E-commerce Automation

What is E-commerce Automation?

E-commerce automation is the software that transforms most or all of your online store’s tedious, manual tasks into automated tasks. In other words, it is software built into your online store to automate processes, tasks, and campaigns. With e-commerce automation, businesses can perform more efficiently and drive more sales with their resources.

Among different approaches to improving digital selling efficiency, e-commerce automation is a fundamental and innovative tool. Since e-commerce automation handles most of the heavy lifting for your e-commerce business, you can emphasize other significant activities. In addition to streamlining the manual tasks and processes, it also accomplishes them faster and cheaper.

E-commerce automation streamlines various aspects of your business, including:

• Order fulfillment
• Shipping
• Marketing
• Customer service
• Accounting
• Inventory management
• Workflow management
• Selling on online platforms
• Analytics and data collection
• Returns and refunds
• Email marketing to avoid cart abandonment

The following article discusses everything you must know about e-commerce automation, how it works, how to automate your e-commerce business, its examples, its benefits, and more. So, let’s get started.

Examples of E-commerce Automation

After being familiar with what e-commerce automation is, let’s understand its examples. 

Fulfillment: Once you are ready to lauch a product in an online store, e-commerce automation triggers an SMS, email, or Facebook message to the customer.

Inventory levels: It involves unpublishing stock-out products and delivering an e-mail or a Slack message to the marketing team so they can halt the advertising operation.

Bestsellers: It involves re-adding stock-out products to the online store after replenishing them.

Customer loyalty: The e-commerce automation system automatically tags high-value customers for segmentation. Subsequently, it notifies customer service to deliver a customized “thank you” message or use discounts or specific shipping rules to customers through e-mail addresses or tags such as “Loyalty Member.”

High-risk orders: The system immediately flags and notifies internal security teams about high-risk orders. An example scenario can be a bot that rapidly purchases all the available stock from your e-commerce store.

Discounts: It adjusts prices at checkout depending on product quantity, combinations, or customer destination.

Order tagging: The e-commerce automation system tags restricted shipping zones and holds payments from customers attempting to ship to those zones. It informs staff to give customers credit to spend on their subsequent purchase or a refund.

Scheduled Sales: It automatically changes prices and offers promotions for fixed periods.

Customer preferences: It shows and hides payment options related to customer criteria like order location, history, and device.

Channel preference: It detects, tags, and segments customers who purchase from specific sales channels like Facebook, Amazon, Pinterest, etc.

Scheduled product releases: It involves preloading new products and simultaneously publishing them to your e-commerce store, sales channels, apps, and social media.

Manage donations: It involves using a spreadsheet and Slack to keep track of money donated.

How Can You Automate Your E-commerce Operation?

Check out the following tips that help you automate your e-commerce operation.

Customer transactions’ tracking

You must track and evaluate the customers depending on their transactions. Moreover, you need to group the customer base. It is better to use appropriate messaging tools when you need to share important information. You can also use these tools to provide information about sales promotion information to all the customers.

Price updates

The product price may fluctuate depending on the changes in the market and offers presented by the e-commerce store owner. Using a reliable inventory management system can help update the product’s price.  

Declaration of new product launches

You must inform the customers immediately after you take the decision to launch a new product. With the e-commerce automation features, your e-commerce store can share this information by posting on social media and other marketing platforms.  Immediately after the new product’s launch is announced, upload the corresponding data to the e-commerce automation software. Ultimately, it will update the information on all sales channels.

Accounting

Accountants must keep track of every accounting detail in the e-commerce business. So, the number of transactions is huge. In such cases, it proves to be time-consuming and tedious to record the transactions manually. Moreover, the odds of error increase.

Automating and linking the company accounts with the bank statements can automatically update the payments and receipts. Streamlining the accounting process using e-commerce automation can help the e-commerce business quickly make judicious decisions.

