AutoDS Review: A Quick 101 On This Dropshipping Tool

Suppose you've already researched dropshipping and how to get started with it. In that case, you'll likely know it's one of the cheapest, quickest, and easiest ways to launch your own online store because you don't have to store, manufacture, or ship your inventory.

But that doesn’t mean that dropshipping doesn’t come with challenges. Most notably:

• Sourcing and evaluating products
• Listing products on your store
• Updating product pricing
• Managing stock

Fortunately, there are tools out there you can use to streamline and automate the entire process. 

This is where AutoDS comes in. 

So, in this article, we’ll review what AutoDS is, how it can help your dropshipping business, and whether its features justify its pricing. There's lots to cover, so let’s get started…

AutoDS Review: What's AutoDS?

As we hinted in the intro, AutoDS is a dropshipping automation tool that enables you to:

• Source trending products
• Manage product pricing and stock
• Import products
• Automatically process orders

The process is simple:

1. Find trending dropshipping products in AutoDS's catalog
2. Import products to your online store with just a click
3. AutoDS monitor pricing and stock 24/7
4. Automate order processing and even fulfillment with AutoDS’s fulfillment solution

At the time of writing, AutoDS has assisted over 67,000 entrepreneurs worldwide, accumulatively generating over $200 million in sales. So, they must be doing something right!

AutoDS Review: Suppliers

AutoDS’s suppliers operate worldwide, with suppliers in the US, EU, China, and beyond. This means that no matter where your customers are based, you should be able to offer products to your audience. 

Notable suppliers include:

• Banggood
• AliExpress
• Amazon
• Wayfair
• eBay
• Alibaba
• Costco Wholesale
• Walmart
• Etsy
• Target

There are 26 suppliers in total, which you can filter by location. 

AutoDS Review: Key Features

Now we've covered the basics, let's put AutoDS’s most noteworthy dropshipping and automation features under the microscope:

Find Trending Products

There are over 500 million products in AutoDS’ database, so you won’t struggle to find relevant products. AutoDS also scans its suppliers for trending products so you can focus your product search on best-selling items. 

You can use the AutoDS finder to search for products. Unlike a traditional search filter, you tell AutoDS:

• What type of product you’re looking for
• How many products you want to import
• Which of your stores you wish to import the products to.

Then, AutoDS searches its database based on your criteria (like your supplier and fulfillment location). You can also filter products according to bestsellers or the ones you’re likely to get a coupon for if you sell them. This is essentially a discount, so you can buy them cheaper and get a better margin. 

Of course, you can also search by a specific product type. Still, the beauty of using the AutoDS finder is that they scan for the best dropshipping products on your behalf. However, using the AutoDS finder costs credits. The cost is broken down into categories based on how well the product’s likely to sell.

For example, finding products with a high chance of a discount coupon costs five credits per product. Whereas finding a basic product with an average of three sales per month costs only one credit.

Import Products

Once you’ve found a product you wish to sell on your online store, you can use AutoDS’s one-click import alongside its eCommerce integrations. For instance, eBay, Shopify, Facebook, Wix, and WooCommerce, to add it to your store in under a minute. Then, orders placed on your eCommerce store for AutoDS products are automatically accepted and forwarded to the supplier for processing and shipping to your customers.

At this point, it’s worth noting that you can also set product pricing during the import. AutoDS automatically calculates a break-even cost which you can round up to include your profit margin. When setting pricing rules, you can also define other details, such as your:

• Shipping policies
• Item location

…and more, and to decide whether to include shipping costs in the displayed price.

Plus, you’re not limited to a single store. You can use AutoDS to import products to multiple stores simultaneously.

Finally, you can set a specific number of products to automatically import to your online store daily or at other specified time frames. This works by using the AutoDS finder tool to search and select the best dropshipping products based on your supplier criteria and fulfillment location. What’s great about this is you can use it to schedule uploads ahead of time, for example, for a holiday sale!

