An Automation Guide for Your eCommerce Business

“If you make a sale, you can make a living. If you make an investment of time and good service in a customer, you can make a fortune.” — Jim Rohn.

The customer rules the market, whether it is an online or offline business. The terms and conditions of business are always based on the consumer’s preferences. This pandemic has influenced the consumer’s purchasing behavior. It has encouraged people to shop online. From the groceries to the accessories, we are ordering everything online. It has boosted the growth of the eCommerce market, which is why every business is developing its online platform today.

For example, when you try to buy a Mobile phone from an ECommerce website.

These are a few steps involved in the conventional ECommerce buying process:

• Step 1: When you place your order, your browser connects to the web server, and then the web server sends your order to the order manager.
• Step 2: The order manager checks the availability of the product.
• Step 3: The stock database confirms and shows an approximate arrival date when the vendor’s supplies will be obtained. The order manager continues to process it, assuming that the product is in stock.
• Step 4: Next, it communicates with a merchant system. The merchant system checks the customer’s bank computer. The bank confirms whether the customer has enough funds.
• Step 5: The merchant system authorizes the transaction to go-ahead, then the order manager confirms that the transaction has been successfully processed and notifies the Web server.
• Step 6: The Web server confirms that your order has been processed and the transaction is complete.
• Step 7: The order manager sends a request to the warehouse manager to dispatch the goods to the customer. The warehouse manager connects with the delivery agency, and then your order dispatch from the warehouse.
• Step 8: Once the goods have been dispatched, the warehouse computer emails the customer to confirm that your goods are on their way. Here also, the delivery company is involved who delivers the product to you.
• Step 9: Finally, the delivery agent delivers the product to you.

This was all about making a purchase, but then the customer also exchanges or returns his/her product. You may infer that since it is invisible, operating on ECommerce seems simple, but it takes a lot of effort to deliver a product to you. Plus, manually typing these data does not just slow down the process but also creates chances of error.
In addition to the many tasks they need to accomplish in a day, the managers of eCommerce Businesses have one important issue they are unable to solve, streamlining the various workflows they need to run manually. With automation, your eCommerce business’s back end can be simplified, allowing you to concentrate on the more significant factors.

What is eCommerce Automation?

eCommerce Automation helps your eCommerce business to convert the manual tasks into automatic and self-fulfilling tasks through any tool or software. It automates the tedious workflows and saves you from the hours of manual data entry. eCommerce automation is required at every phase of your eCommerce operation, whether it is handling your inventory, simplifying your book-keeping, or running email marketing campaigns. You should automate your ECommerce business so that your employees can focus on more important things like the business growth strategy.

eCommerce automation integrates all the procedures, tools, and the order fulfillment process from the moment a customer clicks the ‘place order’ button to deliver the product on his/her doorstep.

A few examples of ECommerce Automation:

If any regular customer hasn’t purchased anything for six months, you can approach your customer with an automated message. You can give a discount code or a special offer for him/her. If somebody has bought groceries from your website, there will be a need for groceries again. You can create an automated reminder and send a “We miss you” email to your customers. It is a type of Cycle-based automation.

Another example can be sending rewards and discount offers for your loyal and the best customers. You can do it through Loyalty-based automation. Your system will automatically send such an email to your consumers based on their purchasing patterns.

Advantages of eCommerce Automation:

ECommerce Automation can simplify and solve a variety of problems. Small enterprises may benefit more from technology because they have a few financial and human capital.

Here are a few key benefits of eCommerce Automation:

1. As most of the operations will be done through Automated Software, it saves a great deal of time.
2. It helps in making business operations quicker and easier.
3. By connecting your ERP and POS systems, you can easily handle your inventory.
4. With multiple fulfillment drop-shipping, quick returns, and increased customer support, you can deliver a better customer experience.
5. It reduces business expenses as you are going to need fewer workers and less training.
6. It allows you to focus more on the business’s growth strategy rather than just handling the business operations.
7. Through automation like cycle-based and loyalty-based automation, you can increase your sales.
8. It makes communication easier for both marketing managers and consumers.

