Guest Author on January 29, 2019 
All growing E-commerce Business reach a point where they either have to evolve or suffer the consequences. The field in itself is full of fierce competition and those not trying to get ahead will inevitably get left behind in the dust.
If you’re seeking to scale up your online business, there are two things you undoubtedly need: time and money.
If you’re seeking to save money, consider implementing some accounting tools in your business.
But if you’re seeking to save time (and money in the long run), then you might want to consider automating some parts of your eCommerce business. And if you’re not sure how to do that, then you’ve come to the right place.
In this guide, we’ll be looking at how you can start automating some tasks in your eCommerce business.
1. Automate product imports and more
Depending on where you get your products from, you might be spending a lot of time on manually importing products to your store and making sure they’re set up correctly. This takes time because the process has a lot of details you need to be keeping an eye on.
But what if you could automate this whole process with just one click?
Oberlo is one of the most important E-commerce Business and Shopify tools that can help you in running your online store.
For example, if you’re running a drop-shipping type of website and you’re importing your information from AliExpress, Oberlo can make that process go by with a single click. It imports the text (which you then might need to switch up based on your target market), images, products and more.
This is one of the most convenient ways to save time and have new products show up on your website straight away.
2. Automate social media posts
Social media is a powerful way to market your business and make sure you’re laser targeting the right people, especially in terms of advertising. But many business owners often neglect social media or either just focus on one single platform (usually Facebook).
While it is true that some platforms might be more useful for you than others (depending on your niche, industry, etc.) the principle is still the same here. Regardless of your social media platform, it’s important you know how to utilize it correctly.
If you want to save time managing social media for your business and schedule future posts, consider Buffer as your social media management tool and EvergreenFeed to automate your evergreen posts.
With Buffer, you can manage and plan up to 10 social media posts for free per day. And when those posts will go live – that’s entirely up to you.
So, essentially, you can plan out your whole social media posts in advance and watch them go live throughout the week on all your platforms. All you have to do then is sit back and view the analytics.
3. Automating product reviews
Your reviews could be the deciding factor for someone making a decision to buy. Customers take reviews as personal recommendations, so, the more authentic and positive reviews you have – the better.
Social proof is essential in eCommerce.
There are a number of ways to generate reviews as an e-Commerce business. But arguably the best way to do so is to just automate the whole process without your involvement.
For this, the Products reviews addon extension is a tool that will automatically ask customers to leave product reviews after receiving the product. Your customers can then leave a review straight from the email they’ll receive – making the process even more convenient for everyone involved.
While this sounds simple, by automating review requests, you’re giving your eCommerce business a bigger chance to be trusted by your customers and generate more sales. Reviews help customer conversion rates and if they truly loved the product, they won’t hesitate to leave a positive review.
4. Automating emails
Do you do a lot of customer support and have to send a lot of follow-ups and reminders?
Chances are, if you’re working in eCommerce, you don’t want to lose your potential clients and leads. So, if you want to better organize your email system, consider using a tool like Boomerang for convenient email scheduling and reminders.
Boomerang is a browser extension that allows you to select when exactly you want your emails to go out. If you’re dealing with a lead who’s in another time zone, you can specify for your email to be sent when it’s the morning for them. This way, you’ll make sure they’ll see the email in the morning and you can also see if they opened it or not. You can then follow up accordingly.
But the convenience doesn’t stop there. Boomerang can also help you manage your emails and organize them more neatly too. If you want to be reminded of your important emails, you can get the app to archive the message and then be put back in your inbox with a star later.
It’s integrated within Gmail, thus, downloading and setting it up is easy to say the least.
5. Every other various business tasks
Finally, if you want to automate a number of business tasks, based on certain prerequisites – consider using IFTTT. This is a great way to connect other apps that otherwise might not have integrations with each other.
For example, if you often have to do a lot of manual tasks only after a certain task is done – you can just automate the whole process based on the prerequisites. In other words, if you want to change your Twitter profile whenever you change your Facebook profile, you can set up a trigger task through IFTTT. Hence the name – “if this, then that.”
There are countless other tasks you can automate, especially for E-commerce Business. The tool is easy to use, free, and has a lot of potential for eCommerce tasks.
