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Time is money, and a rapidly growing business can be a victim of its own success. Scaling quickly increases the amount of time-intensive tasks for your employees. When the exchange rate is one-for-one — time in, money out — your company’s growth can stall.

Freeing up time for your employees lets them focus on revenue-generating growth areas for your business. That’s especially important for a fast-growing company.

Within this context, ecommerce automation helps employees devote themselves to higher-value work activities. Using simple apps and scripts, forward-looking e-commerce platforms can now execute custom workflows automatically. These automation opportunities don’t just save time. They can also unlock new revenue streams for your company.

Need some inspiration on how to automate your processes? Here are five ways that high-growth brands should use automation to save time and boost revenue.

  1. Personalize your store for every visitor. Every one of your customers can get a customized shopping experience based on their past purchases, and you don’t need to invest in expensive personalization software to do it. Simple tags can categorize customers based on their buying behavior, letting you tailor the experience for each shopper.
  2. Reward your most loyal customers. Loyalty and retention initiatives keep your best customers coming back, and you can segment customers based on their lifetime spending or amount of orders. You can use this information for targeted promotions, and you can also send push notifications to customer-service teams. That way, they can send personalized messages and thank-you gifts to your high-value customers.
  1. Auto-prioritize low-stock products. No more manual merchandising of low-stock products! instead, low-stock products can automatically appear in prominent places on your site, helping you move through inventory. With no manual intervention needed, you can move items to your clearance collection and add urgency on product pages. It provides an extra nudge to buy a product when it’s running low, and you can also auto-hide items when they’re out of stock.
  1. Avoid wasting time on fraudulent orders. Orders that have a high risk for chargebacks just slow you down. Automation can cancel and restock any order that your platform deems to be high-risk — no manual reviews needed. Automated push notifications to customer-service teams can alert them to review high-risk orders before they’re processed.
  1. Automate bulk discounts. Bulk discounts reward your customers, but applying them manually can take forever. Using scripts, the process can be automated by adjusting prices when a shopper increases order quantity.

These five examples are impressive, but automation can do a whole lot more for your business. To learn how e-commerce automation can help a fast-growing business scale successfully, download Shopify’s Ecommerce Automation Enterprise eGuide.