24/7 Price and Stock Monitoring

AutoDS automatically notifies you if an item's price changes or availability is low. That way, you’ll avoid losing profits on an item that’s now more expensive. Similarly, you’ll avoid disappointing customers if an item’s out of stock because you can respond immediately without manually tracking your stock.

AutoDS also permits you to calculate product pricing dynamically so that if a supplier changes the cost of an item, your store automatically increases your product pricing to match. 

In addition, you can use global pricing range changes to alter product prices according to what you’re trying to achieve. For example, you can change prices automatically based on the following:

• What you need to generate to break even in a given month
• Your stock levels
• Shipping methods
• Desired profit margins

For instance, to do this, AutoDS can automatically round to XX Cents to make your pricing end at .99 or .97 cents, which is known to affect your customer’s price perception. You can also raise prices based on a product's sales performance: Higher demands mean you can increase your expenses to a set limit. The same goes for when sales decrease or if a product hasn’t sold in a specific time!

Dashboard

You can view the critical information from the convenience of one centralized dashboard. This includes stats about your dropshipping store, like your best-selling items, total revenue, items imported, etc. You can also see which products haven’t sold yet and cut them out of your offering to save on advertising costs.

From the dashboard, you can also quickly access product inventory across all your stores, view supplier info, overview product variants that are out of stock or on hold, and more. 

Tracking

With each order, you’ll receive automated tracking information as soon as it becomes available from the supplier. So, you can keep customers updated throughout, leading to higher customer satisfaction!

You can enhance this further with AutoDS’s dropshipping automation order system add-on ($9.90 per month). This helps you to easily automate tracking with minimal effort. Once you’ve purchased the add-on, go to the store settings and click the “fulfilled by AutoDS service” option. From there, you just select your suppliers, tell them how much you’re willing to spend on purchase order pricing, and AutoDS will do the rest. They’ll process all your orders, from sending them to suppliers to updating customers on their order progress. 

AutoDS Review: Customer Support

AutoDS provides 24/7 customer support via live chat. On top of this, it offers a range of helpful resources for dropshipping merchants, such as webinars, courses, a blog and podcast, and even premium mentorship programs.

The website also has an ecommerce calendar that marks important seller dates, such as profitable seasons and holidays and a list of free dropshipping tools that you can access.

Finally, there’s a help center with articles on all features, configuration, onboarding, and more. 

AutoDS Review: Pricing

AutoDS offers three pricing plans, depending on which eCommerce platform you integrate with. Pricing is billed either monthly or annually, whereby annual billing affords you a 25% saving. There’s also a 14-day trial period that gives you access to all features and add-ons.

As Shopify is perhaps the most popular eCommerce solution, we’ll display its annual pricing here. However, note that out of all options, eBafy is the cheapest, and Facebook is the most expensive.

For Shopify, pricing for importing 200 products starts at $19.90 per month on annual billing.

This plan also comes with basic automation features, like:

• The product research tool – discover best-selling products in seconds
• Draft manager – view and edit products before you import them to your store
• Order manager – view and edit your store's orders in one place
• Products manager – manage all products across multiple stores directly from AutoDS
• Product variation support – list all product colors and sizes
• Product image editor – run actions on multiple product images at the same time, such as adding watermarks
• Smart filter system – optimize your products with a bulk change system 
• Access to the full business dashboard (as discussed above)
• 24/7 support
• Access to all supported suppliers (as discussed above)

The Starter 500 plan allows you to import 500 products and access price and stock monitoring for those products. The plan costs $29.90 per month when billed annually and also unlocks the following:

• The Q4 Dropshipping ebook – a resource on seasonal selling with info on trending products
• Full product editor – edit any information on your product pages directly from AutoDS, such as title, description, images, tags, etc.
• Bulk product importer – import multiple products at once
• Automated orders – link your buyer accounts, and AutoDS will process all orders automatically.
• Smart pricing rules – round pricing up or down, change pricing when the base product price changes, etc.
• Advanced bulk changes – change over 12 product attributes on multiple products with just one click.
• Get automated tracking updates from your supplier (if they support it).
• Supports fulfilled by AutoDS (an add-on service)

The Advanced 1K plan costs $49.90 per month when billed annually. It allows you to import 1,000 products and also unlocks the following:

• Multiple store management for up to three stores 
• VIP support – get faster responses

There are further plans to choose from if you want to import even more products, allowing you to add up to a maximum of 10,000 products for $249 per month.

