Magento 2 Automation Guide for Seamless Store Management

You do hundreds of small tasks in your Magento 2 store daily. While they don't seem to be a significant time-waster individually, together they kill productivity. It happens a lot, especially when you start to scale your business. Your store grows, and so does the complexity and the repetition of tasks you need to complete. 

Magento automation gives time you and your team would rather spend on high-value tasks. So, if you struggling to keep up with product updates, category management and other important tasks, you're in the right place.

Today, you'll learn how to turn the most time-consuming Magento operations into self-fulfilling, automated tasks.

Ready to start?

1. Add Products to Categories

Adding products to categories or rearranging categories is one of the most time-consuming tasks in Magento. You prepare categories for sale, organize new products in categories or gather all best sellers in one place.

And it never changes. Whatever point your store is at, you need to create and manage categories. So, it's time to change that with dynamic categories.

Magento 2 Dynamic Category Extension helps you create categories by pattern automatically and add products to them. But that's not it.

Categories created by pattern in Magento

You can create dynamic category rules to add and remove products from categories on autopilot. You just need to set product attribute conditions under which to group products into categories. The module does the rest, leaving so much weight off your shoulders.

Dynamic category rule conditions

2. Assign Related Products, Cross-sells&Up-sells to Products

You can look for multiple ways to boost sales on your store, but none will beat the related products, cross-sells and up-sells. It is the most basic, yet effective way to encourage customers to buy more. 

Unfortunately, Magento requires you to set them manually for each product. Guessing aside, it takes ages.

So that's why it is the next step in our Magento 2 automation guide.  And we've got a perfect tool for that — Magento 2 Automatic Related Products. 

Dynamic category rule conditions

The variety of related product rules it enables is stunning. You can choose from 20+ locations to display related product blocks and a variety of conditions for what products to display in these blocks. 

All you need is to set up a rule one time, and the related products will be added to multiple pages at once. Besides, you can even choose different templates for the product blocks to allow customers to compare products or buy bundle packs.

Bundle pack templates for related products

The process comes down to a few clicks which is the best way to automate Magento 2 product blocks. A lot of our customers report to have significantly saved time managing product blocks with this tool.

3. Set up Metadata for Products and Categories

Although Magento offers you an option to set the meta title, description and keywords for each product and category, there is a catch. Guessed already? You need to go to each product page to set or edit it. And since you need to optimize metadata with keywords regularly, you need a way to do it faster. 

The solution is Magento SEO rules. You can configure a rule, or templates, in other words, to add metadata to any page or set of pages.

Meta tags templates

4. Improve Internal Linking

Internal links are as important as external references to your store since they pass the link juice from one page to the other. While you can add an internal link to one page while creating or editing it, you can't add it to multiple pages at once. That's how default Magento works. 

Thus, the easiest way to automate Magento here is cross-links. Nothing complicated here. Cross-links work the same way as links in general.

The only difference is, that they appear on multiple pages at once, and in some cases even in multiple locations on the same page.

Magento cross-links grid

All you need to do is to set the keyword a link should be applied to, the target link and the alt text for the link. That is what covers the basic settings.

However, you can also specify the website these cross-links should be added to and where on the website to display it. 

Additionally, you can cover the time when the link is to be displayed on the website and how many times per page. Once you save the settings, the cross-link is added to multiple pages at once. 

5. Enable and Disable CMS Blocks

You set up multiple CMS blocks and banners to prepare your store for holidays or seasonal sales. It is a long process to create an engaging picture with an intriguing CTA.

But it takes even longer to enable and disable all of these blocks manually when the sale arrives. 

What if we told you there is no need to do that for each CMS block? You can simply use the Magento 2 CMS Display Rules extension that does it for you. 

It allows you to define what pages to display the block on or what customer group to show it to. Additionally, you can specify what devices to show it on and whether to lazy load the blocks to improve the performance. 

But, the best part still is the Magento automation. You can set the date, days of the week and exact time of the day when the CMS block or banner should be displayed. This way you don't have to worry about enabling and disabling them manually every time. 

Date and time settings for the CMS display rules

5. Collect Reviews

Customer reviews build trust and help customers make informed purchasing decisions. If you sell great products, people are going to love them and leave a review. However, you need to remind them to.

Could it be hard to collect reviews if people already love your product? Believe me, it could. 

So to take some pressure off your shoulders you can automate Magento to the point where it collects the reviews for you. But not just any reviews, but Google reviews, which are more trustworthy. 

Google survey opt-in on checkout success page

You can set up Google customer reviews and Google will display the survey opt-in on the checkout success page.

Then, once customers agree to take a survey, Google will send them a one-minute survey to complete. You'll never forget about collecting reviews or have to worry about it with this Magento automation hack.

Google review survey in the email box

7. Send Order-Related Documents

Order processing in Magento is much facilitated thanks to the default Magento setup. Nonetheless, there are still things to improve.

Very often customers request you to send them order-related documents about invoices, refunds, etc. While managers can create those PDFs and send them via email, it takes time, especially with high-volume businesses. 

Thus, you can take a thing or two from this Magento automation guide to optimize the process. You can attach PDF in sales emails automatically by tweaking a few options in the admin. 

PDF document attachment settings

8. Receive Stock Notifications

Magento stock management has a special place in the "Why Magento" list. You can remove out-of-stock products from the catalogue, enable backorders, and preorders or let people sign up for the "back in stock" notifications.

However for you as a store manager, it is not that easy.  You need to monitor the popular items' stock to make sure it never runs out. 

Not only is it inconvenient, but takes the time you'd rather dedicate to the more important tasks. 

Thus we offer a solution — low-stock email notifications. You simply enable those and set the threshold for the emails to be sent. That's it. 

Low stock notification settings

You'll receive email notifications when you're low on some product so you can restock timely. Moreover, if you use MSI, you can get notified about low stock in each source separately. 

Why You Need Magento Automation?

Magento is a complex system that covers a lot of things for you automatically. However, it can't cover everything. 

Thus to make the most of your time you need to prioritize and automate those tasks that take the longest. We've shared only a small portion of the things a store manager does. 

Still, if you want to go beyond these Magento automation requirements, check out other Magento 2 Extensions that could come in handy.