Our ebook won the Sustainability in Ecommerce Award at the UK Ecommerce Awards 2023! Check out the award-winning ebook
Ecommerce
Automation
Ecommerce automation: It’s here to make your life easier, simpler and more productive. In ecommerce businesses around the world, the countless manual tasks once performed by error-prone humans are being completed faster and more accurately by intelligent software.
Done right, this frees up employees for tasks that technology still isn’t up to - those that require a bit of inspiration and imagination. When your accountant doesn’t have to reconcile thousands of transactions they can spend time interrogating cost saving measures. With an automated post-purchase email flow in place, your marketing department can instead concentrate on more creative marketing plays.
But perhaps you’re wondering where to start with ecommerce automation, or whether you’re making the most of the technology available? Below are ten of what we believe to be the most useful automations for today’s ecommerce business - those that will increase efficiency, drive revenue and improve customer experience.
Ecommerce automation: It’s here to make your life easier, simpler and more productive.
For most ecommerce businesses automating the end-to-end order fulfilment process is essential. Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are two of the most common ecommerce automations in place today.
While a fully automated WMS would involve robots picking & packing stock within a warehouse, a more common approach is using software to automate a lot of the administrative tasks related to each order. Typically, this would include:
Orders: When an order is placed on your ecommerce platform, software picks up the order and sends it to the warehouse for picking & packing.
Order Acknowledgement: The warehouse acknowledges the order and updates the status to “Picking”.
Shipments: Once the order has been shipped the software updates the order to “Shipped” and triggers a “Your order has shipped” email to the customer.
An ERP system goes one further, providing users across the business with real-time information on everything from sales, accounting, supply chain and more, including information from the WMS.
Automating order fulfilment through a WMS reduces the chance of human error and streamlines the process, making tracking inventory more exact. Incorporating this into an ERP product allows for everyone within the business to feed into the same database, allowing different departments to work more efficiently together.
Many Warehouse Management and ERP systems have extensions or apps for popular ecommerce platforms, such NetSuite for Woocommerce or SAP for Shopify. Alternatively, you can build integrations between different systems, using products such as MuleSoft, Flowize or Apio. Finally, there’s always the option to get a developer to custom build an integration for you.
Product Information Management (PIM) is the central source of information for every platform, manufacturer or retailer you work with, organising the plethora of data that comes with a large product catalogue. And that includes a lot - everything including technical specifications, shipping information, tags, categories, customer reviews, SEO info, creative assets, and so much more.
This can then be used on D2C platforms you use to sell, such as Amazon, eBay or WooCommerce, or it could be for B2B purposes and accessed by third parties, such as your distributors or retailers.
Centralising the data allows for changes to be made once and implemented everywhere, regarding everything from product dimensions to pricing information. It also deals with translating these variables into the necessary formats for the platforms you sell through.
That efficiency means cost saving, but it also means the potential to increase revenue because expansion into new markets, platforms or products becomes so much more streamlined. There’s also the benefit of holding a central source of truth, reducing the possibility of human error and ensuring you’re complying with local regulations.
Email marketing is something that many businesses have set up from the start. At its most basic level this might involve keeping a central list of customers, and sending out emails to all regarding things like seasonal promotions or when new product ranges are added.
Automation can increase the sophistication of email as a marketing tool. An automated email flow can send emails at specific points in the customer journey, such as when they’ve just received their product (“Thanks for your support! Leave us a review and win a voucher.”), when they’re likely to need to reorder (“Would you like us to send you more eco loo roll?”) or when they’ve failed to reorder (“We miss you! Have a £5 voucher”). These kinds of post-purchase emails see open rates that are almost 17% higher than the average email automation.
Email automation can be used to improve many of the key metrics that concern ecommerce businesses: abandoned cart rates, customer retention rates and even cart size. The key is to put in the work to optimise the automation through vigorous A/B testing. Over time, you will discover what type of subject lines resonate with your audience, when it’s best to send a re-engagement email and whether it’s short and snappy or informative and well-researched that pays off.
Check out Klaviyo, Emarsys and Synerise
A booming business is great news for everyone except the person in charge of reconciliation. And the ecommerce ecosystem is becoming ever more complex, with gift cards, flexible payment options, cross-border transactions, payment processor fees and so much more resulting in a constantly moving target to challenge any accounting process.
Automated reconciliation and accounting creates one central resource to deal with matching orders to incoming bank transactions, taking into account the various complexities that come from the many players involved in the average ecommerce transaction. Reconciliation then becomes a case of running that script, rather than matching each and every transaction manually.
Legacy tools such as MS Excel no longer cut it in today’s ecosystem, and make scaling up something to be feared rather than celebrated. An automated solution reduces the time, cost and crucially, the potential for human error in the process. With financial risk such a fundamental concern of many ecommerce businesses, an automated solution is essential.
Cross-selling and upselling are important tools in any ecommerce business’ arsenal, but will only deliver on their potential if they’re employed tactically. You’re unlikely to increase basket size by recommending earmuffs to someone shopping for a red swimsuit, but a well chosen beach towel or more pricey red bikini might just do the trick (particularly if you highlight that it will push the shopper over that magical ‘Free shipping’ threshold).
Recommendations can be made on any number of bases, but it does require careful product tagging to work. For instance, if you want to be able to recommend products in a similar fabric, suitability for a certain event or even ethical manufacturing methods, these need to be tagged from the outset.
