How many repetitive tasks do you perform on a regular basis to keep your online business running? You might be surprised by how much time these repetitive to-dos take. Enter ecommerce automation. Automated solutions can save you time, effort, and money—and they can allow you to focus on growing your business.
You can use ecommerce automation tools to streamline a variety of daily processes, like setting prices for products, tracking sales trends, and even fulfilling customer orders. Amazon has ecommerce automation tools to help in each of these categories.
What is ecommerce automation and why should you use it?
Ecommerce automation lets you put time-consuming tasks on autopilot. It’s programmable software that performs manual or repetitive tasks with little-to-no work on your part. You can set up automated workflows for inventory management, marketing campaigns, and many other operations to help your business run more smoothly.
Effective ecommerce automation can free up resources so you can reinvest in your business. It can also just free up time so you can take a break. Automation can give you valuable data, too, which can help you make informed decisions quickly.
Benefits of ecommerce automation
Automated tools can make running an effective ecommerce business easier. Here are a few examples:
- Improve customer satisfaction: Give shoppers precise inventory levels, real-time discounts, and price matching to keep them coming back.
- Maintain a consistent brand presence: Keep your brand and messaging reliable across channels by avoiding manual updates.
- Gain valuable business insights: Compile data and find information quickly so you don’t waste time hunting for reports or manually inputting spreadsheets.
Transitioning your ecommerce business to automation can be a complex process. Think about your business model—what can you automate? Start by trying one or two automated tasks and see what results you get. Amazon offers several easy-to-use tools that can help you get started. Read on for inspiration and strategies you can start applying today.
6 ways to automate your business
- Automate shipping
- Automate pricing
- Monitor stock
- Track sales
- Track orders
- Enhance marketing
1. Automate shipping
Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is a program that lets you outsource customer orders to Amazon. With FBA, you can store products in Amazon’s network of 100+ fulfillment centers. When a customer places an order, we pick, pack, ship, and provide customer service and returns. The program can help you increase sales and stay focused on growing your business.
You can also use FBA’s Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) program to outsource fulfillment for purchases made on your own website or another sales channels.
2. Automate pricing
Tired of monitoring and changing prices on the fly? Amazon’s free Automate Pricing tool automatically adjusts prices to help keep you competitive and increase your chances of becoming the Featured Offer. Create pricing rules and limits, apply them to your products, and Amazon will help keep your offers sharp 24/7.
3. Monitor stock
In the balancing act of inventory management, you want to maintain enough stock to ship quickly to customers, but avoid excess inventory. When you use FBA, you connect to our machine learning-based inventory management system. You can also visit the Inventory performance dashboard, which provides information about how efficiently and productively you’re managing your FBA inventory. That information includes an overall score for your FBA inventory, which we call the Inventory Performance Index (IPI).
4. Track sales
Monitoring inventory goes hand-in-hand with tracking sales. That’s why we also provide FBA sellers with an overall FBA Inventory dashboard that helps them see what’s selling. This dashboard automatically calculates the sales rank for your FBA products and provides a sales summary. It also provides an estimate for the number of days your current inventory supply will last, and it offers recommend actions to help increase sales.
We’re able to watch our sales every single day [and] look at our inventory levels.
5. Track orders
Ecommerce sellers tend to overestimate delivery times. But with Amazon shipping automation, you won’t have to manually estimate transit times for the customer orders you fulfill directly. Shipping Setting Automation (SSA) gives you accurate delivery estimates based on warehouse location, customer location, and delivery providers. Once you’ve entered a product’s ASIN into the shipping template, delivery times automatically optimize. When you use SSA as part of Amazon’s Buy Shipping service, you and your customer can also track the package automatically.
ASIN
6. Enhance marketing
Marketing emails are a form of ecommerce marketing you can simplify with automation. Consistent email interactions can help you connect with customers, strengthening engagement and loyalty.
- Create, modify, and send templatized campaigns.
- Set up automated campaigns that occur on regular cycles.
- Schedule emails to go out at strategic times (for instance, seasonal sales).
- Send product-review reminders to customers who make a purchase.
- Track email open rates, click throughs, and total sends.
More resources to automate your ecommerce business
In addition to the Seller Central tools above, you can deploy the Amazon Seller app, third-party automation software, or Amazon’s Selling Partner API to take automation to the next level.
