Running your own online store may seem overwhelming—especially if you’re working on your own. But ecommerce technology eases the burden on storeowners by automating processes and simplifying time-consuming strategies.

Efficiency is key to ensuring your store grows. Gone are the days of handwritten accounting and snail-mail marketing. Partnering with the right shopping cart software provider is the first step on your path to create an efficient online retail business.

Choose a shopping cart provider that offers you plenty of built-in functionality mixed with access to leaders in ecommerce. Take a look at some ecommerce partnerships that will help set you up for success.

Many online merchants use other sales channels in addition to their own storefront. Some of these include Amazon and eBay. The challenge many of these stores face is manually updating inventory and accounting information to ensure disparate channels are up-to-date.

Using a service like Bizelo or SmartFeed pulls in data from other channels in a central repository. As you make sales, each storefront you maintain synchs sales so inventory and accounting are as accurate and up-to-date as possible.

A storeowner shouldn’t have to be an accountant, too. Taxes are tricky and overwhelming if you’re selling across state and country lines. The sheer volume of tax rules out there makes it nearly impossible for you to manage it all.

Plenty of tools help you automatically calculate taxes based on where the buyer lives. For help, check out Avalara.

It’s tough to handle manual shipping, day-to-day store management and marketing at the same time. As a result, shopping carts and ecommerce partners have developed simpler ways to fulfill orders.

Need a place to store your products? Check out fulfillment partners like Fulfilltopia and ShipWire. If you store your own products, ease the shipping process with services like Endicia.

For quality assurance and marketing, emails are your best friend. Unfortunately, exchanging emails with customers could eat up a lot of your time. The right shopping cart software will include ways to set automatic emails based on shopper behaviors. Autoresponders can be set to go out after a shopper has made a purchase or after designated periods of time following purchases.

Generating consistent, high-quality content is one of the most important measures you can take to get found online. But a strong content strategy takes a lot of time. You need to focus on managing your store. Let a content marketing partner like Brafton take care of it for you.