Starting an ecommerce store provides some advantages over a brick-and-mortar, allowing you to get up and running with a simplified business model. If you want to reduce complexities further, consider dropshipping via Amazon. That’s an ecommerce model where you don’t need to have your own inventory. Suppliers provide the products and handle all the shipping hassles while you simply make the sales on Amazon.
One of the best ways to find products to dropship on Amazon is SaleHoo, which simplifies the process of selecting products and sending them to your customers. SaleHoo also researches all the suppliers it uses, ensuring that you can trust them to deliver high-quality products in a timely manner.
Crazy Egg’s Favorite Tools for Dropshipping on Amazon
When looking for a dropshipping partner to handle product sourcing and fulfillment, it’s important to realize that there are a variety of options. Some are great for dropshipping a variety of products while others specialize in particular product lines or customization. Take a look at three of the best options in our eyes:
SaleHoo is great for getting started with dropshipping in general, and it closely tracks the quality of its suppliers, ensuring trustworthiness. Subscribe to SaleHoo through Crazy Egg and you can get a second year of the service for free.
Printful is a unique option for offering fashion and custom clothing products to your customers. Sign up for a free account at Printful and start developing ideas for your own clothing.
Worldwide Brands gives you lifetime access to more than 16 million products when you pay a one-time fee. Avoid subscription costs by getting started with Worldwide Brands today.
More Top Tools for Dropshipping
Want to know more about these and other dropshipping companies? Or do you just want to get a better feel for dropshipping overall? Either way, check out our full post listing the best dropshipping companies to learn more about this easy, unique, and profitable ecommerce method.
Step 1 – Get Started with SaleHoo
SaleHoo makes it easy to get started. Once you follow our link to their homepage, scroll to the bottom to see the price for the annual plan. Then, click the Get Started button to take advantage of our special offer. Or, you can follow the same steps and choose monthly billing if you’re not ready to commit to a full year.
You’ll then enter your user name and email address and click Create Account to enter your payment information and get your account activated.
It’s as simple as that, but it’s only half of the setup for getting ready to dropship on Amazon. For the other part of the process, you’ll need to create an Amazon seller account.
Step 2 – Get Started As an Amazon Seller
If you already have an Amazon account as a customer, you can add the ability to start selling on Amazon as part of that account. Otherwise, you can visit the Amazon seller page and click the Sign Up button to start the process.
You’ll need to provide a couple of documents and some personal information to verify your identity and trustworthiness as a seller on the Amazon platform, including:
- A government-issued ID or passport
- A recent bank account or credit card account statement
- A valid credit or debit card
- Your mobile phone number
- Your date of birth
- Your current mailing address
Amazon also will need your bank account number so it can deposit funds from your sales and make withdrawals for returns as necessary.
As you share this sensitive information, make sure you see a lock icon in your browser’s address box to ensure the site is using encryption for your information.
Amazon also has some specific rules you’ll need to follow as a seller, with some considerations specific to dropshipping.
First, you need to be operating out of an accepted country to be able to open a store on Amazon. More than 100 countries are part of the Amazon seller network, so most people should be able to qualify.
Regarding dropshipping, Amazon requires that make clear in product listings that you are the seller of record, not the dropshipper. Your dropshipper must include your information on invoices and on packaging labels, not their own, even though the dropshipper is sending the items on your behalf.
Additionally, your dropshipper must be able to handle all aspects of customer returns, including processing.
You must abide by any terms that are part of your Amazon seller agreement, and the dropshipper also must adhere to these terms as well. These rules seek to ensure that the end customer does not know that you are using a third party to ship your products. You can read the rules on Amazon’s dropshipping policy for all of the details.
Step 3 – Find Products to Sell Through SaleHoo
When dropshipping on Amazon through SaleHoo, you do not hold any of the inventory at your physical location. Instead, you are creating a storefront on Amazon to sell products that SaleHoo’s suppliers hold in inventory. SaleHoo manages the shipping process, so all you have to do is list products and watch the sales come in—no need for managing inventory levels or fulfillment of orders.
When a customer makes an order through your Amazon store, you pass that order to your SaleHoo account. As the dropshipper, SaleHoo then works with its suppliers to fulfill the order for you.
One advantage of using SaleHoo is that it verifies and monitors all its product suppliers, helping you guarantee the quality of the items you’re selling to your end customers on Amazon.
