Get Ready To Automate Your eCommerce Store Holiday Season in 2020

The holiday season is arguably the most lucrative time of the year for online retail businesses, and the covid-19 push for eCommerce is expected to make it even more significant in 2020. As the lockdowns amid the pandemic waves continue to keep brick-and-mortar stores shut, online selling is expected to drive most sales. Adobe expects a 77% YoY growth in the online retail industry owing to the pandemic.

As the customer sentiment shifts towards online shopping and getting products delivered at their doorstep, preferably through contactless deliveries, you can expect a higher volume this holiday season. Perhaps, catering to such increased volumes will require you to automate processes and step up your marketing game extensively.

Buckle up to explore the automation tips for the 2020 holiday season in this mini-guide inspired by upcoming trends in cloud integrations.

Improvise Your Web Store Experience

To begin with, we recommend optimizing your website experience through small but actionable steps. We suggest implementing Google AMP to make your website load quicker and extend a smoother user experience. It would help if you also optimize your web store SEO and optimize it for voice search and image search. For inbound traffic generation activities, we recommend creating unique landing pages as they provide better consistency. Audit your product segmentation strategy to ensure that your visitors get relevant product recommendations and they do not encounter “no products available” for any query due to faulty listing. Also, integrate your store frontend with core business processes to share real-time data as required by customers.

Automate Core Business Processes

Automation of modules like order management, inventory control system, shipment tracking system, HR software, and CRM plays an important role in facilitating eCommerce business. This can be done using dedicated cloud integration platforms as they allow you to integrate all systems and automate core business processes. You cannot meet the peak demands with manual data entry into various software, and that would also sabotage your data integrity, posing considerable risks for your organization. Automation will help ensure that your customers are adequately served regardless of the volume.

Leverage Marketing Automation Solutions

The Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the Christmas season will be considerably different this year. We believe that using MarTech solutions will help you improve your conversion ratio and client retention rate significantly if you play your cards well with an omnichannel marketing strategy. You can refer to these infographics to make changes in your 2020 marketing strategy:

Also, we are putting down the CMOs’ projected strategy changes to cope up with the pandemic. Have a closer look here:

The customers’ budgets are expected to dip. Hence, you will need to adapt to upcoming situations and look for more sustainable marketing options like email marketing that gives an ROI of 4400%.
Integrate Your CRM with Order, Shipping, And Inventory Management Modules For Better Customer Experience

As far as automation is concerned, integrating your CRM with core business modules is a must. For instance, your transactional messages should be automated, as many operations like tracking shipments are ultimately the scope of your logistics partners. Setting up an automation framework will ensure that your resources are freed from looking after administrative tasks. Under peak demands, automating customer servicing also results in cost control as well as de-escalating aggravation instances. We are stressing out on this point as a significant portion of purchases in this holiday season is going to shift towards online shopping:

Automate Fraud Detection

Online stores also need to prevent financial frauds done by dubious individuals. You can set up automation workflows to identify and prompt suspicious credit card credentials to your executives. Setting up conditions to identify if the email address matches the customer’s names or their shipping address doesn’t fit with the credit card address, a red flag should be raised. Securing your payment gateways and using proper return labels for RMA (return merchandise authorization) will help you safeguard your interest against frauds made by any suspicious individuals. eCommerce integration platforms make business easier and help utilize your resources optimally.

Enhance Transparency by Automating Data Transfer

Using eCommerce integrations will help you cope with the shipping issues and volatility in shipping prices with the uncertainty regarding second and third waves of covid-19 triggering further lockdowns. iPaas integrations help your customers choose shipping options, payment gateways and track their orders on a real-time basis. Being upfront and confident about the information you display will improve customers’ trust, and they will feel more satisfied while ordering from your web store.

Wrap Up

2020 is indeed the right time for investing in cloud integration solutions, and i95Dev is one of the premier companies offering iPaaS solutions for various leading marketplace platforms. Using iPaaS solutions should be a top priority for your business as it reduces the development and deployment period to one-tenth of separate API-based codings. At the same time, it also simplifies site updates and maintenance. We hope that you find this blog on automating your eCommerce sales for the 2020 holiday season insightful.