Dropshipping with Investify is a retail fulfillment method that allows entrepreneurs to sell products without holding inventory. With dropshipping, store owners partner with a supplier or manufacturer to ship products directly to customers on their behalf.
The dropshipper lists products on an online store or marketplace without purchasing any inventory upfront. When a customer places an order, the store owner forwards the order details to the supplier, who then ships the product directly from their warehouse to the customer. The supplier usually charges a wholesale rate, allowing the store owner to keep the retail profit margin.
Some key benefits of the dropshipping business model include:
Low startup costs: Dropshippers can launch an ecommerce store without investing in product inventory. This reduces financial risk, as you don’t purchase products until customers order them.
Easy scalability: You can add or remove products to your online store instantly based on demand. There’s no need to worry about overhead costs, warehouse space or shipping capabilities.
Flexibility: Dropshippers have the freedom to test and pivot product offerings frequently. You aren’t tied down with excess inventory.
Wide product selection: Partner with multiple suppliers to offer a huge variety of products across many niches and categories. Customers have abundant choices.
Focus on selling: With suppliers handling fulfillment, entrepreneurs can devote their time to optimizing marketing, branding and the online customer experience.
In summary, dropshipping provides entrepreneurs an attractive ecommerce model to start and grow an online retail business with minimal financial risk and operational costs. Leveraging dropshipping effectively can help turn hobby stores into thriving businesses.
Challenges of Manual Dropshipping
Dropshipping can be an extremely lucrative business model, allowing entrepreneurs to sell products online without holding any inventory. However, managing dropshipping operations manually comes with some significant challenges:
Sourcing Products
Finding high-quality and reliably suppliers is difficult and time consuming. Dropshippers need to thoroughly vet suppliers on factors like product quality, shipping times, reliability, and wholesale pricing. Manually evaluating dozens of suppliers per product is tedious.
Managing Inventory
Keeping track of supplier inventory across multiple platforms is a major headache. Inventory levels constantly fluctuate and it’s easy to oversell a product if you lose track. Out-of-stock issues result in canceled orders and angry customers.
Order Processing
Receiving customer orders from multiple sales channels and manually placing corresponding orders with suppliers is incredibly labor intensive. As a business scales, the number of daily orders can become unmanageable to process manually.
Shipping & Logistics
Coordinating package tracking information and customer communication across multiple sales channels and suppliers is a logistical nightmare. Errors and inconsistencies easily creep in during manual order processing.
Accounting & Tax
With orders flowing in from many sources and purchases from multiple suppliers, keeping books and records organized for accounting, taxes and reporting is extremely difficult without automation. Critical financial data is challenging to access and leverage.
Manually managing all the moving parts of a dropshipping business ultimately prevents entrepreneurs from efficiently scaling and maximizes the risk of costly mistakes. Automation is key to overcoming these obstacles.
Introducing Investify ECOM
Investify Ecom is a relatively new ecommerce automation tool that aims to streamline the entire dropshipping workflow for eBay sellers. Founded in 2021 by a team of ecommerce experts and software engineers, Investify was created specifically to address the pain points and inefficiencies of manual dropshipping operations.
The key benefits and features of Investify include:
End-to-end automation – Investify automates every step of the dropshipping process, from inventory management and order processing to shipping and tracking. This removes the need for manual work and dramatically speeds up order fulfillment.
eBay integration – Investify seamlessly connects with your eBay seller account to sync your store’s inventory, orders, and shipping. New eBay orders automatically flow into Investify for processing.
Supplier integrations – Investify connects with major dropshipping suppliers like AliExpress and automatically imports product catalogs. It also automates ordering from suppliers when your eBay inventory needs restocking.
Order tracking – The platform provides automated tracking info and status updates to your eBay customers. This improves the post-purchase experience and satisfaction.
Inventory management – Investify’s smart inventory tools help you maintain optimal stock levels, avoid overselling out-of-stock items, and simplify reordering when inventory gets low.
Analytics – Users get access to data and insights about sales volumes, costs, profits, best selling items, and other KPIs to help optimize the eBay dropshipping business.
By leveraging Investify’s suite of automation features for eBay dropshipping, online sellers can dramatically increase operational efficiency, reduce redundant manual work, improve customer satisfaction, and maximize sales and profits.
Key Features of Investify
Investify aims to automate every part of the dropshipping workflow. Here are some of its key features:
Automated Product Research
Investify has an AI-powered product discovery engine that analyzes market trends, competitor data, and consumer demand to identify profitable products to sell. You can set parameters like price range, profit margins, etc and Investify will suggest products that match.
Supplier Integrations
Investify has pre-built integrations with major dropshipping suppliers like AliExpress, Spocket, and Printify. It automatically syncs product catalogs and inventory between your store and suppliers. When an order comes in, it is automatically sent to the right supplier.
