Every ecommerce business has finite resources, time, and cost when it comes to producing quality products and customer experience. Your customers only see the end results, but behind the scenes you have to balance getting everything done–Without taking on too much.
Figuring out the best way to save time and cut down your to-do list is critical to business operations.
Why? When you can do more with less, you’ll start seeing results faster.
In this article, we'll share how you can save time operating your ecommerce store to spend more time on the activities that will grow your business.
Prioritize Your To-Do List
When thinking about your tasks, identify and focus on the most important tasks that will help achieve your goals and increase your gmv. After you create a to-do list, mental or written, think about the order in which you should complete the tasks. Focus on one task at a time until they’re completed.
Kyle Harrington, VP at Hawke Media, shared his advice, ““Stop multitasking or launching as many things at once as possible. It's simply impossible for brands to truly focus on multiple tasks, lines or products that require investment. Do something well, then iterate and repeat.”
Automate Your Workflows
Running automated workflows allows business owners to save time by offloading repetitive tasks using automation tools. Without taking on more cost to hire or outsource, you can recreate manual processes in a workflow builder and execute the processes automatically.
How Do Ecommerce Brands Use Automation?
For ecommerce brands, you can save time with ecommerce automation tools. For example, if an order made through Shopify has an order note, automatically notify your team by sending them the order note attached. This saves time from having to manually check orders.
You can do this across the different platforms you use including BigCommerce, Magento, Google Sheets, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and more.
Who Benefits from Automation?
- Founders: Founders can replace manual tasks like reporting, checking orders, dealing with fraudulent orders, and more.
- Marketers: Automation for ecommerce marketers saves time switching between marketing platforms, running day-to-day marketing operations so marketers can focus more on marketing strategy.
- Operators: Streamline your shipping logistics and operations by directly connecting your spreadsheets with your 3PL, while automating internal reordering communications.
- Engineers: Automation for ecommerce engineers means engineers can stop dealing with messy APIs without sacrifices.
Outsource or Hire for Certain Tasks
By outsourcing certain tasks, you can save time from completing them yourself. For example, if you have a quarterly or annual manual task you need to complete, you can hire a task service to get it done. Or if you have on-going activities, like content production, you can hire a freelancer to create content for you.
This saves time from you having to execute on the activities, but will still allow you to formulate the strategy around them.
If you're unsure of how to find someone or what types of projects are available, check out sites like Upwork, Fiverr, Freelancer.com, or PeoplePerHour.
Use a CRM or Task Management System
If you're like most people, you're probably juggling a lot of tasks at once. Organizational tools or CRMs can help you keep track of your customers and your outstanding tasks.
You can use a CRM or task management tool to create tasks or reminders that automatically trigger when certain conditions are met (e.g., when a new customer is added to a list or when an old customer has not logged in to the system in 90 days). You can also use a CRM to automatically send emails or text messages to remind a customer that an important event has occurred.
Setting up automatic follow-ups, reminders, or scheduled communications will help keep track of what you need to do so you don’t have to.
Popular tools include Notion, Asana, Jira, or Hubspot.
Take a Break
Did you know that taking a break can help you be more productive? It’s common to think that if you work harder, you’ll get more done, but sometimes this is just not true.
When you take a break, you can gain mental clarity on priorities, come up with new ideas, and have the space to think about your goals.
Start Working Smarter, not Harder
Whether you start automating or outsourcing manual tasks, taking more breaks, using organization or CRM softwares–saving time spent on repetitive tasks will help you achieve your business goals faster.
With less time spent on repetitive tasks or non-priority projects, you’ll have more time to spend on product development, revenue growth, and strategy. For a more in-depth guide on how to save time, Alloy Automation created a full playbook to help you achieve your goals with automation.
This is a guest post written by Katie Krische at Alloy Automation. Alloy Automation is a no-code platform for ecommerce brands to build automated workflows that save time and increase efficiency. Alloy has integrations with Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, & 100+ other support, marketing, loyalty, & fulfillments apps. Top brands use Alloy to automate tedious operations tasks and to power more personalized marketing. At the end of the day, lean teams can use automation to get more done.
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