Benefits and tasks that can be automated (2024)

Every retailer performs hundreds, if not thousands, of small tasks that take 2-5 minutes each day. Taken individually, they don't seem like a significant waste of time. But when they come together, they take away productivity and stunt growth. Rather than focusing on incremental changes, the study recommends focusing on improvements that can fundamentally change the way an organization operates.

Ecommerce automation is all about giving your employees and yourself the most important thing you can do: time. More than that, the current climate is helping teams navigate new fulfillment processes, crisis communications, retraining staff on new supplier deals, navigating HR challenges, experimenting, sales and marketing, and product iterations. You'll be able to invest in high-value work. .

Thousands of online retailers use Shopify Plus to implement e-commerce automation. Even more impressive are the hard numbers behind these businesses. 1.1 billion workflows/decisions were offloaded, eliminating the manual process for each workflow/decision. In total, that's 9.2 million hours (or more than 1,000 years) saved.

In this post, we'll look at how e-commerce automation can save you time, streamline costs, and help you focus on what's important.

table of contents

What is e-commerce automation?

E-commerce automation is the use of technology and software to streamline and automate various tasks and processes in online retail. This includes inventory management, order fulfillment, payment processing, customer support, and marketing automation, resulting in increased efficiency, accuracy, and scalability for your e-commerce business.

The problem is simple. As your business grows, demands, complexity, and repetition increase. Systems that previously worked become increasingly inefficient and break down. In response, businesses turn to time-consuming workarounds. Even if it's just a push of a button, time that could be spent on important things is sacrificed for time spent on urgent things.

Or companies turn to new hires. Unfortunately, people don't scale. But it does not undermine people's values, but rather strengthens them. People, especially time and energy, are your most powerful resources.

Why is automation important in e-commerce?

As your business grows, so does your demand for resources. While hiring more people, adding new tools, and increasing workloads may seem like the way forward, automation is different.

Automation provides a simpler and more effective way of doing business. By focusing on fundamental changes to processes and workflows and automating them wherever possible, you can improve and scale your mission-critical strategies without increasing costs.

Further automation allows teams to automate tedious, time-consuming manual tasks. This frees them up to focus more on strategic decisions that move the business forward.

Additionally, automation drives scalability to a whole new level, allowing you to create entirely new capabilities. These new capabilities can help you unlock new market opportunities or solve specific problems that are holding you back.

For example, chatbots are on the rise, and for good reason. Businesses around the world are integrating chatbots to provide 24/7 customer support without the need for constant human interaction. As a result, chatbots can handle a high volume of issues and questions, and support teams can handle more complex or specialized inquiries. Additionally, businesses will be able to handle higher call volumes and provide better support at scale.

Benefits of e-commerce automation

We've already touched on this a bit, but let's dig a little deeper into some of the specific key benefits of ecommerce automation.

1. Improving employee value and well-being

Zapier reports that 94% of daily work revolves around repetitive or mundane tasks. For e-commerce stores with a large number of products, this might mean manually creating shipping labels, checking inventory, and notifying team members about out-of-stock items.

Automating these types of tasks can increase employee efficiency. But more importantly, it allows us to spend our time on specialized tasks worthy of human intelligence. By doing so, your employees will feel more impactful, happier, more fulfilled, and are much more likely to stay.

2. Fewer errors

Human error is common in high-volume, repetitive tasks. Fortunately, automation can help address the causes of fatigue and distraction. Consider inventory level monitoring as an example. With large order volumes, it is unrealistic to expect a single person or small team to process such high-value orders with tight deadlines and error-free.

On the other hand, automation is less prone to clerical and mathematical errors. Automated tasks are never tiring and never boring. These appear evenly every time, ensuring that these simple but repetitive and important tasks are completed on time. Everything is certain.

3. Reducing the impact of labor shortages

It goes without saying that you need the best talent to drive your business forward. But so do others. Navigating these turbulent conditions can be difficult as the demand for qualified staff increases and the pool of available workers decreases.

Automation can help here too. Optimize your current operations and workflows to get the most out of your existing workforce. This way, you can grow your business with your existing team rather than dealing with a labor shortage.

4. Improving customer experience

In the world of e-commerce, every touchpoint can make or break a transaction. By automating key moments like order confirmations, shipping notifications, and support contacts, you can help shoppers feel supported every step of the way.

For example, you can set up automated emails to update your customers about when an item will ship or if it will be delayed. Alternatively, you can implement a chatbot to provide 24/7 customer support.

5. Increase revenue and reduce costs

Considering all four benefits mentioned above, it's clear that automation has a significant impact on your bottom line. Reducing costs through automation naturally increases the overall revenue of your business. Increase team efficiency, speed up workflows, optimize processes, increase productivity, and scale to support more sales and more deliveries. All without adding cost.

5 important tasks you can automate

With these benefits in mind, let's take a look at some ways to tactically apply automation to retail e-commerce.

1. Inventory, Ordering, and Fulfillment

Of all the areas of a retail e-commerce business, fulfillment is perhaps the one most amenable to automation. Whether you want to streamline label creation or follow up after every delivery, automation can help you create labels the right way every time.

Automation can also address other situations to accelerate your business.

• Flag multiple orders from one customer to save on shipping costs and improve the customer experience.
• Prevent stockouts and overstocks, and respond to common inventory fluctuations.
• If an item is out of stock, notify your inventory team or supplier.

2. Customer loyalty

Customer acquisition costs are rising. That means it's even more important to cultivate a loyal customer base and keep them coming back to your business. Automation allows you to foster these relationships and segment your most valuable customers through specialized marketing strategies.

For example, you can set up auto-tagging to give your customers a loyalty shopper tag or access to higher tiers of your loyalty program if they reach a certain spending threshold. Or you can automatically offer customized incentives and offers based on your customers' shopping habits. Essentially, countless marketing tactics can be automated to support the customer experience, thereby increasing customer loyalty.

3. Sales/product release schedule

The last thing you want to worry about when starting a sales event is being late to the party. And given that these types of projects typically require collaboration across multiple teams, getting to the finish line on time can be stressful.

Automation allows people on web, sales, and marketing teams to plan and strategize ahead of time and launch exactly when they need to. For example, you can schedule price changes for certain predetermined periods, such as Black Friday or Cyber ​​Monday. Alternatively, you can preload new products onto your site on the backend and automatically publish them once sales begin.

4. Customer support

We've touched on this a little bit already, but automated support is key to long-term customer retention. Especially since shoppers expect constant support and fast communication.

So whether you're using chatbots or other automated customer communication workflows, automation always ensures that your support processes are streamlined and happen as quickly as possible. Chatbots can answer everyday questions and can be scheduled to send email updates about order confirmations and shipping notifications.

5. Rules-based pricing and discounts

Prices fluctuate throughout economic conditions, so it's important to be able to dynamically adjust price offers, discounts, bundle deals, and wholesale rates as needed. Automation can also be used to tie these types of price changes to specific customer profiles powered by data.

For example, you can reward loyal customers with favorable prices. Or you can adjust prices and discounts based on member status, order history, and more. No matter how you set it up, automation will take care of the rest and apply it at strategic times to drive higher conversions.

Save time with automation with Shopify

Any company can benefit from incorporating automation into its workflow. Employees feel more strategically able to complete important but resource-intensive tasks faster. All for the benefit of our customers.

If you're ready to start streamlining your costs and getting value for your platform investment, contact us today.