eCommerce Automation – Everything That You Have to Know

Why eCommerce Automation? Do You Really Need It?

As your eCommerce business grows, your business processes get more complex. Systems that once worked flawlessly become inefficient due to an increase in orders, faster delivery requirements, increasing complexity and repetitive tasks add up the trouble. In situations like these, you may even find yourself looking for better eCommerce platforms.

If this situation sounds relatable to you, then you need a smart, fool-proof technology — eCommerce Automation.

But how?? How can you bring automation to your eCommerce business? That’s what this blog is for. Here we will discuss everything you need to know about smart eCommerce automation in detail. Let’s dive in!

What is eCommerce Automation?

Ecommerce automation is a phenomenon when businesses use software and applications to perform repetitive manual tasks, campaigns, and processes automatically. It is basically setting your business to auto-pilot mode!

Ecommerce automation is by far the best way to leverage innovative technologies to do more with less manpower, less time, less cost, and fewer resources. Further, it becomes very important for a business to automate as it grows to deal with the growing demands and complexity.

For eCommerce retailers, automation is no less than a boon. Using it, they can perform their cumbersome, time-consuming repetitive task automatically. Not just that, it also acts as a buffer so your team can focus on other important areas for the betterment of your business.

Furthermore, eCommerce retailers can leverage the power of eCommerce automation to simplify different areas of their business. Some of the common areas that hugely benefit from automation are as follows:

• Dropshipping
• Inventory Management
• Customer Support
• Data Collection
• Digital Marketing
• Order Fulfilment

And because most of the processes in an eCommerce business are repetitive, performing them automatically can make your business operations much more swift and smooth while also improving the quality of service you provide your customers.

If you’re still not convinced why you should bring eCommerce automation to your business, then the following eCommerce automation stats can be an eye-opener for you!

Importance of Ecommerce Automation

Given below are some eCommerce automation stats that clearly shows the importance of eCommerce automation:

• After introducing automation, 80% of the users noticed increased lead generations, and 77% witnessed better conversions.
• A total of 36% of marketers use automation to handle repetitive tasks.
• Users of marketing automation experience an increase of 451% in the leads. Further, it improves the productivity of the business by nearly 20%.
• Epsilon says, triggered emails offer approximately 70.5% better open rate, and about 152% higher CTR than normal emails.
• Marketing automation has helped nearly 63% of companies to outperform their competitors.
• With the help of eCommerce automation, many B2B marketers spiked their sales pipeline contribution by approximately 10%. Many of you may find this 10% increase negligible. However, the truth is, that having a well-defined sales pipeline can result in a substantial increase in the revenues.
• Chatbots can help you save around 30% of the customer support service cost.
• Instapage says companies and businesses can save as many as 6 hours per week by automating their social media ads and posts.
• Omnichannel marketing automation results in a whopping 90% increased customer retention rate as compared to single-channel automation.
• Automation has proven to reduce marketing overheads by 12.2% and increase sales productivity by a whopping 14.5%.

Benefits of eCommerce Automation

By reading the above-mentioned eCommerce automation statistics, it is clear that it is extremely beneficial for your business. In fact, it is more of a necessity for any eCommerce business.

Below are the benefits you enjoy after incorporating automation into your online business:

1. It Saves Time

Time is by far the most valuable resource for any eCommerce business, especially when they aim for timely delivery. Every minute you save through business automation can give you more time to focus on other important areas and tasks of your business.

With automation, you don’t have to waste your time performing repetitive tasks. For example, you can use automated order tracking notifications to save time and provide your customers with a satisfactory shopping experience.

2. Streamlined Order Processing

Processing a few orders doesn’t take much time. But what about processing thousands of orders while also updating the inventory manually? Sounds hectic? We know!

Generating shipment for bulk orders is a tiresome task. This is where the need for automation comes in. For example, you can ship all of your bulk orders with Shiprocket, which allows you to create shipments for bulk orders in minutes without forcing you to go through an entire process.

3. High-Quality Marketing Leads

eCommerce automation makes your business operations smooth and helps you gain more high-quality leads.

Note that the quality of lead directly depends on the client close rate. What’s this mean? If you have poor quality leads, be prepared for a poor client rate as well. Moreover, processing these low-quality leads can cause significant overhead in terms of resources.

With the help of automation, you can reach a wider pool of audiences, which in turn will help you identify high-quality leads by using data such as click-through rates (CTRs). Once that is done, you can convert your leads into customers by nurturing them.

4. Faster Order Delivery

Timely delivery is the most crucial factor while running an online business. Notably, the late deliveries can cause a great reduction in your customer experience.

Automation can make the delivery process swift and faster. Today, all the small and big businesses use inventory management software and solutions to manage their delivery and inventory. It is a cost-effective method that increases the efficiency and productivity of an online business.

5. Reduce Cart Abandonment

Shopping cart abandonment is no less than a nightmare for every online business. It is when a customer comes to your site, puts their favourite product in his cart, and then leaves your site without making the final purchase. Scary… isn’t it?

