E-commerce is a competitive field and it is always about profits and more profits. Same time, it is also about efficiency, optimization, automation and scalability of your business. If you are looking for the best ecommerce automation tools then our upwork team would like to share the knowledge with you and help you succeed in your business!
The term eCommerce automation tools is nothing new. Ecommerce companies have been using these automated tools for eCommerce business growth for many years. And the meaning of the term has changed too. It is no longer about using an automated tool, but rather about using a suite of tools to make your ecommerce business run like clockwork.
The eCommerce marketplace is highly competitive, and the market is growing. If your company wants to drive new sales in this environment, you’re going to need the best eCommerce automation tools possible. These will help you not only increase your customer conversions but also create more traffic on your website and reduce costs in the long-term.
You’ve taken the first step in bringing your ecommerce store online. It’s been a slow process but you’re getting there. Next, you want to automate your store: to increase efficiency and scale, make changes without hassle, and most importantly – to save time! You’re not the best at programming, so what are the best ecommerce automation tools? Ecommerce platforms are varied and the tools each of them offer to automate businesses are also quite different. Learn more about the best ecommerce automation tools with this article.
What is eCommerce Automation?
eCommerce automation can be a software, tool or application used to eliminate redundant, manual and complex processes. Whenever there are multiple sets of tasks to be performed, automation comes in handy. This helps businesses to scale and lets them prioritise tasks accordingly.
Automation works great for inventory management, conversational commerce, converting leads and managing order-related notifications. With the number of customisations being offered by these tools, you can operate your eCommerce store efficiently.
Verloop.io
Verloop.io is one of the leading tools to automate conversational support for eCommerce stores. With its scalable insightful data, you can engage with your customers 24×7.
Verloop.io features a recipe builder that lets you automate FAQs, demo scheduling, proactive communication and more! The AI-driven eCommerce automation tool also assists you in acquiring leads, engaging customers and extending support in every possible way.
Key Features:
- Real-time insightful dashboard – 24×7 functionality
- Endlessly customisable reports
- Interact with your customers on live chat
- Multi-language support
Pricing Plans:
- For Startups – Custom plans based on the requirement
- Enterprise plan – Custom plans based on the requirement
Hubspot
Hubspot offers an inbound marketing tool for eCommerce business. It hosts various features like content management, email marketing, social media handles management and analytics. A complete package for eCommerce marketing solutions.
Hubspot has advanced features that let you manage the entire sales funnel. Personalising your marketing strategies, it’s a good platform to scale your marketing activities on eCommerce stores.
Key features:
- Email campaigns
- Landing pages
- Abandoned cart nurturing
- Upsell campaigns
Pricing plans:
- Free plan available
- Starter – 50$ per month / 540$ for annual
- Professional – 890$ per month / 9,600$ for annual
- Enterprise – 3,200$ per month / 38,400$ for annual
QuickBooks
QuickBooks is the leading online accounting software that is a complete package for your eCommerce store. It lets you create invoices, generate reports and check costs incurred. Best suited for businesses ranging from small to mid-level companies.
QuickBooks can be operated on multiple platforms and has a creative visual interface. Complete accounting software for organising and managing multiple tasks in one place.
Key features:
- Compatible on the computer, laptop or smartphones
- Account creation / Shareability
- Custom invoice templates and generate reports
- Unlimited customer support
Pricing plans:
- Simple Start – 16$ per month / 151$ for annual
- Essentials – 25$ per month / 237$ for annual
- Plus – 34$ per month / 322$ for annual
Dotdigital (formerly Dotmailer)
Since 1999, this marketing automation platform has built its services around email, the number-one performing digital marketing tactic. More than 70,000 customers in 150-plus countries use Dotdigital to build automated email programs that follow the full length of a customer’s journey.
- Pricing – Packages run from $150 per month to $600 per month with a 20% discount for nonprofits and charities.
- Ease of use – Dotdigital is one of the simplest as well as the most powerful platforms on the market. It’s a great place to start for growing businesses that are familiar with Email Service Providers like MailChimp and who now want to take the next step.
- Features – Training, Campaign Management, Creative Studio, Strategic Services, and Custom Integrations. Integration with Yieldify.
- Best for – Email marketing professionals who need an all-in-one package with powerful capacity in a drag-and-drop template.
Oracle Bronto
Focused on high-growth eCommerce retailers all around the globe, Oracle Bronto provides email services that can integrate with all commerce platforms. Bronto also gives users the capacity to deliver responsive social and mobile media campaigns with an emphasis on cart abandonment recovery. The platform includes an array of powerful apps beyond core functionality.
- Pricing – Free demo. Quote-based plan.
- Ease of use – Capterra users gave Bronto 4 out of 5 stars for ease of use.
- Features – Drag-and-Drop Automation, Post-Purchase Campaigns, Cart Abandonment Reminders, VIP and Loyalty Programs, Precise Segmentation. Integration with Yieldify.
- Best for – eCommerce retailers who need an ultra-powerful marketing automation platform with an intuitive interface.
Sender
Sender is a rising star. This tool provides a full range of features to help lead to effective email marketing. Sender is most suitable to send newsletters, automated follow-ups, or triggered emails and transactional emails.
