How to Automate Your Dropshipping Business

Learning how to automate dropshipping can make it easier to coordinate orders, suppliers, inventory updates, shipping details, and customer communication. When those tasks are handled manually, even a growing business can quickly become difficult to manage.

Dropshipping automation helps reduce repetitive work by routing orders, updating inventory, sending supplier information, and returning tracking details to the sales channel. In this guide, we will explain what dropshipping automation is, which parts of the workflow can be automated, and what to look for in a dropshipping management platform.

Why Automate a Dropshipping Business?

Dropshipping automation helps merchants manage a larger order volume without manually handling every step of the fulfillment process.

The main benefits include:

Less repetitive order entry
Faster routing of orders to suppliers
More accurate inventory updates
Fewer fulfillment errors
Faster tracking updates
Better visibility across suppliers and sales channels

Automation does not remove the need to oversee suppliers or resolve exceptions. It reduces the routine work so your team can focus on customer service, supplier relationships, merchandising, and growth.

What Is Dropshipping Automation?

Dropshipping automation uses software to move orders and fulfillment information between your sales channels and suppliers.

When a customer places an order, the software may automatically:

Identify which supplier should fulfill each product
Route the order to that supplier
Update inventory or availability
Receive shipping and tracking information
Send the tracking details back to the sales channel

The exact workflow depends on the supplier, sales channel, and level of integration available.

How Does a Fully Automated Dropshipping Business Work?

You can fully automate your entire dropshipping business, or you can pick and choose what you want to automate.

1. Automate Adding Products to Your Ecommerce Store

The first step is to automate adding products to your store. The best dropshipping automation software will make adding new products much easier than manually. Ordoro offers full inventory management software that will help you keep track of all your products when you automate adding them.

Automation will take a single or bulk item from your supplier and place it on your target marketplace, eBay, Shopify, etc. in a short period of time. It automatically copies everything that is possible: title, photos, product description, product specifications, etc.

With a dropshipping management tool, you can schedule your product additions for events or sales.

2. Automate Listing Optimization

Optimizing your product listings for better traction can be tedious, frustrating work, but you can automate this function. For instance, you can automate Shopify store to optimize titles and descriptions for each product by giving the software rules to follow.

Certain parts of your product listings are boilerplate, so the software uses templates for your store policies, returns, etc. It then fills in the product listing with optimized title, text description, and image files.

3. Use Inventory Management Software

Inventory management software notifies you of inventory issues. For instance, knowing when a product goes out of stock is important if you have it on sale in your shop. Customers will be irritated if you keep trying to sell them an item that’s not available. The inventory software will track changes and inform the automation software, and then adjust the automation software automatically.

4. Automate Order Processing

Dropshipping software for suppliers can automate order processing. Doing this speeds up your order process immensely. Orders can be placed and processed quickly once you set up the rules.

5. Automate Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is so important for current customers, and how their experience influences future customers. You can automate your responses after receiving a new order, and when it ships. And you can set up an auto-messaging system to encourage customer feedback.

6. Adding Shipping Fees

Added shipping fees are sometimes tacked onto a shipment for minimums or package size. You can set up automation to notice additional shipping fees and add them to your final price automatically.

7. Automate Tracking Details

The best dropshipping automation can automate tracking details so your customer can follow package shipping.

8. Marketing Automation

You may also automate some of your marketing content, including ads for social media or responses to routine questions.

The process of getting orders out the door and on their way can get tedious. Ordoro’s automated features have your back. To get your shipping workflow moving like clockwork, put our Automation Rules and Shipping Presets to work.

Dropshipping Automation Software from Ordoro

Ordoro offers you dropshipping automation software with full support for any issues and handles communication with your dropshipping supplier.

Clear and effortless communication between merchant and supplier(s) is required to dropship effectively. Through auto-routing and order splitting, Ordoro’s dropshipping automation software delivers on that, helping speed up your process by reducing the back-and-forth.

Ordoro Gives You Step-by-Step Instructions on How to Setup Products for Dropshipping

Products can be assigned to dropship suppliers, and then set to be auto-dropshipped in Ordoro. This means, your incoming orders will automatically get routed to the correct supplier.

Supplier Warehouse Mapping

You can set up supplier-warehouse mapping for your dropship orders, and automatically assign orders to a warehouse when dropshipped to a supplier. This feature can help with deducting available on-hand inventory from the mapped warehouse when orders are dropshipped. This works for manual dropshipping, process dropshipping, and automatic dropshipping.

Why You Shouldn’t Use Free Dropshipping Software

One of the most important elements of success for any business is building a reputation for dependable, high-quality customer service. For dropshipping businesses, your reputation is the single most important factor in determining not just how long you stay in business, but whether you stay in business at all.

If you want to build and maintain a good reputation, you need to have dropshipping software that you can rely on with customer support behind it to resolve any problems.

Using a free dropshipping automation software program sounds great when you first get started. The problem occurs when you want to scale up your orders. Free programs are only free up to an order limit, then you have to pay. The problem is that you’ve already stored all of your business information and inventory in software that you can’t use anymore because your orders are too big.

The result is that just when you start achieving some success, your business gets disrupted and you have to find and learn a whole new platform.

Negative Reviews

Reviews can make or break your success. Positive reviews influence the decision to buy from you, and negative reviews turn customers away. If you use free automation software for your new dropshipping company, then you run into an order limit, who does that affect the most? The end customer will be the person stuck waiting for their order. They will be the most disappointed. Then they will likely give you a negative review. Unfortunately, the fallout from getting a negative review can snowball, driving other customers away too.

Finding the Best Dropshipping Suppliers

There are plenty of dropshipping suppliers willing to partner with you for your dropshipping business. The problem is, how do you decide who to work with? This decision is also based on your automation software. Will the best free dropshipping tools integrate with your suppliers?

Ordoro says that you shouldn’t be “entirely dependent upon just one supplier” and states:

The best dropshipping platforms allow you to seamlessly integrate multiple suppliers to utilize all those advantages—without having to become entirely dependent upon just one supplier. The more resources you have access to, the better the chances are that your small business will be able to survive those first two years and become a medium-sized business.

Ordoro’s platform allows you to view, utilize, and control all of your most important resources and processes from a single dashboard.

Shopify Automation Workflow

Here are some examples of Shopify automation workflow to see automation at work:

Customer service – Send an email to your customer after they purchase a featured product. An order confirmation is standard for ecommerce these days. When the order is processed, send them an email that thanks them and confirms when their item will be delivered.

Order fulfillment – Pause marketing when your inventory gets low from your successful campaign. Automatically turn off ads when you’re below an identified inventory threshold.

Best Automated Dropshipping Software

We’ve already discussed numerous ways that Ordoro can help online merchants automate their dropshipping business.

Ordoro can save you time and money.
Ordoro is a reliable company with a solid reputation.
Ordoro has the best dropshipping automation software.
Ordoro can give you hands-free dropshipping.
Ordoro’s automated features have your back.
Ordoro offers 30 days of free onboarding.
Ordoro has a single dashboard.

Ordoro also provides resources and tools to help you have a successful dropshipping business.

Simplify Your Dropshipping Workflow

Dropshipping can reduce the need to stock and ship every product yourself, but it still requires accurate order routing, reliable suppliers, current inventory information, and timely tracking updates.

Ordoro brings dropship orders together with your other inventory, order, and shipping workflows. With supplier assignments, order splitting, automation rules, and centralized order visibility, your team can spend less time moving information manually and more time managing the exceptions that affect customers. Start Your Free Trial