When it comes to eCommerce, automation is essential. After every sale, your store should:
- Accurately reflect your current stock.
- Send the customer an invoice and delivery information.
- Add new income to your accounting program.
An automated system ensures that, among other things, all of the above will happen automatically, without any action on your part. Automating eCommerce is all about identifying the processes to be optimized and then selecting the right applications to perform them.
In this article, we'll tell you what apps are available to improve your eCommerce business.
Usually eCommerce business is based on these components:
- Sales and Marketing
- Inventory
- Accounting
- Performance
- Optimizing
We've also compiled all of the article information in a convenient video format!
SALES AND MARKETING
Creating an online store from scratch with your own developers and designers will take a long time and be costly. An effective alternative is to use platforms designed to get your store up and running as quickly as possible. These platforms usually come with a variety of themes that you can choose from and offer integration with major payment gateways.
Recommended Appendix: Zoho Commerce
You can create, design and build your online store the way you want without writing a single line of code. Zoho Commerce is already integrated with Zoho Books and Zoho Inventory to maintain inventory and keep track of incoming payments and expenses. You can also send emails to customers to remind them when they've left items in their cart. And Zoho Commerce is integrated with leading payment gateways, so you can easily start accepting payments.
INVENTORY
It is very important that your store is not overstocked or understocked. When your inventory is not selling, you are faced with a scenario in which products are just sitting on the shelves and you have no budget left for additional marketing. On the other hand, if you don't have enough product when there is high demand, you run the risk of losing sales and potential loyal customers.
While it's best to have your own eCommerce store, you should also leverage your audience on existing marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy. Therefore, if you sell products through multiple channels, you need to know the inventory status of each channel.
From time to time, customers return merchandise. The need to manually reimburse or credit the customer and then return the item to the warehouse or dispose of it if it is damaged can be a problem.
Recommended application: Zoho Inventory
One way that Zoho Inventory helps you manage your inventory is by giving you the ability to set a reorder point for each of your items. Based on past sales and current trends, you can select a safe reorder point for items where Zoho Inventory will automatically place an order with suppliers when inventory reaches that level. This ensures that you're not hoarding items that aren't selling, and that you have an ample supply of items that are in demand.
When a customer returns an item, you can easily create a sales return from a sales order and either give the customer credits or refund the amount. You can also mark the item as damaged if it should not be returned to your store.
And you can manage inventory across multiple channels because Zoho Inventory easily integrates with Amazon, Etsy, Shopify, WooCommerce and more. Zoho Inventory 's powerful reports tell you how your products are performing in each channel.
ACCOUNTING
Accounting software tracks the comings and goings of money from your business, so you know exactly where you are financially, at any given time. You need to account for sales revenue, track expenses, bill and comply with tax regulations.
Recommended application: Zoho Books
Zoho Books is ideal for your eCommerce business as it is tightly integrated with major payment gateways such as Stripe, Authorize.Net, PayPal and Forte. You can create invoices, generate invoices, issue purchase orders to suppliers and convert them into invoices when you receive the goods. With Zoho Books, you can create profit and loss statements, balance sheets and cash flow statements for your business at any time.
PERFORMANCE
Project Management
You have to redesign your website, come up with a marketing campaign, or even launch a new product. These are all big projects with a lot of tasks. You have to know exactly where what is, what needs to be done, who will do it, and how long it will take. A project management app lets you do all of this.
Recommended Appendix: Zoho Projects
Zoho Projects allows you to manage projects of any size. The comprehensive task management module allows you to break down any large project into smaller manageable parts. You can also add milestones, get a view of tasks by kanban, and create public and private chats for contextual discussions. You'll find all your work-related information in one place, neatly organized by task.
Team communication
While task-related discussions take place inside the project management application, you'll need a way to communicate quickly with colleagues privately. While it's best to keep in touch in one dedicated portal - such as the Project Management Portal for effective collaboration - many times you need ad hoc collaboration. You'll need to quickly create a group to complete that urgent task or share a document with a teammate.
Recommended Appendix: Zoho Cliq
You can create groups and channels to discuss specific topics, as well as make audio and video calls.
File Management
Text documents and spreadsheets are not the only files you need to run an e-commerce business. An online store requires product images, videos, PDF files, and more. All of these files need to be available to the right people so that collaboration goes smoothly.
Recommended Appendix: Zoho WorkDrive
The Zoho WorkDrive approach to folders ensures that files are properly organized and stored in designated group folders. Each group folder is created based on a project, task, team, or department. Only authorized participants will be able to read, write or comment on files, and all members of the group folder will be notified of changes made to any of the files in that folder.
Business email
While you shouldn't use email for internal communication, you certainly need email for external communication. You will also need it for email marketing and outreach. If you use the right tools for the right purposes, your inbox will never overwhelm you.
