Running a BigCommerce store online can get busy really fast.
Tasks like updating products, following up with customers, sending emails, and tracking orders might not feel like a big deal. But as your store grows, those little jobs start adding up.
Before you know it, you’re down spending hours and hours every week doing work that could be easily automated.
That’s where automation can make a huge difference.
The idea isn’t to automate every inch of your business. It’s to take the repetitive work off your plate so you can spend more time on your fellow customers, products, and growth.
Why Should You Automate Your BigCommerce Store?
Think about how many tasks have exactly the same process every time.
A customer places an order. You send an email.
A product sells. Inventory needs to be updated.
Someone leaves items in their cart. You follow up.
An order is delivered. You ask for a review.
These are important tasks, but they don’t always need someone on your team to handle them manually, hand by hand.
Automating the right workflows can help you:
- Saving hours of repetitive work
- Reducing mistakes
- Keeping product and inventory information accurate
- Following up with customers more consistently
- Spending more time actually growing your store
A good place to begin is with the tasks you find yourself doing over and over again.
1. Keep Products and Inventory in Sync
Managing inventory is simple when you’re selling through a single store. It gets a lot messier once you add more channels. Sell through BigCommerce and a marketplace like eBay, for example, and now you’re juggling stock levels, prices, product details, and orders across two platforms instead of one.
Trying to keep all of that updated by hand doesn’t scale for too long. This is where a tool like M2E Cloud comes in – it connects BigCommerce to marketplaces and automates most of the busywork. Rather than updating each platform separately, you are able to use M2E Cloud to:
- Synchronize inventory
- Keep product information updated
- Sync pricing
- Manage marketplace orders
- Reduce duplicate product management
That means if something changes in one part of your ecommerce operation, you don’t necessarily have to make the same update manually everywhere else.
If eBay is one of your sales channels, M2E Cloud also has a useful guide to selling on eBay with BigCommerce.
2. Send Review Requests Automatically
Customer reviews are unimaginably valuable to a store, but collecting them manually doesn’t scale very well.
You don’t want one of your team members to check completed orders every day and decide who should receive a review request from the company.
Well…
With Fera, BigCommerce merchants can automatically send review requests after customers make the final purchase.
You can use it to:
- Send review requests after an order (created, fulfilled, delivered)
- Choose when customers receive the requests
- Send follow-up reminders for more engagement
- Collect photo and video reviews during the process
- Gather feedback without manually contacting each customer
Once the workflow is set up, the whole process keeps running as new orders come in.
You still control how and when customers are being contacted, but you don’t need to remember to send every request yourself – quite helpful, right?
3. Put Your Email Marketing on Autopilot
Email is another part where automation can save a surprising amount of time.
Instead of manually deciding and picking who should receive the email, you can create simple little workflows based on what customers do:
For example, a new subscriber to your store could receive a nice welcome email automatically.
Someone who leaves products in their shopping cart for too long could get an abandoned cart reminder.
A customer who just received their first order could get a post-purchase email a couple of days later.
Common email automations include:
- Welcome emails
- Abandoned cart reminders
- Post-purchase mails
- Review requests
- Re-engagement campaigns
- Product recommendations
The nice thing about the workflows is that most of the work happens upfront.
You create the emails, decide when they should be triggered, and then just let the automation handle the day-to-day operation.
From there, you can look at the results and improve the emails as time goes by.
4. Simplify Order and Fulfillment Workflows
Orders create a lot of small administrative tasks.
Customers need updates. Inventory needs to change. Shipping information needs to be recorded. Marketplace orders may need to be synchronized with your main store.
When order volume is low, handling these things manually might be manageable.
When you’re processing dozens or hundreds of orders, it becomes a different story.
Depending on the tools you use, you can automate things like:
- Order notifications
- Shipping updates
- Inventory adjustments
- Marketplace order synchronization
- Internal order management tasks
If you’re selling through several marketplaces, tools such as M2E Multichannel Connect can help bring those marketplace orders into a more centralized workflow rather than forcing you to constantly jump between platforms.
5. Look for the Tasks You Repeat Every Week
You don’t need to install ten new apps and automate your entire business overnight.
A better approach is to look at what you’re already doing.
Ask yourself:
- Which tasks follow almost exactly the same steps?
- Where do mistakes happen most often?
- What work takes time without really requiring human judgment?
- What could automatically happen after a purchase, delivery, or customer action?
Those are usually the best places to start.
For example, if someone on your team spends hours and hours every week sending review requests, automate that first.
If you’re constantly correcting inventory between BigCommerce and another marketplace, take a look at inventory synchronization.
The best automation is usually the one that solves a real problem that already exists.
Build a Store That Requires Less Manual Work
Automation isn’t about removing the human side of ecommerce.
Your customers still want good support. Your products still need thoughtful merchandising. Your marketing still needs creativity.
Automation simply handles the repetitive work around those things.
For a BigCommerce store, that might mean using:
- M2E Cloud for marketplace listings, inventory, pricing, and order synchronization
- Fera for automated review requests and customer feedback
- Email marketing tools for abandoned carts, welcome sequences, and post-purchase communication
- Fulfillment and ecommerce apps for other repetitive operational tasks
You don’t need to automate everything.
Start with the work that repeatedly eats into your week. Even removing a few small manual tasks can add up to several hours saved every month – and give you more time to focus on the parts of your business that actually need you.
