Automated Commerce refers to ways of employing technology to make a process or task simpler, quicker and better by reducing the number of steps or actions taken by the user. Among the themes explored were biometrics, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, big data, location tracking, and automated payments[1].

How to Automate Your E-commerce Workflows

E-commerce automation can be realized in different forms such as tagging customers for doing marketing research, Data analytics, segmentation and marketing, standardizing visual merchandising, streamlining tracking and reporting and halting high-risk orders. The goal of the workflow is to reduce manual labor and simplify tasks[2][3]. Automated workflow can apply to many aspects of E-commerce business:

Customer experience and support

Send Rewards
Automated workflow can help to boost customer loyalty by providing a positive experience. It can track and reward your most engaged customers. You can set business rules to send targeted marketing to customers who reach a certain order value or a number of purchases[3].

Process Feedbacks
It can process the feedback. Seeking feedback is how successful brands identify their weakness and improve them. An automation tool can send out follow-up emails. It can also reach out to negative reviews and refer them to a service team member[3].

Segment Customers
An automation tool can also divide customers by certain characteristics for the purpose of analyzing and tracking customer behavior[4].

Figure 1: Customer Segmentation (additional information in PDF)

Marketing

Schedule Social Media Posts
Effective social media marketing is an ongoing process for online retailers. You need to continually create and share content that engages your audience. The Automation of this area can save much of your attention on social media[3].

Send Out Emails
Automated tools works in a similar way to customer retention via email. You can set up a process by which prospects get sent useful, persuasive content. Pitch the content right and send it periodically, and you can turn a wavering lead into a customer[3].

Purchase order approvals
With automation, you can get purchase orders raised according to incoming sales. When a purchase reduces your stock to a predetermined level, the order can be generated automatically. You can even create rules about first choice suppliers for different items[3].

Vendor and supplier onboarding
Change is something that can always lead to disruption in the business world. A prime example is when you have to switch vendors or add a new supplier. There’s lots of information to share between your firm and that which you’ll be working with. All that takes time. If you devote a team member to doing it, you’ll lose out on what that member would usually be doing. An automated supplier portal can take that burden away from your employees. You can share and receive all details pertinent to a vendor relationship via a web-based interface. It’s quicker, more accurate, and lets your team stay productive in other areas[3].

Order management

Manage Shipments
The dispatch and delivery of orders is a crucial element of every E-commerce business. Failed deliveries can be a huge expense in the long run. Often, problems with distribution are down to small mistakes along the way. A staff might mistype an address on a shipping label, or an order could be incorrectly recorded in your system as complete. Workflow process automation streamlines this part to make it more efficient and accurate. You can also send out reminders at the precise time to your customers by automated workflow[3].

Send abandoned cart emails
Most people who add products to E-commerce carts don’t go on to buy them. According to the Baymard Institute, close to 70% of shopping carts get abandoned. That’s a lot of customers you’re missing out on. Abandoned cart emails are a proven way to win some of them back. This kind of automated tool can register when a customer abandons their cart and send emails to try to get them back. This process can be personalized based on the products they wanted to buy[3].

Inventory
Inventory management is vital to all online stores. Understock, and you won’t be able to fulfill critical orders. Overstock, and you’re wasting valuable warehouse space. By automating inventory management, you can optimize your warehousing and fulfillment[3].

Sales
There are not as many outbound sales involved in E-commerce. Most online stores rely on visitors to find their sites and buy products. If your business does have a sales team, automated workflows can make their lives simpler[3].

Repetitive sales tasks
Salespeople spent much time on repetitive tasks. Automated workflows streamline these processes and save much time with just one click. Automation tools can instantly log their details, schedule a sales call, and allocate that call to a sales agent[3].

Automate deal follow-ups
Making a sale takes a lot of work. A salesperson may need to contact a lead many times before they finally turn them into a customer. Automation is an excellent way to ensure that crucial follow-ups happen at the right time. You can set up automated workflows that reflect those different courses of action. For instance, if a sales call goes poorly, the immediate chance of a deal may get lost. An agent can mark the prospect or deal as lost in their automation tool. A follow-up email can then get scheduled at a suitable point in the future. When that time arrives, the follow-up gets sent automatically[3].

Automatically track your calls with prospects
When a member of your sales team does make multiple calls to a prospect, those calls must get tracked. Salespeople can establish processes for logging all call details and data. By using automated tools, that information is then at the agent’s fingertips when they follow up with the prospect. By tracking calls accurately, sales staff can avoid the missteps that may lose them a deal[3].

Strategizing Business With Automation Tools

Strategizing a business requires more than using popular automation tools. It takes a lot of effort to ensure that the combination of those tools works together synchronously, which can be ascertained with business intelligence (BI). The BI strategy includes determining the triggering points, such as conditions for alerts and reports, as well as other data sets for specific situations[3].

E-commerce
Automation Software

Here are some popular automation software for E-commerce:

Shopify
It is one of the most popular E-commerce platforms. It offers plenty of powerful productivity apps in its app store. Many of these are designed for automation, including Arigato Automation, or “the app with a million uses,” Shop Workflow Automation, and Stock Sync[4].

Shopify Flow
It’s workflow-based and makes it impressively simple to create
automation both within Shopify and with other apps via seamless integration. It includes automation templates that you can copy and adapt to easily get set up. Shopify Flow automation templates are divided into buyer experience, customers, inventory and merchandising, loyalty, orders, promotions, and risk[4].

WooCommerce
If you’re using WooCommerce to power your store on WordPress -a content management system (CMS) that allows you to host and build websites, you also have a lot of options for automation. Most of these are powered by WooCommerce’s huge number of extensions, which enable you to power up your WooCommerce site with premium features and integrations[4].

Other Software to Integrate With Your E-commerce Platform

Email marketing automation tools: Mailchimp to trigger emails to your customers

Automation tools: ActiveCampaign to trigger workflows for internal process and communication with customers

CRM tools: HubSpot

Help desk tools: Freshdesk and Zendesk

Accounting and invoicing tools: Wave Accounting, Xero or Quickbooks Online[4]

Future Outlook

Automation is the future of E-commerce. It streamlines many formerly labor-intensive operations while reducing errors and providing more accurate data. By setting up ahead of time, it can complete various customer communication tasks on time to provide a positive experience and improve customer retention. It can undertake many tasks of e-commerce, including marketing, shipment and inventory management, saving a lot of energy and time for managers and employees.