Over 65% of businesses have adopted automation to help them streamline their operations. In fact, automation is helping save companies at least $100,000 annually. If you’re not using automation in your eCommerce store, you’re missing out.
What if you didn’t need to spend so much time sending emails or manually entering data? What if your product listings or inventory updated themselves? These are just some of the ways eCommerce automation can benefit your business.
In this article, we’ll discuss eCommerce automation, how it can be used to improve your operations, and tips for choosing the right solution.
What Is eCommerce Automation?
eCommerce automation involves using software and technology to automate tasks and processes related to running your online store.
The options for implementing automation in your eCommerce business are endless. However, some of the most popular are:
👉 Inventory management
Automation helps you accurately track inventory levels, restock in real-time, or receive alerts when your stock falls below a certain threshold.
👉 Order processing
You can route orders to the right vendor or warehouse, update inventory, generate shipping labels, send confirmation emails to customers, or share tracking information automatically.
👉 Customer service
Through the use of chatbots or email, for example, you can automatically send order status updates to your customers. Keeping them informed every step of the way can help to build customer loyalty.
👉 Marketing campaigns
You can use eCommerce marketing automation to streamline email campaigns, create pre-scheduled social media posts, or send automated text messages from your sales team.
👇 Later in this article, we’ll explain how all of the above four points can be automated for more streamlined operations.
How eCommerce Automation Works
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eCommerce automation operates through a structured sequence of three key steps: trigger, condition, and action. These steps define how automated processes execute tasks within an online store.
Let’s break this down with a common example: an order being placed in your online store:
1. Trigger
This is an event that starts the automation. In this case, the trigger is when a customer places an order on your website. This action signals to your system that a process needs to be initiated.
2. Condition
Conditions act as checkpoints to determine whether or not an action should proceed. In our example, the condition could be whether the payment has been successfully received.
If the customer’s payment is verified, the process moves forward. If the payment fails, an alternative action might be implemented, such as sending an automated payment reminder to the customer.
3. Action
Once the condition is met, the automated system executes the right action. In this case, an order confirmation email is automatically sent to the customer.
This email might include details like an order summary, estimated delivery date, and tracking information.
The Benefits of eCommerce Automation
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Now that you know how eCommerce automation works, let’s look at how it’s beneficial for your online store:
✅ Improved efficiency
Over 90% of companies still perform repetitive, time-consuming tasks. However, automation has now improved 90% of workers’ productivity.
Repetitive tasks like order processing and managing inventory are essential to your business. However, you don’t have to have someone handling this process.
By automating these processes, you can dedicate your attention to high-value tasks, like scaling your business and making your operations more efficient.
✅ Better accuracy
One report found that financing automation can reduce errors by up to 90%.
Manual tasks are prone to human error, which can be costly and decrease customer satisfaction.
An example would be sending the incorrect order to the wrong customer, which can lead to dissatisfaction and the costly process of rectifying the error with the order.
Automation significantly reduces the chances of costly mistakes by reducing human error.
✅ Scalability
You don’t necessarily need to hire additional employees to grow your eCommerce business—automation can help you scale your business while maximizing profit margins.
Let’s say instead of hiring an additional team member to process your orders, you use software to manage this for you. This saves you the overheads of hiring additional employees and could result in a more significant profit margin.
In fact, companies that use automation can reduce operational costs by 90% and scale their businesses exponentially.
✅ Cost-savings
Rather than handling repetitive and time-consuming eCommerce tasks yourself, automated processes free up your time to focus on more impactful work, such as growing your business and customer base, which can boost your revenue.
One example would be the time-consuming task of manually inputting pricing updates into your website, which can be automated using eCommerce automation software, giving you one less responsibility.
You also save money as you don’t have to hire someone to carry out data entry like pricing updates, reducing the need for larger overheads.
✅ Reduce wait times
Automation isn’t just beneficial to eCommerce stores; it can also help you create a better reputation for your brand by improving customer interactions.
Examples are chatbots and automated messages, which can provide customers with instant support 24/7. This means they don’t have to wait hours or even days for someone to get back to them about a query.
In fact, 74% of customers would rather speak to an automated chatbot than speak to a human.
✅ Personalize shopping and offer a better experience
Over 80% of customers prefer shopping with brands that offer them a personalized experience, and automation can help you do this.
If someone makes a purchase via your online store, automation can save their preferences and display the most relevant results the next time they visit your website.
