Workflow Labs' E-Commerce Operations Assistant, HelpDesk

Running repetitive tasks and similar workflows make days in the workplace mundane and draining, and the e-commerce business is one of the many fields where employees have to face tedious tasks daily. While customers get to enjoy browsing through products they love and need, the internal processes to make those displays happen can be a drag.

Whether diving into inventory management, catalog updates, or customer support, the list of tasks for proper operations in the e-commerce business seems endless, further burdened with wanting to stay productive and grow while dealing with monotonous tasks every day.

To assist employees of e-commerce in surviving their days, Seattle-based startup WorkFlow Labs, founded by CEO Justin Leigh, creates HelpDesk, a task workflow system software that automates e-commerce operations.

Automation for Productivity

While routine tasks are a pain to deal with, they are certainly far from unimportant, vital even for one to keep their online stores up and running. However, their simplicity makes automation, which can help bring more efficient workflows and help employees gain new skills and grow in the workplace, a great possibility.

HelpDesk, which was originally designed for and currently only caters to Amazon vendors and sellers, is a software stack that acts as a workflow management tool, equipped with browser automation, API integration, and a web application with a dashboard for e-commerce operations.

According to Leigh, who previously worked as a product manager at Amazon, sellers tend to have difficulty managing their daily tasks effectively due to a lack of teams and resources. Based on research conducted by the 8-person startup, those who have to manage e-commerce catalogs on Amazon spend the majority of their time with the same mundane tasks daily and $2B is spent every year just on catalog management.

Not only are the processes of catalog management undoubtedly costly, but continuous mundane tasks can stifle an employee’s creativity and leave them feeling unfulfilled, which may potentially cause reduced engagement and a drop in performance.

This ongoing trend prompted Leigh to build an assistant that can make operations on Amazon a little less painful and much more productive.

Amazon Primed

Upon building HelpDesk, Workflow studied how Amazon’s catalog, merchandising, and supply chain systems work. Using process mining, the startup was able to understand what could and needed to be done to manage systems on behalf of different brands, and this understanding led to the creation of HelpDesk along with all of the assistant’s abilities.

Essentially acting as an “easy button,” HelpDesk can assist Amazon sellers and vendors with suppressed items, variation requests, new item setups, and updates on product details and page contents.

If items were to become ineligible for sale due to inaccurate back-end data, for instance, HelpDesk can quickly identify any mistake and automatically run the steps needed to fix the issue. If sellers wish to add an abundance of new items of multiple variations and need to group them, which would normally be incredibly time-consuming, HelpDesk can spend less time on it and build customer engagement all at the same time, by automating product groupings based on customer demand and search patterns.

In cases where details such as titles and bullet points are adjusted in an e-commerce platform without notice, which could greatly affect online search algorithms, and in relation, to the relevance of one’s product online, HelpDesk is equipped with a tool that can update, upload, and edit images and product copies for items to remain visible, consequently relevant, online.

HelpDesk’s ability of automation and data analysis is hoped to bring great assistance to Amazon sellers and vendors, especially in times when the e-commerce industry remains overflowing with customer demand, thus requiring continuous supply.

After raising $1.3M during its seed round, which included participation from Emerson Group, Flywheel Digital, Tapas Capital, and Tacoma Venture Fund, Workflow Labs has plans to expand its services, making HelpDesk available for other e-commerce platforms. As of last August, Workflow has helped automate operations and management for about 50 customers and has a total of $2.8M in funds.

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