14 Ways to Automate Your Ecommerce Business

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When it comes to owning a business, time is your most valuable resource — but, time is finite, and are a lot of tasks competing for your attention. You need to make sure the right products are listed on your website, that you’re fulfilling orders and payments 24/7, and that you’re processing and dispatching packages efficiently… all while staying on top of marketing campaigns, user reviews, and customer service.

And, as you scale, your ecommerce processes get even more demanding.

So, how can you make time for the work that brings in more customers while keeping everything else on track?

With ecommerce automation.

Automation is playing a vital role in the future of tech — and it’s no surprise that we’re seeing more of it in tools designed for ecommerce businesses. As a store owner, it’s your secret to putting your time-consuming tasks on auto-pilot.

In this post, we’ll explain what ecommerce automation is, then show you what it looks like with 15 ways you can automate your online business.

What is ecommerce automation?

It means using software to turn manual tasks into automated workflows. These workflows can trigger internal or external emails, notifications, or actions in other apps — such as creating new support tickets in your help desk. To make sure everything works perfectly, you can set multiple conditions that need to be true for the workflow to run.

Although ecommerce automation saves you time, it doesn’t mean firing your employees — or yourself. Rather, it frees up your team’s time for the customer interactions, creativity, and big-picture thinking that matter most in your line of work.

To get started, here’s a list of some of the best ways to use marketing automation for ecommerce, whether you’re using Shopify, WooCommerce, or another platform.

Ecommerce Automation Software

There are several types of automation software you can use for your ecommerce business. The most popular tools are:

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.