As an Amazon seller, you’ve likely heard about the word “automation” and its power to change a business’s work. But what exactly is Amazon Automation?
In this blog post, we will explore these questions by diving into what automation entails in the context of Amazon selling as well as uncovering some potential benefits and concerns around automation for eCommerce businesses.
What is Amazon automation?
It’s a business management strategy that involves outsourcing certain management functions to an agency, software, or virtual assistant.
In the world of e-commerce, manual processes can be a headache and take up valuable time. That’s where Amazon automation services comes in. It involves automating repetitive tasks to streamline workflows, increase productivity, and ultimately help sellers grow their businesses.
The meaning of Amazon automation varies depending on who you’re talking to. It could refer to hiring an agency or subscribing for a software to manage your Amazon store or automating specific tasks within your current Amazon business (PPC, analytics, pricing, etc.)
What is an Amazon automation store?
It’s a business that utilizes automated solutions to streamline its operations. With these services, sellers can automate everyday tasks such as managing orders and inventory, providing customer support, tracking sales analytics, adjusting PPC, changing pricing, etc.
Some sellers are actively using automation without realizing it. If you are an Amazon FBA member, and Amazon collects, packages, and ships your orders and manages customer returns, you have already utilized automation.
Basically, there are two ways to automate your Amazon business:
1) Automate specific business tasks using various software and scripts.
2) Delegate the largest of your business activities to a third-party service provider or simply saying hire an agency to handle these amazon business processes.
Amazon automation agency
Most Amazon automation agencies are willing to provide full support for your store on Amazon. They have the necessary experience and tools to handle it.
Amazon Automation agencies work by using a combination of automation tools and strategies tailored to sellers’ needs. These might include PPC management, product research, listing creation, pricing optimization.
This is an attractive business strategy for Amazon sellers who are willing to make a substantial initial investment but do not have enough time or knowledge to handle Amazon stores.
While automation agencies offer an enticing promise of streamlining your Amazon FBA business and making it profitable, you should be prepared that it may take a few months before the first returns on your investment. Additionally, even if the agency’s workload decreases over time, you will still pay the agreed-upon fixed or profit percentage fee for their services regardless of how much Amazon sales you generate.
When it comes to Amazon, there is always a risk, whether you run your store yourself or hire someone else to do it for you. You basically provide full access to your Amazon store and they can do whatever they want, so consider this risk when deciding whether to hire freelancers or agencies to run your amazon business.
Pros of Amazon Automation Agencies
They possess a strong understanding of the market.
Save you time and money in the long run.
They handle tasks that may be unfamiliar to you.
Allow you to generate passive income.
Help to scale your Amazon business.
Amazon automation softwares
Amazon sellers who feel ready to control their own business but are looking to automate some routine tasks can take advantage of a variety of amazon automation tools. Different automation software can assist in boosting efficiency, sales performance, and saving time.
They enable sellers to concentrate on higher-level strategies for expanding their business rather than getting bogged down in repetitive tasks. Some software are already using artificial intelligence to automate some processes.
Here are some examples of amazon automation tools: inventory management, order fulfillment tracking, customer service management, ppc management, analytics, repricing and more.
Generally, automated tools for e-commerce can be divided into several groups; let’s look at each of them separately.
Product Listings Optimization
To increase your visibility, you should optimize your product listings. This involves researching and adding new keywords to improve your visibility in search results and optimizing each product so it ranks higher than your competitors.
Optimization is not a one-time effort and requires constant engagement and analysis to stay the ranks of the best. You can deliberate these tasks, but to assess the quality of the work performed, you must know the basic principles of optimization in 2023.
Inventory management
Although Amazon FBA handles inventory maintenance and management, business owners need to keep track of inventory levels and know when to restock. My Real Profit inventory analytics can help you to avoid stockouts and overstock with this simple analytics.
Order fulfillment
Software tools can help to streamline the merchant order fulfillment process for sellers. Usually these tools connect with 3P delivery companies and automatically create labels for FBM orders.
Advertising
Such software can help you drive PPC advertising for your Amazon FBA store. They can perform some basic automation tasks such as managing multiple campaigns, implementing rule-based bidding, and handling your PPC campaign management. But there are advanced software that use AI to manage entire account of your automated amazon store.
Email marketing
Automated email campaigns help you to create the appropriate emails to your customers and sent them automatically.
Pricing
Pricing Automation is something new to market and Amazon sellers. Timely reductions and increases in price are key to good profit margins and strong sales. Using automated pricing, you can swiftly adjust the prices of their products in response to changing market conditions. This guarantees that your products stay competitively priced 24/7 and boost your profit.
