Key points
- By automating their Amazon businesses, sellers can maximise their efficiency and save dozens of hours every month without creating any issues for their businesses. Amazon automation is an excellent solution that allows sellers to focus on growing their company, sourcing new products, and improving their service.
- There are several ways to automate an Amazon store. This includes joining the Amazon FBA program, using specialised email marketing software, and utilising price trackers and automatic Amazon review programs.
- Another way to automate your Amazon business is to hire a virtual assistant who can create product listings and manage orders, use a multi-marketplace inventory management system to ensure that your products are always in stock, or use PPC software to optimise and manage ads.
Being an Amazon merchant has become an extremely challenging task these days. And it’s not only Amazon sellers who are facing difficulties but also merchants working on other platforms. Each more or less popular shopping website offers thousands of products from millions of sellers eager to increase their profit margins. And as competition heats up, the struggle to get ahead becomes more and more brutal. Building a successful business comes at a very high price and demands thousands of hours of your precious time. But thankfully, there are ways to optimise your business that will also help you to free up some time for more important areas of your life.
If you dream of becoming a successful marketplace merchant and taking your business to the next level, Amazon automation is an amazing option. Regardless of how big or small your Amazon business is, there is nothing that can boost it more than Amazon automation. Not to mention how much automation can ease the burden of mundane work. We all know how exhausting it is to manage several projects at once. But imagine that you no longer have to worry about handling shipping, asking for feedback, managing PPC advertisements, finding inventory, and creating product listings. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Delegating such repetitive and mundane tasks to someone else will significantly free up your time and save a few extra hours every day.
In this article, we’ve compiled the best advice on how you can automate some aspects of your Amazon business and use these ideas to increase the productivity and efficiency of your own business.
What Is Amazon Automation?
Let’s figure out what Amazon automation means in the first place.
Amazon automation implies outsourcing repetitive and mundane tasks to software or a third-party service without compromising your business. The purpose of Amazon automation is to free up the time and resources required to expand your Amazon company. It can also help you increase order processing efficiency, ensure better management of customer relationships, and cut down on operating expenses.
Effective automation enables you to:
- boost your bottom line
- enhance client satisfaction
- expand your business
- lower the frequency of order processing mistakes
- gather more information about your buyers
- increase inventory management efficiency
- assist you in running a profitable Amazon business in general
These tasks can be accomplished by using Amazon’s internal Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) program or via utilising third-party partners like Expandly or Inventory Source.
Now that you know why it’s so important to automate your Amazon business, let’s look into how to achieve it.
Top 7 Ways to Automate Your Amazon Business
#1 Enroll in Amazon FBA
In spite of being the most trivial way to automate Amazon’s business, Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is still the easiest and most effective option. The Amazon FBA business model is a blend of traditional e-commerce and dropshipping businesses.
Known as one of the most advanced fulfilment programs, FBA takes over most mundane tasks associated with running an Amazon business, including storing inventory, packing, shipping, and communicating with customers about their Amazon orders. It also grants you as a seller a competitive advantage, which can be pretty helpful when you’re trying to win the Buy Box.
Since the Amazon FBA team manages all customer-related processes, they also handle returns and provide customer service for all FBA sales. All you have to do as an FBA seller is ship your inventory to Amazon Fulfillment Centers and let them handle inventory storage, order fulfilment, refunds, interactions with customers concerning delivery issues, and everything else.
However, there are some fees you’ll have to pay to benefit from FBA services. Amazon charges a storage fee and a fulfilment fee for each fulfilled order. The size of the storage fee depends on the dimensions and weight of your products, while the fulfilment fee depends on the category. FBA can seem very expensive, but its benefits outweigh the expenses for many small business owners.
But what if you have some orders that are not eligible for FBA? No problem at all. You can always take advantage of Amazon’s multi-channel fulfilment service that ships and fulfils all orders that do not qualify for FBA.
#2 Automate Communication with Potential Customers with the Help of Email Marketing Software
Sending timely, up-to-date messages is crucial for improving your reputation on Amazon Marketplace, as it affects how customers view your brand. Implementing email marketing software into your business strategy allows you to save valuable time for more important issues that might result in you achieving your goals faster than expected. Automating something so ordinary not only frees up your time and saves your money but increases customer satisfaction as well.
Email automation enables you to quickly compose customised messages to your target audience and send them at a predetermined time or at set points in time that are tied to the customers’ activity. Such a technique is most helpful in terms of building strong, long-lasting relationships not only with repeat customers but also with potential buyers, which may later result in a boost in sales and profitability.
Don’t know what types of automated emails to create? Try setting up a welcome email which will go out when someone new subscribes to your mailing list, or a new email gets added to your database. You can also send regular curated emails based on the customer’s specific preferences (discovered by analysing their purchasing activity) and discount emails that entice customers to buy again.
Remember that you can also automate answers to anyone who contacts you with inquiries or concerns regarding purchase confirmations and delivery details.
