If you manage an ecommerce store, then you know how difficult it is to stay on top of things. It can feel like there’s never enough time in the day to fulfill all these tasks. Thankfully, there are ways to make your online store easier to run.
The market is full of great software products for managing your ecommerce store. These ecommerce automation tools are designed to make everything from marketing to inventory tracking simpler and more efficient. It is important that you find the right app for your needs — after all, a bad one can cost you a lot of time and money!
In this article, we will provide you with a few useful automation tools that will help you manage your ecommerce store much better.
Contents:
1. Ecommerce automation: Introducing automation tools
2. Automation tools in ecommerce: Why should you consider ecommerce automation?
3. Ecommerce tools that can help you automate your online store
Ecommerce automation: Introducing automation tools
Running an ecommerce brand requires a lot of planning and maintenance to turn a profit and scale effectively. By automating the repetitive parts of selling online, you and your team are freed up to keep your customers happy.
Ecommerce automation tools range in many categories, but they all focus on making your business easier to manage and run. These tools will help you automate the parts of your business you might have done manually in the past. For example, you can automate communication with customers and manage customer orders from any number of channels to streamline every aspect of your business.
We are going to dive deeper into how automation is one of the keys to running an ecommerce business that scales, attracts, and converts customers and why automation is a crucial element that many modern businesses strive to achieve.
Let’s dive into ecommerce automation!
Automation tools in ecommerce: Why should you consider ecommerce automation?
Selling online means juggling a lot of different tasks. From uploading new products and taking orders, to sending out shipping notifications to your customer base and processing customer payments, there’s a lot that goes into running an ecommerce site. These tasks can be time-consuming and stressful if you’re not utilizing the latest tech products that make it quicker and easier to stay on top of every aspect of your business.
Here are a few solid reasons why you should consider investing in ecommerce automation tools for your online business:
• Increasing efficiency by making store operating less time-consuming.
• Introducing more possibilities for long-term strategic planning.
• Helping scale your ecommerce business faster.
• Allowing your ecommerce business to adjust to the market calls and customer needs easier.
• Getting better business insights and making better business decisions.
Now that we know what ecommerce automation can help you achieve, let’s explore the ecommerce tools that can take your business to the next level.
Ecommerce tools that can help you automate your online store
When navigating through the abundance of the latest automation apps, you would want to look for useful functionality, customizable functions, and convenient navigation. These qualities make software a go-to for online merchants.
All the apps discussed below solve ecommerce business owners’ pains and offer a lot of useful features to get the most out of online sales.
Let’s tale a look at ecommerce automation software and review our top 5 ecommerce tools.
Shopify – The perfect place to start your ecommerce business
Shopify is a popular solution for those willing to start an ecommerce business. It can be useful both for those who are planning to start a business from scratch or move their retail business online. Thus, one platform unites various ecommerce and point of sale features you need to start, run, and grow your business.
You can build your website with displayed goods. The in-build tools have lots of features that help you find customers, drive sales, and manage your day-to-day operations: you can get orders, accept customer payments, track inventory, etc. The platform allows you to gain the insights necessary for growing the business — with a single dashboard to manage customer orders, shipping, and payments. You can even hire contractors or get professional advice at the Shopify Experts Marketplace on different aspects of your ecommerce business, which can be handy. Additionally, utilizing a Shopify upsell app can boost your revenue by increasing average order values through personalized product recommendations and one-click upsell offers. These apps seamlessly integrate with your Shopify store, enhancing the shopping experience for your customers.
Being a smart platform, Shopify gives ecommerce business owners plenty of features and an opportunity to integrate their Shopify store with third-party applications that they find useful. These integrations will work in perfect tandem, amplifying your business performance in many ways.
Some of these automation tools are listed below.
Adwisely – Efficient advertising for ecommerce
Adwisely is an actionable tool helping ecommerce merchants to create effective and efficient ads for their online stores and target customers better. The app creates ads on Google, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok for ecommerce businesses specifically focusing on those who might be interested.
While any ad would only attract random people, this software tool offers businesses better targeting and engaging capacities. You can not only attract people who have never been to your online store but also re-engage old users, recover abandoned carts, and upsell by offering an improved version of the product to people who viewed the product in your online store.
