The process of automation in e-commerce requires the use of advanced technology to help businesses grow and increase productivity. By automating various processes in e-commerce, businesses can save manpower, reduce costs, and deliver customized experiences.
In other words, automation is tasks that are performed without human intervention using online systems and software. To give a few examples, e-commerce automation can do the following for you:
- You can send an email to a customer with an item in their cart, triggering a request to complete the purchase.
- With the chatbot feature, you can help a customer who visits your website at three o’clock in the morning by greeting them.
- A B2B buyer can receive personalized recommendations and special prices based on their business relationship with your organization.
- Automation in e-commerce has many benefits. By finding and implementing the right options for your business, you can gain many advantages.
Benefits of Using Automation in Your Ecommerce Store
In essence, ecommerce automation improves the quality of the customer experience (through segmentation and personalized offers) while also allowing businesses to prioritize and dedicate time to more important tasks that require strategy and soft skills. Here are a few ways your business can benefit from e-commerce automation:
1. Save time
As a store owner, time is your most valuable resource. E-commerce automation helps you get more done in less time by putting your time-consuming tasks on autopilot, such as
- Automatically publish or remove website content (banners, pages, blogs, etc.)
- Automatically hide or show products and catalogs
- You can change the product sale automatically (price, stock, content, etc.)
- You can automatically segment and engage with customers
- You can automatically notify team members
2. Grow your business faster
Automation can be applied to all parts of your business, from marketing, sales and warehousing to customer service. It helps you manage your business more effectively, such as the functionality to reorganize tasks, optimize processes and categorize store data.
Statistics have proven that automation tools enable businesses to save up to 30% of their financial and human resources. It has also shown that automation systems are effective in achieving business growth targets (i.e. revenue, profit, customer acquisition and retention, etc.).
On top of that, by spending less time on day-to-day repetitive tasks, you can free up more time for the important things that are key to growing your business: innovation, quick decision-making and strategy development.
3. Improve sales and marketing effectiveness
E-commerce sales and marketing teams have the most to gain from automation. For example
- Personalized customer experience with real-time customer segmentation and engagement,
- It can respond in a timely manner thanks to an automated system that tracks customer activity,
- You can realize proactive and dynamic marketing campaigns with planned marketing campaigns.
According to recent statistics, using sales and marketing automation effectively enables businesses to achieve a 50% increase in revenue.
E-commerce automation examples
As automation becomes more ingrained in e-commerce, the way we use it is constantly evolving. For growth-oriented e-commerce businesses, automation will automate your business as if you’ve been doing it for a long time.
Without the right systems in place, it can be difficult to pick, pack and ship orders. Make sure you choose the right strategy to avoid the infamous “Where’s my order?” conversation with customers. Here are a few examples:
Taking Inventory: Automating inventory management on your e-commerce store allows you to list and update products quickly and easily.
Employees can scan barcodes with smartphones or tablets so that the details of your products are integrated into the system. You can complete stocktaking in much less time.
Warehousing/Order Picking: You can have your Daily Orders collected at one time and displayed on the system.
Delivery: Thanks to e-commerce automation, you can prevent wrong product shipments and thus prevent customer complaints.
Thanks to your digital documentation, you can solve your problems quickly.
Returns: You can track your return processes thanks to the automatic labeling and editing system.
Customer Service: In most cases, your first point of contact is your customer service department. A happy customer is a loyal and repeat customer.
Receiving customer complaints: You can follow up customer complaints regularly and prevent their dissatisfaction with quick responses and actions.
Assigning the case to the appropriate department: Thanks to error groupings such as “tag/ticket” that you will create through the system, you can ensure that the problem is instantly distributed to the relevant department in the right way. In this way, you can both prevent the loss of assignments and increase customer satisfaction with the rapid response of the relevant department to the problem.
Facilitating resolution: When a consumer abandons their cart or has a payment issue, a quick and scheduled call can be made to contact them. Instead of waiting for the customer to send an email, agents can make an automated call to resolve the issue.
Suggesting a solution to close the complaint: When a user has a question or issue with your website, the first thing they look for is a chat option. This is why live chat is important. If necessary, missed replies can be forwarded to the support agent’s inbox for a quick response.
Solution.
Automation saves your time and the financial resources of your business. It makes your business processes much faster and more efficient. It helps to increase the effectiveness of marketing and sales activities. Most importantly, automation gives you the freedom to focus on what really matters to your business.
