There’s a lot that goes into building and more importantly, running an eCommerce store. You, as a business owner, know the various uphill battles that can hinder the success of an online brand.
From order listing, and sales campaigns, to shipping, and post-purchase, there are multiple operations under your hand from the beginning. Handling them simultaneously can be challenging and that’s why Ecommerce automation tools exists!
These platforms enable you to automate multiple operations and focus on growing your brand further. To save you the effort, we’ve compiled the best Ecommerce automation software tools that provides solutions for automating various operations. Read on!
What Is eCommerce Automation?
E-commerce automation refers to the process when brands adopt various tools, technology, and systems to eliminate repetitive, manual tasks in eCommerce. This can be any small task like sending an order confirmation email to any huge task, like inventory management and logistics optimization.
The main goal behind adopting eCommerce automation is to save time, so businesses can invest that time in more important tasks, such as creating a new business strategy.
Top 10 Best eCommerce Automation Tools [2024 Updated List]
We’ll go over platforms that help you automate various tasks like inventory and logistics to help you make the best choice and how these tools differ.
1. ClickPost
The first ecommerce automation tool on the list is ClickPost—a logistics intelligence platform. Using this tool, online businesses can automate their shipping operations and control post-purchase services like tracking and estimated dates of delivery under one roof. You also have the option to automatically refund customers once their returns are successful.
Online stores can further the platform’s multi-carrier integrations to save costs and ship with the quickest or most cost-effective option available. Using a separate NDR dashboard, brands can trigger alerts to customers via multiple communication platforms as soon as a delivery is marked as undelivered.
Check out a few more features of ClickPost and its ability to automate your shipping needs:
- Automatically assigns the best delivery partner at the current using machine-learning-based carrier allocation.
- Enables you to print bulk shipping labels within a couple of clicks.
- Provides a branded tracking page along with automated delivery milestone notifications sent to your customers.
- Lets you create a dedicated returns portal where customers can initiate returns instead of contacting your support team.
2. Netsuite
Netsuite is best known as an enterprise resource planning tool aimed at small to midsize businesses. When it comes to eCommerce, Netsuite provides a range of services, most notably pre-built workflows that allow you to automate syncing data from the platform to your online store or shopping website and vice-versa for price updates.
You can customize these workflows for shipping operations as well like pick and pack. Just set predefined rules and your products will be sent to the most efficient fulfillment center.
Instead of juggling between multiple software, it also provides a CRM system that contains customer-centric data like preferences and interactions from any channel.
Moreover, your omnichannel business is consolidated under one dashboard.
This allows you to manage both digital and physical orders simultaneously. If needed, brands can even set up new stores and keep tabs on orders from any store and customers in a single view.
Here are more features that enable Netsuite to automate eCommerce operations for your brand:
- Syncs all inventory data with your front end, allowing you to automatically update any price or stock changes.
- Provides customizable automation workflows along with a drag-and-drop editor for quickly placing triggers.
- Gives your team a flexible point-of-sale solution that lets them communicate with customers easily.
- Allows you to automate financial tasks such as closing books and looking after transaction records.
3. Klaviyo
Klaviyo is a marketing automation platform that allows ecommerce businesses to communicate with their customers using targeted SMS and email campaigns.
This also includes segmenting different customer bases and using artificial intelligence (AI) to craft different promotional messages.
The platform automatically places your online store with around a hundred different companies in the same niche and industry to help you compare your monthly statistics against them.
You also gain the ability to create online web-based forms for various purposes and conduct A/B testing to learn your consumer base’s form preferences. Klaviyo even sets these preferences as default so you keep creating forms that engage customers.
Further, the tool’s wide integration range enables you to unite data from multiple platforms into one. Learn more about how Klaviyo can improve your marketing automation processes with these features:
- Enables stores to create trigger-based SMS, push, and email campaigns and use hide/show logic for displaying content to a specific customer base.
- Provides pre-built analytical dashboards that show the performance of your marketing efforts.
- Hosts 50+ templates for web forms, allowing you to quickly create forms for sign-ups, announcements, etc.
