Ecommerce operations automation
Somebody on your team spends a third of their week on work a machine should do.
Opening orders. Copying lines into templates. Re-uploading stock levels so the marketplace does not oversell. Pasting the same twelve replies. It is not a hiring problem and it is not a software problem. It is a process nobody has had time to build properly.
Time study, estimated
Where the month goes
Drag to your own volume.
123.0 h
of manual work a month
$3,444
at a loaded $28/hour
107.3 h of it is work automation takes over.
| Process | Hours / mo | Cost / mo | Automatable |
|---|---|---|---|
| Order → invoice → notify | 42.7 | $1,195 | 40.5 h |
| Support triage & "where is my order" | 26.7 | $747 | 22.7 h |
| Returns / RMA | 23.5 | $657 | 19.9 h |
| Inventory sync across channels | 14.4 | $403 | 13.7 h |
| Supplier purchase orders | 8.3 | $233 | 4.2 h |
| Post-purchase review requests | 7.5 | $209 | 6.3 h |
| Manual work, all in | 123.0 | $3,444 | |
| What automation takes over The rest stays with your team. We quote the remainder honestly. | 107.3 | $3,005 |
The assumptions behind these numbers
Every figure above is an estimate built from one input. It is meant to be argued with. The audit replaces each assumption with your answer.
- Loaded operations cost of $28 per hour, salary and taxes and tools included.
- Roughly 8% of orders become a return, a quarter generate a support contact, and a third get a review request.
- Automation takes over 95% of pure data movement, 85% of documented if/then rules, and 50% where a real judgment call is involved.
- Merchants under-estimate minutes per task by about a third. These figures do not.
What this is
One process off your desk, built properly, kept running.
Stores between roughly USD 500k and 5M a year have enough chaos for it to hurt, and not enough scale to hire a developer. Delta Tech Automation takes one of those processes, builds it, maintains it, and shows you the hours it gives back every month.
It does not replace anyone. Every workflow routes anything that needs a judgment call to a person, deliberately. What disappears is the copying, the tab-switching and the chasing.
The library
Six processes, already built.
Each one is a blueprint rather than a bespoke project, parameterised per store. That is why the first build is USD 1,000 and takes two weeks instead of two months.
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Order → invoice → notify
25–55 h / mo returned
Opening the order, copying lines into an invoice template, emailing the customer, sending the bookkeeper a copy.
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Support triage & "where is my order"
15–30 h / mo returned
Reading the inbox, looking up the order, pasting one of the same twelve replies.
-
Returns / RMA
15–25 h / mo returned
Request in, checking eligibility, issuing a label, tracking it back, refunding.
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Inventory sync across channels
12–25 h / mo returned
Re-uploading stock levels so the marketplace listing does not oversell what the store already shipped.
-
Supplier purchase orders
5–15 h / mo returned
Spotting the reorder point, drafting the PO, getting it approved, sending it, chasing it.
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Post-purchase review requests
4–10 h / mo returned
Working out who to ask, skipping the unhappy ones, sending the request.
How it works
Four stages. The third one is a stage, not a habit.
Most automation work skips the checking and calls it done. Here it is a gate with a checklist, and silence is treated as a failure rather than a pass.
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Audit
45 minutes, then two business days
A working session, not a demo. We walk through the parts of your week nobody enjoys. You get a written report listing every process, the hours a month it costs, and the order I would fix them in, whether or not you hire me.
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Build
About two weeks
One high-pain process, automated end to end and running live. Built on n8n in your own account, so you own it. Every client value lives in a single config node, which is what makes the second one cheap.
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Self-check
Before anything reaches you
Thirty checks across edge cases, error handling, duplicate actions, logging and production safety. Nothing is handed over until it passes, and every revision stays on the record.
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Dashboard
Every month, ongoing
Each run writes a row. Those rows become the monthly view: what ran, what it saved, what it caught, and how every number was calculated.
What it costs
Priced so that saying yes is small.
Retainers run a three-month minimum, then month to month. No annual lock-in, because the dashboard should be the reason you stay.
Automation Audit
45-minute call plus a written report. Credited in full against the build.
Free then $300
Initial build
One high-pain process, automated, tested and live in about two weeks.
$1,000 one-time
Maintenance
Monitoring, fixes, and the monthly value dashboard.
$500 / month
Growth
Maintenance plus one to two new automations a month.
$1,200 / month
Who builds it
The person who scopes it is the person you call when it breaks.
Fourteen years in backend engineering, formerly CTO of a payments fintech leading a team of more than twenty. I have run a back office under real load and know exactly how repetitive manual work chokes a growing business.
That combination is the whole offer: operations judgment at the level of someone who has done the job, and the technical ability to build and maintain the system personally. No account manager, no handoff, no ticket queue.
Questions
The ones worth asking first.
Will this replace someone on my team?
No. Every workflow routes anything needing judgment to a person, on purpose. What disappears is the copying, the tab-switching and the chasing, not the people.
What does the audit cost?
It is free for the first clients, then USD 300, and the 300 is credited in full against your first build, so it costs nothing if you go ahead.
What if I have tried automation before and it broke?
That is the first thing I ask about on the call. Most failed automations broke because nothing handled the edge cases or alerted a human when a step failed. That is what the thirty-check stage exists to prevent, and it runs before anything reaches you.
Who owns what gets built?
You do. It runs on n8n in your own account, with your own credentials, and it is handed over documented. Every setting specific to your store lives in one config node rather than scattered through the workflow, and the written self-check report records what was tested and what was fixed. If we stop working together the automations keep running, and another developer can pick them up without reverse-engineering anything.
How quickly does it pay for itself?
The first build is USD 1,000 against a process typically costing 15 to 55 hours a month. At a loaded USD 28 an hour, most first builds pay for themselves inside the first two months. The audit report shows the arithmetic for your store before you commit.
Do I need a developer on staff?
No. That is rather the point. Stores in this range usually have one to three people on operations and nobody to build internal tools. The person who scopes your automation is the person who builds it and the person you call when it breaks.
The next step
Book the audit.
Forty-five minutes on your operations. Two business days later, a written report with the hours each process costs you and what I would fix first, yours to keep either way.
Book the auditPrefer email? hello@deltatechautomation.com