The Basics of Building an Automated Dropshipping Store

Looking for tips to get an automated dropshipping store? You’re in the right place then!

Once upon a time, businesspeople were limited to opening stores in physical buildings.

These days, a new generation of entrepreneurs doesn’t need to worry about a storefront or physical inventory. It’s all thanks to the dropshipping model.

Automated dropshipping can make your business scalable, affordable, and easy to run. You just need to know how to set it up. Here’s what you need to know about dropshipping, why it’s difficult to manage without automation, and how our model makes all the difference.

The Basics of Dropshipping

To set up an effective dropshipping business, you should first understand how dropshipping works.

Dropshipping is a way to sell physical products without an actual storefront, allowing you to buy at wholesale prices without purchasing in bulk.

Think of it as a highly streamlined business.

A retailer like Target or Home Depot has physical inventory and a physical store in which to display and sell that inventory. But to sell large quantities of the same thing, they have to buy large quantities from a supplier at a wholesale price. They make a profit by marking up those products before selling them.

Dropshipping is the same basic principle. The difference is that you don’t have a physical store and you don’t have to buy your products in advance. In a dropshipping model, a customer purchases a product through your site. You then place their order with your supplier and get the product shipped to your customer.

That way, you don’t have to maintain an in-house inventory, and you don’t have to deal with the cost of creating products, maintaining unsold inventory, and keeping employees to handle inventory. Your supplier does all of that for you.

The Difficulty of Managing Dropshipping

There is one big problem with dropshipping: trying to manage your inventory the old-fashioned way.

You see, while you don’t have to deal with an in-house inventory, you still have to coordinate an inventory to deliver products to your customers.

Think of it this way: when your inventory is online and managed by a third-party supplier, every surprise sell-out slows you down. And your success as a dropshipper relies heavily on your speed and efficiency compared to other retailers.

When dropshipping first began, it was a nightmare for business owners. Managing an inventory took all of your time. In the following paragraph, we will describe how this system evolved in time and how it becomes full automatized.

Traditional Dropshipping

This is what we’ll call the traditional dropshipping model. It follows a specific process.

First, you had to find suppliers that could dropship your products. They provide the product description, price, and picture (again, manually). Once you have the relevant information, you could create a page product on your store and start to sell. When orders start arriving on your store, you need to create an Excel sheet for each supplier with the orders related to his specific products.

When the order is shipped out, they will send back to you by excel file a list of fulfilled orders and tracking numbers, which you have to check manually throughout the process.

Now, imagine completing that process for a hundred customers at any given time. Sure, you can do bulk orders, but you’re still going to waste most of your time trying to stay on top of customer orders and managing your supplier.

Oberlo and Dropified

Things start to change with Oberlo and Dropified. These apps help you connect your store directly to AliExpress (an online store like Amazon, owned by Alibaba) and use it as a marketplace for dropshippers like you. You could automatically import the products on your store and they make it easier to pay orders.

However, there is a couple of problems also with this system.

First, purchasing on Aliexpress, you have to buy at business-to-consumer prices, rather than wholesale prices, which shrinks your profit margins considerably. You also have to deal with multiple AliExpress suppliers to get your products. Each supplier has its own quality standards and shipping rules. Plus you can’t sell private labeled products, so this means that you can’t really build a brand.

So even if these apps help you to simplify the management of your dropshipping business and in part also to automate some business daily tasks, they still leave your online store in a state of constant flux. You’re spending a little less time babysitting your inventory, but not much.

The Yakkyofy Difference

We know that this model is not ultimately sustainable if you want to make a real income with dropshipping. It’s expensive, it leaves your quality standards up in the air, and it’s an inefficient use of your time.

That’s why we made something better.

Our system allows you to completely automate your dropshipping business so that you can stop worrying about small daily tasks and focus on keeping your customers happy.

With Yakkyofy, you can import a product on your store with all the relevant information with only one click. When an order arrives in your store, our system automatically processes it for you so that you don’t ever have to worry about falling behind on order fulfillment.

Plus, the system bundles together multiple item orders so that you can save money on shipping (thus boosting your profit margins).

And when our system handles an order for you, it provides you with all the tracking numbers related to your orders and automatically sends them to your Shopify customers.

Moreover, with Yakkyofy you can dropship private label products and this means that you will be able to create your own brand, build a successful business that can generate customer loyalty and last in time.

Basically, it’s a system that’s designed for smarter, faster, more effective dropshipping. It provides you with the tools you need to create a profitable dropshipping business, all without the stress and worry of a traditional dropshipping model.