Mahi Sall, Advisor, Fintech-Bank Partnerships, Payments and Financial Inclusivity
January 25th, 2023
Mahi Sall is the CEO & Founder of FinXpair, a Berlin-based strategic advisory boutique firm focu[...]
4 Aspects in Your Ecommerce Business You Should Automate
Guest Post | Jun 2, 2020
I know why you’re here.
You’re trying to scale your enterprise while avoiding adding too much on your workload, aren’t you?
If you’re nodding in agreement, then you need to start using automation.
Automation streamlines your processes, enhances your efficiency in performing tasks, and bolsters your capacity to handle volumes of work.
By taking the manual, repetitive tasks off your hands, automation saves you time and effort so you can attend to more profitable ventures.
That is why automation is crucial to growing your productivity and the success of your online store.
Here are four aspects of your ecommerce operations that you can automate.
1. Product integration
Running a dropshipping ecommerce business involves several little, critical, but time-consuming actions.
Adding a product to your store is a classic example.
You need to copy the product details from your supplier then add them to your store. These details include product photos, names, descriptions, prices, and others.
See: The Enterprise Automation Imperative—Why Modern Societies Will Need All the Productivity They Can Get
Manually doing that is fine for one or two items, but for 20 or more? It’ll take hours to complete.
Save time and effort by automating these manual tasks. Use dropshipping platforms with automation functions.
One of these platforms is Spark Shipping, which automates a good bit of your dropshipping tasks.
This platform fully integrates your product details, harmonizes stock quantities, and receives and fulfills order requests to the vendors suited to their different required formats.
Spark Shipping also takes care of delivering orders, updating you about the shipment status, and sending tracking information to the customer.
With platforms like this, your dropshipping operations can run smoother, which allows you to focus on other crucial aspects of your ecommerce business.
By automating your product integration, you can forget about the hassle of having to manually copy product details from its source to your website, monitoring product availability from your supplier, and even doing certain parts of your product fulfillment process.
2. Time and Productivity Tracking
Improve your productivity and pay your employees the right amount by using reliable time tracking tools.
Manually measuring their working hours, though, is laborious and time-consuming, especially if you have a sizable staff.
Thankfully, you can automate monitoring your staff’s productivity through time tracking software programs such as TimeCamp.
TimeCamp automates task recognition, timesheet generation, and invoicing based on the recorded billable hours.
Automated time tracking lets you uncover any impediments to your staff’s productivity. It shows which tasks take longer to finish, help your employees manage their hours better, and more.
As you optimize your team’s productivity by uncovering (and addressing) areas that can be improved, you get more value out of your employees’ work hours.
What’s more, since the process is automated, human error can be avoided. You won’t have to stare at your excel sheets for long periods of hours just to make sure everyone is paid the right amount.
3. Customer Support
Accommodating your customers’ queries and support requests is crucial when running your online business. However, it can also eat up your productivity.
If you’re like most ecommerce store owners with a decent amount of monthly orders, then you’d be flooded with customer inquiries.
With that, you’d end up spending a good chunk of your time solving your customers’ problems, when you could have spent your time doing something more meaningful.
To streamline your customer support, automate your buyer engagement and answering of FAQs through live chat.
To install that system on your site, use tools such as LiveChat.
LiveChat lets you automate your customer service with chatbots. You can create and customize templates for these bots.
Let’s say you run life coach certification programs that help mentors get accredited and thrive in their industry.
Installing live chat automates the delivery of human-like replies to basic queries such as, “What is a life coach?” “How can I become a life coach?” and more.
LiveChat bots will then respond according to your pre-set template and answers. They can also automatically email you the transcript of the dialogue.
These bots can handle the initial customer engagement and support, and then turn over specific or complex queries to you (once customers create help tickets).
4. Abandoned Cart Emails
Sending abandoned cart emails is an effective method to recover sales and engaging your inactive customers.
Abandoned cart emails are messages for shoppers who added items to their virtual pushcarts but never continued their purchase.
By reminding your customers of the products left in their shopping carts, you reinforce and entice them to complete their purchase, which then spikes sales and profit for your store.
See: CRM in 2020: Creating a Competitive Advantage for Your Business
However, manually designing an abandoned cart email and sending it to each inactive customer consumes too much time and attention.
It requires you to check your store notifications now and then for any abandoned pushcarts, interrupting your focus and ecommerce work.
To prevent that, automate your abandoned cart emails by using modern email marketing platforms, such as MailChimp.
MailChimp lets you set triggers for the delivery of an abandoned cart email or email series.
With MailChimp, you can opt to set the trigger an hour after the logged in shopper leaves his cart in your store. You can also extend it to one to three days after cart abandonment.
MailChimp even lets you freely customize the message content and details, such as the recipients’ email address, your name as the sender, and more.
With automated abandoned cart emails, you shorten the process of reaching out to your potential buyers and effectively bring back lost sales.
Automate your ecommerce store now.
Whether you’re running ecommerce marketing strategies, integrating products to your store, or you’re helping your customers with their inquiries, there is almost always a way to integrate automation into your process.
In this guide, we learned that you can automate these tasks.
- Product integration
- Time and productivity tracking
- Customer support
- Sending abandoned cart emails
If you have questions, additional strategies, or ideas that you’d like to share, feel free to add them in the comments section below.
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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