Automate Your Dropshipping Business in 5 Unbelievably Easy Steps Automate Your Dropshipping Business in 5 Unbelievably Easy Steps

AUTOMATE YOUR DROPSHIPPING BUSINESS IN 5 UNBELIEVABLY EASY STEPS

Picture of Jairene Cruz
Jairene Cruz

Share:

Are You Spying on Your Competitors' Ad Campaigns?

Our tools monitor millions of native, push, pop, and TikTok advertising campaigns.

We can all agree that dropshipping, like any other type of business, can be challenging and time-consuming, especially if you are just starting out and doing everything yourself.

Between setting up your store, planning your marketing strategy, researching and adding products, fulfilling orders, and more, you can quickly get burned out!

But don’t get overwhelmed. If you want to start an eCommerce dropshipping business, things can still get easier for you. Many operational tasks that are time-consuming can actually be automated with the help of the right tool. And guess what, we have found the perfect one for you.

If you’re ready, then let’s dive in. Here are the five steps to building and automating your dropshipping business:

Step 1. Find Hot Selling Items

Finding hot selling products is the most crucial step in running a successful dropshipping business. It doesn’t matter if you have an eye-catchy store if your product is not what your customers need.

How then can you go about finding items that are selling right now? Via market research, of course. You can stalk great performing eCommerce websites to find hot products, but this alone can take you hours or even days!

The best way to automate this process is to sign-up with a Dropshipping Spy Tool, the best of which is Anstrex. This tool is currently free to use, so all you need to do is sign-up to gain access.

Filtering Products

Once you’ve logged in, go to either the Product Catalog or the Viral Products tab to find products. To narrow down the top-performing ones, you can sort the results based on the Most Popular Products, Percent Growth, and Total Order. The date range can be from the past 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days.

You can choose a product based on just its performance, or you can narrow it down to a specific category, supplier, or country.

Under Suppliers, there are three choices: AliExpress, DHGate, and Banggood. If you already know which supplier platforms you want to utilize, you can select one. If not, just go with the default (all suppliers). The most popular medium of all three is AliExpress.

Next, choose a category. Many dropshipping stores focus on a specific niche so they can better market their products. Still, there are those who work on various categories, focusing instead on hot selling products, no matter the niche.

The choices for Category include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Appliances
  • Computer
  • Home Improvement
  • Home
  • Outdoor Fun & Sports
  • Office
  • Toys
  • Security
  • Automobiles and Motorcycles
  • Consumer Electronics
  • Beauty and Health
  • Shoes
  • Phones and Telecommunications
  • Tools
  • Kids and Babies
  • Jewelry
  • Watches
  • Bags
  • Men’s Fashion
  • Women’s Fashion
  • Hair

Some of these categories have subcategories as well. If you can’t find the category you are looking for, you can try typing the keyword at the search bar at the top of the dropdown list.

Again, if you don’t want to choose a specific category, you can simply go for the default (all categories).

Once you have selected your filters and sorted the results based on popularity, your dashboard will display all possible results for your search. Anstrex’s Dropshipping tool has collated more than six million products in their database, so the more focused your search is, the better results you’ll get.

Product Information

Now that you have a list of products, it’s time to evaluate their potential. If you have sorted your list, the top-most products are the hottest ones right now.

To better illustrate this, here is the result of our search for the “Arts, Crafts & Sewing” category.

When choosing a product, there are several indicators that can help you evaluate the product’s performance. Each product card has the following information:

The summary is enough to initially choose a product. To learn more about its complete information and performance, you should click on the product card to view the full product information page.

Step 2. Add Items to Your Store

Let’s say you found a product you’re interested in; the next thing to do then is to add it to your store. This is one of the most labor-intensive tasks when setting up your dropshipping business. That is, if you do it manually.

Thankfully, Anstrex also has a way to automate this process, allowing you to perform this task with a simple click of a button.

But before we do that, you must first connect your Shopify store account to your Anstrex account. The image below shows the simple procedure to do that:

After successfully linking your store to Anstrex, the next step would be to download the Anstrex Chrome Extension.

You are now ready to automate the product adding process!

Head back to your Product Catalog, filter out the products you want, and then choose a product you want to add to your store.

Click on the View Item button.

The supplier page for that product will open up. Once there, you can click on the Anstrex extension in your browser.

A window pop-up that contains all information about the product will show up, including options for name, category, pricing, choice of images, variants, and more. You can edit the information according to your liking and how you want the product to be displayed in your own store.

At the bottom of the pop-up window are two buttons: one allows you to directly upload to your Shopify store, while the other one allows you to save the product to your board in Anstrex.

If you don’t want to add the product to your store yet but would like to save it for later, click on the “Save to Board” button, which adds the product to your collection in Anstrex.

If you want to add the item to your store immediately, click on the “Send to My Store” button.

Open your Shopify store, and you’ll see your product already uploaded like magic! It’s really fast and easy.

All you have to do now is to double-check that everything is correct in your Shopify store. If you are confident that all is set, then you can select the Sales Channels where you want the product to show up in, and you’re done!

