Workflow Automation Ideas for ECommerce Businesses for Better Productivity

Ecommerce is experiencing tremendous growth. In fact, according to Statista, the value of Retail e-commerce sales worldwide was estimated at 4.9 trillion U.S. dollars in 2021. By 2025, this figure is expected to grow by 50 percent, reaching about 7.4 trillion dollars. In the upcoming years, growth doesn’t appear to be slowing down, much less leveling out. Businesses have numerous chances to develop in a booming industry.

An e-commerce business can increase the size of its market share by looking more closely at its procedures. A business can increase its bottom line by automating its workflow. But what remains to be a fact is that e-commerce sites are constantly accepting orders and payments, administering marketing, looking into cart abandonment rates, and other activities. It can be expensive, labor-intensive, and prone to error to hire people to work around the clock. According to a SnapLogic study, 90% of the workforce is required to perform monotonous duties.  Eliminating these drawbacks while assuring effectiveness is achieved by automating crucial procedures.

This article covers some of the best automation ideas that you can use to enhance productivity in your eCommerce business. Automating workflows is a useful solution Because not only are repetitive chores boring, but they also take up a lot of time. And when your monotonous tasks are automated, the tasks are made simpler which in turn ensures better productivity.

Let us dive in.

What is eCommerce workflow automation?

Ecommerce workflow automation is the process of employing the appropriate procedures and tools to automate the tasks associated with managing an online store. To assure accuracy and effectiveness, it makes it easier for data to flow back and forth between your systems. This gives human resources more time to focus on other projects. Workflow automation, to put it simply, is a means to automate monotonous operations that require hours of manual labor.

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Businesses must carry out a variety of sales and marketing responsibilities every day. Workflow automation is the concept of developing and automating workflows using tools and software. This relieves your staff of some of the workload and makes the jobs simpler to complete accurately.

Why automate eCommerce workflow?

Many online stores have trouble keeping up with their regular obligations. Workflow automation in eCommerce enables them to simplify and expedite certain tasks, increasing productivity.

Workflow automation, however, offers a wide range of advantages beyond increasing efficiency. Here are a few incredible advantages of workflow automation in eCommerce businesses:

• Minimizes Errors: With automated workflows, there are no manual inputs required, which reduces human error.
• Reduces the Risks: A minor human error can have serious ramifications. Similar to how a sales staff mistake may cost you customers Automated workflows don’t make mistakes, therefore risks are eliminated.
• Reduces Time: Of course, automating your time-consuming tasks will allow you to save plenty of time that you can utilize to concentrate on other tasks.
• Increases Productivity: When you have extra time, you may use it to accomplish more.
• Reduces Costs: Manual labor costs more. There need to be more workers hired and more training provided for each job. With automation, you can do your current responsibilities with fewer resources as well as cut costs.
• Simplifies Data Monitoring: Many automation programmes offer reporting, which is a very useful feature. This feature produces several reports, graphs, and charts that are simple to interpret. With the help of this tool, brands can locate and eliminate bottlenecks that could result in losses.
• Manages Tasks More Efficiently: Task management is improved with good workflow management. A dashboard, calendar, and other features are included with almost all automation tools. To make job management simpler, these features display all the data in one location.
• Increases Team Cooperation: Multiple people from various departments can log into a marketing automation platform by using it. Each of them is capable of offering input on a particular project. As a result, team collaboration is enhanced.

Best eCommerce workflow automation ideas 2024

• Inventory Management

According to a Motorola Future of Warehousing survey, 66% of retailers significantly increased their investments in inventory and warehouse management in 2018.

This is due to the difficulties manual inventory management presents for eCommerce enterprises, whether they are local or international. An eCommerce company’s inventory contains hundreds of items. Additionally, maintaining tabs on each person is a time-consuming task. Automation of the eCommerce workflow might be very helpful in this situation.

You can track every one of your items with automation. This makes it easier for firms to cease receiving orders when a product runs out. If you don’t have enough of a product, accept restricted orders instead. In order to avoid wasting warehouse space by maintaining excess quantities of a product, you can also handle overstock products.

• Grouping and Customization

Customer segmentation is crucial for internet businesses because it enables them to provide clients with more individualized services. Based on their demographics, product preferences, online behavior, browsing patterns, and previous transactions, your clients and subscribers can be segmented with the aid of automation technologies.

