The SaaS boom has empowered people, with access to sophisticated technology at affordable prices. However, there are many operations involved in an eCommerce business, and most of them need to be happening dynamically. The first order of business, if you’ve recently opened an online store, is to identify the various operations involved, and then streamline them using the right apps. Once you have those necessary systems in place, you can further leverage the apps you’re using by setting up effective workflows that optimize your business. Here are 6 powerful eCommerce order automation workflows to try on your BigCommerce store.
Inventory management
A robust inventory workflow is something you can’t live without. While you’ll no doubt be using an inventory management system, it isn’t practical to manually enter data for every purchase. So it’s imperative that there’s an integration between your eCommerce store and your inventory management system. You’ll need it to be a two-way sync, so that every time a sale happens in your store, a sales order is created in your inventory management system, and the stock of the item is updated accordingly. You’ll also need the updated stock quantity to be reflected on your site.
Another important function of the integration is to capture customer information when they complete an order. Properly maintaining the list of customers who have bought from you not only makes your refund process easier but also helps your marketing efforts. You can then use that data to offer promotions based on the purchase history of your customers.
Accounting
As with inventory, accounting has to take place dynamically, whenever a sale happens. Customer and purchase information must be passed on to your accounting application from your inventory management system. You may record sale as income and each supply order to your vendor as an expense. For refunds, customer can request a credit note and apply the next time they make a purchase. A seamless integration between your eCommerce store, and your inventory management and accounting applications ensures all these operations happen automatically, without any manual intervention.
Replenishing supplies
For items with predictable demand, you can set up a workflow in your inventory management app. It’s to automatically send a purchase order to the vendor when the stock of the item is low. For items you can’t predict, you can set up a workflow where to create a task in your project management application as soon as the stock of an item reaches a certain amount. You can then discuss the task with your teammates and decide how much to order.
Order fulfillment
When you get an order and find that you’re low on stock, you can do one of three things
- Transfer that order to another warehouse
- Drop ship it
- Place a backorder for the items
In the workflow section of your inventory management app, you can set up a preferred action when you encounter an order for an item with low stock. For example, you can first look to transfer the order to another warehouse. If there’s no stock there as well, you can ask your vendor to fill the order. If both these options aren’t feasible, you can backorder the supplies and communicate to the customer that delivery will take longer than usual.
Refer: Bigcommerce cross sell
Capture leads in your CRM
Interactions with potential customers happen in multiple avenues; like social media, your live chat, or even a direct inquiry from a website form. An integration with your CRM will add these potential customers as leads. This ensures that you don’t miss out on opportunities to reach out to people who have engaged with you.
Welcome email
Welcome emails have an 84.22% open rate. Which is decidedly more than regular promotional emails addressing the reader by their first name as the only personalization, without providing any value besides telling readers about their subscription confirmation.
In cases like an order status, a notification email is expected, but your welcome email should be more. For delivering a relevant welcome email, consider using your marketing automation software to find out how they arrived at the subscription page; or which page or product they spent time viewing. So that you can customize the content according to their interest.
If it’s a first-time buyer instead of a subscriber to your newsletter or blog, it may be a good idea to send them a discount code as part of their welcome email.
Conclusion
All of these eCommerce order automation workflows require integration between multiple software applications. Since there are countless apps out there, chances are that you might not be able to find the exact integration you’re looking for. That’s why a workflow automation software like Atom8 is exactly what you need. It helps to relieve all of your burdens by automating your process, getting rid of time-wasting tasks with eCommerce order automation workflows. Give it a try and you will see the difference.
