If you are looking to start or scale your drop-shipping business, you’ve come to the right place.
Today, we’ll cover two of the main dropshipping tools out there: AutoDS and Zendrop.
We’ll compare its key features, pricing, pros and cons, and see which one is best for you!
AutoDS vs Zendrop
AutoDS
AutoDS is an automated drop-shipping tool for your store. In addition to automating drop-shipping, it also finds you best-selling products to sell, explores private suppliers, and more.
It offers multiple integrations including Amazon, eBay, Shopify and Facebook.
AutoDS was founded in 2016 and has locations worldwide, from America to Asia and Africa.
Zendrop
Founded by Jared Goetz in 2019, Zendrop is a dropshipping app used by more than 3 million sellers.
It integrates with Shopify and ClickFunnels and focuses primarily on dropshipping products for US customers. With it, you can access to more than 1 million products from vetted and independent suppliers.
Key features
Selling platforms
The selling platforms each tool integrates with are one of their main differences.
You can connect the AutoDS app straight to your Shopify store, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, WooCommerce, Etsy, and Wix. AutoDS also recently added TikTok Shop to this list, which gives them a huge market advantage.
Almost all of AutoDS features are available for all platforms, except the AI store generator which is specifically designed for Shopify.
Zendrop, on the other hand, only integrates with Shopify, ClickFunnels and TikTok Shop US. They don’t have direct integrations with other platforms. They used to support WooCommerce but not anymore.
However, if you’re selling Zendrop products on platforms like Facebook Marketplace, eBay or Amazon, you can manually place these orders through Zendrop for fulfillment.
Stock and Price Monitoring
AutoDS also offers Stock Monitoring. You can set the minimum product quantity and maximum shipping days to keep the products in stock as long as your supplier doesn’t exceed those settings.
In fact, they go the extra mile and offer Price Monitoring. With Automatic Price Automation, AutoDS maximizes your profit by raising your prices automatically for best-selling products and reducing them with discounts for products that don’t sell.
Zendrop, sadly, doesn’t have this level of automation. Their system provides real-time inventory tracking, so you can monitor stock levels and if they go out of stock, you’ll receive an email and you’ll have to take action.
They also have a Trending Products list, available with a Zendrop Plus membership, which is updated weekly with hand-picked items by their product specialists. This list helps you stay competitive with pricing but it’s not the same as having an automatic price automation feature.
Product research
AutoDS’s Product Research Tool helps your dropshipping business discover, source, research and import dropshipping products in no time. Inside the Winning Products Hub, you’ll find trending items with high ratings and a large number of reviews and rake in more sales.
Thanks to its Smart Filter System, you can also filter products by price, shipping, supplier, warehouse and more.
Another way to find products is through the TikTok Ads Spy tool. This trend discovery tool shows you popular product-related TikTok ads and videos. You can find your proven products based on engagement and conversion data.
To find products on Zendrop, simply go to their Find Products page. You can use many filters to fine-tune your search results, and they can even be combined with keywords. Some of the filters include price range, suppliers and categories.
Artificial intelligence
AutoDS has two main AI tools: an AI writing assistant and an AI Shopify Store. The first one generates product titles and descriptions and you can adjust its tone and temperature.
The AI Shopify Store is a new feature that creates an optimized Shopify store that fits your business goals and is tailored to your chosen niche.
Similarly, Zendrop creates a custom Shopify AI-built store for you. The store comes with a ready-to-use website, premium custom theme design, and 20+ pre-loaded products.
It also has an AI suggestion tool that helps you in your TikTok strategy and chooses the right product collection for you.
Print-on-Demand
Print-on-demand is a type of business that allows you to create and ship custom-designed products after the customer has already paid. Your POD partner takes care of the printing and fulfillment process, while you can design unique products.
Both AutoDS and Zendrop offer Print-on-Demand.
I tested Zendrop’s templates and created a black dress in seconds. But you can go with more advanced stuff like skirts, blankets, flip-flops and the list goes on. Besides changing your color, you can add text, cliparts and more depending on the product.
Product Sourcing
AutoDS has established its own warehouse to inspect products and quality before they are shipped from China. The warehouse also affects shipping and delivery times.
The Product Sourcing feature also reduces the usually long shipping and processing times for Chinese suppliers since it processes requests within 24-48 hours.
Moreover, you’ll also be able to send messages directly to suppliers to resolve issues and thus ensuring better communication.
Zendrop has a private network of over 30 million suppliers in both China and the US. Its vetting process for suppliers includes checking business licenses, conducting product quality inspections and evaluating customer reviews.
Chrome extension
AutoDS’ extension allows you to find trustworthy vendors in your region, as well as automate your order fulfillment process. It is free for everyone and easy to use. Simply select regions, suppliers and the product you want and done.
To see more of it in action, read our AutoDS review.
Zendrop used to have a Chrome extension but unfortunately is not longer available.
Languages supported
Zendrop’s dashboard is available in English, French, Portuguese and German.
However, AutoDS, sadly, doesn’t seem to have multilingual support.
Support and resources
AutoDS has multiple learning resources: a blog, e-books, a podcast and courses. Its YouTube channel is updated pretty much daily.
It also offers a mentor program for users for $39.97 per month. You’ll often have live availability to your mentor but, if they are offline, you can leave them a ticket when you have a question to ask.
You can contact the support team by submitting a ticket and they will get back to you in 24 hours. There’s also a community on Discord that you can join for free.
Zendrop also has plenty of resources, from a help center and an academy to blog posts and YouTube tutorials, so you’ll never feel lost. They are very active on social media, they even have a TikTok account where they upload almost every week.
If you need help with anything, they have 24/7 chat support!
Pricing
AutoDS offers three plans for each selling platform. Although there’s no free plan or trial, you can try any plan’s features for 14 days for $1. These are the prices for Shopify:
- Import 200: $19.90 per month. Import 200 products from all over the world and access the Smart Filter System.
- Starter 500: $29.90 per month. Import 500 products and access the AI writing assistant.
- Advanced 1K: $49.90 per month. Import 1K products and run all AutoDS automation tools in multiple stores.
If you need to import more products, you can customize your plan. For more than 100K, you’ll have to contact sales.
Zendrop offers a free plan and two premium tiers:
- Free: access more than one million products.
- Pro: $49 per month. Make unlimited orders per month, get automated fulfillment and access custom branding.
- Plus: $79 per month. Get live weekly coaching calls, private product listing and the Trending Product Finder.
AutoDS Pros and Cons
Pros
AutoDS integrates with a long list of selling platforms and most of its features are available for all of them. It’s also very powerful: as we mentioned, it has a lot of automation features.
And there’s also a Chrome extension that you can use for free!
Cons
To use its main features, you need a paid plan. A multilingual dashboard is also not available at the moment.
Zendrop Pros and Cons
Pros
The main pro of Zendrop is its free plan, which allows entrepreneurs to start their businesses without having to spend any money.
They also have a very user-friendly interface and each feature is very intuitive and easy to use like their print-on-demand tool.
Cons
Zendrop integrates with only two selling platforms and instead of adding more options, it reduces them. In 2023, it discontinued support for WooCommerce.
Verdict
So which one is better, AutoDS or Zendrop? Well, although they are both great dropshipping tools, as we can see in this post, Zendrop falls short in many aspects.
Not only does it not provide enough automation, but it also lacks support for multiple selling platforms. Yes, it has a free plan, a clean interface and many cool features but, in comparison, AutoDS is a better option.
So at least for now, I would pick AutoDS to create and escalate my dropshipping business.
Which one do you choose?
Tell us in the comments!
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