- Lets you create customized mobile push notifications built on specific workflows and communicate with customers when they take/don’t take a certain action.
4. Zapier
Zapier is an automation tool that allows online brands to connect various applications with one another. These connections are called “Zaps” and are used to transfer data between platforms quickly. Using zaps, you can set up triggers that send specific data to another platform once all conditions are met.
For example, you can set a workflow to automatically update your CRM software whenever you gain a new lead on Facebook. Supporting 7000+ applications, Zapier lets you link various platforms and eliminate manual effort to update data on them.
Similarly, this tool provides dedicated tables for your prospects and customers. Even here, you can set triggers to take certain actions whenever you click on a button in a table such as “Send Email.”
Zapier also helps you automate your ecommerce operations using the features below:
- Initiate multiple tasks on different platforms using a single trigger in tables.
- Provides drag-and-drop functionality for creating web pages and forms.
- Use an approval method within your customized workflows as triggers to take specific actions.
- Type in any task you need to be completed using Zapier AI to build a new automated workflow.
5. Brightpearl
The last software on our list is Brightpearl, a retail operating tool that automates inventory operations for online businesses. You can set up rules for orders that come from different selling channels and their payment status.
This is helpful for prioritizing paid orders when you’re running low on stock in a specific warehouse. Online stores also get recommendations for specific inventory based on forecasted data.
Check out some more features of Brightpearl for automating your inventory-related tasks:
- Use accurate forecasting for multiple inventory items to know when you need to restock and prevent supply chain disruptions.
- Leverage multi-location inventory automation to automatically ship a product from another location when you’re out of stock.
- Lets you conduct partial inventory cycle counts to update your store with the latest stock information.
- Provides a wide range of integrations to help you connect with various platforms and fulfill high-volume orders.
6. Omnisend
Omnisend falls under the eCommerce marketing automation platform. To be more specific, it’s an email & SMS marketing platform for businesses of all sizes.
Even if you’ve zero coding knowledge, you can still craft personalized email campaigns with its simple drag-and-drop email builder.
For campaign optimization, it offers functionalities, like campaign booster, A/B testing, etc. At the same time, it’ll help you send automated text messages, MMS messages, and build SMS lists, and so on.
It also has a pre-built SMS automation workflow for events like cart abandonment, shipping notifications, and birthdays. Alongside this, it helps retarget customers with specific push notifications.
Have a quick look at other top-notch features provided by Omnisend:-
- Offers pre-built automation functionalities to make the process up and running within just a few seconds
- Helps you create SMS lists by offering TCPA-compliant list-building tools, like popups, teasers, landing pages.
- Supports all country codes for SMS marketing to boost international reach
- Improve engagement rate with the 2-way messaging option
- Provides in-depth reports to track the performance of email and SMS campaigns
7. Recharge
Nowadays, getting first-time buyers is comparatively easier than retaining them. That’s why most brands are opting for the subscription model to retain their old customers and maintain repeat purchases.
One such eCommerce automation tool that helps businesses grow the customer retention rate through subscription management is Recharge.
With Recharge, you can nudge your shoppers to opt for subscriptions with deals and discounts, let subscribers manage their orders by their own rules, and create personalized product bundles with customized pricing to increase your order volume.
Alongside these, it projects future trends in sales and inventory. At the same time, you’ll get to know about customers’ behavior and predict the churn rate.
Plus, to improve your average order volume and retention rate, it lets you personalize product recommendations, incentivize the shoppers, and recover failed payments.
In fact, Recharge easily integrates with Shopify, BigCommerce, and other headless commerce platforms and software tools.
Here are other additional benefits provided by Recharge:
- Offers automated functionalities for shipment consolidation, multi-subscription updates, and partial order fulfillment
- Enables your customers to redeem gifts and items, so they stay subscribed
- Provides in-depth information and analytics on how much you’re getting from subscription sales, which products are trending among subscribers, and when customer churn can arise
- Provides insights into the performance of discounts and coupons
8. Hootsuite
If you want to create great impressions among your customers and win more sales, you can’t ignore social media marketing in eCommerce. Though there are lots of software solutions that help in social media marketing, Hootsuite is one of the best among them — and for good reasons.
