Working with large e-shops and sites with lots of visitors, we have seen that for a website to make the most profit, most of its processes need to be automated.
The easy things to automate on your site!
There are fairly easy automation processes on a website that cost nothing at all. For example, when someone sends you an email through a contact form on your website, you can have an automatic reply that reassures your customer, since they know you have received their email. This way you gain both time and credibility.
The same of course applies when an order is placed in an e-shop: a confirmation message should always go out, as well as a message when the order leaves your shop.
Facebook also offers automation, since you can set up frequently asked questions in its chat (Messenger) with ready-made answers and links that solve the problem straight away.
Last but not least, there is automation for SEO / website promotion purposes: automatically creating your website’s URLs in Greeklish (Greek words written in Latin characters), along with its titles and meta descriptions. That way, when a product is published, Google can easily recognise it.
Harder automations and integrations
Above we talked about simple automations that even a beginner can set up. The harder automations are usually the ones that free up someone’s hands, and even if they cost quite a lot at first, they pay for themselves within a short time.
What is ERP integration with an e-shop?
The most typical example is connecting an ERP to an e-shop . The initial cost can be high, but the benefits become clear straight away, because stock levels no longer need updating and new products no longer need adding by hand: it all happens automatically. What is more, if the integration is two-way, the e-shop can also tell the ERP about the orders it receives, so that stock is correct in both systems.
With this solution an online shop can handle a large volume of orders without much work from its administrator. The administrator can then spend time on more important things, such as adding product attributes, improving photos and descriptions or, even better, writing an article for the blog. In general, the e-shop administrator now has more room to work on the marketing of the e-shop. In an ERP integration, the technician who works with the e-shop on the ERP side plays a huge role, as they can make the difference between problems being solved quickly or not being solved at all.
What is email automation?
We started with the hardest and most complex process, but there are also mid-level automations, such as building a proper marketing funnel through email. The first step is to separate the subscribers to our newsletter from the people who have already bought from us, and put them into different lists or into the same list with different attributes.
Next, automated emails should go out at set intervals, depending on the company and the product. For example, someone who has just joined our newsletter list should receive an email within 4-5 days, while someone who has bought from us might receive one after 30-40 days, depending on the sector. The goal should be for the customer to come back and buy again within 100 days.
Email automation can also be used on simple websites that are not e-shops: after someone fills in a form, we can offer them a discount to help them go ahead and buy our service, or tell them about additional services.
Automations between e-shops
Other automations that can save you time are those between e-shops, whether for triangular sales (drop-shipping) or between a B2B e-shop and a retail one.
The most common case is connecting 2 e-shops through XML, so that a supplier can supply products to a customer who resells them in turn. In WordPress this is usually done with plugins such as WP All Import.
Integrations between retail and wholesale e-shops are usually built with custom code, so that everything is easier to configure and more flexible.
Automation with chatbots
Another kind of automation that often helps service websites is automating conversations with chatbots. Chatbots can detect words and phrases, and connect the customer to a member of staff only if the automated answers did not solve their problem.
All of this needs a very good server
All of the more demanding automations above, such as ERP integration, need a good server that the developer can access or, at worst, whose limits the company managing it can adjust. As a company, we usually recommend LiteSpeed servers, which make a big difference compared with Apache.
Automation & Scale
Automation and “growing” the business are the key words that need to go hand in hand, so that an e-shop can grow as much as possible.
If you would like any of these automations, do get in touch so we can talk about the benefits, the possible risks and the pitfalls of each one.
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