A complete guide for eCommerce automation in 2024

When you have an eCommerce business, whether new or well-established, you must carry out a massive load of activities every day. There are small tasks and big ones too, but each one is vital to making the business successful.

Yet, doing everything manually will need a lot of time and energy. You will often find yourself drained out of energy doing all the work or even managing people to do the work. This is where business process automation comes as a savior.

eCommerce automation is that gift of technology that will help you save time and retain productivity.

This blog is for you if you are not too familiar with eCommerce automation yet. We will discuss the benefits of automated eCommerce business, different activities of how to automate your eCommerce business, and eCommerce automation tools to help you get started.

But first, let’s discuss what eCommerce automation really is and why you should adopt eCommerce automation in the first place.

So, without further ado, let’s jump into the discussion, shall we?

What is eCommerce Automation?

eCommerce automation is basically the process of lessening the human work and relying more on different eCommerce automation systems. It is easy to make a mistake when there is a lot to do. Adopting automation allows business owners to get their work done much more efficiently with the least effort.

The maintenance of a business comes with a lot of work, and it is impossible to do each one of those works manually. The primary goal of the eCommerce automation process is to save you time. This entire process is designed to take that heavy weight off your shoulders so you can focus on your long-term goals.

Perks of eCommerce Automation

eCommerce automation is a package of solutions for different modern world challenges, and it comes with many exclusive perks that help an eCommerce business grow faster. We will identify and talk about some of those perks in this section of the blog.

Saves a tremendous amount of time and stress

We understand how time-consuming it can be to manage an eCommerce business. When you have just started, it would often need you to wear many hats simultaneously. Imagine how many hours of the day you will have to work if you do EVERYTHING manually!

Besides killing a massive portion of your time, it will also make you very stressed. The same goes for your employees. Even if you do have a number of employees for your business, doing everything hand to hand will make you stressed and tired. And that cannot be good for your business.

This is where eCommerce automation will help you. An automated eCommerce business will save your time and help keep you relaxed and calm. You can rest assured knowing that you will not lag doing any critical task; no-code workflow automation will ensure that for you.

Reduces the chances of errors

When you have a load of mundane tasks to do every day, it is natural to lose concentration, and losing concentration will make you make mistakes. But, you cannot afford any error if you want to succeed with your business. eCommerce automation will help you at every step to avoid any errors. Let me give you an example that will help you understand better.

Making a product feed is not an easy task, right? Even more so when your eCommerce store has thousands of products. Making an ideal product feed containing all the information for all those products in a systemic way to be approved by Google Merchant Center without making any errors can be challenging.

However, if you adopt automation and use an ideal product feed manager, you will have a negligible chance of making any mistake. eCommerce automation will take away your hassles of manually doing such tedious work.

Increases employee satisfaction

When you allow your employees to do all they have to do in an easier yet more efficient way, it's natural that you will gain employee satisfaction in the process.

Maintaining an eCommerce business involves a lot of monotonous jobs. Online business automation at different stages helps the employees do all those much easier and more comfortably. This also helps them in staying stress-free and relaxed at their workplaces.

Lastly, it saves the employees a significant amount of time to do something else and be more productive, which can be good for them and the company as well! So, you get an energized, productive and tension-free workforce by adopting automation for your company.

Make the customers happier

One of the significant motives for any eCommerce business is to satisfy the customers. And satisfying the customers usually takes a lot of work. You have to be there for them whenever they need you. You have to serve them with the easiest and smoothest services and with utmost efficiency.

It might be easy to please a small number of customers, but as your business grows, the number of customers will grow with it. Soon it will become tough for you to handle such an extensive customer base.

The eCommerce automation system will ease this for you. You will soon start seeing happy customers when they find whatever they need is being done automatically, effectively, and most importantly, QUICKLY!

5 eCommerce Automation Software

The core aim of eCommerce automation is to help business owners reach their targeted goals very easily with the help of modern tools and technology. Now, which are those tools, you might be wondering, right?

Well, there is a myriad of excellent eCommerce automation software today for online businesses. However, we will talk about 5 of them in our blog today. All these are highly effective for eCommerce stores and relatively easy to use.

Let’s take a look at their features and prices now:

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is the tool that you should select when you intend to automate your marketing and sales process. All your marketing campaigns, from welcoming the customers to your website to the final step taken by the customers to make the purchase, have over 500 automation that can be made with ActiveCampaign eCommerce workflows.