How Automation helps business:

Let’s take a closer look at some of the main aspects where your eCommerce business can benefit from automation one by one:

1. Eliminate the data manual entry process:

As mentioned above, eCommerce Automation reduces the work of manual data entry. The employees needn’t sit in front of systems the whole day and enter each data. The data will be automatically recorded by artificial intelligence.

Businesses should stop relying on manual data entry because it has a risk of human errors.

2. Marketing Automation and CRM:

Using marketing automation, one can interact effectively with consumers.

Here are 10 examples of Marketing Automation:

1. Welcome messages: It is very popular nowadays. When you open any website, you get this quick notification on your screen. “How may I help you?” Then it asks for your email ID, and you sign up for that website and start receiving updates and emails from that website.
2. Cycle-based automation: When a customer stops making purchases from your ECommerce, you can use this tool to connect with your customer again. In this automation, you don’t even have to analyze the whole data; the system itself will calculate and analyze facts & figures.
3. Shopping cart reminder: You have often received this mail stating, “Your cart is waiting for you.” This is a technique used by ECommerce platforms to reminds their consumers that they have added few products in their cart, and they have yet to make their purchase.
4. Content-based automation: Artificial intelligence makes suggestions to consumers on the basis of their browsing history and site behavior.
5. Upselling and cross-selling: Have you ever noticed, when you select and add a product to your cart, the website itself makes suggestions to you like: This chino will match with this t-shirt perfectly, these pair of shoes will complete your outfit. It is done through the Upselling and cross-selling automation.
6. Thank you messages: Thank you for your purchase! Automation is really important when it comes to managing your relationship with your customer.
7. Surveys: Through automation, we can collect the response of the consumers. We can take feedback and ask the consumer to make suggestions to us.
8. Personalized and targeted automation: You can ask your customers about their birthday and anniversary and send personalized marketing messages through automation.
9. Loyalty-based automation: You can send coupons or rewards to your valuable customers by Loyalty-based automation.
10. Reminders: You can send reminders like only 2 products left in the stock, buy this item before it’s gone. You can remind your consumers about their cart items, sales, and many other events with the help of automation.

3.Customer Relationship Management (CRM):

Marketing automation is narrowly oriented, but CRM covers a much broader spectrum of processes, targets, and support functions. In addition to its more widely recognized sales capabilities. It provides marketing and support software for your ECommerce.

Marketing and CRM work well together because their features complement each other. It helps in maximizing the efficiency of the marketing and sales departments. Customer relationship management provides platforms like the customer portal and ticketing system, which increases the sales department’s efficiency.

4. It makes complex business operations easy:

Automation of ECommerce can help to automate these process types:

1. Multi-location fulfillment: Fulfillment from the cheapest or nearest location
2. Dropship: Integrate directly with suppliers to expand product assortment
3. Automate returns process: Make returns quick and seamless for consumers
4. Display on-hand inventory: Allow consumers to shop from available inventory and avoid overselling

Ways to Automates eCommerce Process:

Running an ECommerce business can seem like an endless task. Customer service, answering email, phone calls from customers, social media management, email campaign, store management, running sales, data entry, book-keeping, cold-calling, etc. These activities are time-consuming and leave you with less time to handle the important stuff.

You can’t work on all these tasks alone, and hiring additional staff will increase the cost and cuts into your business profit. You can manage all these tasks by hiring a virtual assistant.

These are the ways to automate your eCommerce:

1. Sales Scheduling:

It is nearly impossible to tweak prices manually each time you wish to go on sale. The beauty of automating such a task is that when the sale goes live, the price changes on your eCommerce portal will roll out automatically.

Don’t waste hours of your time to adjust prices anymore. A good example of such an eCommerce automation platform can be Shopify Flow. In addition to reducing error rates, it also allows online-based businesses to save lots of time.