All in all, Advisely features help ecommerce businesses to:
- Create traffic campaigns on Facebook and Instagram to target new prospective customers
- Retarget customers on Facebook and Instagram to re-engage the people who visited your online store and/or abandoned their carts
- Launch special offer campaigns on Facebook in order to promote short-term deals, flash sales, etc.
- Create Google Shopping campaigns to reach new visitors to your store and get more returning store visitors
The tool is also really simple to use because all you do is set the daily budget, while Adwisely updates bid and audiences 24/7 to ensure maximum return.
Synder – Streamlined accounting and insights for ecommerce
Synder provides simple accounting automation for ecommerce businesses of various sizes. This ecommerce automation software helps you harness the power of multichannel sales by allowing you to integrate and gather data from as many payment gateways connected to your online store as you need.
Let’s say, you are a Shopify merchant. You can accept payments from your customers by a variety of methods: for example Shopify Payments, PayPal, and Stripe. Giving so much flexibility to your customers is a good start for increasing your revenue. But on the other hand, the bookkeeping process becomes more and more difficult to manage with each purchase. It’s time to automate.
That is when Synder automation software comes in with its useful automation features. Synder helps you to:
1. Synchronize sales data for your ecommerce store from each payment source directly into your accounting system, with no limit on how many or what sales channels you use. Depending on the size of your business, you might either sync all the transaction details to your accounting with Synder’s Per Transaction sync mode, or choose to post one journal entry a day per each connected platform with Synder’s Daily Summary. Choose what suits your ecommerce business needs best and get data entry automated.
2. Skip duplicates, avoid financial errors, identify data gaps, and help fill in missing information. With Synder’s smart duplicate detection mechanism, your books are safe. If you’re not satisfied with the sync results, you can use the Roll Back feature to undo the synchronization and erase them from your accounting, and then re-sync these transactions with the new settings.
3. Apply payments to open invoices. Synder automatches received payments with outstanding invoices and closes them in your accounting. The best thing is that it’s all automated.
4. Record merchant fees. Synder allows you to track and record merchant fees associated with your e-commerce transactions. It can integrate with your payment processors and automatically import fee-related data, making it convenient to monitor and account for these expenses.
5. Reconcile the sales and transaction data in your books with the current bank balance. The reconciliation feature of Synder utilizes intelligent transaction matching algorithms. Synder’s automation software leverages criteria such as transaction dates, amounts, and descriptions to identify matches, ensuring a comprehensive and accurate reconciliation process. The automated matching capabilities help save time and reduce manual effort that would otherwise be required to prepare each individual transaction for reconciliation manually.
6. Prepare accurate P&L’s and Balance Sheets. Synder takes the data needed for correct reports from your payment systems and trasfers it into your accounting platform, which helps you create accurate P&L and Balance Sheet. If something is missing on the side of the channels, Synder will help you add it to your accounting system.
7. Implement smart customization with Smart Rules. Synder allows ecommerce businesses to add the data missing from their channels to their accounting system, apply classes, locations etc. to get the full picture of sales and expenses. You can automate these flows and be sure that when a certain event triggers a rule, you’ll get the necessary info in your accounting.
Thanks to a wide array of features developed with ecommerce businesses in mind, Synder assists greatly in keeping your books in order and preparing them for correct reporting and tax filing, saving you time and headaches. This automation software integrates easily with a variety of ecommerce and payment platforms, has an intuitive and clean interface that is easy to use even for those who know little to nothing about accounting.
Want to explore Synder’s automation features? Check out the tool by signing up for a 15-day free trial, or book a seat at our upcoming webinar to see Synder in action and ask questions. It’s time to ease your ecommerce bookkeeping with a smart automation platform!
Mailchimp – Email marketing automation for ecommerce
Mailchimp is a marketing automation software platform with a range of marketing and commerce tools for growing an online business.
It offers marketing tools that help you stay in touch with customers and grow your business. For example, the service can help you automate launching an online business by allowing customers to book appointments directly from your website. But it is broadly known for its targeted e-mail flows automation.
A business looking to stay on top of ecommerce can’t do it without making the most of email marketing. In Mailchimp, you can manage your mailing lists, create custom email templates, and nurture your entire email marketing campaigns. The great user interface and a selection of useful features let you send emails, manage subscribers, offer tracking, set up autoresponders, and split test your email campaigns.