Automation can also help you deliver personalized marketing content. Suppose a customer has purchased from you before. In that case, you can send them automated emails suggesting similar products to their initial purchase, potentially getting you more sales using eCommerce marketing automation software.
We’ll discuss how automating your marketing strategies can benefit your business later in this article.
What Can You Automate in eCommerce?
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As mentioned above, eCommerce automation can streamline almost every aspect of your online store. Below are some of the main areas where eCommerce automation can help:
➡️ Order processing
Order processing is one of the most repetitive and time-consuming aspects of eCommerce.
With eCommerce process automation, you’ll never have to manually send order confirmations, process payments, or send shipping information again.
The right automation tool will help streamline these operations while still keeping you informed along the way.
You can also use automation to ensure orders are routed to the correct vendor, and customers receive their tracking information immediately.
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💡 A Tool to Use for Order Processing Automation By using Spark Shipping’s automated order fulfillment feature, you can route orders intelligently. Your orders are routed automatically to the correct vendors when a customer orders from your store. Our tool allows you to map products to multiple vendors, enabling each product listing to track different SKUs, vendor identifiers, stock quantities, and unit costs for each vendor it’s linked to. This can help ensure you keep products in stock, get more orders, and route orders at lower prices than your competitors. |
➡️ Inventory management
Why spend your time restocking when eCommerce automation software can do it for you? Automated inventory workflows streamline stock management, ensuring you never run out of popular products or overstock slow-moving items.
For example, eCommerce automation software can continuously track your inventory levels in real-time.
This means that when a product’s stock drops below a predefined threshold, the system flags it as low stock and initiates an automated response.
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💡 A Tool to Use for Inventory Management Automation There’s nothing worse for your reputation than having to tell a customer you can’t fulfill an order they’ve placed. With our automated inventory updates, you can avoid this altogether. You can use our One-to-Many mapping to link a single product to multiple vendors. You’ll also receive real-time product updates from all vendors, ensuring you can route orders to an in-stock vendor. This feature also allows you to run inventory updates on-demand or completely automate them. Additionally, you can set minimum inventory limits to ensure you can always fulfill an order so you’ll never disappoint your customers. |
➡️ Customer service
Did you know that 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases from businesses that offer excellent customer service? Additionally, customers are five times more likely to refer the brand to others.
Retaining a customer costs significantly less than acquiring a new one, so you need solid customer service processes to retain as many shoppers as possible. You can automate eCommerce customer service to ensure this is always the case.
From automated responses to issue tracking, automation will help you improve your customer experience.Your customers want to be kept in the loop, and automation does that for you with email marketing, for example.
You can also automate customer service with chatbots. These provide instant, around-the-clock support to give shoppers the answers they need immediately, potentially leading to better customer loyalty.
Maximize the effectiveness of your chatbots by programming them to answer common frequently asked questions (FAQs).
Most chatbots will route shoppers to a human agent if they can’t solve the customer’s problem. This can help reduce the workload of your customer support team as they don’t need to spend time answering common queries and can instead focus on resolving more significant issues for your customers.
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💡 A Tool to Use for Customer Service Automation Salesforce Service Cloud can help you provide seamless self-service experiences to your eCommerce shoppers. The tool uses artificial intelligence (AI) to answer FAQs and other customer inquiries. This saves you resources as you won’t have to spend time answering routine questions that AI can handle. You also don’t have to hire additional customer service representatives to handle higher volumes of queries. Additionally, you can integrate Service Cloud with your eCommerce store so that there is a live chat function when your customers visit your website with questions. |
➡️ Marketing campaigns
Your company’s sales productivity can be increased by 12% just by using marketing automation tools.
The automation software you choose should integrate with your marketing management tools. Look for a solution that helps you automate email, content, social media, advertising, and any other aspects of your marketing strategy.
For example, your chosen software should be able to seamlessly integrate with your email marketing automation platforms so that you can streamline sending marketing messages throughout the customer journey.
You can automate email marketing campaigns, social media posts, and paid advertising using eCommerce marketing automation tools. This means you’ll spend less time marketing your online brand while maintaining a cohesive online presence.
