A guide to ecommerce automation

Ecommerce automation is more critical than ever

To grow and thrive, companies must rethink their ecommerce automation strategies. Ecommerce sales have been steadily increasing for years, as more consumers are now shopping online. Global ecommerce sales are expected to reach $6 trillion by 2024.

With over 40% of ecommerce revenue coming from repeat buyers, process automation is critical to improved customer experiences. By integrating your ecommerce apps and automating manual processes, you will use internal resources efficiently, refine cross-departmental processes, and eliminate long sales lifecycles and manual data entry.

Ecommerce automation ensures that as your business grows, you won’t outgrow your operations. Companies that embrace enterprise-wide ecommerce automation have no limit to how much they can grow. With the right automation tools and strategies, you can streamline your operations, reduce human error, and increase productivity.

To begin implementing automation in your ecommerce business, start by identifying areas of opportunity. Analyze your current processes and look for tasks that are repetitive or time-consuming. These are the areas that would benefit most from automation.

Next, look for software solutions that can help you automate these tasks. There are many options available on the market, so do some research to find the best fit for your business needs. Look for solutions that integrate with your existing applications and have a track record of successful implementations.

How to decide if you need ecommerce automation

Celigo automation experts have worked with thousands of companies that use ecommerce to sell B2C and B2B. To achieve business objectives, we found business operations teams need real-time insight into these questions:

1. Do you always have the correct inventory levels for top-selling products?
2. Do you have insights into customer service KPIs such as support time, labor cost data, support costs, and acquisition channels?
3. Do you have access to real-time marketing and operational data?
4. How many employees work with data entry, repetitive tasks, and error management?
5. How does your business deal with incorrectly placed orders?
6. How many technical resources are focused on low-level technical work versus strategic, revenue-generating initiatives?
7. What is your volume of transactions, and are you outgrowing your internal resources?

Benefits of ecommerce automation

Ecommerce automation allows companies to quickly ingest inventory, logistics, procurement, sales, and marketing data and enables your business teams to create new insights without IT or technical resources.

Enhance customer experiences

• Perfect the customer experience every time. Gain valuable insights by integrating customer service apps and customer review data. Optimize returns and customer support to boost brand loyalty and repeat sales.

Improve operational efficiency

• Measure key performance metrics around order-to-fulfillment rates, stock-outs, order cancellations, and cart abandonment to identify areas for operational improvement.

Move beyond manual processes

• With ecommerce process automation, you can eliminate manual processes and error-prone tasks.

Gain visibility into your business

• Automation streamlines your whole ecommerce operations to scale, helping you grow while keeping operational costs as low as possible.

Automate ecommerce processes with Celigo

Order-to-Cash

• Speed up order processing by connecting ecommerce storefronts, marketplaces, ERP, 3PL, and payment gateways.
• Fulfill orders and process cancellations, returns, and refunds fast through real-time sync of critical data between ecommerce sales channels and ERP.
• Avoid selling out-of-stock items to customers through up-to-date inventory levels across all sales channels.

See Order to Cash Integration Guide for details

3PL fulfillment

• Make healthier business decisions for procurement and distribution through real-time inventory data. Gain real-time visibility into fulfillment status, returns, and stock levels.
• Process and fulfill more sales orders in less time through fully automated processes.
• Provide a better customer experience through fast fulfillment, return processing, and status updates.

See 3PL Fulfillment Integration for details

Inventory management

• Manage your inventory in real-time.
• Update inventory levels on the ecommerce storefront less frequently to avoid overselling.
• Split inventory into multiple locations for multi-channel sales.
• Use a manual trigger to release new products for sale.

See Inventory Management Integration for details

Supply chain management

• Connect your supply chain end-to-end to automate your business-critical processes.
• You can expedite strategic projects such as vetting supply chain vendors for security or launching dynamic pricing.
• Automate workflows and processes for growth and scalability. Reduce time spent manually managing shipments.

See Supply Chain Management for details

Customer 360

• Get the complete customer visibility needed to shift from reactive to proactive customer engagements to avoid potential issues and identify upsell opportunities.
• Acquire insights from website traffic, email, mobile app data, paid media data, loyalty program data, and data from ERP, CRM, and Google Analytics.
• Improve forecasting with real-time visibility into your fulfillment rate, inventory turnover, stock-to-sales ratio, backorder rate, and rate of return.

See Customer 360 Automation for details

Why Celigo for ecommerce automation?

Celigo automates every stage of your ecommerce business

Celigo provides full coverage with a comprehensive library of solutions built to support ecommerce business processes. With managed, prebuilt solutions, you can leverage AI/machine learning to manage and assist in integrations, including self-healing and error management.

Experts in ecommerce process automation

With over a decade of experience and thousands of customers, Celigo has the subject matter expertise and is the leader in ecommerce process automation. No one else can offer our level of end-to-end coverage with expert guidance and customizable business best practices.

A powerful, scalable platform

The Celigo platform has all the power you need to handle any complex integration or transaction volume. Integrate all of your ecommerce applications, automate your business processes, scale your business, and say goodbye to operational inefficiencies. The Celigo Platform handles large volumes of transactions during peak sales seasons.

Accessible to everyone

An intuitive UI empowers business users to self-serve and manage automations without coding. Easy-to-use monitoring and error management means you don’t have to rely on technical resources to run your business.