2. New Products Rollout:

The software industry does not lack resources; it can allow you to automatically preload and publish your latest range of products on your website and in other sales channels. You can consider automating this process if you are tired of dealing with all of these time-consuming and repetitive tasks. Automation replaces the process and makes it more efficient.

3. Accounting:

Just as inventory management, each time a transaction takes place, accounting must occur dynamically. A good way to accomplish it is to ensure that customer and sales information is sent directly from the inventory management system to its accounting application.

One way of treating such details is to report every transaction as revenue, and every delivery order made to the retailer as cost. The buyer should be told to submit a credit note when it comes to refunds, which they can do the next time they order a product at the online store.

To keep all of your accounts digital and stop making a folder full of receipts, use payment apps like PayPal, Stripe, and FreshBooks. Integrate all the requirements for accounting, providing electronic payroll, billing, and invoicing solutions.

Don’t completely overlook the value of collaborating with a competent accountant. Consider your business requirements to decide if you are better off with an outsourced or in-house operation. Accounting professionals must keep the tax codes up to date and ensure that your company should meet all regulatory requirements.

4. Minimize cart abandonment rates:

Try to simplify certain things to make the consumer go as far as possible. Let them see that they get a decent deal for their hard-earned money. One way of doing this is to change rates at checkout to describe how much X is bought, a combo ordered, or even discounts.

An abandoned email cart allows businesses to sell to more website users, who may have left for reasons like insufficient income, unstable internet access, etc.

5. Customer service:

If you work with several customer inquiries, you might end up losing out on the requestor going back to the customer a few days later. You might lose the consumer by the time you try to communicate.

How will this be prevented? You can start with a workflow incorporating your favorite customer service applications and automating a portion of your customer support operation.

Top eCommerce Automation Process:

You must adopt these top five ECommerce Automaton ideas for greater

efficiency and quality:

1. Retailer/Supplier Onboard Process:

All large eCommerce businesses have strong systems to rapidly and accurately incorporate new vendors and suppliers into their systems. Onboarding and approval processes for vendors/suppliers are mostly carried out using spreadsheets and emails, slowing things down, and leading to conflicting details as the spreadsheet flows through the emails.

Workflow automation will speed up and streamline vendor/supplier onboard processes and ensure continuity and accuracy in data.

1. Purchase Order approval:

You can update your purchase order approvals using process automation technology from an email plus spreadsheet combination that hinders decision-making.

Purchase order monitoring also makes it simple with automation, as it removes the need for flipping between sheets and emails.

1. Approval of item/ Catalogue listings

The process of selling new products on your eCommerce platform also requires numerous internal approvals. This process should be adopted to avoid inconsistencies and improve the speed & productivity of your eCommerce platform.

1. Refund Claims

One of the most common sources of disappointment for eCommerce companies is refunds. When customers file claims for refunds, it often ends up as an email in someone’s inbox. Many eCommerce businesses, particularly those that are young and which manually process them. It would not only waste a lot of time and money; it will also result in a negative brand reputation in the eyes of the consumers as the refunding process may have delays and inaccuracies. This method can be easily automated (with a desirable set of features) using a workflow framework. Ideally, you would like to choose a workflow program that can monitor the “Service Level Agreement” (SLA).

1. Customer grievances

Through marketing and customer relationship management automation, you can effectively meet your customer’s needs. Your customer can file his/her complaint any time on your given support email id, and his ticket will be raised automatically. Later your customer care manager can look into it and resolve this issue.

Conclusion

ECommerce Automation enhances effective back-office process flows for eCommerce companies. It makes the operations less sophisticated and well-organized.

It allows employees to focus on their strengths, enables faster decision-making processes, and improves information security. It also ensures continuity of the procedure, prevents mistakes, inaccuracies, and miscommunication.

Originally published at www.ateamindia.com on Nov 21, 2020