But the good thing is, that you can prevent this by identifying the customers who have abandoned their cart and re-targeting them with the help of automation. You can send them push notifications and emails automatically to get them back to where they’ve left.

Although this will not convert all the abandoned shopping carts, it will improve the conversion rates to a great extent.

6. Automated eCommerce Fulfilment

Order fulfilment is crucial for an eCommerce business. You have to pick, pack, label and ship all the orders to the right addresses before the estimated delivery date. You can automate this entire process by using the right order fulfilment tools. These can help you save a lot of time, resources, and effort.

Don’t know what the best eCommerce automation tools are? Here is your answer!

Best Ecommerce Automation Software

If you think switching to eCommerce automation is a complicated process, then you’re wrong. Below are some best eCommerce automation software that will help you bring automation to your business. All of these tools work great with all the best eCommerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, and so on.

• Shopify Flow
• Rewind / Replay
• Zendesk
• Missinglettr
• Shogun

So, you have now understood the importance of eCommerce automation and also know about the tools that can help you automate your online business. But the question is, how to automate an eCommerce business? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered!

Best Way to Automate Ecommerce Businesses

Automating your eCommerce business has its own perks: increased efficiency, better conversions, reduced workload, happier customers, and higher profits. To help you get started, here is a step by step process to automate your online business.

1. Know What to Automate

eCommerce is full of repetitive processes that can be easily automated. As a general rule of thumb, any process that takes a lot of time is repetitive, and requires a lot of manual effort, and should be automated. For instance, processes like order tracking, order processing, and inventory handling are most suitable for automation. Once you decide what processes to automate, you can think of the integrations and connectors that are needed to make this automation possible.

2. Select the Right Automation Tool

There are thousands of eCommerce automation tools out there. However, not all of them are worth using. In fact, picking the right tool can be very challenging as you need to check whether they are suitable for your site or not. A good idea is to explore multiple vendors and look at their strengths, weaknesses, how they handle processes, and so on. Also, don’t forget to ask for testimonials and case studies. Not only will it help you select the right tool for your business, but will also encourage you to take a 360° view of your business.

3. Choose Pre-built Connectors

When your systems have pre-built connectors and can be integrated with your eCommerce platforms, automation becomes a hassle-free process. With this approach, you will not need to hire professionals and manage the implementation yourself. This is especially true if your automation vendors are offering connectors that can transfer customer, order, product, and other data dynamically between your systems

4. Always Process Your Data in Real-time

A majority of support and sales representatives are responsible for inventory updates, follow-ups, shipping updates, and many more processes.

The logic behind real-time automation is to prevent these representatives from switching between software, manually inserting data, and maintaining hundreds of Excel spreadsheets.

So, it is important to make sure your data is transferred and synced in real-time, and not in batches because this could affect your customer experience in a negative way.

5. Monitor Your Data and Validate It

eCommerce business needs huge amounts of data to be transferred between systems. This means a higher level of integrity and accuracy needs to be maintained. Therefore, look for automation platforms and systems that allow you to recheck, resend, and repeat tasks manually. This will make sure you’re not losing any data that is crucial to your business.

6. Don’t Overlook a Professional Support Team

Your automated systems should work smoothly, without any obstacles. However, in case there is any hiccup or a technical glitch, you should have a winning support team ready to assist you 24/7. This will make sure your order processing works swiftly without messing with the customer experience.

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Examples of Ecommerce Automation

To help you get started, below are some great examples of eCommerce automation you can take inspiration from:

• Inventory Management

  With eCommerce automation, you can automatically unpublish the products when they are out of stock, and re-publish when they come back in stock.

• Customer Segmentation

  Automatically categorise your customers on the basis of attributes such as geographics, age, purchased products, demographics, etc.

• Handle High-risk Orders

  Automatically flag or hold High-risk orders and notify your customers automatically via email.

• Internal Communication

  Auto-notify your team members and other stakeholders via messenger or email whenever a VIP customer has signed up or send auto updates regarding the availability of products.

• Scheduled Automatic Sales Campaigns

  Publish high-quality content automatically on your website, including blog posts, themes, banners, announcements, product or sales categories, and so on.

Future of eCommerce Automation

Automation has completely transformed the way eCommerce functions on a day to day basis. This revolution has led to the UK market hopping on a technological bandwagon. In the world of technology, the phrase “change is constant ” has always been in practice. However, the UK eCommerce industry has seen massive but pleasant changes in the past few years, all thanks to automation.

Today, the future of eCommerce depends on automation to a great extent. Technological advancement and innovations have led to revolutionised trends that are being adopted by millions of small and large online business owners.

Simply put, to stay ahead in the competition, embracing eCommerce automation is the key to a business’s success.

Conclusion

eCommerce automation is more of a necessity than an option. It not only saves you a lot of time, resources, and money, but also helps you generate more leads and conversions. All you need to do is find the right automation tools and a winning team at your assistance. We have mentioned everything you need to know about eCommerce automation. You can easily follow this article to automate your business. Alternatively, you can reach out to us and we will take care of the rest. We can automate your eCommerce business in the most efficient way. Reach out to RVS Media Today!