Most people who start an online business do so to create a successful, scalable business without the responsibilities of maintaining a store front and all of the factors that are tied to a physical store – like rent, employees, admin and maintenance costs…

Indeed, one of the most attractive features of managing an online store is that it involves less work than a physical store, and it can be grown without physical constraints.

If you’re like most other e-commerce store owners, you began your WooCommerce store with the dream of creating a successful store that handles itself, requiring minimal effort on your part. Then somehow, somewhere along the way those dreams were shattered by the dozens of menial, repetitive tasks requiring your attention on a daily basis. Accounting, customer service, emails, payments… It all adds up!

Luckily, there’s quite a few tools you may use to minimize those tasks by automating your WooCommerce store! Not only will automating your store save you time, but it will also make it less error prone!

Let’s face it – we’re humans and we make mistakes, no matter how hard we try. Software, in contrast, does not. These tools also have the ability to increase your sales and customer satisfaction, all without requiring any effort from you.

Hundreds of plugins have been developed to automate dozens of different processes, so in order to make the most efficient use of your resources, you should carefully consider what activities are taking up the most of your time, and which ones you can automate.

1.FAQ’s/Documentation

If there’s any business task who’s quality depends on the time invested, it’s customer support. In order to give good support, most of us have to put the time and effort in, but there’s ways to cut down on that time! Do you receive the same questions over and over again, or are you constantly explaining the same things – whether it be to your customers or employees? If so, you can automate this informational exchange by creating FAQ answers and documentation pages. They may take initial time and effort to set up – but in the long run you could be saving an immense amount of time and effort.

2.Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great strategy to increase website visits and conversions, but building and implementing an effective campaign can be very time consuming. Whether you’re sending weekly announcements, order confirmations, scheduled reminders, or any kind of notifications, you may benefit immensely by automating this process.

The Signpost CRM Dashboard is a fantastic tool to both create and automate your marketing emails. Their friendly email composer makes it easier than ever to create beautiful, eye catching emails that are bound to convert your results.

The tool includes some impressive features, like customer segmenting to help you segment your strategies based on customer groups, and email performance indicators, which automatically report your results. Smarter planning and feedback leads to better results! With the Signpost dashboard you can automate the entire email marketing process!

To top it off, we’ve developed the Signpost Sync for WooCommerce, a free plugin that integrates your WooCommerce store with Signpost, automatically adding any new Woo customers to Signpost!

As a Signpost Agency Partner, we offer the tool at a discounted rate. Contact us for more info.

3.Accounting

Accounting – the one thing we ALL have to do but none of us enjoy. It’s one of the most time consuming business related tasks. That is, unless you use the right tools to automate the process. If you set your business up right, you can have your accounting completely automated, so that the only thing you have to worry about it sending the data over come tax season!

The first step is to choose the right accounting software. QuickBooks Online is preferred by hundreds of thousands of businesses for its ease of use and intuitive interface.

Using an accounting software is a huge step, but it won’t save you that much time on its own. You also need to consider how you will get your data from your store into QuickBooks. Doing so manually is quite time consuming, but there’s plugins like the MyWorks Design WooCommerce Sync for QuickBooks Online that do all of the work for you – allowing you to sit back and relax as your orders, inventory and clients are synced over automatically.

This plugin even syncs your data from QuickBooks Online over to WooCommerce, meaning you never have to worry about entering or creating things like inventory twice – just watch it all sync across both platforms (in real-time!).

With automatic, two-way sync, extensive settings, and global tax and currency support, this plugin is the perfect tool for any WooCommerce store using QuickBooks Online as their accounting software.

4.KPI’s

Gone are the days of inputting data into Excel spreadsheets and running dozens of operations to calculate your KPI’s. Save yourself the time, effort and errors by using a KPI reporting tool.

Signpost‘s CRM Dashboard automatically creates reports analyzing your business, providing you with the information needed to identify your strengths, weaknesses and opportunities. It then completely automates your marketing tasks, and tailors them to each person! By sending the right message at the right time, this tool helps you increase sales, improve your ratings, reward loyalty, and even gives you new strategy suggestions!

Contact us for more information and discounted rates.

5.Inventory Management

If you sell finite physical goods, keeping track of your inventory is important. You have to make sure you’re not overselling, and that you’re properly accounting for inventory levels. Manual inventory management is time consuming and error prone!

Managing and keeping track of your inventory is a big job, especially if you have high sales volumes or sell on multiple channels. If you don’t set up a good inventory management system from the beginning, you’ll end up spending unnecessary effort down the road.

It’s also important that your inventory be in sync across all platforms. The WooCommerce Sync for QuickBooks Online helps you ensure that your inventory is efficiently managed, synced and updated between WooCommerce and QuickBooks Online.

Keep in mind that as your business grows, you will be investing increasing amounts of time into each activity, and even if they aren’t taking up a lot of your time now, they may do so in the future. The only way to make your business scalable is to build efficient systems that will allow it to grow without depleting essential resources – like your time. Time is your most finite resource, use it efficiently.