Automated control in e-commerce facilitates and automates many different tasks and processes in online retail using technology and software. This includes optimizing inventory management, order processing, payment processing, customer support, and marketing, leading to increased efficiency, accuracy, and scalability for online businesses.
What is automated control in e-commerce?
Automated control in e-commerce is the use of technology and software to streamline and automate various tasks and processes in online retail. This includes optimizing inventory management, order processing, payment processing, customer support, and marketing, leading to increased efficiency, accuracy, and scalability for online businesses.
Examples of automated control in e-commerce
Automated control in e-commerce can take many different forms such as tagging customers for retail and marketing, unifying visual merchandising, streamlining tracking and reporting, and flagging high-risk orders. With every workflow, the goal is to simplify tasks.
Here are some examples of reducing manual tasks:
- Execution: When an item is ready for sale in the store, an email, text message, or Facebook message is triggered to the customer.
- Inventory Levels: Delisting unavailable products from stock and sending a message via Slack or email to your marketing team so they can pause advertisements.
- Good American used a flow to automatically tag products so that they appear as “Sold Out” on their website when sold, or display as “Low Quantity” when their stock falls below a certain threshold.
- Bestsellers: Re-adding out-of-stock products to the store when they come back in stock.
- Customer Loyalty: Automatically tagging high-value customers for retail and notifying customer service to send a personalized thank-you message, or applying discounts or specialized shipping rules for customers with email addresses or tags such as “Loyalty Member.”
- High-risk Orders: Immediate notification and alerting internal security teams of high-risk orders, such as if a bot is quickly purchasing all of your stock.
- Donation Management: Tracking donated funds via Slack and spreadsheets.
- Order Tagging: Tagging restricted shipping areas and holding payment from customers trying to ship to those locations. Informing staff to offer store credit to customers to spend on their next purchase or a refund.
- Customer Preferences: Showing and hiding payment options based on customer criteria such as order history, location, and device.
- Channel Preferences: Identifying, tagging, and segmenting customers who purchase from specific sales channels, such as Amazon, Facebook, Pinterest, and others.
- Scheduled Sales: Price changes and promotional offers for specific time periods.
- Discounts: Adjusting prices at checkout based on product combinations, quantity, or customer location.
- Scheduled Product Releases: Uploading and launching new products to the store, social media, apps, and sales channels simultaneously. Launching and revoking full feature changes for seasonal promotions or product releases.
Scandis, a home goods company, has created seven active workflows across three different Shopify stores, including a workflow to track commissions from store assistants in 32 retail locations.
It has also created workflows for employee feed, inventory management, and reorder processes, optimizing refund reporting which saves them hundreds of hours each year, canceling and relisting products based on availability and warehouse movements and returns.
The possibilities are endless.
Read more: E-commerce automation software: 10 Shopify Flow workflow templates
How can you automate your e-commerce process?
Building your own internal systems or engineering your communications between your platform and tools takes a lot of work. Shopify Flow is an out-of-the-box solution you can use to create automated workflows across your online store and applications.
Get started
E-commerce automation takes seconds with easy-to-use templates. Shopify Flow follows a trigger-condition-action logic created through a user-friendly visual builder. You can build and deploy workflows in minutes, or you can use predefined workflow templates, all without writing a single line of code.
Shopify Flow can also integrate with many other tools, as outlined below:
- Automation tools that integrate with Shopify Flow
- Shopify Scripts tools
- Apps that connect to Shopify Flow to increase sales
- Back In Stock
- Growave
- Apps that connect to Shopify Flow to enhance customer experience
- Scribeless
- Slack
- LoyaltyLion
- Klaviyo
Who does your time-saving through e-commerce automation benefit?
E-commerce automation works best when adopted by interrelated roles and departments within the organization. Just remember, this is far from being a comprehensive picture. The following examples represent a small sample of automations you can create using Flow.
Operations managers: Retail operations can use automation for a variety of workflows related to inventory, shipping, and products. Products can be automatically named and added to collections based on their title, SKU, or type to standardize visual merchandising and facilitate discovery. When stock runs low, Flow can send alerts to you or be used to email a supplier to reorder.
Source: https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/what-is-ecommerce-automation
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