Effective online store. What to automate first?

“The site is the main tool of the online store” is a truism for every Internet entrepreneur. At the same time, the vast majority of online stores have a back-office that is not automated at all. For a novice businessman, this task does not seem to be a priority. The main thing - to go to a certain turn and make a profit. Nobody thinks about the price that will be paid for the lack of automation of certain areas of the online store afterwards.
We describe the main, in our opinion, the task of automating business processes that need to be addressed at an early stage of development of an online store.

Accounting orders and customers

All orders that came to the online store from the site, by phone or by e-mail should be stored somewhere. As a rule, the CMS database of the online store is used for this. Orders placed by customers on the site automatically enter the CMS database. The rest of the orders, for example, received by phone, the manager draws up for the client, using the same form on the site. The disadvantage of this approach is the lack of tools for reporting, so you have to use the services of a programmer.

It is very important to start accumulating any information about orders and customers as early as possible. This allows you to make important conclusions for the further development of sales and the online store as a whole. Also, the result of the analysis of statistics may be a change in advertising companies and other marketing tools.
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To account for orders and customers, we recommend not experimenting and not inventing a “bicycle”, but use proven products with the ability to integrate with CMS sufficient for a small business: My Warehouse , 1C trade management .

Accounting Finance

Each company, including an online store, is created for the purpose of obtaining financial benefits. To accurately understand the profitability of an online store, you need to keep track of all expenses and incomes.
You can keep financial records in Excel and at the initial stage it makes no sense to invest in special software. But at a certain stage of business development, it is necessary to start using software for commercial and financial accounting, which, as a rule, requires integration with the site and refinement for business features. This task is solved by the acquisition of 1C accounting or any other accounting program.

Uploading balances to the site

Many online stores do not have their own warehouses, so they are forced to work from suppliers' warehouses. The supplier sends information about stock balance in a random format, most often in Excel. If you work with several suppliers, then you get several files in different formats. Downloading information about the availability of goods on the website of the online store (“spill”) each time requires special data preparation. This process takes a lot of time, and it is often necessary to do it every day.
Conclusion: it is necessary to automate this process of updating the status of availability on the online store site as much as possible.
Here are some solutions to this problem:

• Freelancers are ready to update availability status and dig in with Excel files.
  In fact : Expensive and most importantly, not always on time.
• Write your own handler.
  In fact : In the files received from the supplier, markup errors are often found, etc. This interferes with the normal automation of file processing.
• Hire a person for daily updates on the availability of products on the site.
  In fact : Actual only for medium and large online stores.
• Independently update the availability of products on the site.
  In fact : Almost everyone does so until the online store grows.

Accounting and control tasks

If your project develops, then your team must constantly perform tasks according to a specific plan. Create a development plan in Excel and assign tasks according to this plan to the implementers. But for automating the accounting of tasks and obtaining statistics on their execution, the Excel file will no longer be enough. It is necessary to use special systems or services that allow to conduct projects and set tasks for both employees and freelancers and freelancers.
There are a lot of programs for accounting and controlling tasks. At the initial stage, you can use any: Megaplan , Teamlab , Basecamp and so on ...

E-mail newsletter

It is no secret that mailings can increase sales. Automation is required to prepare letters and perform mailings.
There are several services for mailing lists:

MailChimp is powerful analytics functionality, but complex setup and high requirements for the online store's customer base.
UniSender - sufficient functionality, easier setup.
We recommend to integrate services with your online store at the earliest stage of development of an online store. This will allow collecting e-mail addresses of your customers from the very beginning and will teach you to do the right e-mail marketing, the result of which will only increase with the growth of the store. The cost of this tool is almost zero.
Despite the seemingly exclusively marketing component of this tool, the results of e-mail marketing can display very important features and preferences of the audience of your site. Analyzing the information received, you may change the concept of the entire business.

Conclusion

Any business requires constant analytics of various indicators. It is impossible to understand the effectiveness of the company without having statistics and metrics. Always collect as many metrics as possible and analyze them regularly, and automation will help you with this. Automation, even at the simplest level, will require considerable labor costs from you, but the result will be the opportunity to see the business from completely different perspectives. This will allow you to make the right strategic decisions in the early stages.

We wish you success! Wait for the continuation of a series of articles on “Effective online store”