On top of these pricing plans, you can also opt into various add-ons. 

• The Dropshipping Auto Ordering System– This fulfills orders automatically with AutoDS. It also adds automatic tracking numbers to all products. It sends three automated messages to buyers about the progress of their orders. AutoDS fulfillment costs $9.90 per month.
• VA (virtual assistant) Access – This gives your team members or virtual assistants unlimited access to your stores. You can set their level of control over your store (i.e., what they can and can't access ) and other user privileges. You can also let your VA manage your business for further ease and automation. This add-on costs $14.90 per month.
• The Mentor add-on costs $39.90 per month. As the name suggests, you’ll receive a mentor to answer any dropshipping-related questions.

Finally, as we mentioned earlier, although the product research tool is included with all packages, it’s based on credits. Credit costs depend on which type of products you want to find, for instance:

• Basic products (those with an average of three monthly sales) cost one credit.
• Popular products (five sales a month) cost two credits.
• Bestsellers (eight sales a month) cost four credits
• Discount (coupon) products cost five credits.

You can also buy credits in bulk, starting at $0.5 per credit for 20 credits (for a total of $10).

AutoDS Review: Pros and Cons

Last but not least, let’s consolidate some of what we’ve learned by listing AutoDS’s most noteworthy pros and cons:

AutoDS Pros:

• When you first sign up to AutoDS, you get 400 free credits for the Product Finder.
• The product catalog spans over 26 suppliers and 500 million products.
• Suppliers are based in multiple locations worldwide, so AutoDS is a useful tool for international sellers.
• Automated pricing is a practical, time-saving tool for optimizing profits based on product availability, base pricing, and demand. 
• Various bulk editing tools make it easy to list high volumes of products.
• With AutoDS’s fulfillment add-on, you can easily add automated tracking to your products, which is a great feature for higher customer-satisfaction
• AutoDS seamlessly integrates with popular eCommerce platforms, including Shopify and Woocommerce.
• Users benefit from round-the-clock live-chat customer support.
• All features are user-friendly, making it easy for beginners to get started with a range of tried-and-proven dropshipping-related tools.

AutoDS Cons:

• There’s no free plan, and the free trial unlocks everything, which might make it difficult to assess how useful the cheaper plans are. 
• For some eCommerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce, automated orders are only supported on the Starter 500 plan. This is a basic feature that most store owners need, essentially forcing you to upgrade to their mid-tier plan. 
• AutoDS is built for quantity rather than quality – it lets you add products at volume based on general sales statistics. It doesn’t evaluate whether the products are high quality. 
• Many features are add-ons, which cost extra. This could get expensive.
• Similarly, the product research tool seems like a core feature. Still, it isn’t actually free to use – 2,500 credits cost $34.90 and deplete when you upload products.

AutoDS Review: Our Final Verdict

All in all, AutoDS is a powerful dropshipping automation tool for beginners and experts alike. Its automation features go far beyond what many other dropshipping platforms offer, especially where its price, stock monitoring, and dynamic pricing attributes are concerned. 

In many ways, it allows you to lean back and let your dropshipping store manage itself. Thus, it's an attractive solution for businesses that otherwise would have to manually manage hundreds of products.

Where beginners are concerned, it’s a decent solution for those that don’t know where to start and need help picking profitable products to sell. 

In our eyes, the biggest downside to AutoDS is that it doesn’t seem suitable for dropshipping stores dedicated to their brand and quality. If product quality is crucial to you, you might be better off looking for a dropshipping directory like Spcoket that makes it easy to order product samples and thorough supplier vetting.

That’s all folks for this AutoDS review; let us know in the comments below what you think of AutoDS as a dropshipping automation solution!