Auto DS: AI Dropshipping & POD

Before I begin this review, let me make this categorically clear. I am not usually the kind of person who goes online to write bad reviews about businesses because I believe in fair play and live and let live, but my hand has been forced by the underhand way in which AUTODS has chosen to address (or not address) my case.

If you are considering using AUTODS...DON'T! Let me tell you what happened to me. I signed up for their free trial, and after that, I signed up for another month at 7,99 because my store was not ready and I needed to use the service in an actual working store. Before it expired, I was sent a notification to renew. I responded that I had no workable store as yet. You can imagine how shocked I was when a bill from AUTODS appeared on my PayPal account: 368 euros for a one-year bill. This was where the horror started because, despite repeated shows of evidence, PayPal judged the case in Autod's favour. When I saw that I could not get a refund I asked AUTODS to connect my Shopify account, which I had put on pause to build, they refused after tens and tens of communication back and forth. The last straw was when i received the following message from an AUTODS's staff called Kristine and I quote ‘I am sorry if this is not the outcome you expected. Unfortunately, since you lost the dispute, the transaction has been deemed ineligible, and the amount in question will remain in our account.’

I am a one-woman business owner who is going into dropshipping to try and make life a little easier for my family. 368 euros is a lot of money to lose, first of all. Losing it without any service is even more appalling. I find this incredible, not to mention unethical. That a company that took money from my account, unauthorised, refuses to refund that money. Even worse, it is refusing to provide the service for which they took the money despite offering to forego the refund instead of reinstating my account, giving me access to the product they have billed me for a whole year. I cannot access the account or use the service, yet I have been billed 368 euros! How is this ethical? Businesses like this hide behind the advantage of being online, with no knowable physical office to go to in situations like this, to dupe people of their hard-earned money. I guess daylight robbery is how they make money and remain in business.

AutoDS has 4.9 star reviews because you earn free fulfillment tokens if you give a 5-star review. Naturally, people will take advantage of the free tokens by giving 5 starts.

Influencers will tell you "you're stupid not to take advantage of the free plan" with a smile on their face, but here's how "free" AutoDS really is ->

Cons:
1- AutoDS has a minimum $26 a month fee.
2- You *will* pay higher COGS for products.
3- Pay an extra fee for each order (10% of cogs in my case).
4- My total COGS for a product were ~$16, but in reality I was paying $25.51.
5- You have to pay to source products into AutoDS.
6- You will have to pay to fulfill orders from autoDS.
7- You will have to pay (on top) to automatize all fulfillment process.
8- You will likely have to source your product, because there's not a lot of products listed.
9- No photo search (which free suppliers do)
10- If you have upsells and a customer orders 3 products, you will have to pay shipping for 3 orders, not 1. (they say they don't have the systems in place to make 1 order of 3 products count as 1 order of 3 products. What the actual ****)
11- The amount of hidden fees/subscriptions *everywhere* will suck the soul off your pocket.

Learn from others (my) mistakes. If you are starting, *not scaling*, make sure to make the best choice.

Pros:
1- great customer service
2- rich and complex platform.

To edit a product, you must do everything on the autods. If you're unaware of this, you'll be surprised when your product titles and prices suddenly change automatically. Unfortunately, you can't disable this feature, and customer support is unhelpful when it comes to resolving such issues.

"Edit everything on the autods platform" fine, I’ll do that. Then I thought, what about images? I had uploaded them through Shopify. Would they revert to the original ones from autods? Customer support couldn’t answer this question. So, I decided to upload the images directly on autods, wasting additional time. Guess what? If you're serious about improving your website speed, their platform doesn't allow you to upload images in webp format.

Oh, and let’s say you're running a discount offer and want to add a "compare to" price. Yes, you can do this but only if your store currency is set to USD. For stores using other currencies, you have to manually convert prices in their platform from your currency to USD. And the conversion? It doesn’t work correctly. For example, my product price without a discount is £68. Technically, that should convert to $85. I entered this USD price into the autods platform so it would reflect correctly in GBP. Instead, it converted to £112.

No words.

I would give 0 stars if I could. I worked extremely hard to get my store up and running and relied on their service for fulfilment until an order came through, I topped it up, then they marked my account as high risk and they took 3 days to resolve the issue. They say they have 24/7 online help, but no ones available to resolve the issues you encounter. I chased approx 5 times in those 3 days outlining my concern. I just received a 4 point strike from Tiktok due to the delay and a few hours later Autods sent me an email advising issue is resolved and Happy Sales!

I am giving this platform a 1-star rating due to the extremely poor support and overall disappointing experience. First, the support team is the worst I have ever encountered. They don’t thoroughly read the questions and only respond to what they deem necessary, often ignoring key issues. I had to repeat the same question in 4-5 emails before finally getting an answer.

Additionally, the platform offers the assistance of an AutoDS mentor, but my mentor did not respond for 3 or 4 days. I had to reach out again myself to get a response.

Moreover, the AutoDS platform lacks essential information regarding suppliers, such as where the listed products can be shipped. They claim to merely facilitate services, but on multiple occasions, I encountered products listed on the platform that I couldn’t sell because the supplier's link was broken, and I had no way of knowing if the product could be sold in the European market.

Overall, the support is unresponsive, the mentor service is unreliable, and the platform lacks critical information for sellers. I cannot recommend this service to anyone.

easy to use, easy to import, and its a solid platform for fulfillment as well

update:
nevermind I would not recommend... tried fulfilling a order since nov 5 has never been shipped since and today is nov 16... paid for a service left with disappointment and anger

First thing—if you want to use their automation tools, it costs extra on a monthly basis. If you use research or hand-pick products, it will require additional purchases. And yes, just a cherry on top: to automate orders, you must buy some credit from them! As for their " suppliers," ... you will purchase from regular online stores like Walmart, HomeDeport, Amazon, etc. I'm just saying that these are not wholesale suppliers! You will get a better deal just going to their stores and using something like Walmart/HomeDeport CC or other promotions or coupons.
Also, I canceled my membership with them, and instead of receiving a confirmation email about my cancellation, I got an email from AutoDS saying that they created a new account for me with my email and a new password without my permission! Not cool, AutoDS!
P.S. I almost forgot that if you have any problems, let's just say that you want to cancel a subscription with them. You are all the way in the back of the waiting line, and if you want your problem resolved quickly, guess what you need to do? If Your guess was that you need to pay EXTRA... you are right! :)

I used to have service with them, and there are bad services they offer. Be careful who you do business with because they will take your money. They should also offer you a free service to even start as a beginner.

They just charged me $368 in fees and my store isn’t even launched yet. I haven’t even adding any products from AutoDS to my store. Complete scam!!!!!!!! Telling all my students & mentees to never use them.

Laughably bad. The credit system is terrible, the customer service is non-existent. Had orders sitting in queue for days and the response was, "we process thousands of orders." Seriously? I don't care, I need my customers' orders processed. Just a giant waste of time and money.