Feb 16 2021
Ecommerce has become an integral part of our daily lives - and at the latest with the Corona crisis, every retailer has at least once thought about starting out in e-commerce. But even a side project with e-commerce can be quite lucrative today.
Every e-commerce business has its own requirements and needs to be configured individually. However, the average e-commerce process can be roughly divided into these 6 steps:
These steps can all be automated and you can devote your time to other things - like your product development and marketing, that, in fact, with the right approach and good knowledge of marketing automation, can also be partly self-operating. Note that many of these steps involve sending emails to clients, and you must ensure that when automating email marketing and sending mass emails, verifying your email list is a must. Consider using a bulk email verification service for this task.
Of course, in order for customers to order anything from you at all, you need a website with an online store. There are great tools that already do a lot of the work for you: The top dog Shopify offers you almost everything your business heart desires, depending on the pricing model - but there are also great (and cheaper) alternatives. If you already have a Wordpress site, WooCommerce is the most popular plugin and offers you some options to build your store the way you want. Another alternative for e-commerce platforms is Gumroad. They are great for digital products especially for creators. And the good news: all of them got a native Zapier integration. Also, as most customers prefer a mobile-friendly approach, you can use an app or a digital catalog for orders. If your budget is not tight, you can hire iOS developers or Android ones for this. You might also be able to get involved in an existing ecommerce store through franchise local or other similar means.
Once you receive an order, you should process the data in a structured way. That can happen in the e-commerce platforms themselves, but it can also make sense to store your customer data in an additional CRM like Hubspot.
With Zapier or Power BI developers, you can create a Zap that stores your customer data from your ecommerce store in your CRM if there is no native connection. Incorporating a tool like Dolphin Anty can help manage and secure multiple accounts during data processing, ensuring that sensitive information is handled efficiently and securely across various platforms
Next, you should log the product you ordered. This happens either directly in your e-commerce tool, or you tie in another payment processor like Stripe. In Stripe you can create your different products as well as the tax amount applicable to your country. Stripe is a good payment provider for SaaS solutions or subscriptions.
If you sell a subscription, there are special NoCode tools for this as well. Memberstack and Memberspace are certainly the most popular, but Outseta is also worth a look. Outseta is priced a lot cheaper than Memberstack and also offers a whole CRM including campaign management.
After the order data has been successfully processed, your customer should receive a confirmation email about the order received. This is also offered by many platforms, but you can of course also run the whole thing through your CRM / newsletter tool like Mailerlite, Active Campaign, Mail Mint, or Cleverreach. You can also easily connect them via Zapier.
If your product is a digital one like subscriptions, e-books or access to a tutorial, you can also send the product or the access data to the purchased account directly with the confirmation email. Then your customer can directly access the product. If you sell a physical product, of course, your logistics providers must also be informed here. You’ll also need to ensure you’ve got the right packaging, and using specialists like Ozpack is the best way to make that happen.
Services like ShipStation aim to take care of the whole dispatch process for you, and integration with Zapier.
After you have processed the order data, you should create an invoice. Most e-commerce platforms or payment providers offer this service, but the invoices are often insufficient, especially for the European market. Invoice templates are crucial for creating professional invoices. Here FastBill is a great alternative, with which you can also do the complete accounting. Invoices can be customized with everything you need - and can be sent automatically via Zapier. Other apps to check out include Freshbooks & InvoiceNinja
After these steps, your ordering process is usually complete. However, two points are still essential for any e-commerce process. Both are aimed at providing the best experience for your customers.
Assuming you've looked after your customer post-sale, within a period of a few days you should send your customers an email to ask for a review of your product. On the one hand, this increases the engagement, on the other hand, it gives you insights into how your customers like the product and what you can possibly improve. And - good reviews polish up your store enormously ;)
You can send review emails via the common CRMs by including a link in it, which then in turn processes the review and saves it for example in a Google Sheet or Airtable, from where you can then again save good reviews as testimonial on your site. All automated of course ;)
Choosing the type of testimonial is where it gets a bit tricky. Rather than using a photo and some texts, you can explore alternative formats to make your testimonials more impactful. If your firm was hired to make custom packaging boxes or another visually focused product, for example, consider using a video testimonial recording platform (that you can send to your customer as a link), as they have a unique ability to capture the genuine emotions and enthusiasm of satisfied customers, making them more compelling and engaging than static images or text.
However, video reviews can take a lot of time, and if your customer doesn’t want to show their face, then this can be an issue. So, you can also get reviews from them in a simple way, getting 5-star reviews on the product. To create a good review for your product, you can take help from Paraphraser an online tool that can help you write catchy and attention-grabbing product reviews. Just paste your simple review in the tool, and let the magic happens! Additionally, you can refine the results using an AI humanizer to ensure they sound natural and human-like.
Another important point in your customer journey is customer support. In e-commerce, a live chat or AI-powered knowledge base integrated directly on your site is particularly suitable for this. There, customers can ask questions and self-serve themselves also you can help them directly. There are many great tools on the market, for example Userlike, Landbot.io or Intercom. If you have a small business, it makes sense to push new messages in your live chat directly to your messaging tool like Slack or Microsoft Teams via Zapier - so you can get all the messages right away and respond directly.
If you need help setting up automations for your e-commerce store, feel free to contact us!
And if you want to know which automations can boost your sales process, take a look at this article.
Another helpful step to optimize order processing in your store is auto-completing orders. Many times, orders do not require manual approval, and as soon as payment is received, the order can be moved to the completion stage.
E.g., for digital downloads, the orders are delivered instantaneously after payment, and so there is no need to keep your customers waiting. Furthermore, with a huge influx of orders from across the globe, it can get very hard to check each order one by one and change the status of completed orders yourself.
Therefore, to save yourself from the trouble, you should consider a system that autocompletes orders for you. One way to do so is by using Auto Complete order for wooCommerce extension.
This extension allows you to move your orders to completed status based on various conditions like order duration, product in the cart, user roles, etc. You can choose the conditions, and once these conditions are fulfilled, the order will automatically be marked as complete, optimizing your order management!
This post was written by Lilith Brockhaus
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