The eCommerce Automation Checklist

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The eCommerce Automation Checklist


Everyone can start an eCommerce business. It’s easy to do, trendy, and lucrative. ????

Thanks to available eCommerce solutions like Shopify, my favorite, you can open and have a successful online shop without any additional tools or costs. And that can be considered a success, that is.. If you don’t have any bigger plans.

Every expert knows that, its impossible to have a scalable business without automation.

If you want to grow and expand to a larger scale, you need automation. That’s why I wanted to pre-prepare you for this journey, to point out which processes you need to automate to become an extensive and successful business. I’ve created an eCommerce automation checklist to help you painlessly navigate through the process.

Welcome to the world of Automation

You’ve all probably heard about automation, but many people still don’t know what automation means. And those who are still unfamiliar with automation probably think that it is an expensive, exhausting, demanding, and time-consuming process. On the contrary, modern tools, such as SyncSpider, enables you to automate your business processes without one single line of code, and it can be just as easy as opening an online shop on some eCommerce platforms.

Automation helps you track your stocks, orders, shipping, billing, customer support, managing your team, marketing campaigns, and what’s most important, it keeps your data synchronized and up-to-date.

Benefits of Automation

Large-scale eCommerce stores use automation to be one step ahead of the competition and guarantee better performance and productivity. And whenever you see the stores that have a large number of sales, excellent ratings, and last for years, be sure they’ve already automated their businesses.

You can easily automate a process such as order status updates, replenishment, and stock keeping and better utilize your marketing budget.

With automation, you don’t have to worry when your sales go up because you already have automated ordering and shipping processes, and there will be no room for mistakes. And one more benefit of automation is that you don’t need an extra workforce when your business starts to grow. For automated processes, it’s basically the same whether you have 10 or 1000 sales a day.

So, we can say that automation has a triple impact on your business:

  1. it saves time
  2. it eliminates the possibility of making mistakes
  3. it’s cost-efficient

But if I had to single out one ultimate benefit, it would be that automation leads to growth by computing all benefits listed above.

eCommerce Automation Checklist

If you are dwelling where to start, this checklist will be a refreshing text for you. Whether you’re a novice in the eCommerce business, or you tend to grow it and increase sales, here are some points you have to pay attention to.

I’ve made a list of business processes you need to automate so that you can expand your business and seize the opportunities that the online world is providing to each one of you.

The eCommerce automation checklist encompasses several segments of your business, starting with marketing, multi-channel sales, customer support, and ending up with managing orders, shipping, feedback, and managing your team.

Automate your Marketing Activities

We all know that your business largely depends on your marketing strategy. If it’s a good one, your business will thrive. If not, you will experience setbacks even before your first sale.

So, let’s see what things from your marketing segment you can automate.

  1. Leads generation – Every business needs to be present on most existing social networks, and all the likes, shares, comments, and followers become your leads. On top of that, your subscribers are also your leads. You can use Vbout or noCRM.io, for example, to extract and capture all your leads. All of them could become the buyers of your product or service. And there, most businesses get stuck, not managing multiple sources. It’s straightforward to get confused, not have an up-to-date list, or even duplicate data. With automation, you don’t have that problem anymore. All your leads will be up to date and in one place—the list of lead capture software you can find on SyncSpider’s integration list.

  2. Email marketing campaigns – Email marketing campaigns are a logical lead generation sequence. And yes, they can be tricky. You need to use your leads list and send them compelling newsletters to nudge them to buy your product or service. This campaign relies on three pillars, your leads, the content, and sending schedule. And, surprisingly, all three can be automated. If you struggle with content, you have to know there are so many excellent tools you can use for content writing, which will provide you with quick and efficient solutions for your newsletters, such as Revue. When it comes to sending emails, automation solutions are all around you, UseInbox, Smaily, Mailshake, EmailOctopus, SendGrid, and many others.

Automate your Multi-channel Sales

The second segment you would like to automate is your sales channels. We live in a multi-channel age, where we all use multiple channels for communication, purchasing, finding information, etc.

If we know that there are more than 100 online marketplaces worldwide with more than 1 million visits per month, it is evident that your eCommerce store needs to be present on at least three or four of them to increase your sales. Besides the most visited Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Shopify, Magento 1 and 2, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, PrestaShop, etc. We mustn’t forget that most eCommerce businesses use their own sites to sell products or services.