Recommended Appendix: Zoho Mail
Zoho Mail is an email solution built specifically for business. Collaboration is built right into Zoho Mail. You can review your emails before you send them. You can share your emails with colleagues rather than forwarding them. And collaboration can happen through comments at the top of the email. It's a simple but effective alternative to the endless chains of replies that inevitably occur in email.
OPTIMIZATION
CRM gives eCommerce entrepreneurs insight into the shopping habits of their customers. Using information from your eCommerce site and other sources, the CRM software creates a comprehensive view of your customers, their buying habits and their online behavior.
In addition to attracting new leads, CRM allows you to improve the customer experience for existing customers and maximize the use of your company's resources by improving customer service and streamlining processes. CRM can keep you informed about the number of customer inquiries that need attention and even direct those inquiries to the appropriate agencies.
Recommended application: Zoho SRM
Zoho CRM helps you track visits to your website and social media pages to identify new leads. From there, you can manage conversions with follow-up emails and even create a centralized customer list that can be accessed from anywhere.
You can also create integrated solutions, useful web applications and mobile apps using the platform Zoho CRM .
To get more out of Zoho CRM, we recommend using integrations with Shopify and BigCommerce, which are discussed below.
Extension Shopify for Zoho CRM- is an easy-to-use extension for syncing orders from multiple Shopify stores to your CRM account. This extension will help you efficiently transfer your order list and all related data from Shopify to your CRM-system. Extension supports multiple stores simultaneously, so you'll never miss an order. Frequent automatic synchronization with your online store eliminates the need for constant manual updates. The extension supports tag synchronization and recognizes API limitations of your CRM-system.
Key Features:
- A simple installation process that can get your extension up and running in less than 10 minutes.
- The ability to sync multiple stores simultaneously without worrying about limitations API. There is support for synchronization by tags.
- Ability to track the progress of orders with a history of synchronization with the stores Shopify.
- Technical support for any questions or problems.
Price: $49 a month, or $549 if you pay all at once for a year (6% discount).
BigCommerce for Zoho CRM - is an easy-to-use action to synchronize orders from BigCommerce online store. This application allows you to transfer the list of orders with all their details from BigCommerce to your CRM-system. There are no unnecessary additional settings, and the translation takes little time and effort, so you can process orders conveniently. Extension supports multiple stores simultaneously, so you won't miss any orders. Frequent automatic synchronization with the online store will also save you from constant manual updates.
Key Features:
- Transfer sales orders, customers and products to your CRM.
- Support multiple stores.
- Track your progress with synchronization history logs.
- Sending reminders about missed orders.
Price: $29 a month, or $299 if you pay at once for a year (14% discount).
Website Optimization
Recommended application: Zoho PageSense
PageSense is a conversion optimization and personalization platform that helps you optimize your website, personalize pages to meet the needs of your target audience, and increase your overall conversion rate. With features like funnel analysis, form analysis, heatmap, session recording, A/B testing and personalization, you can understand exactly what's working on your website, what's causing bounce rates, and optimize it to increase conversions.
CUSTOMER SERVICE
Customer support is important both before and after a purchase. While people may be interested in your product, they may want to know if it will actually be useful for their specific requirements. And after the purchase, customers may need advice on how to use the product effectively, or they may have questions about certain features. There will be times when customers ask for refunds or replacements.
Now imagine if all of these different types of customer questions fell into the same email account. When there are multiple people involved in customer support, sharing a traditional email account is not an ideal solution. That's why you need a customer support app. That way, all of your teammates can log into their account and access every customer question. They can decide who answers which questions by assigning tickets to themselves or others.
Another reason to use help desk software is that not all customers contact you by email. Some will contact through social media and use forms built into your website. So it's easy to get confused by customer questions coming in from different channels. However, customer service brings everything together in one place where any member of your team can respond.
Recommended Appendix: Zoho Desk
With Zoho Desk, you get it all. Advanced claims processing, a comprehensive agent productivity system including time tracking and collaboration, and full integration with Facebook and Twitter, so you can answer questions across multiple platforms right from your desk.
As helpful as a Web site can be, nothing beats talking to a real person to get help. In fact, 63% of customers are more likely to return to a website that offers online chat. There's no better way to start a relationship with customers than by helping them exactly when they need it.
Zoho Desk also has a built-in chat room that offers easy conversion of live chats into tickets, ready answers to frequently asked questions, and customer satisfaction ratings for each chat room.
Bottom line: If you automate your eCommerce business with the right set of applications, your sales, inventory and accounting will run smoothly with little or no manual intervention. You'll have robust structures for marketing and support, as well as everything you need for collaboration and project management.
