Ecommerce store owners are required to wear a lot of different hats. Even if you have a talented team around you (and, at least starting out, a lot of store owners don’t), managing all of the responsibilities required to run a successful online store can still be more than a full-time job.
Thankfully, technology has come to the rescue. With the help of ecommerce automation software, store owners can streamline a wide variety of routine tasks, freeing them up to spend more time focusing on growing their business.
To help you unlock the powers of ecommerce automation, let’s take a look at what ecommerce automation is, some of the types of automation tools available, and how companies selling precious metals online can use an automated solution like nFusion Solutions to supercharge their businesses.
What is Ecommerce Automation?
Before we dive into the tools and best practices for leveraging ecommerce automation, it’s probably a good idea to first define what ecommerce automation is. It’s a process that can take a lot of different forms, but the general purpose of ecommerce automation software is to automate the routine, time-consuming tasks that are essential for running an online business.
This can include things like setting up, launching, and managing marketing campaigns, order fulfillment and inventory management, adjusting product pricing, and a myriad of other tasks. By using software to automate these tasks as much as possible, companies can cut costs and improve efficiency while at the same time reducing the potential for human error.
The Numerous Roles of Automation in Ecommerce
If you can dream it, you can automate it! While that might be just a bit of an exaggeration, the fact still remains that there is a wide range of solutions on the market designed to automate an equally wide range of ecommerce processes.
Here’s a breakdown of the different roles automation currently plays in ecommerce and various processes automation tools help streamline:
Marketing
Arguably the most well-known use of automation in ecommerce is ecommerce marketing automation. Along with streamlining the process of setting up and managing marketing campaigns, the biggest benefit of automated ecommerce marketing tools is that they allow you to deliver marketing messages that are timely and personalized.
For example, automated marketing software lets you do things like send real-time product recommendations via live chat based on a customer’s browsing history, send automated reminders to customers who have abandoned their cart, and execute a limitless range of other personalized marketing strategies that simply aren’t feasible using manual methods alone.
This timely, data-driven, and personalized approach to ecommerce marketing that automated marketing tools unlock enables companies selling precious metals to dramatically increase their conversion rates and turn more leads into paying customers.
Inventory Management
Maintaining optimum inventory levels is a key priority for any online store that cares about customer satisfaction; shipping delays due to back-ordered items, after all, isn’t exactly a recipe for happy customers.
For companies with large catalogs and large amounts of sales, though, keeping track of inventory levels can be challenging. Thankfully, it’s a process that’s a whole lot less challenging when you leverage automation.
Automated inventory management tools allow you to track stock levels in real-time, forecast demand, and automate reorder processes. This helps save a lot of time while also reducing the likelihood of inventory management issues such as stockouts and duplicate reorders.
Order Processing and Fulfillment
When customers are purchasing high-value items like precious metals, the time between when an order is placed and when it arrives at their doorstep can often be nerve-wracking. To maintain customer trust and satisfaction, it’s essential to ensure an order fulfillment process that is both efficient and transparent.
Automation helps with this by automating order processing, picking, packing, and shipping tasks for more reliable and efficient order fulfillment. It ensures that orders are delivered swiftly and—even more importantly when it comes to customer satisfaction—correctly.
It’s already a recurring theme at this point, but using automation tools to streamline order processing and fulfillment can save you and your team a lot of time as well. For large ecommerce operations, fulfilling orders is one of the most time and resource-intensive tasks there is. Any opportunity you have to make this process more efficient is one worth capitalizing on.
Customer Service and Support
Speaking of customer trust and satisfaction, offering excellent customer support services is another major key to keeping your customers satisfied and loyal. In fact, it’s arguably an even bigger key for companies selling precious metals than it is for other companies; not only are your customers purchasing high-value items, but there also isn’t a lot of room for innovation when it comes to the products themselves (gold and silver haven’t changed all that much over the years). This means that things like branding and the quality of your support services are especially important when it comes to setting your company apart from the competition.
With that said, there are numerous ways that ecommerce companies can leverage automation to level up their customer support services. Things like chatbots for instant assistance, automated responses to common queries, and AI-powered helpdesk systems capable of routing more complex issues to the appropriate human agents can all improve the quality and efficiency of your support services.
This gives customers shelling out large amounts of money for precious metals invaluable peace of mind and a powerful reason to keep doing business with your company.
Security and Fraud Prevention
Running an online store requires you to collect sensitive information like credit card data and personal info from your customers. Not only is protecting this data from prying eyes a major key to winning customer trust, but it’s also, in many cases, a regulatory requirement.
Automation tools can enhance your store’s security measures by implementing things like multi-factor authentication, fraud detection algorithms, and real-time transaction monitoring. This helps you mitigate risks, maintain compliance with regulations regarding customer data, and give your customers the peace of mind they need to feel comfortable purchasing products from your company.
Dynamic Pricing Strategies
For some ecommerce stores, product pricing is relatively static and doesn’t require a lot of adjustments. For companies selling precious metals, though, this isn’t the case. In the precious metal industry, product pricing is entirely dependent on what the market is doing—and, every minute of the day, the market is constantly changing.
