As an eCommerce Marketing Agency, one of the comments that we hear more frequently from our clients and prospects is their overwhelming need to get organized as their business grows.
Growth is a beautiful thing, but it can also kill a company if it’s not managed properly. In most eCommerce businesses, growth is measured by sales revenue. More sales, more revenue, more growth. Yet, two other equally important components for growth are time management and costs.
When a business scales (and grows) the demands from its customers, complexity of sales processes, and overall requirements to manage the growth can become a real handicap in the long run. That’s the type of situation when priorities get mixed up and what is ‘urgent’ starts replacing what is ‘important’ and any shortcuts taken to solve a problem or deal with a particularly urgent issue will come back to bite you sooner rather than later.
What can companies do to handle growth? One option is to hire more people. This is always a valuable option, however, people and new hires need to be trained, the learning curve can be steep and expensive and new hires are not guaranteed to provide the desired result.
The more effective option is to implement tools and systems to automate their eCommerce process. This is usually referred to as eCommerce Automation.
What Is eCommerce Automation?
In a nutshell, eCommerce automation is about streamlining a series of manual tasks to simplify complexity and provide your team with the most valuable asset they need: time.
At MGR, we apply eCommerce automation techniques for a variety of clients. We do that by analyzing and studying their sales process and finding new ways to convert tasks, processes, or campaigns within their eCommerce business into automations that intelligently execute exactly when needed.
This can happen in a number of ways depending on each particular case. For example, some tasks may include tagging customers for segmentation and marketing purposes, inventory management, streamlining tracking and reporting, identifying high-risk orders, eliminating high maintenance and low profitable items, and more. With each, the goal is the same: maximize efficiency, reduce the number of redundant tasks, save time, and eliminate complexities that lead to human errors as much as possible.
Other examples of eCommerce automation applications include:
- Schedule sales — i.e., price changes and promotions — for pre-determined time periods
- Preload new products and publish them to your store, social media, apps, and sales channels simultaneously
- Tag high-value customers and notify customer service to send personalized welcome messages
- Unpublish out-of-stock products and send a message or email to your marketing team so they can pause advertising
- Adjust prices at checkout based on product combinations, quantity, or customer location
- Identify, tag, and segment customers who buy from specific sales channels, such as Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, and more
- Apply discounts or specialized shipping rules to customers with email addresses or tags like “Loyalty Member”
- Rollout and rollback entire theme changes for seasonal promotions or product drops
Automating tasks like these wins back time, energy, and thousands in expenses. More than that, it unleashes your teams to invest where they do their best work: experimentation, creative endeavors, product iteration, sales and marketing, and personal development.
MGR Summary
Automation, in all industries, is a critical component to manage growth. This is especially critical for online applications such as eCommerce. Unfortunately, for smaller businesses, the ability to develop their own in-house systems to connect all eCommerce components is severely limited due to budget, time, personnel and a number of other reasons. The solution is to work with partners like MGR that can conveniently bridge the gap between productivity and technology, to help small businesses keep up with their more financially resourceful competitors.
Ecommerce automation should also be simple to implement once the main organizational chart has been laid out. After that, it’s just a matter of following your customized workflow to ensure that all processes are completed in a seamless way.
For more information or to find out how MGR can help your eCommerce business grow to the next level, feel free to visit MGR’s eCommerce pages.
Thank you for reading. Until next time, this is Manuel Gil del Real (MGR)