Key Features

• Automated contact management
• Automated lead nurturing
• Automated sales engagement and tracking
• Site tracking
• Automated mailing
• Pipeline automation

Price

The professional package of this tool costs $149/month. However, there is a lite package that comes at $29/month. You can customize your own packages as well.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is one of the most popular tools used by thousands of business companies for email marketing automation. The automated emails sent by this tool to the target customers will help you build and maintain a loyal customer base.

Key Features

• Automatically sync customer data with MailChimp after the purchase
• Performs marketing automation through email by reminding card abandonment, following up after purchases, showcasing product recommendations
• Displays marketing performance data on the dashboard
• Automatically track and segment customers based on their purchase history

💡 Use n8n workflow automation tool to connect Mailchimp with Hubspot, or create custom workflows with Mailchimp node.

Price

Although Mailchimp has a free version, you can also buy different paid versions at different prices for different kinds of packages. The Mailchimp recommended version starts at $17/month.

Zendesk

Remember when we talked about how eCommerce automation is also about making your customers happy? Well, that is what Zendesk does. This is an automation tool specially designed for providing top-notch customer support.

Key Features

• Available options for live chat and messaging
• Ticketing options for customer queries and problems
• Integrated voice solutions for complex situations
• Available answer bot option

Price

The foundational support price for this eCommerce automation tool starts from $19/month.

Hubspot

A famous crowd choice, Hubspot is a one-stop solution for automating a plethora of marketing activities. Let it be managing social media, sending emails, designing content, or any other significant business activity, Hubspot can automate them all.

Key Features

• Contact management
• Lead generation and management
• Pipeline management
• Email marketing
• Tracking potential customers

Price

The starter package of Hubspot comes at $45 per month. However, if you are on a budget, you can always use their free version as a WordPress plugin.

💡 Learn how to build two-way data synchronization between HubSpot and Pipedrive with n8n.

Drip

Specially tailored for eCommerce businesses, Drip is that software that will automate your marketing system and make the experiences of your customers much better. The pre-built workflows of this software will definitely make your life easier by taking a lot off of your shoulders.

Key Features

• Welcome series options
• Abandoned cart handling
• Post-purchase activities
• Winning back lost customers
• Remembering birthdays of existing customers, etc.

Price

This eCommerce automation tool allows you to have a 14-day free trial period. And after that, you will have to pay $39 per month.

eCommerce Automation: 5 Ways To Automate Your Store

In this section, we will describe how to automate your eCommerce business using 3 workflows that will help you automate your eCommerce tasks.

To smoothly connect different ecommerce automation tools we’ll use n8n, a workflow automation platform that lets you design custom integrations and build sophisticated logic between the tools.

Mailchimp eCommerce workflow

Though Mailchimp itself is an automation tool, you can automate the process even more by integrating Mailchimp with n8n.

To integrate Mailchimp with any other tool, we will need the API key. Here’s the process of creating an API key from Mailchimp.

1. Login to your Mailchimp dashboard
2. Click on the user icon & select Account from the dropdown list
3. Navigate to the Extras tab and select API Keys from the dropdown
4. Click on the Create a Key button

That’s it! You’ve generated an API key successfully. Now, it’s time to use it during the integration process.

Now, we will add a new member on Mailchimp by n8n. The node design will be like this:

Then double click on the Mailchimp node and enter the required parameters. The parameters are:

1. Authentication method
2. Credential for Mailchimp API
3. Resource
4. Operation
5. List Name or ID
6. Email address
7. Subscription status &
8. Other additional files

Note: You can either add credentials from the parameters section or from the Credentials option on the left sidebar.

After providing all this information, just execute the workflow, and the new member will be added to the Mailchimp dashboard.

Here’s the graphical representation of the whole automation process:

💡 You can also integrate hundreds of additional apps with Mailchimp using n8n.

For example, you can add Airtable, Google Sheets, etc to automate your marketing and sales process.

Suppose, you want to add a new member in Mailchimp from Airtable. Simply use this n8n workflow, add credentials, and execute. The workflow will look like the following one:

Besides, you can also create members on Mailchimp from Google Sheets too. In that case, you can use the following n8n Google Sheets to Mailchimp workflow.

Impressive, isn’t it?

Asana eCommerce workflow

Asana is an all-in-one project management tool. It is mostly used to organize or manage all of your projects from a single platform. You can track, manage, map, or communicate with your teammates easily.

But, integrating Asana with n8n will help you to automate the tasks even more efficiently. To automate Asana’s task with n8n, you have to connect n8n with Asana using the Access Token or OAuth.

