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Founding Principles: Knowing When To Simplify Your Work With Automation

founding-principles:-knowing-when-to-simplify-your-work-with-automation

We hear the term often. But what is ecommerce automation?

Ecommerce automation is the process of streamlining repetitive tasks and operations using smart tools to increase efficiency and productivity, with an end goal in mind – focusing on strategic activities.

Automation is great for increasing productivity & efficiency, connecting disparate business systems automatically that would otherwise require manual steps or even improving internal or external experiences. The benefits are so wide reaching that it’s daunting to know where to start.

Now the question is: how can you identify the tasks that you should automate?

Identify repetitive tasks – The first step towards creating effective automation is pinpointing bottlenecks in your business. From there, you’ll be able to understand the most significant pain points and fix them with smart workflows.

Define business goals – When you decide on the tasks that need to be automated, you can think in isolation. Always have the big picture in mind. Having a holistic approach is the only way to see the real value of automation and how it fits your long-term strategy.

Select the right automation solution – The main purpose of automation is to simplify things. In other words, the solution you choose should make your life easier. Now you can save time by using pre-built workflow templates for some of the most popular tasks for growing e-commerce stores.

Train users – One of the steps that often gets overlooked is the importance of training the users. Ensure that everyone who’s going to use the solution understands how it works and how to make the most out of it. There’s no shortcut for this. Invest time and effort to prepare your team to thrive.

Measure & optimize – Contrary to what many believe, automation doesn’t mean that you should set everything up and never look back. The key to successful workflow automation is to measure and optimize based on results. Over and over again. That’s how you stay on top of your ecommerce game.

The next decade will reward forward-thinking companies that leverage automation for repetitive tasks and invest their time on more strategic issues.

Ryan O’Donnell

CMO @ ShopPad

Special thanks to our friends at ShopPad for their insights on this topic.
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