Benefits of Using Automation With Your Online Store

Two key benefits of using e-commerce automation are

• It enhances the customer experience (using customized offerings and segmentation)
• Allows businesses to focus on more important tasks that demand social skills and intensive planning

The following section discusses various other benefits of using e-commerce automation for your online store. 

1. Saves time

Time is the most valuable asset for any e-commerce store owner. E-commerce automation helps you to accomplish more in less time. It schedules your time-consuming tasks on auto-pilot with the following strategies:

• Automatically hide/unhide catalogs and products
• Automatically publish/unpublish website’s content, including webpage, blog, banner, etc.
• Automatically update product marketing (including price, visibility, buying power, etc.)
• Automatically segment and have effective customer engagement
• Automatically notify team members

2. Grows business faster

You can implement e-commerce automation in all areas of business – marketing, sales, customer service, and so on It can assist your business in effectively dealing with all these functions by streamlining processes, restructuring tasks, and grouping store data.

Some e-commerce automation tools can help e-commerce businesses save on finance and human resources while still fulfilling business growth objectives.

3. Increase sales and marketing effectiveness

The e-commerce sales and marketing teams benefit the most from e-commerce automation. It enhances sales and marketing effectiveness in the following ways:

• Offers personalized customer experience with real-time customer engagement and segmentation
• Guarantee timely response with prompt automated emails/messages leading to customer activities
• Supports practical and dynamic marketing campaigns with time-activated scheduled marketing campaigns

How Does E-commerce Automation Work?

E-commerce automation works as smart solutions that facilitate e-commerce automation in response to the website users’ input, feedback, or actions. AI (Artificial intelligence) is at the core of working on these solutions. It originates from human comparable actions and thought processes.  Plenty of fundamental activities like sending emails to engage customers, AI can effectively manage real-time data monitoring and more.

AI and ML (Machine Learning) help provide a tailored experience to the customers. Customers receive identical recommendations whenever they search for or buy a product from an e-commerce store AI technology chooses those products depending on what it has learned from customers’ interactions with the website.

How Can You Automate Your E-commerce Business?

If you are unsure how to automate your e-commerce business, go through the following section.

Automating Workflows

A manual order fulfillment process means that your e-commerce business relies on manual documentation for the product selection process, inventory management, returns management, and consignment management. It can lead to a poor customer experience and reduced conversions.

Implementing automation for your order fulfillment workflows helps improve order accuracy rates, effectively manage inventory, optimize the product selection process, pinpoint bottlenecks, and enhance the overall customer experience.

Automating workflows can streamline an e-commerce business’ day-to-day operations like customer management, inventory control, and improving marketing strategies.

Automation Rules

Automation Rules simplify the deployment of automated actions when a customer’s order fulfills specific conditions. You can apply such actions to customers’ records and orders.

SmartCategories

SmartCategories are real-time product categories that automatically match the products that fulfill certain criteria. They are beneficial for assembling products over a single page. The purpose is to let customers easily find products without altering their typical product category structure or wasting time adding/removing products from the extra categories.

E-commerce businesses can use SmartCategories to help shoppers swiftly browse all products available on sale or all products available with free shipping. Moreover, they can display your business’ 50 latest products depending on a search keyword.

Newsletter SmartLists

Newsletter SmartLists automatically categorize your mailing list subscribers and customers depending on certain customizable criteria. Thus, they help customers to receive specially targeted newsletter campaigns.

SmartLists can also prepare dynamic groups based on customers’ location, order status, order amount, signup date, purchase date, and more.  

Scheduled Exports

Certain e-commerce businesses require regular CSV exports for purposes like recordkeeping, accounting, inventory ordering, information backup, etc. The e-commerce automation software allows your e-commerce business to export a lot of data into a CSV file format. For example, the data can include customers’ details, orders, products, pricing, categories, reward points, etc.

E-commerce automation can also streamline the scheduling process of periodic exports of CSV files. Subsequently, these files will be automatically go to an email address or preferred FTP account.

