It’s a great time to be an eCommerce business owner!
Running your eCommerce business better doesn’t mean spending your profits to gain growth, what it does mean is examining your processes for places that have room for improvement.
Here are some common pain points that can create undue stress for a business like yours:
- Ignoring customer service. Small eCommerce businesses with limited staff often are forced to choose between handling orders and dealing with complaints. Of course, it seems more productive to send out more product, but ignoring those customers who are complaining can come back around to bite you later.
When your focus is customer-centric it may require a bit more input in the beginning, but it’s also a path to long-term, sustainable growth. Happy customers tell their friends, but so do unhappy customers. What kind of reputation would you prefer?
- Making it too hard to buy. It is absolutely important to collect information on your customers and present them with lots of useful details about a product in your catalog, but not at the expense of the buying experience.
Overly cumbersome sites, sites that require a shopper register before being able to check out and even sites that won’t supply shipping cost estimates upfront can be serious turn-offs for your customers.
- Doing your own fulfillment. How you package your products matters, everyone knows that, but that doesn’t mean you have to spend your valuable time on order fulfillment.
Instead of letting this time-consuming self-fulfillment process eat up your most valuable resource, instead find a 3rd party logistics (3PL) partner to do this job for you. They’re faster, they have better reporting tools and data collection methods and ultimately, they’ll save you a ton of money.
Running your eCommerce business better should be the ultimate aim of every business owner, but you don’t have to wait for a new year to build better processes. Today is a great time to improve your customer service, make it easier to buy from your web site and outsource your fulfillment to warehousing and distribution experts. These three small changes can make a huge difference to your business’s continued growth.
