Automating eCommerce: A Case Study on Ted's Vintage Art

Justin Blase is a marketer and a certified Zapier expert who has always been fascinated by automation. He has a background mostly in marketing and lacks coding skills. Despite this, he has managed to build an eCommerce business, Ted's Vintage Art, that runs almost entirely on automation. The business sells vintage map prints of cities, counties, and states all over the United States. Justin has sold over 5,000 vintage map prints since the inception of his business. He is also a Certified Zapier Expert through his business Blase Media, and he uses Zapier as the backend of most of his business processes.

Justin Blase, a marketer with a keen interest in automation, wanted to build an eCommerce business that ran almost entirely on automation without compromising on the quality of the product or the uniqueness of the business. He was interested in print-on-demand services and loved the idea of not holding any inventory other than digital image files in the cloud. However, he lacked coding skills and needed a solution that would allow him to automate various aspects of his business, from product creation to post-purchase processes, without the need for a developer.

Justin turned to Zapier, a tool he had used in the past, and other tools like Airtable to build his eCommerce business, Ted's Vintage Art. He used Zapier to automate various aspects of his business. For instance, when a team member uploads a map image to Google Drive, Zapier automatically sends that information to Cloudinary, which creates over a dozen variations of the image to be included on product pages and listings. Justin also uses Airtable as the hub of all his business data, managing product inventory, real-time sales data, product metadata, UPCs, customer data, reviews, and other items. He also automated the post-purchase processes. For example, whenever a purchase is made, the customer is added to Airtable, where they store customer data and order details. Zapier also sends the customer information to ActiveCampaign for drip marketing email sequences and email newsletters. When purchases are made across any platform, Zapier automatically sends the order via Shipstation to Printful, Justin's third-party printing partner.

• The automation of various aspects of his business has allowed Justin to focus more on marketing efforts like SEO and social media promotion. His goal of creating a mostly-automated company has become a reality, and he has time to focus on the parts of his workflows that require his creativity and passion. The automation has also ensured that the quality of the product and the uniqueness of the business are not compromised. The business runs smoothly with automated workflows running in the background, ensuring efficiency and consistency in operations.

• Justin has sold over 5,000 vintage map prints since the inception of his business.

• The automation of image creation saves him over an hour per product. With over 3,000 products, this adds up to significant time savings.

• Justin saves 20+ hours a week with Zapier, allowing him to focus more on marketing efforts.