When you are trying to grow your eCommerce business, scaling is the perfect way to ensure sustainable growth for which you are prepared, resulting in losses. Without a proper strategy, the sales and your costs may increase proportionally.
This means that as your orders and sales grow, you will need more employees, more man-hours, on top of the additional shipping costs, and so on. And if at some point sales decrease, you may end up with more employees than you can afford to pay, debt, and even an unprofitable business.
Instead, what you want is exponential growth, in which your costs are more or less independent of your sales. Also, this is what scaling is supposed to do for your business if done right. And that’s why it is such a crucial part of your business growth strategy.
There are many tools and software that allow you to see the details in every step of the process and can guarantee a smooth operation with little or no employee effort needed.
Additionally, when improving your eCommerce, you should consider investing in different things to make your and your employee’s jobs much more manageable. Just some of those are plugins, hosting services, etc.
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Use good eCommerce plugins
There are a lot of great eCommerce plugins that will help you a lot with scaling and automation. WooCommerce Order Export is a great example that allows you to set up automatic cron schedules to have your orders exported to a file or to have new orders emailed to you or your shipping team at regular intervals. This powerful automation can eliminate a lot of manual work keeping track and directing orders that come in.
Another useful plugin that allows you to create powerful shipping rules for your store is WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping which gives you the options to create shipping rules based on weight, item count, the logged-in status of the buyer, and more.
Become Visible
Getting people familiar with your brand is crucial for your business. You can’t scale a company that doesn’t reach potential clients. While there isn’t one marketing strategy that works for all, one of your focuses should be bringing organic traffic to your online store.
There are many ways to attract potential clients to your eCommerce business, including SEO optimization, offering quality content, social media marketing, and so on.
However, hiring knowledgeable, experienced professionals who know the ins and outs of advertising social media tools can make a huge difference in your conversion rate. Also, it will take all this work off your plate.
You can hire experts who can help you get Instagram followers interested in what you have to offer or run a successful Google or Facebook ads campaign. Building a strategy may seem easy with all the digital options, but there is a reason why there are services that can do that for other businesses.
However, remember that quality is what you should be going for when choosing marketing professionals. It’s better to get Instagram followers in an organic way than have a massive number of fake followers.
Outsource When Needed
Businesses that successfully achieve their goals thanks to the people involved in each operation. You can be knowledgeable about many aspects of your business and competent to perform many or all tasks needed to function. However, doing everything yourself isn’t the best strategy.
Marketing is the perfect proof that things can be done better if outsourced. It takes some of the burdens off of your and your employees’ shoulders, and most importantly, it will ultimately save you time, resources and help you scale your business.
Make Information Easily Accessible
Another way to scale your eCommerce business is to make it easier for your customers to navigate your online store, whether you are selling services, hundreds of products, or a single product.
One great way to do this is to find a reliable knowledge base software for creating a knowledge base where visitors can find answers to common questions.
You will improve customer service by offering as much information as possible about your products or services. Also, it will enable you to save your employees a lot of time they could be spending on looking for information.
Invest in Your Employees
For a truly successful business, more than one person is needed. Creating a team that’s united, motivated, loyal to the business, and working together towards its objectives, is a crucial step in scaling an eCommerce business.
To do this, you need to focus on job satisfaction and allow for professional and personal growth, open communication, independence, and so on. And while each member should be talented, they should also get constant training to grow their skills, discover hidden talents and new interests, which will also help with the efficiency of the workflow.
Use Automation
One of the many perks of any online business, the possibility of automation, is another step in successful scaling. But, choosing right which things to automate is also crucial in this process.
From the ordinary functions of an online store to payment and customer service, there are many tools and software that can guarantee a smooth operation with little or no employee effort needed.
However, while you can go ahead and automate many aspects of your eCommerce business, such as managing inventory, analyzing data, retargeting and saving abandoned carts, detecting fraud, etc., you should also be cautious of fully automating things that benefit from the human touch.
For instance, you can use automation to create a superior customer experience. Still, if you only offer AI-powered software to guide your customers and help them choose, order or purchase, you can inadvertently increase your bounce and cart abandonment rate.
Punchout Ordering System is also an option. When a supplier makes his product catalogs available online, clients can search for and purchase items or services directly through the client’s e-procurement platform.
Conclusion
Many people don’t realize how many things go into running an eCommerce business. And to get the most out of your investment and your effort, naturally, you want your business to grow. However, to succeed, you need to make sure that your business can accommodate growth.
However, this is why you need a strategy for scaling your eCommerce business to accommodate your business growth. Investing in the right tools, software, people, and partners can help you achieve this.