How to Automate Your eCommerce Business Operations? +10 Tools

In order to provide a seamless online shopping experience, business marketers are facing various challenges. Suddenly, there are hundreds of tasks to do and all are essential in running an eCommerce business successfully. There’s marketing, accounting, communications, order fulfillment, shipping, and more! These tasks needed to be done all while making sure that customers are treated well and be given a VIP experience.

With so many tasks to accomplish every day, it might be a little too difficult to focus on pressing matters, like new product development. This is where ecommerce automation comes into play.

Spending less time doing repetitive tasks would allow you to boost productivity and at the same time be there to offer personal interaction with the customers. These and more benefits await you when you automate your ecommerce business.

But first,

What is ECommerce Business Automation?

Ecommerce business automation is a fundamental approach to simplify complicated business processes in order to save time that is better spent on growing your business more effectively. It involves the use of different technologies that are meant to lessen human assistance or intervention on labor-intensive duties.

Automation is considered as a necessity in order to soften the blow that is brought about by growing pains, such as increased order volumes, a variety of inventory challenges, and maintaining customer satisfaction. It helps in running the business smoothly while still being able to grow the business and keep improving the customer experience.

What are the Benefits of ECommerce Business Automation?

It is easier to please the customers if you have more time to attend to their needs. While giving you more time in a day’s work is the ultimate advantage of automating processes, there are actually more good things that can come from it. 

Here are some of the significant benefits of ecommerce business automation:

1. It saves more time. Automation lets you save more of it by getting more tasks done at a lesser time. There are certain tasks that normally consume more time but can be put on auto-pilot. Some of these are messaging or answering customer inquiries, gathering and analyzing customer activities, computing revenue and expenses, and management of product inventory.
2. It helps your business grow faster. Automation can help manage different functions from marketing, sales, fulfillment, and customer service. It makes you more effective at reorganizing tasks and streamlining processes so that you can save both financial and human resources while still being able to hit business growth targets.
3. It increases marketing efficacy. The marketing team has the most to gain when adopting automation. It helps a lot in most marketing processes, such as with real-time customer segmentation and engagement, automated email sequences, and enabling dynamic marketing campaigns.
4. It increases your sales. The goal of marketing is to increase sales. This can easily be achieved when marketing campaigns are done efficiently.
5. It is more consistent and accurate. Every task is handled in an appropriate and consistent manner because the software does it according to what has been programmed. This is very different from manual work where a lot of factors, like physical stress, can affect how the tasks are done and could even lead to human errors.

While these are only several obvious reasons why you should automate your eCommerce business, it cannot be denied that automation relieves some of the burdens in running a business. It is a professional approach that would allow you to devote more time in being effective as an entrepreneur rather than doing menial tasks.

Tools to Automate Your ECommerce Business Operations

With an increasing number of online shoppers, it is only smart to automate business processes and use eCommerce Business Tools for Startups to accomplish all tasks in your ecommerce business portal. It can be daunting to face the tasks on your own but streamlining everything can be the best strategy.

 Smarten up and boost your ecommerce business operations with the following tools:

1. Chatfuel - Respond To Your Customer Inquiries Fast

Customers are shopping online because it is a convenient and faster way to acquire their essential goods. It is a must that your brand can respond to inquiries fast to keep their interest in your products and services.

Chatfuel lets you have a chatbot that would instantly respond to customers 24/7. This means that you can attract leads and immediately engage them so that you can move on to the next stages of the customers’ buying journey.

Key Features:

• It has drag-and-drop features which means that no coding is necessary to create a simple bot for your business.
• There are also ready-made templates that you can use so that you can automate all communications instantly.
• Chatfuel also has a built-in CRM function so it is easier to segment and export leads.
• It can be integrated with other tools, such as Google Sheets, or you can have the API to customize the integration feature.

Pricing Plans:

• Free - can build a full-featured bot and use it for 50 conversations.
• Entrepreneur: $9.75
• Startup: $39.00
• Small Business: $123

All paid plans come with priority support and increases monthly conversation credits for up to 5000.

