6 Ways to automate your ecommerce business
Selling online is a lot of work. From marketing and communication to fulfilment and shipping, not to mention all the follow-up, and everything else in between. Real-time eCommerce automation might just be the silver bullet you are looking for.
With ecommerce automation, you can create and deploy automated tasks that will:
- Increase your sales
- Reduce your costs
- Reduce the workload on your team
- And a whole lot more!
Let’s take a look at some of the ways e-commerce automation can help you grow your business.
What is ecommerce automation?
Ecommerce automation is a great way to simplify the day-to-day tasks of running an online business. In fact, it’s one of the most effective ways to free up your time so you can focus on other aspects of growing your business.
If you’re still doing things manually and don’t have any automated processes in place, that’s costing you time and money. Automation can help you grow your business while freeing up your time to focus on higher-level responsibilities.
Adding various apps or software might help you with this, but they may not give you the results you are looking for or take too much time to implement. That’s where e-commerce automation comes in. What if things just happened, without all the legwork each time? E-commerce automation is the magic needed to free you from the mundane details that come with selling online.
6 ecommerce areas to automate
An automated e-commerce store frees you up to focus on things that matter.
Here’s 6 areas that we believe are ripe for automation:
1. Customer experience and support
Retention. It’s the name of the game in ecommerce.
According to research conducted by Forrester, the probability of selling to an existing customer is more than 30% higher than that of selling to a new prospect. That figure only climbs higher as your business ages and gains trust.
One of the best ways to boost retention is by rewarding customers for their loyalty. You can rack up points or dollars through a rewards program, or even give customers free shipping for hitting certain spending thresholds.
When you automate some of your business processes and functions, you can improve the customer experience at your shop. You can make it easier for your customers to find what they are looking for, purchase what they want, and leave your website with a favourable impression.
2. Marketing
Automating email marketing is an excellent way to boost sales.
The best way to automate processes in this way is by syncing an email client with your CRM system. That way, you can ensure you segment your email list as effectively as possible. Take, for instance, a prospect who shows an interest in a particular product. You can get them automatically added to a relevant email list.
Those customers will then get targeted marketing material relevant to their interests. The kind of content will increase the conversion rate from prospect to customer.
3. Purchase order automation
If you’re like a lot of ecommerce businesses, you outsource inventory management to a supplier that you source from regularly. You may even have several suppliers. That’s fine, so long as you don’t mind working with spreadsheets and other documents to track purchases and manage your inventory.
But there’s a better way. By using automation software, you can get purchase orders raised according to incoming sales. When a purchase reduces your stock to a predetermined level, the order can be generated automatically. You can even create rules about first choice suppliers for different items.
Purchase order tracking is also more straightforward with automation. You don’t have to flip between stock sheets, emails, and other documents. Everything gets done within one management system.
4. Vendor and supplier onboarding
Supplier relationships are never easy to maintain. In fact, sometimes they can be downright hard work.
When it comes to maintaining a solid relationship with your provider, there’s lots of information to share back and forth between the two parties involved. You’ll need to exchange payment and tax details, and you may even have to get your supplier up to speed on your systems and procedures.
All that takes time. If you devote a team member to doing it, you’ll lose out on what that worker would usually be doing. An automated supplier portal can take that burden away from your workers. You can share and receive all details pertinent to a vendor relationship via a web-based interface. It’s quicker, more accurate, and lets your team stay productive in other areas.
5. Order management
Order management sounds like a simple thing, but it’s actually a catch-all term for a vital element of online store operation. It refers to the process by which customers’ orders get tracked and progressed from start to finish. It overlaps with project management, customer service, and many other areas.
As an ecommerce business grows and matures, there are many opportunities to streamline and automate business processes. Those opportunities can be found in many places in the order process—from order placement to post-sale, many can be automated.
6. Inventory
Tracking your inventory is essential for a number of reasons. It allows you to fulfill customer orders quickly and accurately, as well as identifying any problems with your supply chain that may cause delays.
While manual tracking is always possible, automated tools can make the process much easier by reducing human error and ensuring that everything is counted properly.
Automation is also good for preventing overstock—or even worse, understock—of products in warehouses. If the right information gets to the right people at the right time, then there will be no surprises when it comes to how much stock you should have on hand.
So there you have it ….
Automation is the key to scaling your ecommerce business. If you’re still doing things manually and don’t have any automated processes in place, that’s costing you time and money. Automation can help you grow your business while freeing up your time to focus on higher-level responsibilities. If you’re looking to automate your online store contact us now for a free no obligation chat to see how we can help.
Ready to work with us?
1. Join our Facebook group NocodeVA where we share in-depth content and trainings on automation and the latest no-code tools
2. Book a Power Hour where we will hang out on Zoom, share screens, focus on your automation plan, problem solve any tech issues you have, map your workflows out or just brush up on your automation skills. The choice of what you spend the hour on is yours
3. Sign up for interactive Zapier or Airtable training. The training will help you to run your business better and faster.
4. Work with us on a 1:1 basis to create bespoke business automations specific to your workflows. Email us at info@amsuk.co
