How to automate your e-commerce business


How to automate your e-commerce business

If you just started working as an e-commerce entrepreneur, chances are you are able to handle your workload well. However, if all goes well, your business will grow, which means you will get more work on your plate. As an online store owner, you will have to deal with more tasks and the tasks themselves become more time-consuming. At a certain moment, there’s only one solution: you have to automate your business to bring some balance back into your work and private life. But how do you do this? We are happy to tell you more about this. In addition, we have some useful tips on how to easily automate your e-commerce business to save time.

E-commerce automation offers many possibilities

As an online store owner, you can take advantage of various opportunities when it comes to e-commerce automation. You can automate various processes and tasks, such as bookkeeping, executing email campaigns, processing customer information, and managing inventories. What you want to do is focus on your main goal; making sales. This means there is no other option than e-commerce automation. In the long run, you need to automate tasks to free up some time to do what you love most. With the right integrations, many time-saving possibilities arise.

Ecommerce automation is becoming ordinary

E-commerce automation has become a common practice nowadays, as it is a given you will fall behind as an online store owner if you do not automate. For example, multiple platforms, including WooCommerce and Shopify, have already put a strong focus on automation. Shopify has brought out some automation results that show clear results. An online store that automated the launch of a clothing line completely finished the selling procedure of an item within two minutes and managed to yield a return of over $150,000 in 60 minutes. Similar results are also seen with systems like WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Magento, among others.

Why is e-commerce automation falling behind?

If e-commerce automation offers so many interesting benefits, then why are many e-commerce entrepreneurs still falling behind in this area? For many online store owners, the main problem is a lack of time to get started. If you want to save time through e-commerce automation, you need to invest time to set it up first. This is exactly the time store owners cannot spare. It’s not just about setting up the automation but also doing experiments and trials to see what works and what doesn’t. Several things have to be tested before they work properly and can actually save time in the future. However, automation is without a doubt worth the time and effort. That is why we are happy to give you a number of tips on automating your online store.

  1. Organizing sales and inventory management

Every online store owner knows that sales and inventory management takes a lot of time. It seems to take an endless amount of time to update prices, go through stock lists, delete old stock listings, and order new products before they run out of stock. In addition to inventory, online store owners must also 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 placed. But customer management doesn’t end there. Customer data should be used to set up various processes, such as setting up automatic discounts for returning customers. Routine tasks, such as sales and inventory management, are time-consuming, but can be automated completely.

Automating sales and inventory management

When we look at sales and inventory management, we can apply e-commerce automation in several ways. Examples are analyzing product performances, product inventory management, and giving a warning when product inventory is low. In addition, you can also think of data-based stock decisions, such as removing or expanding a specific product line.

How do you automate sales and inventory management?

You can set up processes that send alerts to the inventory manager about low product inventory, so they can refill stock before the item runs out in the web store. You can even raise prices for low inventory items to leverage demand and earn more. Several platforms, including BigCommerce, offer centralized inventory management. This helps to keep track of your inventories, update inventory levels and keep customers informed better. This way you can avoid disappointments among customers, which is very important. You can instantly set up a notification that will be sent to interested customers when their favorite product is back in stock.

  1. Automate Email Marketing

Email marketing shows an ROI of no less than 4400 percent. Based on this, it is not very surprising more online store owners than ever are using it. With automated email marketing you can, for example, create a link with ActiveCampaign, which ensures the right message is presented to the right person at the right time. Personalized emails will always be superior to generic emails, so this is also something to pay attention to. It is important to personalize mail traffic so the customers feel like they are valuable to your webshop, which they are! The best way to offer emails that are tailored to the recipient is through the use of e-commerce automation.

What can you do with email marketing automation?

Automated emails allow you to send messages that will definitely be well received and generate revenue. For example, as a store owner, you can set up abandoned cart emails that are sent to the shopper based on the product in their shopping cart they have not bought yet. The mail shows the customer the image of the product, which helps them to remember to buy the product. You can even send discounts to carts that have high-ticket items, boosting conversions. Email automation allows you to develop a strategy to increase conversion, without having to manually personalize email traffic.

What kind of emails can you send automatically?

You can set up e-commerce automation for mail traffic in several ways. What kind of emails can you offer automatically? A few examples are emails that increase engagement and customer loyalty, emails to promote referral programs and recommend products, emails with upsell and cross-sell products, and emails to draw attention to abandoned shopping carts.

How do you automate email traffic?

Ecommerce automation is all about finding the right integrations. If you want to automate mail traffic, you can integrate Zoho, Hubspot, Salesforce, Gmail, MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, and other interesting apps that boost your automated mail campaigns and grow your e-commerce marketing. By integrating email marketing apps into your platform, such as Magento or WooCommerce, you can sync orders, products, abandoned carts, and customers within minutes. For example, you can sync new Shopify customers with a Mailchimp list and continue to run upsell campaigns.

