Why Automated eCommerce Is The Future Of eCommerce

While some people identify “automated eCommerce” with those warehouse robots retrieving items from shelves to be shipped out, it’s more than that. “Automated commerce” is an umbrella term used to refer to any software, hardware, and strategy used to automate the flow of any online or conventional business processes.

The thing is, as a business scales, the demands and complexity also increase. In this article, we’ll discuss what automated e-commerce exactly is, the tools, and the best practices.

What Is Automated eCommerce?

Automation in eCommerce is the usage of multiple software applications and related instruments that create a sequence of processes, which eventually reduces redundancy, removes disconnectivity, increases growth and efficiency, and simplifies flow. In other words, automated eCommerce involves an almost hands-free operation that allows the entrepreneur or the store manager to focus on revenue-generating activities instead of worrying about various tasks.

Automated eCommerce Tools

Several categories of eCommerce automation that can be incorporated into your store include:

#1 Research Automation

Before deciding on which products to carry, do your homework first. Research which products are top performers on Amazon, eBay, and the web. Use tools like Jungle Scout, ShelfTrend, Ahrefs, and SEMRush.

#2 eCommerce Platform Automation

An eCommerce store requires specific features that most WordPress blogs don’t have. Shopify, for instance, offers useful features that increase efficiency. Other platforms to consider include PrestaShop and BigCommerce.

#3 Operation Automation

To run a business, you’d need to find inventory, track employees, maintain a budget, and keep tidy bookkeeping. The Oberlo app allows you to use an existing Shopify store to source pre-vetted and sell dropshipped product suppliers, so you don’t need to keep inventory and only purchase the products after they have been ordered by customers. Tickspot can be used to automate budgeting, Asana for project management automation, and Wave for automating bookkeeping and invoicing.

#4 Fulfillment Automation

If you sell products that must be stored in a warehouse, you can automate the whole process of order fulfillment and shipment with ShipMonk, ShipBob, and ShipCentral. In their facilities, your products will be processed with automation and robotics.

#5 Marketing Automation

Sell more with automated marketing tools, like MailChimp for e-mail marketing, Buffer and Later for social media scheduling, OmniStar for affiliate referral, discounts, rewards, and contest management. Thrive Leads for building lead generation.

#6 Data Analytics Automation

Without analytics, you wouldn’t be able to measure the performance required to strategize better. Start with Google Analytics. Next, you can use something like Optimizely and Neatly.

Best Practices In Automated eCommerce

Strategizing a business requires more than using popular automation tools. It takes a lot of effort to ensure that the combination of those tools works together synchronously, which can be ascertained with business intelligence (BI). The BI strategy includes determining the triggering points, such as conditions for alerts and reports, as well as other data sets for specific situations.

With the BI strategies and applications’ synchronized functionalities, better and faster decisions can be made. For this purpose, only software applications that provide real-time data collection and reporting should be adopted. This being said, integrating BI with data is crucial to ensure prompt handling of issues.

Nicholas Montgomery, the founder of Shelfies, a Shopify store, for instance, uses Flow to automate custom order fulfillment and fraud prevention. With its print-on-demand business model, many processes are repetitive and time-consuming, such as customers’ freedom to put anything they wish on the apparel. The thing is, Shelfies needs to recognize high-risk orders, like fraudulent ones, before the supplier fulfills them. With Flow automation, they were able to customize payment fraud protection on the backend to merely the process. This way, they can save thousands of dollars in annual loss due to fraudulent orders.

An 18-year old millennial entrepreneur named Matiss from Latvia started an online art store Arsty Wall. He started a dropshipping store, which is automated with Oberlo app. It allows him to source products conveniently and to save costs by not having a warehouse and only buy a product with wholesale price after it has been paid for by the customer.

Dropshipping automation allows entrepreneurs to focus on marketing the products and reduce costs to a minimum. And since the startup capital is almost zero, it’s easy to experiment with various product categories to see which ones work better.

In conclusion, automation in eCommerce is the way of the future. It provides a precise and prompt execution of processes with minimal costs. It also allows for minimized error due to accurate data points triggering further processes. Adopting automation in research, platform, operation, fulfillment, marketing, and data analytics is key to massive scalability that saves time and money, as well as generates more revenue.

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