The Future of Dropshipping With AI (7 Crazy Updates)

nless you've just woken up from a coma or crawled out from under a rock, you've likely been hearing about some of the artificial intelligence (AI) tools that have been released in the past year or two. This technological revolution is rapidly changing industries from the inside out, and in this article, we're going to be taking a look at some of the best ways that you can try dropshipping with AI tools.

AI is no longer reserved for scientists or researchers. There are a ton of AI tools being released every week, with a variety of use cases for the dropshipping industry. While there are likely hundreds of ways to try dropshipping with AI, we're going to be focusing this article on the 7 applications that excite us the most.

Let's get started before the technology changes and this article is rendered out-of-date!

Why Everyone Should Embrace Dropshipping With AI

While dropshipping isn't the most rapidly evolving industry, it's still crucial to stay competitive. Most dropshippers work in small teams or alone and aren't able to provide all of the services or benefits that a big brand can offer. That's why these strategies for dropshipping with AI are so useful — they allow you to do more with the same amount of time and effort.

Think of AI as your ultimate business intern. Dropshipping with AI can allow you to optimize your operations, improve your marketing, personalize your copy, and automate many of the boring, mundane tasks that come with running a business. Moreover, dropshipping with AI will reduce your need for hiring, streamline your data analytics, and help you with nearly every aspect of your business.

It's not just about efficiency and profit margins. In a saturated market, where every dropshipper seeks to carve out their niche, AI can offer a competitive edge. Dropshipping with AI tools can help you rapidly adapt to the market and stay one step ahead of the competition. Dropshipping with AI isn't just about keeping pace; it's about leading the charge in the next generation of eCommerce.

#7: AI Customer Service

Most dropshipping businesses are run by a single person or a small team. And, the more a dropshipping business scales, the more customer service inquiries will come in. These inquiries can be very time-consuming and can take people away from running their business. That's why customer service is usually the first thing that dropshippers outsource.

What's the solution? AI customer service.

Right now, you can basically train an AI chatbot on your business's information, policies, products, and brand language, and have this chatbot address all of your customers' concerns.

• A customer wants to know if your product can work in the rain? Train the chatbot on the answer, and let it automatically reply to all future inquiries.
• A customer wants to know if their order has shipped yet? Have AI check the auto-populating Google Sheet and give a status update, automatically.
• A customer's product malfunctioned and they want a refund? Have the chatbot issue an empathetic apology and pass along the next steps for the refund process.

The crazy part is that this software already exists, and can be implemented in your online store in a matter of hours, not days.

Not only can you drastically reduce the number of people you need to hire, but you'll also be able to address customer inquiries in record time, leading to record levels of satisfaction.

#6: AI Sales Agents

Most dropshippers rely on funnels for their sales. Leads click an ad or social media post, get sent to a website, and place an order through the website directly.

While this is perfect for younger consumers, not everyone is such a big fan. Older generations, high-ticket shoppers, and others may want to speak to an agent on the phone before purchasing.

For most dropshipping businesses, this simply isn't possible. It's much too expensive to have employees waiting on standby ready to answer the phone at all times of the day. Plus, if more than one person calls at the same time, you need to have multiple sales agents working or you risk losing the additional sales.

However, with the invention of AI sales agents, this is rapidly changing. And their capacity to revolutionize dropshipping with AI is crazy.

AI sales agents are essentially voice-enabled chatbots that are capable of having a full-fledged conversation and respond in real-time to customer inquiries.

Want an example? Check out this 5 minute podcast segment for more details on what this can look like:

We might soon be able to have dozens or hundreds of AI sales agents manning the phones, answering your customer's questions, and overcoming objectives. A single person will be able to oversee all of it, and your data and transcripts can flow into a single place.

Dropshipping with AI sounds crazy, right? Well, we're still just getting started.

#5: Personalized Marketing Funnels

One of the best use cases for generative AI (like ChatGPT) is that it can automatically create personalized emails and website copy. But, this impacts dropshipping with AI in ways that you might not have realized. Let me explain:

Imagine you're browsing Instagram and you come across an ad for a product that helps relieve back pain. You click it, and you're brought to a mini chatbot. You're asked a few questions and then directed to the website where you can purchase the product.

This is nothing new. What's new, is that website owners will soon be able to spin up entire web pages that cater to a certain audience, identified with those questions, in a matter of seconds.

Instead of creating a single product page for the back pain relief product, you can ask the lead a few questions to determine their age,  gender, what problems they're facing, etc. Then instead of a single product page, you'll be able to have software automatically generate a personalized product page for that person.

For example, you can have the software create pages with copy specifically catered to:

• Back pain relief for young athletes
• Back pain relief for blue-collar workers
• Back pain relief for seniors
• Back pain relief for pregnant women

And so on.

For each of these pages, the copy, testimonials, and images will all be catered to the visitor based on the results of their survey. Since these pages will specifically address the needs and problems that the individual consumer is facing, conversion rates will naturally be a lot higher.

