5 Tasks You’re Doing You Can Automate

How many times have you wished that there were more hours in the day?

It feels like there are so many manual tasks on your to-do list and the more orders you need to process, the fewer hours you have in a day. Plus, you've got other responsibilities such as marketing your business and responding to customers' questions and queries.

You might think it's good to be hands-on with all of these tasks, but it can restrict your business from scaling sustainability. The good news is that you can automate many of these duties without sacrificing quality.

If you would like some precious hours back in your day, consider automating these tasks so you can focus on taking your business to the next level.

1. Inventory Management

You don't want to walk into your business each day to count your stock manually. It's also not ideal to run out of inventory while continuing to advertise sold out products in your store. This can lead to delays in fulfilment and upset customers who may not purchase from you again.

There are several applications that can update your stock levels across all of the channels your products appear on. It can also forecast future demand and submit orders when the time comes to restock. It will help avoid delays and ensure you have enough inventory during high volume sales periods.

2. Customer Support

While customer service is a vital component of any business, there are several ways to automate this task and encourage your shoppers to self-serve. It may not eliminate every single enquiry that arrives in your inbox, but it should reduce it dramatically.

Thankfully, there are plenty of ways to automate customer enquiries. You can build a Knowledge Base or FAQ section featuring all of the most common questions that you respond to. It's also easy to install a chatbot on your website to answer queries 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Find out what will serve your customers best and look to implement it.

3. Social Media

Marketing is essential for every business. However, you don't need to snap a photo of your products and then manually post it to Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Several solutions allow you to automate this task and provide you with the tools to help you succeed.

You can schedule posts on the best days and times so more of your potential customers will see your content. Many solutions will also offer hashtags and ideas for future posts, so you don't need to set aside time to brainstorm a social media strategy.

4. Post-Purchase Surveys

Once your customer receives their product, it doesn't mean the transaction has been finalised. Many reports recommend contacting your buyer to ensure they're happy with the purchase journey and the item they bought. It's also an excellent opportunity to request a review.

But you don't need to contact every single shopper personally. You can automate this task so that your customer receives a survey to fill out. You're even able to decide when this correspondence goes out. It might be a few days after they receive their parcel or a couple of weeks.

5. Shipping

You can spend all day shopping around for the best courier service for your needs and then copying and pasting each individual order into their website to fulfil it. A better option is to automate this task. You can use the Interparcel Shipping Manager to import all of your orders across multiple platforms as well as marketplaces and process them with a few clicks.

In addition to fulfilling your orders, the Interparcel Shipping Manager can automate postal tracking notifications for your customers. The Branded Tracking Portal will keep them up to date on when their parcel has left your premises all the way until it arrives on their doorstep. The best part is that you don't have to lift a finger at all.

How to Automate Shipping and Fulfilment

If you want to scale your ecommerce store or optimise your processes to achieve business objectives, you need to automate your shipping. As the volume of your orders increases, the number of free hours in your day will decrease as you attempt to fulfil each one manually.

Don't put fulfilment in the too-hard basket. Start shipping easier today so you can dedicate more time to the parts of the business that matter to you. Head over to our Shipping Manager page to find out how to get started.