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💡 A Tool to Use for Marketing Automation Hubspot is a solution for automating your marketing activities. The software streamlines your efforts to increase the effectiveness and quantity of your campaigns without you having to put time and effort into this. The tool lets you automate the lead nurturing process with email drip campaigns. It also automates lead scoring, follow-ups, and notifications. This gives you—or your marketing team—more time to spend on impactful work, like developing successful marketing strategies. |
➡️ Analytics and reporting
Automated analytics are a great feature that can help you generate insightful, actionable reports every month.
You can set up your automation software to display which metrics matter most, and it will generate quality reports you can use to improve your business.
For example, you need a tool that can produce reliable data to help you decide which products to keep selling—because they’re popular—and which items to consider replacing. It would be hard to make this decision without the analytics provided by automation software.
If you’re looking to expand your product offering, the data produced by automation platforms can help inform your decision about what new products to start stocking in your store.
Automation can collect data and generate in-depth reports that help you better understand your customers, sales performance, and overall business operations.
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💡 A Tool to Use for Analytics and Reporting Polar Analytics is an automated reporting tool for eCommerce businesses. It allows you to build customized reports with ease. You can do this by connecting Polar Analytics to your store, and you’ll receive automated reports without crunching the numbers yourself. The tool also allows you to create custom metrics in your reports, such as net profit and profit on ad spend, without using any code. |
➡️ Integrations
Integrations make life easier because you don’t have to transfer data manually from one platform to another.
That’s why it’s essential to choose automated workflows that easily integrate with any popular eCommerce platform, accounting software, and customer relationship management (CRM) tools. This saves time, reduces errors, and improves efficiency.
Your automated workflows should integrate seamlessly with eCommerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Magento.
For example, when a customer places an order, automation ensures that the transaction details instantly sync across all your platforms.
Payment information updates in your accounting software, while customer details and purchase history are added to your CRM—eliminating the need for manual entry.
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💡 A Tool to Use for Integrations Spark Shipping helps you integrate all your eCommerce sites, tools, and sales channels. This makes connecting with vendors, uploading products, managing inventory, and accepting orders a breeze. Our integrations include:
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➡️ Workflow customization
Since your online business is unique, you need to be able to customize your workflows. For example, one eCommerce brand may offer multiple shipping options, while others might not.
You want eCommerce software that allows you to customize your workflows based on your specific operations and create your own automation rules.
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💡 A Tool to Use to Customize Workflows You can create automated and customized workflows for your eCommerce business with Jotform Approvals. This tool automates eCommerce workflows for order approvals, preventing customer, vendor, and supplier bottlenecks. It comes with approval flow templates, and you can also create your own unique approval workflows. |
➡️ Security
When running an online store, you’re storing a lot of sensitive customer data, from credit card numbers to addresses.
You need to choose automation software that will keep this data safe, like solutions with encryption, two-factor authentication (2FA), and regular patches and updates.
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💡 A Tool to Use for eCommerce Security Cloudflare for eCommerce is an excellent automation tool that helps online store owners with security, especially in protecting sensitive customer data, ensuring a secure shopping experience. The tool provides enterprise-grade security while automating key security processes to project data, prevent cyber threats, and optimize store performance. |
➡️ Personalization
Over 70% of customers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. Additionally, 76% of customers get frustrated when this doesn’t happen.
Personalization is one of the most effective ways to stand out from your competition, boost customer engagement, and drive sales.
With the right automation tools and data, your online store can create highly targeted, personalized experiences without manual effort.
Here’s how eCommerce automation can help you personalized the customer journey:
- Sending abandoned cart emails: If a customer leaves an item behind in their cart, an automated email can be sent reminding them of their unpurchased products.
- Displaying recommendations on your website: AI-driven automation tools can analyze customer behavior and display tailored recommendations across your website.
- Sending thank you messages: You can automate sending instant post-purchase thank you emails, offer discounts on the next purchase, and encourage engagement.
- Sending marketing emails: Marketing emails should feel tailored to each customer, and segmented email lists can help you send messages based on shopping habits, preferences, and past purchases.
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💡 A Tool to Use for eCommerce Personalization Nosto is a tool that helps you deliver tailored shopping experiences by using AI and real-time data to automate product recommendations, personalized content, and customer segmentation. It automatically suggests relevant products based on a customer’s browsing behavior, past purchases, and interests. Additionally, it can adjust your homepage banners, product descriptions, and pop-ups in real-time based on each visitor’s profile. |
➡️ Fraud filtering
eCommerce fraud is a growing concern for online store owners, but automation software can detect and prevent fraudulent transactions in real-time. This saves you from revenue loss and reputational damage.