Under its feature section, you’ll find lots of functionalities that have been specially designed to improve your social media game.
For instance, Owlywriter AI is an automated tool that will help you generate social media content, captions, and hashtags related to your vertical.
It offers a multitude of engagement features, like private and public messaging, autoresponder, and automated tagging to improve the customer engagement rate.
BlueSilk AI™ is an automated social listening tool provided by Hootsuite that converts complex data into easy-to-understand texts and finds brand mentions.
In addition, Hootsuite has multiple ad management tools for different social media platforms, including Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Facebook. It also offers in-depth information on how your posts are performing, sentiment reporting, and industry benchmarks.
Hootsuite provides more automated solutions. These include:
- Helps you evaluate the best time to post on your social media handles
- Offers a unified messaging solution for customer response and service
- Automatically turns your best posts into a sales-driving engine
- Lets you set automated triggers for your posts
9. ShipBob
ShipBob is an end-to-end eCommerce fulfillment solution. It provides lots of automated functionalities to improve brands’ logistics operations.
You can connect ShipBob with almost all eCommerce platforms, TikTok, CRM systems, and other tools. Under its order fulfillment service, you’ll get a distributed inventory solution.
The moment a customer places an order on your eCommerce platform, the orders are automatically sent to these fulfillment centers. There, the whole picking, packing, and labeling tasks are taken care of with automation.
ShipBob also pushes the tracking information on your store automatically, so customers can monitor the orders on their own.
With ShipBob’s technology, you can choose the most efficient route for your deliveries. Though ShipBob puts everything on autopilot, it’ll still let you control the whole process.
Here are the key highlights of ShipBob:
- Automatically generates picking slips
- Lets you monitor your inventory levels at each location and track orders in real time
- Helps you identify slow-moving inventories
10. Tidio
In eCommerce, customers are the ultimate heroes. You’ll have to make them feel valued and heard every time they need you. While this seems a bit daunting, Tidio can make it possible.
Tidio is an AI customer support service platform by nature.
With this tool, you can send automated messages, promotions, and opportunities to your customers, encourage visitors to subscribe to your email list to get promotions and provide them instant help in their buying process.
Lyro AI is a dedicated chatbot that will be available on your website and social media 24/7 to resolve customer queries instantly.
The best part about Tidio is it shows all customer queries across various channels, including tickets, support forms, email, and Instagram on a centralized dashboard, so you can stay updated at each step and decide which answers can be automated and what needs human intervention.
Additionally, you can boost customer retention rate with next-order coupons and incentivize shoppers to leave positive reviews — all through an automated way.
Take a look at other services provided by Tidio:-
- Provides pre-designed messages, so you can send the right messages to customers at the right time
- Automates the post-purchase support activities, like order status checks, address inquiries, etc
- Provides you the flexibility to support foreign customers in their native languages
- Lets you automatically route tickets to the right departments
How Does Ecommerce Automation Software/Tools Work?
Let’s quickly brush up on our basics before we get to actual platforms. Ecommerce software is any platform that allows you to create workflows for a specific process. For instance, imagine running an email marketing campaign targeted at new customers.
Without automation, your team will manually check new sign-ups or purchases and send each customer a new email. This entire process is extremely time-consuming and can potentially prevent employees from focusing on other important tasks.
However, with an automation tool, you can easily set up a trigger, add the condition, and send all your new customers a welcome email as soon as they sign up.
So the question stands: When should online stores use these tools? For tasks that require a lot of repetitive manual effort and hours, you should use automation software. However, you can ideally automate any task that includes a trigger and specific conditions.
Conclusion
E-commerce automation isn’t an exclusive trend; it’s been here for quite some time. But, day by day the need for eCommerce automation tools is growing because of the value they bring to the table.
However, these were the top 10 eCommerce automation tools available today. Each of them specializes in what they do and helps brands minimize unwanted manual work. To help you better understand the services of these tools, we’ve also provided some key highlights of their offerings.
Remember to analyze your current business needs and where automation is more important to choose a tool that helps you make eCommerce operations more efficient.