Building a business on Amazon from scratch is no joke. Along with time, dedication and perseverance, it also requires you to multitask around the clock. You are not only in charge of sourcing the products and selling them to the right clients but also in charge of keeping track of customer orders, interacting with the customers, packing, shipping, and so on. Check out how to setup your automated Amazon store.
The idea of an automated Amazon store has received some skepticism ever since its inception. It is developed as a way to assist sellers in some of the routine business tasks. This eCommerce automation guarantees to take your business to the next level.
The confusion, however, lies in its meaning and what it encompasses. Let’s take a look at what exactly it means and how it can help your business out.
What is Amazon Automation?
Amazon Automation is an umbrella term that refers to running your Amazon business with the assistance of either software or third-party services. So you are either automating your tasks within your existing Amazon business or you hire an agency to take care of the tasks for you. In short, automated Amazon store manages repetitive tasks like order fulfillment for you.
Now this delegation of tasks through Amazon automation can be done in three ways. Let’s take a look at what those are-
- Amazon Automation through Amazon FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon): This is Amazon’s own automation service to help your business grow. All you have to do is send your products to Amazon Fulfillment Centers. They will manage your inventory, pack, and ship the orders for you.
- automated Amazon store through Third-Party Services: These services might be given by non-Amazon third-parties or third-party service providers that manage your Amazon FBA business.
- Amazon automation through Third-Party Software Services: These tools will help you to create email campaigns, manage accounting and inventory, and advertise through PPC (Pay per Click) advertising.
How is Amazon Automation important for sellers on Amazon?
Sellers on Amazon find it a challenge to accomplish everything by themselves. Multitasking might often affect the flow of the business as it enables space for more errors to occur. Besides, most Amazon sellers have a limited budget they have to work with. Managing everything at once prevents these sellers from concentrating on growing the business through business development.
Amazon automation takes these tasks from the seller’s hands and performs them with accuracy. While there is no such thing as a perfect automated Amazon solution, delegating the repetitive tasks to these automation definitely takes away the hassle of doing all the repetitive tasks by yourself. This leaves you plenty of time to think, plan and execute ideas to scale your business.
Pros of an Automated Amazon Store
- Helps to increase net profit by maintaining consistency in receiving and delivering orders.
- Improves customer satisfaction through thorough interaction and fast deliveries.
- Creates more loyal customers through consistency of deliveries.
- Helps to scale the business.
- Reduces the chances of making errors in order processing.
- Manages and compiles the data from the customers.
- Manages inventory in a more efficient manner.
Cons of Automated Amazon Store
- Costs more money as you are hiring an agency or taking services from software to do the tasks for you.
- In addition to the fulfillment and storage fees, there might be some extra fees associated with other factors like returns processing and inventory storage.
- Arranging and labeling all your products to send to fulfillment centers might become an issue if you have thousands of products.
- Physically accessing your products might become a challenge as you have to send all your products to the fulfillment centers.
Is the Automated Amazon Store Legit?
The doubts surrounding Amazon Automation are based on its validity. People are often found claiming it to be a scam. These controversies around automated Amazon stores might be a result of its shortcomings. However, that is not to say that it does not have its benefits.
There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all strategy to grow your Amazon business. Some strategies might work well for you while others might not. Just because Amazon automation does not help your business does not mean that it is a scam.
You have to be sure of the agency you invest in to get better results out of Amazon automation services. Prior research and interaction with the agency to better understand their tactics might help you achieve your goals in terms of business growth. There are different cash grab agencies who promise to give you the most results in the least amount of time. Instead of getting influenced by their high-pressure sales tactics, research them yourself. Remember that it is not the approach, Amazon automation, that is the scam, but how some agencies might be scamming you for your money.
What is an Automated Amazon Store?
Don’t get confused by the name. There is no such store you can go to and choose the automation of your dreams for your Amazon business. The automated Amazon store refers to any agency or person who will handle the fulfillment of your Amazon business.
Apart from the basic fulfillment services like receiving orders, packing, and shipping, these agencies are also known to provide additional services. The additional services may include building and running your Amazon business, optimizing listings, tracking orders, and managing your inventory.
To sum it up, an Amazon automation store is a team of experienced professionals hired to run and grow your Amazon business. They take away your burden of mixing products, pricing, handling supply chain management and marketing. They are potentially getting it ready for success.