One of the key ways eCommerce automation software can address fraud is by tracking and verifying customer orders.
For example, these tools can flag suspicious transactions by cross-referencing a customer’s IP address, billing address, and shipping location.
If there’s a mismatch—such as a payment made from one country while shipping to another high-risk region—the system can automatically flag the order for you to review or block it.
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💡 A Tool to Use for eCommerce Fraud Filtering Signifyd is a great fraud prevention and automation tool for eCommerce businesses. It uses AI and machine learning (ML) to automate fraud detection and protect customer transactions in real-time. It automatically analyzes customer behavior, order history, and payment details to detect and block fraudulent transactions. It also tracks where orders originate and flags high-risk locations, proxy use, or mismatched addresses. |
➡️ Customer feedback collection
More than 80% of shoppers trust the voice of other customers more than messages that come from your brand. For this reason, you need to collect and showcase customer feedback.
Customer feedback is essential for improving your products, refining the shopping experience, and building brand trust.
However, manually reaching out to customers for reviews, processing feedback, and analyzing responses can be time-consuming.
eCommerce automation software can help you effortlessly collect, manage, and act on feedback.
For example, after a customer makes a purchase, automation software can trigger an email or SMS request asking them for a review at the right time, such as a few days after receiving their delivery.
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💡 A Tool to Use for Collecting Customer Feedback Yotpo is an eCommerce automation tool for customer feedback collection. It helps online store owners gather, manage, and showcase customer ratings and surveys. The tool automatically sends post-purchase review requests via email or SMS, ensuring you get valuable customer feedback without manual follow-ups. It also uses AI to analyze customer reviews and detect common themes, helping you understand what customers love or dislike about your products. |
➡️ Payment and invoicing
Handling payments and invoices manually can be error-prone and inefficient—especially for growing eCommerce businesses.
Automation simplifies the entire process, ensuring that payments are processed securely, invoices are generated instantly, and financial records stay updated without manual intervention.
The benefits of automating payment and invoicing include faster transactions, fewer errors, better cash flow management, and an enhanced customer experience.
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💡 A Tool to Use for eCommerce Payment and Invoicing Chargebee is a payment and invoicing management platform for eCommerce. It automates billing, invoicing, tax compliance, and subscription management. It supports multiple payment gateways like Stripe, PayPay, and Authorize.net, automatically processing payments and retrying failed ones. The tool generates and sends branded invoices to your customers immediately after a payment is processed, ensuring compliance with various tax regulations. |
➡️ Product information management (PIM)
Managing product information across multiple sales channels can be challenging to get right. Manually updating product details, descriptions, images, and pricing can lead to inconsistencies, outdated listings, and missed sales opportunities.
eCommerce automation can ensure product data is accurate, up-to-date, and synchronized across all your platforms.
Product descriptions, SKUs, specifications, real-time pricing, and discounts can all be managed from a single platform.
This saves you time, improves accuracy, enhances your discoverability on online marketplaces, and optimizes multi-channel selling.
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💡 A Tool to Use for Product Information Management Spark Shipping can help you with product information management automation, particularly for businesses that rely on multi-supplier product management. Our tool integrates with suppliers, distributors, and marketplaces to automatically pull in product descriptions, images, pricing, and inventory levels, keeping your listings up to date. If you source products from multiple suppliers, our platform can consolidate product data, map SKUs, and standardize product details. |
➡️ Customer rewards programs
Over 83% of consumers say belonging to a loyalty or rewards program influences their decision to buy from a brand again. And 84% of customers say they’re more likely to stick with a brand that offers these programs.
As you can see, having a rewards program can boost customer retention, loyalty, and repeat purchases. However, managing a rewards system manually—tracking points, issuing rewards, and ensuring customers stay engaged—can be a lot of work.
eCommerce automation can make the entire process seamless and effort-free for both you and your customers.
Instead of manually tracking purchases, eCommerce automation software can award loyalty points instantly after purchases, automatically update customer point balances, and segment customers based on spending habits.
Automation also allows you to offer personalized loyalty incentives based on customer behavior. For example, customers who spend over a certain amount automatically unlock exclusive discounts on early access to new products.
