Growth in Automation in E-commerce

2020 has brought a lot of changes and uncertainty amongst all people and organizations, including businesses. But with the pandemic restrictions come innovative ways for customers to change their spending habits, and for businesses to answer this call.

Consumers spend their time at home, not wanting or not allowed to go out for their safety. But even when everybody was inside their homes, the need for necessities did not stop; it became even more demanding. Added with boredom and lack of diversion from the stress brought about by the quarantine, those who can afford to spend continue to splurge through online shopping.

Online shopping is not restricted anymore to clothes, books, or kitchen gadgets, they now include groceries, medicine, and specialty products. With the shift of traditional businesses to an online platform, businesses are now looking for more ways to make their products and services effectively convenient for their consumers.

This is where E-commerce automation plays a big role.

What is E-Commerce Automation?

E-commerce automation is a tool that can help businesses automate some of their functions, features, and services online. For example, a business may hire people to manage their page and answer inquiries from their customers. It would be costly to hire plenty of people to meet a 24h hour shift so that your business is accessible anytime. Automation can help in this situation.

Why E-Commerce Automation?

Automation is one of the things that can help you reach your goal of faster growth at a lower cost. Automation can handle repetitive tasks 24/7 so you can focus your time, money, and energy doing other tasks that will help your business flow efficiently and achieve faster growth.

E-commerce automation tools help bridge the gap of your resources and function even more effectively with less error. With automation tools, you can have consistent answers to frequently asked questions, and you can even create a whole system of answers and questions until the automation can no longer find the answer to your customers’ problem.

The good thing about this is that your customer can rely on the automation tools available 24/7 with more efficiency and quicker response time. With that said, e-commerce automation does not just solve problems with customer support but also with other areas of your business such as shipping, or even social media engagement.

Automation tools can provide your social media pages life whenever you are tired or unavailable. Just set up your automation tool and it will respond to all of the comments or reactions you get on social media.

They can also help you organize all of the data needed in your business from stocks to shipping, to queries, to customer support, and more. Most automation tools for e-commerce allow problems to put all of this data in one inbox or ecommerce app so that you can access them more conveniently through one device anytime you need.

E-commerce automation is the answer to help your business grow this year. Automation lets you increase productivity, make operations more efficient, boost marketing and conversion, and improve the customer experience. Implementing it in your e-commerce business is becoming more and more of a must as time goes by.

Chatbots

One of the most popular and accessible forms of automation for e-commerce is the chatbot. It’s a technology that has become a staple in e-commerce due to how it can help make online chat responsive 24/7, which helps reduce the size of a customer support team. It also has other applications that are becoming more prominent.

While chatbots have been around for years now, the technology has advanced quite a lot in recent years, so much that their responses have become more and more human-like. That makes them very useful for customer service, and increasingly in sales. This has made chatbots more mainstream. According to Statista, the chatbot market is expected to grow to $1.25 billion in 2025, which is exponentially more than $190.8 million in 2016.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a catalyst for the rise of chatbot adoption in 2020 due to the greater need for e-commerce and other online services. At this point, if you don’t have a chatbot already, you should implement one now or you’re totally missing out.

Synchronization of inventory, customer, and product data

Using automation to consolidate product and customer data can give you a more consistent customer experience on every channel. A single automation platform that integrates all your current systems seamlessly lets you link workflows with data sources, making everything more efficient and easier to manage. Nothing slows things down more than getting bogged down by jumbled data.

You can automate the syncing of product information in real-time through your omnichannel to make sure your inventory stock and product data are always up to date. This is important for selling directly to customers online as enhanced visibility of your available inventory will make them feel more secure and willing to buy from you.

Few things make shoppers trust your business less than inaccurate product information. Many businesses still find it hard to update their product pages and databases due to how tedious the task gets. By automating that process, you can make sure that the information is accurate at all times. It also lets you do accurate demand forecasting and supply chain management, so you won’t find yourself either ordering too much stock or running out of stock.

Since customers equate e-commerce with speed, your business should be able to keep up with that expectation. As demand for e-commerce continues to grow, you should get to automating your operations, reorganizing your supply chain, and making your fulfillment process quicker and more efficient. That will enable you to serve your customers better.

Omnichannel

Customers want to be able to access everything in one place. Automating your e-commerce business means consolidating all your channels into one cohesive omnichannel to make everything easier to access and manage. If you have to get at everything from different places, that slows things down and makes managing them more tedious. If customers have to deal with that, they’ll likely look elsewhere for services.

It also enables you to create a better customer experience with a headless and API-first architecture that makes it feel more human and authentic instead of talking to a robot, helping to separate the front-end customer experience from all the stuff that goes on in the backend.