10 Ways to Automate Your eCommerce Business

When it comes to owning a business, time is your most valuable resource — but, time is finite, and are a lot of tasks competing for your attention.

And, as you scale, your ecommerce processes get even more demanding.

So, how can you make time for the work that brings in more customers while keeping everything else on track?

With ecommerce automation.

Automation is playing a vital role in the future of tech — and it’s no surprise that we’re seeing more of it in tools designed for ecommerce businesses. As a store owner, it’s your secret to putting your time-consuming tasks on auto-pilot.

In this post, we’ll explain what ecommerce automation is, then show you what it looks like with 14 ways you can automate your online business.

What is ecommerce automation?

It means using software to turn manual tasks into automated workflows. These workflows can trigger internal or external emails, notifications, or actions in other apps — such as creating new support tickets in your help desk. To make sure everything works perfectly, you can set multiple conditions that need to be true for the workflow to run.

Although ecommerce automation saves you time, it doesn’t mean firing your employees — or yourself. Rather, it frees up your team’s time for the customer interactions, creativity, and big-picture thinking that matter most in your line of work.

Customer Experience & Management Automation

1. Track and reward your most engaged customers.

Do you reward your best customers? Customer retention is valuable for all businesses, including ecommerce.

Turns out you can increase your profits anywhere from 25-95% by increasing your retention rates by just 5%.

To reward customer loyalty, you could automatically add a free gift or free delivery to orders over $100. 

2. Sync your customers to a Mailing list.

All of the top ecommerce platforms — including WooCommerce and Shopify — have native integrations with Mailchimp. So, if you’re using the popular email marketing tool to send your newsletters and email marketing workflows, make sure to sync your accounts.

An integration with Mailchimp can automatically pass the email addresses of shoppers who show interest in your emails into a specified Mailchimp list, so you can keep them updated with your latest products and offers.

3. Gather feedback after a purchase.

Every ecommerce store knows how powerful reviews and honest feedback are. It can make or break your business. To encourage reviews, set up automated email workflows to send follow-up emails a certain amount of time after a purchase is made. Ask for honest feedback and share a link to where they can post their review.

4. Reach out to negative reviews.

If you receive an unfortunate 1-star review, make sure you respond to it. You can set up an automation to create a support ticket in your helpdesk software to make it easier to reach out quickly and make amends — or at least listen and understand what’s happened.

5. Tag and segment customers based on buying behavior.

Segmentation can help you understand your customers and stay on top of the different individual needs they might have. With a CRM, you can tag or segment based on demographics (e.g. gender or location), lifetime order value, milestones, number of orders, or any subscriptions or memberships, for example.

Inventory Automation

6. Automate inventory management for low-stock items.

Running out of a product can mean missed income and frustrated customers. To avoid this, automate your inventory management so you know when a product is low in stock.

With Woocommerce, you can trigger low stock notifications (based on thresholds you set) and out-of-stock notifications. This way you can instantly know when a product needs reordering from your supplies.

Order Management Automation

7. Send abandoned cart emails.

75% of ecommerce shopping carts get abandoned. Abandoned cart reminders help you bring customers back to your site — and with automation, you don’t have to do a thing.

Integrating your ecommerce software with a mailing provider is an easy way to send abandoned cart emails. You can also look at other native integrations between your ecommerce platform and transactional email providers.

8. Send reminders to re-order consumables.

Do you sell food, health, or beauty products? Your customers might be interested in repurchasing consumables once they run out.

To let them know, set up automated workflows to send reminder emails for these products a certain time after purchase.

Marketing Automation

9. Nurture leads into customers with email marketing.

People don’t always become customers right away. Your company will have its typical customer journey, with people spending time in research and consideration phases before deciding to hand you any money.

However, if someone has given you their email address and permission to contact them, you can nurture this process along with marketing content. Just make sure that anything you send them is top-quality and valuable, perhaps with discount codes or free gift offers.

10. Choose a powerful help desk software.

As you scale your ecommerce business, it’s important to make sure your customer service is covered. Implementing help desk software is one of the best ways to do this.

With a help desk platform, you’re in the best position to centralize your customer support in one place and get a clear view of tickets from all channels. These tools also give you many options for improving your customer experience with automation, such as with bots and satisfaction surveys.