5 Online Tools for Automating Your E-commerce Business Tasks

People working in e-commerce often feel that their days are too short for all the work on their plate. While this may be true, it is sadly impossible to prolong the day. However, this doesn’t mean you can’t get more time.

With the right tools, you don’t have to delegate or expand your workforce. With that in mind, here are the top five online tools for automating your e-commerce business tasks and doing more in the same period.

1. Abandonment cart email follow-up

If you sell hair loss products, people who are not losing hair will never become customers, regardless of how much money you spend on marketing. This is why qualified leads matter so much. These are the people who have the potential to become customers.

Instead, you need to find the low-hanging fruits (qualified leads). These people are the most likely to become paying customers (even if you don’t spend a fortune to convert them).

Identifying qualified leads is often not easy; luckily, in e-commerce, you can track shopping cart abandonment instead. 

These are the people who are showing interest in your product. They’re looking at it (perhaps several times) but not making a purchase. If you have a shopping cart or a wishlist feature, they might add an item but won’t buy it.

• Why? 

Well, there are many reasons. The most common ones are:

• High additional costs

• Having to register an account to buy

• Complicated checkout

• Lack of same-day/next-day shipping

• Bad return policy

While analyzing and fixing this is the right way, sometimes you just have to ask again. Offer them a better offer or just make the same offer again. You would have no idea if they were an inch close to accepting the last time.

What you need to do is send a follow-up email.

According to some statistics, shopping cart abandonment accounts for 60-80% of visits. Imagine having to send emails to all these people manually. Instead, you need a tool to automatically send these people follow-up emails.

An email needs to be personalized and contain the same item/category that they were previously browsing. A tool can make this easy, seamless, and instantaneous.

2. Payment processing and invoice templates

As an e-commerce business, you’ll have to include as many payment gateways as possible. Sure, more than 200 million people use PayPal, so including it is a no-brainer; however, you also want to include major platforms like Apple Pay and Google Pay. For the most part, these platforms are already automated.

This is so vital because your audience wants their digital wallet to be accepted on your platform. If it’s not, they’re more likely to move elsewhere than get a new wallet to buy from you.

Even if you have a slightly better offer than your competitors, there’s only so much that your customers will inconvenience themselves for this price difference. If you don’t provide cover for their wallet, they’ll have an easy time shopping elsewhere.

The secure payment process is the most crucial issue you need to address. It’s people’s most sensitive data that we’re talking about, their credit cards, etc. This needs to be as secure as possible.

It’s also relevant that you remember that your customers are not the only party that you have financial interactions with. You also need to think about your suppliers and strategic vendors. For these interactions, you need good invoices.

Using reliable online form templates is the best way to automate and facilitate this process. These templates are easy to edit and can be adjusted in minutes (sometimes seconds).

Another relevant thing to integrate is the AP (account payable) automation. This can help out immensely when paying your invoices. It can ensure that you never miss a due date, which helps you to skip fees and penalties.

Having the right form and always paying on time to save face. Reputation is everything in the business world. Sometimes, it takes a single missed payment to ruin it. With automation, you will avoid this quite effortlessly. 

3. Marketing automation

Marketing is a race against time. You want to spread the word as far as possible as quickly as possible. At the same time, you want to do so without giving false promises or using dishonest techniques that will come back to haunt you in the future.

You need to invest a tremendous amount of effort to get all this. This means either thousands of work hours or better marketing automation.

John Wannamaker once said that although he knows half of the money he spends on marketing is wasted, he can never know which half. You can easily figure this out with modern marketing automation tools. Some of the best tools have a split-testing feature, which lets you see exactly which solutions give desired results. 

The most vital aspect you automate this way is the communication with your customer base. Similar to what we’ve mentioned earlier, lead follow-up is incredibly important. You want these emails to be customized but need them to fulfill the quantity criteria. No matter how you look at it, the number of emails you send daily matters. Here, an automated tool will always outpace manual email marketing.

The reach also depends on the number of channels that you’re active on at the same time. This is why capabilities for multichannel marketing are pivotal. Social media, email, and even SMS can be effective. With the right platform, you can easily coordinate between these mediums.

The best feature is that most marketing automation platforms are made with e-commerce in mind. This means that you can seamlessly integrate them with your marketplace of choice.

4. Offer and discount system automation

While the previous three tool categories could, in a way, be applied to any type of business, here’s something specific to e-commerce. You see, e-commerce businesses need to have new offers to stay relevant. 

However, what if there are not enough new items to keep the offer fresh at all times?

Should you risk pushing obscure items to the forefront? Probably not!

What you should do instead is make special offers and discounts. Create bundles, add extra upselling choices, and provide unique limited-time offers for your products.

This task, however, is more difficult and time-consuming than you think. This is especially true when you have too many items in your offer.

While 90% discounts may create an impression that the original cost doesn’t matter and that the discount percentage is arbitrary, this isn’t the case. It takes a lot of planning and careful consideration to make logical offers.

You can speed this process up with the right software and benefit your e-commerce business in other ways.

For instance:

• A platform like CartHook can help create these offers and increase the order volume. 

• A tool like ReCharge can make return purchases easier. Since 20% of your customers make 80% of your revenue, this is one of the biggest investments you can make. 

• A platform like ActiveCampaign provides a more customized customer experience. This, in turn, boosts customer experience, improves your reputation, and earns you more positive reviews. 

Overall, e-commerce is a peculiar field with many specific tasks directly impacting revenue. With the right tool, you can directly financially benefit from this truth.

5. Inventory management automation

In e-commerce, most transactions revolve around large volumes of items with the small order value. This means that the inventory changes are incredibly dynamic, and keeping track of everything is a near-impossible task. That is until you include automation into the mix. 

There are numerous benefits to great inventory management automation.

The accuracy of the inventory management system is incredible. There’s no manual input, meaning you don’t have to worry whether someone has forgotten to add something to the manifesto. Also, tracking items in real time was one of the biggest challenges in traditional inventory management. Now, this problem is successfully solved.

Knowing what’s in your inventory at any point helps you stay well-stocked and supplied. Losing a customer due to a stockout is one of the worst feelings any e-commerce specialist can experience. With automated inventory management, you will receive a notification when any item goes low. This matters the most for your best-sellers.

The inventory management costs are also much lower with the right tool. This is because you don’t have to keep unnecessarily high stock out of fear of running out of supply without notice.

Also, this system is scalable. Still, it’s far better to start using it while your operation is still relatively easy to manage.

By automating your e-commerce business, you’re making it more efficient and more proffitable

Automation is always worth it. It cuts costs, improves efficiency, and ensures real-time data tracking. As an e-commerce business, there are some aspects that you should prioritize when it comes to automation.

You need to start with qualified leads (or low-hanging fruits). This is where you’ll see the biggest revenue bump with the least effort invested. Second, worry about your payment methods and marketing.

Finally, automate your inventory management and your pricing/discount tools. This way, your business will become more efficient as a whole.

By Srdjan Gombar

Author Bio:

Veteran content writer, published author, and amateur boxer. Srdjan is a Bachelor of Arts in English Language & Literature and is passionate about technology, pop culture, and self-improvement. His free time he spends reading, watching movies, and playing Super Mario Bros. with his son.