4 ecommerce business processes that benefit from automation

3 key takeaways

   –> Creating a unified customer experience across channels can boost revenue.
   –> Automating processes like order management enhances customer experience.
   –> Automation can also improve operational efficiency and reduce costs.

Ecommerce businesses are adopting an increasing number of channels to reach their customers, and for good reason, marketers using three or more channels in a campaign earn a 494% higher order rate. This accelerated channel expansion is blurring the lines between digital storefronts, social search, and marketplaces–making it more difficult than ever to deliver consistent shopper experiences.

To ensure flawless experiences across all your channels, you need to integrate your tech stack and automate your business processes. Without integration, your operations will be slow and error-prone. Gartner found that organizations offering a unified commerce experience by frictionlessly moving customers through journeys see at least a 20% uplift in total revenue.

Start driving results at your organization. Discover four ecommerce processes that you can automate to enhance customer experiences and drive consistency.

Getting started

Before you jump in to automating your processes, make sure you have a solid strategy in place to ensure sustainable implementation. Start by identifying which of your business processes are most critical and should be automated first. Then, list the related tools and applications that you use that will need to be integrated in order to automate these processes. This will help you get a clear picture of the integrations you need to implement in order to achieve your automation goals.

Here are a few processes you should add to your list:

Order management

Many ecommerce integration strategies start with order management because it’s at the heart of ecommerce. The process starts with a customer’s order and goes all the way through billing, processing, and order fulfillment.

With integration, you can sync your orders, inventory, and fulfillment between your storefronts and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) or order management platform. This will help you fulfill orders quicker and more accurately.

3PL integration

Working with a third-party logistics provider can be a great step forward for your organization. It allows you to gain expertise and expand your business. However, as you scale, the lack of real-time inventory visibility can cause operational inefficiencies. These inefficiencies can result in delays, errors, and ultimately, unhappy customers.

By fully automating your 3PL processes, you can stay aligned with your provider and access real-time data. This allows you to provide your customers with timely updates on their orders. Check out our blog to dive deeper into 3PL automation.

Product data (item) management

As your sales channels and number of SKUs grow, so does the threat of operational issues. Manual data processing can slow down your time to market and cause inaccurate stock levels to be displayed.

With automation, you can automatically and accurately update items across channels. This allows you to reduce operational costs and prevent delays and stockouts.

Payout-to-reconciliation

Payout-to-reconciliation often involves manually comparing payment processor payouts against your financial records to ensure matching amounts. This is time-consuming and can prevent you from closing your books on time.

By automating this process, you can identify discrepancies sooner and shift your focus to more strategic and high-value priorities. To explore payouts-to-reconciliation automation further, check out our blog.

Next steps

With automation, you can make sure your customers are receiving excellent experiences regardless of the channel they engage with. You can also see a range of additional benefits such as:

• Improved operational efficiencies
• Reduced costs
• Increased agility and flexibility to adapt to changes in the market
• Elimination of manual tasks

The key to successfully implementing these automations is choosing the right tool. Celigo’s iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) has helped thousands of ecommerce customers integrate their tech stack and automate their business processes. Sign up for a free trial today to see how Celigo’s iPaaS can work for you.