When most people open up an eCommerce business, process automation is the furthest thought from their minds.  Their immediate focus is customer acquisition and generating orders, so the business can grow and be profitable.  But then as the company grows and becomes more successful, they find themselves enveloped in thousands of repetitive tasks.  Because they haven’t automated any of their business processes, every task has to be done manually, they find themselves most of the time-fighting fires instead of spending their energy on growing the business.

Business Process Automation allows the business to automate these time-consuming, repetitive, manual tasks and create a process or procedure that does that task with minimal or no human intervention.  The big benefit of process automation is the efficiency it provides your business.  Instead of you and your employees having to do these tasks, you let automation take over and then focus your energies on higher-value tasks for the business, such as marketing and sales.

A key ingredient to building business process automation is having internal systems that share data.  Having your store connected to your CRM allows for the free flow of data both upstream and downstream.  Having this connection allows the business to start creating pre-defined workflow rules to automate repetitive tasks.  As well, it can be used to respond to conditions on the website based on user action. 

So where to start? One way to accelerate the sharing of data is by using integration software.  This middleware software is designed specifically for the integration of two different systems.  It lets the business create data flows through an intuitive graphical user interface.  Once this data bridge is in place, you can then start looking at all the different activities that can be automated.  A short list of these activities includes:

• Sales Process Automation
• Real-time product pricing and inventory updates
• Activate and unpublish promotions, rebates, discounts, etc.
• Customer Segmentation for marketing engagement and retention
• Implement fraud Prevention strategies
• Automate marketing and Advertising tasks
• Update design changes and web development
• Publish fulfillment and shipping updates
• 
  

Once you have this integration built, and you have the automation rules in place, it allows you to improve the customer experience, run your business more efficiently, and grow your business faster.  Time is your most valuable resource, and being able to leverage automation gives you the freedom to focus on the things that matter most.  More importantly, this gives your eCommerce business a huge competitive edge.  Based on current analysis, only 16% of eCommerce companies have fully functional integrations with their CRM.  Having that integration and automation in place puts your company in the fast lane.  It will allow you to tack faster to market changes and implement strategies to keep you one step ahead of the competition.