Merchants have too much on their plate, from operations to revenue to customer support to inventory to marketing. It’s a never-ending to-do list. But, one emerging technology is making eCommerce much easier and smarter— eCommerce automation.
With automation, merchants can increase efficiency in their eCommerce processes, save time by delegating small manual tasks to automation apps, and decrease errors in their work. What’s more, by setting up automations, you can deliver faster and high-quality customer experiences, make smarter decisions and increase your sales. Convinced that you need to set up automations on your Shopify store?
Here are 10 eCommerce automation you need for your Shopify store.
10 eCommerce Automations For Higher Sales
1. Abandoned cart recovery
On average, merchants witness a 69% abandonment rate on their stores. That’s a lot of potential sales and customers lost. And individually targeting each abandoned cart is not a feasible option. Now, merchants have many remarketing eCommerce automations available to allow them to recover carts without any effort on their part.
You can choose from different remarketing channels like email, SMS, web push notifications, and ads, or set up a combination of remarketing channels to effectively bring back the shopper. Shopify’s app directory gives you a vast collection of apps to choose from to set up your remarketing efforts.
Use Klaviyo for setting up remarketing emails and SMSBump for SMS remarketing. These apps allow you to tweak the copy of the email, setting time delays for your reminders, and generating the image of the product that the individual abandoned automatically.
2. Customer support
If you don’t have real-time customer support on your store, you’re definitely missing out on capturing your site visitors who have questions about your products. What’s more, a satisfying live chat experience is even sure to ensure repeat purchases. One study found that 52% of consumers are more likely to repurchase from a company that offers live chat support.
But, the cost of hiring customer support executives, and scheduling their shifts around the clock, is sure to put a dent on your wallet. Instead, you can set up chatbots that interact with your customers and help them with their queries. That's why one of your eCommerce automations should be customer support.
Chatbots are AI-based chat interaction software that can simulate a conversation (or chat) with a user. It uses machine learning to understand the right answers to questions and provide error-free assistance. With chatbots, you can easily automate communication and create personalized customer experiences, however many customers are requesting for help on your store at one time.
You can use apps like Tidio Live Chat which embed native live chat functionalities on your store. You can enable the chatbot within this app and get started instantly. If you’re looking for a different solution, Flashchat lets you set up Facebook Messenger chatbots on your Shopify store.
3. Operations management
With Shopify Flow, you can predict and automate smaller ad-hoc tasks. Flow allows you to simplify your operations and skip to the more important aspects of your store management. For instance, you can set up a task on Flow to tag customers with specific tags based on the conditions defined by you. A smart eCommerce automation, right?
This way, you don’t have to spend time tagging customers and instead, send marketing messages to customers with a particular tag without any hassle. Another use case of Shopify Flow is notifying your team about an order that seems fraudulent and putting the order on hold automatically. You can explore the different use cases of Shopify Flow here.
4. Inventory management
For many merchants, inventory is still not streamlined. This is because, unlike a retail store, your products are not in front of you. This means that a lot of your time managing your inventory is spent keeping an eye on the stock changes on your store and manually keeping a track of an extensive spreadsheet. But, handling your inventory managing is time-consuming and oftentimes, you won’t have accurate or error-free data about your stocks. Such bulk tasks just need to be automated!
Apps like Stocky and Inventory Planner take the spreadsheets out of your inventory management. With such an app, you can get predictive reports about the demand for your products, updates about your low stocks, and get a better insight into your large inventory.
You wouldn’t need to manually manage your inventory nor keep an eye on the stock changes routinely. Instead, the app will keep you in the loop at all times, allowing you to avoid low stocks or overstocks. Delegating your inventory handling to an automation app saves you time and ensures accurate inventory planning.
5. Analytics
Many eCommerce store owners overlook analytics and deprioritize it for the smaller tasks on their task list. But, analytics is a crucial part of ensuring your store’s growth that every merchant needs to use to make smarter decisions. With the vast amount of data that your store collects— from how your visitor lands on your store to the way they navigate through it to their order amount— you can’t possibly collate this data together in a dashboard without some human error. Here's where eCommerce automation for analytics comes in.
