Have you ever wondered if there was a market-ready artificial intelligence system to help with your eCommerce business? The modern world of e-commerce is set to undergo a huge change as booming advancements in RPA technology unfold. The best time for you to start learning how robotic process automation can benefit your e-commerce business is right now. Currently, not too many players in the e-commerce market are fully making use of robotic process automation technology.
Getting in early will keep you at the forefront of development as this amazing tech continues to grow. The e-commerce industry has always been a business that gives owners the ultimate freedom to work anywhere they please. The added effect of robotic process automation makes becoming an e-commerce seller even more enticing. Let’s take a look at the ways you can apply this artificially intelligent inspired technology to work for your benefit.
Automated Communications
A very important part of your e-commerce strategy will be the communications portion. Staying in constant contact with your customer base and prospective customers will help you improve your revenue. A great way our RPA can assist with this is by sending out targeted messages to visitors to your e-commerce store. This can manifest as specific promotions or offers that pop up for the user while engaged with your website. Making these automated communications specific to demographic traits like location, age and gender can further improve your conversions.
Geo-Targeted Content
Customers from different geographical regions will have different overall needs and pain points. Therefore, RPA can be used to automatically notify you when dealing with a customer from a specific region. This can take place in the form of an online chat, incoming email, incoming phone call or any other form of interaction. It can help you understand how to tailor your verbiage to their specific situation. Additionally, geo-target content can be automatically distributed by certain triggers. These triggers can include anything from a visit to your website, comment on social media or any other interaction a customer makes with you in the digital space.
Registering With New Vendors
Registering with new vendors on platforms like Shopify and others can be a time-consuming process. If your website takes the approach of selling hundreds of different categories of products, you want to have an automated system for on boarding those new vendors. RPA can be used to create a specific process that finds, registers and acquires new products for your e-commerce store. This can include anything from locating Chinese wholesalers of certain products, sending out bulk emails and even fine-tuning listing details.
Advanced Chatbots
Advanced chat boxes can be created with RPA. Giving your website the ability to funnel customers through your process and into checkout can be a real profitable benefit. It all starts with finding what your customer’s largest pain points are. Initiating automatic conversations and sending unprompted messages to website visitors can have a beautiful impact on your conversions. Sometimes, a preemptive offer can stimulate a desirable reaction. These processes can be designed, implemented and monitored using an RPA solution. The faster you leverage powerful tools like AI-based Chatbots, the more prepared for the future you’ll be.
Automated Customer Service
The dream of every e-commerce seller is to discover ways to make the customer service process more efficient. Using automated technology can massively improve your customer service performance. A great example would be an Amazon seller that sells a product and receives a review from a customer. That review can automatically trigger a customer service upsell offers. Many marketing automation platforms provide a similar service, however, the comprehensiveness of RPA makes it a better alternative.
Financial Reporting
Creating complicated financial reports is not a task that anyone says they love doing. However, this process can be automatically managed by a robotic process automation program. Assigning the task of exporting transactional data and converting it into a profit loss statement as an example, can be managed very easily by an RPA program. This is a concept that should be automatically included in every eCommerce business plan. Since financials are the bedrock of any operation, having those powerful reports at your fingertips will help you make more informed decisions in the future.
Inventory Resupplying
Resupplying your inventory can sometimes get the better of you. However, maintaining a watchful eye over your supply levels is the only way to prevent inventory mishaps. Having a program that automatically reviews your level of inventory and notifies you can prevent embarrassing shortages when you really need products. There are many e-commerce tools that work for sellers using Amazon and other platforms. However, if you maintain a standalone e-commerce website, it’s worth the investment to begin developing your own proprietary business processes to help you scale into the future.
Personalized Responses
When customers reach out to you for an inquiry, an order or for anything else, responding with a personalized message can boost your conversions. Having a system that automatically identifies your recurring customers, individuals with items in the cart and other details can be useful in communicating with those same customers. Using RPA to automatically identify customer information within your CRM and cross-reference it against who you are currently talking to can give you some incredible insights you’ll be able to leverage to close a deal, satisfy customers and overall improve customer retention.
Customer Outreach
If you have a database of customer information either in your CRM or in a basic Excel spreadsheet, it can be used to automate customer outreach. Having the proper software ready to utilize a customer's information it’s not so complicated. Automating those bulk emails to go out before Christmas time is just on the surface of what is actually possible. You can even take a proactive approach by engaging in automated advertising, automated content promotion and other organic digital marketing strategies that exist. Out of all the ways RPA can be used in your e-commerce platform, this is one of the most powerful. Since your business exists to make a profit, customer outreach should be at the core of your day-to-day activities. Let RPA help lead the way to enhanced growth.
