If you are running a small business, you might already know how important it is to automate as much work as possible. Because it allows you to assign all of your time and energy into the important bits of the business like finding new clients and expanding your current operations.

However, if one is happy with his or her current business state, automation can still be beneficial as it allows to have more free time to spend it with the family, friends or on one’s hobbies.

However, you might not have a company yet and just stumble upon this article as you are searching for some help or a small business idea. If so, I recommend you to delve into the e-commerce industry as it is growing really rapidly and is expected to be $4.5 trillion industry by the year 2021. I might be hard to become a huge player, but it is certainly isn’t that hard to earn enough to make a prosperous living out of it with the right tools that I am going to present to you.

So, without further ado, let me present you a list of 8 tools that every small business can use to their advantage.

1. Uncode

A very small proportion of small companies could earn a living without having a website in this connected internet age. I believe that every business deserved a stunning website. Thus, the WordPress content management system might be the best option for that as it doesn’t require any programming experience to start as well as has a bunch of plugins and themes to start with. One of the themes that I can recommend is created by undsgn.

Uncode – Creative WordPress Theme is a perfect tool for your website. Although it is called a theme it is more like an amazing tool as this pixel-perfect WordPress theme allows you to create a website that will look stunning and will represent your business in the best possible manner. It is one of the top-seller creative themes on ThemeForest. Uncode has over 200 design templates that you can choose from with countless customization options as well as 28 powerful page builder modules. It should come with no surprise that you do not need to have any coding experience as it has an intuitive page builder interface and it will always remain sleek and responsive.

2. Opinew

As mentioned before e-commerce is a perfect place to start your first small business and one of the best places to start that is Shopify. It allows to open online shops in no time and has thousands of tools to automate your work. One of those tools that might help you automate your work is Opinew Shopify Product Reviews App and Importer.

Opinew allows Shopify store owners to more easily obtain product reviews almost without doing any work. If you are a dropshipper or reseller, it enables you to automatically import product reviews from such online retail giants like eBay, AliExpress, and Amazon. It also enhances search engine optimization as it shows product star ratings on Google Search and one can set it to automatically send customers an email asking for a review. This tool is currently used by more than 800 online shops and has already collected over 100,000 reviews.

3. DepositPhotos

Every business needs photos whether it is a big one or a small one. Companies use them for their blog posts, marketing campaigns or just on the website design.

However, it is not that easy to take high-quality pictures and then edit it. You not only need expensive equipment but a lot of knowledge of the photography itself as well not to mention all the editing. Therefore, is much easier, quicker and cheaper just to buy stock images online. You will be able to invest saved money and time into things that have a much bigger ROI for you like searching for prospective clients.

4. Indy

Indy is a task management tool created for freelancers. It’s features are streamlined, easy to understand, and designed to balance multiple projects at once. You can categorize different tasks with your own custom tags, add reminders and due dates, and pin or “star” a task based on it’s priority. The time management feature lets you track time spent on each individual task; you can see what you’ve accomplished in one sitting, how long you spent on each task, and the total amount of time you’ve worked.

These are just two of the features Indy offers, and all of them come together in the project tab. This space serves as a hub, seamlessly integrating tasks and tracked time, as well as giving you the space to organize important contacts, upload files to cloud storage, and jot down notes or reminders. You can even utilize the chat feature to communicate with others working on the project, regardless of if they use Indy or not.

5. Landing Page Builder

It is really important to have a good landing page on your website or during your marketing campaign as the page might encourage your prospective customers either to stay or leave on your webpage. We all know that the first impression is everything and it is much more likely that the traffic will convert into leads if people will get the first positive encounter right away. This is the reason why you should consider using landing page builders.

6. Bookmark

In this hyper-connected world is really important to have a well-presented online presence as it leads to having more customers. Bookmark is an amazing tool that will help you to do that using AI. In just a few minutes it will create a fully functioning website for your business without you having to worry about it.

This service also makes it easy to expand your business by joining their Agency Reseller Program as it allows you to create beautiful websites for your clients cheaper and much faster than ever before. In addition, they have their own entrepreneurial platform where one can participate in forums with fellow entrepreneurs and learn about business via Bookmark’s online courses.

7. pCloud

There are countless dropbox alternatives online. However, pCloud might be a really solid choice as it is one of the cheapest safe cloud services out there. It is not that safe to keep your business data on the computer or servers as they might unexpectedly break or be lost, on the other hand, Google Drive, in general, is not that safe because of all those frequent cases when millions of Gmail passwords get stolen.

If you are concerned about your business data, you might consider using Dropbox Smart-Sync but it is paid and might not be affordable for your small business yet. Therefore, that is why I recommend using pCloud as it has all the safety features included for free. It provides you with 10GB of free storage, sync option with all of your devices and it protects your files with multi-layer security.

8. Customer Service tools

Taking care of your customers is everything if one wants to succeed in business. Customers only return to the business where they get superb services and all of their issues are fixed quickly and without any questioning. This is the reason why you need to focus a lot on your company’s customer service.

Include live chat in your webpage, be active on social media, reply to every direct message and comment under your posts. Also, don’t forget to ask for feedback after every interaction as customers love when they are important and their opinion matters.

You can outsource customer services to other companies that specialize in it or use tools like live chatbots, and autoresponders to notify your clients about orders or their queries. This would improve your customer service and automate it a little bit more.

9. 48hourslogo

Did you know that logo is an essential part of every business identity? If you don’t have one, you should get it straight away. As the logo will make it easier to perform marketing campaigns, represent yourself online and in general will increase brand awareness.

A good place to get your logo done quickly and professionally is 48hourslogo. This online logo marketplace allows you to start logo as well as whole band identity design contest where multiple designers are able to participate. Consequently, you will get multiple design options to choose from in as fast as 48 hours.