Creativity and innovation have allowed hundreds of small businesses to thrive online. With the right mindset, they too can now enjoy the same luxuries as more established e-commerce ventures. This includes automating stores in WooCommerce for greater efficiency.
For SMEs, this isn’t just a question of convenience and clocking out early. A smaller budget often means less staff to handle your more menial and repetitive tasks. But that doesn’t make balancing core responsibilities with stuff like marketing, site backups, or CRM any less difficult.
So, to make selling online more streamlined and free of fuss, automation is a solution that isn’t limited only to larger companies. But how does a small-scale e-commerce store approach this effectively?
Automation Through WooCommerce
WooCommerce does a lot more than provide the basic materials to build a virtual storefront. With it, you can tailor your shop to perfection. This includes being able to set up certain important, but tedious, tasks to be automated.
Several WooCommerce tools let you do this. Some are dedicated entirely to automation while others work that feature into a larger, more focused e-commerce strategy. But before we get into those, automation isn’t something to dive straight in if you’re a novice.
Sure it’s helpful, but only if you do it right. So, it’s worth understanding the basics of running an automated store.
Things To Consider
Know What To Automate
Automation in e-commerce is usually done to make a task more convenient more effective, or both. However, you need to understand which tasks would benefit from it and which won’t. Let’s take WooCommerce social media marketing automation as an example.
You can schedule notifications, ads, and DM messages if you’re sending too many followers at a time. However, for a post or a story, it’s best to take things head-on, even if you plan on using an AI-powered copywriter.
Choosing Tools
Many plugins offer automation capabilities, including those compatible with or hosted on WooCommerce. But before you burden your online store with them, take into account their value to your online store.
Steer clear of plugins that have poor compatibility or add friction to the task you’re trying to automate rather than eliminate it. Consult reviews and ratings to rule out any technical and security issues when downloading or using any automation software.
Long-Term Considerations
Automating stores isn’t a perk that lets businesses escape from responsibility. It is meant to help advance your business. Update your store regularly and test to ensure that your automated processes are running smoothly. As your business evolves, make sure that your online store can keep up.
What Can You Automate, And How?
Inventory Management
Keeping track of your stocks and products helps buyers fill up their carts and finish their purchases more quickly. Automated store inventory helps keep your books in order and your buyers satisfied without the need to keep an eye on them yourself.QuickBooks specializes in automating various financial and stock-related responsibilities. Thanks to its centralized, cloud-based inventory tracking, stores can keep their full range of goods in order with minimal stress.
Email Marketing
Tools like MailPoet make it easier to plan WooCommerce email automation for your campaign. You can set up custom templates and schedule them based on given intervals or customer actions.
Map out welcome emails, newsletters, notifications, alerts, and much more. It’s also useful as it helps with automated cart recovery emails and upsells, improving sales and conversions.
SEO
SEO is a continuous process that demands tireless keyword analysis and competitor research. But these are the things that store owners or a resident SEO expert should tackle head-on. How can you automate your pursuit of higher rankings?
Yoast SEO can take several important tasks off your hands. It can output insights that can help store websites improve copies for rich snippets. You can also plan meta tags and optimize XML sitemaps with this tool. So, you can satisfy Google’s crawling requirements without having to constantly dive into the little details by yourself.
Order Fulfillment
A few things fall under “order fulfilment”, like drop shipping, order processing, shipping rates, and more. WooCommerce offers a few built-in functionality to automate store fulfilment duties. Aside from those, you can use tools like ShipStation for more robust results.
Backups
The risk of outages or a security lapse make backups essential. But routine backups can become a chore to oversee. Even if they aren’t that frequent, they can be time consuming and hard to plan or look forward to. Luckily, automated store backups are super easy to ensure.
Backups are often at risk when a WordPress store must undergo a major update. To combat this, UpdraftPlus is a useful plugin for WooCommerce stores. It performs automatic backups ahead of pending updates, ensuring that your data and progress remain intact.
Advantages Of Automation
Eliminate Friction And Errors
Automated stores are less likely at risk of human error, as they enjoy a more streamlined mode-of-action. Plus, automation significantly speeds up tasks that may otherwise take time to complete, like managing inventory or sending stock email reminders.
Personalization
Product recommendations and marketing are important strategies for boosting sales. Automation fuels greater data collection and email marketing campaigns that can help create tailored shopping experiences.
Round-The-Clock Operations
Through automated store functions, buyers from any time zone can interact with an online business at their leisure. From customer support to order fulfilment, you can offer a more substantial customer experience while performing your own management duties at your convenience.
Conclusion
It doesn’t matter whether you’re sending out welcome emails or ensuring that your site backs up on time. Automating stores can help businesses save money, increase conversions, and eliminate inefficiency from every aspect of their venture. And thanks to WooCommerce, automation is a luxury that even growing businesses can make the most of.
