When it comes to running a business, time is your most valuable resource – but time is limited and there are many tasks vying for your attention. You need to make sure that the correct products are listed on your website, that you are completing orders and payments 24/7, processing and shipping packages efficiently … and customer service.
And as you scale, your e-commerce processes become even more sophisticated.
So how can you take the time to do the work that brings in more customers while keeping everything else on track?
With e-commerce automation.
Automation plays a vital role in the future of technology – and it’s no surprise we’re seeing more of it in tools designed for ecommerce businesses. As a shopkeeper, your secret is to put your time-consuming chores on autopilot.
In this post, we will explain what ecommerce automation is, then show you what it looks like with 15 ways to automate your online business.
What is ecommerce automation?
It means using software to turn manual tasks into automated workflows. These workflows can trigger internal or external e-mails, notifications or actions in other apps – for example, the creation of new support tickets in your help desk. To make sure everything works perfectly, you can set several conditions that must be met for the workflow to run.
While e-commerce automation will save you time, it doesn’t mean laying off your staff – or yourself. Rather, it gives your team time to focus on the customer interactions, creativity, and the bigger picture that matter most in your workspace.
Here is a list of some of the best ways to use marketing automation for ecommerce, whether you are using Shopify, WooCommerce, or any other platform.
E-commerce automation software
There are several different types of automation software that you can use for your ecommerce business. The most popular tools are:
Shopify
As one of the most popular ecommerce platforms, Shopify has many powerful productivity apps on its app store. Many of these are designed for automation, including Arigato Automation, or “The One-Million-Use App,” shop workflow automation, and Stock Sync.
Shopify Flow
This ecommerce automation suite is available with Shopify Pro – which is certainly not the cheapest (you should be over $ 1 million in annual sales to justify this). It’s workflow-based and makes it impressively easy to build automation both within Shopify and with other apps through seamless integrations. It includes automation templates that you can copy and customize for easy setup.
Shopify Flow automation templates are divided into buyer experience, customers, inventory and merchandising, loyalty, orders, promotions, and risk.
WooCommerce
If you use WooCommerce to run your shop on WordPress, you also have a lot of options for automation. Most of these are supported by the large number of WooCommerce extensions that you can use to upgrade your WooCommerce site with premium features and integrations.
Other software to integrate with your e-commerce platform
You can also use automation software on your e-commerce platform. These include:
- Email Marketing Automation Tools, like Mailchimp, to trigger emails to your customers
- Automation tools like ActiveCampaign to trigger workflows for internal processes and communication with customers
- CRM tools with automation functions like HubSpot
- Help desk tools with automation functions like Freshdesk and Zendesk
- Accounting and billing tools like Wave Accounting, Xero or Quickbooks Online
Read on to learn 14 of the best ways to automate your ecommerce business, including features on your ecommerce platform as well as other automation tools that you can easily sync.
15 ways to automate ecommerce businesses
Customer experience & management automation
1. Track and reward your most dedicated customers.
Do you reward your best customers? Customer loyalty is valuable for all companies, including e-commerce.
It turns out that you can increase your profits between 25 and 95% by increasing your customer retention rates by just 5%.
To reward customer loyalty, you can automatically add a free gift or delivery to orders over $ 100. With a tool like ActiveCampaign, you can also segment customers by lifetime spend and send them automated emails with rewards.
2. Sync your customers with a Mailchimp list.
All of the top ecommerce platforms – including WooCommerce and Shopify – have native integrations with Mailchimp. So, if you are using the popular email marketing tool to send out your newsletters and email marketing workflows, make sure you keep your accounts in sync.
An integration with Mailchimp can automatically push the email addresses of buyers who show interest in your emails to a specific Mailchimp list so you can keep them updated on your latest products and offers.
3. Collect feedback after a purchase.
Every ecommerce store knows how powerful reviews and honest feedback are. It can make or break your business. To encourage reviews, set up automated email workflows to send follow-up emails after a certain time after purchase. Ask for honest feedback and provide a link where they can post their review.
4. Contact negative reviews.
If you get an unfortunate 1 star review, make sure you respond. You can set up automation to create a support ticket in your help desk software to make it easy to contact and make amends quickly – or at least to listen and understand what happened.
5. Tag and segment customers based on buying behavior.
Segmentation can help you understand your customers and take into account the different unique needs they may have. For example, with a CRM you can create tags or segments based on demographics (e.g. gender or location), lifetime order value, milestones, number of orders, or any subscription or membership.
Inventory automation
6. Automate inventory management for low-inventory items.
When a product runs out, it can lead to lost income and frustrated customers. To avoid this, automate your inventory management so you know when a product is running low.
Woocommerce allows you to trigger low inventory notifications (based on the thresholds you set) and out of stock notifications. In this way you know immediately when a product needs to be reordered from your supply.
Automation of order management
7. Send abandoned cart emails.
75% of e-commerce shopping carts are abandoned. Abandoned cart reminders help you get customers back to your website – and with automation, you don’t have to do anything.
Integrating your ecommerce software with a mailing provider is an easy way to send abandoned cart emails. You can also check out other native integrations between your ecommerce platform and transactional email providers.
8. Try dropshipping for residual income.
Did you know that some ecommerce companies automate order processing and delivery? This is possible with dropshipping – a way to find products, add them to your online store, and ship them directly to your customers without holding or risking inventory yourself.
Oberlo, which was acquired by Shopify in 2017, is one of the most popular dropshipping tools. As expected, it integrates seamlessly with Shopify and you can add dropshipping products to your existing Shopify store or create a new one for your dropshipping products.
The biggest challenge in dropshipping is finding the products that match your store’s branding and quality standards.
9. Print shipping labels and send tracking numbers with one click.
By integrating WooCommerce with ShipStation, multiple time-consuming tasks can be completed with a single click:
- Sync your orders with ShipStation.
- Create and print shipping labels for your WooCommerce orders.
- Mark all orders as completed.
- Generate and send tracking numbers.
10. Send reminders to reorder supplies.
Do you sell groceries, health or beauty products? Your customers may be interested in buying more consumables when they are exhausted.
To let them know, set up automated workflows to send reminder emails for these products a certain time after purchase.
Marketing automation
11. Get leads to customers with email marketing.
People don’t always become customers right away. Your company will have its typical customer journey where people spend time researching and deliberating before deciding to give you money.
However, once someone has given you their email address and permission to contact you, you can maintain this process along with marketing content. Just make sure that whatever you send them is of the highest quality and valuable, maybe with discount codes or free gift offers.
12. Schedule social media posts automatically.
When social media is taking up too much of your time, there are plenty of tools to streamline processes.
Use Shopify’s Post Studio – Auto Posting app to automatically post products to your Facebook and Twitter pages every day.
Buffer is another app that makes it easy to schedule messages in advance. Even content that performs well can easily be rescheduled.
Business management automation
13. Add tasks to Trello, Asana, or Slack.
If you’ve used automation to find out when a product is low on stock or a customer left a frustrated review, you should also notify your team so they can do something about it. Another benefit of automation is that you can notify your team on the internal platforms you use the most – like Trello, Asana, or Slack.
If you’re a Shopify user, Arigato Automation has over 100 out-of-the-box automation features, including pushing data to Google Sheets, Slack messages, Trello cards, and more.
14. Choose powerful help desk software.
As you scale your ecommerce business, it is important to make sure that your customer service is covered. Implementing help desk software is one of the best ways to do this.
With a help desk platform, you are in the best position to centralize your customer support in one place and get a clear overview of tickets from all channels. These tools also give you many ways to improve your customer experience through automation, for example with bots and satisfaction surveys.