This is one of the ways that dropshipping with AI will soon become more profitable than ever before.

#4: One-Click Website Builders

When you're setting up a new dropshipping business, one of the main things you need to focus on is building your website. Depending on your level of skill and experience, this can take between a few hours and several days of focused work.

Naturally, this can slow down progress immensely.

The good news is that you might soon be able to fully automate this process with AI. There are already multiple one-click website builders that will design a complete website for you, with a single click.

However, I have yet to see one of these tools that can actually produce an attractive website. They're usually very basic, ugly, and not optimized for conversions.

Even so, I believe it is just a matter of time before we see an AI tool that is able to generate an attractive Shopify (or Shopify alternative) website that is optimized for conversions. It will likely be able to design amazing landing pages, write compelling copy, draft product descriptions, and optimize the entire site for SEO.

Dropshipping with AI is soon going to be able to help you set up a website in less than an hour.

#3: AI-Generated Organic Content

Right now, most people in digital marketing know that AI can be extremely useful for generating organic content. But, this doesn't have to be limited to written content.

While the technology is still being developed, I'm quite certain that you'll soon be able to generate multiple social media posts that feature your product, in a matter of a few clicks.

You'll be able to generate trendy TikTok videos, explanatory infographics, realistic product mockups, fake UGC (user-generated content), blog posts, social media captions, and more — all with a few clicks.

Why is this a game-changer? Well, right now organic social media is one of the best ways to reach your potential customers, but it's also one of the most time-consuming channels. With paid marketing, you can continue to run the same ad for weeks or months at a time. But, with organic marketing, you need to basically post new images, videos, or articles every single time.

In the next few years (or even months!) there will likely be tools that allow you to create a content calendar, generate the content, and schedule it for posting within a few hours.

This is one of the ways that dropshipping with AI will make selling products easier than ever before.

#2: One-Click Product Research

As any successful dropshipper will tell you, product research is likely the single most important part of getting your store started. Selling the wrong product is like pushing a boulder uphill. It's extremely challenging, and you're likely to eventually get crushed by the market.

Choosing the right product, on the other hand, is like holding on the the boulder as it rolls downhill. Your job becomes to slow down your business's growth so that things don't get out of control. Out of the two sets of problems, the latter is definitely more desirable.

But, that doesn't mean product research is easy. You'll likely need to look at competitors, price points, suppliers, keywords, fit for ads (some products can't be easily advertised), alongside many other factors. The result is that you can spend days or weeks trying to find the perfect product to focus on, and even then, results are never guaranteed.

The good news is that AI will soon be able to assist you with your product research. I'm confident that you'll soon be able to provide software with your criteria for a product, and the AI will scour the web and dropshipping platforms to find you some options.

Imagine: You tell the AI you want a female-oriented product in the beauty niche, that can retail for >$60, that won't be blocked by Facebook, has US suppliers, and has 3-5 competitors on TikTok. You go get a coffee and let the AI do its thing for a few minutes, and when you come back you have a full spreadsheet full of ideas and information.

This isn't a fantasy — it's only a matter of time.

#1: Realistic AI-Generated Photo Mock-ups

AI has been developing at a very rapid pace, and out of all the ways to fuse dropshipping with AI, the one I'm most excited about is its capacity to generate realistic photo mock-ups.

This technology already exists. It's just not widely used yet.

Basically, you can upload a photo of your product and have AI create a highly realistic image with it in use. Let's say you order a sample of your product — we'll use a hoodie for example. You put your hoodie on a mannequin and take a picture of it.

You can then input that photo of the hoodie on the mannequin into a program like WeShop, and the software will automatically generate realistic images of models wearing your hoodie.

The result is that you can generate completely unique product photos that look like UGC without ever hiring models, paying for photoshoots, or waiting. You can create a full catalog of product images in an hour or two, sitting at home on the couch.

This technology isn't years away, either. It's available now, and few people are using it. You could be one of the first!

Wrapping Up

So, by this point, we've gone over 7 ways that dropshipping with AI is set to profoundly change the industry. It's important to note that these are just some of the changes that are coming, and there are undoubtedly others that we haven't caught yet.

However, we're staying up-to-date with the industry so that you don't have to. If you want to hear more about how dropshipping is being changed by AI, then make sure to subscribe to our newsletter. We'll send you more articles like this one, directly to your inbox.

And if you're looking for dropshipping products, then look no further than DropCommerce. Our dropshipping marketplace has been around since 2018, and has over 20,000 products that you can sell directly on your eCommerce store — all of which ship from the USA or Canada!

It's time for you to get your dropshipping store rolling so that you can surf on this AI wave rather than missing out. If you want to get started quickly, check out our prebuilt Shopify stores! They're loaded with products and ready to go, so you can start dropshipping in a few days rather than a few weeks.

Good luck, and thanks for reading!