Check our article: Profitable Amazon Pricing Strategies: The Key to Better Profit Margin
Financial statements
Having an accurate picture of your financial situation is essential for any business. Automation tools can provide financial statements, such as profit and loss, cash flow statement, in real time. This will help you make more informed decisions about pricing changes, and understand the impact from changes you are making in your business.
Customer Service
Your customer service should be top-notch in order to keep your customers happy and loyal. Automation tools can help you automate the routine tasks of responding to customers’ reviews, requests, and complaints.
Sales Analytics and Metrics Tracker
Sales analytics tools are essential for growing your Amazon business. They can help you identify trends in sales, customer behavior, and other key metrics to drive future decisions. These software tools enable you to make data-driven decisions, so that you can boost profitability and optimize efficiency.
Amazon’s automation services can be great tools for improving operations, but you must select the right ones to fit your business needs. To benefit fully from automation services, Amazon sellers need to have a clear understanding of their needs.
Pros of Amazon automation software tools
Using automated systems is more cost-effective than the services of agencies.
You can provide quality control at any intermediate stage.
Most automated services for Amazon sellers scale in response to demand.
Diverse set of tools allows you to take advantage of the most suitable.
Streamlining processes helps to achieve the efficient running of the entire business.
Is Amazon automation legit?
Long story short – Yes. Automation has become a hot topic in the world of e-commerce. With the rise of Amazon automation agencies and tools, many businesses are using this technology to increase their profits. However, many people are asking the question: Is Amazon automation legal or is it a scam?
How to check if the Amazon automation tool is legit?
Check selling partner app store. Only Amazon-approved tools are listed there. Link to selling partner app store: https://sell.amazon.com/tools/selling-partner-appstore
How about agencies?
Generally, it is legal until the agency guarantees you huge profits. Amazon automation scam is about lying and hiding terms. So if you think the business model is unfair or non-transparent, you should avoid working with them.
Nevertheless, with the right strategy and approach, automation can be a powerful tool to drive growth and increase profitability for your Amazon business. But it’s also important to remember that success is not guaranteed. It all depends on the particular seller and their ability to adapt to the fast-changing environment in e-commerce.
Is Amazon Automation Right for You?
You don’t have to use Amazon store automation, but you can certainly use additional helpers. Of course, you can hire professionals to run your PPC campaigns, SEO-optimize your listings, analyze and manage inventory, and research new profitable products and keywords, or do it yourself. But all these tasks take a lot of labor hours and, therefore, cost. Using software can significantly down your business costs and increase your profitability.
When you start your business, you can only use FBA automation, thereby covering only a part of all processes. As your business grows, you should implement more and more technologies: inventory management software, accounting software, virtual assistants, or chatbots.
Ultimately, it is up to you to decide how profitable an Amazon automation investment is for your store at the time. Monitoring and analytics software for your Amazon account is an effective way to stay on top of your Amazon sales.
As your store and product line grows, keeping track of all accounting data becomes more difficult. You may have encountered a situation where inattention or ignorance has caused you to incur additional costs or miss out on a benefit. Analyzing all the data requires experience and a lot of time. Additionally, you are not insured against errors in the calculations. Thus, at this stage, you already need a reliable assistant.
My Real Profit team has extensive experience with manual analytics and knows all of the pitfalls inside and out. Now, we offer a user-friendly analytics software geared towards Amazon that offers three analytical tools:
Profit Dashboard – shows all your data about the products, sales, profits, and expenses in a single display.
Inventory Analytics – helps you track your Amazon inventory levels in real-time.
Profit Calculator – helps you calculate profit per unit using different selling strategies. You can play with unit economics to find the best way to price and market your products.
Do you agree that time is money? Why not save twice? Use our tools at no charge for 14 days.
Final Words
Amazon automation has been controversial due to the potential for automation to take away from the human element of running an e-commerce business. Automation can be seen as a way to “cut corners” and make money without the effort that would ordinarily be required. However, automation is not necessarily a bad thing. To maximize the benefits of automating your business, it’s crucial to comprehend the potential risks involved.
You should understand that automation is just a business management strategy that involves outsourcing certain management functions to an agency, software, or virtual assistant. The efficiency of your strategies depends on the state of your eCommerce business and the choice of the right assistant.
The main advantage of an automated store is that automation helps improve efficiency and reduce routine tasks, saving time and effort. Software and virtual assistants usually automate the specific task at hand, while most agencies provide a full range of services; however, you will have to pay for their services regardless of the profitability of your store.
When making the best choice between an agency and software, you should focus on your business tasks. If you need help scaling your business or are looking to invest for passive income, an agency will suit you. However, if your store is going well and you have a nice marketing team, consider using specialized software to improve the efficiency of your operations. Remember that without automating processes, managing large sales volumes can become increasingly complex.
