We get it—you’re busy. Your online store is thriving, and you want to do everything yourself. There’s only one problem: there aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything independently. That’s the beauty of automation; you can set and forget repetitive administrative tasks so you don’t have to manually perform them.

There’s a huge advantage to setting automation features as part of your order processing strategy. If you haven’t investigated them yet, you might want to take a look at some of the ways you can automate storage, shipping and fulfillment so you can retrieve some of those lost hours of the day and use them for other pressing matters.

You’re caught up in promoting your brand and products to drive more sales—but administrative tasks like shipping are taking up a lot of your time. It’s a common problem for online retail storeowners across the globe. Lucky for us, automation can help cut a lot of time you spend organizing your shipping manually.

Your ecommerce software should come with shipping integrations that empower you with the tools to automatically print shipping labels, manage your orders and customers and update your order status. Services like TrueShip, ShipWorks and Endicia have built partnerships with several ecommerce solutions. Simply sign up with the service and install the plug-in. Autoresponders make excellent tools for processing repeat orders on perishable goods and related items. When you process an initial order through your shopping cart software, you can set autoresponders to behave in predetermined ways based on customer activity.

For instance, if you sell a perishable product to a customer, you can set an autoresponder to generate an email when the usable life of the product is up. That way, you increase return customer conversions while automating order processing. As orders are processed, you’re going to need a record of them for accounting purposes. If you’re already set up with a program like QuickBooks, you can set up your 3dcart account to integrate directly with your order processing system so orders feed directly into your accounting system. eBridge is a popular integration tool for accounting programs developed by Sage Products, Intuit, SAP and Microsoft. The right ecommerce software solution will have plenty of options for accounting integration. Want to save time and money associated with storing, categorizing, organizing, processing and shipping your stock? You don’t have to let your products fill up your living room. Simply sign up for fulfillment services like Efulfillment, Webgistix, WeFulfillIt or Fulfillment by Amazon and they’ll take care of all the little details surrounding order fulfillment. The services mentioned above (plus many more) are plug-ins for the 3dcart sytem.