- Pricing – Free Forever plan up to 2500 contacts and 15 000 emails/month. The paid version starts from $10/month for all premium features and supports 24/7.
- Ease of use – Rated as a TOP3 user-friendly email marketing tool by Capterra.
- Features – Drag&drop design-builder, Advanced subscribers and campaigns management, Drip automation (with triggers for abandonment carts, birthdays and etc.), Pop-ups, and forms builder.
- Best for – Smaller businesses looking for a user-friendly tools with all premium features, high deliverability for the best price in the market.
Shopify
One of the most popular ecommerce platforms, Shopify 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.
Shopify Flow
This ecommerce automation suite is available with Shopify Pro – which certainly isn’t the cheapest (you’ll want to be making over $1 million in annual revenue to justify it). It’s workflow-based and makes it impressively simple to create automation both within Shopify and with other apps via seamless integrations. 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.
WooCommerce
If you’re using WooCommerce to power your store on WordPress, 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.
Other Software to Integrate With Your Ecommerce Platform
You can also use automation software on top of your ecommerce platform. These include:
- Email marketing automation tools, like Mailchimp to trigger emails to your customers
- Automation tools like ActiveCampaign to trigger workflows for internal process and communication with customers
- CRM tools with automation features, like HubSpot
- Help desk tools with automation features, like Freshdesk and Zendesk
- Accounting and invoicing tools like Wave Accounting, Xero or Quickbooks Online
Read on for 14 of the best ways to automate your ecommerce business, including features from your ecommerce platform as well as other automation tools you can easily keep in sync.
Ways to Automate Ecommerce Businesses
Customer Experience & Management Automation
1. Track and reward your most engaged customers.
Do you reward your best customers? Customer retention is valuable for all businesses, including ecommerce.
Turns out you can increase your profits anywhere from 25-95% by increasing your retention rates by just 5%.
To reward customer loyalty, you could automatically add a free gift or free delivery to orders over $100. With a tool like ActiveCampaign, you can also segment customers based on lifetime spend and send them automated emails with rewards inside.
2. Sync your customers to a Mailchimp list.
All of the top ecommerce platforms — including WooCommerce and Shopify — have native integrations with Mailchimp. So, if you’re using the popular email marketing tool to send your newsletters and email marketing workflows, make sure to sync your accounts.
An integration with Mailchimp can automatically pass the email addresses of shoppers who show interest in your emails into a specified Mailchimp list, so you can keep them updated with your latest products and offers.
3. Gather feedback after a purchase.
Every ecommerce store knows how powerful reviews and honest feedback are. It can make or break your business. To encourage reviews, set up automated email workflows to send follow-up emails a certain amount of time after a purchase is made. Ask for honest feedback and share a link to where they can post their review.
4. Reach out to negative reviews.
If you receive an unfortunate 1-star review, make sure you respond to it. You can set up an automation to create a support ticket in your helpdesk software to make it easier to reach out quickly and make amends — or at least listen and understand what’s happened.
5. Tag and segment customers based on buying behavior.
Segmentation can help you understand your customers and stay on top of the different individual needs they might have. With a CRM, you can tag or segment based on demographics (e.g. gender or location), lifetime order value, milestones, number of orders, or any subscriptions or memberships, for example.
Inventory Automation
6. Automate inventory management for low-stock items.
Running out of a product can mean missed income and frustrated customers. To avoid this, automate your inventory management so you know when a product is low in stock.
With Woocommerce, you can trigger low stock notifications (based on thresholds you set) and out-of-stock notifications. This way you can instantly know when a product needs reordering from your supplies.
Order Management Automation
7. Send abandoned cart emails.
75% of ecommerce shopping carts get abandoned. Abandoned cart reminders help you bring customers back to your site — and with automation, you don’t have to do a thing.
Integrating your ecommerce software with a mailing provider is an easy way to send abandoned cart emails. You can also look at other native integrations between your ecommerce platform and transactional email providers.
8. Try dropshipping for passive income.
Did you know some ecommerce businesses automate order fulfillment and delivery? It’s possible with dropshipping — a way to find products, add them to your online store, and ship them directly to your customers without holding any inventory or risk yourself.
Oberlo, acquired by Shopify in 2017, is one of the most popular dropshipping tools. As expected, it integrates neatly with Shopify and you can add dropshipped products to your existing Shopify store, or create a new one for your dropshipped products.
The main challenge with dropshipping is finding the products that match your store’s branding and quality standards.
9. Print shipping labels and send out tracking numbers with one click.
By integrating WooCommerce with ShipStation, a single click can complete several time-consuming tasks:
- Sync your orders with ShipStation.
- Create and print shipping labels for your WooCommerce orders.
- Mark all orders as complete.
- Generate and send tracking numbers.
Conclusion
You might have heard the buzzword Ecommerce Automation pretty frequently in the recent times. Ecommerce market has been growing like anything in the last few years and there are lot of services being offered to help small and large business owners run their ecommerce operations more efficiently. Ecommerce Automation Software helps you automate different areas of your ecommerce store and save a lot of time.
Automation helps e-commerce companies to execute their work faster and helps in saving time on a lot of tasks. Since the world has gone online, it’s very important to give best user experience to the visitors of your e-commerce store. To provide best user experience, you should make sure that your website is fast and working without any problem.