Harness These 5 Tools to Simplify Your Online Business Operations

Running a business requires tremendous work. 

However, working smart can help ease the burden when executing your operations. Rather than spending much energy on manual labor, you can streamline your processes and do things faster. 

Leveraging robust tools is one way of working smart and simplifying your job. When you pair these apps with proper task delegation and team coordination, you get better chances of hitting your business goals. You can also increase your accuracy and save more resources.

Here are five essential tools to use for simpler business operations.

1. Ecommerce sales tax software

Computing for your ecommerce sales tax is burdensome because of the complicated formulas and highly detailed regulatory provisions.

If you calculate your sales tax manually, you risk committing costly errors with profit-draining penalties. You can also waste a lot of time and effort that you could’ve spent on more productive activities.

That’s why, to simplify this taxing responsibility, use ecommerce sales tax platforms. 

These tools can:

• Determine the applicable rates based on your products and state and local regulations
• Stay up-to-date with jurisdictional sales tax laws
• Integrate sales taxes into your price computations
• Provide relevant details for your financial audits 
• Maintain sales tax exemption certificates
• Automates tax filing processes, and more.

With ecommerce sales tax software, you reduce your administrative burden and increase your accuracy and attention to other business duties.

2. Conversion optimization solutions

Conversion-optimizing software is among the lesser-known but powerful digital marketing tools you must use.

This kind of tool offers various solutions that bolster your conversion-boosting strategies and improve your conversion rates and ROI.

Depending on the solution, they can have features such as:

• A/B testing
• Behavioral, contextual, audience, and geo-targeting
• Abandoned cart recovery
• User behavior analysis
• Performance analytics
• Ad retargeting
• Conversion rate predictions
• Personalization of offers and product recommendations
• Customer feedback collection
• Pop-up generation
• Social sharing
• Website personalization, etc.

Conversion-boosting tools also usually integrate with lead generation capabilities, e.g., live chat and lead prospecting, qualification, nurturing, segmentation, and verification. 

With conversion optimization tools, you can efficiently amplify your marketing and retargeting efforts for more sales.

Leverage user-friendly Content Management Software (CMS) as well to simplify creating and designing web content to support your conversion optimization strategies.  

3. Social media management platforms

Social media helps you widen your customer reach, strengthen your online visibility, and interact with your shoppers.

However, social engagement and promotion entail several tasks that can eat up your time — especially when using multiple platforms. 

You can also get confused and make mistakes as you open different inboxes and post on multiple networking sites.

Stay on top of your social media tasks by automating repetitive workflows and assigning them to social media management platforms.

Tools such as Buffer, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and many others have functionalities like:

• Post scheduling
• Instant publication according to the content calendar
• Social listening for brand mentions (including competitors)
• Message queuing or automatic post sharing (for content lapses)
• Publication optimization according to customers’ location and peak social time
• URL tracking
• Engagement, messaging, and other performance analytics and reports
• Collision detection (for message replies)
• Conversation history, etc.

When selecting the best social media management tool for your business, consider how they centralize and simplify your work. 

Ideally, you should be able to automate, analyze, and control your social media presence and accounts from one place.

The tools should also let you integrate with email, multiple social media platforms, and other essential apps.

With social media management tools, you can optimize your workflows and smoothly take the steps to social media success.

4. Employee shift scheduling technologies

Managing your employees’ schedules can be overwhelming, even if you’re handling a small team. After all, you need to:

• Arrange shifts according to their availability
• Monitor staff’s breaks and overtime
• Approve employees’ requests for days off
• Negotiate with substitute employees for shifts with missing staff, and so on.

If you use Excel spreadsheets or bulletin boards for this, your efficiency will surely dwindle, and you can lose and overlook important information.

Simplify this task with employee shift rostering software. These tools have automation and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to take care of all admin tasks.

For example, the AI can screen your employees according to factors such as tenure, experience, skills, availability, and others. 

Automation features can instantly convert working hours into equivalent wages according to your company policies and local and national regulations.

Most reliable Human Resource (HR) software with employee scheduling tools also has visually pleasing and intuitive calendars viewable in different ways based on your preferences. 

They even have built-in chat systems for internal communications. They can allow employees to swap shifts and update the calendar right away.

Automating this task gives you instant relief from the scheduling burden and greater attention to other business operations. You can also look into streamlining your scheduling process with your clients. Obviously, there are various options there. You can either use a WordPress appointment plugin or a service business software, if your site isn’t on WordPress.

5. Task management apps

If you handle several assignments in a day, you can quickly feel overwhelmed and indecisive about your priorities. You can also lose track of upcoming deadlines and the progress of your tasks. 

Take better control of your assignments through task management apps. These tools help you organize your must-do’s and ensure completing them on time.

The apps have features such as:

• Task planning, scheduling, visualization, tracking, and delegation
• Multiple scheduling for recurring assignments
• Task prioritization labels
• Automatic time tracking
• Sub-task creation
• Alerts for upcoming due dates, approval, overdue items, etc.

For example, if you’re hosting a virtual summit, you can use task management apps to organize to-do’s by month and phase.

Pre-summit assignments can include:

• Studying what a summit is and how it differs from conferences, conventions, etc. (crucial for planning the next aspects)
• Brainstorming the event’s theme, target participants, resource speakers, colors, and others
• Designing invitations and content materials accordingly
• Sending invitations to presenters and promoting on email, social media, etc.

You can then list, schedule, and assign on-the-day and post-event tasks.

ProofHub, nTask, Todoist, ClickUp, Timehero, Taskworld, and Taskade are some of the best task management apps to use for your company.

Simplifying your business operations with robust tools

Leverage these and other tools to streamline your business operations. Explore their features and how they satisfy your company’s requirements and dynamics. Then invest in the most suitable solutions to gain optimal productivity and profitability and eventually help you reach your goals.