E-commerce has become an integral part of our everyday lives - and at the latest with the Corona crisis, every retailer has dealt with e-commerce at least once. But even a side project with e-commerce can be quite lucrative today.
The e-commerce process involves many different steps in which data is processed - and in a manual process, something can easily get lost. The good news is that you can automate most of these steps yourself with the right tools.
Every e-commerce business has its own requirements and must 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.
In order for customers to be able to order anything from you, you need a website with an online store. There are great tools that do a lot of the work for you: The top dog Shopify offers you almost everything your business heart desires, depending on the price 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 several options to build your store according to your wishes. Other alternatives worth checking out include Gumroad for artists and creators.
Once you have received an order, you should process the data in a structured way. This can happen in the e-commerce platforms themselves, but it can also make sense to store your customer data in an additional CRM such as Hubspot, Salesforce or Zoho.
With Make, you can build an automation that stores your customer data from your e-commerce store in your CRM if no native connection exists.
Next, you should log the ordered product. This can be done directly in your e-commerce tool, or you can connect to another payment provider like Stripe. In Stripe, you can create your different products and the tax amount applicable to your country. Stripe is particularly suitable as a payment provider for SaaS solutions or subscriptions.
If you sell a subscription, there are also special NoCode tools for this. Memberstack and Memberspace are certainly the most popular, but Outseta is also worth a look. Outseta is 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. Many platforms also offer this, but you can of course also run the whole thing via your CRM / newsletter tool such as Mailchimp, Active Campaign or Brevoe. You can also easily connect these via Integromat or Zapier.
If your product is a digital one, such as subscriptions or e-books, you can also send the product or the access data for the purchased account directly with the confirmation email. Then your customer can directly access the purchased product. If you sell a physical product, your logistics service provider must of course also be informed. How you can automate the process with external logistics centres and external deliverers would go too far here, but we will explain this in another article.
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. FastBill is a great alternative here, with which you can also do all your bookkeeping. Invoices can be wonderfully customised here with everything you need - and can be sent automatically with an Integromat connection.
After these steps, your ordering process is usually complete. However, two points are still essential for any e-commerce process. Both aim to provide the best experience for your customers.
On the one hand, you should send your customers a feedback email after a period of a few days so that they can rate your product. On the one hand, this increases engagement, on the other hand, it gives you insights into how your customers find the product and what you can possibly improve. And - good reviews polish up your shop enormously;)
Review emails you can send via the common CRMs by including a link in it, which then in turn processes the review and saves it to a Google Sheet or Airtable for example, from where you can then save good reviews as testimonials on your site again. All automated of course ;)
Another important point in your customer journey is customer support. In e-commerce, a live chat that is integrated directly on your website is particularly suitable for this. Customers who have questions can contact you there and you can help them directly. There are many great tools on the market, for example Userlike, Landbot or Intercom. If you have a small business, it makes sense to push new messages in your live chat directly into your messaging tool such as Slack or Microsoft Teams via Make or Zapier - so that you receive all messages directly and can answer them straight away.
If you need help setting up the automations for your e-commerce shop, feel free to contact us!
