Automate Your Online Business With These Top eCommerce Apps

Automation is a concept that has been around for a while, businesses have been trying to reduce their overheads and costs through automation for decades now. However, they have not seen much automation in the realm of traditional businesses, however, the shift to online businesses has brought with it, a lot of automation.

You might have bought something from an online store in the past few days, you get tons of emails from the stores, every step of the order process, and after that as well. You get a lot of other notifications as well on the web store itself when you are making the purchase, and sometimes you might get the occasional text message as well from the brand, all of these are automated processes, done through a plethora of apps that you can integrate into your e-commerce store as well. We will look at a few of these apps that we think are a must-have for your eCommerce store. 

1) Shopify Flow

Shopify is one of the biggest eCommerce platforms on the planet, most eCommerce sites are built on Shopify. As most web stores are built on Shopify, it is a no-brainer to use Shopify’s own product which helps with customer experience, inventory management, and a host of other things. The tool is called Shopify Flow, and for everyone already using Shopify Plus it is a no brainer to have this tool integrated into your web store. It takes care of a lot of things for you, and automates the most mundane tasks like

a) Customer Experience: 

It creates a google sheet and whenever a negative review is posted it creates a support ticket for the review and logs the review on to that sheet. You can then easily track it by looking at the google sheet. 

b) Inventory Management: 

It also looks at the inventory levels of your products, so you can update your stock, tells you about the low inventory levels and automatically removes products from your listings when the stock is low.

c) High Risk Orders: 

It looks at the high-risk orders, and automatically cancels them before they become a hassle for you and your canceled orders start piling up. 

d) Customer Loyalty: 

It takes care of your customers for you, charts out your loyal customers, and sends them personalized messages, discount codes and initiates email campaigns to get them to buy more. 

2) Zapier

There are thousands of apps for the automation that we are looking to do, you are not going to get thousands of apps to do that right? Nobody in their right mind would do that, that makes no sense, practically as well as financially, that’s where application aggregators come on. These aggregators take the best of applications and put them in one application that is easier to manage. One of the best aggregators in this space is Zapier creates a connection between multiple apps and your store. It aggregates all of the features of the apps you need and brings them to one platform. Before Zapier it would take a lot of time and effort and even development capabilities to integrate two apps, now with Zapier you can do it through some clicks on the phone, it is as easy as that. 

3) Mailchimp

If you have received an email from an online store that you have ordered from, you might have seen the next application at work. Mailchimp is your go to application for automating emails, it automates all your repetitive emails and removes your pain points. It can be used at any scenario of the customer’s journey and the whole process can be easily automated. It can take into account different scenarios and send emails based on those scenarios for you. 

For example one of the biggest problems in eCommerce is cart abandonment. 70% of the people add stuff to the cart and don’t purchase it. Mailchimp can send email to these people and ask them to complete the purchase or it can follow up for their review and stuff like that. There are endless possibilities with what you can automate with that. 

4) Shiptheory

Shiptheory automates your shipping and logistics for your business, it is integrated with the online marketplace environment like Shopify and Wix and takes the data from these websites and automatically sends them to the logistics services such as FedEx and DHL. It automatically prints the shipping information for your products and generates tracking ids, everything is done automatically through the data coming directly from your webstore. It gives you everything you need, and then your operational staff only needs to hand the package to the service providers and that’s it. 

5) Buffer

Buffer is a tool for managing social media for your business. Customer service is quite important, however, in the world of social media it is a hassle to manage these social media platforms as there are a lot of them. Buffer helps you manage your social media better, it gives you insights about social media that can help you better manage your social media posts and campaigns that you are running. 

6) Trustpilot

As the name suggests, Trustpilot is a tool that helps you build trust with your customers, it has an automatic feedback system incorporated in it, which can automatically send buyer requests to your account. It also has requests email scheduled about everything in the customer’s journey for full transparency. Trustpilot helps you automate the whole customer experience process by making sure that your customer receives the best care possible. It also gives you the ability to ask for reviews if you feel under confident about the product so that you can build upon the strategy of your product. 

The map of the customer’s journey is created by Trustpilot and at every point in the journey Trustpilot asks the customer for their reviews, which are then helping your business get better. The first time the review is taken is when they try the product for the first time so you get better reviews in the honeymoon period. These are some of the strategies that work for the company. 

7) Mixpanel

Even if you have plenty of customer data, it can be hard to gain real insights without a reliable way of visualizing and interpreting the data. Mixpanel is an automation tool that enables its users to create dashboards full of useful graphics and statistics containing insights about your customer behaviors. This is perfect for internal team meetings to assess company performance and learn what's working and what isn't.

One of Mixpanel's primary aims, according to their website, is to enable anyone to understand and interact with their dashboard 'no matter their data expertise. In this sense, Mixpanel automates in a different way from many of the other tools on the list. Rather than removing small or meaningless tasks, Mixpanel's dashboard eliminates the need for your team to be data specialists by automatically generating graphs and statistics.