Let’s face it - running an e-commerce website is a lot of work. You have to deal with suppliers for your products; You have to deal with customers (both happy and angry) and you have a website to manage and keep updated. That is a lot of work for one person to handle. Fortunately because a lot of things are repetitive (such as processing orders) you can create a system which allows you to automate your store, saving you both time and money.

Here are 4 easy things you can do to automate your Miva Merchant Store.

Use Flat Rate Shipping – Unless you have extremely heavy products, or products which require special shipping, you should be using flat rate shipping. There is no need to offer every shipping method under the sun. Sometimes you have to think of yourself. Using flat rate shipping allows you to use only one shipping method (UPS, USPS, or FEDEX) which will save you a lot of headaches down the road. Go through you last 50 orders and find your average shipping cost. Use this as your new shipping rate. Some customers will pay a little more, and some customers will pay a little less. Overall it all works out in the end.  Now if you carry inventory (as opposed to using a drop shipper) you can schedule UPS (or whatever shipping method you use) to come at a scheduled time to your home /office to pick up your orders. No more wasted trips to the post office.

I know flat rate shipping won’t work for everyone’s store. The main point I am trying to make, is keep shipping simple.

You should also be offering a free shipping option for orders over a certain amount. This makes customers want to buy more to get to that free shipping level. Do some tests and see at what price range you are able to offer free shipping and then implement this on your website. This further simplifies your shipping and also increases conversion rates.

Take a look at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. They offer free shipping for any order over $25. This is a great way to increase overall order values and increase sales.

Give Your Customers Their Order Status - One area which can be really time-consuming is dealing with customer inquiries. People always want to know the status of their order. “Did it ship yet?”, “When should I expect it?” etc… You can eliminate a lot of these questions by installing an order status module. Miva does not come with this functionality, but lucky for us Sebenza makes a great little module called, Ultimate Order Status. It allows you to update the status of your customers orders from the Miva admin and also send them automatic emails when their status changes. You are also able to send them a tracking number so they can track the status of their shipment. Customers really love this information, and it will save you a lot of time not having to answer order status emails.

One of the nice features of the module, is that it allows you to integrate with any of the four big shipping programs. This allows you to automatically download customer information and print shipping labels right from your computer. Don’t waste time re-entering customer data again. Get the module and save yourself the time and energy.

Use Synchro – Synchro is a great little add-on from Miva Merchant which allows you to integrate Miva Merchant into QuickBooks. You can download your order information and easily store all your data in one easy to use program. Miva Merchant Synchro does all the work for you with one click of the mouse. You can even schedule it to automatically synchronize at set intervals.
Add or update products, customers and inventory in QuickBooks and Miva Merchant Synchro will update the data in Miva Merchant.
Don’t let the cost deter you ($399) it will more than pay for itself in the time it saves you each and every day.

Have a Miva Web Developer on Retainer – Now this one is a definite must, however I see very few store owners do it. Leave the store updates, SEO, and maintenance to the Miva professionals. Why waste your valuable time struggling to move a button around, when you can pay someone to do it in half the time. Your job as a business owner is to grow your business not to learn HTML and update your store. Having a Miva developer on retainer, allows you to easily update products, get small fixes done quickly and have someone to turn to in case of a emergency. Imagine if you store goes down and you have to track down a developer on craigslist or on the forums. You are losing money every second your e-commerce store is down. Always be prepared.

Another benefit of having a developer on retainer is that they can constantly be doing SEO for your site. Maybe one month you don’t have any site updates, in that case all the hours you are paying for can go to optimizing your site better for the search engines.

For anyone interested, I offer monthly retainer service starting at $500 /month. It includes the following:
Website Updates / Module Installations
Product Updates
Search Engine Optimization
24 hour help in case of an emergency

If interested, you can contact me here.

These are just a few ways to automate your Miva Merchant store. The main thing to remember is to keep things simple. Use the tools that are available to help you save time. You might only be getting 1 order a day now, but would your current system hold up if you were getting 10? What about 100? It always helps to be prepared.

About the Author: Brennan Heyde is an e-commerce consultant working in San Diego, Ca. He specializes in online marketing and SEO for e-commerce.  Have a struggling e-commerce website? – Contact Brennan today for a site analysis.