Give Your Business a Better Potential for Long-Term Success
It’s no secret that some of the largest and most successful business leaders are piloting some form of automation in at least one of their home or business operations. Automation is proving to be one of the defining differences between the old way of running an ecommerce business. Just like the rudimentary robots helped to automate many assembly and packing lines, automation streamlines the process of getting your product into consumer’s hands, faster than any manual process.
The upside, however, is that you don’t necessarily need to mechanize your operations to gain the benefits of automation. You can automate many aspects of your Amazon business, often known as Fulfillment By Amazon or FBA, with one of these forms of automation. This can help your business streamline its day-to-day operation and can lead to more revenue, in less time, and with fewer errors than without automation. With Amazon making up nearly half of all e-commerce buying, understanding Amazon automation is more important than ever.
Automation simply means using machines to perform repetitive or mundane tasks. Even though “automation” sounds like there is some sort of robot at work, this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. When referring to Amazon automation, it just means having the Amazon service perform predefined operations for you, under certain circumstances. It can be an umbrella term that means a lot of things depending on who you ask.
There are several types of Amazon automation that are commonly found in use. The most popular include Amazon FBA, third-party fulfillment agreements, and third-party software suites.
Amazon FBA, or fulfilled by Amazon, is an arrangement where products are shipped to Amazon facilities called fulfillment centers. Once at a fulfillment center, the packing, shipping, returns, and all subsequent inventory management are done by Amazon.
Third-party fulfillment is where other business entities, besides Amazon, handle the order fulfillment, as well as manage the service providers often called Amazon automation stores. These stores are the management arm of an Amazon FBA business and extend to not only the Amazon storefront but the listings for the actual products as well.
Third-party software is an automation method that uses various applications to automate interactions with Amazon. These can automate tasks dealing with inventory, accounting, PPC advertising, and creating email campaigns.
An Amazon automation business sometimes referred to as an Amazon automation company is a company that handles the Amazon business automation for your Amazon shop. While all automation businesses will operate slightly differently, the general process will be the same across many of the best Amazon automation businesses.
They will not only help you choose the product or products your store will sell, but they will also set up everything else for you, as well as run about 90% of the business for you. You will need to pay a set price per item that you sell, often between $5,000 and $25,000, and some firms will have a minimum number of products in the event that one or two are not profitable.
These companies will essentially build you a turn-key business for you, while splitting the profits, and you can either continue renewing their service or use their jump-start to hit the ground running as the owner and manager of your own Amazon business.
We buy millions of dollars of high quality big-brand name merchandise directly from manufactures and big box retailers. We pass on an amazing (wholesale price) to you. We own our warehouse and fulfill your manifest in blazing speed. We carry many big brand names that the vast majority of sellers struggle to acquire.
We Move Fast! As your order is being fulfilled at the warehouse, the upload team is optimizing your listings simultaneously.
1) We inspect, pack, prep, polybag, fold and ship to Amazon.
2) We upload each individual item.
3) We optimize each listing.
We Do the Heavy Lifting!
When a customer makes an order on Amazon from your store via Amazon FBA, the item is delivered to the customer. Amazon professional sellers generally get paid by Amazon every two weeks. Each payment includes 14 days of orders that were successfully delivered seven days ago.
An incredible portion of Amazon sellers are small businesses and entrepreneurs with budgets that need to scale with their businesses. With limited budgets, staff, and most importantly time, automation can create considerable time savings for those in the most vulnerable stages of business growth and development. That time and those resources are now able to be invested somewhere else they are needed.
While there is no magic bullet for an automated Amazon business solution, working with an Amazon automation company can take a lot of the work out of getting your business off the ground. While there are some restrictions on what products can be sold with FBA, having a business automation model that incorporates or facilitates FBA can make your products much more appealing than the competition since they would then qualify for the Amazon Prime 2-day shipping perk.
There are many reasons that anyone wanting to maintain an Amazon presence would want to use an automation company. It makes running and maintaining the business much easier, it cuts down on errors, it frees up your time, and it can help you scale your business.
Running your business is one of the most time-consuming things, and allocating a large portion of the operations is a great way to free up a lot of time and headspace. If you are just starting out in e-commerce, you’ll still be in the early stages of figuring out what works best for you and your company, in terms of shipping, warehousing, and so on. Even in the early stages, packing and shipping orders manually can take a significant amount of time.
The error reduction of automation is another big benefit, and it can grow in value with your business. Once you get busy, you’ll increase the risk of errors in your business, which means working harder later on to rebuild that customer trust. Since the software doesn’t make errors, incorporating automation into your business can reduce errors in automated functions to zero, or nearly zero.
Personally seeing each step of all the daily tasks of a business can be an incredible time-suck, and with particularly tedious tasks like packing and shipping, it can not only cost you productive time, but it can weigh on your mental health as well. When you automate fulfillment and shipping, not only can you free up significant amounts of time, but you can also take the space formerly used for on-site inventory, and dedicate it to something else.
Finally, the benefits that automation has for scaling a business are priceless. If you have a small or medium-sized Amazon business, and you have a product suddenly go viral, having ordering, fulfillment, and shipping automation is going to be crucial to making sure the spike in orders isn’t a customer relations disaster. Sudden surges in activity don’t have to be terrifying deadlines with automation in place. Additionally, the time that you’ve saved by automating other aspects of the business can help you focus more on branding, marketing, growing your digital presence, or whatever else needs your attention.
For more information on Amazon business automation and what it can do for your organization, reach out to The Amazon Junkies today. You can learn more about the services we offer, and how we can give your business a better potential for long-term success than many other firms that dabble in automation.
