7 Tasks Your eCommerce Business Should Automate Now

For most people who are running any type of online business, a major goal is to be scaleable and to grow their business without adding to their workload. The dream is often to live the flexible life of the digital nomad, the person who is able to make a reasonable living by working in their own time and traveling wherever and whenever they please.

A major component of meeting this wish is how well you build systems to either completely automate tasks, or to simplify them and make them easily replicable. Anything that is systemised and documented is able to be passed onto someone else to deal with, allowing you more freedom as the business owner.

That being said, here are some tasks your eCommerce business should be automating now.

1. Tax Calculations and Compliance

Of course we had to start with this, because it's one of the biggest headaches online sellers face. Especially if you're selling across borders!

Growing your business at home and abroad is exciting, but it also means more complicated tax compliance issues – especially as there are more and more countries with internet tax on online sales. Whether it’s VAT, GST, or US sales tax, you might be liable for collecting and remitting tax in new places.

If that’s the case, then you need to know the local tax rates in other states and foreign countries. Some countries have tax thresholds, so you need to keep track of how much you’ve sold there. Some countries don’t want you to collect tax on B2B sales, so you need to check which buyers are tax-registered businesses. And on top of all this, you need to collect two pieces of data that confirm your customer’s location and send tax-compliant receipts!

This is as stressful and tedious as it sounds, but there’s tax compliance software like Quaderno that will automate much of the process for you. By automating the process, you can remain focused on growing your business.

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2. Inventory Management

Managing inventory and ensuring that you have stock available for purchase is a big job if you haven’t put good systems in place. Ideally, you want to have your inventory updating and reordering automatically when stock reaches certain predetermined levels.

There are a number of inventory management systems available for eCommerce stores, so here are a few things to look for when choosing one:

• Do you sell across multiple channels? Many eCommerce store owners sell in more than one place to increase exposure and sales, but are using the same pile of inventory to stock each. In this case, you need an inventory management system which will sync across your various channels.
• You want synchronisation to occur automatically and in real time.
• Integration across different warehouses if you use more than one for fulfillment.
• Consolidated view of inventory sold in each store.

Software such as Saleswarp, Stitchlabs, Veeqo or Finale Inventory are good options for inventory management across multiple channels.

Dropshipping

Dropshipping tends to involve much smaller margins on products as they are sent to customers directly by the vendor or vendor’s agent and the seller isn’t required to purchase inventory first. However, if you have enough traffic coming through, it’s a great way for the digital entrepreneur to be more hands-off.

For dropshipping of hard-copy versions of information products, vendors like Kunaki are set up to create retail-quality products from recordings or designs that you provide to their websites. Products are all made-to-order so there is no warehousing required.

3. Payments

The aim is that you should never have to pick up the phone and talk to a customer or manually do any work to accept payments in your business. There are a number of different payment gateways available to help you automate the payment process, so here are some considerations before picking them:

• Does the gateway operate in the country/ies where you want to sell? Sometimes you may need to offer more than one to accomplish this.
• Is it easy for your customers to use?
• Do you want a payment gateway, merchant account, or all-in-one payment system?
• What are you looking for in fees and contract terms?
• Does the payment gateway integrate easily with your website?
• Are you a “high risk” business? Some industries, such as gambling, diet, travel and adult content are considered high risk, which means some payment options won’t want to work with you. In this instance, you will need a specialised provider who deals with high risk industries.
• Does the payment gateway support preferred payment methods of your customers? For example, some are limited as to which types of credit card they will accept.

Some popular options for payment gateways include Paypal, Stripe, Braintree, and Paymill.

If you do need to use multiple platforms and want a centralized way of looking at your payment streams, Quaderno integrates with several payment streams and gives you an overview in one place.

If you need tax calculations at checkout, such as for VAT payable in the EU, that is another thing you want to make sure your checkout process can automate. Again, this is something Quaderno takes care of with automatic calculation of appropriate VAT and issuing of invoices.

4. Customer Service

Sometimes people are reluctant to talk about automation in customer service – it can bring up negative experiences with impersonal phone menus and inappropriate canned responses. However, automation or semi-automation through having processes in place can be good for the business if done right. An example of a new automation technology is Lyro, a conversational AI chatbot built for small and medium businesses. The benefit to using an AI chatbot would be to save not only time with training, meetings, digital onboarding, etc., but you'd also save quite a bit of money on hiring costs.

