On top of using reliable task management tools and productivity hacks, you need automation to improve your business workflow.
When used properly, automation will do wonders for your ecommerce business by streamlining your processes — saving you precious time, effort, and money.
“If you’re sticking to performing tasks manually, you lose a good bit of your resources on tedious jobs that automation can accomplish in half the time. That is why there are agencies like Nuanced Media Marketing that advise you for a good management of your business. ”
In this guide, we’ll take a look at five tasks you can automate to improve the workflows of your ecommerce business.
1. Inventory and sales
Manually managing your inventory is a time-consuming process since you’ll have to go through your inventory list, update your prices, remove old listings, restock your orders, and more.
On top of that, you’ll need to go over your sales processes to manage your buyers, gather customer data to set up special offers, facilitate order processing, etc.
Using automation in your inventory and sales management, however, you streamline these tasks.
Reliable ecommerce platforms such as BigCommerce, for instance, provides centralized inventory management with a tracking feature that lets you monitor and update your stock levels easily.
Input your current stock level and low stock indicator on the inventory tracking tab. Once you reach the low stock level, the platform’s system sends you an email alert.
With inventory and sales management automations, you can plan your inventory accordingly and perform the checking and restocking process more seamlessly.
Plus, this helps ensure that you don’t disappoint your customers when you run out of stock.
2. Product pricing
Product pricing can be time-consuming and labor-intensive because it requires analyzing your competitors’ prices and cross-checking with established platforms such as Amazon for average pricing (among other things).
Plus, you’ll need to consider your production costs, customer demand, taxes, and more to come up with the right pricing for maximum profits.
Through automation, you can spend less time and energy on doing the grunt work and, instead, make the process more efficient.
Work with platforms such as Informed.co that provides automated repricing and analytics features to help you with strategic pricing.
Once you add your marketplaces, you can view your competitors’ prices, your store’s product and sales data, and more.
The software then uses smart algorithms to adjust your prices based on competitor benchmarking and collated data — making the entire process simpler.
With this, you won’t need to manually research product data to make instant price changes, increase your sales, and make better pricing and business decisions.
3. Invoicing and Purchase requests
Working with automated software for automatic invoicing and purchase request approval when they meet specific conditions can save you and your team time and effort — and it expedites the workflow.
However, you can’t exactly automate the entire process, so to ensure that you’re making the most out of automating your purchase requisitions and invoicing, here are a few tips to consider.
- Identify the tasks that the process needs to determine a successful transaction. This includes establishing accounts payable requirements, such as a valid receipt and purchase order for invoicing approval.
- Set up built-in controls that will not require manual monitoring. Automatically monitored controls can reduce the chances of human error. The more accurate your process is, the less time you’ll spend on double-checking or correcting inaccuracies.
- Make sure the required documentation is available when requests arrive for invoicing. Invoices without their supporting documents will need manual processing, and this defeats the purpose of automating.
Achieve straight through automated processing by ensuring the necessary documentation is ready — allowing for smoother workflows with minimum manual input.
Using automation to streamline your internal processes can help improve the efficiency and productivity of your ecommerce business — freeing up your internal resources for other crucial aspects of your operations.
4. Vendor management
Managing several vendors at a time — let alone getting new suppliers onboard quickly — while handling other business tasks is no easy feat.
Automation makes the process easier by helping you create a consolidated workflow for new vendors.
Contract and vendor management solutions such as Contractpedia, for example, can help you stay on top of your contracts and keep your automated renewals in check.
The tool lets you create email reminders and to do tasks, identify critical risks on your supplier contracts, find overlapping contract services, and more.
For instance, if you’re working on multiple design projects simultaneously, the process of hiring a web designer and getting them on board becomes more efficient with automation.
By working with automation tools, you can manage your vendor contracts efficiently, track movement within your team, and set up automated reminders, so you don’t miss critical dates and lose money.
5. Return merchandise authorization (RMA) process
Managing order cancellations and returns is crucial to ensure your ecommerce business provides quality service to your customers.
Doing this manually will lead to processing delays — which can make for unhappy customers.
Automating your Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA) process can help keep this from happening.
For instance, if an order gets canceled before shipping, set up automatic notifications to the warehouse of the cancellation — which can save you time and money.
Another example would be to sync your inventory with customer refunds, replacement, and returns requests so your product listing updates automatically.
With the help of automation, you can ensure your menial, but crucial tasks get done while you focus on other essential aspects of your ecommerce business operations.
Plus, automation tools can help you provide timely service delivery — which not only improves your workflow but can also boost your customer satisfaction.
Final thoughts
Whether you’re running ecommerce marketing campaigns, doing product research, or studying your competitors, automating your processes can and help you achieve better results fast.
With the right strategies, automation can streamline your tasks, cut down on your expenses on managing processes, and improve your productivity.
Although automation takes a bit of an investment, its benefits and cost-efficiency can offer twice the advantages of manual processes.
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