What is eCommerce Automation?
Simply put, eCommerce Automation allows store owners to convert different tasks and processes within their eCommerce business into automated work. For example, it’s a good practice to update your customer information in your CRM whenever a high-value product is purchased on your e-commerce platform. Now, that is a part of the e-Commerce Automation workflow that you can set up to save you hours of manual data entry.
Be it managing your inventory, automating your bookkeeping or running email marketing campaigns, e-commerce automation is necessary at every step of your e-commerce business. As workforces evolve to focus on the more important parts of growing your business, eCommerce store owners need to automate the mundane workflows that are usually run by their employees.
Automation is key to ensuring that you aren’t lagging behind. Even platforms you use, like Shopify, Bigcommerce, and Woocommerce have strongly prioritized automation. Shopify has even built an automated app of their own, Kit, which allows Shopify store owners to automate their ads.
How to Automate for your eCommerce Business?
1. eCommerce Inventory and Sales Management
Manual inventory management is time-consuming. As a store owner, you’re sure to have dealt with hours of scrolling through your inventory list, updating prices, re-ordering products as they go out of stock, removing old inventory listings, and more.
Besides inventory, store owners also need to manage their customers, identifying and tagging them based on how they found the online store, the sales channel they purchased from, and the number of orders they’ve made, to name a few.
Customer management doesn’t stop there.
If store owners want to get ahead, they need to use this data about their customers to set up different processes— from setting up auto-discounts for their loyal customers to alerting customer support about any high-risk orders so it can be followed up before order processing.
Although it is a routine task, inventory and sales management is an important part of any store management. But, it doesn’t have to be on your plate or anyone’s task list for that matter. Set up apps that automate your inventory and sales management workflows to save time while getting your work done.
What are the Inventory & Sales Management Automations?
A few places where you can use this eCommerce automation include:
- Low product stock alerts
- Product inventory management
- Analyze product performance
- Data-based inventory decisions (like removing a product range)
How can you automate inventory and sales management?
Let us explain how this works with an example.
You can set up processes that send alerts to the Inventory Head about low product stock so that they can stock up before the item runs out on the store. You can even raise prices for low stock items to leverage the demand and smartly earn more.
Similarly, if your store is on BigCommerce, the platform offers centralized inventory management. It helps you keep track of your stock, stay informed about low-stock products, update stock levels easily and more to keep shoppers informed. This prevents shoppers from feeling disappointed when they’re not able to bag the products they’re interested in, but at the same time, they can choose to be notified of when they’re back in stock.
The platform offers easy inventory and order management by integrating with different tools like Inventory Planner.
2. eCommerce Email Marketing Automation
Email marketing is as old a marketing tactic as it is effective. With an ROI of 4400%, email marketing is on every eCommerce store owner’s radar. As shoppers evolve in the way they shop and as ads and promotional content get more specific to the shoppers, generic emails aren’t going to cut it.
Your email marketing needs to be highly personalized and relevant to the shopper it is sent to. The best way to send emails that are tailored to each shopper is with eCommerce automation.
According to eMarketer, B2C marketers who leverage automation have seen conversion rates as high as 50%. Top online stores leverage automated emails to set up email campaigns for different requirements based on customer triggers and behaviors. Some of these email campaigns include welcoming new shoppers (check here for the best welcome emails), reminding shoppers about their abandoned carts, recommending and cross-selling products to them, to name a few.
With automated emails, you can send messages that are sure to bring clicks and revenue. For instance, as a store owner, you can set up cart abandoned emails that are sent to the shopper based on the product(s) left in their cart. The email will show the customer the image of the product, helping with recall. You can even send discounts to carts that include high-ticket items in the cart, boosting conversions.
What can you achieve with Email Marketing Automation?
With email automation, you don’t have to worry about whether you can personalize for each of your shoppers. Instead, you can spend more time understanding shopper behavior and strategize the copy within these emails to increase your conversions.
A few use cases of email eCommerce automation include:
- Recover abandoned carts
- Upsell and cross-sell products
- Recommend products
- Promote referral programs
- Boost customer loyalty with engagement
3. Customer Support Management
To ensure that your customers have a great shopping experience from your store, you need to have a stellar customer support system. American Express reported that consumers are willing to spend 17% more on a company that has outstanding customer service. Your customer support can make or break the success and growth of your eCommerce store.
But, it’s not easy to keep track of every aspect of your customer support management. From recording any tickets raised, managing them, making changes to following up with the customer, customer support needs a great system for it to work efficiently.
For instance, a customer is having difficulty with one of your product pages that allows customization to the product. For this, you need to contact your developer to fix it.
If you’re dealing with a lot of customer requests on that day, you may end up missing out on the request or getting back to the customer a few days late. By this time, you’ve lost the customer.
How can you avoid this? You can start by setting up a workflow that integrates your favorite customer support management apps and automates a part of your customer support process.
What can you automate in customer support management?
A few use cases of this eCommerce automation include:
- Offer shopping assistance
- Reduce and recover abandoned carts
- Upsell products
- Cross-sell product ranges
- Make product recommendations
4. Payment & Bookkeeping Automation
Finance and payment management is everyone’s least favorite part of managing a business. When running an eCommerce store, finance is even more time-consuming as compared to other businesses. From managing payments for employees to paying for apps and platforms used to paying manufacturing costs and keeping track of the payments made by customers, manual bookkeeping is a nightmare.
Use payment software like PayPal, Stripe, and FreshBooks to keep all your accounts digital and avoid having a folder full of receipts. Integrate all your finance requirements, providing automated solutions for accounting, billing, and invoicing.
5. Product Pricing Automation
Pricing every product on your online store is no small feat. If you’re doing this task manually, you need to cross-check with large platforms like Amazon to check their average prices, analyze your competitor’s pricing, and even take into account your manufacturing costs, taxes, and customer demand.
Updating your product pricing needs to be done routinely to ensure you are efficiently making the most of the changing market. But, it’s tough to keep track of such a time-consuming task. This is especially true for store owners who have a large product list.
6. Social Media Campaign Management
Social media platforms are one of the best ways to communicate with your shoppers and create strong relationships with them. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest— these platforms allow store owners to engage with their shoppers in many different ways and capture different kinds of shoppers.
Typically, eCommerce stores create organic posts on social media to keep their existing audience engaged while also running paid campaigns to bring new, relevant audiences to their social media accounts and ultimately, their online store.
If you don’t have intelligent software to manage social media, you would be spending a lot of time going between social media platforms to schedule and send out messages on each channel.
What’s more, after posting, you may be having trouble handling data from both your organic and paid efforts across multiple social media channels. Cross-referencing this data and pooling it together to get an overview of your shopper behavior might also be tedious.
What can you do with social media eCommerce automation?
With eCommerce automation for social media in place, you can:
- Promote flash sales
- Recover abandoned carts
- Retarget store visitors
Conclusion
We hope these automated workflows help you set up processes that drive more impact with less effort on your part.
Whether you’re thinking of setting up automation for marketing or for your inventory, don’t take a one-size-fits-all approach to your automated workflows. Instead, work on tailoring your automations to the kind of shoppers you receive.
Customizing your eCommerce automations is similar to how you personalize a customer’s journey with the brand. It might take you some time but with ecommerce automation tools this can resolve easily.
Ready to earn more revenue for your store with eCommerce automation? Get started with Automate.io and let your apps talk to each other!
Marketing Tech 