What Is eCommerce Automation: Why And How To Use It

Ecommerce has become a giant industry with a global valuation of nearly 3.5 trillion dollars in 2019. It is having a presence everywhere from selling toothpaste to technical equipment, furniture, insurance policies, etc. The global online retail sales figure is expected to reach 17.5% in 2021. B2B alone is expected to reach a valuation of $6.6 trillion by 2020. However, due to the coronavirus pandemic, these stats can now vary.

In the ecommerce industry, the utmost priority of a seller is to meet the expectation of the customer and deliver the best quality products with complete services. Nothing can be worse for the seller than screwing up with the order. A single bad experience by a customer will make you lose him forever. There can be many reasons for an improper delivery such as:

• Incorrect data
• Unreliable integration
• Slow Order Processing
• In-effect payments etc.

But whatever the problem, after getting messed up it doesn’t make any difference. In fact, then you will spend your time fixing these issues rather than acquiring new customers or making new business strategies. For overcoming such problems, ecommerce automation came into the rise. Now, this complete industry is getting automated with the epithet “ecommerce automation”. In this article, we are going to discuss in a detailed manner about all the aspects of ecommerce automation and how it can be beneficial for your business.

63% of people believe that possibility of setting a goal and measuring performance is the most vital advantage of ecommerce automation systems

What is Ecommerce Automation?

Ecommerce automation is an epithet illustrating the use of software tools for completing tasks, maintaining processes, and campaigns of your business executing by automation exactly when they require. The software is able to do many repetitive and manual tasks for which you may require additional resources. It will not make entirely your business automated but to a great extent, many of the business processes will get simplified.

• Generating Leads
• Managing Inventory
• Internal Communication
• Decision making and business strategies
• Customer Services
• Product Releases
• Communication System and Marketing

Apart from making business processes automated, it also helps in providing better customer services. Some of them are:

• Sending “Welcome” mail to the new customers when they create an account
• Moving the new customers to a specific group if they make their first order with a high-value product.
• Sending a newsletter to all customers once a month, with different versions to different categories or groups of customers.
• Flagging suspicious orders in which shipping and billing addresses don’t match as high risk for review as potential fraud.
• Sending e-mails of other suggested items to existing customers when they make a purchase.
• All customers receive an email 30 days after purchase to request a product review.
• If the stocks in inventory fall below a threshold, you will get notified to reorder stocks for your inventory
• Customers who abandon their cart after adding items should be notified by e-mails or push-notifications as part of an abandoned cart recovery campaign.

Also Read: How To Develop An eCommerce Website

Interesting Ecommerce Automation Facts

• 63% of companies are successful in ecommerce automation plans to increase their ecommerce automation budget.
• Nearly one-third of companies have already implemented ecommerce automation software within their business.
• 70% of the companies find improved targeting of messages is the most important benefit of ecommerce automation.
• 64% of ecommerce marketers say e-mail marketing and ecommerce automation contribute to more sales.

How does ecommerce automation work?

There are smart solutions that drive ecommerce automation in response to the actions, input, or feedback of the website users. At the core of all solutions is Artificial intelligence which comes from human alike thought processes and actions. Many of the basic above mentioned actions can be easily managed by AI such as sending emails to customers.

AI is highly capable of doing many more advanced tasks. It can also self learn and improve upon its own programming by machine learning. Machine learning or ML is a mechanism for making the AI’s intelligence better by self-learning processes. This enables the AI to become more efficient with time and to give visitors more personalized experience.

Artificial Intelligence with ML helps in providing a personalized experience to the customers. As you must have seen every time you search or purchase a product from an ecommerce site you get similar recommendations. Those products have been chosen by an AI-based on what it has learned from you through your interactions with the website. Some of the other services of AI that improve the customer experience are Voice Search, Chatbots, Smart Search, Advanced Visual Search, Automated Product Description, IoT, Warehouse Automation, Cybersecurity, Data Management, AI-powered e-mail marketing, etc.

Dynamic emails after a visit with personalized offer show 248% higher OR and 463% higher CTR when compared to bulk messages

Why should you adopt Ecommerce automation?

Making this automated in your business will give you smooth business management and resolve a lot of issues. Small companies can make the most out of automation as they have less financial and human resources. Here are some of the methods your business can benefit by going automated:

1. No requirement of Manual Data Entry

Whether it is the product description, stock management, or order management, there is no need for manual data entry. Automation will reduce the manpower requirement in your company and you will require no additional resources for data entry. It will also eliminate the chance of errors prone to human mistakes.

2. Keep your words to the customers

By automation, you can keep the words or promises to your customers such as you told them that they will get delivery on time, or they will get the notifications email, you will provide them discounts, cashback, or other offers, etc. Automation will make sure that each word to the customers gets fulfilled. As everything is synchronized between the systems you can keep your word of one-day shipping or delivery on time.

Also Read: How To Develop A Mobile App For eCommerce

3. Enhanced Product Information

The product description on an ecommerce site can make it big or can destroy. Regardless of the image of the product, if the description of the product is not filled properly, you can lose the trust of your customers. However, manually entering the product description through your employees can be a very long & tedious process. It will also result in increased employee costs and have significant chances of human prone errors. AI can resolve this problem by automating the process of writing details of the product. The benefits offered by the automated product descriptions are:

• AI can create multiple product details per hour
• Products descriptions are not prone to any error and include demanding details
• AI can also check the effectiveness of the description and can make certain changes if required.
• Dynamic pricing that maximizes revenue and sales volume

4. Automation lets you focus on more important issues

You can reduce the manual efforts and also save time by automation. This will let you focus on more important business processes such as multi-location fulfillment, manage returns, display on-hand inventory, and much more. You can extend your abilities to provide better customer experience and function better as a business. With automated tasks securely in place and working 24/7, you’ll be free to focus on strategic initiatives and get ahead of your competitors.

5. Accurateness and Consistency

As automation is handled by the software solutions, so there are no chances of errors until & unless there is human intervention. With automation, you just need to schedule the tasks, and software takes care of the rest.

Now as you have gained an understanding of ecommerce automation along with its benefits, let’s know how you can automate your traditional business.

Welcome e-mails for new users show 4x higher CTR when compared to bulk messages

Rules of Automation

Following some rules can make it easy to set up automated actions whenever a customer’s order meets some conditions. You can apply these actions to orders and customer records in a variety of ways.

• Making different groups of customers and adding customers when they make a purchase, like a membership card that gets them access to the VIP group with special pricing.
• Changing the order status of placed orders including a certain product, shipping, or payment methods, or include products from specific distributors, etc.
• If you are both a B2B & B2C platform, then you can send specific email campaigns to people who are in customer groups such as “businesses” or “individuals”.
• You can also add customers on the basis of the amount of their order with the capability to define a minimum and maximum range rather than a specific amount. So that the customers who spend Rs. 1000-Rs. 3000 are in the 1st group only, and those who spend Rs. 3000- Rs. 5000 are in 2nd group only.

These are a few of the ways of automation and you or your employees wouldn’t require to make groups manually. You would be able to do all these tasks through automation.