  1. Automating Customer Support

As an online store owner, you need a good customer support system. If your customer support system is not optimized, you are missing out on opportunities. After all, a good shopping experience ensures that customers will return. There’s a lot that goes into managing customer support. Think of registering collected tickets, managing tickets, making changes, and following up on the customer. Customer support needs a great system to run efficiently. Imagine a customer has a problem with a product customization page. Then this problem is first sent to you, after which you pass it on to the developer. Are you too busy to keep a consistent eye on your email? Then you can overlook or forget to respond to the customer’s message. If the customer has to wait a long time for a solution, they will probably choose not to use your store again. That’s why e-commerce automation is important: to prevent this.

What can you automate within customer support?

can apply e-commerce automation in multiple ways when it comes to customer support and management. This includes making product recommendations, providing upsell and cross-sell products, reducing and restoring abandoned shopping carts, and offering shopping assistance.

How can you automate customer support?

Multiple integrations are available to enhance customer support and thus increase customer satisfaction. The possibilities are endless, from setting up emails when live chats are completed to recording chat sessions in your spreadsheets and even raising tickets. Automating live chat functionality will make your store’s customer management more efficient. You can worry less about losing valued customers and spend more time providing quality help and support. For example, when a live chat is activated, the automation will retrieve customer data and store it in your CRM tools. Once the live chat has ended, the workflow can activate the email integration to send a thank you email to the customer.

  1. E-commerce Automation for Bill Payments and Accounting

Arranging the finances often costs an online store entrepreneur more time than the entrepreneur of a physical store. Accounting takes an enormous amount of time and will only take more as your store gets more popular. There is therefore more to it than sending invoices and receiving payments. For example, tracking payments for employees, processing payments for platforms and apps, paying production costs, and ensuring complete invoices.

What can you automate in payments and accounting?

There are many interesting options for e-commerce automation from a financial point of view. For example, you can set up payment alerts for due payments, set up new payment alerts, automatically generate invoices and send notifications to the customer about paying an invoice.

Easily automate accounting

Accounting is one of the least favorite activities of online store owners, while it is a task that requires a lot of time. You can integrate your favorite financial software, keep all your customer transactions in one dashboard, and even receive monthly statements about your cash flow.

  1. Automate product pricing

Entering all product prices manually takes an incredible amount of time, especially since you have to check other things as well. For example, you want to be sure about the average prices, but you also want to analyze the prizes of competitors. In addition, you want to take customer demand, taxes, and of course production costs into account. Updating your product prices should be routine to ensure you are efficiently benefitting from the changing market. This is an incredibly time-consuming task, especially if you have a large product list. E-commerce automation can save you a lot of time.

What exactly can you automate when it comes to product pricing?

You can make the product pricing process a lot more efficient with e-commerce automation. You can apply dynamic pricing strategies, monitor inventory availability data, and automatically conduct competitor pricing analysis.

How do you automate your product pricing?

By choosing the right tools and integrations, you can automate product pricing. A good integration offers insight into sales data and competition prices, but can also give you a heads up if prices need to be lowered or increased. You can then make automatic price adjustments based on the data that has been collected and based on benchmarking of competitors. This can save a lot of research and analysis time.

  1. E-commerce Automation for Social Media

Entrepreneurs can no longer ignore social media. Companies that are not active on social media miss out on great opportunities. As a webshop entrepreneur, you do not want to make this mistake. However, keeping up with social media does take a lot of time. It is important to post regularly, so your business keeps gaining attention, but communication through social media is also becoming increasingly important. Besides this, your business can benefit greatly when you tap into customer behavior through social media. You can use e-commerce automation to greatly reduce the time you spend on social media.

How can e-commerce automation boost your social media activity?

E-commerce automation of social media can save you a lot of time. For example, you can restore abandoned shopping carts, promote flash sales, and retarget webshop visitors. Automating social media campaigns guarantees a lot more free time.

How can you automate social media campaigns?

You need the right integrations to automate your social media campaigns and posts. By doing this, you can focus more on content and performance, while worrying less about the way in which you post on the various social media. Among other things, you can integrate Facebook lead ads, for optimal management of your paid efforts, but you can also save all Facebook leads in a spreadsheet and add these leads to your email marketing platform and target them with product recommendations. The best integrations take a lot of social media tasks out of your hands.

Let e-commerce automation speak for you

Automation is incredibly convenient and widely used nowadays. For webshops, automation possibilities keep increasing, which creates more opportunities when it comes to the growth and development of your business. Automation will give you a higher ROI when it comes to efforts, with more conversions and more sales. APIcenter is there for you if you want to get started with the right e-commerce automation. Discover online what we can do for you, or contact us without obligation.

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