Online marketplace management is a constant juggling game – from managing inventory, fulfillment, shipping, marketplace listing, order processing and dispatch, marketing, and customer service. But time is your most precious asset. The question you must ask yourself is how you can make the best use of your time, all the while giving each task the necessary attention. The answer is automation.
Cool point, but is automation really necessary?
Short answer: yes. As you scale, so do the complexities and expectations of your ecommerce marketplace management processes and capabilities. Old systems that used to work just fine break down and become inefficient. When that happens, companies often use workarounds that can be expensive or time-consuming – such as expanding recruitment.
Unfortunately, employees cannot scale like technology. That’s not to undercut the importance of people. In fact, it reinforces the value talented employees can bring to the table. When automation takes over repetitive, mundane, and time-consuming tasks, your team can instead focus on creative ideas and strategies, and big-picture thinking.
Transform marketplace management with automation
Ecommerce automation can be defined as the use of software and other technological tools to convert manual tasks into automated processes and workflows – all without human intervention.
This could include setting up notifications to internal supply chain stakeholders when critical metrics need attention, flashing alerts when top sellers are flagged ‘out-of-stock’, scheduling discounts automatically, and triggering alerts when your catalog is not live on specific platforms. These changes driven by automation may appear minor, but have a compounding effect on marketplace management. By strategically leveraging automation, you can:
- Save time
- Improve quality of leads
- Get better quality insights through data analysis
- Optimize delivery speed and costs
- Streamline operational structures and processes
- Enhance customer satisfaction and reduce churn rate
- Boost employee productivity and engagement
- Fine-tune marketing campaigns
- Maintain a consistent brand identity
- Scale easily and instantly
This list of benefits is not exhaustive. When it comes to automation, the possibilities are endless, as new and improved technologies come to the market to solve emerging problems.
Start with the A of automation
If you’ve been thinking of introducing automation to your online marketplace management practices, here’s a quick guide to getting started.
- Look at the big picture
When you’ve seen all aspects of your business up close, it can be a little tricky to step away and look at the bigger picture. But figuring out workflow bottlenecks and other shortcomings in your processes is the all-essential first step to successfully integrating automation. Take a minute to reflect on what your customers, employees, and markets are saying and address those needs first.
- Figure out what you can automate
Once you’re sure about where you need to improve, start identifying the processes that should be automated. Focus on tasks that are repetitive and time-consuming, and require significant manual handling – such as inventory management, order processing and tracking, updating product information, routine order alerts, etc.
- Choose the right partner
Finally, ensure that you choose an experienced partner who can introduce and manage automation solutions for you. Take time to explore vendors and their case studies to ensure their objectives align with yours. After all, choosing the right automation partner can mean that you can step away without a worry and use your time for better pursuits.
Integrate automation with purpose using Tensight
Tensight, our proprietary analytics platform for end-to-end digital and ecommerce solutions, offers a multitude of automation-centric marketplace management services ranging from supply chain optimization, ecommerce technology, online marketplace listing, analytics, metric management, and more. And in the past few years, we’ve helped some of the biggest brands in the country track their critical KPIs, run analytics and make online marketplace management both scalable and profitable.
Here are three of our success stories in the realm of digital and automation solutions:
- To help an international denim brand boost their conversion rate and marketing ROI in India, we helped with enhanced content and listing optimization to better engage customers. With our digital services, we enabled a 2x growth in conversion rate and a 3x boost in clickthrough rate (CTR).
- We implemented an automated bin system in the warehouse of a prominent innerwear and apparel brand in a bid to reduce order fulfillment turnaround time (TAT) from 48 hours to 36 hours. With Tensight, the brand was able to achieve a 33% reduction in TAT and saw a significant boost in the number of processed orders per day. They also processed 99.8% orders within SLA.
- Tensight also helped a national footwear brand with logistics optimization to reduce cost per shipment. After a detailed cross-comparison study, we created a mixed partner approach to reduce costs. This exercise reduced delivery time by 2-4 days on average and cut costs by 45%.
Interested in integrating automation into your ecommerce business? Get in touch with our experts today!
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