Expanding your e-commerce enterprise comes in a variety of ways. You may explore new specialized items, employ influencers as brand advocates, or start a new advertising campaign. You still have a long way ahead of you if you haven’t already employed any of these tactics. This article will help explain how to automate your online store.
However, you should take a step back to look at the bigger picture from a vantage point and seek ways to enhance what you currently have before moving forward with new frontiers.
For instance, using mechanization, i.e. automatic machinery in the production of your products, is a terrific approach to increase the effectiveness of certain aspects of your e-commerce enterprise. You may increase website traffic, improve your sales funnel, and quicken the lead nurturing process, all with less effort.
Automation is a tool that can take away the unnecessary stress load while improving the organization of your business.
Automate Emails
Every online business requires an email marketing plan to generate and nurture prospective customers. You may retain brand recognition, develop recurrent visitors to your site, and promote specials that could boost sales by routinely distributing pertinent information via newsletters.
Using current email marketing systems, you may quickly create automated workflows that schedule communications depending on user activity or significant dates. A typical illustration would be an email sent to a customer anytime he leaves your online store’s checkout page or cart.
The products that were in the user’s basket when the email was sent generally come with a link to the checkout page where the transaction may be completed. By doing so, you’ll be able to compel additional purchases from customers who may have abandoned your site for a variety of factors, like lost wifi, a lack of accessible finances, and more.
Additionally, you may rely on inbuilt functionality in e-commerce systems to simplify cart recovery. For instance, the “Abandoned Cart Saver” engine from BigCommerce operates automatically. According to their research, this strategy can help retailers recoup, on average, 15% of lost revenues.
Feedback through reviews
If you want to persuade your audience to make a purchase from you, a review or a client endorsement is the best way to establish trust.
Automating the collection of consumer feedback is another application of email remarketing. For this tactic, you can use a platform like MailChimp, which assists you in sending or planning automatic communications once clients make a purchase.
Customer testimonials will organically accumulate over time without your direct engagement. Typically, you may discover them in the comment box of your own blog, on review websites like Yelp, or on social media networks.
Always keep in mind to reply to reviews that are unfavorably one-star. In order to make it simpler to contact someone immediately and make amends—or at the very least, listen and understand what happened—you may put in place automation to issue a support ticket in your helpdesk software.
Know your products inside-out
One of the most laborious parts of operating an e-commerce enterprise is inventory management. However, you can quickly automate crucial operations like monitoring customer orders, updating the number of items in store, or determining the real-time value of your inventory by linking your business website with an accounting program like Quickbooks.
Also, with Woocommerce, you can establish thresholds for low stock and out-of-stock messages to be sent out. In this method, you can quickly determine whether a product in your inventory needs to be restocked.
Get your payments
Online payments can be a hassle or a boon. The trick is to use the feature to your advantage skillfully. Receiving online payments from your customers is the most trusted way to be safe from scammers.
Manually generating and submitting every invoice to your clients might make asking for payments onerous. The good news is that you can quickly establish recurring invoices on many accounting and payment platforms. Other payment gateways besides Quickbooks include Due and PayPal, which you may utilize to generate automatic invoices.
Additionally integrated into well-known e-commerce platforms like BigCommerce is automated billing. You only have to connect the appropriate extensions to automate bills and receipts.
Consumer service
The word Artificial intelligence is not simply a trendy word. It need not refer to audio virtual assistants or coaches that can keep track of your vital signs.
You can create your own Facebook chatbot with tools like It’s Alive, a straightforward application, without writing code from scratch. It can assist you in developing discussions that are influenced by the user’s typing or clicking on the available options.
Sending consumers a hyperlink to your Help page anytime they enter phrases like “how” or “help” is a straightforward strategy. Undoubtedly, not every automated encounter results in a sale. However, at the absolute least, you can help every person without employing a live representative on call.
Categorization
By using categorization, you can better understand your clients and remain on top of any unique demands they might have. With a CRM, you may, for instance, classify or divide based on demographics (such as gender or geography), lifetime invoice value, achievements, order volume, or any memberships or registrations.
Drop-shipping is also an option
You can also automate order fulfillment and delivery. Dropshipping makes it feasible to discover things, include them in your online shop, and ship them directly to buyers without keeping any inventory or taking any risks.
In this type of retail operation, the vendor takes orders from customers without holding inventory on hand. One of the most well-liked dropshipping systems is Oberlo, which Shopify purchased in 2017. It works well with Shopify, as expected, and you can either add drop-shipped items to your current Shopify store or start a new one specifically for the products you want.
But remember, finding items that adhere to the branding and quality criteria of your shop is the biggest problem with dropshipping.
Conclusion
So now that you have better knowledge of how automation may be used in e-commerce operations, you still have a long road ahead before declaring your e-commerce store a success. By following some of these techniques, your business would see visible improvement and would take you one step ahead of other businesses in the market.
