An online store with a predefined package of options opens a sea of opportunities in front of you. Needless to say the more routine tasks you get automated, the more time you release for business management to yourself.
So, what can be automated? Let’s figure it out!
These are some areas where you can focus your online shop automation efforts:
Search
The best place to start with automation is the search. With a high-rank level, you get more traffic. Leaving the SEO issues to machines you are safe against typos.
Proper organization and structuring of metadata and markup increase searchability and lead more candidate buyers to your store. You can fine-tune your digital shop performance using SEO Templates to optimize metadata for products, categories, pages, blog posts, and product images or apply JSON-LD for SEO functionality to benefit from rich snippets and increased searchability of your store, products or blog across the web. The work of these automatic helpers is invisible and background but there is no way to surpass competitors nowadays ignoring your rank in the search engine output.
Product Uploading and Management
Automation is of great help where the task involves routine operations not requiring your imagination and creativity but only repeating the same just like in the case of the inventory import to the store. If you are a toil ardent supporter, you still can keep on uploading them manually. But, what if their number is more than 1,000? XML & CSV Import can automate the product database uploading. Further updates in the catalogs will be synchronized with your store automatically. As an alternative, it is also possible to add products from another platform. Amazon Synchronization add-on gives CS-Cart users a unique opportunity to expand the business by integrating the products in the Amazon seller account and CS-Cart store. Our specialists can customize the add-on according to your business needs and guide you through the process of synchronization. In Sales & Social Proof add-on you can use a cron job to schedule updating the number of purchased products to show it to your customers and increase the sense of urgency.
What else can be automated there:
- integration with Facebook to upload products into Facebook shop by cron;
- recurrent orders;
- export of order details to a file to send them to another service;
- conversion of product option combinations into product variations;
- Synching two CS-Cart-based shops.
Payment
Finance is a sensitive issue. You might think it is better to leave it to yourself. You are almost right! However, computer-aided finance management combines the advantages of humans and machines to keep your business accurate and operating in real time. Consider an opportunity to set automatic recurrent invoices to charge for services provided on a repeated basis or splitting payments when it comes to income distribution among sellers. The Stripe Connect payment gateway is one of those solutions which enables automatically split payments to several vendors and save sensitive credit card information in Stripe. Stripe is only an example of how payment automation may be used. The Simtech Development company has got a huge experience in connecting payment systems to Multi-Vendor and CS-Cart stores and adding extra functionalities to them (think about automatic notifications sent to customers about product updates, for example) to make the process of payment management seamless and effective at the same time.
Customer shopping & browsing
Rewarding customers for their loyalty to your brand allows you to build strong customer relationships that last. By building strong customer relationships you build loyal fans who will promote your brand to their friends, spend more money than new customers and keep your brand in the business. Setting a loyalty program is the process requiring the implementation of strict algorithms for the correct reward calculation and distribution. Why not assign this job to a computer? The Loyalty Program is a great eCommerce automation tool for those looking to retain customers.
Don’t forget to analyze the outcome you got from your loyalty program. You can use behavioral analytics with Google Analytics to help gain insight into customer behavior. The Google Analytics Enhanced eCommerce add-on integrates your store with the Google eCommerce Analytics. This is a must-have extension for CS-Cart that allows you to measure the number of transactions and revenue that your website generates.
Closing
Of course, we addressed only a small part of automation opportunities. We will continue sharing our tips and solutions with you further in our blog! And you can contribute to this process and suggest your idea on what you want to have automatic in your e-shop.