Automation is a process in which time-consuming and laborious tasks can be carried out by hardware or software without the involvement of humans.
A simple example of eCommerce automation would be automatically sending an email receipt to a customer when they complete checkout.
Running an eCommerce business involves lots of these time-consuming repetitive tasks. If you have a large eCommerce site that’s making thousands of transactions each day, you can imagine how long it would take if you had to email all of these customers manually. You could hire more people to take over these tasks, but it is very expensive to pay humans to do tasks that can be automated by computers.
So it’s essential to automate your most common business task to make running your business more efficient.
The Benefits of eCommerce Automation
The most obvious benefit of automating processes in your eCommerce business is that it saves you time so you can focus on more strategic aspects of running and growing your business.
Some of the other benefits of automation include:
- Offering a better and more personalized customer experience
- Preventing customers from ordering out of stock items and preventing items from going out of stock in the first place
- Reduced costs
- Improved marketing leading to more sales and conversions
- Your business can mostly operate by itself even if you’re unable to work
How to Use Automation in Your eCommerce Business
Some examples of eCommerce automation include:
- Automatically un-publishing out of stock items from your website
- Automatically flagging high-risk orders for manual review
- Giving customers an automatic discount if they place an order above a certain value
- Automatically publishing new products to your website on certain dates
- Sending automatic emails to ask for a review a certain number of days after an item has shipped
Most eCommerce and email marketing platforms have some kind of automation built-in. You can also use third-party automation tools like Zapier to automate your business flow.
Automation workflow tools follow logical, conditional rules that will be familiar to anyone who has experience in programming. But that doesn’t mean it’s complicated to set up automation rules.
A basic rule will consist of a trigger, a condition, and an action. Some automation workflows may be more complicated and include several interlinked triggers.
Popular eCommerce Automation Tools
There are hundreds or probably thousands of automation tools that can help you to run your eCommerce business more efficiently. Here are some options you might want to consider:
For email marketing
- MailChimp
- SendInBlue
- GetResponse
- Constant Contact
- AWeber
- ConvertKit
For social media automation
- Buffer
- Meet Edgar
- Hootsuite
- Loomly
- Agorapulse
For dropshipping
- Oberlo
- Dropified
For retargeting and conversion rate optimization
- AdRoll
- Optinmonster
- Convertful
For workflow automation between services
- Zapier
- IFTTT
For general eCommerce automation
- Shopify flow
- Ecomdash
- Orderhive
- Contalog