Save time and labour with A-commerce

Running a retail business require thousands of small tasks that take between two and five minutes daily and sometimes needs to be executed simultaneously, an issue that devour productivity and stunt growth. 

Fuelled by venture capital over the past five years, the automation industry has seen increased availability of new warehouse-automation innovations, making it easy for businesses to eliminate or shorten multiple workforce functions. These include increased order volumes, inventory management challenges, and dropping customer satisfaction. 

However, the idea is not to fire employees. Yet to shift the focus into creating automated flows using tools such as Power Automate or for more customised tool for retailers, Shopify flow and WooCommerce.  

Start first by understanding the automation principles and its use cases. 

Understanding A-Commerce 

Automating some aspects of the process keeps eCommerce businesses running smoothly while channelling resources to processes that grow the business and improve the customer experience.  

By the broadest definition 

• Automation: is the labour-saving technology by which or procedure is performed with minimal human assistance. 
• E-commerce automation: it’s the use of technology to help eCommerce businesses grow sales and increase staff productivity using a software that helps your online store convert most or all the manual, repetitive tasks into self-fulfilling automated tasks 

Which gives the meaning to the A-commerce acronym.  

Automation is usually related to administrative task yet so much more across the entire tech stack can be automated, it provides a foundation for scaling it intelligently completes all your fulfilment tasks, from marketing to inventory. 

Underneath the Automation Hood 

Most used case of A-commerce, when it comes to stock management, is automatically tag products as OUT OF STOCK on site or Low Stock when it’s sold out or its quantities dipped below a certain threshold. 

Inventory management and highlighting best sellers

Auto-publish/unpublish products when they are in/out of stock, while automatically notifying your stakeholders.  

Customer Experience Management 

Customer loyalty

Automatically tag high-value customers for segmentation and notify customer service to: 

• send a personalized thank you message 
• apply discounts or specialized shipping rules to customers with email addresses or tags like “Loyalty Member” 

Customer segmentation based on buying behaviour

Automation will help you ensure the segmentation and clustering of your customers. With a CRM, you can tag, or segment based on: 

• demographics (e.g., gender or location),  

• lifetime order value (a business metric that measures how much a business plans to earn from the average customer over the course of the relationship). 
• milestones 
• number of orders 
• or any subscriptions or memberships 

Schedule sales

Plan before hands your sales campaign. You can automatically schedule product that will be on sale/discount, as well as publishing call to action and promotional campaigns on your website or on your social medias.The possibilities are endless  

Create simple and effective automated flows 

A typical eCommerce automation consists of a series of actions that have been configured and customized. It consists of three components:
Trigger-Condition-Action. (When-IF-THEN) 

• The Triggers: A trigger is an event that starts a workflow, and can be something that happens in your store or in an app.  It’s to answer to the question WHEN X happens i.e., when an order is placed, a customer creates an account, product inventory goes down to 0 or a specific time such as Black Friday, Christmas eve, Flash sales, etc. 
• The Condition: A condition determines whether an action is taken, based on the conditions that you set. IF Y is fulfilled i.e., Attributes, Names, Amounts, Date, Spending, Numbers, etc. 
• The Action: An action is a change that’s made to your store or in an app if the condition is met. THEN do Z i.e., sending automated emails, adding inventory, assigning customers to a group, publishing blog posts, switching website themes, etc. 

A-commerce Software 

Shopify flow 

Shopify Flow is an eCommerce automation solution that build workflows to automate tasks, campaigns and processes within your store and across your apps. You can choose from a library of templates to get started with right away or use the visual workflow builder to create a custom automation.
Few of the main eCommerce areas that you can automate with Flows 

• Buyer experience 
• Customer management  
• Inventory and merchandising  
• Risk management 
• Loyalty and retention  
• Promotion and discounts 

WooCommerce 

Better known as AutomateWoo, it allows you to create workflows-which are made up of different combinations of Triggers, Rules and Action within WooCommerce. Once you created a flow, you can schedule your workflows to run at virtually anytime  

AutomateWoo features  

• Mailing system.  
• Review reward: Encourage more product reviews by offering discounts. 
• Personalized coupons: Generate dynamic customized coupons for customers to raise purchase rate. 
• Subscriptions automation 

Activate growth with automation 

The recipe for success starts with stakeholders, customers, and employees. Then mix in product information processes, customer acquisition and retention programs, and support during the buying journey. Bake under the watchful eye of management and adjust as necessary. 

Without automation to eliminate, streamline, or enhance these tasks, it’s hard to focus on the high-value aspects of your business. Business growth and long-term success require a focus on doing things right and doing the right things. 

A-Commerce saves time, enabling your human assets to focus on tasks that demand creativity, intelligence, and problem-solving. All this is a must for minimizing errors, improving productivity, and increasing customer focus.