This email marketing software promises everything you need to create multichannel campaigns that reach and resonate with your customer base, deliver unique customer experiences and drive more sales.
One more great thing about this marketing automation software platform is that you can connect all your other tools to this app and unlock even more useful features. Mailchimp integrates with various third-party applications and platforms, including ecommerce platforms, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and content management systems (CMS). This allows you to connect and synchronize data between Mailchimp and other tools you use in your marketing stack.
Need more email marketing tips? Check out our article about email marketing follow-up strategies.
Zapier – Bridging the gaps between apps for ecommerce
Zapier is a tool that automatically moves crucial business information (like customer opt-ins or unsubscribers) between your other apps. This automation software allows your ecommerce business to work more efficiently by connecting all tools in work to create an automated ecosystem.
Here’s how it works. You link your web apps, so they can share data. Then the software passes the info between your apps with workflows, or tasks, that they call Zaps. It helps automate those repetitive and sometimes tedious parts of your business, build processes faster and get more things done. And just like other tools on this list, Zapier offers an easy-to-use interface and no coding is required.
Zapier supports hundreds of online tools so you can create an almost endless number of tasks that you need to run your business. Here are a few features to get a quick overview of the flow:
• Get notifications about new form submissions, so you can know the instant a customer fills out your form. No need to wait for the customer to come back or send you an email, Zapier sends an email notification instantly when something has been submitted.
• Automatically generate customer contact lists from your opt-in Shopify customers to organize all your leads in one location.
• Send new contact list subscribers to Google Sheets. Get all your customer data in one place that everyone from the team can access.
• Synchronize your unsubscriptions with your CRM so the whole team is up-to-date on what’s happening and be able to react immediately.
Lyro – AI-powered customer communication tool
Lyro is a new AI-powered NLP chatbot by Tidio. Being the first conversational AI chatbot on the market with a variety of useful features, it was created with small and medium businesses in mind affordable even to 1-person businesses.
Lyro’s key features include One click activation, FAQ scraping, Intent analysis, Scalable learning, and Identification of popular topics. It’s a fully autonomous chatbot that learns from each customer interaction. It’s also quite safe for customer data. Powered by Claude – the most secure large language model on the market, Lyro remains a safe and ethical tool.
Lyro also has responsive and efficient 24/7 support.
Appy Pie Connect – Streamlining E-commerce Workflow
Appy Pie Connect is a leading workflow automation tool that helps businesses increase their operational efficiency by automating tedious and repetitive tasks. This platform enables businesses to create automated workflows, known as “Connects,” which automate tasks that traditionally consume considerable time and effort. With Appy Pie Connect, e-commerce businesses can enhance their operational efficiency by integrating various apps and services into a unified, automated system without the need for extensive technical knowledge. This approach not only simplifies complex processes but also democratizes the power of automation, making it accessible to businesses of all sizes and technical backgrounds.
The platform’s intuitive design ensures a straightforward setup process, allowing users to automate workflows effortlessly. This automation software offers a wide array of integrations for E-commerce platforms such as Shopify Integrations, WooCommerce Integrations, QuickBooks integrations, and many more. Key features of Appy Pie Connect for E-commerce workflow automation:
- Connect your e-commerce platform with over 150+ apps including CRM systems, payment gateways, email marketing services, and accounting software, enabling a seamless flow of data across your business ecosystem.
- Eliminate manual entry by automating tasks like adding new customers to your email list, updating records, and generating invoices, freeing up more time to focus on strategic growth.
- Automatically sync orders from your e-commerce platform to inventory management and shipping tools, ensuring timely fulfillment and updates.
- Enhance customer engagement by automating the synchronization of customer data across platforms, enabling personalized marketing campaigns and support services.
Summing up
Automation in ecommerce has come a long way from its initial use as a way for companies to make their stores run faster and cheaper. It is now commonplace among online retailers and website owners, and even more importantly, automation tools can actually increase profits and drive your growth.
Investing in the right tech products pays off in the long run. The best ecommerce automation tools and their useful features can help you convert more customers and streamline sales, improve the financial performance of your online business, make better strategic decisions and enhance productivity.