Order Management
Investify has an order dashboard that gives you real-time visibility into new orders, order status, shipments tracking, and more. You get notified via email/SMS about new orders. The status is automatically marked as ‘Fulfilled’ when the tracking number is available.
Accounting & Tax Calculations
Investify can integrate with QuickBooks to automatically sync sales data. It calculates sales tax obligations in different states and handles tax filings and remittance.
Advertising Automation
Investify allows you to setup automated ad campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, Google, and more. You can define audiences, set daily budgets, and monitor performance data.
Analytics & Reports
In-depth analytics are provided on all aspects of your ecommerce business – traffic sources, conversion rates, margins, top products, and more. These reports help you identify opportunities for improvement.
With these comprehensive automation capabilities, Investify aims to simplify dropshipping operations and help sellers scale their eBay stores.
Integrating Investify with eBay
Investify offers seamless integration with eBay to help sellers optimize and automate their eBay dropshipping businesses. After signing up for Investify, users can connect their eBay account to enable the following benefits:
Automated eBay listings: Investify can automatically create product listings on eBay based on your inventory and pricing in the Investify platform. This saves sellers tons of time compared to manually creating listings.
Automated order fulfillment: When an eBay order comes in, Investify will automatically process the order, purchase the product from the supplier, and handle shipping, without the seller needing to do anything.
Inventory and pricing sync: Inventory levels, product information, and pricing are automatically kept in sync between eBay and Investify. So you don’t have to manually make updates in both places when something changes.
Performance tracking: Key metrics like sales, profits, and ROI are tracked across your eBay business, allowing you to optimize your listings and inventory for maximum profitability.
Customer support automation: Investify’s artificial intelligence can automatically handle basic buyer inquiries, freeing up the seller’s time for more important tasks.
Overall, integrating Investify with your eBay dropshipping business makes the entire operation more efficient, automated, and optimized. eBay sellers can drastically save on time and grow their businesses by leveraging Investify to automate key parts of their eBay dropshipping workflow.
Step-by-Step Setup Process
Integrating Investify with your eBay account is simple and straightforward. Here is an overview of the setup process:
- Sign up for an Investify account
- Connect your eBay account
- In Investify, click on “Settings” and select “Connected Accounts”
- Click on “Connect New Account” and select eBay from the dropdown menu
- Enter your eBay credentials when prompted and click “Connect”
- Investify will now sync your eBay account
- Set up listing defaults
- In Investify, go to “Settings” and click on “Defaults”
- Here you can set default values for new listings like product description, return policy, shipping profiles etc.
- Set up product sync
- In Investify, go to “Products” and click on “Manage Sync”
- Click on “Connect New Sync” and select eBay
- Configure sync settings like sync frequency, product filters etc.
- Investify will now automatically sync eBay products as per your settings
- Review and list products
- Synced products will appear in your Investify products database
- Review products and create listings by clicking on “List”
- Manage and scale your store
- Use Investify’s bulk editing and automation rules to manage listings at scale
- Create workflows like sending order info to suppliers automatically
And that’s it! Investify will now automatically handle core parts of the eBay dropshipping process like inventory syncing, listings management and order routing. You can focus on scaling your eBay store.
Automation in Action
Once Investify is connected to your eBay store, the automation begins immediately. Here are some examples of how Investify automates key parts of the dropshipping process:
Automated Product Listings
Investify syncs your product catalog and automatically lists new products on eBay for you. When a supplier adds a new product to your catalog, Investify will create the eBay listing including title, description, images, pricing and more.
Order Management
When an order comes in on eBay, Investify will automatically update the order status on both eBay and your supplier’s platform. It will mark the order as paid on eBay and send the order details to your supplier to fulfill.
Shipping and Tracking Updates
Investify integrates with shipping carriers to automatically print labels and update tracking info on eBay. As soon as your supplier ships the order, Investify will sync the tracking number and shipping carrier back to eBay so the customer can track their delivery.
Inventory Syncing
Inventory levels are automatically synced between your supplier and eBay in real-time. If a product goes out of stock from your supplier, Investify will automatically update the eBay listing to show out of stock.
Product Pricing
Any price changes from your supplier are automatically pushed to eBay to keep pricing up-to-date on both channels. There’s no need to manually update pricing one listing at a time.
Out of Stock Emails
If a product goes out of stock after an order, Investify will automatically email the customer to notify them of the delay and provide an estimated restocking timeframe.
By automating these repetitive, manual tasks Investify enables you to scale your eBay dropshipping business exponentially. You can focus on high-level strategy while Investify does the busy work of managing listings, orders, inventory and more automatically behind the scenes. This makes the entire operation more efficient, profitable and easier to run at large volumes.