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💡 A Tool to Use for Rewards Programs Smile.io is one of the best eCommerce automation tools for customer rewards programs. It helps you create and manage loyalty points, referral programs, and VIP rewards without manual effort. With an automated point system, seamless reward redemption, and referral program automation, Smile.io is the ideal tool to help you drive customer retention and loyalty. |
➡️ Upselling
Upselling can lead to a revenue increase of between 10% and 30% on average. It’s a powerful way to increase your average order value (AOV) and maximize revenue by encouraging customers to purchase higher-value products, premium versions, or add-ons.
However, manually suggesting upsells can be time-consuming and inconsistent.
With eCommerce automation software, you can deliver personalized, data-driven upsell recommendations at the right time without manual effort.
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💡 A Tool for eCommerce Upselling Automation ReConvert is an eCommerce automation tool for upselling that allows you to increase your AOV through personalized, automated upsell offers before, during, and after checkout. With ReConvert, you can immediately upsell to customers with special offers before they checkout. The tool also uses AI and customer behavior to automatically suggest relevant upsells and high-value products. |
What to Consider Before Implementing eCommerce Automation
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You may be tempted to automate every task within your business. However, humans should still handle some aspects of your eCommerce operations. To help you decide what to automate, ask yourself these questions:
- Does the task require three or more people? If so, the process could run more efficiently. That might mean you need help with the task or communication between your team. Automation could minimize the back-and-forth to make business processes more efficient.
- Is the task prone to human error? If a task is prone to human error—like data entry—this can lead to costly mistakes in the long run.
- Does the task involve many platforms? As eCommerce businesses scale, it becomes more common for them to move data across multiple platforms. Done manually, this can result in costly errors.
- Do particular actions trigger the task? A trigger initiates an entire automated sequence. If the task has a clear trigger, it’s easier to automate it.
If you answered yes to these questions, there’s a good chance that a task would be more efficient if it were automated.
Tips for Finding the Best eCommerce Automation Tool
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You now know how robust the right automation software can be to supercharge your online business. But how do you choose the right solution when so many are available?
Follow these tips to choose the best automation software for your eCommerce business:
🤔 Identify your needs
Every eCommerce business has unique pain points, so you’ll want to start by assessing where you spend the most time or encounter the most challenges.
For example, if you struggle with customer service overload, you should look for tools with chatbots, automated email responses, and self-service portals.
If you’re making frequent inventory or order processing errors, consider software that syncs your inventory across multiple sales channels and integrates with suppliers.
🤔 Consider scalability
As you put in the work, your eCommerce business will naturally scale. Find software that can handle large volumes of data and transactions. Your business might be smaller now, but you need to choose software that can grow with you.
The right tool should handle large transaction volumes without slowing down, integrate seamlessly with other tools, and offer flexible pricing plans as you expand.
For example, if you’re currently fulfilling 50 orders a day but aim to progress to thousands, your automation software should support bulk order processing, supplier automation, and high-volume customer support interactions.
🤔 Choose ease of use
The best eCommerce automation tool shouldn’t require hours of training or a dedicated IT team to manage.
Search for tools with a user-friendly dashboard, minimal setup time, automation templates, and predefined workflows.
For instance, if you’re setting up an automated abandoned cart email sequence, it should take minutes—not hours—to configure and go live.
What Makes Spark Shipping the Best Automation Solution?
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Automation tools like Spark Shipping simplifies eCommerce by automating everything, including:
✅ Uploading products.
✅ Updating inventory.
✅ Sending orders.
✅ Providing tracking updates.
Our unique “one-to-many” mapping approach also links a single product listing with multiple vendors. This means you can benefit from working with multiple vendors, like maintaining a 100% in-stock rate. We can even help you automatically route orders to the vendor with the lowest price.
Spark Shipping also provides intelligent order routing and industry-specific integrations.
From managing inventory to shipping to third-party logistics, Spark Shipping integrates with everything you need for eCommerce success.
We also integrate with other solutions to help your business thrive, including inventory management, shipping software, and third-party logistics.
Elevate Your eCommerce Processes with Automation
Your eCommerce business is a massive commitment of your time. By automating resource-intensive and repetitive tasks, you’re giving yourself time to focus on the work that will help you grow and scale your business while boosting your bottom line.
Spark Shipping goes beyond automating time-consuming and error-prone tasks; our solution takes care of your entire business process to ensure you’re running the best possible online store.
Visit our website for a Spark Shipping demo and experience the power of eCommerce automation firsthand.