You can’t invent more time, but you can use smart strategies to automate your eCommerce business to make it feel like you do. World Renowned Author Michael Gerber of “The E-Myth”, a must read for business owners, states that in order to grow and scale your business and brand you must be working on it, not in it.

By automating important tasks and daily processes in your business, you can create systems that fulfil your orders seamlessly, and gather more leads to your business. That allows you and your team to focus on growth, strategy, and providing amazing customer service.

Inventory Management

Sync Your Inventory Across Your Platforms

If you sell products across multiple online platforms and marketplaces, like Ebay, Amazon, eCommerce and in-store, you’ll definitely want to avoid inventory inaccuracies, and automate processes to help make sure you have the right amount of stock when, and where you need it.

Inventory management software, such as Stitch Labs and Sellbrite lets you say ‘bye’ to excel spreadsheets, unfulfilled orders, and consequently unhappy customers by helping you ensure that you have accurate stock levels across the different channels of your business.

Whether your brand has an eCommerce website, an eBay store, or a brick and mortar store with a cloud-based point of sale, inventory management software can communicate between all of these channels helping you get a bird’s eye view of your inventory levels, updates on order fulfillment, forecast your sales, and order new merchandise. Your fulfillment team will have up-to-the-minute data on what customers have purchased, and everything they need to package orders up accurately, and ship them off to your happy buyers.

With smart technologies like these, you can set up systems that optimize your business, ensuring you won’t miss sales opportunities due to low stock and helping you quickly grow and scale your business effectively.

Ship Your Products With Order Fulfillment Centers

Depending on the type of business you run, you may want to consider outsourcing the shipment of your products to customers to a fulfillment center.

After an order is processed on your website, with the right tools, your order would be sent directly to the fulfillment center where they would collect, package and ship your products for you.

Many eCommerce operations swear by using fulfillment centers so that they can instead focus on sourcing new products, growing their customer base and scaling. Although there a few costs to keep in mind, such as warehousing fees, picking fees and recurring fees it allows you to be location independent, and can give you increased warehousing space to hold more of your products.

Minimize Shopping Cart Abandonment

An alarming amount of sales are lost every year in eCommerce businesses due to abandoned shopping carts. The rate of shopping cart abandonment is increasing every year, with this report on cart abandonment estimating that 4 trillion was lost in cart abandonment in 2015.

Cart abandonment happens when customers begin a purchase, they intend to buy a product, and then for some reason they drop off before completing the purchase. This can be minimized by making the forms on your eCommerce website as quick and simple as possible for your customers as possible.

You can even reverse cart abandonment by connecting with customers after they have dropped off of a purchase on your website. By implementing tools on your website that automatically reach out to customers who have dropped off during their checkout, you have the opportunity to win these customers back, and recapture some of those dollars.

Social Media

Although you’ll want to have a great social media manager nearby, there are distinct ways you can automate your social media so you can get back to managing your team.

Keep Your Facebook Fans Updated On Facebook And Twitter Around The Clock

When you post an offer, sale, or promotion on your Facebook fan page, or twitter account, only a small number of your customers will actually see it. At any given time your audience may not be online, or on the social media platform at that time, so they miss your important updates.

Social media management tool, Edgar, eliminates that problem by letting you schedule your blog posts, sales, links to products and more when it’s convenient for you. It then continues to repost them your pre-scheduled updates for you around the clock, for as long as you would like.

By staying consistent with a marketing strategy that works for you around the clock, you can continue to raise awareness on your brand in the marketplace, and consistently boost social media interaction rates, customer acquisition, and drive new leads to your business.

Drive Serious Traffic To Your Business Using Pinterest

Pinterest is a secret weapon when it comes to driving traffic to your eCommerce business, for multiple reasons:

• The buying power of the users on Pinterest is incredible – Pinterest users spend more money than users on any other social media platform, and they spend more often.
• The ability to continue to receive traffic to your website from pins posted weeks, months, and even years ago- Posts to pinterest have incredible longevity.

With most social media platforms, once your content is posted, it often moves down your feed and into the abyss.

With Pinterest, that is not the case. It allows you to get the most out of your pinning power. With the power of re-pins, your content becomes more powerful and draws more views to your website the more a pin you create is saved by others in the pinterest community. While some social media platforms have limitations like maximum characters in a post, or inability to link to specific pages, pinterest gives you the power to customize destinations for your users, and really craft the buyer journey.

With scheduling tools like Board Booster, you can schedule your pins once, and allow Board Booster to do the work for you again and again. It can assist you in pinning, testing for broken links or duplicate pins, and even curate relevant content for your pinterest community.

Lead Generation

ABC: Always Be Capturing (Email Addresses that is)

The average shopper will not purchase from your company until they’ve had 7 interactions with you. The best way to ensure that you can keep in constant communication with your online shoppers is by growing your list of email contacts.

Collecting leads for your business around the clock is essential in creating a strategy where you can stay consistent with your interactions with a customer, and help them familiarize themselves to your brand.

The average online shopper is not going to fall for the standard pop-up box when they arrive at your website, so getting strategic when building your email list is essential. It’s worth it to invest a significant amount of time and energy in finding a process for gathering email that can connect to your audience.

Invest in a landing page tool, and a good combination of opt-in forms with irresistible offers that will align to what your target customer is looking for. For every dollar you spend on email marketing, studies show you have the opportunity to make $44.25 return on your investment so creating automations that drive customers to your list is worth the effort.

The good news is that once someone shops with you, they are 67% more likely to shop with you again. Email, when used strategically, is an excellent way to nurture your customers, guide them on a journey, educate them on your products, and show them how your products will help improve their lives.

Back Office

Accounting

As a busy business owner, you may want to automate the part of your business that is usually the most…taxing (no pun intended) – your bookkeeping and accounting.

Using a cloud-based automation tool that integrates with your current systems to order your products, sell to your customers and send invoices can save you countless hours. A software like XERO could even save you money, and make your bookkeeper love you even more, as it’s much easier to file the tax returns of a business who keeps their records organized, rather than the one who drops off their receipts in a shoe box.

With the power of technology, there are more options than ever to automate processes in your eCommerce store reliably, saving you time, money and giving you even more opportunities to grow your brand.

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