A successful e-commerce business requires some combination of innovative product design, market fit, unique selling proposition, and, of course, luck. Indeed, the success stories we tend to hear about often don’t share many common elements beyond passionate business owners looking to provide an indelible experience to their customers.
But no matter whether your business is just starting up inside your garage or a co-working space, or has been up and running successfully for some time, you ultimately must have a foundation from which to scale. Here’s a look at some of the best methods for scaling your e-commerce empire.
How to Scale the Growth of Your E-Commerce Business
Paid Advertising
While it may take some time for online foot traffic to reach your e-commerce site, paid advertising can get consumers there faster. But you’ll need to further your skills as a webmaster and become a pay-per-click Jedi in order to support your site’s growth and compete with today’s other popular e-commerce sites.
Of course, your customers and prospects who tend to compare the attributes of various brands rely on ads in their decision-making. In fact, product listing ads account for 75 percent of all clicks from non-branded retail searches.
Moreover, growing e-commerce sites rely on specialized services – two more notable providers include Google Merchant Center and Amazon Advertising – to achieve successful pay-per-click campaigns. Get started on both with these best practices:
- Google Merchant Center: By connecting your AdWords and Merchant Center accounts, this allows Google to pull information from the merchant center to use as AdWord shopping ads. Information on specific brands, pricing, and product availability must be kept updated at all times for this integration to work, as failure to do so will result in a data suspension warning.
- Amazon Advertising: Creating sponsored ads on Amazon requires six to eight times the amount of keywords compared to using an AdWords campaign. Because Amazon’s keyword suggestions aren’t always as reliable as Google’s, you may have to develop a set of your own. You can do this by searching for relevant terms on Amazon.com and seeing which auto-suggestion options appear. But since you aren’t just limited to using specific keywords, you may also benefit from including mentions related to current events and political goings-on making headlines.
Fulfillment and Shipping
When it’s time to scale, investing in a third-party warehouse often saves e-commerce owners a good chunk of change. Ultimately, this decision allows these business owners to avoid hiring an excess number of employees; instead, they can simply pay a flat rate instead of ad-hoc shipping costs to fulfill customer orders.
Perhaps more importantly, using a fulfillment center allows e-commerce business professionals to work on other areas of their business. Indeed, the opportunity to conduct e-commerce marketing, handle customer service issues, and drive sales can better position you in the driver’s seat as your business grows.
Need an easy way to get started? Your best option may be to research and begin using Fulfillment by Amazon, a service created by the popular online retailer that allows you to store your products in Amazon’s nationwide fulfillment centers.
These warehouses are located in more than 20 states, and Amazon can pack and ship your products as well as provide customer service on these orders once a purchase has been made. Best of all, Fulfillment By Amazon can help you scale your business and reach more customers.
Customer Service
Performing customer service at start-ups and home-based businesses can oftentimes involve personalizing each customer’s sale. But when operating at scale, customer service can become more tedious and difficult. That’s why avoiding ongoing customer service gaffes is critical to compete with more seasoned e-commerce pros.
To that end, you’ll want to focus on providing exemplary customer service by honing in on important data. Data reporting is crucial for understanding where and why problems are occurring. But you can better manage customer service emails, online chat requests, and inquiries through social media by setting up a cloud contact center.
This way, you’ll help limit call volume by providing your customers with more efficient options to reach you when an issue arises.
Ultimately, you’ll want to bolster your customer service channels to decrease the number of support-related calls coming into your e-commerce business.
With that in mind, set up an email address, social media pages on Facebook and Twitter, and live chat on your e-commerce site to provide around-the-clock and more efficient customer service.
Identity Magazine is all about guiding women to discover their powers of Self-Acceptance, Appreciation, and Personal Achievement.
We ask that every contributor and expert answer the Identity questions in keeping with our theme. Their answers can be random and in the moment or they can be aligned with the current article they have written. In that way, and as a team, we hope to encourage and motivate each other, thus inspiring you to Get All A’s.
What have you accepted within your life, physically and/or mentally? Additionally, what are you still working on accepting? Now, we’re not talking about resignation, rather stepping into, embraced, and owned.
My height. However, I have no issues on 10+ hour flights!
Appreciation is everything. What have you learned to appreciate about yourself and/or within your life, physically and mentally? On the other hand OR in contrast, are there elements of who you are that you’re still working on appreciating?
I appreciate that I’m still as passionate about sports as I was when I was a kid.
Share with us one of your most rewarding achievements in life? Tell us not only what makes YOU most proud but also share the goals and dreams that you still have.
I appreciate that I’m still as passionate about sports as I was when I was a kid.
