Marketing automation has been an extremely crucial aspect of boosting both productivity and organization growth for a fairly long time. When it comes to ecommerce automation, those same aspects are applicable, too. The point of ecommerce automation tools and software is to try to offer users what they need in order to get rid of any of the tasks that require a lot of time but are necessary for an online store.
The thing is, without automation, businesses would have to spend a lot of hours on repetitive, everyday jobs that would take up a lot of the time of those that are skilled in much more difficult and important things. However, thanks to automation, those tasks are cut 10 fold and now only require several minutes before completion. Since it was necessary to free up some time for harder tasks by taking care of any of those tasks that require a lot of repetition, ecommerce automation was born.
Ecommerce automation can be used together with many ecommerce platforms, or it can already be integrated with it. Let’s first take a look ecommerce automation software that can be integrated into ecommerce platforms.
Ecommerce Automation Software
Oberlo
This dropshipping solution lets you source items directly from AliExpress and imports them into your own online store. You end up getting charged the wholesale price and then you’re in charge of figuring out how much your customers should pay for it. Then AliExpress ships them out to your customers while you don’t even do anything in order to make that happen. They’re useful if you don’t have your own items, but if you have created your own then this may not work for you.
MailChimp
MailChimp is an email marketing provider that offers solid marketing and a nice workspace to work in. They offer very thorough reporting with essentially all of the information to everything that you’d need such as clients, geo-tracking, social media, as well as a Google Analytics integration. The majority of their tools are in the free package and you can have 12,000 emails to 2,000 of your subscribers. Additionally, they have a really good template editor that is simple, yet powerful. Overall, it’s pretty easy to use and personalize.
However, their email automation is pretty good, followed by rules to send follow up emails depending on the situation. However, the usability isn’t the best when it comes to more difficult automation such as goals or page link actions. Their list management, however, would benefit from a makeover.
Each one of these is great, but they’re only great for one purpose. It would be terrible to have to pay for an ecommerce platform and then for each third-party application on top of it.
However, fortunately, there is ecommerce software such as Shopping Cart Elite that can keep users from running into that kind of problem.
Zendesk
Zendesk is a help desk software for any kind of business type and size that offers some unique features such as multi-channel support and a reliable ticketing system. It’s also got a pretty good reporting and analytics module. They’ve got a self-service portal that can assist you with setting up a knowledge base along with FAQs that way you can offer better customer self-help. This product is pretty flexible and easy to setup, comes with some time-saving widgets, as well self-service support in addition to their online communities and knowledge bases.
However, their Zendesk Reports automation options aren’t as good as users would’ve hoped they’d be. Additionally, their app could be enhanced by becoming more user-friendly. Additionally, both agents and administration have to take time to do training sessions on Zendesk in order to use it the most optimally. If the budget allows, some just book their staff into a course. Also, you need to have a technical setup. They do, however, have some experts to help out with that. If you’re interested in taking advantage of all of the features that they offer, then also, Zendesk ends up getting pretty pricey.
Shopping Cart Elite
Shopping Cart Elite has saved many retailers from spending a lot of extra money on third-party applications in order to offer automation, marketing, as well as SEO tools for your company. Additionally, it’s completely customizable, with an open API and many integrations with their own App Store. A few of the features that they offer are a customized graphic design, along with no limit on the number of items, storage, or bandwidth. Additionally, they even automate processes such as graphic design, data entry, fine-tuning, custom development, synchronization, as well as hosting. Thanks to all of those features, you can easily start and run your online store. In addition, you are able to sell on a variety of channels such as eBay and Amazon simultaneously. You can even take advantage of the data collected in order to make the best decisions thanks to their predictive analytics.
Every single process regardless of whether it’s at the beginning or at the end is automated. Additionally, since their marketing systems were both built and developed by their own staff, marketing automation is at the simplest level that it can be. On top of that, those marketing systems that work on top of SCE work all together in a bundle. They really do the full A-Z software development and marketing in-house for their users. Even white hat SEO strategies are automated, therefore your online store is completely optimized for search engine crawlers.
Whether it be the website, email marketing, marketplaces, inventory, CRM, analytics, or SEO, Shopping Cart Elite can do it all.
Conclusion
The first three aren’t complete ecommerce solutions. They are typically used as third-party solutions. If you only need a few, then that may be the route to go. However, if you aren’t interested in paying for every single integration and would rather have everything all in one place and at one price, then a platform such as Shopping Cart Elite may be the direction that you should go in.