As demand for selling through EC sites has surged in recent years, a host of EC building platforms have emerged. The one drawing the most attention worldwide is “Shopify.”
With “Shopify,” you can use plenty of EC site templates and apps that streamline your operations at low cost, building your site freely as you see fit.
Once your site is built, operating it over the long term brings many tasks, such as inventory management and customer information management. By automating those necessary tasks, you can redirect resources to other work like marketing initiatives and new product development. In this article, we introduce apps and tools available on Shopify that help automate your operations.
Automate the Work Right Up to Shipping: Integrating SHIPPINO
The first thing that matters when building an EC site is the shipping system. Shopify can integrate with “SHIPPINO,” which automates every task up to shipping.
SHIPPINO is a web service that supports the complete automation of shipping operations, from order confirmation through to dispatch requests. It works not only with Shopify but also with EC sites such as Amazon and Rakuten Ichiba, as well as many other logistics services. The tasks that can be automated are as follows.
- Confirming order information
- Sending order confirmation emails
- Checking inventory
- Submitting dispatch requests to logistics services
- Sending shipping completion emails
- Registering delivery information
- Syncing inventory
All of these can be automated or streamlined together.
It can also handle gift wrapping and special packaging, as well as centralized data management. It supports integration with Amazon’s fulfillment service “Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA),” allowing dispatch requests to be sent to logistics services in as little as 10 minutes from when an order comes in. For Honshu, orders placed by 2 p.m. can be delivered by the next day. And because the service runs 24 hours a day, orders never pile up on your days off.
- Details vary depending on the delivery carrier, the connected marketplace, and the warehouse.
Because it can dramatically cut the workload of shipping operations and comes with applications that make everything from EC building to operations more convenient, it is highly recommended if you are considering automating your work. SHIPPINO is just one example; there are many other applications that can reduce and streamline the workload of shipping operations.
Source: SHIPPINO
Shopify Apps That Support Automating a Range of Tasks
The “Shopify App Store” is packed with apps that can automate your operations. Shopify requires very little effort from app purchase through setup and implementation, so connecting an app is simple.
Here we introduce a selection of apps that can automate your work.
Apps for Inventory Management and Shipping Automation
Hapilogi
Lets you automate product shipping operations. Inventory management can be handled all in one place even when you have multiple warehouses, and all data can be converted to CSV.
Source: Brainwave Shop Osaka Hapilogi
Wipeout Hide Sold Out Products
Automatically hides products that have gone out of stock. Listing a lot of sold-out products on your site can get in the way of the customer’s purchase experience. By hiding sold-out items, customers can find the products they want more smoothly. It can also automatically display products on your site again once they are restocked.
Source: StoreBuilder Wipeout Hide Sold Out Products
Apps for Order Management Automation
Auto Fulfill
When an order is completed, it automatically sends order confirmation and shipping emails and tracks the product automatically as well. It also automatically creates an order management sheet that can be exported as an Excel file.
Source: Estore Automate Auto Fulfill
Auto tag Customers + Orders
Automatically tags customer and order information. Once you set up tags in advance, it sorts everything automatically and even tags information that existed before you installed the app. For example, by setting up tags for first-time customers, you can include a perk reserved for first purchases when shipping their product. You can also tag customers by address and automatically compile lists for a given region, which helps streamline shipping operations.
Source: App on Demands Auto tag Customers + Orders
Apps for Reporting Automation
Report Pundit
Automatically creates a wide range of reports, from inventory checks to sales. The templates are customizable, and reports can be exported in various formats such as Excel and CSV.
Source: Estore Automate Report Pundit
Ontrack Analytics app
Collects data on the customers who purchased a product, such as age, gender, and the device used to buy, and automatically turns it into reports. You can put this to use in your future marketing strategy, and it can automatically turn Google Analytics data into reports as well.
Source: ONTRACK DIGITAL Ontrack Analytics app
Other Apps
There are also apps that let you set up a campaign where customers can win points through a lottery when they make a purchase, automating the entire flow from the draw to awarding the points. And beyond automation, there are plenty of apps that streamline systems in other ways. Using apps to make EC site operations more efficient and cut your workload is a tremendous advantage.
Shopify Flow Templates That Support Automating Many Tasks
Subscribing to “Shopify Plus,” Shopify’s plan for building large-scale EC sites, gives you access to “Shopify Flow.” This app comes with close to 100 tools for automating a wide range of tasks, and by selecting the automation tool you want, you can automate your work. You can automate things like detailed product tagging and sending messages.
It can also integrate with Google Sheets and Slack, allowing it to notify you when a product’s inventory drops below a certain level or when a product receives a low-rated review.
Examples of automation tools
- Reporting when a low-rated review is posted
- Creating a report of top product search results on the site
- Receiving a notification when a product’s inventory runs low
- Hiding a product page when the product goes out of stock
- Adding a free gift for orders above a certain amount
- Issuing gift codes based on the number of times a product is purchased
- Automatically sending shipping notifications to the order management screen
- Adding a feature that earns points when a product is added to a wishlist
- Partially excerpted from the app page
It can even automate fine-grained tasks such as creating sheets for international orders or prompting visitors to write a review as they leave the site. Because these come ready-made as templates, setup is simple as well. Use is limited to subscribers of the Shopify Plus plan, but automation templates have a strong chance of cutting resources and saving significant amounts of time.
Conclusion: Turn the Time Automation Frees Up into Sales Growth
In this article, we introduced apps that can automate your operations. Because you can use so many automation apps like the ones above, you can dramatically reduce the workload of operating an EC site.
And since the time and resources freed up as a result can be spent on initiatives to grow sales, there is no doubt this will be a major help in increasing revenue going forward.
Demand for online shopping will continue to grow within Japan as well. According to the JDMA, mail-order business sales rose by 10.8% year over year, confirming a clear upward trend. On top of that, the recent push to prevent the spread of the coronavirus has fueled a rise in stay-at-home consumption as people avoid going out. In that environment, we believe it is extremely important to operate EC sites more efficiently and to place greater weight on initiatives that grow sales. The further development of the EC business is well worth watching.