In order to enhance leads and sales, you will be able to target the appropriate individuals within the appropriate teams and make your marketing campaigns more relevant. Cross-selling, up-selling, gifting, and offering discounts on purchases can all be done with segmentation. They assist in making clients feel welcomed and understood, which will enhance the user experience.

• Accounting

E-commerce companies have a lot of invoices, receipts, and other paperwork to manage. Dealing with all of those takes a lot of time and effort. Automating these will make the process quite manageable. An automated solution can make updating your ledgers and tracking expenses (for example, shipping, warehousing, marketplace, and fulfillment expenses) easier.

This will make it easier for you to keep track of all your expenses and the financial health of your online store. The transparency provided to you regarding your operating costs will help to guarantee the financial expansion of your company.

• Recovery of Abandoned Carts

69% of carts are left unattended each day. Additionally, 45% of receivers accept emails from an e-store asking them to retrieve abandoned carts, 21% of them click through, and 11% of them make a purchase. That conversion rate is good! Therefore, online stores should make an attempt to retrieve their abandoned shopping carts.

But doing it manually can need resources, time, and effort. Use automation to achieve this goal. Some programmes automatically identify customers who added items to their carts but abandoned them before making a purchase, and they send them emails to retrieve their abandoned carts.

Also read: Top reasons why shoppers abandon their carts

• The Automation of Email Marketing

As discussed earlier, eCommerce marketing automation software may gather information about your customers and divide them into different groups to enable customized communications. With the help of your email marketing platform and your e-statistics, stores can target customers based on their behavior, favorite products, previous purchases, and other factors. The stage of the customer journey and activities will determine when emails should be sent.

Over time, as you continue to examine the open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribes, you’ll learn what resonates with your clients and what doesn’t. You can then modify your efforts to suit their needs. And using this as a marketing tactic could be one of your best.

• Loyalty Programs

 Any client loyalty programs are an additional crucial aspect of your online store that you can automate. Based on your customers’ information, past purchases, and browsing habits, eCommerce automation software will allow you to choose the requirements for them to earn loyalty points.

You’ll be able to decide how to give consumers their loyalty points and how they’ll use them by setting up the procedures for doing so. For instance, you can program prizes to be sent to them on special occasions like their birthdays or wedding anniversaries, when they join your Elite Shopper program, or when they make purchases from you that total more than a predetermined sum of money.

• Posting on Social Media

Global social media usage is anticipated to reach more than 3.6 billion users in 2020. By 2025, this figure is anticipated to reach around 4.41 billion (Source: Statista). This means that you shouldn’t let your e-commerce company miss out on the exposure and prospects that social media would provide.

It can be difficult to consistently publish on social media, though, as different social media networks have different criteria and features. Ecommerce workflow automation can be useful here. Without exerting too much effort or working at inconvenient hours, you can plan posts and interact with your audience.

• Reminder to Review

Avoid wasting your precious time trying to persuade others. 72% of buyers wait to make a purchase until they read a review, so you shouldn’t give up on getting reviews entirely.

Therefore, automating this procedure is the best option. You can automatically send consumers an email asking them to review your products after they make a purchase. If you’re satisfied with the information, you’ll receive more reviews.

• Packaging Labels

Every eCommerce firm depends on the dispatch and delivery of items. In the long term, missed deliveries might be very expensive. Distribution issues are frequently the result of minor errors made along the road. An employee may have entered the wrong address on a shipping label, and an order may have been wrongly marked as complete in your system.

Workflow process automation speeds up and improves the efficiency of this area of your firm. When automation is used, you can complete numerous tasks with a single click. That includes appropriately designating orders as despatched and printing your shipping labels. Creating tracking numbers for deliveries is another aspect of it.

Conclusion

E-commerce workflow automation can help your company save time and money, boost productivity, improve product information, enable on-time shipping, and streamline complex business processes by getting rid of a lot of manual work. You can use automation in a number of different contexts.

Workflow automation should be used by your online store if it hasn’t before. You can use this to increase your bottom line while staying current with trends. To guarantee that you get the most out of workflow automation for e-commerce, be careful to avoid typical pitfalls in eCommerce marketing.

So, if you are seriously considering automating your existing workflows, consider the ideas mentioned above. What’s more, you can increase the productivity of your business processes ten-fold with expert solutions offered at Webuters. Get in touch with our experts today to find out more.