After three years of building up the garden here, I'm starting to shift to more automation.
I don't mean watering robots or computer controlled climate. That might be cool but I've read too much sci-fi to trust that.
I'm talking about switching from annual veggies to shrubs and trees.
We started the process when we moved in by adding about a dozen fruit trees, nut trees, and berry bushes. The rest of the yards are filled with annual veggies, typically cycling between 2-3 per year in a location.
As I've gotten more experience though I've started to run out of time. This year we'll be filling most of the garden with more trees and shrubs (another dozen or so).
That'll replace a lot of plants that need weekly attention with plants that need attention 2-3 times per year.
It might be tempting to start with automation in your Shopify store. Have software send your data all over the place to trigger automatic flows and conditional logic.
But that's probably a bad idea.
At least to start with.
Find 10 people who have automated parts of their business and you'll find 9 people who've had an automation mistake bite them and one person who has a mistake in their automation right now they don't know about.
Automation is good, but only once you know your process and can devote the time to program and debug it. Even the most "user-friendly" automation system will need programmer-type thinking to make sure it doesn't go off the rails.
Take automation slow. Start with only one thing and only after you've done it by-hand enough to have your process down.
Once that's running without any bugs, THEN automate the second thing.
(You might also be surprised at how much you can get done by hand and how little some automation actually saves you)
Automating data collection and calculations can be a useful first step if you take the time to look over the results. Computers are really good and fast at math, especially when there's a lot of numbers like what ecommerce stores create.
That's why Repeat Customer Insights automatically collects the data from your store, runs the calculations, and takes the effort to explain what it found and recommends.
It's not as sexy-sounding as those AI-do-everything-for-you systems but it helps you learn about how your customers are actually behaving while saving you time running all of the numbers yourself.
Eric Davis
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