Automation in eCommerce: a growing trend

It is nothing new: automation came into our lives a long time ago and, fortunately, it is here to stay. It is in our daily lives in things we are aware of, and in other things we are not so aware of.

 

eCommerce has been able to take advantage of the automatic completion of tasks to really important levels... and the trend is to continue growing.

Basically, it is another productivity tool. It consists of using tools and platforms so that the tasks that are repetitive and of less creative involvement are performed without human intervention (beyond supervision or strategy).

 

This includes almost anything you can imagine: invoicing, sending transactional emails, order tracking, customer service (basic)....

 

There are more and more efficient options, so it is logical that companies end up automating their online stores as much as possible to free their workers from what a machine can do, that is, in everything where people do not provide the value that they can provide in other phases and processes.

There are two main reasons for this: efficiency and resource optimization. These two aspects have become increasingly necessary, especially considering what has happened in recent years.

In 2020 and 2021 COVID-19 has transformed eCommerce as well as everything else. The volume of online purchases grew at a awesome pace but companies had the same resources as a year earlier. In addition, scaling the business was very complicated on the human side, the market was closed and the rise of teleworking did not allow to add new profiles with the same simplicity.

Then, we have had the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This has generated a lot of uncertainty in a market where raw materials are in short supply and company margins are threatened by energy costs. It is therefore imperative to minimize costs and maximize resources to remain competitive. And this is exactly what eCommerce automation provides.

 

Adding these two factors to the increased sophistication of competitors' strategies, it seems more than justified that eCommerce automation is a trend that continues to grow.

The possibilities are enormous and, as time goes by and technology advances, they are only growing. There are many examples:

 

But best of all, automation has not only managed to create new tactics and tools such as those mentioned above; it has also been able to transform others that seemed doomed to become obsolete sooner rather than later.

 

We are talking especially about email marketing, which is living a fourth or fifth youth thanks to automation. In fact, it is more trendy than ever for all that it brings: self-segmentation capacity, delivery of different messages for different audiences and phases within a flow, or automatic mailings based on user behavior (the best example is the recovery of abandoned carts).