How to Set up an Automated Amazon Store
This is how you can automate your Amazon business:
a. Enrolling your Amazon business in Amazon FBA
You have to enroll in Amazon’s fulfillment program (FBA) and become an FBA seller. Once you have set up Amazon FBA, the next step is to arrange your products and leave them in the hands of the professionals in Amazon fulfillment centers. They will take care of inventory management.
From receiving orders, to packing and shipping- they have got it all covered. They will also take care of returns and other processes associated with the fulfillment service. The best part is that if all this is too much for you, you can simply hire other agencies that will do this for you.
b. Automating your Amazon Email
Email marketing done effectively can help your business grow faster. You might consider a few factors for a successful email marketing campaign. For instance, sending out relevant messages will help to keep your target audience interested. The time you send out the email is also very crucial. It will only be effective if the timing aligns with the customer’s needs. Email marketing is highly based on giving out tempting offers to hook more clients. Finally, the branding strategies used in these campaigns will help to facilitate better business.
While curating these email campaigns, some other factors should also be considered.
- Focus on your target audience and what they want.
- Add effective branding tactics to convey the brand sentiments to the audience.
- Use unique but effective email templates that highlight the important messages for the audience.
- Be concise with your points to establish relevance and power in your messages.
c. Setting up your Automated Amazon Store Review Process
Reviews have become a necessary part of every business. Your potential customers learn about you and your services through the reviews of other clients. The reviews and experiences shared by these customers might help you get more customers or make you lose some potential ones. It all depends on what experiences others have had. Making a good impression on your future clientele might be quite a challenge for beginners. Here are some pointers to consider if you want to attract more customers to your business:
- Ask your existing customers for reviews. Nobody trusts a business with no reviews these days.
- The tone used in the messages should be polite and positive. Losing patience in this case is not an option.
- Create a copy for automated messages. Once it is ready to use, have third-party softwares automate them for you.
How to use Amazon automation to grow your business
By now, you must have gathered that an automated Amazon store helps your business run and grow. It is essentially freeing up your time that was being spent doing regular repetitive tasks for your business. Doing so helps you to spend more time on business development.
Automated Amazon stores or third-party service providers have got everything covered for you. But they are just one aspect of the whole automation. You can avail several solutions offered by softwares to automate your Amazon business as well. Let’s look at a few to understand the whole scenario-
1. Optimization of Product Listings
Your product listings need to be optimized for better results. This might include optimizing the keywords so that they appear in more searches. Each product should be optimized in a way to allow them to rank higher than the competition.
2. Pay-per-Click Management
Software tools can help you manage PPC advertisements. These tools ensure that ads get the most visibility for the best price. They also show this to the potential target audiences at the correct times.
3. Protecting the Brand
Product monitoring tools can protect your product listings from hazards like hijackers, price changes, listing errors, and so on.
4. Managing Accounting
Handling spreadsheets might be the most tedious part of any business. Thankfully, there are bookkeeping tools like various accounting software to do that for you.
5. Product Review Management
There are several automated review tools to manage the review process. These help the sellers to check the reviews and give necessary feedback. Building unique feedback campaigns can also aid the growth of the business.
6. Inventory Management
Amazon FBA takes away the pain of maintaining and managing your inventory. However, as a business owner, you still need to be aware of the current stock you have. Knowledge of the current stock will tell you when to reorder. Inventory management software tools will do it for you.
7. Net Profit Calculation
There are tools that can help to calculate the net profit of your business. Determine the amount of profit or loss you are making with the help of these tools.
8. Automated Email Campaigns
These software programs help you to create certain email campaigns, send them to the target audience and keep track of which emails are achieving the goals and which are not.
9. Virtual Assistants
Virtual assistants or chatbots are pre-programmed software tools designed to respond to FAQs and other routine queries with automated responses. These chatbots are created to imitate real human conversations. Some chatbots are more technologically advanced. They have the ability to learn from the customer queries and curate responses according to what they have just learned from the customers.
Conclusion
The bottom line is that you are saving up time and resources by availing Amazon automation. These services are not only helping you to achieve better customer experiences, but they also contribute to reducing operational costs. You get to reinvest this time into promoting your brand, brainstorming, and executing different business development ideas.
Overall, an automated Amazon store can be really helpful for your business on Amazon and allow you to achieve the goals you have set for the growth of your business. Contact Lab 916 if you need help with anything about Amazon.