2. Removal.AI - Automatically Remove BG from Images with AI

When you engage in ecommerce business, it means dealing with a lot of photos that are to be used as product images. It can be such a time-consuming and overwhelming task to remove backgrounds from hundreds of photos before you can actually upload them on your site. A tool to remove bg simplifies this process.

Removal.AI is primarily a background remover that would let you create transparent backgrounds on product images. It uses Artificial Intelligence to automatically detect subjects and create neat cutout edges.

Key Features:

• Get rid of photo backgrounds in seconds.
• It can handle hair or fur edges and get the images with either a transparent or white/ customized background.
• The bulk background remover tool can be used to remove backgrounds in big batches
• It has a built-in photo editing tool to further enhance photos.

Pricing Plans:

Price plans of Removal.AI are highly scalable. This means that you only pay according to how many images you need to have their backgrounds removed.

You can choose to pay monthly subscriptions for as low as $0.03 per image. You may also try it for free with 1 free credit.

3. Easyship - Make Order Processing Easy

Processing orders is repetitive work that takes a lot of hours if you are to do it manually. You need to input a lot of information, such as the courier, delivery details, package size, product value, generating labels, and more. A shipping tool is the best solution to this.

Easyship is a cloud-based shipping tool designed to streamline all processes involved in fulfilling orders. It instantly manages the orders and creates shipments from your ecommerce store.

Key Features:

• You can customize the shipping rules.
• Guesswork is taken out as you program the system beforehand and everything is done automatically.
• It can be integrated in other ecommerce software solutions, like Shopify, so you get to have seamless inventory management, order syncs, and even real-time analytics.

Pricing Plans:

• Free: up to 100 shipments a month but you are limited in terms of cool features like chat and phone support, pre-generated return labels, etc.
• Paid plans: $29 - $49 a month. It has plenty of premium features and would process up to 2500 shipments every month.

4. Salesforce - Customer Relationship Management

Keeping customers happy is one of the foundations of a successful business enterprise. A CRM tool ensures that your customers are satisfied with their journey with your company while helping the team manage other aspects of marketing and sales.

Salesforce acts as a unified platform where you can stabilize the business and focus on ensuring an exceptional customer experience. It helps you personalize marketing strategies to attract customers and lets you respond to customer issues faster.

Key Features:

• Run your business right from your mobile devices.
• It has over 4,000 prebuilt apps that you can use to solve a variety of business problems.
• The flexible and robust security architecture ensures utmost safekeeping of your business data. 

Pricing Plans: 

• Essentials Plan: $25.00/month
• Professional Plan: $75.00/month
• Enterprise Plan: $150.00/month
• Unlimited Plan: $300.00/month

Salesforce has plenty of plans according to the services that you need. Their pricing plans are designed for small businesses where you can get an all-in-one sales and support app, and a bunch of marketing automation tools, depending on the plan that you subscribe to.

5. HubSpot Service Hub - Better customer service management.

With the amount of competition on the online business world, offering a personalized and fast customer resolution is the only way to step up your game. A unified CRM platform ensures that you do not get overwhelmed in meeting the growing demands of the business.

HubSpot Service Hub is a  customer service software intended to make customer onboarding a seamless process where you can offer flexible customer support and maintain a deeper customer relationships. It is an efficient all-in-one solution to help you delight the customers at all times.

Key Features:

• Has a range of conversational and desk automation tools that are powered by CRM.
• It has knowledge-based functionality, can create customer feedback surveys and do the reporting so that you will have a unified view of all customer interactions.

Pricing Plans:

• Starter Plan: $45.00/month
• Professional Plan: $360/month
• Enterprise Plan: $1,200.00/month

6. Buffer - Automate Social Media Posting

Social media continuously grows and it is mostly where customers can be found. You need to be active on social media so that customers will be able to find you and be informed about your products and services.

Buffer is the ultimate tool for automating social media posting. It is an intuitive solution to reach more people on social media by giving you tools that would cover all aspects of the social media marketing strategy.

Key Features:

• Buffer has tools to ease your publishing tasks so that you can plan, collaborate, and publish awesome content.
• It is built with analytics tools to help you analyze your performance.
• You can also use it to navigate through customer interactions, like comments, and quickly engage with your audience.