#3 Price Trackers are the Key to Success
Beating the competition on marketplaces like Amazon can’t be an easy task. In spite of all the hard work, it can often seem like you’re missing out on something and can improve even further, no matter how big your business is. Instead of simply offering high-quality goods at affordable prices, some merchants use pricing as a marketing technique to increase conversions and win over customers. This is especially important on Amazon, where the majority of sellers use price trackers to determine the best price points for their products.
Remember that you will never be able to create a sustainable business by sacrificing the quality of your products or if you set prices so low that you can never make a profit. And you won’t be able to grow a robust business until you do proper research, either.
Regularly checking Amazon listings and product pricing is an amazing way to ensure that your business remains competitive enough to maintain high profit margins and still retain customers. However, this kind of task can be incredibly time-consuming if you do it manually.
Instead, many sellers use services like CamelCamelCamel, Prisync, or Competera to keep up with trends and keep an eye on Amazon products and their prices.
#4 Get More Reviews by Utilising Amazon Review Automation
When purchasing goods online, customers are always taking a risk. They can’t really see or touch your product before they buy it. Their decision is based on reviews of previous customers. This is why asking your past customers to leave a review should be your main strategy for building a successful Amazon business.
There are plenty of online tools that make it easy for sellers to automatically ask people for product reviews. These services are compliant with Amazon’s ToS, and their use can have a significant impact on seller feedback.
However, please keep in mind that if Amazon temporarily bans your seller account from sending proactive messages to customers, you won’t be able to use the templates created by such tools. In this situation, you’ll need to use Amazon’s ‘Request a Review’ template.
#5 Automate Amazon Ads
Amazon advertising is probably the only source which can instantly bring you a significant increase in traffic. Amazon ads is an umbrella term for paid advertisements located in search results, Amazon listings, and on other websites.
Amazon ads can improve your conversion rates, and they are also very helpful in terms of introducing new product listings that haven’t yet reached Amazon’s organic search results.
If you are looking for a way to automate this side of your business, you should consider implementing Amazon PPC software into your business strategy. These online tools help you to control your bid amounts and streamline your expenditure by eliminating irrelevant keywords to ensure that your advertisements are seen as much as possible at a better price.
You can even go a step further and engage an management services for Amazon companies company like NUOPTIMA that will help you to set up and manage PPC ads, grow your Amazon business, and develop your strategy. Sign up for a free discovery call with one of our experts now and become closer to building a successful Amazon company.
#6 Automate Multi-Marketplace Inventory Management
Being an Amazon seller also means having to handle inventory and logistics. You need to analyse your sales and determine which products are the most popular with customers, how much inventory you need to have on hand, and where to keep it, and all of these tasks need to be managed by someone.
In spite of the importance of inventory management, it often turns out to be a time-consuming and exhausting task. There are plenty of mistakes you might make in the process, and it demands lots of thought and care, diverting your attention away from other very real problems associated with running a business. Moreover, poor inventory management can lead to overstocking or understocking of your goods, which can later result in a decrease in your profit margins, loss of buy boxes, and low rankings on Amazon search.
Good inventory management software will make the processing of orders and returns much more efficient and help you to optimise your selling process and prices. It will also track inventory stored in different warehouses and warn you when you are running low. Inventory management software will also assist you with vendor procurement and business process automation while providing you with the information you need to anticipate future stock needs with extreme accuracy.
Multi-marketplace inventory management systems offer all these features as well as some additional capabilities that might be helpful for growing your business.
#7 Hire a Virtual Assistant to Create and Optimise Amazon Listings
The first thing customers who find your products on Amazon see are your product listings. They can either attract them and convince them to buy your goods or drive them away and discourage them from making a purchase from your brand.
But information and images contained in the listing are not the only important thing for achieving Amazon success. You also have to pay attention to keywords. Searching for products through relevant keywords is the main way for shoppers to find the products they are looking for on Amazon. Therefore, including highly relevant keywords in your product listings is crucial for getting lots of traffic and sales.
And this is exactly why so many sellers turn to Amazon experts and ask for their help with this part of their business. Hiring an experienced virtual assistant will not only help you to automate the process of creating new listings, but it will also improve the quality of your listings, which will lead to them being ranked higher in search results. In turn, this will bring about higher conversion rates.
High-quality listings require outstanding photos and convincing descriptions. These tasks are just perfect for a virtual assistant! You could hire a photographer to take pictures of your goods and a copywriter to create keyword-rich descriptions for them. It might be a good idea to look for workers who have experience working with Amazon listings, and perhaps you’ll be lucky enough to come across people who specialise in this field.
There are several websites where you can find freelancers to hire. However, Upwork and FreeUp are considered the two best options. Place your job description on one of these websites and choose the best candidates for the job.
Final Thoughts
In today’s extremely competitive e-commerce market, sellers spend most of their time developing new strategies to grow their business, which leaves them with no time for other tasks. Therefore, automating Amazon order management and delegating a few mundane, repetitive tasks to software or an assistant is an important step toward achieving Amazon success.
If you want to grow your business and ensure that it stays lucrative, your best option is to hire an experienced Amazon growth agency like NUOPTIMA. Schedule a free discovery call with one of our specialists now, or leave your email, and we will send you more information about our services.