If you are running an eCommerce business, it is almost impossible to do it without automation. With the increased outreach and business flow of such companies nowadays, employees alone would be swamped before dealing with it. However, trying to automate your business can seem like a daunting task. This is why it is essential to understand how to automate an eCommerce business!
Carefully choose your shop’s software
The first step in automating an eCommerce business is, naturally, to select a good software provider to support your store. This is the first step towards making your ideas a reality, and, luckily, you've got plenty of options to choose from. Most come in the form of WordPress or other CMS software plugins. An excellent example of this is WooCommerce, Shift4Shop, Shopify, and similar. One thing to note is that most of these offer free versions for you to try out and play with before committing to purchase more professional versions of the software. They will allow you to automate the sale process a little and make your website's shop operational. The individual differences between the software are not that great, but you should still look through them and select the best fit for your business.
Automate your marketing
Another important step, of course, should be to funnel customers into your newly growing store. And the best way to do that is through effective marketing!
The most promising tool for this job is online marketing. If you want your ads and similar to be effective, it is essential to put them through some automation. For example, PPC automation benefits your business tremendously if you plan to run your campaigns for promotion through it. After analyzing customers' interest through their selected pages when visiting a website, they are offered an ad that is most likely to catch their attention. Through such targeting, you are much more likely to ensure click-through. And, therefore, the first step of generating leads for your business.
Remember to select the right payment processing platform
When talking about how to use automation for your eCommerce business, it is impossible to skip the step of payment processing. If you need your employees to process every payment and create every invoice personally, it can take forever. This would slow down the shopping process and waste some of the potential generated by the previous efforts. After all, it doesn’t matter if you have a perfectly automated shop that leads your customers to check out if they need to wait forever for an email confirming their order and payment. It would lead to a severe bottleneck in your sales and limit your expansion opportunities. It is also crucial for you and the customer to quickly get notifications for failed payments, canceled orders, and similar. You also need to select a reliable payment platform. Such as PayPal or similar to ensure you and your customers are not cheated.
Handle your shipping
Covid 19 has changed eCommerce, and it is more important than ever to have a reliable and robust shipping system. So, automating at least a part of it is a huge advantage. Whether you are a minor, handcraft-based business, or a huge reseller, shipping is always a headache.
Having to deal with each package is already strenuous enough. However, what is really even more time-consuming is printing out shipping labels. This is why you need to set up an automated system that would allow the printing of labels immediately after an order is confirmed. Without it, your employees would need to hunt down and enter all the information personally. This takes at least as long as actually packaging the goods! Some store automation platforms, such as Shopify, actually have extensions that allow for this already. If it’s not built-in, you need a good plugin.
Automate customer support
Having live customer support available at the click of a button can make customers feel cared for and valued. However, once your business grows, this might mean that some customers are left with long waiting times while your employees scramble to handle everyone. This would, of course, not earn you any popularity. That is why having some degree of customer support automation is crucial.
You can gradually accumulate a list of the most frequently asked questions and encountered problems on your website. Then offer the answers in the customer support window. The customer then needs to look through those and decide if the information is sufficient. If not, they can be rerouted to live support. Of course, it can be hard to ensure everything works as intended on every platform, be it a smartphone, computer, or similar. Thankfully, you can look for a free consultation on the matter of platform compatibility.
The live element
Of course, no matter how far you automate an eCommerce business, your employees will still be crucial for its success. Software encounters issues and bugs. If you overly rely on it without a team to troubleshoot and handle errors, it can be extremely easy for everything to shut down. In such a case, you would be hard-pressed to restart the regular operation of your business quickly. So, always value your employees and make sure they are thoroughly aware of how to help the automation along!
Final Advice
Understanding how to automate an eCommerce business, you should be ready to give it a shot. However, remember that the most important thing is still discerning which services and platforms you choose, especially when it comes to something as important as the payment platform and the printing of shipping labels. Issues with the first can cause both monetary and trust losses. And the latter would cause friction with customers and bad reviews. So, it will take a lot of work before you can kick back and watch your well-oiled business machine at work!