E-Commerce Automation: Examples and Benefits

What is E-Commerce Automation?

E-commerce automation automates repetitive tasks, streamlines workflows, and optimizes various aspects of your online store. This can include everything from inventory management and order processing to marketing and e-commerce customer service.

E-commerce automation offers various benefits that can significantly enhance operational efficiency and deliver an exceptional customer experience. By automating time-consuming and error-prone manual processes, businesses can redirect their valuable human resources toward strategic and creative endeavors, fostering innovation and growth. E-commerce automation ensures consistency and accuracy across all touchpoints, minimizing the potential for human errors and providing a seamless and personalized experience for customers.

Examples of E-Commerce Automation

E-commerce automation does many different tasks, each designed to solve specific problems and optimize operations.  Here are seven examples of e-commerce automation that provide a comprehensive overview:

Automated Pricing Strategies

Automated price monitoring is one of the foundational automation in e-commerce businesses. It eliminates manual tasks such as endless digging through Excel spreadsheets or scouring the Internet. When implemented correctly, automated pricing strategies can simplify, speed up, and make online product pricing more profitable. 

Productpine, a sustainable D2C marketplace, is a prime example of the successful implementation of an automated pricing tool. Thus it resulted in a 15% increase in sales and a significant reduction in manual workload.

Segment Your Products with Custom Labels

Custom labels are metadata tags that can be assigned to products in your product feed or catalog. These labels allow you to categorize and segment your products based on various attributes, such as product type, brand, price range, or any other criteria relevant to your business. Custom labels help users to create more targeted and relevant marketing campaigns for specific product groups. 

Marketers have made custom labels in platforms like Google Shopping, Google Ads, and Facebook campaigns indispensable for e-commerce marketing automation. Custom labels allow product catalogs to be segmented according to various criteria. 

Automating this segmentation process can be a great advantage for businesses. Feed management is monitoring, organizing, and administering product feeds for different sales channels. It uses a smart feed management tool to add automatic rules to a product catalog, group products based on set rules and performance indicators, and boost campaign success.

Automating A/B Tests for Your Campaigns

A/B tests are another essential aspect of e-commerce automation for online retailers. They help by comparing different versions of Google Shopping ads to determine which one converts better. 

The process involves assigning a common custom label to the tested products, applying an automatic rule to change an attribute (e.g., word order, title, or image) in the product group, and monitoring the performance of the two ads in Google Ads to identify the better-performing variant.

L’OREAL LUXE, for instance, automated A/B testing of ad images and saw a tripling of revenue generated via Google Shopping.

Regroup Products Automatically According to Performance Criteria

To automatically group products based on performance, e-commerce businesses need a strong feed management tool that pulls in the user’s product catalog.

There should be ready-made segments like TOP 100 sales or FLOP 100 clicks that users can customize to improve sales strategies. Users can easily group their products into these suggested segments and use them to set up their feeds for each online channel or create new segments.

Automatically Disable Out-of-Stock Products

E-commerce businesses need a feed management tool to automatically deactivate products that are out of stock. This involves creating a rule in the “Quantity” field to set the quantity to zero when the stock falls below a predetermined threshold (e.g., less than three products in stock). 

This method ensures that products with low stock levels are not listed on active marketplaces and marketing channels, preventing overselling and avoiding negative effects like customer dissatisfaction and possible account closures.

Automated Marketplace Order Management

When a product is bought, businesses must track all orders and take the right actions (accept, reject, etc.). The order status (e.g., shipped) is then automatically sent back to the marketplace, and the buyer is informed. Finally, inventory is updated automatically based on sales.

Businesses get a global overview of all orders, and can import orders into the back office of their e-commerce site.

Automate Category Matching

Automated categorization is another key example of e-commerce automation. In the “Category Matching” step, a feed management platform should automatically suggest categories that might match the categories in a business’s product catalog.

Once products are online, they are presented in the correct categories, minimizing the risk of category selection errors. Thus ensuring better visibility and findability on online distribution channels.

Benefits of E-Commerce Automation

E-Commerce Automation Saves Time

Automating repetitive tasks can save a lot of time for e-commerce businesses. By eliminating the need to track and remember these tasks, businesses can focus on more strategic and creative work. Tasks like data entry, customer emails, and social media management can be automated. Thus allowing businesses to get more done without increasing their workload.

With e-commerce marketing automation, businesses can schedule sales promotions to start at the right time, automate new product releases with announcements, remove discontinued products, adjust prices, apply discounts, track purchases, and provide rewards. Automation often performs these tasks more accurately than manual processes, reducing errors and increasing efficiency.

E-Commerce Automation Increases Worker Engagement

 E-commerce automation can significantly boost employee satisfaction and engagement by eliminating mundane, repetitive tasks that often drain energy and motivation. By automating data entry, order processing, and other routine tasks, employees are free to focus on big objectives, such as strategy, learning, and professional growth.

This can breathe new energy and excitement into the team, creating a more engaged and productive workforce.

E-Commerce Automation Helps Customer Satisfaction

In today’s competitive e-commerce landscape, customer satisfaction is paramount for success. Automation can help businesses keep customers happy and turn them into repeat customers, even as they scale to reach a broader audience.

By automating processes and workflows, customers can find what they’re looking for more quickly and purchase desired products more easily, without being hindered by unavailable or out-of-stock items.

E-Commerce Automation Streamlines Supplier Relationships

Maintaining positive relationships with suppliers is crucial for profitability in e-commerce businesses. Various e-commerce marketing automation can keep these relationships engaging and moving forward. Automated supplier portals can give employees more time to focus on company growth. While new vendors and suppliers can take the lead in setting themselves up within the system.

Additionally, automating customer service and order management processes can minimize errors and ensure a seamless experience for suppliers and vendors, fostering long-term partnerships.

E-Commerce Automation Simplifies Deliveries

E-commerce marketing automation systems can process orders directly from customers, printing receipts and shipping labels without the need for manual data entry. This saves time and prevents mistakes that could lead to lost or misdirected packages. As customers increasingly want package tracking, e-commerce marketing automation can send tracking information automatically, improving the overall delivery experience.

Summary

E-commerce Automation is transforming online businesses by using advanced software and tools to streamline tasks and optimize workflows. It enhances all aspects of online stores, making operations more efficient and effective. This powerful approach offers numerous benefits, including improved operational efficiency, consistency and accuracy across all touchpoints, and a superior customer experience.

However, most current automation tools come with fixed, non-customizable features. Users often require assistance in designing personalized automation features for their specific needs. This is where Robylon AI comes in. 

Robylon AI empowers users to build AI assistants that deeply understand their needs and can guide, help, and take action using plain English. Users can record the tasks that they want to automate and can give them input to automate the rest of the task. Thus, creating their own customized workflow for automating tasks. With features like Actions & Workflows, Usage Analytics, Triggers & Schedulers, and an Integrations Ecosystem, Robylon AI streamlines tedious processes, executes cross-platform actions, and provides valuable insights.
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