eCommerce business automation makes sense for several reasons and is something all B2B organizations should consider in order to work smarter. In order for your eCommerce site to keeping operating at full capacity 24 hours a day, you need to ensure the adequate structures are in place to make this possible.
In this context, automation refers to the use of technology to assist your eCommerce site to increase sales and assist with staff productivity. Once implemented, automation of your eCommerce site will result in an increase in overall efficiency which will lead to reduced workloads and happier customers – a boon for growth in your sales.
Deciding what elements of your eCommerce site to automate could seem challenging, but going through the process is worth the time and effort and result in positive business growth.
Five Ways to Automate Customer Tracking in Your eCommerce Business
Research indicates that you can increase your profits anywhere from 25-95% by increasing your retention rates by just 5%. So it makes sense to look at optimizing elements of your eCommerce site pertaining to the customer experience (CX).
When asked, many niche eCommerce companies stated they rate customer experience over any other aspect of their sites for the simple reason that a positive customer experience leads to customer loyalty – something all companies will benefit from today.
There are various ways you could automate your workflow to improve CX. These include:
- Reward loyalty: Integrating basic automation to tag customers based on what they are buying and then applying business rules to automatically send a message when a customer purchases to a certain value offers a personalized and incentivized shopping experience.
- Pay attention to customer data and then automate the communication process: Once you start analyzing your data effectively, you can automatically synch your customers to various emailer lists based on their shopping experiences. Customers will then only receive correspondence pertaining to their interests.
- Monitor feedback: Any company knows how valuable feedback is. Automate your feedback process to gather data relevant to your products from your customers.
- Effective inventory management: By automating stock elements on your site, your site will flag low stock items before you run out of stock.
- Manage your social presence: Every business today realizes the importance of a social media presence, but they also know how time-consuming and cumbersome these can to manage on a busy schedule. Automating the scheduling and posting of content on social pages can eliminate this headache.
There are numerous other options available for business eCommerce automation, and partnering with a company that specializes in automation software can assist you in ensuring you cover as many automation bases as possible.
Create a Seamless Inventory Management for Effective Business eCommerce Automation
There is nothing more frustrating than looking to make an online purchase only to discover an item is out of stock. Inventory management is therefore crucial in business eCommerce automation. Software solutions such as the Smart Merchandiser can assist you to automate inventory management and eliminate this frustration from the CX.
Smart Merchandiser features an inventory management tool that helps identify potential stockout problems even before they happen. The software includes three features that help you avoid not just a one-time sale loss, but also eliminate or mitigate the damages from repeated out-of-stock issues.
The visual out-of-stock (OOS) alerts trigger a notification when they detect products that have low inventory. Realizing that not all products have the same demand, each item can be assigned its own low inventory threshold.
When a product’s stock registers below the threshold, an orange bar will appear on the product image, prompting the merchandiser to adjust the display properties, initiate a reorder, or take other action. A completely out-of-stock item will display a red bar.
It also sends customizable alerts to notify merchandisers when OOS (Out-of-stock) conditions happen or when inventory is back-in-stock.
While a smaller business may not necessarily see the need for automating the inventory process, their long-term vision should be for business growth, and as their business grows, they will start to struggle to keep track of their online inventory. Automating this process early on allows their business to grow seamlessly and enjoy customer loyalty.
Increase Your Overall Productivity with Automated Visual Merchandising
A picture paints a thousand words, and in this case a thousand business scenarios. Smart Merchandiser’s visual merchandising features arrange and layout products via drag and drop with full control making the management of your merchandise that much easier.
It allows you to automatically sort products by assigning relevant business rules based on important KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Popular KPIs for online retail include conversion rate, abandonment rate, sell-thru rate and inventory. Weighted KPIs support sophisticated marketing promotions for each industry and business.
“Advanced business rules can automate several aspects of visual merchandising, such as organizing a product page’s color swatches according to conversion rates,” says Teresa Zobrist, CEO and President of the Zobrist Software Group, owner of Smart Merchandiser.
This visual display helps the business owner see quickly what is working and what needs to be changed and to effect those changes instantly, thus increasing the productivity of their site.
“In addition, says Teresa, “Smart Merchandiser’s visual merchandising can apply sequencing in real-time via a single interface. Instead of sequencing each product one by one, you have the option of automating item sorting and sequencing.
You can apply business rules to determine how products get sorted, and how each item is displayed by default. In addition, you can get a preview of how the finished catalog would look, allowing your team to go over the whole thing before committing to go live.”
Managing out-of-stock items also becomes easier with the Smart Merchandiser as it automatically moves out-of-stock items to the bottom of the page, leaving the space above the fold for products that can be purchased immediately. This alone adds to the credibility of your site as the potential customer is not met with countless out-of-stock items when visiting your site.
Why Smart Merchandiser Is the Right Choice to Make for Business eCommerce Automation
Functioning in today’s world is about working simpler and smarter. Business eCommerce automation is one way to do both, but establishing automation structures to manage all areas necessary on your eCommerce site may not be that easy.
Understanding all the nuances behind what to automate, where to find the data to make those decisions, and how to automate those sections effectively, may take up more time than you currently have. The good news is that software like Smart Merchandiser can achieve all your automation needs, and the experts at Zobrist are ready to help you get there.
Contact Zobrist today to take your company’s eCommerce site automation to the next level.
