5 Easy Ways to Automate Your Online Business this Holiday Season
Tuesday, October 11, 2016Lauren Macdonald
Discover Easy Ways to Automate Your eCommerce Store
Even though it’s only early October, online retailers across the globe are already frenziedly prepping for another holiday shopping season. After all, success in the fourth quarter requires more than just a few snazzy holiday banners; customers are expecting you to knock their socks off, not only with tantalizing sales promotions, but with a stellar website design and flawless shopping experience, too.
Whether you’re new to eCommerce or a seasoned online retailer, the increasing demands of today’s shoppers may have you wondering if your business is equipped to handle the chaos that’s just around the corner. Fortunately, whether you’re feeling the heat due to budgetary constraints or limited resources, new, affordable technology now makes it easier than ever before to easily grow and expand your business, even during the year’s busiest shopping days.
Automating various aspects of your business can not only help you save time, money, and energy, it can also mean the difference between success and failure during a period of increased traffic and high expectations.
Check out the following five areas of your eCommerce business that can easily be automated for a stress-free, profitable fourth quarter.
1. Email
Email marketing is a critically essential ingredient in eCommerce’s holiday recipe for success. Sending automated, time-sensitive emails to shoppers based on their preferences and shopping habits is an easy way to entice shoppers, encourage repeat traffic, and increase traffic.
Successful email marketing hinges on timeliness and the appeal of your offer. Quickly reengage customers who’ve abandoned cart or entice repeat purchases by using a customer’s purchase history to create a uniquely tailored campaign. The possibilities are endless when it comes to automated email, and can only result in increased sales, traffic, and ROI for your business during the year’s busiest shopping days.
2. Shipping
Picking, packing, and shipping orders is not only labor intensive, it’s incredibly costly and time consuming, too. Using a fulfillment center or a dropshipping company is one of the simplest ways you can quickly and significantly lighten your workload. Although not a suitable solution for every business, a fulfillment center or dropshipper can offer more flexibility in regards to available shipping locations (nationwide or globally), and can mean reduced risk and upfront costs, stress, and fewer responsibilities for you and your team.
3. Accounting
Integrating your business with an accounting system or ERP can make a major difference in your business’s day to day operations. A perfectly integrated system can lead to performance and efficiency increase, and improved customer service and satisfaction. In addition, implementing an ERP can significantly reduce your operating costs, and allow you to better streamline different organizational processes for a smoother, less bumpy holiday shopping season.
4. Taxes
Few merchants share a passion for taxes – in fact, online merchants often name taxes as the worst aspect of running a business. It’s easy to understand why they’re so despised: they’re tedious, extremely time-consuming, and unfortunately, an unavoidable, obligatory component of owning a business. With state tax, city tax, county tax, and special taxes changing every year across thousands of jurisdictions, staying on top of taxes can be a real nightmare, even if you have a fondness for numbers and math.
Fortunately, automated tax solutions offer an easy solution to avoiding taxes. In addition to eliminating unavoidable human error, an automated tax solution can ensure orders are always processed with real-time tax calculation, and can additionally manage your collecting, filing, and remittance processes as well.
5. Fraud Detection
Few things are as universally feared and dreaded as fraud during the busy holiday season. Responsible for costing merchants billions of dollars every year, the increasing prevalence of cybercrime has businesses of every shape and size on edge. As an online retailer, your business is at risk of fraud every day, but is even more susceptible during the year’s busiest shopping days, when many merchants let their guard down.
Using an automated fraud detecting program allows you to identify fraudulent orders before they’re ever processed, and can safeguard your business from an untold amount of lost revenue. Automated fraud detecting programs use essential data such as IP address, banking information, mailing address, and other factors to check in just seconds whether an order is fraudulent – a process that could take hours if not days to complete manually.
Written by Ashley Duke, content creator at 3dcart