Ecommerce Order Automation
By automating your order process, your business can scale sales without scaling headcount and costs.
Why Automate Orders?
People cost money, and people also make mistakes. If you want your eCommerce business to grow and make a profit, you not only need to increase sales, you need to make sure your costs stay as low as possible without impacting your service.
Automating your order processing can be more accurate than humans performing the work. It is faster, cheaper and also has the ability to scale without you needing to add extra staff to your team.
For growing online retailers, this can literally save you hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in what otherwise would have been spent on adding more order processing operatives to the team.
Case study
From paper picking to done by 10:30am
Taskers the Home Store was printing every order and picking from paper lists. By the time orders were printed, sorted and picked from the shop floor, it was roughly 2pm each day.
We built an automated system that sends picking lines straight to a tablet. Because Taskers pick from existing store stock rather than a warehouse, orders are organised into an efficient route around the shop.
Once implemented, picking was complete by 10:30am on average each day. That saved 8 hours a day across two operatives, who are now free for other duties.
Read the case studyFlexible Order Processing
Not every online store operates in the same way. There are many order processing tools on the open market that may take away some of the manual work required. Tools like Shopify Flow can help, but to fully automate order processing we need to understand what happens in your actual office and the process your team is following.
Once we understand your process, we work with whatever your systems can offer. If your software has an API, we connect to it directly. If it doesn’t, we can read from and write to its database, or exchange files over FTP using the CSV or XML formats your supplier or warehouse system already uses. Even older systems that only send orders by email can usually be brought into the process.
That means you don’t have to replace software your team already knows, or change the way your suppliers work. We build around your business, not the other way round.
Manual orders vs automated orders
What happens to a single order, step by step.
Real Results. Local Businesses.
Ecommerce brands we've helped grow through connected SEO, PPC, development, and automation.
Direct
Scaling Organic Traffic for Liverpool's Largest Bed Retailer
How we helped Bed Factory Direct, a Liverpool-based bed manufacturer and retailer with over 37 years in business, increase organic visibility and drive ecommerce revenue through a connected SEO and development strategy.
Driving Ecommerce Revenue for Liverpool's Iconic Home Store
How we helped Taskers, an established Liverpool home and furniture retailer with over 60 years of history grow their online revenue through an integrated approach spanning SEO, development, and ecommerce optimisation.
Dropshipping Order Automation
Many online stores dropship. This simply means an order is placed on your online store, the order is then sent to your supplier and in a lot of cases they will deliver the goods. In some circumstances, you may need to arrange delivery yourself.
In between this, the staff in your office may be printing an order from your CMS, emailing the supplier, emailing the customer, logging onto a delivery company’s website and booking in a job. All of this is totally unnecessary.
If this sounds familiar, you will recognise that when your sales increase you may have to employ more staff to follow the same process. If this member of staff costs you, say, £30,000 a year, the extra profit you are making could be swallowed up in one go by the extra member of staff. This is not actual growth; it’s doing more work for the same return.
If you have a process like this, you are doing unnecessary work. By automating the dropshipping process, you don’t even have to press a button. It will just happen on the fly without any human interaction.
How we work
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01
Map your process
We look at how an order moves through your business today, from checkout to the customer's door, and find every manual step.
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02
Build the connections
We build the links between your store, your systems, your suppliers and your couriers, around the way your team works.
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03
Test, then go live
Everything is tested with real order data before it goes live, and we stay on hand while your team settles in.
Order Automation for Manufacturers
The scenario may be a little different if you manufacture products. The order could come into your online store, and from here somebody could take the order and manually input the job into your ERP or warehouse management software.
Paper could still be printed, job sheets handed to the factory floor and stock checked by walking round the warehouse. Every one of these steps is a chance for a delay or a mistake, and every one takes someone away from more valuable work.
By connecting your online store directly to your ERP or production system, orders can drop straight in as jobs. Materials can be checked and reserved automatically, and your production team can see what needs making and when, without anyone retyping a thing. When the job is complete, the order status updates on your website and the customer is told, again without anyone needing to pick up the phone or send an email.
Shipping and Tracking Automation
Shipping is a huge part of order fulfilment and can be very time consuming. It could be as simple as placing a job with a courier such as Royal Mail, but it can also be more complex.
If you deliver orders using your own fleet of vehicles, delivery could be tied to a production system, lead time constraints and set delivery days. Routing can be a manual process too, where a manager in your delivery team may be liaising with manufacturing and producing a delivery schedule.
This is another element that can be inefficient. Unless you are using logistics software, the route proposed by the delivery manager may be inefficient, and this costs you fuel. Over 300 delivery days a year, that inefficiency adds up to a lot.
Orders dropping straight into your route planning software can show you the most efficient way to handle deliveries. It can plan not only the route taken, but also inform production, delaying or speeding up certain jobs depending on the current schedule. You don’t want to be driving hundreds of miles out if you will be back in the same area two days later with five jobs.
Once your drivers set out, customer notifications letting them know what time to expect their delivery should be automated too.
Where are your hours going?
Tell us how your orders get processed now and we'll show you which steps can be automated. No obligation.
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Frequently Asked
Common questions about ecommerce order automation.
It's using software to handle the steps your team currently does by hand after an order is placed. That could be sending orders to suppliers, creating jobs in your ERP, producing pick lists, booking couriers and updating customers, all without anyone needing to press a button.
No. We work with the systems you already use. If your software has an API we connect to it directly, and if it doesn't we can work with its database, or exchange CSV or XML files over FTP. Your team keeps the tools they know.
That's common, and it's rarely a blocker. Many suppliers accept orders as CSV or XML files, over FTP or by email, and we can automate those just as well as an API connection.
For simple tasks, sometimes yes, and we'll tell you if that's all you need. Off-the-shelf tools start to struggle when your process involves several systems, suppliers or production steps. That's where a custom integration built around how your business works pays off.
Every project is quoted after we've mapped your current process, because the cost depends on how many systems are involved and how complex your order flow is. Most businesses compare it against the staff time it saves, and that's usually where the case is made.
No. Everything is built and tested with real order data before it goes live, while your team carries on working the way they do now. We stay on hand while everyone settles in.