Learning how to automate your ecommerce business can help you scale quickly and focus your attention where it matters most. Nearly every aspect of selling online can be optimized with ecommerce automation. With the help of the right ecommerce platform, you can offload repetitive admin tasks and customer support.
At scale, automation tools allow businesses to expand rapidly. For example, Julio Giannotti, web manager for home décor brand Scandinavian Designs, witnessed the value of automation tools after using Shopify Flow. “The more you automate with tools like Flow, the more money a business can make,” he says. “It’s allowed us to run three Shopify stores without hiring an employee for each one.”
Read on to learn how to automate core parts of your ecommerce brand, including marketing, fulfillment, and fraud prevention.
What is ecommerce automation?
Ecommerce automation uses software to handle repetitive tasks and workflows so that your business runs more efficiently. Tasks that ecommerce businesses automate include inventory management, order processing, and responding to customer inquiries.
Ecommerce automation works by connecting your online store to software that handles predictable tasks through automated workflows. According to your settings, specific events trigger an automated action. For instance, a customer who makes a purchase prompts automation software to send a confirmation email, print a shipping label, notify your packing department, and adjust inventory. If you’re low on that item, automation can trigger a restock purchase.
Automation tools facilitate fast growth. For example, accessories brand Ridge uses AI to automate massive portions of their operations, which allows the company to operate extremely lean at $5 million in revenue per employee.
On an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast, CEO Sean Frank explains how Ridge uses AI to handle 60% of its customer service tickets, which actually resulted in higher customer satisfaction scores than when handled by humans. They also use AI to run data analysis from Shopify reports, manage complex inventory planning and buying, and automatically generate 500 static marketing ads per day.
How to automate your ecommerce business
You can automate almost every aspect of an ecommerce store to some degree. Here are some of the most common ecommerce processes that businesses can automate.
Marketing
You can automate ecommerce marketing with software that facilitates email marketing, SMS marketing, display ads retargeting, and customer segmentation and personalization.
Typically, these tools—which include Shopify marketing automation tools and third-party software like Klaviyo and Omnisend—work via a standard flow from trigger to conditions to action. The trigger is the event that initiates the automation, like a customer leaving your site after adding an item to their cart. The conditions are rules that determine whether the trigger meets preset criteria, like the cart value reaching a certain threshold. If the conditions are met, the automation executes an action, like sending an abandoned cart email.
Shopify Messaging lets you create personalized automated email campaigns. For example, if you run a business that sells plants online, you could automate follow-up emails containing a guide for how to care for the plant your customers just purchased, or offer add-on products like fertilizer and potting soil.
You can also automate lead scoring. Set criteria to rank sales prospects by their behaviors and attributes, then use this data to automatically contact high-value customers based on actions they’ve taken, such as products viewed or purchased.
Inventory management
Automated inventory management can help your team stay on top of growing order volume and minimize human error. Inventory management automation tools, such as Shopify Flow, facilitate tracking and restocking.
Let’s say you want to keep track of when your stock of a popular item gets low. Rather than constantly checking manually, you could use Shopify Flow to create an automated workflow. You would set a trigger for every purchase to scan for certain conditions—in this case, a purchase of the item. When your conditions are met—the item dips below a certain stock threshold—your workflow could trigger a restock.
Building workflows might seem complicated at first. Shopify Flow’s template library provides pre-made templates that make it easy for you to plug-and-play the workflows you need for inventory, marketing, and other tasks.
For example, Sean automates Ridge’s inventory planning and buying by using AI to run complex models on sales data and product launches. In doing so, he was able to maximize the Ridge team’s efficiency: “I have one inventory director who does all of our planning and buying,” he says.
Order fulfillment
Automated order fulfillment can verify addresses, print shipping labels, arrange package pickups, and respond to customers who want to track purchases. In addition to easing your fulfillment team’s workload, automation speeds up the fulfillment process as you scale.
Ecommerce automation tools like Shopify Shipping integrate with fulfillment and shipping tools, giving you a full shipping workflow inside your store’s admin dashboard. This lets you print shipping labels in bulk and partner with carriers like UPS and FedEx to handle fulfillment. Shopify Shipping also automates services like order updates and shipment tracking, helping customers get quality post-purchase support.
Customer service
When you automate ecommerce customer service, you can resolve customer tickets without human intervention. Chatbots and conversational AI can cut wait times by answering routine customer inquiries, such as those involving order status updates or return policies. This frees up your support team to focus on more complex customer issues.
Over time, with AI and machine learning capabilities, automation tools can detect trends in support inquiries that could identify chronic issues in need of your attention.
AI recommendation systems can suggest relevant products based on shoppers’ interests, allowing them to find products that are perfectly tailored to their needs.
Fraud prevention
As your customer database grows, you take on more responsibility to protect their sensitive data. AI can spot potentially fraudulent activity faster than humans can. Fraud prevention apps run in the background of your operations, scanning for red flags in new orders.
Shopify Payments’ automated fraud analysis tools use advanced machine learning technology trained on billions of data points from real ecommerce stores. Use Shopify Flow to automatically classify suspect orders (as low, medium, or high-risk), then tag, hold, or cancel high-risk orders.
Generator retailer FactoryPure uses the fraud prevention app NoFraud. “They check every order and give you an assessment if they think it’s legitimate or not,” says cofounder Eugene Ravitsky on an episode of Shopify Masters. If they still have concerns about an order, FactoryPure uses another app called Signifyd, which automatically covers chargebacks in exchange for a 4% fee on the item’s revenue.
How to automate your ecommerce business FAQ
How does ecommerce automation work?
Ecommerce automation uses software embedded in your store to automate day-to-day tasks that are repetitive and predictable. For instance, you could set up an automated workflow to send personalized follow-up emails with new product suggestions to customers who buy certain items.
How do you automate an ecommerce business?
You can automate online businesses with ecommerce automation software, using AI and other tools connected to your store. This can be done with automation software like Shopify Flow.
What is an example of ecommerce automation?
You might use ecommerce automation tools to manage inventory, setting up a workflow that triggers a restock purchase of a particular item every time a new purchase sends inventory below a certain threshold.
