Small Business Automation Tips in 2021
COVID-19, despite all of its detrimental impacts, has signaled a positive trend within the eCommerce market with the witnessed growth of 4 to 6 years ahead of its time. The eternal quarantine has demanded small and medium enterprises (SME) to scale up their business to meet the increasing needs of customers who are unable to go to physical stores. As a result, store owners have to keep an eye on multiple tasks at the same time to keep the business afloat. Considering the social distancing restriction and the limited resources, it feels impossible for SMEs to streamline operations and increase efficiency. However, there’s an answer to it, that is automation. So what is eCommerce automation? In short, automation is the process of converting your daily manual tasks within your eCommerce small business into automated work. Source: Shopify During Black Friday sales 2018, Shopify recorded $123.73 billion sales with a 2-billion pre-scheduled thanks to eCommerce automation. Astonishingly, one store even sold out their most popular items in 2 minutes. Automation has become an emerging trend in the eCommerce market. For any small business, automation can be a game-changer. In a small business, a small number of employees often take over a huge amount of workload. During high seasons, a marketing executive might be in charge of contacting logistics partners, while an accountant might as well take responsibility for fulfilling packaging. Besides causing fatigue and inefficiency, it takes up time for more important tasks. This is where automation comes to the rescue. With automated applications installed in your platform, you can save up time and resources on repetitive tasks to come up with ambitious strategies that may entirely transform your business. Let’s look into the 2 most important aspects of business where automation proves efficiency. 1. Inventory & Order Management Why do you need automation? The operation management involves the process of inventory and order management as well as fulfillment and delivery to customers. A small business can often get away easily with simple manual steps because there’s not a high volume of orders yet. However, as the business grows, these repeated tasks become massive and might cost the organization the time needed to optimize the revenue. After having all your products in order, delivering to the customers is another challenge. As people shift to online shopping, your customers can come from any corner of the world. With such large-scale order, a disruption in the supply chain would not only cost you revenue loss but also decreased credibility in your brand. Therefore, small store owners always have to pay attention to the logistics, fulfillment or inventory list, be it the package placement in the warehouse or the delivery status. Although being small routine tasks, it shouldn’t be anyone’s concern all the time. Thus having an automation app would be an efficient means for small business to get the work done. Ways to automate your inventory and order management Product inventory management is the first go-to An automated inventory management system allows store owners to add, edit, delete and transfer their inventory in real-time. This keeps you away from human error while updating a lot of data in a spreadsheet every day. Some software like Atom8 also provides you with real-time reports of how much inventory your suppliers have and how much you are distributing across channels. This enables small and medium entrepreneurs to make smarter decisions about their business. Beware of out-of-stock items Being a small business, it is likely that you have to spend the whole day scanning the inventory list to identify low-stock items and reordering supply on your own. By employing automated software, you can rather set up a process on your platform’s Inventory Head to send an alert when your stocks hit a certain threshold. Shopify offers a centralized inventory system that allows inventory tracking, history viewing, and count adjustments. This helps prevent customers from feeling disappointed when they can’t bag the product they’re interested in. It also allows them to get notifications when it’s back in stock. It never hurts to keep track of the delivery status Your small business can rely on technology to conduct the procedure from placing a new order to getting it delivered. Many platforms have integrated with fulfillment services like ShipStation or Vend, allowing them to track the order as soon as it is placed. The company therefore can get real-time insight into the order status and delivery record. Having such a streamlined shipping system allows you to cater to a larger volume within a lesser time, thus fostering the business revenue. 2. Marketing Management & Customer Service Why do you need automation? Email marketing and social media platforms are among the best ways to communicate with your customers and build up a strong relationship with them. Research has shown that omnichannel marketing automation can produce 250% higher purchase and engagement rates than single-channel strategy. SMEs often get into trouble cross-referencing and pooling data together because of mundane sources of information. In addition, customer service is an indispensable part of sustaining your business. 54% of customers are likely to purchase more products from a brand after receiving positive customer support. However, this has never been a simple task. Higher business growth means more customers. Good customer service requires active communication across multiple channels. Therefore you probably need to have sufficient human force available anytime to respond to your customers. If you’re dealing with hundreds of messages a day, you may end up missing out on some requests. By the time you get back to your customer, they have already switched to other brands. How to avoid these? You can start by setting up a workflow that integrates your favorite marketing and customer support apps and automates a part of your work. Optimize data processing is the first-and-foremost step Let us begin with the most tedious part of uploading the customer data. Many business owners don’t really know what information they need from their customers. Here are some of the most used
