We Dive Into Dropshipping Automation…Here’s a Quick Disclaimer🙃
Automation in dropshipping doesn’t mean you are using sophisticated software, it simply means you are outsourcing your dropshipping tasks such as product research, marketing, customer service, and others to professionals.
Now, let’s take a deep dive into dropshipping automation and how you can leverage it to grow your business⏬
So, Why Should You Automate Your Dropshipping Business?
There are so many turning wheels in dropshipping, from managing supplier relationships to handling customer service, marketing, and more. It’s easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day tasks and neglect other important aspects of the business.
Also, running your dropshipping business without automation can make it hard to make executive decisions. When you are spending your time running the day-to-day, it’s hard to see your business through the lens of a CEO or business developer. You end up running your business like an employee looking to complete their tasks, not as a CEO looking to grow and scale their business globally.
Parts of Dropshipping Should You Automate?
Here are the dropshipping services you should be outsourcing and who you should hire:
- Product Research
Product research is the foundation of a successful dropshipping business. It is identifying high-demand products your target audience wants or needs.
While you can outsource this task to a freelancer, having your product researcher on a retainer and giving them a vested interest in your business like performance bonuses or equity is more advisable. This will motivate them to find winning products because they will also make money from it.
- Website Design
Having a well-designed and user-friendly website helps you generate impressive website traffic and conversion. You can find affordable website designers on freelance websites such as Fiverr, Upwork, and others.
Also, while you don’t need a full-time web designer, keeping at least one website designer on a retainer allows you to regularly update your website design without having to spend so much hiring a new designer.
- Marketing
You need marketing/advertising to drive traffic to your dropshipping store and generate sales. This involves social media management, content creation, PPC, SEO, SEM, and more.
When outsourcing marketing tasks, especially ads, it’s always advisable to pay your contractor based on profits from ad spend, not on a retainer. This will motivate them to develop effective ad campaigns that will generate traffic and sales to your dropshipping store.
- Customer Service
You also need excellent customer service to build customer loyalty and foster a positive brand reputation. Typically, your customer service agents should be people who understand your company culture. So, hire contractors or full-time staff.
- Supplier Relationship Management.
Establishing reliable and trustworthy supplier relationships helps you to maintain product quality, timely deliveries, and business sustainability.
When outsourcing this task, go for someone with excellent negotiation skills, this will make sure you get the best deals from suppliers, increasing your profit margin.
- Operations
After automating your dropshipping business and you have started making a sustainable profit, maybe for 6 months to a year, you need to hire an operations specialist. The operations activities of a dropshipping business can be time-consuming; outsourcing your operations streamline operations and free up your time for more strategic activities.
Also, your operations specialist should be someone with a vested in your business, for example, you can pay them a retainer fee and add attractive performance bonuses or stock options. Doing this will motivate them to ensure your dropshipping business runs smoothly and that other employees perform their tasks excellently.
Should You Automate All Parts of Your Dropshipping Business?
It all depends on how big your dropshipping business is. As a new merchant, you don’t have to automate all parts of your dropshipping business. However, if you are looking to rapidly scale your dropshipping business, you should automate both your basic and managerial tasks.
Let’s Break Down The Two Major Types of Dropshipping Automation and Who They Work For⏬
Standard Automation
This involves automating the time-consuming parts of your dropshipping business like website design, marketing, and customer service. You could still be in charge of managerial tasks like procurement and supplier relationship management.
You should go with this automation if you are a new drop shipper to minimize costs. Spending so much on automation, while you haven’t started generating significant sales could crash your dropshipping business.
Advanced Automation
With advanced automation, you are not dealing with basic or managerial tasks- everything is done for you. Instead, you are focusing on your dropshipping business development, strategic partnerships with global suppliers, and making executive decisions like new locations to expand into, and more.
This automation is a great solution if you are a rapidly growing dropshipping business looking to scale up and become a big brand. It completely eliminates all distractions, allowing you to critically review your dropshipping business performance such as sales or customer satisfaction, and find innovative ways to optimize it.
Trendhijacking- the Smarter Way to Automate Your Dropshipping Business
Whether you are looking to completely automate your dropshipping business or only outsource the basic tasks, trendhijacking has a customized automation program for you.
What Are the Trendhijacking Programs?
The Basic Trend Hijacking Program- This program is for you if you are a beginner looking to grow your dropshipping business sales. You learn about dropshipping automation best practices and how to use them to scale your business from the ground up to $10k sales /month.
The Partner’s Program- This program is a perfect fit if you are an experienced drop shipper struggling to scale up or generate more sales from your dropshipping business. You get to learn how to profitably automate your dropshipping business to up to $50k sales/month. You also get recommendations on who to hire and suppliers to partner with.
The Automation Program- This is the complete dropshipping automation program, perfect for you if you have a rapidly growing e-commerce business. It is also a great fit if you want to expand aggressively or you simply don’t have the time to effectively run your dropshipping business.
All your outsourcing and dropshipping tasks will be done for you from customer service to supplier partners with a laser focus on generating over $100k sales/month for your e-commerce store. You’ll simply review performance data such as sales to make strategic decisions to grow your dropshipping business.
The Bottom Line
There are so many different parts to dropshipping and juggling them all doesn’t necessarily minimize your costs, it almost always guarantees inefficiency and low sales. Automating your dropshipping business is how you take your sales and customer satisfaction from the ground up.
Keep in mind that the level of automation you need depends on the size and profits of your dropshipping business. So, using an effective and tailored automation program like Trend Hijacking allows you to effortlessly reach your sales goals and frees you up from the tedious daily tasks of running a dropshipping business.