Pricing Plans

• Free Plan: gives access to basic publishing tools and can manage up to three social media channels.
• Essentials Plan: $5/month. This is highly recommended to have all premium planning and publishing tools plus the engagement and analytics tools.

7. Warmbox.ai - Increase Email Deliverability 

Most marketing emails land in spam. You need to warm up your emails to ensure that sales and marketing communications duly land on the inbox.

Warmbox.ai is an email solution that increases email deliverability by sending realistic emails that are able to generate positive reactions.

 Key Features

• Lets you add multiple inboxes to globally raise your email reputation and increase email deliverability.
• It gives you detailed analytics of your inbox reputation so you can observe how you are able to reach your target and enjoy more sales.
• There are many warm-up options to choose from and monitor them easily in your dashboard.

Pricing Plans: 

• Solo Plan: $15.00
• Start-up Plan: $69.00
• Growth Plan: $139.00

You may also customize a plan to fit your specific needs. 

8. Trustpilot - Get Customer Feedback and Insights

Reviews are very important to companies who engage in online enterprise. It builds your reputation online and allows you to grow a solid following that can vouch for your stellar products and services.

Trustpilot is among the top review platforms where there are over 144 million written reviews for more than 626,000 websites. It helps customers find the best companies so that they can make better buying decisions. By using Trustpilot, you get to make your brand stand out as you get more reviews.

Key Features:

• Helps you get service, product, and location reviews then allow you to respond, flag or respond to the reviews.
• You can then analyze the reviews from the dashboard then showcase those using social media tools, TrustBox widgets, and other marketing assets.

Pricing Plans:

• Free Plan: You can start engaging with customers and show ratings but with limited features.
• Standard Plan: $200.00/month. Will showcase full reviews and comes with a bunch of cool premium features, like inviting more customer reviews, detailed analytics, and use 8 review TrustBox widgets among many others.

9. QuickBooks - Simple accounting software to manage business finances.

Financial solutions are handy when it comes to managing your own business. A huge load of tasks is accounted for accounting alone so it will be a relief to have tools that will lighten the workload.

QuickBooks is smart online accounting software that is built for small businesses. It is a unified platform to track expenses, customize invoices and even run reports of your business finances. It keeps everything organized so you can easily find accounting data that you need.

Key Features:

• QuickBooks has a load of powerful accounting tools for cloud accounting, invoicing, project profitability, inventory management, expense tracker, data migration, accounting reports, and more!

Pricing Plans:

• Simple Start Plan: $8.00/month for basic accounting tools to track income and expenses and send custom invoices and quotes.
• Premium Plans: $12 - $17 

Premium plans provide great value when you have a growing business or if you have an established one that needs to thrive.

10. 3Dsellers - eCommerce workflow automation

Managing a lot of tools for your business workflows can be time-consuming and confusing. It would be a huge help to have a tool that organizes everything so you can work in one place.

3Dsellers come with automation tools that lets you manage your eCommerce business efficiently. Save time in dealing with repetitive tasks and simplify your workflow so you can focus on growing your business. 

Key Features: 

• Order management. You can synchronize all your orders across various selling channels/platforms.
• Bulk Processing. Accomplish repetitive tasks easily through automation and bulk actions such as editing/modifying your listings, managing multiple accounts and copying the listings from one eBay account to another. 
• CRM. Write custom message templates to help you deal with customer inquiries. 

Pricing Plans:

• Starter Plan: starts at $10.55/month
• Professional: starts at $14.40/month
• Agency: starts at $16.80/month

You can try all 3Dsellers tools and solutions free for 7 days. 

Takeaway…

It is always wonderful to see your business grow. More customers mean more profits and a better future for your business to expand. Along with growth, however, is the rise of more demanding responsibilities, mainly on keeping and making new customers. You will find yourself and the whole team busier and facing significant challenges almost on the daily.

 Automating an ecommerce business is the most efficient and effective way to streamline your business processes and take a huge load off your shoulders. With automation, you can make more time to bring in more customers while still keeping all essential processes on track.