Logistics Management
Automatic programs have been used in logistics management processes for many years now. However, the adoption of those same programs into the e-commerce industry is something that is currently new. This includes automating the entire sales chain by streamlining order notifications and connecting the entire organization on one simple easy to use platform operating in the cloud. By keeping everything extremely transparent and available for every member of your department to view, the logistics of getting products to your customers become less of a headache. Imagine a world where a customer places an order and the shipping label is already printed, ready to be applied and shipped. The possibilities are endless.
Data Entry
Robotic process automation was originally invented to manage extremely time-consuming data entry tasks. Over the years, it has evolved to serve many industries around the globe. e-commerce retailers also engage in data entry when copying and pasting product information. This also is a process that can be managed with 100% accuracy by a robotic process automation application. Why do you need to copy and paste information manually, enter product values into a spreadsheet or any other form of data entry that can be accomplished through the powers of RPA? With the added free time at your fingertips, you now can focus on more growth-related tasks that bring additional revenue.
Customer Registration & Verification
Sometimes you need to review customer orders, verify their legitimacy and manually process the request. While this number may not take too much time if you’re only doing it once or twice a month, the more manual customer registrations you do, the more time-consuming it will become. RPA can be developed to automatically perform the same job you would do, according to your parameters. Programming the software based on your needs allows you to focus on growth building activities and less time on admin work.
Product Listing
Your e-commerce website uses a stable platform for listing and displaying products. Why not have an automated process for uploading products, product information and product descriptions using an automated program. Whether you’re a specialty e-commerce retailer or a general store that sells everything, you can benefit from automatic product listing procedures. Platforms and distributors don’t always have automatic import and export processes set up. This is when robotic process automation can really come in handy. Giving you the ability to take product information from any distributor and automatically upload it to your website can serve as a powerful time-saving asset.
Emulate Human Action
When you think about it, RPA has the power to emulate most human actions you can take on a computer. That means that your creativity is the only limit to the powers of an RPA program. Learning how to work with RPA doesn’t sound like it would hurt your e-commerce empire in the slightest. If you don’t have the necessary time to learn how it all works, contracting with an RPA consultant is your next best option. With the power to emulate human action comes the lowered risk of mistakes that humans commonly make. Having everything managed by an AI-based system eliminates the risk for user error, while also streamlining your productivity.
Returns
Product returns are another avenue that can provide significant research work for e-commerce sellers. RPA can give you an unbiased, nonobjective return process that’s automated and simplified. Customer return requests can be evaluated by the RPA process and either approved or declined on the basis of the parameters you've set. How many returns do you receive in a typical month? If you were a high-volume seller on Amazon, you know how difficult returns can be to process. Automating that entire interaction can help deliver better customer service and improve reviews from your buyers.
Auditing
It’s important to know how you’re performing. Now that you built your standalone e-commerce website, on your own domain, it’s up to you to empower yourself with the tools you need for success. A critical business process to not overlook is the periodic auditing of everything from financials to inventory. Automated auditing gives you a virtual third pair of artificially built eyes working on your behalf. This can help you audit things like over-purchasing, remarketing old inventory, incorrect financial figures and even gaps in the marketplace where your products would do well.
When working with Chinese wholesale suppliers and other international distributors, you want to perfect the due-diligence process. One of the ways to prevent mistakes, avoid user errors and streamline the details of this process is through the use of RPA. It’s a proven technology currently making its way through the e-commerce sector. Getting out in front of the technology behind RPA right now will benefit you in the long run. As more and more things become automated, time will only tell how much you really stand to benefit.
Take this opportunity to dive deep into the literature and understand the concepts that make automation such a powerful asset. Once you understand how it can be applied to your e-commerce store, there will be no turning back. Get started on discovering the ways you can keep up with the future. The world is changing and it only goes in one direction. Entire industries will be prompted to evolve or fall by the wayside.
It's pretty clear that technologies like RPA and other AI-based programs will be the way of the future. Brands and sellers that haven't adapted to the new industry standard of automated have no hope. If you're looking to keep your e-commerce store alive and well over the next decade, getting on board with AI Tech right now is a great idea. It's better to be safe than sorry. The last thing you want to do is look back 5 years from now and say I should have done something.