Your reputation can be on the line with every customer service experience your customers have, so if you don’t have the manpower to keep up timely service in person, automated solutions can have a positive impact by providing customers with quick responses to questions.

Online customer service providers tend to run on some version of a monthly subscription model and have tiered rates depending on the level of service you require. They largely work by operating a help ticket system where an actual person has to get back to your customer when they submit a ticket.

Your role is to provide the support desk with as much information as you can and answers to FAQs so that hopefully they are able to provide an immediate answer. At the very least, if they need to clarify something, they will still get back to your customer quickly and explain that, while their ticket has been received and acknowledged, they will need to get back to them with an answer later.

“Live chat” is a feature available with many of these online support desks and can also help to provide a better customer experience. For eCommerce businesses, live chat can be a powerful tool in the shopping cart so that customers who are unsure can ask their questions. This can help trim back cart abandonment rates. Popular solutions include Help Scout, Zendesk, and Groove.

You can also automate nearly every other element of customer interactions using a tool like Zapier or one of the Zapier alternatives.

FAQs

Having FAQs set up on your website is a good way to reduce the need for customers to contact you with questions. It’s a simple solution to a common problem and is easy to set up. You can create these manually yourself, or use a tool which will help customers to sort and suggest FAQs. For WordPress websites, plugins such as Instant Q & A or Templatic do the job well.

5. Fulfillment

Order fulfillment is another aspect of eCommerce businesses that can take up huge amounts of time if you don’t have an automated solution in place. You don’t really want to be warehousing, picking, packing, and shipping orders yourself, so a fulfillment house is a great solution to automate the process. Some fulfillment houses are also able to provide you with an all-in-one solution which includes inventory management as we discussed in the first section.

What should you consider when looking for a fulfillment solution? Here are some thoughts:

• Location of their warehouse/s. You will need to pay for inventory to be shipped to them, so the closer the warehouse to your supplier location, the cheaper your shipping costs.
• Their charges – it will always cost you more to use a more convenient solution. (Though fulfillment houses tend to be able to get better shipping rates because of their bulk requirements).
• Level of service – for example, will they put your branding on packages? Do they offer a returns service?
• Do they integrate with your eCommerce platform so that the entire process is automated from when a customer orders?

The more hands-off a solution will be, the better it is for freeing up your time, but you will need to balance that with your required margins.

6. Accounting and Bookkeeping

It’s a common theme among business owners that many simply hate having to keep up with different accounting and bookkeeping tasks. Make life easier for yourself by automating everything you can in the accounting field, and you will also make your accountant’s life easier at tax time.

There are a number of accounting systems available now, but ideally you want one that seamlessly integrates with your payment systems and business bank accounts. This way it will automatically pull in data on your revenue and expenses and provide you with good reporting. Xero and Quickbooks are popular options for accounting tools. Quaderno has automatic accounting functions and integrates with tools such as Xero to keep your finances and billing in order.

If you want to automate your bookkeeping, we recommend Bench.co as the best option for small businesses. As you may know, at Quaderno we don't offer tax filing services, we just provide you with reports and summaries containing all the information you need for filing. You can count on the experts at Bench to file your taxes for you as well!

7. Refunds and Returns

Every business will need to process returns and refunds at some point, and this will be a lot less time-consuming if you have a process in place. First up, you should have a documented procedure so that any customer service staff know what to do and hopefully don’t need to contact you for approval.

Secondly, have a well-crafted return policy that is clearly documented and easy for your customers to find. Studies show that customers look for and can be reassured by a clear policy on returns. This can also save additional queries coming through to customer service.

Lastly, look for an automated returns system. Shopify’s Returns Manager is one example of a system which allows customers to request returns online, but as mentioned earlier, some fulfillment houses will provide returns management as part of their services. Quaderno also has an option for processing refunds.

If you want to create an eCommerce business that will allow you to have time, freedom, and a lifestyle of your choosing, automating tasks that can be time consuming is the way to go.

There are more tasks you can automate, but the seven mentioned – tax compliance, inventory management, payments, customer service, fulfillment, accounting and bookkeeping, and returns – are standard business operations which you will find in most eCommerce businesses.