Updating product pricing manually to keep up with market trends just isn’t feasible for most companies; those that try usually tend to end up permanently behind the curve. With the right automation tools, however, you can automatically adjust the price of your products in real-time to match what the precious metals market is doing.
This allows you to execute the kind of dynamic pricing strategies that are critical for precious metals companies (without having to break your back in the process). While this may not be true for every ecommerce company, a tool for automated dynamic pricing is one of the most essential automation solutions that a company selling precious metals can implement.
The Best Automation Ecommerce Tools for Companies Selling Precious Metals
Now that we’ve looked at the various roles that automation can play in ecommerce, let’s go over some of the top tools for each of those different roles. If you would like to streamline your operations, cut expenses, and reduce the likelihood of costly errors, here are the best ecommerce automation tools to adopt:
1. Marketing: Klaviyo
Klaviyo is one of the most popular marketing automation platforms available, and it allows you to create automated, personalized email and SMS marketing campaigns. Klaviyo works by automatically analyzing customer data in order to deliver marketing messages that are both timely and personalized. The platform lets you create a broad range of automated marketing campaigns and custom rules for triggering those campaigns. To help you save even more time, Klaviyo offers an impressive library of templates and pre-built workflows so you don’t have to build your marketing campaigns from scratch.
Best of all, Klaviyo features an intuitive and easy-to-use user interface that is specifically designed for ecommerce and non-technical users. If you’re looking for a powerful marketing automation platform that is ready to go right out of the box, you’re sure to find a lot to like about Klaviyo!
2. Inventory Management: QuickBooks Commerce
QuickBooks Commerce (formerly known as TradeGecko) is an all-in-one inventory management platform that provides real-time tracking, demand forecasting, and automated reorder management. It’s a solution that integrates seamlessly with all major ecommerce platforms—including Shopify and WooCommerce—so that you can get started automating inventory management in just a few clicks.
While there are other automated inventory management solutions on the market, QuickBooks Commerce is one of the most comprehensive. With QuickBooks Commerce, you can track your stock levels in real-time across multiple sales channels and warehouses, which ensures you always have an accurate view of your inventory. The platform also leverages historical sales data to predict future demand and reorder products automatically so that you always have optimum inventory levels.
3. Order Processing and Fulfillment: ShipStation
ShipStation is a leading order management and shipping software designed to simplify the process of order fulfillment. For starters, ShipStation consolidates all of your orders from across various sales channels into a single interface. This centralization makes for a more efficient fulfillment process and reduces the chance of missed orders and other errors.
Once an order has been placed, ShipStation automates key tasks such as label printing, packing slips, and shipment tracking. It also gives you access to discounted rates from shipping carriers, and lets you create a custom tracking portal so that customers can easily track the location and status of their orders.
4. Customer Service and Support: Zendesk
ZenDesk has been one of the most popular customer support platforms ever since it launched in 2007, and there are several reasons why. For one, Zendesk offers an interface that’s intuitive and user-friendly. It also offers a lot of powerful features to help you streamline customer service tasks while at the same time improving the quality of your support services.
Automated ticket management, chatbots, and a comprehensive helpdesk system are the platform’s three primary offerings. Zendesk’s AI-driven chatbots can handle common customer inquiries instantly, providing quick resolutions and freeing up your support team to focus on more complex issues. The platform’s automated ticker management system, meanwhile, allows you to create workflows that route tickets to the appropriate agents based on predefined criteria, ensuring that every ticket is directed to the agent who is best capable of handling the problem.
5. Security and Fraud Prevention: Signafyd
Signifyd is a leading fraud prevention platform that leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to protect e-commerce businesses from fraudulent activities. By automatically analyzing a wide range of data points—like transaction patterns and behavioral signals—Signifyd is able to identify and block potential instances of fraud in real-time.
Signifyd’s advanced algorithms provide accurate risk assessments, allowing you to approve legitimate orders with confidence while flagging potentially fraudulent ones for further review. The platform also offers a chargeback guarantee, covering the cost of fraudulent chargebacks if any slip through so that you can have complete peace of mind when selling high-value products such as precious metals.
6. Dynamic Pricing Strategies: nFusion Solutions
nFusion Solutions is a gold price API that’s designed specifically for companies selling precious metals online. By automatically monitoring marketing trends in real-time and adjusting product pricing accordingly, nFusion Solutions ensures that you are always selling your precious metal products at the optimum price based on what the market is doing at the exact moment a customer places their order.
Along with enabling you to effortlessly execute dynamic pricing strategies, nFusion Solutions also offers numerous other helpful features for selling gold online, including market movement price alerts, spot price synchronization, interactive charting, a centralized product pricing dashboard, and more.
If there’s one automation tool that every ecommerce company selling precious metals needs, it’s a solution for automated product pricing—and there’s no better option on the market than nFusion Solutions!
Conclusion
Ecommerce automation can be a lifesaver for companies that are overwhelmed by all of the tasks that go into running a successful online store. If you would like to get started selling precious metals online (or revamp your current operation), finding ways to leverage automation for improved efficiency and accuracy is a great place to start.
At nFusion Solutions, we are committed to helping companies that sell precious metals online price their products in a way that’s optimized for maximum profits. To learn more about our industry-leading gold price API, be sure to contact us today!
