Amazon Selling Tools: Save Time with Automation

The Amazon industry moves fast… so fast that what’s effective changes every year. But so far, this year's eCommerce trends tend to revolve around a progressive technology that gives online retailers less to do instead of more. We’re talking about automation, and it helps online sellers just as much as it does shoppers.

Sure, automation has been around for awhile, but it’s only recently that the technology has advanced to become this effective. Automation used to mean clunky algorithms and chat bots that sounded like a drunk Yoda — but these days, automation is improving many different aspects of eCommerce, from dynamic pricing to ad bidding to customer support.

Below, we discuss the current state of automation and how it can help your Amazon business.

Marketing & Advertising

Content marketing and online advertising are essential to eCommerce, especially now with deeper integration of shoppable social media posts. But the more online marketing campaigns you launch, the harder it is it navigate that spider web and consolidate all your endeavors.

Third-party software solutions are increasingly drawing on automation to keep things simpler on the front-end as they get more complex on the back-end. There are more and more services that monitor the success of individual marketing campaigns. Some even automatically allocate funds to the more profitable avenues.

For Amazon sellers, this is most pertinent to PPC advertising, which is one of a few changes Amazon is making in the year ahead. When bidding and keyword viability become too complicated or time-consuming for a person to follow, an automated service can quickly and faultlessly calculate the ideal amounts to spend and where to spend them.

Not only does that save you the time of periodically evaluating each campaign's performance, it also deduces the optimal bids more accurately than any human.

Amazon Repricing

Dynamic pricing is the strategy of changing your prices so they’re always perfect. For example, when demand is higher than expected, raise the price. When a rival seller is trying to undercut you, lower the price. It’s a novel idea that’s already been proven effective, and those nickels and dimes add up in a big way, especially in a competitive niche.

The trouble is maintaining it. Dynamic pricing requires 24/7 surveillance of each and every one of your competitors… for each product you sell. That’s far too demanding for a single person to handle alone, and too expensive to pay someone to do it for you. Essentially, the only way to do dynamic pricing right is with automation.

For Amazon sellers, pricing directly affects the Buy Box/Featured Offer. If you want to win, you need the best prices. How much you charge is no longer just about profitability, it’s also about customer outreach and visibility. That’s where SmartPrice comes in. This algorithmic repricer optimizes your prices for you, ensuring you always have the most competitive prices at all the right times.

To learn more, read about the three ways an Amazon repricer can improve your business.

Emails

Talk about tedious eCommerce duties! Sending emails in small quantities is merely annoying, but in large quantities it becomes economically nonviable as the cost-time ratio shifts. Just like repricing, automation is the only way to get it done effectively without eating up all your personal free time.

Automated email services send out template emails whenever certain conditions are met. If someone abandoned their cart for a few days, automation software can pick up on it by itself and send an email reminder to the shopper. Or, if you want more online reviews, software like FeedbackFive can calculate the item delivery date and automatically send an email asking for a review after the shipment arrives — at a time when the shopper is most excited and most likely to leave an enthusiastic review.

Other Amazon Seller Tools

Amazon sellers have to work within the limitations of the Amazon marketplace, so that prevents a lot of the design and UX trends other eCommerce owners have to deal with. For example, live chat and automated chatbots are popular eCommerce trends, but that’s not applicable to Amazon sellers unless they also sell off of Amazon.

What is applicable, though, is inventory management — even if you’re using FBA, you still have to be on the ball with restocking dwindling items and avoiding the dreaded “out-of-stock” message. Automated software like RestockPro sends time-sensitive alerts to ensure your inventory is always stocked enough to support demand, sparing you the time and stress of having to regularly monitor stock levels manually.

Automation: Your Employee of the Month, Every Month

Wouldn’t you want an employee that works nonstop, never makes mistakes, and costs only a small upfront fee? That’s automated eCommerce software in a nutshell — once these services are initiated, they don’t stop working for you, even during nights and weekends. This technology handles the dreary work for you, freeing you up for the big-picture work like expanding your business and creating new campaigns. After all, that’s what automation is for!