Technology get exciting and easy to use each day, and allows to automate nearly any process or procedure that would have historically clogged up our days and sometimes nights. The beauty of many of these automations is that they’ve become rather inexpensive to create – another benefit of advancing technology – so there is often strong competition in the space.
As a consumer you have options and the options even gets better everyday.
Without much talks, let take a look at four must have ecommerce automations that have the capacity to save enormous amounts of time.
1. Desk
When you’re on a site and are in search of help, then stumble upon its “support forum” that’s chock full of helpful articles and the ability to submit a ticket to the company for further assistance, that automation process is done by Desk – or one of its handful of competitors.
This automation is important because it allows you to create and host a public and ongoing dialogue between you and your customers, which can reduce your inbound questions tremendously by providing the answers to the most often asked questions in a living and breathing forum.
When you have a “ticket submission” from an inquiring consumer, you can create “jones” – or automated responses – for your most typical questions that allow you to respond in seconds with what feels like a personal touch.
You can also set up a live chat function, along with a laundry list of other options.
2. Shipstation
In the Early stage of a startup, it likely makes sense to keep control of as many of the processes that you possibly can.
Now, since I’m preaching “automation” in this article, which would typically mean utilizing the services of a third-party logistics (3PL) firm for order fulfillment.
I do, however, believe that at the point of launching your product – and for at least the following few months – it makes sense to control all processes that have a direct interaction with your customer.
Ok, haven’t said all that, Shipstation is a tool that integrates with your shopping cart and your Stamps.com, UPS or FedEx accounts.
Rules – called “automations” – can be easily set that allow you to login to Shipstation and just click “print,” resulting in the creation of all necessary packing slips and shipping labels – an extremely simple and incredible time saver. How amazing.
3. Facebook videos
Alright, this typically wouldn’t be included as an automation, but it has worked well for automating revenue so I’m doing it anyway!
This is the drill: If you can figure out how to use Facebook videos within your ad platform, you can effectively automate your marketing, and thus, automate your revenue generation in a surprisingly controllable manner.
the Facebook video platform can be used as a main source of daily customer acquisition. the system can be dialed in to the point that it requires less than 15 minutes of maintenance per day and generates a scarily dependable revenue stream.
4. WooCommerce
You can not do without a shopping cart on an online ecommerce store.
The good news is that there are a number of great options that will plug right into your website that are both easy to setup and maintain, as well as mobile optimized — which is incredibly important.
There are a number of option, Shopify, Magento to mention a few, but we have had our success with “WooCommerce“, which happens to have a plugin or extension for about anything you could possibly need. Creating a subscription payment system, want a rewards or referral program or in need of a certain reporting function? No worries, just plug it in.
Have you used any automation on your ecommerce business and you feel is also good? please share with us in the comment section below.