When scheduling the CSV exports, you can

• Choose the type of data to be exported
• Mention the filename
• Choose an email address/FTP server to receive the file
• Choose the frequency for exporting and saving the file

Automating Email Notifications

It can be quite tedious for your e-commerce business to manually send emails to customers. Most e-commerce businesses are familiar with the scheduled newsletters. However, the scope of email automation is not limited to that. Your e-commerce business can automate the emails that you need to deliver to notify customers about important actions. Automating email notifications includes the following aspects.

Autoresponders

Autoresponders are a technique for delivering personalized, automatic emails to customers after they place an order. It can be merely a “Thank You” email to customers after they place an order. However, it can also be follow-up emails delivered over a certain period. You can tailor the follow-up emails and include special coupons, review requests, corresponding product recommendations, and more.

Autoresponders effectively engage customers after they make a purchase. Moreover, they boost the odds of return purchases and product reviews. With personalized coupons, autoresponders make customers feel valued; ultimately, they may convert into lifetime customers.

Abandoned cart recovery

Cart abandonment is a situation that arises when a customer has products in their cart but leaves your e-commerce website without purchasing. Recovering carts by manually contacting the customers can be time-consuming. On the other hand, ignoring cart abandonment can incur reduced sales to your business.

Automatic abandoned cart reminders help your e-commerce business bring customers back to the store. An easy way to deliver abandoned cart emails is by integrating a mailing provider with e-commerce software. Furthermore, you can look at other native integrations between transactional email providers and your e-commerce platform.

Back-in-stock notification

Your e-commerce business may occasionally face a situation wherein popular products are out-of-stock. Certain customers will buy that product from another e-commerce store. But some customers join your e-commerce store’s waiting list with back-in-stock notifications.

E-commerce automation simplifies back-in-stock notifications for your e-commerce store and your customers. The moment you add more “out-of-stock” products to inventory, the customers who joined the waiting list for that product would receive an automated notification. You can decide which products to include in the waiting lists, or you can include all products as well.

Product reviews request email

Most customers read product reviews before purchasing. They see not only the star ratings but also the products with more reviews and products with higher scores. Collecting feedback and working on it is crucial for your e-commerce business growth. Obtaining more product reviews means having more sales. But it can be challenging to get customers to write product reviews. Frequently, customers forget to write a review.

When scheduling these emails, let the customer use the product temporarily before receiving a review from them. You can schedule the review request based on your product type or industry. For example, you can send it after 7 days, 10 days, 30 days, etc. Alternatively, you can schedule website push notifications or in-app prompts that request the customers to provide product reviews or feedback.

Reward points expiration email

Adding reward points to your e-commerce store can be beneficial because customers like rewards. The e-commerce automation software’s reward points module provides plenty of customization for developing a loyalty program. The program includes details like each point’s value, the duration of awarding the points, which customers can earn rewards, and whether they expire or not.

You can email your customers to inform them that the expiration date is approaching. This step is important if you want to include expiration dates for the reward points in your e-commerce store. 

Automated fraud filters

Online sellers may have to pay excessively every year due to fraud. Fortunately, many red flags distinguish a legitimate purchase from a deceitful one. E-commerce automation supports automated fraud filters to block deceitful orders or assign them for review.

FraudWatch fraud rules

FraudWatch is an efficient module of e-commerce automation. It automatically filters incoming orders based on a list of features common to fake transactions.

The common indicators of fraud are

• A mismatch between shipping and billing addresses
• Big dealings from first-time customers
• A history of failed credit card transaction attempts

How Do You Actually Automate E-commerce? 

Automating your e-commerce business provides several benefits like increased efficiency, decreased workload, more sales, and increased customer satisfaction. Follow these steps to automate your e-commerce business.

Identify what to automate

You must automate tedious, time-consuming operations that need manual data handling. For example, operations related to order tracking, order processing, and inventory need automation. Moreover, operations like updating product pricing, product information, and payment options over various e-commerce channels need automation.