That’s what causes headaches for most businesses. It’s challenging to handle everything related to sales when you jog between several marketplaces. You can either automate your business process or let it die, buried by the bad reviews. There is one more option, you can increase your costs by hiring more people who will handle everything, but it’s not such a great idea if you want to keep your budget under control.

Automation of multi-channel sales encompasses:

  1. Inventory synchronization and automation – It is almost utopian to think that in the 21st century, it is desirable to maintain your inventory manually during the new technological revolution we are witnessing. Manual input increases the chance of making mistakes, and when it comes to inventory management, these mistakes are pretty much expensive.

  2. Orders synchronization and automation – Everything related to the sales process is crucial for your business, and therefore, you shouldn’t handle your orders manually. Automating your ordering process saves time and money because you don’t need to increase your work power when your sales go up.

  3. Billing automation – With the automation, the moment you get the order from your customer, the system automatically activates the payment process, and once this step is completed, it triggers shipping.

  4. Shipping synchronization and automation – Orders without shipping are useless. Unless you can handle the shipping as one of the last steps of your sales process, all your effort can go in vain. Automation allows you to set order and payment as the triggers for shipping. You don’t need to check it every 5 minutes; the system does it for you.

When your whole selling process is automated, you won’t need to worry about your stocks, whether you missed an order or not, was the product shipped to the customer, and whether the bill was issued. Everything is happening automatically.

For example, if a buyer on, let’s say Amazon, buys one of your products, the inventory decreases by one on all your sales channels, and you will be able to know in every moment how many products you have on your stocks.

CRM Automation

And here we come to the part related to our customers. How to build a relationship with our customers? How to keep it? That’s why eCommerce businesses usually use CRM software, like Kintone.

So, what does it do?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) represents every customer relationship and interaction. It’s a sort of a bridge between marketing and sales, and it can have a significant impact on your business.

The way you manage your customer relationship will determine whether your business will keep your customers and get positive feedback and reviews. When you are in the eCommerce business, this point is the do or die.

Some 20 years ago, you had to communicate with your customers face to face, or you had to call them by phone. But nowadays, with all new technologies and communication channels, the options are countless.

It is something that opens new possibilities. Still, at the same time, it increases the costs and sometimes can cause you never to get out of the customer relationship magic circle. You or your employees might spend a lot of time jumping from one communication channel to another without keeping track of feedback they got for a customer or prospects. And there is no way to keep it all in order manually.

The other advantage of the CRM system is that you see the results right away, so you can track the results of every action and contact your sales or marketing team makes. That’s why successful businesses usually use some of the available CRM tools (mentioned above).

So, with CRM automation, you can:

  1. Manage your day-to-day activities with customers

  2. Increase engagement with the right message, at the right time, through targeted digital marketing campaigns

  3. Synchronize your sales activities from ordering to picking up the goods

  4. Automate administrative tasks

Connecting all your tools in one!

To complete your eCommerce automation checklist, you need to connect all your tools in one. You are not creating one tool but rather synchronizing all your automated activities handled from one point – SyncSpider, for example.

When all these beneficial tools started to emerge, there was a gap between them. The business users, eCommerce, could use them separately but couldn’t connect them into one. That’s why there was a lot of scattered data, which didn’t give the expected results.

As these tools were improving, we could see more and more software providing this missing connectivity. And one of them is SyncSpider.

It allowed eCommerce businesses to connect all their tools, websites, eCommerce platforms, CRMs, and even communication channels to manage from one place, such as their ERP system.

It is one of the best solutions that one business can implement, regardless of the stage of the business growth. Nowadays, being present on multiple sales channels plays a significant role in the eCommerce business.

Even if you are just beginning your eCommerce business, it is essential to be omnipresent, and it implies not only sales but also marketing.

You can manage your business and your teams more efficiently and effectively with data synchronization. And you can easily measure the results of your business anytime you want.

Startups don’t have to wait for 3 to 5 years to grow their business and implement some of the available tools, it can be done initially, and it usually doesn’t cost anything.

SyncSpider, for example, has a Starter Plan, which is created for those who are just starting the business, with low data exchange and lower sales, which is free. When your business starts to expand, you can switch to an advanced plan that corresponds with your needs. That’s how you keep an eye on your budget without unnecessary and unpredicted expenses.

And once you set up your business the right way, it will be much easier for you to grow it and make the best of your eCommerce adventure.

Go through the eCommerce automation checklist, implement it and grow your business the smart way!!

Aleksandar Stanišić,
Chief Operation Officer at SyncSpider

Aleksandar shares his knowledge gained through more than 15 years of working experience in C-level executive positions

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