Increasing sales is the ultimate goal for automating product recommendations, but it’s worth considering the margin involved. For instance, a retailer that sells both own-brand beanies (high margin) and third party-brand beanies (low margin) might find it worthwhile to highlight their own beanies in that coveted Product Recommendation spot.
Check out Clerk.io, Klevu, Advanced Commerce, Synerise and Nosto
Walk into any supermarket, and you’ll find a carefully curated space, with certain products positioned so you can’t miss them, and others hidden somewhere in the depths of aisle 47. An automated merchandising tool does that for you. With a limited amount of real estate on any screen (particularly with mobile shoppers), it’s incredibly important to uncover the products a shopper is most likely to buy as quickly as possible in their customer journey.
The appearance of a homepage or category page can be tailored to the shopper, such as displaying warm jackets to those browsing from Canada in November. Alternatively, it can be more focused on your own data, displaying high margin items first or even those that are most likely to convert browsers into buyers.
Automating the appearance of your site is a significant timesaver, and this data-led approach takes the guesswork out of what should be displayed where. Ultimately, it should increase your revenue through either an increase in overall sales or an increase in high margin item sales.
Check out Advanced Commerce, Klevu, Nosto and Syte
Shoppers today demand a more personalised experience, and the ultimate expression of this is displaying a different shopping experience to each and every shopper. For B2B companies, this might involve branding the homepage (after lo- in) with the customer’s own brand colours. For B2C customers, this is more likely to be based on their browsing or purchase history.
While the default until recently has been to tag each product in multiple categories, the idea of on-site personalisation requires this to be dialled back, tagging each product in just one primary category. It is this mono-categorisation that will allow automation rules to be built.
Take an outdoor pursuits retailer and a customer who has previously bought a bike from that business. Using purchase history and by tagging the bike as simply that - “bike” - a rule can be built to show the customer other relevant but not duplicate accessories (since they are unlikely to buy a second bike in quick succession): They have previously bought: Bike so we should display to them: + helmet, + light, + high vis jacket, for instance.
Not only will this immediately improve your product recommendations, it future proofs automated personalisation. When any upcoming bike, helmet, light or high vis SKU is added, it will automatically be uncovered for the shopper through on-site personalisation, without the need for any human intervention (besides initially categorising it). Combine this with merchandising and email flows for a highly personalised experience.
Check out Nosto, Fresh Relevance, Bloomreach, Synerise and Attraqt
Customer service has historically been a very labour intensive part of the ecommerce experience, requiring real people to be on-call to answer customer queries via phone or email. However, AI has reached the point at which it can be of genuine help to customers, providing fast, accurate and personalised responses to some of the most common shopper questions.
This automation can be deployed across a variety of channels - chatbot, SMS, email, social media or even voice calls. By integrating with your ecommerce platform, AI can pull the relevant information (what items are in stock, when an order is due to arrive or when a refund was actioned) and deliver it back to the customer in real-time.
Automated customer service can be delivered 24/7, with unfailing accuracy (as long as the integration is set up correctly). There’s a saving on the number of customer service agents needed by a business, and this multi-platform approach allows customers to resolve their problems on their preferred platform.
And if that doesn’t convince you? 83% of consumers cite good customer service as the most important factor when deciding what to buy. You can’t afford not to deliver that.
Research shows that businesses with more reviews generate 54% more revenue than those without, showing it’s quantity over quality that matters in this case. But going after those reviews - and then doing something with them - can be a laborious process.
Using an automation tool streamlines this, covering everything from automatically contacting the customer to ask for a review, right through to publishing it on your website. They cover all the most common sites (Google, Facebook, Trustpilot etc), as well as many industry-specific ones - all done managed by you on one central dashboard. You’ll also be notified if you receive a negative review, so that you can respond appropriately.
The figures speak for themselves: 91% of people regularly or occasionally read online reviews, and 84% trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. While positive reviews speak for themselves, responding to negative reviews can also communicate your proactive approach to customer service.
Check out Grade.us, ReviewTrackers, Yotpo, Junip and GatherUp
Customer returns are a hot topic in ecommerce, with the fast fashion website Boohoo becoming the latest online retailer to start charging shoppers to return items. Returns cost businesses about £7bn a year, with up to half of clothing bought online returned to some retailers. While automated returns won’t decrease the overall number of returns, it can take a lot of the manpower out of the process - which with the sheer scale involved can be crucial in staying profitable.
In the past, a shopper returning an item might repackage it, fill in a returns slip and post it off. It would then be received, checked and a refund issued by someone in the warehouse. With automated returns, a customer can book their return on the returns portal, either using a courier or a specialist service. Once the item is sent and received, a Warehouse Management System (WMS) can automate a return or replacement being sent, or automatically trigger a refund.
Returns are at the forefront of customer service, and it presents a challenge to turn a potentially negative shopping experience into a positive one. But there’s some interesting innovation happening in this space. Various providers are offering features to optimise this experience for shoppers, such as those that allow for new items to be received by the shopper before the unwanted one is returned, or even upselling at the point of booking a return (“Choose something new and get £10 added to your return credit”).
Check out ReturnLogic, loop and returnly
If there’s one overarching benefit to ecommerce automation, it is giving a business everything it needs to scale. With the right tools in place, processes should just as easily be able to cope with 1,000 orders as 10,000 orders a day - and more. This future proofing of your business will pay dividends as you grow.
There is, of course, an upfront cost in terms of time and money in putting these automations in place. But with the efficiencies that can come as a result, there can be little doubt that it is an investment worth making for any ambitious ecommerce business.