Here are the steps of connecting Asana with n8n using Access Token.

1. Login or create your Asana account.
2. Click on My Profile Settings from the user icon located in the top right corner.
3. Navigate to the Apps tab.
4. Click on the Manage Developer Apps option.
5. If you are a new user, click on the New access token button.
6. For the existing users, click on the Create new token button.
7. Enter the token name and agree to the API terms and conditions.
8. Click on the Create Token button.

That’s it! You’ve successfully generated the Access Token from Asana. Copy and save the token number immediately. Because you can’t access the token after closing the tab.

Here’s the visual representation of these steps:

You can also connect by using OAuth. Here are the steps for connecting n8n and Asana via OAuth.

1. Login to your Asana account.
2. Click the My Profile Setting from the user icon.
3. Navigate to the Apps tab > Manage Developer Apps > New App.
4. Enter the app name and accept the API terms and conditions.
5. Click on the Create app button.
6. Copy the OAuth Callback URL from n8n and paste it into the Redirect URLs field.
7. Click on the Save button.
8. Copy the Client ID and Client secret on the n8n credentials section and save it.

That’s how you can connect the Asana account with n8n.

Let’s design a workflow that will automatically create a new task for Asana. You may copy the built-in Asana workflow or design a new one by yourself.

To configure Asana, double-click on the Asana node. Then enter the following parameters there:

• Authentication type
• Credential for Asana API
• Resource
• Operation
• Workspace Name or ID
• Name

Besides these, you can also add some additional fields like assignee name, due date, project id, etc. Then execute the node, and your task will be added to the Asana dashboard.

That’s the process of automating the process of Asana using n8n. By the way, you can also use n8n to automate these tasks in multiple possible ways. For example, if you want to create an Asana ticket from terminal bash-dash, you can do it by using the following n8n workflow.

This workflow will allow you to create a new Asana task via bash-dash.

Customer.io eCommerce workflow

Customer.io is basically an advanced automated messaging platform. It provides more flexibility and control to write and send SMS, notifications, and emails.

As an eCommerce website owner, you can create a bot with n8n to automate several communication tasks. For example, you may create a customer and add that customer to a segment in customer.io.

You may use the n8n customer.io workflow to design this process. Here’s the visual interface of the required nodes.

To execute this automation workflow, you have to authenticate those nodes first. So, here’s the process of authenticating customer.io with n8n using the Access Token.

At first, you have to create the API keys from customer.io. Here’s the process:

1. Login to the customer.io dashboard.
2. Select Account Settings by clicking on the user icon in the top right corner.
3. Click on API Credentials.
4. Click on the Create Tracking API Key button.
5. Enter the API name and choose a workspace.
6. Click on the Create Tracking API Key button.
7. Navigate to the following tab App API Key.
8. Click on the Create App API Key button.
9. Enter the API key name and choose a workspace.
10. Click on the Create App API Key button beside the workspace.

That’s the process of generating both the tracking API and app  API key from the customer.io website.

Note: Copy the App API key immediately after creating it. You can’t access it later.

Now, it’s time to use these API credentials on the n8n workflow canvas. Here are the steps of that process:

1. Copy the design from the n8n workflow or create your own.
2. Double click on the Customer.io node
3. Click on the Credential for Customer.io API option
4. Choose -Create New- from the dropdown
5. Enter the Tracking API Key, Tracking Site ID, and App API Key.
6. Click on the save button on the right top corner.
7. Choose the appropriate Resource, Operation, ID, and other additional fields (if required).
8. Execute the node.
9. Double click on the CustomerIo1 node.
10. Choose the previously generated Credential.
11. Choose the appropriate Resource, Operation, Segment ID, and Customer IDs.
12. Execute the node.

If the node executes properly, it means you have set up everything properly. You can execute the full automation workflow by clicking on the Execute Workflow button from the n8n canvas section.

That’s the complete process of automatically creating a customer and adding that customer to a segment in customer.io.

Final Words

If you have come this far, you seem to be already intrigued, even excited, to start automating your eCommerce business right away. But, there is no rush to it.

Understand your business and try to get into the depth of every little thing that you need to do for business growth and success. It will help you understand which of your business activities need eCommerce automation and which one of those can wait for now.

One thing is sure: you will start seeing outstanding results in a very short time if using the right eCommerce automation tools.

Start automating!

The best part is, you can start automating for free with n8n. The easiest way to get started is to download the desktop app or sign up for a free n8n cloud trial. Thanks to n8n’s fair-code license, you can also self-host n8n for free.