And the Shopify analytics app, Revtap comes in. This Shopify app puts all your store data in one beautiful dashboard, making it easy to identify the little problems your store has and fix them in real-time. The dashboard has all your marketing campaigns in one place where you can understand which marketing channels are helping you grow and which ones can be optimized for better results. This powerful tool is sure to give you an added advantage over your competition and allow you to optimize your store and increase your revenue.
6. Invoicing
The one Shopify automation you need to have from Day 1 is order invoicing. If you’re dealing with multiple orders in a day, it just doesn’t make sense for you to manually design invoices for each order.
Sufio is a great invoicing app for Shopify stores. These invoices are created automatically as orders are created, paid, or fulfilled., Sufio also sends the invoice to the customer automatically. It takes into account different taxes that the business has in place, taking the different currencies into account. You can set up custom designs for your invoices to reflect your branding.
7. In-stock updates
Visitors who are interested in a product on your store that is out-of-stock are lost customers unless you have set up an automated way to let them know when the product is back in stock. Many Shopify apps let you set up in-stock update tactics to allow visitors to subscribe to notifications and automatically receive updates when the product is back in stock.
With the Back in Stock app, you can allow interested shoppers to sign up to get updates when the product is back in stock. This way you can bring these shoppers back to your store and ensure you don’t lose a customer. The app lets shoppers choose the marketing channel of their choice— email, SMS, or Facebook Messenger. You can customize the message you send to the shopper, adding variables that make the in-stock update more personalized to the shopper.
8. Upsell and cross-sell marketing
One of the most important marketing tactics that many stores miss out on is upselling and cross-selling. A well-timed upsell or cross-sell tactic can help you increase your revenue smartly. Upselling increases revenue by 10-30% on average. One article states that Amazon attributes up to 35% of its revenue to cross-selling. But, manually cross-selling relevant products to your customers based on their purchase history is an impossible task. That's why this is another eCommerce automation you need!
Fortunately, current automation capabilities allow you to set up upselling and cross-selling easily. Bold Upsells allows you to set up upsell and cross-sell. You can choose which recommendations will be shown for particular products, create funnels to nudge the shoppers even on the cart page, and show offers for the recommended product.
Bold also has a product bundling app that lets you set up bundles on your store to automatically nudge the shopper to purchase the bundle of products and instantly increase their order value.
Emails are a great channel to cross-sell to your customers after their purchase. Klaviyo’s cross-sell flows let you set up customized emails that show relevant products that compliment their purchase. This email flow runs automatically, sending the cross-sell offer to your customer after their purchase and effectively bringing them back to your store.
9. Email automation
As old as it is, email marketing is still a highly effective form of communication. Email apps have designed specific automated use cases to allow merchants to send highly relevant emails— for abandoned cart recovery, in-stock updates, product recommendations based on their wishlist, product cross-sell based on purchase history, browser abandonment, and more. This eCommerce automation can help keep customers engaged and get them back to your store for making purchases.
Klaviyo is the top solution for Shopify merchants who want to send dynamic and highly personalized emails to their customers. With its broad set of use cases and its email flow builder that allows merchants to select specific conditions, merchants can send high-converting emails that bring in more revenue.
10. Automated ad management
Acquiring new customers starts by bringing them to your store. Many eCommerce stores set up Facebook ads to nudge shoppers to visit their store. But, ad management is a tricky business. Merchants don't have the time to monitor ad performance, recognize opportunities for new audience types to target, and tweak the ad on a routine basis.
Kit is your sidekick for your acquisition efforts. Shopify built Kit to help you automate your Facebook ads and help you reach new audiences without your constant management. If you’re looking for an app to take care of your search ads, AdScale is a great solution that automates and manages your paid ads.
Set up eCommerce automations on your Shopify store to save time, get error-free results, and make smarter decisions.
