If you are leading eCommerce operations for a retail business, you are no doubt searching for ways to increase efficiency and reduce costs. This becomes more challenging when you add complex eCommerce challenges involving inventory management, marketing, security, and more into the mix.
What is eCommerce Automation?
ECommerce automation is the use of technology to streamline repetitive tasks and workflows to allow eCommerce teams to operate more efficiently.
As customer expectations evolve and the demand for faster and smoother eCommerce experiences increases, automating your eCommerce operations is a necessity. But how do you know which aspects of your operations can be automated? And how do you select the right automation tools? Keep reading to learn more.
The Benefits of eCommerce Automation
Save Time and Resources
The most obvious benefit of eCommerce automation is time and cost savings. Automation can help eCommerce retailers spend less time on redundant tasks, so teams can focus on more valuable projects. This can include everything from publishing social media content and sending marketing emails to merchandising, customer service, and more.
Improve the Customer Experience
Customers are always looking for a more efficient, faster customer service experience. 90% of consumers report that they value an instant response when looking for support. Automating customer service tasks through features like a site chatbot or automatic workflows to trigger communications like order confirmations, review requests, and surveys can reduce your team’s manual workload and better the customer experience. A smooth support experience fosters customer loyalty and trust over time.
Increase Effectiveness of Marketing Strategies
Marketing automation can save marketing teams time, but it can also result in more effective marketing campaigns. Beyond its initial basic functionality, marketing automation can help with many labor-intensive tasks such as lead scoring, creating content, and more. Teams who adopt marketing automation into their strategy have seen a 14.5% increase in sales productivity.
Reduce Errors
Properly established workflows and system automations can help reduce errors that normally accompany manual processes. Data accuracy is critical to eCommerce operations, and automations can ensure your team has a complete picture across customer, product, and operational data.
Which Tasks Can Be Automated?
1. Inventory Management
Every step in a customer transaction can be automated to some degree, from the moment a customer places an order to follow-up marketing messages after they receive their order. Automation can help ensure inventory data is up to date and accurate, so you don’t have to worry about disappointing your customers with stockouts.
Tools such as Zapier and Shipstation can help connect apps and programs without the need for coding. It can help to sync inventory across sales channels, connect inventory and fulfillment systems, organize customers' data, and automate email marketing efforts, which improves the customer experience and reduces the need for manual labor from your team.
2. Merchandising
Beyond just inventory management, retailers can use powerful technology like marketAgility, which has built in automation features to build custom pages, streamline product displays, trigger marketing, and optimize discovery so merchandising efforts can be performed in the background.
3. Marketing
Marketing tasks such as lead scoring, content creation and publishing, email marketing, personalization and targeted advertising, landing page creation, analytics and data tracking, workflows, and customer relationship management can all be automated for more efficient marketing operations.
Hubspot Marketing Hub is a great tool for eCommerce merchants who are looking for ways to automate personalized email marketing, customer information organization and management, and lead scoring, and other areas of the sales and marketing process that take valuable time away from your team.
4. Customer Service
Support chatbots and AI agents can help customers discover products, answer questions, and help with post-purchase tasks like initiating returns or providing product support. This helps customers receive the help they need instantly, so your team can focus on high-level tasks.
Zendesk is known for their AI-agent software, which can help automate customer support tasks and make the customer service experience more seamless. This tool can help with automating other labor-intensive tasks as well.
5. Data Analytics
Data entry and analytics can be automated for more seamless information management. This ensures that data received is accurate and relevant. Data automation allows for decision-making that’s backed by valuable, real-time insights that you may not have been able to collect manually. You can even automate your response strategy with workflows that act on certain triggers that correspond to information collected through automation.
Klaviyo is a great automation tool for retailers looking for marketing solutions, as well as data analytics. Some note that the price is a bit higher than comparable programs, however.
6. Security and Fraud Filtering
Automation technology can help retailers keep sensitive customer data safe by catching red flags throughout every step of each transaction. AI can spot fraudulent activity quickly, and with more accuracy than we can. This can strengthen your site security and make it easier and faster for your team to identify issues.
How to Start Automating Your eCommerce Business
After evaluating which tools are right for your business, there are a few key considerations to ensure a smooth implementation. Setting up an automated workflow involves a trigger, followed by a condition and then an action. An example might look like this:
Trigger: Customer places an order.
Condition: Customer’s order total exceeds a certain specified amount.
Action: Automatically provide a discount or reward. Before you start integrating new automation tools, identify which current operational tasks are repetitive or overly labor-intensive. Be prepared for common integration challenges before you start as well, such as ensuring your data is organized and accurate to start and choosing software that can connect with your core platform seamlessly.
After you've completed your data audit and identified your goals, run tests to ensure that your workflows are performing as expected before launching. Lastly, make sure your staff is trained in the new technology to allow for efficient collaboration with your new tools. Though implementing eCommerce automation can help your business in the long run, it still involves planning, strategy, and initial cost upfront. If you’re looking for help with complex eCommerce integrations including automation, accessibility and legal compliance, marketing, design, inventory management and more, Virid can help.
Virid has helped major eCommerce retailers execute complex integrations like omnichannel inventory and fulfillment for Journeys, as well as many other eCommerce challenges. Set up a consultation today to get started and learn more about how our team of expert engineers can automate your eCommerce operations and help optimize your eCommerce site for scalability and growth.
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