Could you explain what you are specifically automating with Python?
I have quite a few 'modules'.
For the research part, I have a database full of products I can sell based on vendor price lists. I also have a database of scraped products from Amz, eBay (with recent sales and watchers), and Google Shopping that match UPCs from my vendor database. This essentially spits out a list of products that sell for more than my breakeven price, but there are a gazillion signals it tracks. Like, if the price from the vendor drops fast, the price on eBay increases fast, or if the qty my vendor has drops at a certain rate signaling someone else is having success with a product.
Once I have my potential products, I choose which products look like winners and write out listings, gather pictures, etc. For this, the python scrapes product images and other's descriptions, but I generally rewrite it all and use it just to make sure I didn't miss anything. For me, more info generally means more sales. So I take what I wrote and the images I'm going to use (which have been altered by Python to make it original) and plop it into another database table along with tags, such as minimum sale price. Python then posts listings to my woocommerce store as well as marketplaces. I make a lot of mistakes, so I always double check manually before going live :/
A third module just monitors everything. If I get a sale, it alerts and saves the info to the db and sends the info to my vendor for shipping. It also sends out after sale e-mails. It also keeps track of my best buyers and spits a list of customers I may want to target with an e-mail campaign. I haven't been able to automate those e-mails, though, so I do a lot of that by hand. It also monitors for repricing. If everyone else drops in price, so will mine. If I run out of stock from the vendor it pauses the listing until it comes back into stock. If an item hasn't sold after 30 days, it'll reprice it lower incrementally until it hits the lowest value I'd accept, then it pauses the listing and alerts me.
The coolest feature, I think, is it'll try to determine if the item is part of a bundle. (I.e. other's sale price is way too high for the product, so it flags it as too expensive). I go through and see what others are bundling with it, and I do the same bundles myself. This is how I win on eBay hands down.
Overall, the only manual part is gathering the input info and hand-picking the products/writing listings. If I trusted the numbers more, I could in theory just trust it, but I'd certainly have less success.
spicy even though your not the one to help.
thanks for the insight.
traffic seems to be my biggest dog.
Do you do any Email marketing?
@Houdinii
Absolutely. I don't myself, but I hand it all over to my partner. It accounts for almost all my repeat sales. Dropshipping without e-mail marketing is missing out on so many potential sales, and if done right, it's also one of the cheapest traffic methods. It's quite a bit advanced, but I use Amazon SES. They give you like 60,000 free e-mails a month with $0.01 per 100 e-mails after that. For 250,000 emails, that's only like $20 with my own contacts. The learning curve to getting it all running is hard as hell, though.
