We have curated ten experts and their responses on the importance and how automation impacts a business overall. They discuss how automation comes in handy in operating your eCom business smoothly and efficiently, improving customer relationships, and helping save time and money.
Managing an eCommerce business is challenging, and not everybody can handle it. It becomes even more relevant when your business scales, you have more orders, and processes become more complex. When it starts feeling overwhelming, that is a clear sign that you need some help operating everything smoothly and efficiently.
That is where automation can come in handy and help you manage the increasing demand. As a matter of fact, many businesses put their trust into eCom automation to save time, effort, and money and improve customer relationships.
But how exactly can automation improve your business operations and help you scale? And, where can you start with eCom ops automation? We leave these questions to our experts, who will share their approach to automation.
CEO of Global E-commerce Experts
According to Andy, “people that win in eCom are the ones that are making their lives as simple as possible. And you can make that happen by using automation and software”.
Anything people can use to streamline processes and make them simpler, using automation is the way to go. There are 1,000,001 pieces of software. So it’s about finding the right software that makes the automation simpler and easier.
Founder and CEO of Hemster
When it comes to automation in operations, Allison says that data science fuels business growth. At Hemster, the warehouse breaks down the traditional tailoring into six different stations. These are tailoring, inbound, outbound, quality control, and two stations dedicated to ensuring their data are right so that they can fulfill the orders and grow.
Director of Marketing at Repeat
For Alex, automation is important for putting things on rails. Once you have discovered something that works, try to find a way to automate specific components of it so that you can take something that wasn’t scalable but was working and try to set up methods to make it more scalable.
As a marketer, Alex focuses on finding those areas where you can wow someone but can’t put automation to all of them because it loses some of that impact. So look for places where you can automate versus where you don’t want to automate because you want it to feel a little more personal.
CEO at Richpanel
Amit describes how they divide their teams into three main buckets. The first is the demand bucket, where you have the marketing team, the sales team, and the partnership teams that are on the top. In the center is the product and the tech team. The bottom layer is the customer success and the support team. Automation ensures effective activity on all levels so that teams can achieve success.
Managing Partner at Enceiba and Author of “Billion Dollar B2B Ecommerce”
Brian admits that Amazon is in many ways automated and that you work more with an algorithm than with people. Amazon works to automate its entire business more efficiently. They also test various AI tools, and Brian believes that companies can learn from how Amazon implements automation.
Founder and CEO of Smartrr
Gabriella thinks technology is the best it’s ever been, and people should use it to make their businesses as efficient and seamless as possible. You can automate the manual processes like retrying someone’s failed payment, sending a manual email to someone saying their payment didn’t go through, or asking if they want to resubscribe.
She believes we’re lucky to get in an ecosystem where there are so many great complimentary products to hours in Shopify, where if you have the right tech stack, you are set up for success.
Chief Operating Officer at Stealth Venture Labs
Evan suggests people learn how to use some basic things like Zapier and a couple of other similar tools and get automation to deal with routine stuff, like reporting daily sales. When you start a business, automate as much as possible to save time that doesn’t drive your business forward, get more insights into your business, and make your life easier.
Founder and CEO at Omniconvert
Regarding automation, Valentin shares that it is crucial nowadays to understand what is working and get to the minimum repeatability in operations. If you get that right, you simply need to fine-tune the process and exclude the human from it.
At Omniconvert, they use automation for sales, marketing, and even reporting to their clients. But their best approach is to go for large companies.
Co-Founder and CEO of Nozzle
Rael believes that when you’re automating something, think about who you benefit from. So you’ve got to be careful what you choose to optimize first, the customer or internal operations team. You might automate something in your internal operations that the customer doesn’t care about. But if you keep prioritizing the customer all the time, you won’t be able to scale the company properly. Automation is about finding the fine balance around prioritization.
Co-Founder and CEO of Escala
Yoni thinks that if you want to build anything for scale, automation has to play a significant role. But you don’t have to automate everything at the start. You really need to think through how you can create efficiencies through it. At Escala, automation touches every aspect of the business. Yoni admits they also have a whole product team building out impressive automation and digital-first integration so that their experience happens digitally first.
Conclusions
Ultimately, automation comes down to running business operations more efficiently, saving time and money, adding value for internal and external customers, and leading business to success.
But, think good through it. Don’t automate everything only because someone told you. So, think about how your business and customers will benefit from it, and be careful what processes you automate.
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