After identifying the operations to automate, you can determine what integrations and methods you need to use.

Select the right solution

Several e-commerce automation tools exist. So, choosing the one that supports the functions and features your e-commerce business requires for effective automation can be challenging. Reviewing different online merchants can give you better insights into their pros and cons. It helps you understand how they manage orders, products, customers, inventory, and fulfillment data within and between the systems.

Always ask for testimonials or case studies when selecting an online merchant. It provides you with information about reliable online merchants.

Look for pre-built connectors

E-commerce automation becomes easier when your e-commerce platform has ready-made connectors and can seamlessly integrate. Pre-built connectors ensure you don’t have to seek external assistance and spend time configuring and employing integrations. It is beneficial if your online merchant includes connectors that can reliably and effectively transfer data about orders, products, and customers between your systems.

Process your data in real-time

Most sales and support representatives are responsible for follow-ups, shipping, and inventory updates. The real-time e-commerce automation stops them from manually pushing buttons, swapping between software, or charting data into Excel spreadsheets. Real-time processing of data makes sure the data is synced and transferred instantly, and not in batches. Consequently, it improves customer experience.

Monitor and validate your data

Auditing data channels and recording data flow about all transactions is essential.

You must look for e-commerce automation platforms and systems that automatically let you resend, recheck, or iterate activities. These processes and systems check the quality and security of data. So, they help in accurate monitoring and validating of data.

Establish a winning support team

Your e-commerce business must work flawlessly. If there is any question or issue, there must be a way to access your integrations 24/7. Hence, the support team can quickly resolve the issues whenever an order doesn’t go as planned.  Moreover, they notify customers of issues without any delays.

Who Benefits From E-commerce Automation?

Commonly, e-commerce automation benefits operations managers, customer service, and marketing departments. The following points justify how different people make the most of e-commerce automation.

Streamline pricing, quoting, negotiation, and shipping

If an e-commerce business owns huge product catalogs and a miscellaneous customer base, it is difficult to price, estimate, and negotiate the sale. E-commerce automation helps organize products in the backend and precisely compute pricing for every customer.

Make it easy for customers to place and manage orders

Customers hugely and directly benefit from e-commerce automation. This is because this system helps e-commerce businesses to provide personalized interactions and support, which improves customer experience.

Reliable e-commerce businesses always line up customer behaviors through their extensive experience. Your e-commerce business can stand out if it provides customers more flexibility and control over the ordering process.

For example, a jeans manufacturer uses a product grid on their B2B e-commerce website. It lets customers incorporate the jeans’ size, and type and place a bulk order in just one step. The e-commerce automation supports the cart function automation that allows users to add a product to a card and modify the product features at once. So, it relieves sales staff from manually registering, uploading, or handling customer orders. Moreover, it gives customers the freedom to order when they need it.

Coordinate multiple approvals required for purchase

Centralizing the approval process in a single place saves significant time and money.  This is irrespective of the number of merchants, stakeholders, or distributors involved. The success of centralizing the approval process needs that your e-commerce system includes the latest inventory, promotions, pricing, and other information. A reliable e-commerce automation system can manage multiple approvals needed for purchase and thus increase your business efficiency.

Improve reporting, sales, and forecasting processes

Online shoppers create substantial data when they visit or purchase from an e-commerce website. At the front end, the corresponding data can help present targeted products, judicious prices, and exclusive discounts. But at the back end, e-commerce businesses can use this data to ensure product availability while reducing cost and inventory.

Sharing customer information across departments like sales, marketing, finance, and supply chains helps attract new customers and impress existing customers.

Delivering customer-specific promotions and upselling

Useful information in follow-ups, notifications, feedback surveys, and promotions positively influences customer satisfaction, brand experience, and conversions. Integrating your e-commerce platform with a CRM can help personalize incentives and promotions for each customer. So, it drives more conversions through upselling and ultimately, boosts your business profit.

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