You can continue steps one and two to fill your new Shopify store with products. Even if you intend to add a hundred products, you can do that in just a matter of hours.

Step 3. Inventory Management

A typical concern of business owners is managing their stocks and updating the price of the products. With a dropshipping business, you actually won’t have to worry about inventory management since you order items on demand.

What you would have to worry about, though, is whether or not your suppliers have inventory. What if they suddenly run out and someone orders from you? You would surely be in a pinch.

But does this mean you’ll have to check the supplier product pages every day to see if they still have the items in stock?

Well, you won’t really have to do that.

If you upload your products with the help of Anstrex, the tool will automatically update the inventory listed in Shopify based on what’s listed on your supplier’s page. If it shows zero stock, then your website will automatically display the product as out of stock. You won’t have to go through all the trouble of finding a new supplier in case your current one no longer offers it and someone orders from you.

Step 4. Order Fulfillment

So you’ve finally completed your store, and you’ve started promoting the products. You’re finally receiving orders! What should you do next?

What else but purchase the product from the supplier and have it shipped to your customer.

But what if your store’s a hit and you receive hundreds (if not thousands) of orders per day? Can you imagine going back and forth between your store and your supplier platform, ordering different products, and manually placing the customer’s shipment information?

That task alone is enough to take you several hours a day!

Can this task be made easier? Of course! Anstrex can once again save your day.

Anstrex automates order fulfillment as well, so when an order comes into your online store, it will automatically be added to your Anstrex Dropshipping account for as long as your Shopify store is connected to the account.

If the product has been added to your Shopify store using Anstrex, all the necessary details (including supplier ID and product page) will be available in your Anstrex account, allowing you to complete any order within a few clicks.

Here are the steps:

1. Head over to the Place Orders section in Anstrex to view all available orders in your store.

2. Find the order you want to fulfill. On the right-most part of the table, click on the Order button.

3. Choose among the modes of ordering:

  • Manual order
  • Auto Place Order - Choose Shipping (which means everything is automated except for the shipping option)
  • Auto Place Order (no intervention necessary)

4. If you choose “Auto Place Order - Choose Shipping,” you will be asked to select a shipping option in AliExpress (or whatever supplier platform), and then you’ll be redirected to the payment page.

If you choose “Auto Place Order,” you will immediately be redirected to the payment page in your supplier platform.

The part where you input your customer’s information, such as name and address, will be totally skipped since the tool itself will fill in all the details for you.

5. On the payment page, you will be asked to choose or input your payment details (if you haven’t already added that before). Then you can click on the “Place Order” button.

You can now go back to your Anstrex dashboard, and you’ll see that the Supplier Order ID will be filled with the order ID number. After placing the order, it usually takes the supplier between 24 and 48 hours to update the tracking information.

With Anstrex Dropship Tool, the task that can take you anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes per order will be finished in as little as a few minutes. What a time saver!

Step 5. Track orders

Let’s say a couple of days has already passed since you ordered from the supplier store. By now, your orders must have already been shipped—time to update the tracking information for your customers then.

If you have several orders for a specific item, you might get confused about which order in your supplier platform is for the correct order in your Shopify store.

If you’re doing this manually, you will have to:

  1. Check the order in AliExpress
  2. Find the corresponding order in Shopify
  3. Copy the tracking number from AliExpress
  4. Visit the order page in Shopify and click on the Order Fulfilled button
  5. Paste the tracking ID in the order fulfillment page and choose the appropriate shipper.

And this is just the short version of it! In reality, it will take you anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes just to cross-check which AliExpress order is for which customer!

You must’ve guessed by now that this is not a problem with Anstrex, too.

You will find detailed information and shipping updates about the placed orders on the Track Orders section of your Anstrex account.

In the Track Order dashboard, you will see a list of your orders synced with your Shopify store. To update the status of the order as well as their tracking number, click on the blue button in the upper right corner, labeled “Bulk Sync with Supplier.”

Select the appropriate date range to get the orders list.

Your list of orders will appear, together with the order status and tracking information. Choose the order you want to update, then click on the “Sync All” button.

Wait for a few seconds, and voila! All your chosen orders will automatically be updated.

If you visit your Shopify store, you will see that the status of corresponding orders will also be updated as well, and the tracking numbers would already have been added.

How simple is that?

Conclusion

Let’s be honest here. Dropshipping is an exciting business, but the tasks needed to make this business work? Not so much. Everything is so repetitive and time-consuming that you’ll run out of energy the moment you need to focus on something else, like marketing your products.

But you can make this business more effortless than it already is by automating all the mundane tasks. Anstrex’s Dropshipping tool is a lifesaver.

And the best part about it is that it is currently free! So save yourself some headaches and start using this tool today. Happy automating! 😊

Top Converting Landing Pages For FREE

Receive top converting landing pages in your inbox every week from us.

Looks good!
Excellent!
Perfect!
We need your agreement to get started. Please select checkbox.

Latest Stories

Here’s what we've been up to recently.

Get our stories delivered

From us to your device instantly