E commerce Business Automation Strategy Starting an ecommerce business sounds simple until you do some research and realise how complex it is. The most important part of ecommerce is to drive sales. This requires not just excellent marketing ideas and innovative products, but also strategy to plan your activities. Ecommerce is crowded field. If you do take the plunge, you’ll be competing with giants. Most businesses start with discount offers, such as 10% off, buy one and get one free, and so on. But before doing this, we need get clear understanding to make your ecommerce and user experience even smarter. So let’s start with five strategies you can use. You can apply them all or you can pick one which suits your ecommerce store. 1. Get a basic understanding of the technology Running an ecommerce business without the technological knowledge is challenging. We’re not saying you need to learn coding and html, but it helps if you have a basic understanding. It will make it possible to save huge amount of administration time if you automate everything. Yes, you heard it right, speak to your tech consultant or interview tech people and learn the basics. Basic is a must for automations– there are number of companies that provide this automated shipping, so simple subscriptions can save you a lot of time. The most popular programs are ship it and starshipit. These automate shipping charges, are label ready and update your customers via email with a tracking code. It easily integrates with Magento and Shopify. Purchase order and barcoding – a simple way to update stock is by adding a purchase management extension to your ecommerce. So it’s an easy way to add stock, receive shipments and, if needed, create barcodes. Having barcodes will simplify the stock in and stock out system, making stock management easy.
2. Get automated There are number of automation software products available and most business owner end up paying a lot of money because of all the advertising for these products. Having said that, it’s not about which software but it is about understands your analytics and your audience before you select. If you are new ecommerce store and still working out how to achieve your minimum visitors’ target, then you start with simple inbuilt automation for abandoned carts and basic email marketing.
If you already have a certain number of visits to your website and Facebook or Instagram followers, then this is the time you plan two activities first. Read your analytics. Yes, you should absolutely know which pages and products are popular and how many pages users are visiting on an average. Once you have clear details about your analytics, the next steps are choosing software and making sure you follow the on-boarding process with your team of consultants. The most common automations are: Abandoned cart Reward programs – remind or add customers to rewards – it helps user to keep coming back to your website. Free shipping offers. Cross sell – add more before you ship and save on shipping. Tracking emails with advertisements (most ecommerce stores miss this as these are the best touch points to advertise products and make your tracking email as best marketing channel).
3. Live chat This isn’t new. You’ve probably have heard this and may be already using it. But the best part is having live chat is not enough. You have right amount of time to serve customers or spend time chatting. Most businesses struggle to answer in real time. So hear it is ideal to automate chat functions, since bots are popular nowadays you can just add a bot to your website which can answer most common questions. And most important part, nowadays, is that bots can be added with search functions so users can quickly query stock or search items. This is super important if you have large product range, stock issues or multiple store with stock. So the main takeaways are to find a live chat service with bot technology and right software which can integrate with your system easily.
4. Product Blogs We get this question all time being an SEO Industry for quite a few years. What we realise this is a struggle for most business. They ask, “What blog we should write?” and “Do people even read blogs?” Blogs are important for SEO but they are also super important for users and must not be taken granted. There are some simple examples that can drive sales. For example, if you’re running a baby products store and your business page has 2,000 followers. So simply write about three must have baby products and link it to your website. You can write about baby gift ideas, talk about fabrics and add products in the blog related to that fabric. The most popular blogs on ecommerce stores are product blogs.
5. Reviews and Product Reviews Reviews are important but we all know how difficult it is to get them. So automate the reviews cycle. The best example in Australian market is Koala Mattresses. From day one, they used right technology to automate review email. The best software to automate everything is Yotpo. However, there are multiple options available on the market. First check which is good for ecommerce platform before using it.