If you decide to use a product supplier outside of SaleHoo, you may need to order test products from the supplier to assess their quality before committing to listing those products on your Amazon store. However, you may want to do that anyway with SaleHoo suppliers, just to have peace of mind that what you’re selling lives up to your standards.
A key aspect of running a dropshipping business is building a relationship with your suppliers. This is a unique factor, as you’ll find suppliers on SaleHoo and then enter into an agreement with them to sell their products. This also allows you to contact the suppliers directly, asking them about key aspects like their ability to support Amazon stores.
While SaleHoo vets all their suppliers for quality and reliability, you’ll still need to take the extra step of interacting with them to see if they can work with your Amazon storefront before committing to selling their products.
Now, it’s time to sit down and start finding what you’re going to sell. Searching SaleHoo’s database is easy and you can even look for specific categories of products, trending items, or products that fit within a certain price range.
You can even see on SaleHoo’s search results some really interesting details, like whether a product is being sold by a lot of other sellers, its sale rate on Amazon, and more.
This is one of the downsides of dropshipping. Even though providers like SaleHoo offer a wide array of product options and suppliers, it’s still a finite pool. Competition can get fierce with dropshipping, especially if you try to capitalize on trendy items and categories, and you may find you’re selling a lot of the same things as other Amazon dropshippers.
You should research your competitors on a regular basis to make sure your prices are competitive. If you don’t have the lowest price for a product, you likely are going to lose out on potential sales or have trouble breaking through when starting your dropshipping business. Just don’t cut your prices so much that you leave yourself with an undesirable profit margin.
Step 4 – Add Products to Your Amazon Store
Once you’ve identified a good crop of products on SaleHoo to start selling, you’ll need to add listings for them to your Amazon storefront.
There are two ways to do this. The first and easiest way is when an item you’ve found on SaleHoo is already being sold on Amazon.
You’ll need to enter your Seller Central dashboard on Amazon and find the Inventory section. Once there, copy the product’s ASIN (the combination of 10 letters and numbers in the middle of the URL for the product) and look in the search returns for the item you’re interested in listing. If the product that appears matches the product you want to sell, click on the Sell This Product button. Amazon will auto-populate a lot of the key details, but you can adjust the price and description.
If the product isn’t already on Amazon, you’ll need to do a bit more manual work. Within Amazon’s Seller Central, click on Create a New Product Tool. You’ll need to enter a bit of information from the SaleHoo product page, such as the product category, brand, dimensions or size options, and more.
Once you’ve filled that all out, click Submit, and Amazon will approve your product listing after three to five days, provided you aren’t trying to list items that need additional approval by Amazon, such as jewelry or watches.
Step 5 – Manage and Track Your Amazon Store Sales
Once your product listings are approved, your products are in place for shoppers to buy when they visit your Amazon storefront. As customers make purchases from your Amazon store, you’ll receive a notification of those orders in your Amazon seller dashboard.
One drawback of SaleHoo is that the platform itself doesn’t integrate directly with Amazon for easy two-way syncing of products and orders. But that doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily have to manually transfer order information into SaleHoo. Back in Step 3, we mentioned the need to talk to SaleHoo suppliers about their support for Amazon sellers. That conversation should have uncovered whether their platform will sync with Amazon, allowing Amazon orders to automatically go to them for fulfillment (and, inversely, allowing their inventory levels to be reflected on your Amazon storefront).
And we hope SaleHoo soon creates an integration that allows for easy and automatic syncing between Amazon and their own platform.
With a supplier that can handle Amazon orders, you’re in the clear. When Amazon shoppers make a purchase, you can then see the orders in your SaleHoo dashboard. Click Orders at the top of the dashboard to see a list of your pending and fulfilled orders.
You’ll want to verify the information for each order as it appears in your SaleHoo dashboard to make sure everything is accurate. Once you are ready to have SaleHoo fulfill the order, click the Place Order button to the right. SaleHoo takes care of everything for you from here.
As SaleHoo takes control of the orders, it changes the status column on your dashboard. Orders that still need an intervention on your part show an unfulfilled or partially fulfilled status. When orders are complete, the Status column lists them as fulfilled.
You’ll still need to handle things like customer service and complaints, but it’s so easy to use SaleHoo to sell and ship products without ever having a single item in physical inventory. Remember to take your time finding suppliers that can work with Amazon stores and finding the products that will resonate with your customers. And don’t forget to market your new storefront on Amazon. Outside of that, SaleHoo will take care of the rest.
